Unicorn Tea Party

Naruto

I wore my Naruto Shippuden t-shirt when we went out to see my brother last summer. He asked me: “What’s with the shirt?” And I said “Naruto! It’s my favorite manga!”  Justin said: “I’m mortified.”  Jeff said: “You know,  it’s that lame ass anime shit she likes.”  Tom cuts through the noise and continues to address me, asking: “What’s it about?”

“It’s about Naruto, he’s a ninja that has a monster inside of him.”

That’s enough for my brother, who nods approval and says “Me too.”

I know that my brother understands, and I don’t need to say any more things about it. I wish that I could say more things about why I love Naruto enough to wear dorky ass age inappropriate t-shirts around in public, but the conversation moves on and I don’t know how to explain it anyway.

My friend Ian would be thrilled to relate at length the story of the night we were drunk and he tried to get me to talk about Naruto and all I could do is repeat, “It’s just, you know, so GREAT.” The only thing I managed to vary in that sentence was word emphasis and comma placement.

I’m not super good at talking, it’s true, but I want to try to tell you about Naruto anyway. Naruto is a shonen manga – that means it’s a manga who’s target audience is pre-teen boys. It is a formulatic entertainment, It has a monster of the week, and a good fight every episode. All the characters have sweet designs and super cool ninja powers.  I’m going to say right now that this is pretty much 80 percent of the appeal for me, as I’m about as shallow as they come.  I love the costumes, I love the monsters, and I love the fights!

This is true, but it’s also not true.  There is a subtlety to the framework of this story that shines for me. This is the story of a village hidden in the leaves, and its will of fire. When I stand at the window and watch the wind blow through the leaves, I think of Naruto and more smile gets added on to the one I already had.

You learn everything you need to know about Naruto in the first episode. He is full of energy and kind of a dorky brat. He wants attention from adults, but he’s crappy at school so he acts out by doing pranks and mischief.

He wants attention from adults because he’s an orphan. He’s an orphan because his parents died the night the village was attacked by a giant nine tailed fox demon. The nine tailed fox demon is an ultimate force of destruction, a superweapon developed by ninjas of the past, and as with all superweapons developed by ninjas of the past, they can get out of control and destroy a lot of stuff if you’re not careful.

A lot of people in the village died that night, so when the people in the village see Naruto, they don’t see Naruto, they only see a reminder of their pain. Doubly so for the few who know that the only reason the village was saved was because Naruto’s father and mother sacrificed themselves to seal  the nine tailed fox demon inside the belly of their infant, Naruto.

Of course at the start Naruto doesn’t know this. Naruto only knows one thing. He wants to become the greatest ninja in the village, The Great Lord Hokage, so that everyone in the village will be forced to recognize him.

Although everyone who hears Naruto say that he is going to become Hokage laughs and dismisses him as a loud mouth brat – Naruto never stops holding to his statement of intent.  He says it out loud all the time, and through the arc of the story he never accepts a situation that would get in the way of this goal. Naruto never goes back on his word, that is his ninja way. Naruto and his ninja way are the beating heart that moves this story along.

After Naruto graduates from the ninja academy, he is placed on a team with a cute pink haired girl he has a super crush on, Haruno Sakura, and the hidden leaf village’s other resident orphan of tragic circumstance,  Uchiha Sauske.  Sauske  is the last surviving member of his clan. The entire Uchiha clan, save Sauske,  was slaughtered by Sauske’s older brother Itachi. Sauske doesn’t want attention from adults, Sauske doesn’t want anything.  Sauske’s only dream is to revenge his clan by killing his brother. It is not too far along in the story before Sauske abandons his village and his friends in a search for greater power.

Sauske is no match for the darkness of his past, he is swallowed up in it and disappears completely. Only Naruto and Sakura believe they can bring Sauske back to his place in the village where friends value each other and the will of the fire is tended with honor.

As the characters grow older and more of the past is revealed, it seems there is a darkness at the center of the village itself that feeds the rift… Naruto and Sakura, maybe they don’t understand it completely but they cling to their way of the ninja, and their way of the ninja means not letting their friend get swallowed up by the darkness, no matter what.

Naruto was first published in November 1999, and episodes still come out weekly. That seems like an amazing long time to me. Naruto is a vast story with a wealth of characters, this couple paragraphs I have put down here are only a fingernail scratch on the surface of what’s there to be enjoyed in the story of Naruto. If you enjoy serial entertainment that is about the struggle of the present to deal with the darkness of the past and somehow find a way to move forward in a positive direction – you might enjoy reading Naruto, and I implore you to give it a try.

A character in the lastest episode proclaimed to her enemy that all who meet Naruto receive from him the flower of hope, and that is why although she will be destroyed in this battle, ultimately darkness will fall in the face of the light of the love Naruto bears for the people of his world, and I got a little thrill of knowing she’s right, because I believe in Naruto too, and will always work to hold the flower of hope in the face of darkness. No matter what!

the extreme thing is generally the true thing

In service to my wistful fairy space girl princesses, I decided I need to break and spend a little of my time working from ref, doing some portraits, working my art muscles, learning to see better & who better to start out with than our dear heart’s mother, adora-thug Emma Goldman.

