[untitled]; or How to grip with your fingernails.

Oh yeah. Happy holidays, for what that's worth. I hope you're doing alright. Thank you so much for reading.

Singh is King; or the Best Things of (in) '08.

It seems like the entire internet is engaging in their year-end 'best of' ritual. I don't really feel too qualified for this. I'm completely and thoroughly out of the loop for what's going on in every possible way. If this list were restricted to things actually released in '08, it would consist of JCVD, which was awesome and you should rent it when it comes out on DVD.
But who can resist the charm of lists? Not me, anyway! (It was actually a surprisingly arduous post to put together, mostly due to my anal retentiveness regarding spelling people's names correctly; one of the reasons you see no directors listed on that movie list, although I wouldn't mind editing in country of origin and year for some clarity.)

To start on a weak note, film and literature drew the short straw for commentary, as reflects their representation in my posting history as well. Like I said, hopefully you enjoy lists.
Movies:
True Stories
Tapeheads
Das Boot
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
Taste of Tea, The
Funky Forest: The First Contact
Lust, Caution
Last Picture Show, The
Badlands
There Will Be Blood
Pornographers, The
River's Edge
Edge, The
Naked Prey
Fail-Safe

Books:
Platform by Michel Houellebecq
Ox Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
The Japanese: A Cultural Portrait by Robert S. Ozaki
Buccaneers of America by Alexander O. Exquemelin
Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami
Low Life by Luc Sante
Crickets By Sammy Harkham
Butcher's Crossing by John Williams
The Freedom by Christian Parenti
Setting Sun: Writings by Japanese Photographers Edited by Ivan Vartanian, Akihiro Hatanaka and Yutaka Kanbayashi
Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings by Edward S. Morse
Beyond the Green Zone by Dahr Jamail
Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Álvaro Mutis
Our Farm by Raymond Depardon
Red Colored Elegy by Seiichi Hayashi
Clockers by Richard Price
Wabi Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers by Leonard Koren
Dirty Snow by Simenon
To Each His Own by Leonardo Sciascia
Wonderland: A Fairytale of the Soviet Monolith by Jason Eskenazi
Red Lights by Simenon
Radiance of the King by Camara Laye
Run Man Run by Chester Himes
Summer Book by Tove Jansson
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

Music:
This is a tough one. I basically don't buy new music anymore. Twice a year there's Archive's record fair. I missed the one that just passed but am still working my way through the 30 records and 60 cassettes that I bought way back in June. I listen to music infrequently, and get uncomfortable listening to too many new recordings in too short a period of time. If an album seems worth anything to me, I tend to want to listen to it quite a few times, at my leisure. Which makes it hard to get through much. Aside from the fact that I don't have a turntable. Actually, most of the year, perhaps everything previous to around October, I wasn't really listening to music much at all. I was getting pretty sick of my collection of CD's, which I'm quite proud of but has had many years to get a bit stale, with no new material coming in. My iPod has been dead for quite a while, and I can't bring myself to buy a new one. (I get far more reading done now anyway, as evidenced above.) About a month ago, when I realized that I would not be able to finish out my semester without surrendering to the darkroom for a stretch of hours, I realized I needed portable music. My brain was able to put two and two together; shoebox of tapes, dusty untouched Sony sports Walkman borrowed from a friend many moons ago, crappy bundled iPod headphones, and two AA batteries sitting on my desk. The result? Music! And a new episode of the podcast. (!) Only one hour this time, all analog. Very casual, very fun. I should look into uploading it to a file hosting site, because I really want to make it available before it gets too old. Expect more in the near future. So, to get to the point, I've got nothing for you from the records or tapes right now, but soon enough should. (Update: fuck procrastination. Here it is. Hope you like it.) I do have a ton... as in far too many, fantastic albums downloaded from some of my favorite sharity blogs. Wire magazine wrote a great piece about this direction of music appreciation in their last issue, which I meant to plug here but slept too long on... which to make up for I'll just have to scan it for you when I get back to school in a couple weeks. Anyway... albums! These are all albums that I've happily kept coming back to again and again. And not to state the obvious, but they're all free.

Special mention: Heartcode- Pause music's awesome chiptunes compilation, discovered thanks to the seriously frighteningly funny and insightful Eegra podcast. (I don't particularly like writing about music. I think album art does a better job in this instance than I could. Any of these blogs individually could consume your life if given the attention they seem to deserve. Exercise caution, and accept the fact that no one on Earth can keep up with all this shit. This is how I try to keep my sanity.)

