WANNA BE SOMEONE WHO COW WOW WOWS

The New York Dolls played Music Hall of Williamsburg this past Monday to a confused crowd of hipsters and people way past their prime. Hey, kind of like the band members themselves!

I'm kidding. Well, no. Well, kind of. David Johansen and Sylvain Sylvain, in their wonderful post-drugged-out glories, are the only two original members still performing today. And good for them, because they can still rock harder than probably anyone I've ever seen. They have a good sense of humor about themselves and are very playful - encouraging the crowd to have even half as much fun as they clearly do.

Also with them is my hero Steve Conte, who is the hardest working man in punk who still "get it", holding his guitar out to the crowd so they can pull at and run their fingers across its strings and running it across his monitor for feedback effects. A band like New York Dolls should be a novelty act playing Vegas at this point, which makes seeing them in one of the smaller famous venues in NYC all the more exciting.

Williamsburg is small and decidedly very un-punk. The crowd moved during the songs they recognized, some even going so far as to jump in place. But you do not go to Music Hall of Williamsburg to mosh. You go to show off your new beard and nod your head to the loudest act you can find. "Am I being ironic?" Who knows! Moshing is for teenagers.

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This past week I read Ode to Kirihito, oft cited as the masterwork of my other hero, Osamu Tezuka. Long-time FTH readers will note my affinity for this man's work, which has made significant contributions to the culture of sf in pure artistist form.

It's about a brilliant scientist named Kirihito who is investigating a mysterious disease called "monmow", which has been turning people into primative animals, eventually killing them. As per his mentor's request, Kirihito goes off to a secluded town where cases have erupted, eventually contracting it himself. The 800+ page graphic novel then follows his downward spiral and the scandal that envelopes it in one of the darkest Tezuka stories I've read thus far.

I very much enjoyed this; I actually wound up reading the majority of it one sitting, because I had no desire to stop. While Tezuka's silliness and cartoony caricatures are absent, many plot points spiral haphazardly toward conclusion in his signature fashion. There are also a number of "breakdown" moments (as seen above) where the reader suddenly enters the abstract psyche of a main character going through stressful agony.

I'm looking forward to getting my hands on Black Jack Vol. 5.

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Also in the world of bizarre Japanese things is Flower, Sun and Rain released for the Nintendo DS. It was created by grasshopper manufacture, Marvelous Interactive, outsourcing studio h.a.n.d., and published in America by XSEED and Marvelous. It's a port of the sophomore effort of Suda 51, whom I think is the only man in video games worth noting these days.

FSR is a pretty bad game, featuring lots of backtracking, puzzles requiring obscure algebra, and just a general outdated design. Much like other Suda 51 games, it's not so much about the game as it is the story and unique presentation. It goes something like this:

Sumio Mondo, a "searcher" who is a master at cracking codes, is sent to Lospass Island, a small resort island that serves as the home to Flower, Sun and Rain, a high-class hotel. His mission is to prevent a terrorist plan to explode an airplane, which is set to take off the day Mondo gets there. On the first day, Mondo is stopped by a hotel resident and asked to use his expertise to crack a code for them. Because he is nice, he gets to work. After he achieves his goal, he steps out onto the veranda and witnesses the airplane take off and explode in mid-air. The next day he wakes up, and the airplane hasn't taken off yet. He gets up to find the bomb, but it stopped yet again by another resident. This happens over and over again.

As the days go on, Mondo begins to unravel, and he starts to believe in conspiracies against him. More and more outlandish things happen to him at precisely timed moments as the hotel and its entire cast of characters begin to warp and torment the poor searcher.

The game has a nice sense of humor and I enjoy its surreal narrative. I love anything that has a large ensemble for a cast. But it's difficult for me to recommend it, because it's not for everyone. You really need to be patient, because there's a lot of walking (no transportation is allowed on the island). There are some chapters that require you to move Mondo from one end of the island to the other, which isn't difficult as there are no obstacles, but it is tedious work.

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Last, but certainly not least, is my second trip (and possibly last) to Celebrate Brooklyn this summer. Blonde Redhead played a free show last night, marking the third time I've seen this fantastic band.

