Purchases benefit
this site.

Painfully long-winded (three hours and change), this docudrama about one of Japan's most notorious and violent political factions wouldn't be worth the attention if it wasn't for the fact that longtime director / agent provocateur Kōji Wakamatsu was at the helm. The movie itself, though, could have been directed by anybody. The first hour's a jumble of stock footage, uninvolving re-enactments and title cards, as the turbulent political world of student groups in 1960s Japan is laid out for us in numbing detail, and it leaves us with little sense that the film will matter for anyone who wasn't actually there.

The second hour is slightly more absorbing, as the United Red Army of the title starts as an earnest splinter group from another faction but gradually degenerates into paranoia and self-persecution with many of its own members murdered for being not ideologically pure enough. The only people we get to know well enough are the instigators of the purge; everyone else is just a name and a date of death.

The home stretch re-constructs the infamous "Asamasanso Siege" (as documented in Shocking Crimes of Postwar Japan). Here there are hints of the movie this could have been as the revolutionists barricade themselves in a mountain lodge, stand off against police for days on end, and face both physical and psychological warfare. But by that point the film has long since worn out its welcome. It's all good intentions for so little real payoff, one-and-a-half hours of movie in a three-hour bag. Then again, maybe Wakamatsu's point is that this revolutionary political stuff is supposed to be boring, but I'm dubious. Bonus points for Jim O'Rourke's mournful soundtrack, though.

Purchases benefit
this site.

If one were to travel into the universe of GTO: 14 Days in Shonan and look up Badass on Wikipedia, I would find the article deficient if a picture of Eikichi Onizuka didn’t appear as the illustration of choice on that page.

GTO stands for Great Teacher Onizuka, and the adventures of Onizuka and his stupefying excursions into rock-ribbed machismo have been chronicled in both a manga and its subsequent anime adaptation. Both were translated into English, but are now sadly out of print. Enter Vertical, Inc., who have been looking to broaden their manga offerings. Rather than reissue all of GTO, which would have been problematic at best, they elected instead to bring English-speaking audiences this previously-untranslated follow-up series. It’s a gamble, but not a reckless one, and the presence of previous GTO stories doesn’t create a major barrier for newcomers.

Purchases benefit
this site.

1.

There is no such thing as perfection. It’s an idea, and not even a particularly useful one at that: all it does is tell you what you are not. It’s even misleading as a goal or a direction to move in, because all it will do is dog you at every step and remind you of how you fall short.

This is what I tell myself most every day, as a way to keep my expectations from being hijacked by the impossible. Impossible is nothing, or so the Adidas ads tell us — and while I do admit every day there is a little bit less of the impossible all around us, there is never any more of the perfect. The only time there’s perfection is when we let ourselves dream, when we freely drop into a space where what’s possible takes precedence over what actually is. Sometimes the best way to get there is with the right music, and if the soundtrack to such a thing is not Kind of Blue then I don’t want another one.

Kind of Blue is the only jazz album I would recommend to someone who has never listened to jazz, whether in a conscientious way or in any way at all. That is only because it’s also one of the few albums I would recommend to anyone no matter what music they already listen to, or even if they listen to no particular music, period. It seems not “educational” but necessary: a world without Kind of Blue is missing at least one major constellation in its sky. You can play it in most any environment without directly noticing what is so special about it, and in a way that is part of what makes it so important. If someone has Kind of Blue in their collection and not a single other jazz record, they are not all that deprived.

Hay Festival: Jonathan Franzen: 'Art is a religion' - Telegraph

I’m amused by how intent people are on making human beings immortal or at least extremely long-lived. One of the consolations of dying is that [you think], ‘Well, that won’t have to be my problem’. Seriously, the world is changing so quickly that if you had any more than 80 years of change I don’t see how you could stand it psychologically.”

Most of Franzen's comments on e-books and technology are pretty shallow — he's an admitted atavist, as per his essays in How to Be Alone  — but he does touch on something worth expanding on here, even if he doesn't seem to realize it.

An incredibly well-timed post from io9: Great Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Who Never Wrote Sequels or Trilogies.

"Well-timed" in big part because I was just debating this very issue with others earlier today, and because it's something I've taken a stance on re: my own work. No sequels, no multiple works in the same universe.

