Pop Culture Gadabout
Saturday, August 29, 2009
      ( 8/29/2009 07:37:00 AM ) Bill S.  


JUST WAITIN' FOR MONDAY: After months of frantic searches, long drives to interviews and too many mornings waking up stressed and worried, I'm starting a job this Monday at a behavioral health center in the area. Though I've been looking far and wide for a job, we've both hoped that we'd be able to stay in the part of Arizona where we lit a little than two years ago: it wasn't that the idea of moving all our stuff seemed particularly arduous (though it does), but we've fallen in love with our quiet little rural desert home. For now, at least, it looks like we get to stay put a while longer.

This definitely, as I've noted more than once, has been a rocky summer: the joy of getting our novel published has been overbalanced by the stress of unemployment and the knowledge that whatever financial rewards we see from this won't come until next year. Our attempts at making supplemental money, writing for a local paper, resulted in some enjoyable journalistic collaborations between my wife and I, but it came to a screeching halt when the paper quickly folded. Difficult times, but I know we haven't been the only ones experiencing it.

Looking for work in the social services sector -- particularly in a state where its ideologically ossified legislators continue to haggle over approving a state budget -- has been pretty daunting. The agency where I was working has sliced its two-man in-home staff in half, while the number of clients served by the program is presently larger than it had been when I initially joined the agency. With funding up in the air, the agency is reluctant to call back in-home workers who they may need to lay off again two or three months down the road. For those who remain, it's the path to burnout, but then the field of family-based behavioral health work has always been a low-pay/high-stress one.

Even when agencies want you, the current practice appears to be to delay the actual hiring process for as long as possible to save some money. I first interviewed for this position weeks ago, and it seemingly took forever until I was actually told I had it late Friday. Like insurance companies holding onto that settlement for as long as they can, the delay proves beneficial to the agency's bottom line.

But, to heck with the cynicism, I'm just glad to be rejoining the ranks of the close-to-gainfully employed.
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      ( 8/29/2009 06:36:00 AM ) Bill S.  


S GIRLS & VIVIENNE WESTWOOD: Half of a two-book package currently being issued in the states by Viz Media, Novna Takemoto's Missin' is a 112-page paperback containing two short novels from the start of his career. Best known in the U.S. as the author of the light novel Kamikaze Girls, which fueled both a popular manga and a film adaptation, Takemoto is famous in his native Japan as an author and fashion designer.

You can definitely see his obsession with the latter in the two tales featured in Missin'. Though the primary focus of each piece is on an ultra-unreliable narrator as he or she describes the beginnings of a non-too-stable relationship, the fashion sense of the object of their obsession turns out to be a significant plot point. In the first story, "Little Shop Called the End of the World," it's the designs of onetime Malcolm McLaren collaborator Vivienne Westwood; in the title story, it's a fashion brand named MILK, originally known in Japan for its "gothic Lolita" look. (If just seeing that term conjures up disturbing Nabokovian images, you're not alone.) In both entries, the story's lead sees fashion as a signifier that the person they're watching is a kindred spirit, though how far Takemoto agrees with them is unclear. He may be a fashionista, but, as a storyteller, he is able to illuminate what's underneath the couture.

Both pieces center on narrators who are speaking to the feminine subject of their desire -- though neither girl actually appears to be in the room. In "Shop," the narrator is a disenchanted free-lance writer who opens a shop selling her personal belongings and junky bric-a-brac; when a seemingly mute girl with a disfiguring birth mark on her face shows up at the shop, he becomes enthralled with her, ultimately running away with the underage girl. We know this move is gonna lead to a bad end.

The title story proves even darker -- narrated by a self-described "homely" teenage girl who stalks Missin', the provocative female singer of a Japanese punk band called Cid Vicious. Fashioning her life on the ideals promoted by a mid-twentieth century writer named Nobuko Yoshiya, who specialized in rarefied "S Class" romances between schoolgirls, the deranged narrator dreams of herself being part of a "maidenly" relationship. She mirrors the singer's dress and quickly insinuates herself into the band's inner circle with the goal of becoming part of the group, even though she has zero experience as a musician.