The pictures I have of the show are pretty bad, and BrooklynVegan hasn't updated yet today, so deal with it. BR's set consisted mostly of material from their albums 23 and Misery of a Butterfly, much like the last two times I've seen them (although Kazu Makino was not wearing a plastic nurse outfit, and there were absolutely zero technical problems! Imagine that!). I also finally got to see them play "Messenger" without Amedeo Pace's voice going out midway through the song. (Quote of the night: When they broke out into "Spring and by Summer Fall" and someone yelled out "THAT'S THAT SONG FROM THE CAR COMMERCIAL!")

The crowd waited in line through a downpour to see them and it was worth the effort, because the rest of the night was cool and clear. The space in the Prospect Park Bandshell is large, as I mentioned in my Byrne post a few weeks back, and we actually got into it this time, with primo seats.

Every time I see Blonde Redhead there's always one guy behind me explaining to his group of friends about how Makino fell off a horse, had to undergo major surgery, and then wrote an entire album about it. This same expert thought that any song the band played before their Misery is a Butterfly album was "new" and his mind was blown each time. The band has a large repertoire - I believe they don't exploit it enough, but the crowd might be bored with their early psychadelic and no wave efforts.

Still, you know what would really floor me? If anyone knew where they got their name from.

HE KNEW IT WAS HAPPENING ALL OVER AGAIN

I have a tendency to have frightening dreams based on whatever I'm critically engaged in at the moment.

A few weeks ago, I had begun playing killer7 for the Gamecube again, a videomajiggy that features co-design credits of Shinji Mikami, creator of the campy Resident Evil series. In this game, enemies would laugh maniacally before slowly crawling towards you, invisible, and if you didn't take them down quickly enough they'd grab you and explode, wrecking your shit. I had a dream where I was running down tight corridors, and I heard the laughter and got very frightened, as if an army of invisible bad guys were waiting behind every corner.

Again, just last week after a hardcore 1984 session, I had a dream that involved telescreens. I had, apparently, broken some mortal law that was about to be scrutinized by the Party, and I had done it in front of a telescreen, which has the ability to watch the viewer at all times. Knowing that I was about to be erased, panic began welling up inside my chest. To me, in a nightmare, there is nothing scarier than knowing you are, undoubtably, going to die. Not even death itself is a scarier concept than knowing that your inevitable doom is slowly spreading through you like the slowly retracting jaw of a snake, ready to attack and strangle its prey for a quick meal. Holy mother of balls.

Needless to say, I have woken up the past few nights in a cold sweat. Sometimes I wake up with the fear still inside of me, as if the dream hadn't ended yet, and it has somehow manifested itself into my waking life.

So perhaps it is not a good thing that I have begun reading Ring, Koji Suzuki's horror novel that spawned the popular films. I briefly mentioned this in my last post, which I will not dignify with a link (scroll down). I, admittedly, have never seen the movies. I'm not much for the horror genre, in case you can't tell. But I find the book engrossing, at least in the first fifty pages, and despite the morbid air and atmosphere it is a casual, fun read.

The translating/publishing house is Verticle, who also has a hand in translating a few of Tezuka's works including Black Jack, which is fucking awesome. It's about an unlicensed surgeon who has the ability to perform miracle cures on patients. He is generally considered an outcast and a thief, considering how loner qualities, deformed appearance, and outrageous doctor's fees. However, we know he's grossly misunderstood - Black Jack is unbearably tragic, constantly the victim of circumstance and a bastion of moral indignity - he is essentially the human, adult version of the serialized Astro Boy and repeating his laundry list of woeful sorrow would be best left for a post later on, when volume 3 is released later this month.

Unfortunately this blog post must be cut short; I have decided that taking a winter class that forces me up at 6AM was a good idea, and so my recent nights have been cut tragically short. I shall end this post with a YouTube video of the Talking Heads, because if I can't see David Byrne live then I can at least close my eyes and pretend I'm there.