I started reading her autobiography this year, and she sure does have a wonderful voice. Thank you Emma Goldman for all your hard work, I sure do appreciate living in this world where I dont’ have to wear such a ridiculous outfit as you have on in this picture.

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/Goldman/toc.html

There are machines that can do this way better

You know how sometimes it feels like your face is smashed up against the ceiling? Like there is a pocket of helium in your skull and you keep bouncing off the top? All you can see is all the other faces smashed up against the same ceiling and all you can feel is all the piles of the past faces filling up the space under you, till there is nothing left except to feel the pocket of helium in your skull push against the barrier?

The rest of this blog entry is going to contain spoilers for Neal Stephenson’s Anathem.

Usually I don’t buy books in hardcover, I prefer the paperback experience for the most part, but I was too excited to wait around past the hardcover cycle for this. I haven’t read everything Stephenson’s written up to this point, I still have The Diamond Age to get through, and the rest of The Baroque Cycle after the first book to read, but I’ve read enough to wonder what there is left to write about after you have written about the past and the present and the future.

I didn’t read any reviews or blurbs or interviews, I just ordered the book from amazon and opened up to the first page. I read the first sentence of the forward that said if you like surprises skip this, so I skipped the forward, and I was surprised, and I liked it.

For two seconds I almost groaned at realizing this was going to be a whole book full of made up science fiction words, and then I immediately stopped caring and loved it, because the ceiling opened up and my head stopped hurting and there was a whole long world where you had a bolt and a cord and a sphere and a giant clock and you could spend your whole life reenacting an ancient battle with some weeds in a back garden, drawing pictures of it on some leaves and shoving them in a nook in a stone wall that you knew was going to last forever until someone else a thousand lifetimes later could find it and say hey that’s cool, I can use this.

I was immediately envious of this life and world, while not perfect it seemed to flow correctly, taking into account the pockets of helium inside our skulls, opening up the ceilings wide enough for each little skull balloon to float up as far as it could.

If you like to think about things like the flow of information through time, isosceles triangles, cats that are both alive and dead, orbital mechanics, phonomancy, and what it means to be a finite biological organism exsisting in an infinte universe, this is a fun book to read.

i just lied to get to your apartment

I drove across Pennsylvania this week to meet my brother’s first son, Elijah Joseph Onuska. He has the cutest most smooshable monkey face. On the way there, I listened to Heretic Pride, on the way back, I listened to Sarah Vowell read Assassination Vacation. I might have died and been born over one thousand times or more.

Today I finished Live From New York, An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, As Told By It’s Stars, Writers, and Guests. My favorite person on Saturday night live will always be Brian Hooper, who would re-do all the funny parts with his friends every Monday during art class, but these guys were cool too. Lorne has lunch with Paul McCartney a lot, by the way.

I started Anathem and I’m ok with that being like it is, I think it’s going to be fun.

I have nothing to say about this book.

Who has time to draw the Reichstag from scratch? My life is half over already!

title grazed from Jason Lutes blog post. I think it is nice that Jason Lutes has a blog, and that it is called Coyote vs. Wolf.

My table is messy these days. It has been more of an adjustment than I planned, not having BW to work on any longer.  I grabbed this book off the shelf because it looked small. It made me angry a lot of times, but it also had glittering abandoned martian cities, empty spaces and firebirds. I do have a question though. What is it with old school SF and whores? I am starting to sense a pattern. Not just bradbury, but all of them that I have been reading lately. A woman comes onscreen and you can bet two seconds later she’s deliberately using her bosom as a weapon. I don’t know, mabye it is because I am not a good looking person, but it just seems like such a ridiculous way to behave.  Also, there was like five failed missions before anything happened. If only we really behaved that way.

I guess, unrealistic, annoying, but still sticky is the final verdict. I’m not sure what I’m going to read next, there is a book about Saturday Night Live that has been whispering my name for the past couple months, well see if it gets through.

In the mean time, I am drawing a b-side for Phonogram 2, and then picking up one of Kieron’s orphan scripts, which is insane, so things are moving along.

Perhaps their programming set up a metaprogram in our computer that interfaced their data wave fronts directly with our memory banks.

Songs From The Stars, by Norman Spinrad

You just don’t hear “memory banks” enough anymore these days.

