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Reviewing Shows: Bungou Stray Dogs

I sure watched Bungou Stray dogs! Why did I watch Bungou Stray Dogs? Because, well, It kinda sucks, but in a fascinating way. Or at least in ways that seem like they might be instructive.

The thing about Bungou... the thing about BSD is it has poor tone control. It tries to blend a hyper-real grim mafia story, irreverent comedy, and cool action together. It does not manage this well.

Spoilers ahead, even though spoilers are a fake idea.

So BSD follows a sadboy orphan weretiger (Atsushi Nakajima) who helps out a drowning man (Osamu Dazai), then is in turn helped by the un-drowned man by being a little-bit press-ganged into working for the “Armed Detective Agency,” a para-governmental organization with a rare and valuable permit to operate with use of members’ super powers.

The premise set up in the first two episodes seems to be that we’ll be joining this wacky cast of characters in the detective agency as they solve crimes involving strange powers with their own strange powers. This is not the arc the show winds up following. Instead the show winds up involved with the Port Mafia (why is it the Mafia and not Yakuza anyway?), the local super powered criminal organization, and their open conflict with the detective agency. Then, in the second half of the show, it introduces a foreign criminal organization called the Guild which the Mafia and detective agency team up to fight.

Oh, I haven’t had a chance to mention that the show’s large cast of characters are mostly named for famous authors from the early 20th century. Every character with a super power — simply called abilities — is named after an author, and their ability is named for their most famous work. The allusions have only a superficial relation to their power, and virtually no impact on the themes of the show. The man named Hermin Melville can summon a spectral whale that can be cladded with iron to become a ship, because, well, Moby Dick was a whale, I guess, and the novel takes place on a ship. The character Mark Twain has two doll friends named Huck and Tom who help him to aim guns really good because ??? There isn’t much else to say about the use of these names because it really has little impact on the actual story; it’s just baffling, one set of arbitrary decisions among many.

As I said, BSD tries to blend moments of absurd humor, dark psychological drama, typical shonen action, and the flavour of a mystery or crime procedural. Audacious, though similar things have been done (Cowboy Bebop comes to mind, blending humor, drama, suave action, and ambiguously moral characters with former ties to criminal organizations well), but BSD bungles it.

For example, at the end of episode three Atsushi and two of his detective agency friends have a run in with the main muscle of the mafia, Akutagawa, and all three are impaled, if not also dismembered, by Akutagawa’s generally sharp darkness powers. The show spends a good several minutes emphasizing the desperation and panic Atsushi feels, along with fanning his “I cause nothing but trouble for people around me, and shouldn’t live” flames. This causes him to black out and go were-magical-tiger, fight evenly against Akutagawa for a bit, then their fight is cut short by Dazai’s ability to cancel abilities. Akutagawa calls off the attack, and has an amicable chat with Dazai over the lead in of the cheerful credits tune. Then the next episode reveals that the fatal wounds of Atsushi’s friends can be healed by the detective agency’s doctor, whose ability fully heals people, but only from the brink of death. Her sadistic enjoyment of hurting to heal is played for laughs.

On paper this doesn’t necessarily not work. But the show plays the drama so dead serious, and the humor so absurd it doesn’t come together as a gestalt. It forever feels like disparate elements being stitched together in one high contrast package. The grittiness of the psychological fear section doesn’t mesh with the empowerment and adrenaline of the super-power action (Atsushi heals himself and becomes invulnerable to things like bullets when a weretiger). Trying to portray the mafia as a ruthless villainous organization doesn’t gel with them also calling truce and chatting for a little while before walking off. Trying to raise the stakes and suspense of an action scene doesn’t gel well with a character who can magically and comedically heal people from fatal wounds.

Speaking of the Port Mafia and wanting it both ways, BSD tries to play this morally grey area, and it winds up breaking the show. The Port Mafia are clearly evil — they extort, they assassinate, they’ll nonchalantly kill dozens of innocents in their way —but we spend a good chunk of the show following their members escapades, and we’re clearly supposed to empathize with them.

There’s a hard break from the main story at the beginning of the second half of the show. For four episodes we watch a new character, Oda Sakunoske, as he follows an apparently traitorous member of the mafia. We’re introduced to him drinking in a classy bar with Dazai (back when he was in the mafia). He is the lowest ranked (yes, singularly low ranked, I guess) member of the mafia because he refuses to kill. Then at some point the enemy organization he’s looking into murders five orphans Oda had taken responsibility for after some other mafia killing spree.

Clearly this moment is supposed to make us feel sad, and sympathize with Oda when he makes it a suicidal quest for vengeance. But we spent all of a minute with the children, and Oda is already a man compromised by working with the mafia. Again, on paper there’s space for this sort of morally dark story telling. But the sheer earnestness with which it shows Dazai scream-mourning for the kids by the flaming wreckage is embarrassing. "Do you feel sad for this man? Are you sad five children are dead?” Nah man, not when they’re being used as a cheap emotional beat with 60 seconds of set up, dude.

So then after Oda’s four episode arc we enter the phase of the show where the Guild (all named for western authors) shows up and threatens to take over their city and the mafia and detective agency begrudgingly work together against them. I suppose the theme of Japan working together to fight off foreigners who want to profit off them is fair enough, even if it’s some sort of cultural allegory since they’re all named for authors, but I don’t get what associating half of the Japanese authors with an the bloodthirsty mafia really gets you. It doesn’t seem very well thought out.

The theme the show overtly ends on is one of wanting/needing acceptance of your friends/peers/cohort, and of trying to be a good person even if you’ve killed dozens of people. Which, huh. For the 13 year old whose power was used against her will by the mafia to assassinate 23 people, okay, I can understand where you’re coming from. It was against her will, she’s very young, she deserves a second chance. But when applied to Dazai, a man who apparently willingly worked for the mafia, and quit only because his friend died? Not to mention that Akutagawa, the mafia guy who kills several dozen dudes on screen throughout the show is the one who’s arc is completed when good-guy senpai acknowledges his strength. Uh???

Once again, it offers this sort of retribution with a hopefulness and clarity of intent that feels very out of place for the content of what’s happened. The denouement is a party at the detective agency. It’s all very fun and full of several gags, and it’s a tone that doesn’t fit the themes they’re trying to discuss. It’s like they either don’t trust the viewer to appreciate a show that settles in a mood for a while, or they don’t even know how to control the tone.

Ultimately Bungou Stray Dogs is lesser than the sum of its parts. The animation and music and sound are fine, parts of the plot are fine, some jokes are funny, some drama works, some action is cool, exploring the need for acceptance and of trying to do good despite your past are good, and using a dozen famous authors as loose jumping off point for characters is a bit high-school but fine enough in concept, but the parts wind up detracting from one another. Ah well, it was at least interesting enough for me to watch through.

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Reviewing Ephemera: Yesterday’s Rain (4/11/17)

It rains in plenty of places, but Portland has a closer relationship to precipitation than most. We have like, three words for rain (rain, drizzle, mizzle, wet, actual-rain, and the occasional storm), and the universal response is a rain jacket, sometimes an umbrella. But Portland has a seasonal phenomena in which rain happens for a minute or two under a blue sky. It’s utterly inexplicable.

Portland isn’t a part of America that recognizes the term sun-shower, which for whatever reason is a sort of great lakes region thing, but this isn’t even that. The platonic sun-shower is a small deep dark could pouring rain somewhere over here, while the sun, usually low in the sky shine in from over there. Rainbows are frequent, at least if you’re on the sun side looking away toward the rain.

Instead this rain event is spontaneous, usually on a rain type day, but where/when it hasn’t been raining for at least thirty minutes, and then after the event usually doesn’t rain for at least another hour or more. It rains hard enough out of this blue sky to get you properly wet — it’s definitely a heavier rain than 90% of what Portland experiences.

Anyway, I was walking back to the train station with a friend after having just watched Your Name. It’s a good Japanese animated film about nostalgia, melancholy, and also, uh, identity? Directed by Makoto Shinkai, it is very thematically and tonally similar to his other works, which I used to super feel, but now fairly feel, but this one had a more or less happy ending. It was weird! As a follower of his work for several years now it was cool to see something different in his work, but it seems like the emotional beats of the movie may have had more impact if it had his typical “tragedy of loss stretched through time” open ended ending.

So my friend and I were discussing where maybe our feelings of “what made this not an instant classic, but instead a ‘merely’ good to great film,” walking past the featureless back wall of the Portland orchestra hall, along a several blocks long park, enjoying the cool crisp air of spring that feels warmer than it “is” because it’s on the way up, when we got rained on under full view of the sun. Luckily I had my rain jacket, having learned to not trust 40% chance of rain for four hours day, but my friend’s sweatshirt got damp. Alack. The rain had a solid patter. The sidewalks weren’t even fully darkened. The trees in the park had began to bud, but the sun made its way through the branches easily. It was 4:30 pm. I had guessed it was 4:45 before I checked.

We got Chinese take in and discussed the movie and it didn’t rain the rest of the day. It did rain that night.

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I like the word “liminal” because it’s fun to say, spell, and mean. The more I learn about things the more indistinct their differences from other things become. It has become increasingly apparent to me that categories are subjective and useful but have no inherent truth. To think of the conscious mind and the subconscious mind as clearly separated feels untrue when we consider “tip of the tongue” phenomena, or when we attempt to understand (and tame) our feelings.

I Am With You, then, is a piece all about liminality. Part 1 sounds very soundy. There are guitar sounds, and there is space. On my first listen it sounded like very much quiet and fairly little sound. I’ve heard music described as the arrangements of sound and silence in time, but it read to me like enough silence and not enough readily accessible order to not fall into the “music” category. I wasn’t sure if I just wasn’t “hip” enough to it to get it and felt a tiny bit hostile about it. But I really appreciate Rugnetta’s other works across the net, so it wasn’t tough to keep giving it a try.

Part 2, then, begins with an undercurrent of acoustic guitar string-rubbing, which I’ve always liked in the same way I like the sound of a good sneaker scuff on marble tile or too-clear mouthsounds in a mic. I like that scraping sort of sound. A chalky sort of sound. Part 2 is still rather quiet, but it’s never silent, there’s always some fine undertone happening. It immediately reads as much more “musical.”

It sounded more like The Books, and other similar soundscape-y musicians. It’s about the “song” at least as much as it’s about the incidental noises, found-sounds, and quality of overall soundspace. I’ve heard a musician calling things like these “tracks” or “performance pieces” in the sense that the raw notes and chords are less important than how they’re conveyed. By his definitions a song was a more abstract thing, and could survive and be interesting transposed across instruments, venues, performers, and still be itself. In this schema a Rolling Stones song is less about the song and more about the sound.

I hear music geeks talk about their favourite tracks of the year, or of the album. I think they’ve arrived at similar places, where plenty of albums have digitally flagged and numbered sections that hardly count as songs, but are still a separate track. Rap album sketches and vignettes being prime examples.

That’s all to say I like these two tracks a lot but don’t know how “song”-y they are, or even exactly how music-y they are. The elephant in this post so far, also, is that these were written to accompany dancers, so they aren’t “supposed” to stand on their own, exactly. But here they are fairly literally disembodied on the net and that’s all I’ve got to experience them by. Part 2 being what it is made it clearer to me what the whole thing is “Trying to Do,” and so made me retroactively get and appreciate Part 1 a lot more. I Am With You is calming, and quiet, and very instantiated. It’s sparse and unworriedly helter-skelter, and spans a space from “maybe not music?” to “definitely music.” It’s liminally musical. It sounds like something I would enjoy listening to before falling asleep. It sounds like something I would enjoy listening to while waking up if I could enjoy anything while waking up.

It’s apparently excellent to write to as well, since, uh, I wrote way more than I was expecting when I started this. Hi Mike! Good morning!

Usually I wait a year or so to make publicly available the music I write for live performances. Tonight I uploaded two pieces written last fall. 

I am With You is the score for a dance piece of the same name choreographed by Hilary Easton. It premiered here in New York at Danspace at St. Mark’s Church last November. 

A Collaborative Project was a performance piece I made with @blinkpopshift and some other pals in San Francisco during October of last year. It was at CCA’s Wattis Gallery.

If you listen to either, let me know what you think! 

