DIY Jonathan Schwartz

My handy tips on how you, too, can sound just like the anti-avuncular host of the Saturday Show & Sunday Show, as heard on WNYC:

Tips for the DIY Jonathan Schwartz impression:

1) As much lip smacking as possible, as if you were broadcasting from the depths of the Gobi.

1a) And keep it low and husky.

2) Remember: your opinion is FACT.

3) Speak slowly, and reiterate endlessly. ("This great work... this masterpiece... if you will...")

4) Don't hold that emphasis in reserve. You've got eight hours of airtime to fill every weekend, so liven it up with pause and inflection for effect ("This great WORK... this MASTERpiece... if you WILL...")

5) No anecdote should have an end or a point.

6) As George Carlin notes about his Ed Sullivan impression: it's not so much how accurate your vocal stylings are - it's all in the bizarreness of the act. Your typical Schwartz anecdote begins with a rambling quasi-history of the song/artist, which then morphs into a defensive insistence that you know how to use email - or something like that.

Putting it all together:

"Frank SINatra... ladies and gentlemen... does it GET any BETTER?... (slurp) ...a recording... not heard for... oh... 1972... forty YEARS... with a superb Nelson Riddle arrangement... Octopus's GARDEN. Locked away... unseen by human EARS in ... TWO generations... A song my FATHER called, ... he considered it 'pure melodic diamond SOUP.'... (slurp) Now... here's something WONDERful... Maude Maggart with... a beautiful... REVELATORY... version of 'Brand New KEY'... (slurp)"

D.

Codin' Fool

All right - I've hit about the halfway point of the massive Everest of site-building that I want to get done before the first week of July is out. The big one is the new site for the Jamaican food company that the agency works for. It's had a fairly tortured and convoluted birth - mostly in the decision-making process of just what goes on the site and it what order. Even with most of that out of the way, the site itself is quite labor intensive. But it's coming together nicely, and I think we'll be going live sooner than later.

The second one is smaller and I really wanted to be done with it weeks ago - the mini-site for Putnam's new album. The question for this one wasn't 'what's going on it?,' but rather 'what's it going to look like?' It took me longer than I'd like to come up with a design I liked, and then once I found it, the site got caught in the pipeline behind the Jamaican site. Not so much that I didn't have time to do both (Putt's site really would only take a couple of hours once the design was sorted out), but you know how it is when one large project completely enervates you for doing anything even remotely related. Well, that's how it is for me, at any rate. Still, I made substantial headway on this tonight, and we should be live in a couple of days.

I will say this: it's probably my best-looking site, yet. Me loves the design.

Also in the music department: as soon as I finish Putt's site, my friend Noah - a jazz pianist, among other things - wanted to refresh his site. It's also, thankfully, past the starting gate in terms of finding a design that both Noah and I like (a little more faith on his part in the color department, since he's partly color-blind) - but the work of building the site and all that will likely take about 6-8 hours. Hopefully, that will be gotten to by this time next week. Under any other circumstances, I would have gotten to Noah's site before Putnam's since it's the larger of the two and I like to hit the big jobs first, but Putnam's album has been out for about a month, now, and there's only the smallest of blurbs up on his site about it.

In my defense: Putnam didn't even request the site upgrade until a couple of days after the album was released. Hint: this isn't really the best way to do things.

Also in the next couple of days will be a minor site upgrade for the Rockland accountant firm, and also lurking around the corner for them are two brand new sites, bringing the total number of complete sites we've done for them to four. One of their new sites has a fun technical angle I haven't tackled before - but, really, almost every site I produce does. Been learning this stuff in leaps and bounds. Really, at some point, I should break down and take classes in all those server-side issues that scare me so.

Do Not Adjust Your Self

Sorry for the interruption in service this past week - I suspect that the next couple of weeks will be like this as I attempt to get everything off my plate that's currently on it. Whether that means stuffing it down my throat or throwing it under the table, headway will be made.

In the meantime, I have the third (and most complicated) chapter in my struggles with Manga lurking incomplete in my drafts folder. Unsurprisingly, it's proving a little difficult to sum up almost three decades of thoughts on this remarkable culture that I know so little about - so that will likely go into the same holding mode as the fabled Pink Floyd reviews.

At any rate, I recommend that you track down and watch Virtuality, the new show from Ron Moore. It covers space exploration, virtual reality and reality shows, plus more. It's pretty good. Caution: it ends on several cliffhangers and there isn't a hope in hell of it getting picked up as a series, but I think it's still worth your time. Two hours of your time, to be exact.

