Bill Randall

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I want join the chorus with a pox on the Tokyopop contracts for their “Shining Stars” program, which were issued in “hey dude” language from a company founded by a lawyer.

The “hey dude” language, utterly disingenuous from a corporation, reminds that Tokyopop is essentially a marketing firm: it exists, and has been successful, as an importer of a popular culture wholly created and owned by other people. Its unique contribution has been spin. For instance, when Japanese creators uninterested in other countries’ customs refused to flip their art, Tokyopop released it unflipped and spun it (quite successfully) as “authentic.” No matter one’s flipping preference, it is clear that Tokyopop’s approach stemmed from no principled commitment to authenticity. That matters if you’re interested in a business relationship with the company.

Then recall what Stu Levy, Tokyopop’s founder and CEO, said in Tom McLean’s Bags & Boards interview for Variety:

I was realizing at the time, well we’ve proven our name as Tokyopop, that we can market and we can distribute. But a lot of people, especially in Japan, were treating us like we were a distributor, maybe even like we were an agent.

So I decided that, yeah, it’s important for us to prove that not only can we work with finished product and adapt it, but we can work with creative people and we can express ourselves creatively as well and become more of a studio. … We think we understand the secrets of the success of Japanese manga, and why it resonates worldwide, so let’s take a stab at it.

To put it differently, and simply, if Tokyopop only licenses, packages and redistributes Japanese-owned goods, then it has no company assests. If it loses a few of its top licenses, it could sink the company. The logical step is to own properties, so that their work building the company isn’t wasted. They have already taken this step with OEL manga, in a co-ownership arrangement. Whether these manga are “authentic” or not has given way to the “manga lifestyle,” Levy’s phrase, with the implication that this lifestyle is not (owned by) Japanese.

A paragraph later in that interview, Levy talks about copyright.

…my personal view on how to approach copyright is I really tend to lean towards opening it up and embracing fans expressing themselves creatively with [intellectual property] that other people have created.

This is in the context of fan-made tributes, mash-ups, and dojinshi, and my pointing it out is perhaps unfair. But I would hope that the creators of characters and stories (”intellectual properties”) might have the same consideration as fans and pirates.

Tokyopop does promise co-ownership, vaguely. However, their goal is clearly the development of related properties, like film and television. It brings to mind “Hollywood deals,” “Hollywood contracts,” all shorthand for getting ripped off. I fully admit the bizarre, sleazy Americana of the place and the industry, but at least they have SAG, DGA, WGA, and other assorted unions that ensure things like residuals and health care. Yes, they are very hard to get into, and no, just because you can get SAG rates doesn’t mean you’ll work every day, or even any day, but at least there is a strong institution with leverage in that industry.

Comics creators have no similar institution protecting them. They also don’t have the same barriers of entry into their field. Creating a movie requires piles of money and the cooperation of talented, unionized craftspeople. Comics require pen and paper. The tradeoff in making a movie is that you don’t own it, but it gets made, and you get paid (usually). The tradeoff in comics, in the case of this Tokyopop deal, is a lot less clear. What do you get, their distribution might? From a company who has produced exactly zero breakout hits in OEL manga? In order to consider signing away the rights, I would hope they would offer a hell of a lot more than they are.

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The Hollywood comparison reminds me that Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton both owned and had creative control of their movies (until Keaton signed with MGM and lost both). So everyone in the Bay Area please please please check out the San Francisco Silent Film Festival coming up in July. I wish I could be there to watch The Unknown, The Man Who Laughs, and even– HER WILD OAT!

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Also: if anyone has had good or bad experiences with Tokyopop or other OEL manga publishers, on or off the record, please drop me a line. I’m working on an article that is leaning in that direction, and I’d like to hear from you.

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EDIT: At first glance, it brought to mind the pay-to-play reading fees for contests in literary journals. Except that economics says these journals can’t afford contests without entry fees, as their readership fits in a pickup truck. By contrast, Shining Stars looks like trawling for marketable properties with a very wide net by charging the people who just aren’t good enough.

I misread and then misrepresented this part of the contract about the “pilot fee,” for which I apologize; it is evidence of my non-legal mind and perhaps the fact that “hey dude” is actually just as confusing as legalese.  Fortunately for my credibility, it was not my main argument.

I would still like to hear from OEL manga creators (and publishers) about their experiences.  For the record, it is not a Michael Dean-esque work of investigative reporting; I’m a critic, not a journalist. Normally I just read a bunch of books in context and react; in writing for the first time in several years on the English-language manga industry, it is becoming clear that the context of English manga centers on creators’ rights and licensing.