KILLIN' IT

I recently finally got around to reading Battle Royale, the sci-fi thriller by Koushun Takami about a bunch of Japanese middle school kids forced by the government to kill each other on a remote island. Since I don't feel like summarizing it beyond what I just wrote, he's an easily-digestable clip from the novel's produce page on Amazon.com:

Battle Royale, a high-octane thriller about senseless youth violence, is one of Japan's best-selling - and most controversial - novels. As part of a ruthless program by the totalitarian government, ninth-grade students are taken to a small isolated island with a map, food, and various weapons. Forced to wear special collars that explode when they break a rule, they must fight each other for three days until only one "winner" remains. The elimination contest becomes the ultimate in must-see reality television. A Japanese pulp classic available in English for the first time, Battle Royale is a potent allegory of what it means to be young and survive in today's dog-eat-dog world. The first novel by small-town journalist Koushun Takami, it went on to become an even more notorious film by 70-year-old gangster director Kinji Fukusaku.

The book's setting is rife with dystopia, given the uneven political landscape and fear of Japanese youth. I have to say that, despite the somewhat stilted and unbelievable dialog, I thoroughly enjoyed this book enough to get me interested in other modern Japanese authors. In my queue I have Koji Suzuki's The Ring, a book given to me for Christmas by Zoraida. I've also been getting into Osamu Tezuka manga, having recently read (and fallen in love with) Dororo and MW, the latter of which was also a Christmas gift from a good friend who does not have a blog. More on that later, however.

The issue at hand here is another movie versus book diatribe - I had not seen the Battle Royale film prior to reading the book, and I have to say that after watching it after my complete read-through, I am disappointed. Although this is absolutely an issue of length and content - a 600+ page novel is sure to have a more detailed story than an under-two-hour film - I couldn't help but be bothered by the film's pacing. I felt the novel to be less about the brutality of the killings and more of the sadness caused by them, and one of the major missing elements from the novel in the film was the development of the relationships between all of the classmates. Very little background is given on any character, to the point where development was so spare that I left completely unsatisfied.

Beat Takeshi is good, but his character in the film seemed a lot more personable than the ruthless game master in the book (they even have different names and backgrounds). The end events were also slightly different, and I was let down by how the entire final scene played out. That said, the film was at least watchable and I can understand why it's a cult classic. The film successfully tells its story even though it alienates so many elements and themes from the novel. Taken seperately, I don't think I'd like the film at all if I weren't able to fill in background information that isn't even there. I'd probably watch it once and shelf it.

Right now I'm reading through 1984 because I hadn't really before, a book also given to me for Christmas by a friend of mine who remains blogless. But in between readings I've been on a Tezuka kick. Right now I'm reading through Astro Boy, which I scored a complete manga set of off of eBay a week ago. One of the truly interesting things about Astro Boy, to me, is that as it is Japan's first animated series, the character himself is a long-standing children's icon in American culture as well. The original television show (which I purchased on DVD last year - over 100 episodes that I am still working my way through) is the first anime.


While all of your classic children's show elements are there: morals, friendship, the monster-of-the-week specials, Astro Boy is a strikingly bleak and depressing look into a future populated by corrupt humans and oppressed robots. And as Asimov would have us believe, robots who go haywire go haywire. They go haywire here too. But then there are the sentient robots who exist for good, only to be reprimanded and despised by humans (Detective Gumshoe, a snarky reoccuring character, has a serious vendetta against all robots) just because of one or two bad ones. This is Astro Boy's most famous dilemma: constant alienation and rejection. The unwavering wish to be a real boy.

In the end, though, Astro Boy learns that it's OK to be different as long as you can save the world a thousand times over. But still, so many episodes deal with death and isolation, that you have to feel at least a little sad.

The differences between the stories in the manga and those in the TV show are aplenty. This is obviously because us soft gaijins can't stand to see violence. Tezuka was the man, though, because in one of his (comic-strip) introductions, he complains about the hypocrisy of American executives who asked him to tone down the violence in the cartoon despite unjustly killing thousands over in Nam. For example, there's an episode in the manga which a national holiday exists where robots are created to look exactly like deceased loved ones. In the same episode of the TV show, those robots are created to duplicate those who are currently in space. I have a feeling the original Japanese episode kept the original story and the English one had it changed, because once you understand certain elements of the driving-character the entire episode revolved around, you kind of realize that it's unbelievable that his family would consider him in space and not dead.

So, it's little things like that that bother me, but it's all good.

In other news, I'm going to see Blonde Redhead again at Terminal 5 tomorrow night. Should be a good show. I've seen them before a year ago and it was a nice way to cap off the year. I end this post with a YouTube video I particularly enjoy, with no reference at all to a part 2 of my end-of-the-year list.