Birthday • 1982-12-17 Gender •
Male Location • Chicago Member Since • 2006-01-30
Personal
Achievements • In grad school! WAO Anime Fan Since • Early '90s. Favorite Anime • Musashi Gundoh. Goals • A university teaching gig! Hobbies • Reading Heidegger. Talents • Not really.
myOtaku.com: Fasteriskhead
Welcome to my site archives. 10 posts are listed per page.
Tomoe Shinohara has actually gotten MORE awesome over the years.
Live painting. Featuring some Philip Glass piece I don't recognize and the last movement of Reich's Electric Counterpoint. Comments (1) |
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Saturday, April 21, 2007
Shows for this Season
WHAT I'M KEEPING SO FAR: Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann (nicknamed Metaphor for Adolescence: The TV) - The first of the season's 500 pound gorillas. Well, it's second generation Gainax and Hiroyuki Imaishi, you either like this kind of stuff or you don't. I find it an utter joy to watch, much like FLCL and the funkier Abenobashi eps. Murder Princess - Technically this is an OVA, but still. Nothing that's going to be remembered over the years, but a fun little action fantasy series. Extra points for using Chiwa Saito as a heavy. Darker Than Black - The second of the gorillas. Definitely a descendent of Cowboy Bebop, with that same future noir sensibility - only a little more insular and thinky, a lot less funny, and way more cynical. And if that doesn't sell you, Yoko Kanno should. Hayate no Gotoku! - Basically a 24 minute long massage for otaku. Although not as much as... Lucky Star (must be pronounced "Lacky Staa~") - The third of the gorillas, and another "you just get it or you don't." This is basically an excuse for otaku to get to see cute girls interested in the same things they are. I for one really enjoyed the discussions of how to eat different kinds of food. Also: best OP of the season. Ikkitousen: Dragon Destiny (nicknamed Romance of the Three Kingdoms Plus Fanservice, Part 2) - I'm one of the few people who appreciated the first series on a level aside from... the obvious. The sequel here is being pulled off much more clumsily, but it's good enough to keep me watching. (Zhuge Liang is adorable and the ED design is by Satoshi Urushihara, King of Nipples)
WHAT I HAVEN'T DECIDED ON YET: Rocket Girls - This is probably going in. Schoolgirl astronauts: it's one of those ideas that you kick yourself for not having. Sure, at first it doesn't sound all that promising, but then you see the training scenes (cute girl getting knocked on her ass firing an automatic, cute girl doing physics calculations). Lovely Complex - Looks like a by-the-books sort of romantic comedy, but it's a lot of fun and pulled off with a flourish. Tall girls, with the exception of Sakaki, just don't get enough love in anime. Engage Planet Kiss Dum - I'm surprised that I haven't heard more about this, because the first episode completely knocked me on my ass. It's like someone was watching the Corellian attack sequences from Eureka Seven and decided to do it better. The downside is that they may be trying to work a plot (and not a promising one at that) in along with the sheer spectacle. Idolmaster Xenoglossia (nicknamed Xenohime) - The Mai Hime staff has abused my trust twice in a row. Now they hand me a mecha show shamelessly trying to channel Eva, except pumping dangerously high levels of moe in while doing so. I should know better, I really should. El Cazador de la Bruja (nicknamed Las Asesinas Lesbianas) - This is to be distinguished from its previous incarnations, Noir and Madlax (respectively, Les Meurtriers Lesbiens and Lesbian Assassins Meet Plot Crash). I've counted three (3) uses of the battle theme now. Not looking promising. Claymore - It's Madhouse, and very much a throwback to the old stoic shounen animes from the late '80s and early '90s (Demon City, Ninja Scroll). Seems to be very uneven, given the first few episodes; I suspect I'll probably drop it unless it turns around.
WHAT I'M NOT WATCHING (THE ONES I CAN REMEMBER, ANYWAYS): Romeo Times Juliet (nicknamed Spacespeare) - I tried, I really did. I got through the first episode from the aura of sheer trainwreck it exuded, but that's it. I can forgive them for ripping out everything interesting from the play and only keeping a few strips of bone left, but judged on its own merits the show just isn't very interesting. Heroic Age - A victim of time constraints. I think this might have had a chance at ending up interesting, but it's one of those deals where I'm just watching too much already. Sola (nicknamed Neko Mamiko Mode) - It probably says something when even Mamiko Noto as a cute vampire (sort of) isn't enough to make your show interesting. Touka Gettan - Also a victim of time constraints. When being cryptic, there is a thin line between doing so in an interesting way (Higurashi is a good example) versus just baffling the audience. Shining Tears x Wind (nicknamed Shining Auron x Rikku, substituting any other fanfiction pairing) - Could someone please explain to me the geography of that running battle in the field from the first episode? Christ, the whole scene was like a quantum nightmare where every character was simultaniously two feet and also a quarter mile away from every other. Sakura Taisen: New York - initially promising, and then underwhelming. Kami-chama Karin - As a general rule, Koge Donbo should not have any creative control over a series beyond character design (witness the slow death of Digi Charat). OverDrive - I didn't like it, but that doesn't say much; sports anime is one of the few genres that I've never been able to get into. Comments (2) |
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I made this one a few weeks ago - it's MELL's Red Fraction (the infamous Black Lagoon op) and, uh... Beat It. Initially I didn't like the results, but given some time it's become one of my favorites. As usual this isn't so much "mixing" the songs as plopping them on top of each other and seeing what happens (I studied counterpoint, not producing). Comments (2) |
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Tuesday, April 10, 2007
the human whose name is written in this book shall become a space alien, time traveller, or esper
pimping a band I like!