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I like this song. I uh, I adore it. Nobody asked but let’s [sic]

Reviewing Anything: Waltz for Zizi, by Yoko Kanno

Written for Cowboy Bebop.

It’s a waltz, so it’s in three. I’ve always found odd metered songs to feel more natural than even. While most bodies are largely symmetrical they’re not perfectly so. We always prefer a side, and the body being a complex series of systems can’t manage perfect symmetry. So we’re lopsided, more and less. Odd meters are lopsided in that way too. I appreciate that one beat will be much more heavily emphasized. I especially appreciate the weird/neat 3-2 system you get in 5/4 time, but mostly I like threes.

This song is real swell. It’s a classical guitar style, right? But like most of the rest of the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack it takes the soundscape and sort of feel of something else but structures the music in a more, what, poppy way? I like traditional jazz but the jazz-like pieces in Bebop play out with more purpose and intent than do ‘regular’ jazz songs. Jazz as it normally functions is of and for itself. You have the song, the players play it and make it their own. For better or worse, the jazz-like-songs in Cowboy Bebop are soundtrack, and so are serving an outside purpose. Purist or not, I wind up liking the Cowboy Bebop type jazz more. Yoko Kanno is a pretty savvy person. She said in an interview how she likes to imagine the world she’s composing for and really takes the assignment seriously, letting it subsume her own ‘personality’, as it were. She doesn’t do her own music because she prefers to work under the constraint of soundtrack. She does it real good.

So Waltz for Zizi here, it’s classical guitar in tangible detail. But a third of the way through it pulls in this steel guitar and an ephemeral piano track in the background. It sounds almost like a chorus. It sounds something like an Ennio Morricone spaghetti western track, but it’s much more tender. A subdued accordion shows up later on. It’s weird. It doesn’t feel weird at all. It fits the culturally-mixed world of 2070′s solar system spanning humanity of Cowboy Bebop.

It’s a sad song though. Though ‘sad’ is too crass a word. It’s a tender song; forlorn, lonesome, nostalgic. I’m no stranger to nostalgia. This was never a song that I kept on multiple serial repeat though. When I was younger the song was too effective. I was affected too strongly. It would make me miss all sorts of things I couldn’t define. It sounded like having said goodbye to friends for the implicitly last time. It sounds like sitting in a bar alone with a dusty sunbeam through a window.

In my youth, especially while I was still in high school, saying ‘goodbye’ to all my friends and acquaintances felt impossible. I recall the end of Samurai Champloo, which while ostensibly happily ending with the three heroes going their own ways, made me feel unidentifiably and unconsolably parted. A part of it was having reached the end of a story I enjoyed, but specifically the three main characters splitting up felt so unnecessary and lonely and sad.

Of course, I would go on to graduate high school and say actual as well as pretty-much final farewells to dozens of long time friends and acquaintances. It was sombre, but they didn’t play this song so it wasn’t so bad.

A couple years later after only a couple months at my first real job, the restaurant manager, whom I had interacted with only a couple times, moved on to another job. My eyes watered at his not-actually-too-sappy farewell speech. “What’s up with that?” I thought, even at the time.

So in the natural course of things, my life has included hundreds more comings and goings of people. Being parted from those many familiar faces throughout grades k through 12 (minus 7th) receded further into the past, and having said goodbye became less painful. Or, if not expressly less painful, through greater breadth and depth of experience became less so by relative magnitude.

Waltz for Zizi is still a quiet tender nostalgic song. It still sounds a fair amount like “goodbye” to me. But now I hear the comfort and sort of wizened contentment in it. It’s a pretty “it’s alright” sentiment. It’s a warm sound, and an open resonant atmosphere. In having grown, my palette has refined (somewhat), and so I’ve found this song to be more palatable than I have before. It sounds a little bit like whiskey, doesn’t it?

Anyway, I like Waltz for Zizi, I like Cowboy Bebop, I like Yoko Kanno, I like Shinichiro Watanabe. I have so much more appreciation for what they do/did now, and I loved the anime so much in my youth. I’m continually amazed by the incidental things I get better at as I age. And I’ve still got so much further to go.

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Reviewing Qualia: Deep Tissue Injury

"Deep tissue injury" meaning any wound that sinks deeper than the skin, more or less. Big bruises, deep cuts, down to bone fractures. These are the non-infectious dis-eases that ache fierce. A paper cut, no matter how sharply it hurts remains a surface and transient sort of pain.

I was recently knocked off my bicycle at about 17 mph and had the fortune to fall onto a median. My shoulder and arm landing on loamy soil got dirty and suffered minor scratches, but my thigh, which bore the brunt of the impact, had landed on the curb, instantly shocking the muscle something deep, causing a welt mere moments later. (My pants also got torn right up but that's tangential.) So then I suffered through a thorough and multi-colored bruise that opacified with pain when touched or used.

It sure sucks, but there's something invigorating about such hurts. It is as though the pain in it's opacity is a cloud of ink dropped in a glass of water. Only the water is my leg and the ink is pain. As I walk it reveals the thickness and volume of my own thigh. Just how much muscle is in there, and when precisely I use the muscle. It makes me acutely aware of my leg as a physical and mechanical object. A variation on waking up to a numb arm and become aware of the weight of it when it can't move itself. I can more wholly understand the thousands of anatomy illustrations revealing the layers of the human body I've seen.

It's a joy to more wholly understand my own physical workings and reality. When I was younger I couldn't help but wish I were a disembodied consciousness, or that my body was a pure and unflinching cyborg. In my naïvety I dismissed the body as largely irrelevant, or at least deserving much less attention than my mind. But, of course, as I aged I came to understand the fundamental inseparability of the mind and body. Where is the discrete line between brain and the "rest" of the nervous system? The two are utterly inseparable, if the distinction can be made at all.

I never really was a particularly physically inclined person. As a child I ran around and climbed trees and played as much as any other, but as I grew I lost interest in those pursuits. So I never really suffered any truly major injuries. Nothing that knocked me out, or required stitches or a cast, or frankly any professional medical care. For this I'm lucky. So perhaps it's the novelty that allows me to revel in this pain; it's not so great anyway. But it serves as a reminder to our more trying past. It's also assuring that I can bare this (fairly small) pain with little theatrics. I surely would've sobbed at this when I was younger, or whimper for the whole day. I've a broader scope to contextualize the injury, and suffer less.

As they (Haruki Murakami) say, "pain is inevitable, suffering is optional." I can come back to health with a greater appreciation for it, and rest assured at how well things manage to keep on going even when they are damaged.

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Reviewing Ephemera: Existential Dread

This is a pretty big topic, but let's not dread it too much and talk about what I love/hate about existential dread. Most of what I love about Existential Dread is that it hits late at night and sometimes inspires me to get to work. Most of what I hate about Existential Dread is that it hits late at night and can leave me restless and desperate for some something that is ill defined and unattainable. When I was younger and had no real responsibility it shoved me out the door and onto the three quarters mile of school grounds, playing fields, and parks just behind the houses across my street growing up. This is in no small part why I worked the graveyard shift for over a year. Now that I'm up during the day again though it leaves me laying in bed wanting for a whole host of things that aren't happening, chief among them the blissful oblivion of sleep.

I have heard that a major loss of innocence we find growing up is the terrible realization that a new day is not in fact a new start. That the problems we left will be waiting for us at least as eagerly in the morning. I can distinctly remember in middle school recalling just as I lay my head down that I had utterly neglected a homework assignment due the next day, but refusing to get up to do it. I awoke the next day wishing that I hadn't, and appeasing my upset stomach saying I would do it in homeroom, which I sometimes did. It left me feeling queasy and off balance all day regardless.

This realization of the persistence of troubles filled me with such an insoluble dread that I considered every possibility to escape it, up to a casual contemplation of suicide. I suspect, maybe hope, that everyone considers that possibility as they come upon the abyss. It's not that I strictly wanted to die, or especially destroy myself; it was just a desire to evade dread and anxiety at large.

Existential Dread is like the mother of (all) maladies. It enables and is exacerbated by trivial anxieties. Imagining disappointing someone I respect is one of the best ways, I find, to be wholly overcome with such worry that it shoves me back in my chair to behold and withstand it. Something as trivial as figuring out what to do for dinner can also summon a case of Existential Dread too, though.

I owe at least half of the valuable work I've ever done to Existential Dread though. I'm grateful to it for that, but it's hardly comforting that (almost) only bald meaninglessness can motivate me to try to do something meaningful with my life.

I can't figure out if all comfort in the world is despite or because of Existential Dread. I sit back and do what I must the days I have to and feel pretty okay most of the time. But I'm uncertain about whether my okayness is genuine well adjustingness, or utter denial. Like with many other things, the answer is probably on that blurry line between the two.

Loving Existential Dread (a great band name?) is an act of masochism though, right? Insofar as learning to be with the world and all the troubles contained within is a form of masochism. Another part of maturing is realizing that our troubles are meaningless, but can still matter. And the ability to develop a future-retrospective that can contextualize the troubles we're having as important learning experiences and mechanisms for our own growth, understanding, and base upon which to build our own empathy.

Anyway, Existential Dread is great and all but I really didn't need it tonight when I have to be up to get to work in four hours. So I'll give it a Zero out of Zero because it's all meaningless anyway.

[reviewinganything]

Reviewing Tropes: The 'Suit Up'

Or, Essentiality

A lot of my favorite stories include elaborate outfits for which every piece is essential to the survival, or at least daily utility, of its user, wearer, collector. In Nausicaä they require a mask with the leaves of a plant as filter for the poisonous air of the forrest of corruption. In dune the Fremen don complicated Still Suits which protect from the harsh elements and keep the body's precious moisture from being lost. In the Metal Gear series the protagonist infiltrators wear complicated Sneaking Suits that augment their strength, compress and keep their innards in place (in part to help them heal, with use of synthetic blood) and keep quiet. In Neon Genesis Evangelion the pilots of the titular Giant "Robots" wear Plug Suits which cling to their bodies with an activated vacuum-like mechanism which helps them synchronize and pilot their machines (presumably through some fetus-womb like metaphor). Every hero that ever held a sword has a complex outfit laden with belts and pouches carrying all means of essential gear, from refreshing mint tincture to gauze to salt. Soldiers, pilgrims, and vagrants, travelers of all sorts, especially before flight, had to have enough on them to ensure basic survival in many eventualities. Who knows how long it takes to properly don a space suit and ensure its proper functionality.

These characters and people dealt with exterior conflict and hostile worlds. We're lucky to live in a world where a lot of this has been alleviated for a lot of us, and I don't begrudge that. But I find myself invariably drawn to this sort of costuming. The more complicated and the longer it takes to make proper use of the gear the better. There's something attractive about that ritual of the Suit Up. Power Rangers (Sentai Rangers) and Magical Girls of all sorts are almost defined as genre by their elaborate magical transformation (read: suiting up) sequences.

I like the clear cut nature of a conflict which requires proper physical prep. While it may be vastly more dangerous to have to deal with a hostile world, at least you know where it and you stand. The majority of my attraction, then, to these outfits, is the lack of ambiguity. Most of the problems and dilemmas we face in the industrialized modernized world are ambiguous moral interpersonal and self defined. They have no clear shape or solution, and are always linked in the endless bureaucracy that defines our world yet is impossible for any one or ten people to understand in total. Thanks to mass media and then especially the internet, our sphere of concern or knowledge can easily span the whole globe, but our sphere of influence remains, save for but a few, our own actions and advice to be given to our closer friends and family.

Granted, I'd rather have penicillin and universal education and have to deal with aimless ennui and existential dread than to actually risk starving to death. Or, I think. I can't in good conscience begrudge the world given to me anyway. Or at least resenting the circumstances I find myself in is a definition of futility.

So and but there remains this "so" and "but," and the crux of this piece. I love the notion of being lean and chiseled by hardship, of having concrete goals and concrete problems and the sense of peace in having what I need with me and having every thing with me have a purpose. I'm jealous. I try to incorporate this philosophy in my own life as well as I can, anyway. I ride my bike everywhere and that gives me greater satisfaction than if she were purely an accessory. I have a small every day carry pocket knife and find myself using it constantly for incidental letter or box opening and that makes me happy.

