Midaregami

For the last couple of days, I’ve been raving that the 2003 film Nasu: Summer in Andalusia was evidence that somebody from studio Madhouse had obtained and installed the necessary technology to spy on my thoughts, and glean from them the precise sort of animated movie I would want to see, before I knew I wanted to see it.

Having now watched it, I can say with some confidence that the circumstantial evidence for this case is continuing to pile up.

The lovingly-animated film is everything you would expect from a Ghibli veteran, with its one possible problem being its length—barely 45 minutes.

That turns out to be the perfect length for the story, though, which is one of those simple-yet-complex narratives I seem to be unable to go more than a month without running across in anime lately. What gives, Japan? When did you get all… all… cool?

The main character is Pepe Benengeli, a domestique for the Pao Pao Beer team. Already I’m grinning; the obvious move would’ve been to make their protagonist the up-and-coming team leader, a Lemond or but they took a much more realistic path.

Like any sport with a large field, only a handful of guys in the peloton have a shot at the overall victory in a grand tour like the Vuelta. Anybody who does have a shot has it because they’re both a strong rider, but also because they have a strong team of other riders dedicated to supporting them—domestiques.

Pepe is a domestique ordered to support his team leader in a breakaway on a mostly flat stage through Andalusia. The team sponsor is irritated with Pepe’s perceived attitude, but our domestique protagonist promises that, even though the stage goes through his hometown, he’s going to support his team leader.

He means it, too. He got into cycling to get out of this podunk town, A desire driven mostly by his older brother stealing his girlfriend while Pepe was doing his compulsory military service—and they’re getting married the same day Pepe’s race passes through town.

Here’s when the film stops being good and is well on its way to greatness—it’s simultaneously subverting and embracing one of the grand old narratives of cycling. Flat stages in these long tours are characterized by breakaways and attacks by riders who have no chance at the overall victory, frequently by guys who are from the areas they’re passing through. There’s nothing better than a stage win in front of a home crowd, after all.

Except that Pepe hates the home crowd; he doesn’t want a damn thing to do with them. As the stage develops (complete with lovingly authentic cycling strategy; they really do love me) he decides he wants to win out of sheer, bloody-minded spite.

Ah, spite. Spite is an emotion with which I can identify; I loved that Pepe ultimately pursues victory to get it on his own terms, because he wants it for himself. The film does more or less show Pepe reconciling with his brother and ex-girlfriend, but that’s only enabled because he’s already won the race.

What a wonderful movie. I’m so excited they’re making a sequel.

Holy crap, little buddy! Sam & Max: Surfin’ the Highway, one of the greatest works of humor ever written in the English language¹, and utterly unobtainable for at least a decade, is coming back in print with a new cover and new material!

I will have to have at least one copy.

¹ I am not exaggerating. Every panel is a carefully wrought work of hilarity.

• “Game of Kings”
• “City that Never Sleeps”

For the past two years I’ve been living here in Honolulu, Hawaii, where I have had a largely excellent time. I have learned a lot, despite some rough spots, and both Herself and I have flourished here, initial misgivings notwithstanding. I think I could legitimately describe the two years here as the best in my life so far.

Thus, if asked about my plans a month ago, I would (with some effort, it bears saying) distanced myself from late-semester panic enough to say that I was in fact quite looking forward to Hawai’i Year Three, wherein I expected to write my MA thesis on the poetics of consumption in Tawara Machi’s Sarada Kinenbi, which I planned to translate as an appendix to the thesis proper. It was going to be grand.

But there has been a twist. A monumental, shocking twist.

That same late-semester panic, inspired largely by a certain graduate class on Edo-era Literature¹, spurred me to spend a couple of evenings doctoring up my resume and sending it into Newtype USA. I have engaged in similar folly before², but this time I had a couple of honest-to-god gonna-be-published notches on my freelancing pistol, so I wondered if my inquiry might have credibility it previously lacked.