I guess I have to admit that when I said before in that other post that I haven’t been reading anything, that was kind of a fib. This book has been in my bag for a while now, so I have something to do while Justin is in karate. There is not an inside waiting area, so the parents just have to hang out in their cars in the parking lot. Despite having seventeen gadgets specifically designed to entertain me while sitting and waiting in the car, reading is still my favorite. I enjoyed dragging this book out over the space of months, I always looked forward to getting to spend an hour with Clear Blue Lou and Sunshine Sue, I’m kind of sad it’s over really. But I will be looking out for more Norman Spinrad. Aparently according to the internet, The Demolished Man is some kind of classic, so I’m sure that’ll be fun. I’d rather be hanging out in La Mirage though probably.

crucifix pose

I’m not reading anything right now. I’m working on the comic. It has a deadline now: all finished by midsummer (24 June 2008). So no reading – if you can be reading you can be working. Work work work. I spent January reading the first four Dune books. A spillover from last May that I spent repeatedly watching the special edition Lynch Dune on on demand, combined with Half Price Books having all four of them for a buck fifty apiece when I was in there after xmas. I didn’t so much read them as shovel them into my mouth like sand flavored cheetos.

It was all fun and games till I got to God Emperor Dune. I always heard it said around that in the event you ever decide to read the Dune books, stop at three, because after that you are on your own. And boy o if ever that isn’t the truth, I don’t know what is. I spent the duration of the book with my soul being kind of aghast at what it was witnessing. The worm lives underground for a reason people. I wouldn’t trade it though, I’m almost curious enough to seek out the rest, but I think I’m OK with leaving it where it is for now.

I was nicely working away on page 60 earlier. Well, going over the script trying to figure out how I’m going to pull it off, and crucifix pose pops up again. I feel like pulling up the word doc and doing a search, getting the numbers on how many times “crucifix pose” is in a scene description, but it would only come up with not enough times to make it funny and just the right ammount of times to make it especially horrible.  It seems like I am always getting crucified or staring into the face of the worm in the course of drawing scripts for Kieron. Duke Leto II would laugh at this joke.

Box of Shakespeare

Every year my jolly friend A.E.W-M and I attempt to go on some sort of adventure to a new city together. One trip ago we were kind of half broke and having to do something on the cheap and not too far away, so we decided to go to Columbus the weekend of S.P.A.C.E. (a small but cute comic-con- I got a blue bunny there that is still decorating my inspiration board.)

Columbus itself was kind of on the dreary and depressing side, but after a couple hours of driving around we managed to find the good independent bookstore, a rambling almost musty old house stuffed full of used, bargain, and strange books of all kinds.

The way to go bookshopping is to wander through and look around till something calls you, it took me two times through all manner of windy hallways and crowded rooms till I saw it. e.e. cummings? I always notice his name because it looks so ridiculous. is that poetry or something? no – it’s a novel. The Enormous Room. Hm, I didn’t know he had a novel. This looks interesting. It got read almost immediately upon returning home, and has never really left me since.

It’s an account of mr. cumming’s adventures serving in an ambulance corps during WWII. Well not exactly – he had a best friend and a smart mouth and a good old time, till they annoyed the boss that had a severe hate on for them so much that he got cummings and his best friend sent off to a french concentration camp on some kind of trumped up “they have a treasonous attitude” charges.

I guess something like this could have been pretty scary, but they were young and arrogant enough still to relax into the absurdity of the experience. Throughout the book cummings goes in to great detail about the people and conditions and daily life of being a prisoner at that time and in that place, all the colorful characters they met, and all the dramas that played out before their eyes, but he never directly talks about himself or his best friend. It seems more like the book was about all of the things that he and his friend talked about to amuse each other while they were there. A recounting of a years worth of private jokes.

Towards the end of the book cumming’s friend gets sent off to the very bad and scary prison where no one that goes there ever comes back from alive, and the sense of heartbreak coming out of the book after that happens is almost unbearable. The day that the box of gorgeous leatherbound Shakespeare editions that he and his friend finangled for months trying to get their hands on arrived, e.e. just shoved them away and didn’t look at them at all. And I just keep feeling sad for that box full of Shakespeare that missed being read by those crazy and brilliant young men to a bunch of illiterate war orphan hoodlums in an enormous wet room at the tail end of WWII. That probably would have been a lot of fun.

Let’s get crossed out and come to harm

Briefly considered picking up some more Stephenson, but decided to keep that ended on a high note for a while. On to Kevin Murphy’s A Year at the Movies: One Man’s Filmgoing Odyssey which was nice and cosy like a blanket. I laughed and I cried and even got a tummy ache on the last chapter where he rips on the Tolkien fans. Took a while to get through because I’ve been a tad on the listless side lately. Everyday things fill up all the dream spaces and I feel more machine than man, twisted and evil? Something like that. Am attempting to pick up Moorcock and read through the Elric saga, but it’s turning to dust, so probably going to take a break from reading for a while and go back to work. Sometimes it seems like you’d do anything but the right thing. Although I did quit smoking between now and the previous entry. Almost by accident, like it got lost in the past and I can’t find it anymore. Taste and smell are welcome back, confronting feelings instead of smoking them to death, somewhat less so, but probably better in the long run.  Breathing is nice, and sometimes that is enough!