Conversely, I feel as though I've swallowed a cloud of dread when I glance at something in my room that I haven't used since the day I got it. It feels like a waste of my space and of the world's resources. It reminds me that I live in a society that demands consumption and that these forces get the best of me despite my intentions and desire to be my own person. Every useless thing of mine, in short, reminds me in some small way of entropy and futility and the heat death of the universe and how much a product of my environment I am. These problems occupy a near equivalent level of concern in my mind, which is probably some form of absurd comedy.

Anyway, some of the 'value' we get out of story is in escapism, or living vicariously. I, as the modern suburban raised disaffected youth I am, fantasize about living a life where my most pertinent problems could be prepared for through an outfit of beautiful form directly from function, rather than through a complexly layered series of modulated attitudes. They say country music becomes popular in each country when the population at large becomes 51% urban. It's likely a form of cultural nostalgia to have this desire, but what can I say. I wish I lived a life that called for an outfit as complex and carefully considered as Nausicaä's sea of corruption flight suit.

[reviewinganything]

Reviewing Games: Final Fantasy IX

The title track for Final Fantasy IX [FF9] is The Place I'll Return to Someday. It's a simple song arranged/synthesized to sound like a small assemblage of flutes playing in large vacant stoney space. It's a quiet sort of song, contemplative. It fits the basic title screen and sets the tone and texture for the adventure to follow. That is, a carefully arranged set of circumstances designed to evoke myths, fairy tales, pulp fantasy novels, Dungeons and Dragons settings/campaigns, and other Japanese role playing games that came before designed to take you on a nostalgic adventure. All this made by a group of dedicated talented folk with a great big pile of ambition and aesthetic astuteness making a work with a slightly misaligned purpose. It's simultaneously ambitious and restrained in focus. It gives a lot, but asks for a lot of patience. I love it, with a conflicted heart.

The place I'll return to someday is a fitting title to give to the song that begins every session of playing the game. Only the most dedicated and/or unobligated folks will finish this game in a single sitting (it takes, at absolute minimum, twelve hours to reach the end of the game, and that's while moving as fast as possible), so at the very least we can assume that anyone who wants to continue to play the game -- to continue to visit the places contained within -- will in fact return. Probably tomorrow, maybe next Friday. It equally welcomes back someone who hasn't played for twelve years, something that somehow feels unexpected in this young medium.

Final Fantasy IX was originally released in July of 2000 in Japan, and November of 2000 in North America. It's the third and final of the Final Fantasy games to be released for the original Playstation, and the experience shows. It's a four disc giant (the PSN download is over one gigabyte!) and brims with confidence and generosity. It was the first Final Fantasy to be self-consciously Final-Fantasy-esque; the series' first (but certainly not last) self-made homage. The previous two games on the playstation had decidedly sci-fi trappings (if not logic), and even the sixth entry, which was the last on the Super Nintendo, included a lot of industrial age flavour. This caused many of the (vocal) fans of the series, who take this sort of thing very seriously and are highly conservative and fearful of change, duress. It also came out in the waning months of the playstation; the playstation 2 was only months away from launch when this game dropped and the next two entries in the series had already been announced and in development for the more advanced console. So it was purposely developed to be retrospective in all manners of design. A project for those who had been developing the games for well over ten years to reevaluate and perfect the ideas that begun the series. This ethic informs every element of the game.

I first played it sometime shortly after its release and at the age of ten or eleven it captured my imagination wholly. It remains the only Final Fantasy I've played through more than three times (well, except Final Fantasy Tactics (I'll write about this one to be sure)), and is the first I've chosen to really return to in earnest in many years.

After I first booted it, I spent a good figurative minute at the title screen listening to the place I'll return to someday, as if lounging in the surf, waves of nostalgia lapping about my waist. I twiddled the cursor and it beeped with a nice round twang, the big white pointing glove marking either "continue" or "new game" clearly. The second thing to really catch my attention returning to this game after such a long time was the resolution.

The second, and so far only other time this game has been released (startlingly rarely for a Final Fantasy (some of which have been re-released and ported up to twelve times)) is for the PS3 (and Vita) on the PSN, as a faithfully emulated copy of the original release. So I've been playing it on a big ol' HD TV, which is 1920 pixels across and 1080 tall. FF9 meanwhile runs at 320x240. Thats 2,073,600 pixels against 76,800. That's a factor of 27 difference. The upshot being that the game on my TV is made of big, fat, giant, perfectly square pixels. Each one a couple millimeters across. When I come back to it after spending some time watching things in HD it looks like a mosaic. It almost seems like abstract art. But it works in its favor.

I noticed something similar as I was replaying Riven for the first time in years just recently. They're both games made primarily of pre-rendered scenes converted to and saved as images on the disc, with occasional moving parts. These moving parts are still too complex to have been rendered by any computer in realtime at the time, and so are presented through video clips spliced (more or less discretely) into the image of the world we're already looking at. I expected Riven to have aged horribly given whats possible now, but funnily enough working at such a low resolution, and with clearly visible compression artifacts, helped strengthen my suspension of disbelief. In both Riven and FF9, every scene was rendered with a higher fidelity than could be fully captured by their low resolution imaging, and so the effect is to make it seem like a more real place. Like they've been recorded by an ultra-low resolution camera. So FF9 still looks pretty excellent. Any problems it has visually are more of 'lens' than with the subject, which is an impressive problem to have working with affordable computer hardware designed circa '94.

Anyhow, after spending said figurative minute looking at the logo and listening to the title track, I finally highlight "new game" and for the fourth or sixth time in my life hit "confirm." And so the game begins.

After a short pre-rendered sequence of a tiny boat flung about on a stormy sea the scene fades to a forlorn looking girl who stares from her ornate room and dress out a window at some white doves, which fly off and carry the camera with them to an establishing shot of her fantastical city. It's a cobblestone and terracotta tile roof town by a lake with a big symmetrical castle with four turrets and a hundred meter tall sword blade glistening white atop it. It's like an aggressive Disney Castle.

It's comedically fantastical. It's something an eight year old would draw on a castle that had to be radical, noble, just, and intimidating. It's the kind of castle that would defy and destroy a dragon. This is the establishing shot for both the introductory sequence and does well to explain the rules of the rest of the world we'll eventually play in. Then the camera cuts to a mermaid figurehead on a ship which is, surprise!, sailing on a sea of mist. It lingers about, cutting a half dozen times to give us a good look at the facets of the ship, if not it's whole form; it's got a half-dozen masts which carry not sails but propellors which turn lazily. Then it cuts to the interior of the ship, and the hero (we already know he's our hero because he's on the cover and features front and center of the promotional material) slides down a pole into view and then walks through a door. The camera follows through the black window.

This sets up our first moments of control. The hero lights a match and thinks to himself he should light the candle in the middle of the room. He is framed near the bottom of the screen in the small bubble of light cast by the match and we rightly assume the candle is just ahead. Walking ahead just a couple steps reveals a table with a small candle and a little exclamation mark word balloon pops up above his head which prompts our pressing of the action button, which makes him light the candle. Once lit, someone from beyond a door to the left asks who it is, which prompts the player for the hero's name.

We didn't know it at the time, but this is the second to last time the hero in a numbered Final Fantasy would be namable, and the last time all of the player characters could be named. In subsequent Final Fantasy titles many if not most story sequences would feature voice acting, which brings its own host of benefits and troubles, key among them being the inability to accommodate renaming the key characters to anything the player might wish. With the small exception of the main character of Final Fantasy X, which the script admirably refrains from ever calling by name.

While it's easy to argue that for at least half the games in the series by then featured story so heavily with characters so developed that naming them confers much less a sense of ownership than naming the completely mute heroes of the first game, there's still undoubtably something lost. It can seem frivolous, but naming the player characters after anyone or anything is a simple joy. Whether named after characters from books, friends and family, or even after a set of prior Final Fantasy heroes, it's a neat form of expression. And the naming screen and process is worked fairly naturally into the introduction of each character, and it acts as the formalization of a party member's entrance to the squad.

Anyhow, the hero's default name is Zidane. Once he's identified himself, through the player, three of his roguish comrades enter, they exchange short and warm greetings, then a large man with a dragon-like mask attacks, the screen fades to black, intense music starts, and the first battle ensues. It's fairly difficult, though not impossible, to lose. Once he's been sufficiently beaten, the mask splits in two and reveals the man (man-bat?) inside to be the group's boss. This sort of thing seems to happen often as they continue into their meeting as planned. The boss goes on to explain, for exposition, that the group (of thieves (Tantalus)) is using the theater ship their on as cover to get into Alexandria castle. It's been invited to put on a rendition of the famous love-story play "I Want to be Your Canary" for the princess' sixteenth birthday, who they aim to kidnap. To what end though, is unmentioned. We assume it's for ransom.

After another short cutscene of the airship and city the player is introduced to the deuteragonist, who we are again afforded the opportunity to name by way of self introduction. His default name is Vivi; a little kid with eyes glowing from a face shadowed by the wide brim of a droopy steepled wizard's hat. His design is one of the central callbacks to previous entries in the series, evoking the black mages present as player characters since the first game. Vivi appears to have just entered the town, Alexandria, to watch the play being put on by Tantalus. It's bright and warmly lit by the setting sun, and the city feels alive with children running about, nobles gossiping about the play, or bar patrons enjoying their drinks. There are several homes to peek into, shops to peruse (though not patronize), inns, bars, and small alleys to wander about. In most places at least one little treasure is hidden, whether it's a trading card, potion, or pocketful of change, to reward and encourage curiosity. Eventually we're directed to the ticket booth, where Vivi's informed his ticket is a forgery, and so he embarks on the small quest to get to a suitable rooftop from which to view the play.

I really like this section of the game. There's a surprisingly large amount of things to look at and do, the vast majority of which is entirely incidental. It could be ran through in a matter of two or three minutes, but I think I spent nearly half an hour poking about, enjoying the ambiance. Almost everyone has a friendly little paragraph to say, there's a whole set of sounds to be heard, from soft static of a crowd chatting, to the creak of a spinning wheel, crackling fire, or ringing bell. It's clear a lot of attention was payed to the city, and it feels convincing. Only upon reflection does it become apparent that there's only three streets available to run about on. It feels natural. The perfect amount to make the place feel believable while not being overwhelming or enough to get actually lost in.

The game so far is preamble; the time with Vivi is relaxed, a jaunty theme plays, and running about as a child encourages playfulness. It's a low stress way to introduce the world and basic runabout controls. Which is important, because once Vivi crosses the threshold and gets a spot from which to view the play, the imbroglio begins and won't stop, really, for twenty hours.

The play, it turns out, begins with a princess running away from home for love, which covers the abduction attempt by half the troupe, who run into the real princess, who it turns out is in the process of running away herself and so wants to be abducted. Of course the queen and her guards object, and so follows an hour of running madly about the castle then theater ship trying not to get caught. Vivi somehow gets embroiled in the middle too. There's an amusing mixup wherein the real princess (who is a fan of the play and has memorized it) acts the part of the princess in the production, and then the guard who has been doing most of the chasing (who, again, we know from the cover to be a player character) unwittingly plays the part of the soldier. After a short battle with firebomb monsters fired from cannons the crew finally starts pulling the ship away, for it only to be critically damaged by several harpoon guns. It barely escapes the city and crashes in a deep dark literal Evil Forest.

The crash site is quiet but for the crackling of fire, the first of only a few moments the background music takes a break. The player is given their first opportunity to save, and will run into their first slew of random encounters along the path. This is, for most intents and purposes, the real beginning of the game after the intense kinetic overture. The whole introduction is paced exceptionally well and is very engaging. Today it looks even better when subsequent Final Fantasies, and many similar RPGs, Japanese or not, have longer and less exciting opening sequences. And/But there is a heck of a lot to unpack here, so it's going to take a (figurative) minute.

First is the reversed "save the princess" premise which is, of course, the beginning of many a fairytale, and most pertinently the beginning of the first Final Fantasy. There the player is given a quest by a king to save his daughter, the princess, from Garland, the kingdom's hero knight who, for some reason, abducted the princess Sarah. While here we have a thief who seeks to abduct a princess willingly from under the queen, who by default becomes the villain. Steiner, the knight, serves as the primary antagonist for the overture, only eventually becoming a reluctant ally for the first half of the game. All the parts from the first game are present, but their relationships are reversed.