While "Shop" concludes on a definite note, the title story is more open-ended. In "Missin'," we're left with our narrator promising/threatening to do something dire with a Hello Kitty guitar, though whether this occurs or not is perhaps left up the sequel, Missin' 2: Kasako, the second short book in this Viz box set. What's more immediately intriguing is Takemoto's convincing recreation of the mental workings behind his two disturbed leads, their personal philosophies, subculturally specific obsessions and rationalizations. "Obsession," the writer narrator in the first tale tells us, "makes everything possible." Untrue, but it can make for some engrossing psychological fiction.

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Thursday, August 27, 2009
      ( 8/27/2009 08:43:00 AM ) Bill S.  


MID-WEEK MUSIC VID: We're a day late with our mid-week music video, largely because I spent too much of my day yesterday unsuccessfully trying to install a wireless card on wife Becky's p-c. Easy install never is.


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Tuesday, August 25, 2009
      ( 8/25/2009 07:54:00 AM ) Bill S.  


"AND THE ONLY TIME I WEAR A SKIRT IS AT SCHOOL BECAUSE IT'S MY UNIFORM." Though the prevalence of gender-bending shojo romances can be disconcerting to many of us straight-laced Western geezers, the regular appearance of new titles on the shelves clearly shows that there's a young girl audience for this kind of stuff. A good thing to remember if you're the sort to get bummed by the reactionary status quo squad: there's a teen-aged audience today lapping up manga that tests the boundaries of traditional sex roles -- and enjoying it.

From what I can tell, Mai Nishikata's debut series, Venus Capriccio (CMX), follows the tenets of gender stretching manga quite faithfully. You have your heroine Takami, a tall and model slender high school girl who has difficulty holding onto a boyfriend because of her tomboyish ways, and an impossibly beautiful male lead who exudes sexual ambiguity in every panel. When the first volume opens, we see her on a disastrous date with an arrogant jerk who ridicules our heroine's un-ladylike eating habits. "For a first date, you're sure stuffin' your face!" he states just before dumping her.

"I was holding back with three pieces of cake and two colas," she later explains to her confidante Akira, but before we can ponder the vagaries of human metabolism, we're shown her ethereally handsome friend at the piano. A "Half" (half Japanese/half Austrian), Akira has been Takima's best bud since they first met at childhood piano lessons. Though her schoolmates see Akira as a "totally hot guy," Takima views him more as a girlish friend than a potential date. It isn't until the lad gets into a fight with her short-lived ex- ("Who knew she had a thing for girly-men?" the macho dickhead sneers) that Takami starts to see him as more-than-a-friend.

Once our heroine realizes her attraction for Akira, their romantic connection begins to fitfully develop. Though the piano prodigy is a couple of years younger than Takami -- he's still attending junior high while our girl is a high school student -- in a lot of ways he's the more mature figure. The fourteen-year-old is definitely her superior at the piano, even tickling the ivories at jazz club. When the two are asked to play a duet at their music teacher's wedding, it's unclear whether Takami will be able to stay in sync with Akira.

The centerpiece of the first volume is a gender blurry sequence where our couple -- thanks to a series of credulity stretching plot mechanics -- compete in drag to become prince and princess at a high school competition. The boyish Takima puts on a suit, while Akira dons a dress, looking, as someone in the audience notes, "super-model beautiful." The masquerade is revealed before the contest ends, but its revelation doesn't appear to have a negative effect on our duo's school status. If anything, Akira's drag appearance at Johoku High School gets a fresh crowd of eager young schoolgirls yearning after his lithe young self. Hard to imagine a similar scene playing out the same way in an American high school.

Niskikata's art is airy and easy to follow. She has a knack for suggesting the physicality of characters still caught between kid- and teenhood, and she's able to do this without belaboring the point. Though her leads are idealized beauties, they don't -- as in some shojo series -- come off so unrealistic that that they remain pure creatures of the comics page. Too, the artist keeps the cartoonish emotional moments to a minimum.

Though Venus Capriccio has more than a few moments where you can see the writer/artist overworking to get her situations in place, both its playfulness and eye for the awkwardness of adolescent romance make it an appealing little romance. When Akira tells our heroine, after a disastrous date at an amusement park, "all the time we spent together here will be become fond memories," we believe him and want to see the twosome take their relationship further -- with or without the cross-dressing.

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Pop cultural criticism - plus the occasional egocentric socio/political commentary by Bill Sherman (popculturegadabout AT yahoo.com).



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