I’ve been watching the small row about the upcoming Kramers Ergot 7, the influential art-comics anthology. Chris Mautner has the best summary, with his own thoughts; the short version is that it’s an expensive book, so some readers feel priced out. More interesting, others see a tension with comics’ populist roots. At least one person thought art should reach as many people as possible. Others spoke of a need to expand the audience.

I suppose people who can will buy Kramers and the rest will borrow it and conveniently lose touch. But the row raises the question of whom art, any art, should reach.

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First, charging for art is always dicey. Gallery artists know this better than anyone, with wealthy buyers speculating on art like stock options or oil futures. But art is only treated like a commodity; good luck making a living with it. Many artists moonlight: Rimbaud (quit poetry to run guns), Joyce (taught at Berlitz), and half the comics artists now working (drawing spot illos). But the right combination, like a dog and a bald kid, can lead to absurd riches.

I know no better chart of these tensions than The Gift by Lewis Hyde, a mix of anthropology, economics, and poetic associations. Hyde supported his own art– criticism– with straight jobs as an electrician and carpenter before becoming a teacher. Read it, and keep in mind that music, like air, apparently wants to be free; that playing in the Hollywood sandbox now costs upwards of $100 million dollars; and that some artists make works that exist for just a few minutes before they wash away.

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Second, on Koya-san, the mountain at the center of the Shingon Buddhist universe, scores of monasteries have unimaginably beautiful religious art. I used to live by the foot of the mountain, but I saw little art. My trips up usually ended with ten empty cans and the shakes next to a coffee vending machine. I can’t read Buddhist art well, my own limitation, so I probably got as much out of the coffee as I would have out of the art.

The writer Alex Kerr has a better Koya-san story in his book Lost Japan. He’s taking some friends there (pardon if I misremember parts) from Osaka to show them Traditional Japan. During the train ride, he gripes about the cancerous urban development. Once he arrives, he gripes about the crummy town. Eventually, he lucks into seeing a particularly fine statue of the Buddha. It’s beautiful; he’s moved. The next day he discovers that they only reveal this statue for one day every few hundred years. The rest of the time it stays hidden from everyone, even the monks.

Another Japan observer, Chris Marker, notes in his film Sans Soleil that “censorship is not the mutilation of the show, it is the show.  … It points to the absolute by hiding it.”  He’s reading soft porn, and the Vatican’s treasures, and old Shinto sex totems, but the idea expands past that. One could say it might be better that a work of art not be seen.

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Finally, on some obscure Greek island there’s a movie screen in a field. Robert Beavers, the protege and lover of Gregory Markopoulos, has been following the elder filmmaker’s last wishes and restoring his life’s work for display. On 27-28 June 2008 he will show the final parts of ENIAIOS to those who want to come. Campsites are available.

The site is called the Temenos, and watching these movies thus becomes a pilgrimage. I’ve only seen one; it relied on lush images and classical allusions. I understood only parts. Were I to travel to Lyssaraia to watch the 80-hour film cycle, I would certainly educate myself better, rather than rely on travel to make sure I’m worth what I’m watching.

Of course, Beavers could just upload them all to YouTube so the maximum number of people can watch them while simultaneously downloading porn and getting their scores. Now that we can fit the Complete Works of Humankind on the head of a pin, there’s no reason not to, if it’s just information, another commodity.

But there are different kinds of information. Some asks to be free; some asks to be enclosed. Some is enclosed, in a market, a box in a monastery, or a small community of people with the tools to read and appreciate it. By being so enclosed, it can increase its force, for those able to understand and see it, like water flows faster when it’s focused, like when as kids we put a thumb on the end of a hose and ran through the spray.

This would have been more substantial, but I’m gobsmacked after receiving today the fourth bill from a random-violence-related emergency room visit. From November! The fourth!

Also, it is due last week.

I want to believe in the free market, but why hasn’t it ground the medical establishment into dust? Everyone I know regards hospitals as a place you go to die, or at least pick up MRSA. Next time I’ll just pay my Chinese doctor fifty bucks to stick needles in my head, even if it’s a sucking chest wound.

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Figure 1.  The Emergency Room. 

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Anyway, spellcheck thinks the article I just finished should be about this:

• Yoshihiro Tatum, from the legendary mange anthology Agro
• translated and edited by Yuji Oink and Adrian Domino
• the artist Mesozoic Furukawa
• Geiger, the “dramatic” version of mange, and:
• the founders of Geiger Studio, like Slouchy Sakurai and Takao Satin, whose violent fantasy Olga 13 now defines “Geiger” more than Tatum’s grim realism.

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Also, I just finished John Nathan’s new memoir, Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere. He has lived a singular life, traipsing to Japan at 22 and soon after translating heavyweights like Yukio MISHIMA and Kenzaburo OE. He makes a memorable cameo with Kobo ABE in the film The Face of Another and became a filmmaker himself, making some classic documentaries. A philosophical, sometimes regretful tone doesn’t change the fact that many of his stories are an utter scream, whether about pitching to Hollywood, Saul Bellow being scum, or fighting with his blind grandmother-in-law.