Starting the plot with a play does a good amount of work. In respect to the series, it pays homage to what is arguably the most famous scene in one of the series two most beloved games: the opera from Final Fantasy VI. It also serves to signal the game's own attitude. That is: distinctly playful and knowingly artificial and melodramatic. It's arch-fantasy. The play is called "I Want to be Your Canary," and reads pretty clearly as a send-up of works like Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, including (attempts at) lofty language and the classic notion of young love spurned by the powers that be. And but it's playful; the scene even includes a "no really, look behind you!" gag. Melodrama but not maudlin.

It even plays with and justifies the crude battle scene geometry. Given the limitations of the hardware, and the fidelity with which they wanted to represent the characters and enemies, the background in the battles --the only times the environment is rendered realtime-- is tiny in scope. But they do their best, using the walls and skybox to affect areas that seems larger or more detailed than they really are. They really don't and weren't meant to draw much attention; when there are four intricately designed heroes and one to five fabulously ridiculously designed enemies on screen the plain grassy meadow background shouldn't draw much attention. But when it is payed attention the artistry in economy becomes evident. They wind up looking in many ways like the backdrop on a stage. As if using murals and occasionally a simple papier mâché replica of statues or a single tree to get across the idea of it being a forest. This is made stronger, of course, by a few mock battles that take place as part of the play, where the character's special abilities are even replaced by "SFX," which make neat looking fireworks and flashing lights and have no effect.

This also helps justify the stilted and abstracted flow of the battle system. Final Fantasy battles originally presented the players' characters lined up along the right side of the screen (Japanese reads right to left, so this is almost certainly part of that choice) with the enemies in a separate window on the right. (Though it's neat to read it as putting the enemies in the position of primacy.) As such:

The player enters commands for her four characters and then every actor in the battle acts in an order according to their speed statistic. The fourth game introduced what they call "active time battle," which simply includes bars for each character that fill at a rate according to their speed, at which point when full the character (or enemy) can act. This is essentially all that had ever changed by the time Final Fantasy IX rolled around.

This whole system was originally born of limitations. The first were present in Dungeons and Dragons (DnD), which was itself based largely on tabletop war-games, which had to find some way to simply abstract the hugely complex business of combat. DnD for its part included several attributes to represent a character's strength and technique, along with statistics on weapon and armor's effectiveness. The rules stipulate a turn order, which itself is dictated by, again, a character's speed or alertness, and a random number to keep things interesting. Battles would proceed as simulated by one agent moving at a time and in order, and this abstraction is accepted as A: mandatory for doing all the calculations in the head or with pencil/paper and/or simple calculator; and B: as a perhaps weird but neat strategic element. Nobody complains that chess isn't realistic enough, after all.

Anyway, in the more than ten years and more than nine games in the whole of the Final Fantasy series the battles were still operating on an old and barely modified system of abstractions descended from tabletop games. Someone who likes games with more action and involvement in things like caring for proper timing and spacing look at the battles in FFIX and scratch their head (in boredom). Folks who don't play many games regularly (or any games at all) will look at this and ask why exactly it is that a character would run over to the enemy, hit it once, then jump back to his place in line and wait to get hit in return.

There's something about characters being composed of just a couple dozen pixels in eight colors that excuses this. But when characters are rendered in a full three dimensions with complex animations the weirdness becomes more apparent. At worst it is read as farce.

I'm of two minds when it comes to this. Probably more actually; but two primary groups.

First is that it's absurd. It's all based on a series of abstractions and concessions that had to be made, but with A: computer hardware to take care of all the calculations, and B: an interactive realtime supercomplex system can allow for much greater fidelity in simulating battles with giant spiders and trolls, so C: why not get closer to actually doing what we've been using our imagination for until now. Zelda or Secret of Mana or Secret of Evermore had been allowing players to run about while fighting trolls and knights for years now, so why not have something like that.

My second mind is that the abstraction and clean systemization of it are entirely enjoyable in their own. I may be unique in that when I played all these guys-line-up-on-sides Japanese role-playing games (JRPGs) I both took the simple systems at face value and never actually really employed my imagination to picture how these battles would/could 'actually' play out.

Part of this acceptance at the time may indeed have been the early parts of this game coding them as a sort of playacting. What's less important is how their fighting, what's more important is why. This gets back at the themes and trappings of this as playacting again.

But playing this game just recently I was made to wonder. I've been told that historically the "point" of Final Fantasy (among other JRPGs) in Japan is to first take time (so games couldn't be completed in one rental period, increasing sales), and second be simple/easy enough to be relaxing, while simultaneously paradoxically seeming to be involved enough to let/make the player feel like they matter. This game achieves that with a zen-like matter of factness and actually-impressive craft.

It's an easy game. In my recent play-through I saw the game over screen only a couple times, each time after being brazenly confident and/or impatient. If played with a simple conservatism/pragmatism and a touch of patience there will be close calls but no disasters. In the event of a game over the player loses all their progress since their last save; this can be up to about forty minutes, but the most difficult battles are usually no more than three minutes past a save point. So failure is a minor annoyance but nothing catastrophic.

Recently I've come to the belief that the objective most video games ought to strive to present us is Interesting Decisions. Chess is a great source of Interesting Decisions (given that both players are competent and also not so versed in the history and scripts of high level play). Tic-tac-toe is not a game that presents Interesting Decisions. Tetris is a game that's nothing but Interesting Decisions. Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time is not a game with Interesting Decisions. Super Mario Bros. 3 is chock full of Interesting and super fun decisions. Final Fantasy IX has no Interesting decisions to make, though it sure as heck has a lot of 'interesting' and neat decisions to make.

A common criticism of JRPGs (from anonymous folks on internet forums) is that all they really are is attacking until a character is hurt enough to heal, then repeat. This is, in a sense, true. But anyone can take anything and reduce it to absurdity. For example: "soccer is just kicking a ball into a net," or, "first person shooters are just pointing and clicking," both of which are useless statements. Yet to some terrifying extent it's mostly true in this game. One of the easiest and most powerful party arrangements is three physically powerful characters and a healer in the back row. All you do is select "attack" and keep the healer ready to heal. It's quick, effective, and cheap. There are maybe one in six enemies in an area that have high physical attack resistance and very low magic defense, which could encourage magical attacks, yet even so it's never completely ineffective to use just a physical attack.

Playing like that though defeats some of the purpose of the game. That purpose being, in approximate order, to: A: enjoy oneself, B: exercise curiosity, C: make numbers go up, D: get to where you are going. Put simply, this game has little to offer someone who isn't willing to play along with the charade (this is true of all games). So the game offers eventually eight characters, all of which have levels to gain and about forty abilities of various kinds to master. These all make facets of the fighting easier, which is the only real friction in the system, and certainly primarily the thing keeping one from checking out the nooks and crannies of the game. ...which usually house items and equipment which will make fighting enemies easier.

I'll be honest. The game is easy, and like I said, there aren't many actually interesting decisions to make. The designers usually offer two to three choices for equipment at a time, a set of which usually has better stats, but has balanced the game just so that without inordinate grinding the characters that have been in use will still need to have their old stuff equipped for a few more battles to master the abilities on them. The only real choice is, "do I keep the weaker gear for three to ten more battles to have this ability (say, immunity to poison) for use at any time, or equip the new gear and not have perpetual access to this ability?" Then when each character has learned a few abilities the choice becomes, "would I rather have immunity to poison and petrification, or greater odds of stealing?" The game is so easy none of these questions are questions of survival, but of convenience. I sure did spend a lot of time thinking on these decisions, but none of this time was crucial, just fun for a guy that likes to fiddle with fiddly stuff. If someone could go back into the raw data they could probably do a good job making things more difficult by just lowering player HP by two fifths. But if you want a turn based old fashioned JRPG experience that's actually engaging, pop in Persona, or Shin Megami Tensei, or Etrian Odyssey.

So as I was saying, how can this game that I posit has no Interesting Decisions to make still be an enjoyable if not worthwhile experience? It comes down to, in order, A: the pretty and fanciful places, B: the background music of the fanciful places, C: the imaginative character (and monster) designs, D: the cute if not fluffy little drama contained within. To any stander-by, I'd say that playing the game up through the first couple hours of the third disc is a good point to stop: that's where the momentum really drops. Up till then the characters in the player's party at any time are dictated by the machinations of the plot; things keep happening, and the player keeps going to new places (and/or returning to places that have been dramatically changed (ruination)). After the initial conflict (with the Queen) gets solved at the end of the second disc, the third disc begins with a truly delightful little interlude, wherein the characters have taken a couple days off, and without a clear direction on what to do next, everyone drifts about for a couple days doing miscellaneous little things. It's cute. It's nice to see these folks who had been on the run since the word "go" linger for a moment. It's nice for the next objective to be, "play some cards," and not, "stop an evil queen's war and solve the criminal weapons dealing behind it," or even, "run away quickly from giant monsters." I wish there was a game all about that two or three hours we get to spend lingering.

Anyhow, after that short moment of recollection and reflection, the True Evil is revealed and then the player has methods to travel the whole world and access to all the party members at any time. At this point the game introduces the first dungeons that are anything more than a short line between A and B and take more than fifteen minutes to get through. The plot slows down, and there aren't any more neat towns, just bunches of ruins. One of my favorite reviews of Final Fantasy VII said that he'd like that game best if the whole thing took place in Midgar, the supergiant distopian hellcity of grimy slums and grimier uptown streets that the first six or seven hours of that game take place in. Well, I really wish the whole of Final Fantasy IX took place on the mist continent, where all of the towns and cities (save three small enclaves) are, and where the plot remains plausible in scale.

The last just-about third of the game involves other worlds and fabricated beings and a whole lotta jargon about being and not-being and planet assimilation and soul-chanelling and loses a lot of it's charm. It is in keeping with Final Fantasy tradition though. Even the very first game, which plays itself as a basic fantasy adventure --again, the first quest in the game is saving a princess from an evil knight-- follows a curve into absurdity as eventually the last boss is a demonic bat winged horned golden god called "Chaos" who represents, well, chaos and entropy and evil generally. The final boss of Final Fantasy IX is "Necron," who assumes that the self destruction of a single character is proof enough that all life doesn't want to exist and so the heroes challenge this ill defined super being in a contest for the right to keep existing. Sure, okay.

It's written for teenagers. It seemed profound when I was younger.

Until this final act though the game's themes are about loyalty, trust, the universally recognized horror of war, the destruction of nations, quest for and folly of revenge, the fear of death, search for meaning, and adventuring with friends. It's neat, and cute, and relatable. It's not particularly intelligent but it is very well imagined craft. If I were somehow in charge of remaking this game, or making something similar, I'd alter the primary friction in the game from battle to the rigors of actually traveling long distances on foot (or with a steed) through sometimes hostile terrain. Like how Lord of the Rings is ultimately about walking.

Despite it all I did play through the whole game in just about forty four hours over two and a half weeks. I don't regret it. I can't really confidently recommend it though either, unless you think you've got an interest already. It sure does strike me as something that doesn't exist anymore though. Not with this level of work put into it. Final Fantasy XIII is a fifty hour trek through prettily wallpapered straight hallways with a completely nonsense worthless plot and a pretty neat though still deeply peculiar 'battle system.' Final Fantasy Four Heroes of Light (and soon the higher budget but-not-in-name sequel Bravely Default) is a similar throwback with actually-neat mechanics but a smaller scope for plot and space. FHoL is the better of the two modern adaptations of this whole idea, but it still lacks the expanse. The tiny and huge details.

Final Fantasy IX's greatest success is in doing a convincing job suggesting a living world. There's a lot there, but it all still works at producing a sense of much more going on just beyond the edges of the screen.

My favorite place in the whole game is this tram station here. It's set at the top of a giant mountain range, as the midpoint between two tram cars which use one another as counterweight to trundle up and down the mountain. The player is asked to go through this place once, and passes through in just a minute if they like. A very relaxed tune plays, and the only thing that really happens here is a chance meeting with some characters from earlier in the game. By all practical game-system interested means there is nothing of importance here. The only things to enter into a database are the contents of the two shops. Yet it received attention and thought and serves as a wonderful bit of texture. One character complains of his commute, a mother watches as her child runs about anxiously.