That said, I am fully prepared to admit I might reconsider once I have to deal with the way publishing works apart from hustling individual copies across a table at a convention.

A common trope of far-future technology is matter synthesis — essentially Star Trek's transporter, wired up in such a way that you just spit out copies of things via energy-to-matter conversion.

We're not going to have anything remotely like that for a long time, but right now we have a fabrication technology which has been turning a few heads: 3D printing. The technology has advanced quite a bit in a very short amount of time, so much so that it's a little intimidating. Check out the Shapeways site, and the range of materials available for use in a given project: it's not just ABS plastic. Naturally the implications vis-à-vis patent and copyright are pretty hair-raising.

What got me thinking, though, is a slightly oddball, sidelong aspect of the whole thing. At what point does the term "handmade" become pointless, especially if you could program a 3D printer to emulate the very imperfections and quirks that make a handmade item so endearing? Or is it even any of those things? Is it just the cachet that goes with knowing you have something an actual human being created with their own hands? How valuable is that feeling going to be in the future?

Purchases benefit
this site.

“This book argues,” writes Richard Gombrich in the preface to What the Buddha Thought, “that the Buddha was one of the most brilliant and original thinkers of all time.” His aim is to place the Buddha in the same canon as Aristotle or Descartes, rather than Jesus or Mohammed — a philosopher and thinker, not simply a religious figurehead.

This is an ambitious undertaking, and I am happy to report that What the Buddha Thought is not a case of hubris or mislaid ambition. It is one of a number of works that I am tempted to call “revisionist-Buddhist,” works that attempt to wipe away the encrustations of time or the dirt of history from Buddhism and make them not only relevant to the current age but allow us to see more of Buddhism than would be possibly by simply reiterating previous work. Brad Warner and Dzogchen Ponlop have both produced work in this vein for lay audiences, and now I am exploring works of a more scholarly nature that attempt to do the same things.

Why Piracy is Not Responsible for 'Ruining' Comics [Op-Ed] - ComicsAlliance | Comic book culture, news, humor, commentary, and reviews

Comic books aren't competing with other comics or being damaged by piracy so much as they're competing with video games, movies, music, and more. They aren't competing with baseball cards or riding around on a dirt bike any more. Is the latest issue of Daredevil more entertaining than Saints Row the Third? In a way, that's comparing apples to oranges. But to consumers, they're both entertainment options.

I suspect this argument cuts in all directions. The range, breadth, and availability of entertainment has broadened to such a degree that competition between all flavors of entertainment has also increased. I'm becoming convinced it's a cycle, and not simply a one-way street.

Purchases benefit
this site.

There’s been any amount of talk lately about how comics, science fiction and fantasy, movies, and all the rest of pop culture constitute a new mythology for the age. I go back and forth about this one myself, because one of the things a mythology seems to imply is the presence of some larger belief system about what is being mythologized. Maybe it’s a matter of terminology: would a fairy tale for the modern age imply that much less baggage than a new mythology?

It isn’t as if I think fairy tales sit further down the ladder from full-blown mythos — more like they occupy different seats on the same general bus. One thing I can say about Osamu Tezuka is that he seems to have been comfortable in any of those seats, as well as comfortable driving the whole bus. He created works that were not only mythology for the new age (Phoenix) but which dealt with real-world myth figures (Buddha) — and on top of that created a whole slew of manga which we could comfortably call fairy tales without feeling like either his work or the term itself was being demeaned.

10 Writing "Rules" We Wish More Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors Would Break

... "sympathetic" isn't the same thing as "compelling" — a character can be unsympathetic but utterly fascinating and spellbinding. Like a lot of the things on this list, this is all in the execution — if you're going to go with a protagonist who's fundamentally unsympathetic or unrelatable, you're going to have to do an amazing job of making the reader care about him or her in spite of everything.

The Stars My Destination comes to mind as a great example of this. Gully Foyle, the hero — er, protagonist  — is one of the less likable characters of any SF story I've read. What makes him the center of such a compulsively readable story is a) we know exactly what he wants, but we never know how he's going to go about trying to get it next, and b) he does humanize as the story goes on. He begins as a brute, mutates into a creature of revenge, evolves into a spy / supersoldier, and ends as a repentant and a transcender of human limitations.