His translation of Oe’s A Personal Matter helped secure the Nobel, but Nathan has his own voice.  This book was a pleasant surprise, unlike random bills and that dude standing at the top of the escalator at Chinatown Station for those two minutes I was distracted, feeling pretty good about the world.

From my notebook, when I was working in Wakayama, south of Osaka:

I’m fascinated by Touch, but not for its eternal brilliance. It just comes on television every day when I get home from work. This 80s baseball soap, a creaky classic, matches nicely with new commercials for Calorie Mate and Boss Coffee. In a way, the 80s were to anime what the 70s were to manga, mapping the territory for everyone to follow. Touch, with its love triangle, high school tensions, and pop songs, could be any tv show from the 80s. Given that kids still watch it, it could be every tv show since.

Since I’m usually cooking when it’s on, I can’t say how the love triangle’s progressing. In fact, I can’t even tell whether they’re showing the episodes in order. They all run together: school, practice and games, tiffs large and small, life-changing teen drama. Sometimes I feel that five different scenes shoot out of a blender every day—there’s your show. In the episode where Punchy’s two illegitimate kids show up (he’s the dog, mind), in between slow-motion shots of Minami doing gymnastics and the baseball coach’s bobbing head, there’s an old school montage of baseball practice. The kids run, hit some balls, and hit the field like nothing else exists. It goes into the night, but it could go on forever.

This montage lifts the practice above the story, where it becomes an emblem of sorts. Touch does have a story arc, with twin boys both in love with Minami, both on a team headed inexorably to Koshien Stadium for the championship. The outcome is inevitable, and not the reason anyone watches. Rather, we watch to see the same thing every week, to see just a little progress without making it end, like everything in our lives eventually does. I finish cooking, turn off the television and the next day go back to school. Repeat.

Why not, then, a 26-episode series in which the road is clearly defined but the progress never told? It could work quite well, even as a thirteen hour loop played forever and only watched five minutes at a time. We don’t recall the long days and adjustments after, say, our first confession of love. We recall the excruciating buildup before we spilled our hearts out of our chests, terrified they wouldn’t make it out there on their own. We recall life on the edge of the cliff, right before you lose balance, knowing you won’t be able to pull back but enjoying every unmeasured moment.

Still on the activist documentary, I recall two films on orphans in Uganda. They  number over two million because of AIDS and war, and we all know that cameras love tragedy.

The first film, ABC Africa, began when the International Fund for Agricultural Development invited Abbas Kiarostami to film in Uganda. They hoped to draw attention to UWESO, the Ugandan Women’s Efforts to Save Orphans. Kiarostami, the preeminent Iranian director, went in with video cameras to take some preparatory notes.  He so liked what he shot that he just used it.

He uses the video camera to meet people and play with kids, and so makes a breezy film that somehow grows in the mind after viewing.  It often shows poor streets and natural beauty shot from cars, and billboards for “Lifeguard” condoms.  In a hospital scene, it quietly glances at the dead.  The film’s centerpiece, however, shows nothing.  Six minutes of darkness, broken only by a match and lightning, let Kiarostami remind us that humans can adapt to anything.

Mostly the film sings. As soon as he arrives at the airport, Kiarostami films a man singing. Women and children sing in groups. Kiarostami intersperses reminders, not lectures, about the problem and UWESO’s solutions.  He also reminds us of our privileged viewpoint.  The film ends by following a white Austrian couple from hotel to airport with their adopted Ugandan child.  The complex situation evokes conflicted emotions, as they photograph this child in his homeland before taking him from it.  Kiarostami ends with a shot of clouds, subtly overlaid with children’s faces, as ephemeral as a video image, or a memory.

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The second film, Invisible Children, began when some American wannabe filmmakers invited themselves to Sudan.  A high-school teacher described it to me as “Road Rules in Africa,” with neither irony nor horror.  When the filmmakers arrive in Uganda, they’re surprised that they can’t cross the desert to get to Sudan. Luckily there’s photogenic tragedy at hand. Locals describe the Invisible Children, fleeing the rebels army’s press gangs at night; the film’s money shot slowly reveals hundreds of children sleeping together in a safehouse. It works as spectacle of nameless bodies, a stand-in for the carnage they never got to film in Sudan.

The film is just the beginning.  Having looked with classic American innocence, the filmmaker’s very American solution should not surprise. They established a business.  Free screenings at high schools and colleges lead to events where students sleep out at night, emulating the children. It gives an experience film cannot, and prepares viewers to act, not watch.  They sell trinkets made by the children and actively solicit donations.  Fortunately, they have also established schools and scholarships, hopefully a more sustainable solution with long-term benefits.