Bernard Xolotl - Return of the Golden Mean from Mutant Sounds.

Par Accidante! from No Longer Forgotten Music.

Rick Crane - Fuji from Mutant Sounds.

Oudaden from Awesome Tapes From Africa.

Hako Yamasaki (1976) from Japan Underground.

Blacklight Braille - The Carmarthen Album from Mutant Sounds.

Top Games Played in '08:
Oh God how I agonized over this list. The whole internet will explode if my top ten games of '08 list somehow fails that weird gamer litmus test... right?
...
Oh yeah. Of course not. I have no readers. (Although for Christmas my blog was blessed with its first honest to goodness troll, that for some sick psychological reason really wants to make enough presumptions about me and my life to win some bizarre argument it's trying to carry on with itself while completely ignoring all of my attempts to pretend to be real living people with actual feelings. Thanks, internet Santa! I would have settled for somebody telling me indie games are for fags and Gears Two rules. We should change the subject, though. The troll gets a bit panty and anxious when people are talking about it.) So basically what I'm trying to say is, Matt Fort90, Non-Existent Joe, possibly Dessgeega if she's around (hi), possibly James COPE Wallis (hey), I hope you like (or have played) these games, because you're the only ones I know who give a shit.

The funny thing is that after all that build up, I don't even have ten games. I started dozens more that are incredible, and deserve to really be explored and opened up. I have a meticulous list of games that I've logged more than a few hours on that I simply need more time with. It's one thing that makes no sense about professional games journalism (they all talk about it constantly); it takes a pretty long time. Not always to play a game, which can sometimes take only a few sessions, but to actually think about the experience. It's not simple. I haven't even adequately finished talking about these games yet. But these all gave me breathtakingly intense, terrifying, intriguing, exhilarating, sublime, epic, or... floaty... good times. Enjoy! (Top two games played in '08 are the last ones.)

U.N. Squadron (Snes)
Clock Tower (Snes, with a translation by Aeon Genesis)
A Boy and His Blob (NES)
Dino Run (Flash)
Knytt Stories (PC)
River City Ransom (NES)
Solar Jetman: Hunt For the Golden Warship (NES)

Screw-Style by Yoshiharu Tsuge

The above image comes from The Crib Sheet, yet another fantastic comics blog that I found through Journalista tipping me off to another Tsuge enthusiast. Domingos Isabelinho is a fantastic scholar of the medium, and a remarkable connoisseur. The typographic images found below come from him as well, and quickly helped me wipe off that feeling of profound disgust and disappointment that arose from an atrocious design course that I struggled through this (just today finished) semester, taught by an utterly vapid and boring fool that perfectly personifies how design is taught, particularly to those that are presumed to know no better. But hey... fuck that guy and his truly terrible lack of artistic ambition. I may die in poverty, but at least I'll know that I had taste!

What was I talking about? Oh yeah, the Hugo Pratt/Héctor Oesterheld page above. I wanted to point it out in relation to a conversation that Jon and I have been having for quite a while now as perhaps exactly the type of sequence and clarity that we're missing so often in today's hyperactive, super frenetic action sequences that are becoming the accepted standard of basically every big-budget Hollywood film that sells itself on its preposterously indecipherable action. In fact, señor black-shirt above even resembles Daniel Craig a bit. Odd that. And for just a smidge more synchronicity to push us into the realm of the truly bizarre, apparently Jon and Domingos know one another from some previous forum discussions on The Comics Journal site.

I think no one knows what the fuck I'm talking about anymore. Regardless, I'm hoping that my failure to provide a better, more comprehensive Tsuge appreciation post a little while ago can be offset by my providing the entirety of one of his most highly regarded strips, Screw-Style, discovered from a link provided by Domingos. Of course, you'll have to put in the work to open each of the 21 images in a separate tab and either read them there, or save each and read them in whatever piece of software you prefer. However, I trust that none of my readers will crush my enthusiasm by griping about such petty inconveniences in the face of a classic strip that English language readers are blessed to have access to (in addition to the three great strips made available by Kotonoha that I linked to previously).