You can watch it at Hulu or Fox. Hulu is grand, but I like the Fox player a little better - plus, no commercials (at least none when I watched it).

D.

Still-Pictures with Life, Pt. II

Keen observers who wonder why, if this is ostensibly a book review, I spent so much time yesterday discussing a) getting my hands on the book, and b) my contentious history with manga. Well, 'b,' I hope, is self-explanatory: I'm using this book as a springboard to reexamine my long-held prejudices about manga, and I'm taking you along with me. As far as 'a,' well, this is the Subway Rambler, after all.

So: before I went off on a tangent, in the first paragraph of yesterday's post, I told you that A Drifting Life is a graphic memoir by Yoshihiro Tatsumi, a veteran manga artist and writer who started his career in the early 1950s at the age of 16. And that's the subject matter of the book - it's essentially a career and industry overview with some human interest bits sprinkled in, covering the first fifteen years of Tatsumi's career.

This isn't the first graphic memoir by an established cartoonist, East or West. But the tight focus of this particular book does make it a pretty unique reading experience.

Right off the bat, a caveat: Tatsumi fares poorly at constructing a dramatic arc for the narrator. The book is a roman á clef, but even allowing himself the luxury of fictionalizing certain elements (I'm not sure what these are), the overall tone is dry and anecdotal. Dozens of people wander on and off the page with little introduction and sometimes little or no purpose in the overall narrative. Characters have motivations that are either paper-thin and sleeve-worn, or completely obscure and inscrutable - which would be fine in a genuine autobiography, where the author is limited by his own experiences, but in fictionalizing certain aspects, Tatsumi does give us scenes of other people in his life that he couldn't possibly have known about, making speculations about other's motivation that may or may not bear any relation to reality.

The reason why this is so distracting is that the entire narrative is delivered in a dry and declarative fashion - things happen and Tatsumi tells us they happened, but never in a particularly illuminating way beyond the basic chronology and dramatis personae involved. The only relationship that ever goes beyond the surface portrayal is that of Tatsumi with his older brother, who shares a close bond but with Tatsumi, but also a competitive jealousy that occasionally boil over. Beyond that, the central character is a cipher - as even the title admits. Someone who is clearly passionate about comics but largely untouchable, at least as presented here.

And these are the qualities that I find a lot of manga shares - maybe I'm too steeped in expectations from western literature, but the overly polite and distant tone of A Drifting Life begins to drag the book down after a while. In a shorter volume, it wouldn't be so much of a problem, but at well over 800 pages, you really miss being able to fully connect with a human presence at the core.

But: if you can bring yourself to read a novel about a completely passive person, there's actually quite a bit here to make the read worthwhile. But that's tomorrow night.

Next: Manga and Post-War Japan

Still-Pictures with Life, Pt. I

Took a visit to the Nyack Public Library, today - well-stocked, but perhaps a little ramshackle in the staffing. The visit was actually the culmination of a minor thread in my life for the last few weeks - trying to get my hands on a copy of A Drifting Life, a new graphic memoir by veteran manga artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi. I have to confess, here, that I'm largely ignorant of manga and only know of Tatsumi through this book, but I took it as a given that he's a giant in the field (having started working professionally at the age of 16, in 1951), and I had faith that the 800+ page book was going to be worth reading.

However, it's not that easy getting your hands on a book like this that you're not willing to spend money on. My first attempt was back in March, visiting the Tappan Library to see if they had it in stock or if they were going to. I tried to sell them on it as an important book (I always get evangelical about libraries increasing their comics stock). The reference librarian very kindly took down all the information and said she'd let me know. Indeed, she did, sending me an email a few days later profusely apologizing that the Tappan Library wouldn't be using their funds to order it. But (she continued), the county-wide database did show that someone might put it on order at another library. So don't give up hope!

I gave up hope. Which was premature, because several weeks later, this amazing woman actually sent me another email, informing me that the Nyack Library had gotten it, and she'd try to get them to send it over.

I owe this woman some thanks. When's the last time that a someone - let alone a complete stranger - was that thoughtful to you? Hell, even if you say, 'she was just doing her job!,' when's the last time you met someone with that level of dedication to their job? Hold on...

... and I'm back, having just written the woman a letter of thanks.