I don't know if anyone who's got less than two decades on them is going to care about this, but there's a new Nine Inch Nails album coming out in about a week. It is very good. Being the nice guys that they are, they've gone and put the entire album up for free listening here (if they ask for an email, you can fake it). After a couple of listens, the standout tracks for me so far are Me I'm Not (check out Trent Reznor's Osaka impression! "Heheeeey..."), The Greater Good, In This Twilight, The Great Destroyer (breakdown ahoy!), and especially Vessel (one of the sexiest and most distinctive songs I've heard in a long time, and damn compulsive listening; hopefully they'll drop it as a single). Anyways, give it a shot if you're into this kind of thing.
Also, I did a fun little mashup of Vessel and Kenji Kawai's Innocence (GITS2) score. It's downloadable here - again, for the folks who are into this kind of thing (that is, wailing women's voices over electrodrums and a bassline from hell). Comments (0) |
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Tuesday, April 3, 2007
Long Post
It's a strange thing, but I haven't been thinking about anime much lately. Not that I haven't been watching it, but that I haven't really been considering any of the new stuff as anything but a fun diversion. Death Note, for all its occasional gestures towards big important ethical considerations, really only has them as ruffles and frills for its ridiculous spectacles (compare to Jigoku Shoujo a few seasons ago). Code Geass doesn't even manage to gesture, at best it imitates such gestures - and in any case, that series is trying to court so many audiences at this point that I doubt it even remembers what it was originally aiming for. Hataraki Man, of all the shows in the past season, has probably given me the most to seriously dwell on, but even there it's mainly been a peripheral thing. A few months ago pretty much all of the questions that were consistently hovering above my desk were in some way anime-related, and that's no longer the case. I have to think that this isn't entirely my own fault.
I like to enjoy what I watch, and a lot of what I've watched recently has been great in an empty calories kind of way. But a few seasons ago I remember just being constantly caught up in the images of the shows (that Kasimasi article, if you're paying attention, is really only about one scene and one image) in a way that simply hasn't happened in recent months. I probably wouldn't have noticed this had I not started up watching Rose of Versailles a few days ago, which does succeed in putting me into this kind of thinking (Oscar is the kind of character you could write volumes on). So what exactly is going on?
Now, don't mistake what I'm trying to say. I'm not a fan of self-consciously "intellectual" shows - you know the ones, the series that feel the need to invoke some 19th century German or a fringe psychological theory in an offhand remark or side scene. This is showmanship at best, and doesn't itself indicate anything worth paying attention to (on the other hand, having the showmanship around in no way means that your show DOESN'T have any real depth; citing Anno's "the Christian and psychoanalytical stuff was just for show" comment doesn't impact on the value of Evangelion any more than the worth of Next Generation [granted, not the best comparison] is diminished by there not being any such things as Heisenberg compensators or duranium). What hooks me about these shows is not a "theory" or a "philosophy," and as such, I hope most of the folks on this site have now reached the point where they don't watch FMA or something and immediately go and theorize the world in terms of equivalent exchange. What I am basically looking for is a kind of clarity of insight, or better, a willingness to pay attention to and point out something fundamentally very simple. This isn't a question of "themes," but of revealing - that is, a show's ability to let what it concerns itself with appear in its own light. Friendship and eccentricity in Azumanga, childhood in Eva, the past in Tekkaman Blade, love and war in Saikano, rivalry in Black Lagoon: the wonder of these shows and others is their ability to take something already known in an unreflective way and bring it to light. This can be compared to the most basic task of philosophy: not to be so ambitious as to claim to be right, but to simply be as clear as possible in what is said and thought. Clarification, not explanation; to let the thing appear in its own essence, not to display it in a pre-built theoretical cage.
So yeah, the shows of the past season or so haven't really let me to dwell on this kind of thing. This can either be the shows' doing or my own weakness, and while both seem plausible (I have, after all, been VERY busy since September) I tend to believe the former. I really want to be able to THINK about anime again. That's what I came to the site for, after all, even if the articles section has been deep-sixed and nothing much fun seems to be showing up on the message boards (I've thought of starting some posts just for the hell of it, i.e. for them to get a trio of one-sentence replies, a brief flame war between me and someone who thinks I'm pretentious, and nothing of any substance whatsoever. However, I'm actually pretty lazy and school stuff overrides this kind of thing, so I'll probably just stick to my usual inactivity and only snipe off a quick reply in the Anime forum every now and then). I have high hopes for the new season, but of course that's a wait and see sort of thing I guess.