Turns out it did. To compress the long and frequently agonizing process of interviews and indecision down to a few words: I got the job.

On Sunday I am flying to my ancestral home of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and a week later I am driving to Houston, Texas. A week after that, hopefully after finding an apartment, I start my new job as a staff translator for Newtype USA.

At this point, all I can really think to say is: Holy Fucking Shit.

¹ It turned out that I received an (extremely generous) A-, and ultimately wrote a paper of which I am actually quite proud—in any case, my panic was unfounded. (“Like it always is,” Herself long-sufferingly points out.)  

² Amusingly, last year I sent my resume to ADV Films, Newtype USA’s parent company, in response to their job posting for a translator. They never replied, and the posting remains up even now, a year later. Maybe they forgot about it.

Grad student gets hit by truck, which runs over his head, then lives to tell about it.

I love the part where he says he hasn’t really stopped to think about the accident because quals are coming up.

Substantive updates coming soon.

I recognize that the Transformers movie is essentially a shameless ploy to wring money out of my childhood nostalgia, but after seeing this new trailer, I do not care.

It is going to be awesome.

Also there is big, big news on the horizon, which I will be discussing soon. Look forward to it.

I recorded some music a while ago. Recently I did some more. Now, I’m making what amounts to a full release, with the presentation of my first EP, entitled: “In Lieu of Talent: The Paul Starr Story.”

Six tracks, twenty minutes of catchy instrumental music, painstakingly hand-sequenced and mixed in the most underrated piece of software ever, Apple’s GarageBand. Three of these tracks are brand new, never before released songs. All of them have lengthy, ridiculous titles. What are they? You’ll just have to download and find out.

Grab the zip and do feel free to comment if you have any sort of reaction. I will be talking more about this “project” soon, but for now, download, listen, enjoy.

I suspect that this debate will rage for years—the debate over the “correct” viewing order for the fourteen episodes that comprise the first animated season of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. It will be one of the Great Otaku Questions, up there with “What in blazes actually happens at the end of Evangelion?” and “What’s it like to go on a date?”

Sorry, cheap shot.

I watched the fansubs—a little late, I know; I should not have let Warren give me copies, but my greedy little nerd heart demanded more. I’m buying the special edition DVDs immediately, so all’s well that ends well, yes? But I digress. The episodes. The fansubs have them in broadcast order; the standard DVD release will be in chronological order.

Hunter, bless his heart, contends that the broadcast order was a cheap gimmick, and that there’s no reason to watch it out of chronological order.

I disagree, but for reasons I myself don’t fully understand. I do think that the Big Reveal needs to be at the end. By that time most viewers have more-or-less figured out what’s going on, but the solution to the Big Problem is more of a surprise, and I think it has more impact if it comes right at the end of the series.

I realize that I am speaking in vague generalities that could hit at anything from “lunch” to “apocalypse,” like some kind of nerd Nostradamus; for this I apologize, but it really is worth staying free of spoilers.

Anyway, Haruhi is really quite special, and no matter how loudly its praises have been sung, I can’t bring myself to call it “overrated.” It simply isn’t. My jaded literature student heart has been moved by this show, moved by the quality of its writing and characterization as much as the postmodern audacity it has to be both itself and a parody of itself.

It was with such admiration, and a new enthusiasm for the animated medium as a whole, that I queued up Genshiken.

I’m going to take a break from fannish raving now, perhaps discussing Genshiken another day, but let me leave with this: Between Planetes, Gunbuster 2, Haruhi, and Genshiken, I’ve seen more paradigm-shiftingly good anime in the last six months than I’d seen in the six years before that.

God help me, I think I’m being sucked back in.

We watched Breaking Away last night; now I want to quit school and ride my bike full-time.

In other bike nerdery news, old-school friend Warren is visiting from his deployment in Iraq; he brought me a present:

But I know people who do, and there’s a certain brutal beauty to it. Watch for the squeeze around 3’ 30”.