A lot of Japanese creatives admire and speak homage to Studio Ghibli; and rightly so. But this is one of the only games to really actually evoke touches of the 'wholesome' holistic solid-material and lovingly rendered workaday background folks in a way that's actually reminiscent of Ghibli. It gives me that small hopeless desire in my heart to live there, like I get when I watch the bakers in Kiki's Delivery Service, or see the way potions and bacon sizzle in Howl's Moving Castle. I just wish they gave me more excuses to enjoy the simple detailed homely spaces, and less time bashing neat looking but dumb dragons and chimeras. I've been spending a fair amount of time wondering if a version of this game stripped of all the battles would still be a worthwhile experience, if not much more so.

I think so, but I'm not certain. But then how weird is that? The game would be a better game if it didn't have any challenge or fail-state. Shouldn't that be contradictory? Apparently not.

Regardless; I was pleasantly surprised to find so much substance to this artifact of utmost nostalgia. There's a lot to learn from this game.

Bottom Line: Final Fantasy IX is a place I wish I actually could return to, someday.

Three of four stars. With thanks and apologies to Action Button dot Net.

[reviewinganything]

Reviewing Songs: Crown of Storms

Crown of Storms appears on Lightning Bolt’s 2003 album Wonderful Rainbow. It’s a furious righteous song about loudness and happiness. The guitar arpeggios up and down fuzzily and breakily. In headphones the sound is muffled as though in the background of the arrangement. As though behind a terror tall black thunderhead wall flying over plains. But as it plays it catches the attention like only a candle in the foreground can. It lends the piece a simultaneous intimacy and expanse. On small decent speakers the arpeggios sound sharp and crispy. How this manages who knows, but it’s a neat effect.

Just before the 23rd second the drums fall in. They fall in and like thunder muffle everything else around them. This is similar to music in eight or sixteen (or one) bit, where the sound effects of a game may take a track used in the music and supersede it for a moment, creating a neat vacancy in the ensemble.

Eventually some voice starts shouting indecipherably into a lousy mic with words about something nobody knows. It adds a strangely neatly flat sound to the arrangement. As if a painting has been hung on a wall with a fluorescent light ensconced above it. We’re supposed to look at it but it’s just a muddled portrait of some old guy with wealth nobody cares or cared about. Why is it there? I suppose because without it the wall would be vast and empty and daunting.

This wall lasts for five minutes. There are nine extra seconds because without them the song would be nine seconds too short. This wall is perfect for, in descending order:

Being angry.

Stopping being angry.

Posing like a martial artist.

Thinking about things proactively.

Building up energy. (Such as for before a bike ride.)

Writing.

Being otherwise productive.

This is the first and last song I have needed for the top two purposes, and is very high on the list for the next three, and pretty notable for the latter two. This is probably the most Guitar song I have listened to more than fifty times in my life. It’s probably the most Guitar song I’ve listened to more than twenty times.

Despite being probably metal and despite featuring indecipherable screaming, it lacks the actually aggressive stance commonly associated with metal. I’ve got a good friend who’s very into metal, and have heard a fair amount of good stuff, and even sorta like the very progressive sort of metal, but it’s one of those things I never actually seek out on my own time. I want to call this a pop album with thick heavy metal themes/motifs. I think it’s probably actually pop in the way that the music of Cowboy Bebop masquerades as jazz (and folk and blues and music-box) but is still mostly constructed like pop music. That’s why I can love it (so easily).

Just listen to those power chords that play every time the arpeggio isn’t. They would be trite if they weren’t played and rendered in such a way as to appear unstoppable, divine.

Crown of Storms, right? The first image that comes to mind is of some deity like Odin; dragon large, flying or not, crashing toward you on an eight legged horse. Maybe it’s a tower wreathed in cloudy lightning. Maybe the earth itself, as viewed from space, with a halo of menacing storm encircling the north pole. Maybe it’s just some normal dude wearing a crown of gold glinting like lightning in the dark on stage. Maybe it’s just some woman with flashing eyes on a driven march. Maybe it’s the greatest storm ever witnessed.

It’s a neat play with words putting something positive next to something negative. It’s perfectly evocative of the noise enclosed. Whenever I come to this song angry I come away (with sometimes more repeats) driven, if not happy. The song switches the listener’s polarity. It, like a disciple of Bruce Lee, applies only a small force of its own to swing your own force/momentum ‘against’ you. I suppose it’s nothing if not violent. It certainly isn’t going to be any sort of proper lullaby. Crown of Storms could only be fallen asleep to if the listener has been thoroughly incapacitated through other means (drugs, concussion), or if the song is playing quietly enough as to be arbitrary.

The rest of the album is excellent, but there’s just something about the march-like qualities it has that brings me back to Crown of Storms reliably. The album cover is so much analogue TV signal static with only a corner of rainbow peeking from behind a cloud-like cutaway. So much noise with just a bit of absurd glee just visible behind it all. The title track is its own short happy(-ish) interlude before the album finally plunges into the depths of the ocean to fight things undisclosed (probably Cthulu).

Crown of Storms. It’s good.

[reviewinganything]

Reviewing Trends: The "10 Hour" Song

Or, more completely, The Ten Hour Song Youtube Trend.

Youtube has gotten so large and its search/related functions so honed that on any given video all the related videos will, in fact, be highly correlated. This is formed by and helps to form communities of sorts; not in that all the individuals involved are intimately familiar with one another (necessarily), but that when you find yourself in a certain corner of youtube, it's usually fairly easy to stay there. One of my favorite such groups is the meta-group and phenomena of "10 hour songs."

The thrust is someone takes a given song and sets it on repeat for ten hours. The more generous ones will edit the song in some small way to make for a smoother repeat, and some will even include a short intro sequence which plays at the beginning and then not once again through the proceeding 9:58:40.

The first question is probably, "why ten hours?" Well, ten hours is an arbitrarily long time that forms a fine number and ought to be long enough for any purpose. Even if you, for whatever reason, spend twenty hours awake, and at a computer (or with any given internet device), you'd still only have to hit the 'replay' button once.

The next question may be, "why not just repeat it?" The answer to that is bifurcated. First is that youtube is a wonderful place where you can listen to virtually any song you've ever heard of instantly which doesn't include any (built in) repeat function, and second, more importantly, and less concretely, having it set as a single item in computational/data terms is relaxing.

Sure, if you have the file on your computer you can play it in any audio player for a computer and set it to auto-repeat; and if you already have the internet, getting any file saved locally on your drive is arbitrarily easy. But having the song played repeatedly in a single go is relaxing. Granted, it's fairly abstract, but the notion of play counts, present in iTunes for at least a decade strong, is very neat. It can be fascinating to know just what songs I actually listen to.

It's also stressful. Ever since I learned about the play count I can't help but have it somewhere in the back of my mind when listening to anything. It manifests insidiously. In the most passive instances it can be skipping the tracker to the end so it logs the play before skipping around. In it's most sinister though it can lead me to refrain from listening to songs at all, or on repeat for as long as I would otherwise.

Of course this is pure neurosis and if any one else ever even saw these numbers they wouldn't care, but to my mind it still matters. I can't ignore it. It's pathological.

So here we have the ten hour song. It utilizes the compound youtube time tracker. Mouseover a part of the timeline and just above a tooltip/inset/balloon will pop up offering finer control over just where you want it to play. In a ten hour long timeline though, usually of songs less than five minutes long (sometimes shorter than a minute), this choice is largely arbitrary. It raises the question again though. Why ten hours of a couple minutes of content?

Because it's a meditation. One thing open in an internet browser tab doing its thing for as long as almost anyone could care to sit at a computer. Gotta get up to fill your water glass? Leave the song running, it'll last another nine and a half hours. It's remarkably soothing, almost absurdly so, to understand in the back of my mind that it isn't one file be replayed ad infinitum.

If it seems like an arbitrary distinction, this is coming from a mode of thinking where zero and a null value are distinct concepts. I especially find the 10 hour songs useful while I'm writing. Even if the song has lyrics (they rarely do; or they're in a language I don't speak) they will fade into the noise. The most practical arbitrarily long songs to play are those from video game soundtracks. They're songs are already designed to loop perfectly, and to set an atmosphere.

The Zora's Domain is one of my favorites. It's simple and quiet and soothing and as the background music for an idyllic water-cave system evokes a plenty calm enough mood in which to write (or perform whatever other engaging long form task). I'm similarly fond of the Astral Observatory theme.

The one that I've listened to the most though is Fukkireta, an absurd simple pink bubble gum Japanese electro-pop song sung by a vocaloid. I listened to it for over six hours over the course of one evening and the next morning. I've probably listened to it for another nine or ten hours about an hour at a time since then (maybe a year ago already). By all means, I expected it to drive me mad after just a few minutes. I'd almost hope anyone else would hardly listen to it for more than thirty seconds. Yet I listened, first in confusion, then awe, then for the simple gleeful energetic groove. Those syllables pronounced so quickly precisely by such a small round smooth voice are catchy beyond imagining. The simple repeating stressed-weak-stressed rhythm in the A part followed by the snare fast driving B part switching off continually keeps things fresh. I had listened to this repeating version for a few hours before I finally clicked on the actual-song version, and then and still the power of the arrival at the conclusion of the song elates me in a way I can only imagine folks who listen to a full many hour symphony must feel upon its (imminent) conclusion. The few english words and phrases sprinkled throughout are like a few cherries set atop the cake, and I can't figure out why I love "gaacchikocchidocchi" so much (it's probably the bouncy syllables and rhyme).

It's a weird thing. Like setting the ten hour long video running is plugging into something more. A greater sonic expanse. It's like the difference between walking forward over (seemingly) endless plains and walking in circles. It's like the strange neat looping backgrounds from cartoons like The Flintstones, the same thing but it's still understood as foreword progress.

The sheer number of these ten hour long songs/videos is amazing. There are dozens of sub categories and groups in which you could get lost for hours at a time. Just hop in anywhere you could care to search. There's plenty of Jurassic Park, for example. (I mean, it's youtube, there's more than two days worth of video uploaded every minute. It's even more existentially dreadful than the Library of Babel. (Or, is quickly approaching.)) I'm particularly and peculiarly fascinated with the vocaloids as a larger phenomena anyway, and may yet write about that.

In any case, I love the layers of generosity inherent in these absurdities. Someone put together the video, uploaded it to youtube, which lets them stay, all to be streamed over broadband internet by whomever for whatever abstract itch it scratches. Many folks indulging others in their weird decadencies. It makes me happy to think about it.

[reviewinganything]

Reviewing Songs: Coyote - Vocalise by YoYo Ma and Bobby McFerrin

I wanted to play cello as a child, but my school already had too many kids signed up for it and so instead I played clarinet, to my great shrug. This cascaded into a huge series of events for which I'm grateful and am still untangling, but that is a story for another time.

It's clear, in retrospect, that a non-negligible amount of my wanting to play cello is due to Yo-Yo Ma. This, in turn, is due in no small part to my mother playing Yo-Yo Ma albums on my dad's wood cabinet just-about-three-feet-tall speakers from his hi-fi Sony sound system put together somewhen among the eighties. The album she played most (or that I remember at all) was Hush , the collaboration between Yo-Yo Ma and Bobby McFerrin.

Goddamn look at how 90's that album cover is though. It was released in '92.

So this album would be playing loudly on bright summer days when I was young enough to form wordless memories coloring these times with an already forlorn yellow-green water color wash. It made a strong impression on me, though of course I didn't know at the time. But as these things go the album faded from our stereo and one day that disc left that 5 CD disk changer to, eventually, never enter it again.

Just about a year ago out of the blue I was struck with the memory of this album. It was a shadowy wordless memory, and so I couldn't recall what the album was called (if I had ever known then), nor who it was who had worked with Yo-Yo Ma. In a time even only of less advanced computers finding this album again would've been somewhat difficult; or, at least, required I search through the collections of many a record shop hoping that by process of elimination, inductive/deductive reasoning, and pure visceral instinct I'd find it again. I likely would've lost gumption to do this (and/or forgotten this impulse) before the search even earnestly began, and so this story of memory and nostalgia wouldn't have had any sort of conclusion.

