David Bowie

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Yesterday I said that instead of a review today I would write a post about David Bowie. This then left me with the same problem as countless other people had yesterday: what on earth can you possibly say? He’s been around my entire life – I was born the week Aladdin Sane came out. I wasn’t old enough to really get the impact that he made on music from 1972-1978, but certainly in the 1980s I was listening to him, even though until college I was never really obsessed with music. You’d hear his singles on the radio – Ashes to Ashes, Let’s Dance, Modern Love – WELI, my local AM radio station, would play Modern Love incessantly, possibly due to its ‘retro’ nature.

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When I got to college, I began to obsess about music to a ridiculous degree, and of course that meant Bowie as well. My first mixtape that I ever made had a Bowie song on it – Suffragette City, still one of my top 5 Bowie songs. Like many, I gravitated more towards the glam Bowie – I still do, and my first choice of albums to listen to yesterday were Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust. But I knew that the musicians that I liked, those whose CDs I bought, and whose interviews I read in the NME, they all talked about a different period that I had trouble getting into – not quite as immediately rewarding, but with greater depth. This would, of course, be the Berlin Trilogy, which was Bowie’s equivalent of The Velvet Underground and Nico, i.e. everyone who listened to the albums formed a band. Except they sold a lot more than TVUAN ever did.

Bowie also touched some of my other musical obsessions. First of all it was nice to have a singer who was in my vocal range – Under Pressure was doable if I didn’t have to sing Freddie’s part! J.G. Thirlwell posted a lovely tribute to Bowie yesterday, talking about how his music influenced his work as Foetus (and likely his current instrumental scoring for The Venture Brothers). Frank Zappa disliked Bowie – stealing Frank’s lead guitar player mid-tour certainly didn’t help – but used Bowie’s then stunning music video iconography in one of his best 80s satirical songs, Be In My Video. There were punk rockers who cited Bowie as an influence, less for the musical style and more for the attitude and exaggeration. And of course as a Doctor Who fan I had to like Bowie – it was a well-known fact that Bowie was secretly a Time Lord, and would never die but merely regenerate.

But sadly that hasn’t happened, and we once again are left with little to say except perhaps “fuck cancer”. I feel bad that I never listened to more of his later period – when I was in college, finally listening to his early 70s period, Black Tie White Noise and Tin Machine II were coming out to critical shrugs. It seemed for a time that every new Bowie album was the comeback… then the next one would be the new comeback, and you’d realized the critics had written off the prior. But that’s music criticism for you, and by the time those reviews came out he’d likely moved on to something else anyway. In the end, I suppose all I’m left with is what everyone else has been saying. David Bowie’s music spoke to outsiders, kooks, weirdos, and those who felt distanced from everyone else. I hope that each new generation who feels the same way can find inspiration and solace in his work, and use it to create their own ethereal, otherworldly beauty. Even if they may find it hard to sing “let all the children boogie” with a straight face.

Of the Red, the Light, and the Ayakashi, Vol. 1

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By nanao and HaccaWorks*. Released in Japan by Media Factory, serialization ongoing in the magazine Comic Gene. Released in North America by Yen Press.

I’ve spoken before about how it can sometimes be difficult to review a new volume of a shoujo romance whose basic premise is ‘girl in high school likes guy, feelings ensue’, as there’s just so many of those out in North America. I am very happy to say that I’m starting to feel that way about the influx of yokai manga over here as well. We have all different types of yokai titles over here, including those for kids, for young adults, for men, for women. After a year that saw the loss of Shigeru Mizuki, it’s heartwarming to see his legacy, and that of Japan’s folklore, carry on. And so we have this new series, which is actually based off of a visual novel, and brings together the yokai genre with mystery, horror, and a bit of not-quite-BL – exactly what a shoujo reader would enjoy.