It's an odd paradox of the times we're in. We have access to more free, fantastic art than we could ever find time to appreciate. Does anyone else find themselves almost resentful when someone tries to give us something? No, not something... that's too vague. As an example, I gave a friend a radio show I did last night for WHFR that you can bet I'll provide here for download once it's available. But it was an hour. One hour of music. And she turned around and put 30 albums on my portable hard drive. What am I supposed to do with that?


I guess what I'm trying to say is that I want, if you're giving me something, recommending something, I want you to love it intensely. I want you to obsess about it, for it to be all that you could think about for a while until you figured out why and that I need to see/hear/read this one part, because it changed your life a little, just a little, right here. See?

I think this one is finished. Games updates certainly pending. And I'm working on a best of '08 list, which is simply ludicrous since it will just be things I liked in '08, but it's my site and it sounds somehow fun. I like lists. Hopefully you do as well.

I want to be Rabbi Stone

So... it's been a week. If I'm going to attempt to set a schedule, weekly seems like a respectable place to start. Hell, apparently "professional bloggers" like those poor schmoes at Gawker are expected to make about 4 posts an hour, for a roughly 9 hour day, and get paid on a sliding scale related to their hit statistics. Sounds great, eh?

Last night I played Knytt Stories for two hours in my school's computer lab (the only access to a PC that I really have). I installed it at work tonight on my break, and made the mistake of showing it to a female co-worker, who immediately was painfully hooked and instantly transformed into that gamer you always cringed at as an adolescent. She was shouting, and swearing, and cursing, and screaming, and laughing... she was not that great at it... but she loved it. And got it. And will probably get good if she plays for another night (instead of working).

Not much of a review, but I think it says a lot. I'm really fascinated by indie game design right now. And frustrated! I need access to Windows! Most desired game right this second? The Shivah.


This is bad. I was vaguely considering whether I should start researching whether it's worth it for me to start considering a new console... [pregnant pause]... a DS! Well... should I?

But now I'm wondering if what I really want is a PC. This is the second time that I've found myself majorly regretting my iMac. (The first time was when I discovered that there are no, to my knowledge, good third party MP3 players that are compatible with OSX. And also in a more minor instance when my mouse scroll wheel died. And of course remains dead.)

C'mon indie designers! Take my money! I won't pirate them... I will pay you $5 to 20 dollars, and not gripe. Don't exclude me.

[Necessary image annotation: manga reads right to left.]


So PCs. What's that look like now? Are desktops still cheaper than laptops? What kind of hardware is necessary to even play indie games? Am I retarded? This is why I left PC gaming so long ago. It felt like my "system" was two years out of date no matter what. And first person shooters pushed out everything else. And let's not even discuss MMORPGs, because I have no interest in that. Have you ever heard what MMOs are like in Japan? I think I heard about it on the HDRL podcast. Long story short, they're better than ours. Because people aren't fucking obnoxious, moronic, player-killing assholes.

Indie games I'm freaking out about recently:
Dino Run, Knytt Stories, Cave Story (about 10 months ago, which I still have to represent here), Seiklus (although my red green colorblindness pretty much killed that for me). And that barely, just infinitesimally, scratches the surface. Don't believe me? Take a look. Not enough? Need more? Here you go.

Welcome to my frustration.

The Epic and Depressing Failure of Yakuza 2, and the Triumphant Return of...

Automatic blogging, round two. I need to impose some kind of mandatory minimum posting schedule if I ever intend for anyone to check here with anything approaching regularity. My assumption that the archives are "infinitely fascinating" may be -mmm- flawed.

So last weekend I found myself in Gamestop browsing the used PS2 games yet again. Still no Sky Odyssey, Sky Gunner (which I am not too worried about since I have a friend I can borrow it from if I'm ever able to resume some semblance of a social life), or God Hand. But the game that I was there for was available. Odin Sphere looks like it has potential. I'm in the second game area. We'll come back to it.