But this is the age of computers, fast internet, and frankly astonishingly reliable Google search. Oh, and complete artist discographies ready for instant lookup on Spotify. I can't recall exactly how long it took between my vague memory of this thing and my finding it, but it was certainly less than a day, likely less than an hour, probably less than ten minutes, maybe less than three minutes.

--

And so I heard those first characteristic trilling hums by Bobby McFerrin in Grace. I swiftly remembered all those lazy days of my early youth in the house my family kept in Amherst NY. The quality of the sun as it reflected off the neighbors house ten feet away through the half-dozen large windows of the living room. Of piecing together crude spaceships from the heap of Lego in the den. Of having one family and one certain home.

I was (almost?) surprised at how struck I was. Then the track Stars played, and that effusive spilling sound like a power line buzzing in a heavy fog completed the psychic transportation.

I may have an addiction to nostalgia. I have an addiction to nostalgia. This is tempered by simultaneous acknowledgement that nostalgia gets us nothing (unless we spin it into art) and that I am way too young for nostalgia.

And yet, here I am. I like to submerse myself in nostalgia but I think I've kept from drowning in it. My parents divorced at what is now the midway point in my life. I can recall being a single family, but much more of my conscious life, and more importantly the more recent part of it has been with a split family. I'm grateful for this; I've learned much about humility and tenacity and the dynamics and fickleness of people themselves and therefore the much more complicated relationships between them.

What gives me greatest yearning; what inspires what I could probably call "sensucht" is the realization that the house in which I used to listen to Coyote is no longer owned by anyone I know, let alone a member of my own family. Some can return to their parent's house and find the room of their youth sitting there, mostly untouched, a cracked chrysalis that can make more complete the return to the state of youth (and past). Boulet puts it very well in his comic Possession. But I don't have that option.

Of course there are plenty of others who also don't have that option, for one reason or one of thousands of others. But we can get at the same thing a different way. In my junior year of high school a heavy wet snow storm on Friday the 13th of October fell on the still-green leaves of the trees and brought countless branches to the ground. So great was the mess that school was cancelled for more than a week. When it was all said and done the number of trees that were gone or wildly altered was approached 100%. My high school, in particular, lost all but just a couple small trees. Their broken remains remained through most of the following year.

Beginning the year after I graduated, however, they began an extensive landscaping project; which involved, at the least, removing all the trees that had been severely damaged, while adding a new large parking lot over what had been an empty if not charming field.

Of course the changes were justified, even though they don't or didn't have to be, and change is inevitable. What it does do, however, is lock memories in the mind, only to be aided, perhaps, with a photo. I can no longer return to the same space that raised me (with only added patina).

In some video games there is a thing known as a "point of no return." This is usually in games with large spaces through which the player has a freedom to explore. But at some point, either physically moving ahead, or accomplishing enough objectives to progress, the designers of the game, for one reason or another, lock off places you have been. The in-game explanation ranges from collapsing roofs to magically overgrown tree roots to something as simple as a six foot cliff you slide down and can't climb up again. But the effect is the same. I inevitably and immediately feel it as a loss. At the same time I realize it's necessary (usually), but this is also tempered by the knowledge that I can simply begin the game again and explore those same spaces.

Reality, of course, does not have that convenience. It does not bow to our whims. Nostalgia, probably mercifully, can only be placated by our own memories, or perhaps the memories of others that match well enough.

My favorite track on the album is Coyote. It's just under three minutes long and contains in its characteristic howling a couple forlorn galaxies. Most of the sound in this song comes from McFerrin's voice. It's quiet and full of those strange pleasant unpleasant sounds mouths make that are only obvious when being used quietly.

(Tangentially, there is a whole set of people who are obsessed with this. Many of them can be found under ASMR, on youtube. There's a whole world of folks whispering for other folks; it's equally strange and charming.)

The sound is very warm, human, intimate, but the reverb and howl and the wind sounds set an expansive stage. It conveys a starry sky over an empty desert. It's practically purpose built as soundtrack for unfocused persuasive sorrow. Even as a child I can acutely remember feeling this ineffable sorrow, loss, yearning. This is why it stuck.

So I can return to this song, and it returns strong holistic emotional ineffable memories. And but though I'm listening to the track on my own five by ten inch wood cabinet fine plastic faced Tivoli stereo speakers the sound they recreate is for most intents and purposes exactly the same (minus a fair amount of bass) as those exact sounds I listened to when I was little. This is a small part of the benefit of digital media; we can remain fairly confident that the file I had and the files I now have, though they come from wildly separate sources, are still probably identical.

But for all that I'm still such a different person. I've heard tens of thousands of hours of other music between now and then. I've lived a (comparative) lot of life. I can relate the sounds to my own experiences of sorrow and loneliness, so in that way my ability to sympathize with the coyote of the song has increased, and but so at the same time my sensitivity to this hurt has dulled.

And then, of course, my listening to it now, then recently and now recently more again for and while writing this I am attaching new memories to the song.

They say that in recalling a memory we play it back, and in being a very analogue format the record is altered each time its played or referenced. While the copy of the song that I'm listening to now is a (relatively) high quality cached file from online service Spotify, and as such practically inalterable, especially not in the sense that a tape or vinyl may deteriorate, it's still being subjectively altered. By attempting to relive this past of mine I am unavoidably altering its context and meaning. This simultaneously weakens its original impact as artifact of past, and but forges new sensory associations with which I can be nostalgic with in the mid and far future.

Every time I listen to Coyote is a Point of No Return. Indeed and obviously, every moment is a point of no return. Even records of our past, may they be photos, journals, songs, or essays, their meaning changes continually due to context. That which is lost can never be reclaimed, etc. etc. etc.

I love the song Coyote, and the whole album Hush, which is remarkably varied in tone. They're two very expressive instruments played by two remarkably talented and hard working guys. They simultaneously shame and inspire me with their effort and dedication.

I expect someday I'll listen to this song at precisely the right (wrong) moment and weep while I listen to it, but not for many years yet I think.

[reviewinganything]

Reviewing Phenomena: Seeing Someone You Don't Know Again

Or: Reviewing Words: "Sonder."

Louis C.K. put it perfectly in his Live at the Beacon Theater standup show. "Have you ever seen someone that you don't know, again." Call it the magic of the persistence of other people. Another word for it would be 'sonder.' A recent word with obscure origins which neatly packages a complex idea family. Usually one notices seeing someone they don't know on the same day. Perhaps walking up the street to a cafe and seeing someone ride by on a particularly handsome blue bike, only to see them fifteen minutes later at the cafe with their bike locked up out front. This can happen a day or two apart too, and the effect of the realization becomes stronger the larger the spatial and temporal gap.

Though unsurprising, I take joy from seeing someone waiting for a plane in one airport, and then four hours and two thousand miles later seeing them waiting at another gate in another airport. This is amplified when, rarely, this other person (or couple) and I wind up taking the same connecting flight as well, and will wind up having spent ten hours living our lives in parallel. I made and especially effective game out of this when I was at Disney World. I constantly casually scanned the crowd and make note of conspicuous people and attempt to notice them again throughout the day. I saw many people twice, several thrice or more, and a few across different parks on different days. Again as the unlikeness increased, the higher the pique. I've yet to notice the same person I don't know twice on a span greater than a few months, and wait in anticipation of (hopefully) someday living this.

In many --probably most-- video games which feature random NPCs they meander through the scene and the disappear once off screen, never to be found or exist again. This can be jarring, as it is strange to follow someone around a corner only to see they've disappeared. It makes sense though; the CPU has to keep track of all entities in the simulation, and most of the sense of liveliness is served by just having extras in the background. The possibility of a jarring realization of their impersistence is accepted as a rare (or inconspicuous) enough encounter for the player to excuse the processing savings that would be spent on keeping track of characters that aren't (or wouldn't be) visible.

Being a 'digital native' and a player-of-games since my youth, I grew to accept this facet of many a digital universe. The occasional game does keep track of all entities (Dwarf Fortress being perhaps the most fascinating/extensive example (there's much to be said about what may be the most structurally complicated game on earth, but we'll save that for another time)), but they are exceptional for being exactly that: exceptions. Though obviously unintentional and well reasoned, this, through the years, had an impact on my subconscious.

Now, obviously, I didn't literally believe that real people behaved the same way. Even children are adept at separating reality from fiction. But this secondary assumption that nevertheless existed at the back of my mind made this realization of persistence, whenever it would happen, that much stronger.

Of course reality is infinitely complex, and of course persistence is one of the most basic features of (meta-)physics that it is, understandably, taken completely for granted. Even energy and mass, being the same thing, manage to persist for eternity. But when I see someone I don't know again, it throws into relief much of (my) the human experience.

Here I am, sitting with my coffee staring out the window, completely absorbed in my life, narrative, mind. Things I definitionally cannot escape. But then here is someone who for all intents and purposes was a purely superfluous extra in the background of my narrative (book, movie, game, ballad, whatever) who had the tenacity to continue existing outside the bounds of my reality and eventually reenter it. At times it seems absurd! But this causes the moment of reflection: I am an extra in their life. I am an extra in the life of almost every single other person on earth. In several dozen other lives I'm a minor role, and in a few I am a supporting character, and perhaps in a couple other I am (or was) a main character. But I'm only (perhaps) the protagonist of my own life (...and perhaps my parents'/brother's?).

The first time I had this realization I nearly drowned in ennui. The second time I had this realization, minutes later, it was a liberation. If I think of my life primarily from the (imagined) perspective of other's lives, the pressure to lead a biographically interesting life is reduced. I don't have to have so much concern for my own story, but can instead do what I do and make a good supporting role.

Sonder. To see someone I don't know again is to glimpse the great liberating unimportance/inconsequence of it all.

"They don't think it be like it is, but it do." Despite the overwhelming totality of my own self/ego, the universe continues to do as it do.

[reviewinganything]

Reviewing Films: The Garden of Words

Makoto Shinkai is a guy who makes animated films about people who love one another in impossible situations.

I saw his first (formally released) work, Voices from a Distant Star, on a DVD from Netflix many years ago. It's a melancholy short film about a girl who goes to fight a space war and leaves her probably-boyfriend behind on earth. As the war goes on she travels farther from earth, and her texts (which in Japan are just emails) take successively longer to reach him. First they take hours, then days, then months, and finally they arrive years after their send date. This works out for her as well as you'd think. It is a strange little work, made almost entirely by Makoto himself on his laptop, and while I liked it, I forgot about it in time.

Years later I found the film The Place Promised in Our Early Days, torrented it, watched it, and enjoyed it. It's quiet, takes its time, and lavishes an absurd amount of love on backgrounds and scenery, rendering them in complicated neat warm light and giving shots of incidental places plenty of time on screen. It has a soft focus on a young awkward polite love triangle and the dream of these older-children/young-adults to explore a tower to space of mysterious origins.

Some months later I heard of another film, 5 Centimeters Per Second, which was directed by the same guy who did The Place Promised..., which after a short bit of internet searching I found out he was the guy who had directed Voices from A Distant Star, that short film I watched several years before on a couch in New Hampshire. Having had this surprising/piquing realization I began to torrent 5 Centimeters Per Second and watched it as soon as it was complete.

5 Centimeters Per Second is a film in three parts about young love, it's dissolution, and the lasting impact this has on its participants. The first act is about the formation of a young romance and ends with the knowledge of its impending doom. The second act shows the main character in his third (final) year of high school, and through a second party explores his alienation, which was caused, at least in part, by his former impossible romance. The final act sees our protagonist in his early adulthood and how he has and has not managed to cope with being human in the modern age (of alienation (in Japan (with regret (and an aching heart)))).

This nostalgic story struck a chord and the rest of me rung in sympathy. It's intimate and mundane, but by being animated it's elevated into sumptuous wonder. The acts of typing on a phone, opening a coffee can, or surfing are drawn with the same soft lines, meticulous pastel color, and care. It spends time lingering on the little moments, to draw out, frame, and express the character's inner state. Which almost invariably is quiet melancholy and that peculiar future-seated nostalgia for the present.