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Our hero is Yue, a name that longtime readers of manga will know always seems to be connected to the supernatural in some way. (I believe in Chinese it means moon.) He’s a yokai, and seems to be very important, but is unfamiliar with much of the world beyond the temple area in which he lives. So he and his friend/familiar descend the mountain to attend a festival, and run into two contrasting humans, one quiet and serious, the other angry and a bit over the top. As the series goes on, and he gets permission to visit his new wannabe friends, though, we discover the village where this is taking place is slightly off to begin with, and that there’s more going on here than meets the eye.

This series is an excellent example of what you want in a first volume. It gives you enough backstory and characterization to satisfy while making you want to read more to see what happens. Yue is sweet and naive without seeming foolish, and Tsubaki is reserved but shows a genuine love of family. As for Akiyoshi, he provides some of the series’ few laughs with his stalker-ish ways, but also gets to carry the bulk of the exposition, as he knows about the yokai without being part of them. Honestly, the three leads make a good team.

As for the horror and mystery, well, it would appear the danger is not just of having your life taken, as if a typical vampire manga, but having your very existence removed from the world. An old kindly elementary school principal vanishes one day, and those connected to the school deny he was ever there – or that they even had a principal. It gives an extra frisson of creepy to the whole deal. For more old-fashioned horror, there’s also the standard scary black ghosts that try to eat you, which also pop up a lot in these sorts of manga. Basically, AkaAka (its fan nickname) may not tread all that much original ground, but it hits all the right notes and really makes you want to read on. A definite good read, despite a double bad sign of both a name all in lowercase *and* a name with a special character in the authors.

Emma, Vol. 3

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By Kaoru Mori. Released in Japan in two separate volumes by Enterbrain, serialized in the magazine Comic Beam. Released in North America by Yen Press.

The entire first half of this omnibus gives the reader the opportunity to watch a giant other shoe dropping, and the back half then shows the shoe’s impact, with horrible consequences for many people, but mostly for Emma. Last time I talked about how well the repressed yet burgeoning love between William and Emma is, and it flowers here, with Emma visibly getting happier and less repressed. William too is different now that he accepts his feelings and is determined to do something about them. Sadly, that determination runs up against absolutely everyone – his own family, who are determined that he not make the same mistakes they made, and more importantly his fiancee’s family, who may cross over the line into actually being evil, or at least willing to commit slow murder.

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The author is very fond of big, dramatic moments – you see it in her Bride’s Story series as well – and you can see why, as she’s fantastic at handling them. The arrival of William at the Molders estate, and Emma running out to embrace him (the the surprise and amusement of the ENTIRE household) is fantastic, and reminds you again that it’s nicely coincidental that Emma ended up in the one household in Britain that wouldn’t be appalled at this. That said, that’s why William came up to meet her – the rest of society is not going to be quite as forgiving. The volume starts off with a flashback showing us how William’s parents, Richard and Aurelia, met and married. Aurelia is not of a lower class like Emma is, but she’s still “eccentric”, and that’s deadly for the time. More to the point, she’s introverted, and the pressures of society exhaust her to a damaging degree. Which is why they now live apart. It’s very bittersweet.

As for Eleanor’s father, wooooow. It’s rare we meet someone in a manga like this who gets to be pure evil. He’s really well handled, too, being extremely polite to William’s father, then throwing away his gloves in disgust afterwards, as he had touched someone of a merchant class – horrors! When William breaks off his impetuous and foolish engagement to Eleanor, to her horror, the Viscount calmly sees what needs to be done – Emma needs to disappear. Luckily, he knows some thugs who can fairly easily trick and abduct her (though the cliffhanger seems to hint she may be rescued soon). This sequence may be the weakest in the book – it’s a bit overmelodramatic, to be honest – but it’s earned, at least, and the true high point of the last half of the book is Williams’ screaming match with his father in any case.

I expect things to be resolved soon, even though we have two full omnibuses to go – the last three volumes of Emma were side stories and sequels, so these two wacky kids should get their happy ending soon. Which is good, as this volume could get pretty depressing at times – as Mori herself notes in the afterword. No worries, the journey is still very much worth the effort.