I was also picking up Front Mission DS for a friend of mine, which meant I was entitled to a free used game. Decision time! It came down to Yakuza 2 (What I knew ahead of time - beat 'em up, frequently compared to Shenmue [by morons, apparently], SEGA - !!! -, looks pretty, some bizarre mini-games [supposedly some shogi, which I've been wanting to learn, but probably not in a videogame, and if I'm truly honest the only reason why I've ever heard of it is because of the fucking Cowboy Bebop movie], and I will try anything yakuza related.), Silent Hill 3 (Again what I knew ahead of time - supposedly decent horror game, but I'm still hesitant since disliking Silent Hill 4 so much for its terrible gameplay and level design, although not for its scares, because whoa.), or a game that I'd played, beat, loved, and apparently never owned since it vanished with some lost roommate or a batch of traded in games (a really short-sighted habit that I no longer really engage in) years ago. And two out of three are sequels. (Ugh, and again a subject for perhaps a later rant.) I decided to take a chance on one of the unknowns.


In a rather humorous coincidence, when I arrived home my roommate had just started Mafia, which had been collecting dust, unplayed, on our shelving unit for months. So we played that. For hours. And while Mafia is certainly far from a perfect game, and quite noticeably dated, the fact is that we were greatly enjoying our time playing. We've since gone on to put in quite a bit of time on it. I could do with less driving back and forth across empty cities which gets to be a chore, but I quite like the shooting segments. The lock-on aiming is, I've come to think, nicely imperfect. It doesn't let you play like you're Max Payne; you have to be a bit conservative, utilizing cover, picking off enemies one by one from as far away as you can manage with whatever weapons you happen to have at hand, very few of which are very effective at great distances. It's also rather stingy with the ammo, which I enjoy, as it encourages you to experiment with the variety of guns that are being dropped by enemies, all of which have slightly different simple characteristics, which gives a nice sense of experimentation and variety, mostly revolving around nuances of range, recoil... I can have a tendency to get a bit weird about guns in games. I was a big Hitman fan for a long, long time, which might have contributed to my gun-porn fetishization.


The story is utterly meh. It's trying for a very somber, filmic thing and pretty much failing all around. Our comments as we watched? My roommate seemed impressed by the texture mapping on one character's hair, which we all found amusing. And I got to say schtupping in context, since our character got laid, which, firstly, huh? And secondly... for a long time I was a firm believer in a legitimate use for the AO rating in games. Now? I'm not so sure. (Or at least not so sure I still give a damn.) Developers... it no longer matters. You have lost. Stop trying. Adult games won't end up utilizing sex or insane gore. Adult games have already come and gone. A Boy and His Blob... Out of This World... hell, even weirdo shit like Herzog Zwei.


Sadly, ignoring a game's disappointing story is a talent that I'm getting a little too accustomed to, but I'll get back to this.

But here's something. In the shooting segments, or perhaps the entire game outside of cut-scenes, I believe that music only emanates from actual in-game sources. Turntables, speakers, radios, etc. It's one of those things that I could care less about when I'm frantically unloading an entire clip into some motherfucker popping out from behind a counter top with a fucking tommy-gun and actual respectable accuracy, but in hindsight? That. Is. Awesome.

Actually, it's one of the odd things about the PS2. I've decided that if mine kicks the bucket that I'll replace it. How can I not? I'm still finding out about great games, and not just from the end of its production life. Imagine how many more great games are waiting for me to find out about them. I'm not deluding myself that it's a bottomless well or anything, but jeez. Who can genuinely claim to be done with the PS2? (Haha... who among you?!)

(Compositional notes no one gives a shit about: this post has too many exclamation points. And I'm failing my Strunk & White test today.)


Anyway... Yakuza 2. I played once. That night. For one hour. Which was when I first was able to save, by the way. The first 15 minutes? Cinematics. Bad ones. That made no sense. This is a fighting game, isn't it? Because everyone's flashing guns and now I want to play a shooter, not a brawler. (Sega, pay attention.) Favorite moment of the opening cinematic? When I sadly watched my controller vibrate across my coffee table at a climactic moment in the cinematic, as I sat smoking, wondering when I would be allowed to play the game that I bought. With my money. Action! Walk over here. Shit. Cut-scene. Five more minutes. Seriously. Then fight! Gasp. Tutorial. Oh. Yeah. Okay, this is alright. Pretty fun. Over. Explore cordoned off area of a gorgeous Osaka night time cityscape. No interactivity. Few more fights. Pretty fun. Oh my god. This "gangster" boss that I just spent an hour of my life looking for... looks like Rain! In a white puffy North Face style jacket. I beat him up, which fails to alleviate my real-world mounting rage, save... and off it goes.


Sigh. De-clench. Go to bed.