His fourth major release, Children Who Chase Lost Voices, is his longest by far and a strange, though not uncharming, take on the prototypical Hayao Miyazaki young-girl-explores-fantastical-place-and-learns-about-herself-and-has-tiny-romance film structure. It has the mold of his other stories buried in it, but there's so much more around and atop it makes it hard to really set this as finely in line with his other pieces. I rather liked it though, and happened to see it in a showing with nearly two hundred other people at Otakon '11, where I saw it with the company of several of my high school friends. Shinkai himself was in attendance, and were I a cleverer person I could've thought of a question to ask him.

Okay, actually talking about the film now.

The Garden of Words came out earlier this year. I caught it on iTunes, where, perhaps unfortunately, it's only available dubbed. This was the first time I've watched one of Shinkai's films dubbed actually. Though it is, from my amateur perspective, pretty decent. It lets the quiet moments sit undisturbed, and it does free up the eyes to soak in the details.

It's hugely green, piano quiet, and about people figuring out other people and themselves. It concerns itself with the wellbeing of two characters and their concern for one another. It takes neat liberties in relationship-montaging the bulk of the conversations between the two protagonists. It's modeled like a short story and restrained in a way I'm not used to, and in a way that would make Hollywood executives die of heart palpitations. It's easy to look at these scenes and say that's where the meat of the story lay, and by showing us more of those interactions it could've been stretched to a more traditional running time.

After all, fifty minutes (two minutes of which are the silent translated credits) is at least twenty minutes short of any "feature length" picture shown in theaters in decades. It's the length of an hour long television show, but it neither aired on TV nor is it a part of a series. But I don't think it would be stronger if these conversations were elaborated upon. Like a short story, showing us just enough allows us to imagine the rest of the iceberg below the surface. And indeed, like how animation works, we read between the lines and supply the reality that isn't fully shown to us. The story grows and lives outside the bounds of the camera/frame. If art, like Urs Fischer says (via New Strategies for Invisibility), "works best in people's memories," then does it not also work best in people's imaginations?

Part of the reason I like this film is that the premise enacts a dream that I've had but have never been able to realize. That is, two people find one another in an unexpected place, serendipitously make a connection and spontaneously decide to meet again. Their agreement is informal, though it's not entirely unspoken. Just before parting for the first time, Yukari, the woman, recites a tanka, "A faint clap of thunder / clouded skies / perhaps rain comes / and if so stay with me?" as she leaves.

An oblique invitation. Though the boy Takao accepts and spends his time in the garden on each rainy day. Through montage we see them become familiar with one another, and how they meet rainy days with a smile and sunny days with melancholy. The two characters live outside social norms; he skips classes, but only according to a rigorously followed code he sets for himself. She cuts work and drinks in a park in professional clothes. They both take solace in rainy days, and in one another. They learn to trust one another, and though they share aspects of their lives it's clear what they discus is both highly intimate (his dream to design shoes that he's told no one else), yet completely impersonal (they don't even tell one another their names). They develop a close relationship and yet are separated by more than ten years age difference.

Though a more optimistic work may believe that such an age difference is surmountable, this one does not. Takao resents his own youth and immaturity and has trouble connecting to his peers for just this reason. He latches on to Yukari as representing the adult world and all its purpose and sense and capacity for self determination. But Yukari is hurt (several of her students spread nasty rumors (that we never hear)), and copes poorly. While nominally part of the mature adult world, she has trouble navigating it as much as he has trouble navigating his world. Neither of these two are well enough to take care of the other as each may like, but they do have and manage to learn a fair amount from one another.

The second act begins with the reveal that Yukino is a teacher at Takao's school, and she had not been at work because of the abusive rumors started by several older students. Takao, having been busy and focused on his own endeavors, and thus largely isolated from his classmates, hadn't known this, which had been a somewhat famous gossip among the community. One of his first majors shifts occurs here, when he finally comes up with the answer to the tanka she had recited to them on their first meeting. "A faint clap of thunder / even if rain comes not / I will stay here / together with you," Though both had enjoyed and needed their meetings, they had both been weak, or passive, to use the rain as the excuse. When Takao recites the response tanka, it is in the park, but on a sunny afternoon. It's his first figurative step towards deciding his own fate, and acting with intent, rather than falling back on a fairly teenager-y code of conduct.

Just before the climax Takao confesses his love to Yukari. She's surprised and blushes, but after one of Shinkai's characteristic long pauses, responds first by correcting his address to her, then by saying she already has plans to return home. This breaks his heart, though he doesn't immediately break down in tears. Instead, he, suddenly formally, thanks her for her hospitality and leaves. Twice in this scene Yukari starts with an objection, then hesitates. After a moment's tearful repose however, Yukari chases after Takao, eventually catching up to him where he stopped on the stairs from her apartment. Here they share the climax of the film, finally putting words to all their doubts and insecurities and thankfulness for one another.

It's uncharacteristic of Shinkai though, to have such a cathartic scene in which the two main characters weep loudly and heave their emotions at one another stutteringly. I'd like to think it's a sign of maturity in his film making. Like his character Takao, in his previous films he was working under a limited set of assumptions as to what maturity meant. Emotional sincerity and honesty in storytelling in his previous films meant leaving things unsaid, or (very) understated. In the second act of 5 Centimeters Per Second the secondary protagonist girl pines for the main character but eventually moves on and contents herself with her unrequited love. Similar shifts in attitude, of stoic acceptance, are marked as seminal moments in the lives of the characters in both The Place Promised... and Children Who Chase Lost Voices.

Now, certainly it's not the case that this sort of lesson or attitude is worthless. Or that it's an incorrect take on maturity. But to have such a strong catharsis, especially an effective one in such a short work, speaks to a maturing of perspective. Communication and honesty are difficult to achieve and always take effort to work at. So Shinkai shows several failures on Yukari's part to be honest to her friend. First she assumes he already knows who she is when they meet, then she avoids confronting their feelings for one another by sidestepping his confession with a "matter of fact," telling of the circumstances. Then after she's already hurt him, she hesitates in interrupting his leaving twice, and finally only after several seconds of crying alone in her apartment does she run after him to tell him all he's meant to her.

The funny thing is I originally was attracted to Shinkai's work by the very same set of seemingly mature ideals his earlier works spoke to. Only in the past year or two have I learned (continually and again) how hard honesty can be, how much for the better it is and how it can even lead to tearful confessions in strange in-between places. Had I seen this film three years ago I would've balked at the climax in this film. I would've dismissed it as un-truthy as Hollywood's exploding cars or Reaganomics. But seeing this film as I am today (was a week or two ago), it spoke to me.

Though I will admit that the melodramatic ballad with obvious lyrics that begins with the climax the bursts out immediately afterwords is overly saccharine and silly. I could attempt to dismiss that as being another strange artifact of Japanese culture (it's apparent in many other works; see, for example, Final Fantasy VIII's Eyes on Me theme), but it's just brash and instantly drew me out of the experience upon my first viewing.

Through the years and all the various methods I've used to watch Makoto Shinkai's work, they've become a moderate small but crucial part of my psyche. It's happened before I ever really noticed it, and they join with dozens of other Japanese works (e.g. Evangelion; FLCL; Cowboy Bebop; Gundam Wing; Outlaw Star; Final Fantasies 7, 9, and Tactics; and the entire collected works of Haruki Murakami) as important parts of my life experience. Though I like The Garden of Words well enough, I can't say it's objectively (whatever that means) his best work, and it's certainly not subjectively my favorite work of his (that's 5 Cm Per Second). It's a bit obvious about some of its themes despite is general quiet, but it is full of visual splendor, and tells a story in a way that is entirely different from Hollywood, or most western filmmaking. The awkward length is delightful too. So I can happily recommend this film to just about anyone, so long as you can stand to watch any film by not-Hollywood.

[reviewinganything]

Reviewing Sounds: Rain on a Roof

There is something about space. Or rather, about volume. I think it's best understood kinetically. Understanding of the mass and volume of a thing is much more intuitively had when the thing is grasped. Preferably lifted, though pushed, or tipped, or rolled work as well. These can be learned by proxy as well; cars and their accelerators for example. Some folks can learn those so well they can hurtle those masses around corners at speeds that would kill other people.

But when a space can't be physically interacted with on a meaningful level it's much harder to understand. Though again we can come at it obliquely. Each spring I will reliably accidentally slam a door shut when I have first opened the windows, and the air pressure differential no longer cushions the closing (or opening) of a door. Even when the space is a whole house this effect is still apparent. It gives me pause. And in idle moments I'll sit back in my chair and stare into space and ponder it.

Sometimes I try to stare into space. I will activate my imagination and attempt to see the eddies in the air, like so much invisible smoke. I'll strain my senses attempting to perceive the imperceptible. Or, it's probably imperceptible. It may be acclimatized, like the smell of your own house that only reasserts itself when returning from a few days away. I wonder if being in outer space throws this into sharp relief.

Anyhow, I'll sit in my chair in my room and attempt to force a new appreciation for my space. Like looking at the face of a good friend one time to many and reeling at their sudden unfamiliarity. To cease my complacency, if only for a moment.

I find nothing so useful in aiding this pursuit as a hardy rain.

I love looking at rain out the window. I love being out of the rain, and appreciate the warmth and dryness afforded me. I'll step back from the window and appreciate just how well (figuratively and literally) I'm insulated from the elements. I'll marvel at the ingenuity of human engineering and take glee in each gust of wind I hear but don't feel. I love, of course, the sound of rain on the roof.

The sound of "rain on a roof," of course, is not a single sound. There are infinite variations of rains on neigh infinite variations of roofs. The overwhelming quiet roar-of-a-crowd noise when the rain practically waterfalls onto the roof of a large supermarket is figurative leagues away from the intermittent plocking drops of rain dripping from the leaves of a tree onto the taught vinyl of an umbrella.

Some of favorites are, in no particular order:

The hard tacky snare roll of giant raindrops falling hard on the roof of a Subaru parked in a McDonalds parking lot in a midsummer's mid-afternoon's rainstorm. The kind of rain that will cause brooks to form in the gutters of the streets within two minutes which will continue to run for another fifteen after  the sun comes out again.

The rolling ocean waves of a moderate rain falling through a forest. Indistinguishable from the sound of leaves flicking in the wind. And the occasional drop gathered and condensed by the leaves that drops onto my skull with a singular "thwop!"

The woody tenor of doom an evening rain effects as I stand next to my bike under a front porch threatening my imminent bike ride. This one makes me most appreciate our human shelters, and also works as the greatest exercise in mental readjustment, as this can be turned into a rousing challenge with enough will.

The misty unsound of a mizzle. Is it drizzle, or mist? The streets streakily reflect the lights though, and the car tires cast that characteristic swishing whir. Hm.

The variations in these sounds allows us to understand our space in a way that can't be understood strictly by looking at it. Older houses may have drafts, newer shoddy construction may have leaks, the roofs of some houses may act as echo chamber and amplify the pitter patter of rain.

These rains also draw a distinct line (of varying sharpness) between "inside," and "outside." Even if the "inside," is under an old maple in the middle of a field. The rain fills what space it can and where it doesn't fall is walled in. It will gray out things the further they are. This gives something to leverage our understanding of just the amount of distance between our eyes and the subject of our sight. A way to slightly less indirectly understand the space there.

My singular favorite sound of rain though is probably the metallic pinging of a moderate rain on a tin roof heard through the vaulted ceiling of a screened in porch on the forested hill of my mom's back yard while eating steak, asparagus and mushrooms in late spring. That sound is worth at least a tenth of my collected nostalgia.

(p.s. I cannot say how many times I wanted to pluralize it as "rooves.")

[reviewinganything]

Reviewing Clothes: Tanner Goods Belt

The other day on a walkabout I finally decided to check out a little boutique I had passed by dozens of times but never had the gumption to go into before. The shop, Tanner Goods, turned out to be based in Portland, and I was glad to have gone in, as it was full of fine things.

It's a fairly small space, with forest green walls and a modern rustic decor. Cozy and simple. In the center of the room two tables stand end to end, arrayed with small leather goods. Key fobs, wallets, coasters and the like. Along the left wall are two tiers of racks of coats and shirts, and a shelf of raw denim jeans. On the opposite wall are racks of long leather strips. These are the belts. But they're not yet affixed with buckles, rivets, or keeper loops.