My reasons for wanting to read the book - beyond just being tantalized by the reviews I'd read - largely stemmed from a couple of years back, while I was still teaching comics at the local art center. Most of the kids in class had manga as their touchstone for what comics are - and I have always had an ambivalent (at best) relationship with the canon. I'm just the right age to have witnessed the first serious explosion of more artful manga into America, with the one-two release of Lone Wolf & Cub and Akira, both high-profile translations that likely owed their release to the rise of Frank Miller, who had mined the works and the genre for inspiration. At least, that's how they were marketed at the time.

And me? In that era, I was just moving from my all-Marvel/DC diet to the fringes of the underground/alternative/independent/whatever they were calling it that week, and having grown up with the after-school diet of watered-down anime like Battle of the Planets, so I was pretty receptive to reading it. But I didn't like it. All of the qualities that Scott McCloud praises in manga in Understanding Comics were present, but it was those very qualities that left me cold.

For starters, it was difficult to see the two works (as different as night and day) as anything other than pastiches of American genre works - a complaint I still lob at both manga and European genre comics. It's understandable - 20th Century American culture really seduced geeks the world over, much as Moebius translations in Heavy Metal did in the 70's and 80's and manga and anime do with American geeks, now.

Those qualities that I didn't like would be a little hard to parse, since I find I like most of them just fine when I encounter their effects in Western comics - I'll get to this - but when collected in one place at the source, it didn't work for me. And the more I encountered manga and more serious anime - going to RISD, a lot of it was forced on me - the less I found I liked it. My biggest complaint was the sameness of the work that I saw and the general thinness of presence.

Beyond (admittedly) looking very, very cool, all of these dystopian robot lesbian stories had nothing on serious science-fiction. The famous Yakuza riff Crying Freeman was tedious and repetitive, lurid without being actually titillating. And it all seemed like stuff I'd seen done before - and better - in American movies. While very little influence of Western comics is felt in manga, it's clear that American movies are the template for much of the work. Note: I'm pleased to say that this little observation of mine was borne out by Drifting Life, where the lead character endlessly details his obsession with American movies and detective novels.

Next: More manga

In which realism defeats entertainment

As I said to Yesenia shortly before we independently reach the same conclusion (that the film was a huge snore), "Wow, there's nothing more I want to watch than a boring, self-important actor playing a boring, self-important dilettante in a boring and self-important film."

In case you can't tell, I was speaking ironically. For all I know, this film may be a masterpiece. We couldn't even make it a half-hour into the first part. And - not that I was ever on board with the Che Guevara cult of personality in the first place, but I'm pleased to announce that my opinion of him has now calcified into thoroughly disinterested disdain. What a tool.

D.

Again with the Classic

Saw Up tonight, at the Port Chester AMC (with Karl & Yesenia). And what can I say? With the partial exception of Cars, Pixar is still just ringing up the the seamless, entertaining works of art. I don't think there's been a run like this in the history of cinema since Disney's original run of animated features from 1939 to - oh, let's say 1960. That's twenty years and about 15 movies - and Pixar's coming close on their heels, with ten films in fifteen years. With their pace now of a film a year, unless they really fuck it up and accidentally produce a Dreamworks script, they might actually beat the Disney run.

It's not to say that Lasseter and the Pixar team have done everything seamlessly. I have no idea what they were thinking letting Chris Sanders go - Sanders is surely one of the great animation directors working today. Sanders, to me, combines the best of a lot of different iconic animators - shades of Ralph Bakshi and John Kricfalusi fuel his work, but he manages a timelessness that eluded both of those directors. Sanders is easily in Brad Bird's league, and it's foolhardy to squander and alienate talent of that order, despite the roster of big guns that Pixar has (Pete Docter, Bird and Andrew Stanton really know their stuff, and even if Lasseter is no longer top-tier in terms of directing chops, it's clear that he knows how to pick and shepherd projects).

Anyhow, Up is yet more fuel for my inevitable Blu-Ray purchase, so the economy better hurry up and recover so that I can justify spending my money on crap that I can't afford, again.

D.

P.S.: Here - another Sanders link: a comic called Kiskaloo that I was ignorant of until about five minutes ago. I haven't read it, but that drawing sure is nice - and it proves once again that the level of talent out there doing webcomics is pretty scary. Note: The site navigation is pretty lame. The link goes to the first (I believe) strip, so click 'next' at the top to read through them.