(What my character should have looked like, if I could get all San Andreas about it.)


Flash forward to today, when I trade it back in at Gamestop in the final moments of my return period for choice number three... Katamari Damacy.

All is right in the world. Funny Gamestop conversation as I stare down at the counter contentedly smiling at my copy of Katamari Damacy (with my money):

Gamestop Employee [searching in the drawers for my disc, with his back to me]: So... it's not defective, is it?
Lin Swimmer: No... it works. [pause] The opening... is really... really... long.
Gamestop Employee [turns to me and hands me Katamari Damacy]: Ummmm. [uncomprehending stare]

Three Short Comics by Yoshiharu Tsuge

Update from the future for Google visitors: you may be interested in a Tsuge post that followed a few weeks later. Thanks for visiting.

Automatic blogging. First, a reintroduction to Kotonoha, as wonderfully stated by one of my favorite comics related commentators, Dirk Deppey.

"I suspect that I may not be the right person to offer recommendations for the vast Kotonoha archives, but then, I’m not sure that anyone really is; it depends upon your tastes, and how similar they are to those of the person doing the recommendations. Put simply: If Mangascreener is the Top Shelf of amateur scanlation circles, Kotonoha is undoubtedly its Dark Horse equivalent. Both groups specialize in offbeat, hard-to-classify manga, but while Mangascreener’s choices in material demonstrate a subtle underlying aesthetic, Kotohona’s offerings are all over the map, running the gamut from genre manga to more esoteric fare, from cute slice-of-life stories to series dripping in sex and/or violence. For a team that prides itself in offering “manga — less ordinary!”, their tastes may seem surprisingly catholic to art-comics fans used to the deep divide between American genre and literary-comics fans. Much of what Kotonoha scanlates would likely be a hard sell to today’s mainstream American manga fandom, but the diverse selection of genre and subject matter ensures that even the most discriminating of comics fans would likely have a difficult time agreeing where some of the gems are. Factor in that I’ve probably only looked at half the material on offer, and… well, you can see why I might not be the best guide to the good stuff: I haven’t read even close to everything, and different readers will disagree on the value of the works I can recommend. Welcome to Mount Kotonoha.

If the choice in materials seems bewildering at times, you can at least take comfort in the fact that their wares are relatively easy to acquire. Almost all the manga on offer have BitTorrent links, and many offer straight-up Web downloads as well, so sampling new and unusual titles is relatively painless. With that in mind, while you’ll probably want to just browse their archives and try titles on a whim, but may I suggest the following…"

See? There's no way I could have possibly done that as well. You can check the titles he recommends at the end of this post here if you're so inclined, but I'm going to be providing art samples from three very short stories by a manga artist that I know basically nothing whatsoever about, Yoshiharu Tsuge. (Bottom of the page, available in HTTP links so you don't even have to know what a torrent is, if that's not your thing. Simple Comic your best viewing option for Mac, PC users fend for yourselves, with your functional mouse scroll wheels and FarCry's, you bastards.)

Chico, of the first image, is the least visually arresting, but is still a good place to start. Tsuge's drawing style is wonderful. There's a bluntness to his figures, but they're wonderfully expressive. His drawing style will probably strike you as somewhat familiar or traditional, but when I search for a point of reference the only thing that I can think of is that I see a broad similarity in the line work of Yoshihiro Tatsumi of D&Q's Push Man. In fact, in reading Chico I couldn't help but wonder if they shared influences, or publishing outlets, or even just something as similar as working methods or materials. Maybe they knew of one another. Regardless, Chico is an 18 page seemingly autobiographical story of a manga artist who buys a bird, a Java sparrow, with his girlfriend that they name Chico. The characters look rather cheerful, but there is a sinister element that makes itself more insistently felt as we traverse the bounds of their rather flawed relationship. I wonder if this qualifies as another example of gekiga. It would seem appropriate, if gekiga were a stylistic and emotional shift toward a style of storytelling aimed at an adult audience. Tsuge has an interesting gray in his work as well that I am very fond of, as well as very curious as to what drawing tools he used to achieve it.

Marsh and Mushroom Hunting are both even shorter, at roughly ten pages each. They are each some of the finest work in comics that I have ever come across, and I feel lucky to have seen them. Take a look for yourself.

Marsh




Mushroom Hunting