The clerk greeted me as I walked in, and a few minutes later asked if there was anything in particular I was looking for, and I said (surprising myself) "belts." "Perfect," he said, and he walked me through the belt purchasing process.

First he had me try on a mocked up belt for sizing. Next I selected one of about eight colors (from the very light natural, to a deep red, to black). Then I had selected a buckle and rivets from a selection of simple polished metal, yellow brass, a coppery brass, or black.

I could not resist the contrasting black buckle. After my selection was made the clerk pressed the hardware onto the belt in under a minute. I made my purchase and was able to wear it out.

The belt is ridiculously handsome. Simple in design and construction the quality of the material is left to speak for itself. And it speaks well. The front is smooth with a matte finish that works well with its warm natural tone. The back is darker with a slightly rough texture which likely keeps in place better. Its several millimeters thick and quite rigid so it doesn't flop around while I feed it through my belt loops. It is, like most well made things, a simple joy to handle.

It has presence and volume. Even when synched snugly around my waste these gaps are still present, with a total depth of a couple centimeters. Though I suspect that with age these parts will crease and flatten.

The buckle and sleeve rattle heartily when frobnicated, and the leather creaks faintly as moves around. A faint musk still hangs about it too. It's strange to think, but it has more than just a visual experience. I like it though, it feels more like a substantial object. More whole and holistic.

After just a few days of wearing, the high stress points are beginning to show the faintest hints of darkening and wrinkling. It's obvious that this belt will last a long time and will patina handsomely as it ages.

Now, it's not particularly cheap. But just earlier that day I was browsing through several clothing stores, and all their belts were not at all appealing. I'd been in need (want) of a brown leather belt for some time, and this one, in stark contrast to the belts in more usual clothing stores, immediately stood out to me. This automatic and complete sense of satisfaction is worth a lot in my mind. Better to pay a bit more to have an excellent thing that I will like and have ten years hence than to spend half as much for a thing I like a fifth as well and will last three years.

Perhaps later I will post an update on how the belt ages. For now though I'm thoroughly satisfied, and see this belt as a daily fixture in my life either until it disintegrates in twenty years time, or until I get another comparable belt. Their black ones are just as fine...

[reviewinganything]

Reviewing Drinks: Strawberry Coffee in Sapporo

I spent two months of the summer of '09 wwoofing in Japan. More specifically in the outskirts of the township of Bikuni, which was an hour bus ride from tiny-city Otaru (which is popular among Chinese tourists for having been the setting in an old film and having a charming old canal), which is itself just over an hour's train ride from Sapporo, Hokkaido (which is an overnight train ride from Tokyo, which is a thirteen hour flight from Detroit).

In retrospect this was an absurd decision, as neither the friend I was traveling with nor myself could speak any Japanese, and our ability to read it was limited to the contents of a pocket sized Japenese-English phrasebook. Despite this however we managed to survive several days on our own, and just over two months with the help of our generous hosts. I must recommend this experience, and given our wanton stupidity and how well it turned out, you have little substantive reason to object.

In any case; though we only had a day off a week, and it took nearly three hours total to get there, my friend and I visited Sapporo (the largest city in Hokkaido) twice. It's a delightful place, bright clean and neat, set on a small grid, with a number of tall glass roofed courtyards and futuristic malls. The city university in particular is a wonder of planning, with tree lined gravel lanes and an idyllic recessed lawn/garden/park shaded by a few giant old trees with a pristine creek lazing through at a wabi-sabi perfect angle.

After a day of wandering this fine city we found ourselves, unsurprisingly, hungry. We managed to find our way back to one of the main shopping strips and browsed the standing poster boards advertising the food of the nearby restaurants. While indecisively reviewing one a young woman in a crisp white shirt and black slacks walked past us to the elevator (which opened to the outdoors), who lent us a smile as she waited. This was a perfect reason to pick one place to eat given our inability to read any menus, so we hustled to join her in the elevator, which rose swiftly to the third floor, where the three of us stepped off.

We exited into the entrance of a fine small restaurant. The top two thirds of the walls were painted off white, while the bottom third were clad in thin cut gray stained wood slats. About eight booths lined the wall, the tall benches upholstered in supple red pleather. At the end of each bench a column rose to the ceiling. There were no windows, the ambient lighting was soft, and each booth lit with a low hung red lamp. The overall affect was that of unobtrusive privacy. Unfussy intimacy. We were the only guests at this off hour.

Miss Crisply Dressed turned out to be both host and waitress. She sat us quickly (after we removed our shoes and she set them in cozy numbered cubbies), then brought us laminated menus arrayed edge to edge with numbered pictures of the dishes. Here is where we pause for a moment and marvel at how well equipped this random little restaurant was for just such a couple of hilariously inept foreign tourists. My friend and I carefully considered the merits of the food we could infer through the photography, strategizing our meal carefully.

A short while later our waitress rearrived and through an engaging conversation of pointing, pantomime, and apologetic smiles on all sides, we placed our order.

Another couple of conversational topics later, our waitress set our drinks down. The color of my coffee was a soft opaque pink, like a piece of fine stationary. Or more obviously like a cherry blossom. An airy pastel, not too saturated nor too bright. It would've been perfect for the frosting on a cupcake, or a girl's hair accessory. Several impeccably clear ice cubes clinked in it, poking strange pits into the surface.

It sat in a fine tumbler. The bottom of the glass was thick, refracting and reflecting light in a curvilinear grid. It weighed just enough disarm me. As I picked it up it imparted the motion with a deliberateness. I'm sure if you clinked the bottom of two of the glasses together they'd ring with the satisfying round ascending note of two glass marbles knocking together. This was not a glass that could be handled absentmindedly.

I took a sip; the coffee felt saccharine smooth but not sticky on the pallet. Flowing as I imagine a well tempered potion might. The flavor was surprisingly fresh. Open, distinctly sweet, but balanced. The earthy bitterness of the coffee was still apparent, and played well with the floral, near minty bright flavor of the strawberry. The two flavors were impressively distinct and well defined. It tasted more like actual strawberries than any strawberry flavored candy or drink I've had before or since. I was compelled to finish in one gulp, and simultaneously to sip on it as delicately as too-expensive whiskey.

The only thing I've ever had that's similar was a violet flavored ice-cream from a boutique ice-cream shop in Madrid.

The cold light drink contrasted pleasantly with the hot, savory, and partially spicy meal. The ice melted and diluted the flavor just enough as the meal progressed, and was somehow so well engineered as to never freeze my lip, nor shift unexpectedly into my face. Despite my intents I could not keep the relatively small portion through the whole meal. Somehow though, ordering more than one felt unforgivably brazen. It also cost six hundred yen. In the end I did not leave the restaurant with that aftertaste lingering on my tongue.

Some things, perhaps, are best left in memory. I scarcely desire any flavor as much as this ever more fabled Strawberry Iced Coffee (from Some Restaurant on the Third Floor of Some Building in Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan). I keep a keen eye out for any similar drink, and haven't even seen a pale comparison to use to fuel my probably-irrational reverence for this one glass of coffee. It's restraint and elegance has made every coffee based cocktail I've had since feel as lopsided as a two wheeled tricycle.

As such, this glass of Strawberry Iced Coffee gets a solid "12 year single malt," out of "PBR."

[reviewinganything]

Reviewing Places: This Public Stair

99 Percent Invisible has a pretty excellent piece on secret staircases. I lived in Buffalo for most of my youth, and the greatest change in elevation you'll find in that city is one hundred fifty feet. Some years later I moved (intermittently) to New Hampshire, then Vermont. These states have changes in elevation of thousands of feet within half a mile. Natural verticality is a neat thing. Walking up a hill doesn't feel like as much work as climbing up a concrete stairwell that switchbacks on itself repeatedly. Or maybe they're that much steeper. Maybe taking those couple seconds to turn about on each landing emphasize the repetition. Maybe the vacancy of that space gives the mind nothing else to dwell on save the effort.

But as hilly and delightful as Vermont and New Hampshire (and parts of upstate New York and Maine) are, they are not particularly populated. They have hills and roads that wind around them, forming sparse noodly configurations on maps. But they do not have public stairs. For that you need a city on (or around) some hills. San Francisco excels with this. As mentioned in the 99 PI episode LA works as well.

Portland, as it happens, has some hills. Large swathes of the city are fairly flat. When milling about parts of the east side I can feel like I'm in Buffalo again. But the hills are almost always somewhere seen-but-not-seen above the horizon. The mountains, Hood or St. Helens even farther out are often visible as well. The hills are still there though. A few fleck the east side while the west side of the city runs right up some appreciable hills, reaching just about a thousand feet.

So; a few days ago I went for a walk on a lovely sunny autumn Monday afternoon looking for something specific that I could not define. I took the train west, exited, and continued walking west. This lead uphill soon enough. As the Dirty Projectors sing in Stillness is the Move, "on top of every mountain / there was a great longing / for another even higher mountain." It's human nature to go up.

I walked farther west and further up. Eventually the grid of the streets breaks upon the geography and this is where I came upon the first set of public stairs I'd climb. As I overcame a corner and looked to my left it rose up above me, and I knew immediately what I had been seeking ardently and aimlessly that morning was an outdoor mossy public staircase. I climbed it immediately which deposited me into the mess of narrow curvy streets that defines any hilly neighborhood.

Meandering incessantly inefficiently upward I eventually came upon this stair. I looked in wonder for a moment, then due to this being 2013 I pulled out my pocket internet device and checked Google Maps. Lo and behold, a small grey line sprouted from the blue You Are Here pip. A public staircase.

What enchants me about public stairs is that they, along with pedestrian bridges, are essentially the first, last, and only public spaces in America not designed expressly for cars. It felt as though I were entering a private space as I walked up these stairs. They're squished neatly between two private residences, and aren't so open or signposted as most other public spaces. One needs only to walk one city block to see dozens of street signs. The stairs have no signs or warnings. They don't match the flow of the abutting sidewalks either. Then they're recessed into the hillside itself, giving them a curiously dwarven, intimate, perhaps even claustrophobic aesthetic.

So despite mild misgivings and with the courage of Google Maps having provided evidence for their being public property, I descended. I noticed the cruft of dust and leaves stuck in the pit of each stair, and how, considering the outdoorslyness of the stairway, they were remarkably well swept. The rise of each step felt a little shorter than I'm used to. For the first several steps I landed with the staccato thud characteristic of underestimating a descent. Each step was also cut just short enough that I'd set a quarter-inch more toe off the edge as I'd prefer. I kept my hand hovering, uncharacteristically, just above the rail for half my traversal.

As I'd been ascending the curly sidewalks of the roads of the hill till this point, my legs shuddered lightly under load. (In my defense, I was being more conservative than I usually would, as a slip would mean falling down several dozens of (concrete) steps.)

Maybe forty steps down, just in the shaded spot in the photo at the top of the post, I came upon a landing bracketed with too benches.

Their recess into the walls formed a neat little space, like a comfortable elevator. A couple trees hung low overhead, their leaves in this mid autumn beginning to fall and make a mess of the benches, which were distinctly less well kept than the steps themselves. Previous passers had carved miscellany into the moss that makes its home on every instance of shaded concrete in the city.

Of course I sat on one for a moment. I wondered that the bench was a slab with space beneath the seat rather than being a solid block. To accommodate those who like to sit with legs tucked under, or even a backpack? They were about the distance apart two benches in a restaurant might be. Perfect for hosting a conversation. I wondered how often they'd ever been sat in, and what the designers (engineers?) were thinking when they designed the space. I thought it'd be a fine fantasy to bring a small table and share tea and conversation with strangers here. I wondered how often these stairs were ever used.

Soon enough, I stood, descended further, passed one more benched landing, and exited the stairs where the second photo depicts. The neighborhood hosted several other stairs that I visited, each one similar but unique, all equally charming.

The intimacy of the space makes it a much more humane and holistic experience. Only a couple minutes later I scurried across a road attempting to not inconvenience a driver. This drew a sharp contrast in my mind. We defer to cars, nervously crossing spaces just a little too large to be comfortable. It's notable in a city when a road is even just two cars wide. The public stairs are smaller than pretty much any other space for the general public I'm aware of. These public stairs make me long for spaces for people.

This public stairs deserves at least a "bench with a fine view" out of "a hellish infinite parking lot."

And here's to many more.