One could be forgiven thinking it’s all crass, given the commercials on the DVD. They are an NPO, though, and seem to be doing good in the world.  Most films struggle to get seen, much less build schools. Fault the distribution networks of theaters and television, which Invisible Children bypassed entirely. It succeeds by appealing to its viewers’ naïveté.  It also does nothing to disabuse them of it, just their money.  Hopefully, the film and organization render themselves irrelevant by solving the problem.  ABC Africa lacks a structure to do that, but it is also not the film IFAD envisioned.  It’s Kiarostami’s film, and I can imagine watching it for a host of reasons ten, twenty, even fifty years from now.

My friend and colleague Genny Baudrillard invited me to speak with her college humanities class on documentary filmmaking. They have recently watched Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke, a rich, complex film. So I mostly spoke on photography. A digressive version of the talk follows after the jump.

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On Wednesday, I’ve been invited to lecture at a small college out in the sticks, so Tuesday’s post will appear Wednesday, with notes on the talk. It’s a pleasant lecture about ethics and the documentary image, not a stern one about cleaning your room. Until then, some notes:

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In the inbox moments ago, Warren Craghead has released another downloadable, do-it-yourself mini of his fine drawings. Time to break out the saddle stapler.

Also, his Postcard project has recently appeared as a blog (link pilfered from Tom Spurgeon).

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The Economist gets in on the Murakami=Warhol kick. May soon become subscriber only. The title, “Infantial Capitalism,” scans well, and the reviewer notes that M.’s a better theorist than artist, but nothing much new save the copperplate prose.

More interesting that the Warhol angle: manga artist Eiji OOTSUKA elevating four-panel cartoonist Takashi MURAKAMI over the gallery artist. This will get even more interesting if Western critics throw their hands up and say, “we don’t get it,” while M.’s work becomes seminal in the East. In a way, it’s moot, because his sources are already that influential, even if his take on them falls away.

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I translated David B.’s “La Bombe Familiale” for a friend ages ago, and I have a book of anime scripts lying around from back in the day.  So the existence of the collaborative translation site Comics Influx came as a pleasant surprise.  Especially nice is how it skirts the scanlation conundrum of people reading and not buying these things (at least the Japanese ones).  (Link trail: Dirk > Katherine Farmar)

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Finally, preparing for this lecture, I’ve been watching When the Levees Broke, which is remarkable for both its restraint and its comprehensiveness. Movies suck at not shoehorning everything into an ill-fitting box, but this one manages to give things shape without distorting the things themselves.

Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiasm, one of those remarkable Soviet silents, thinks it’s a documentary almost until the end.

Like Man With the Movie Camera from two years previous in 1929, it shows the workers working, building up the glorious Soviet state, with a pulsating, innovative soundtrack attached.  It hovers right between sync sound and “silence,” though silent films never were.  Chaplin for one hoped films would stay poised between the two.

Near the end, in a bravura sequence recalling Man’s finale, Vertov’s camera fixes on some workers in a steel mill. The molten metal burns white-hot, moreso on the film stock.  The workers stretch it out to make rods, even as the tension in the material fights with them.  It becomes like a dance on the screen, as light starts whipping around.

It anticipates Norman MacLaren, Brakhage and all those experimentalists, likely inspiring a few.  It also points to the mechanics of the medium, strips of film (memories of light) pulled taut and thrown through a projector.  Now that the mechanics are increasingly lost– light’s not thrown, but washes through a CRT or LCD or another acronym, at home, not a palace– the process seems not antique (though it could) but otherworldly.

I wind up at PingMag, a bilingual English-Japanese design journal, fairly often.  I first found it through this article on Namaiki while researching Fukuokan permaculture and the Power of Duck.  Since then, I often return to its articles on art, film, design, and pop-cult detritus .  A sample:

• This time, I was researching Koi no Mon, a crazed manga by Jun HANYUNYUU.
• Gez Fry, self-taught illustrator who fled a diplomacy career, explains his “manga-style” and slags US comics art
• The producers of Tokyo Loop, an omnibus of animation feature Tabaimo, Yoji KURI and Kotobuki SHIRIAGARI, among others.
• The making of Tekkon Kinkreet into an anime, with lots of production art and photos around the studio.
• The Butt-Biting Bug, about which the less said the better.
• YMCK, pioneering 8-bit band, with videos.
• Dark & comic animation from Run Wrake, described in an interview.
• Jennifer Baichwal, director of Manufactured Landscapes, a fine doc on Edward Burtynsky’s large-format photography (pictured above).
• Some guy who dresses in olde clothes and hand-cranks a projector to show film’s incunabulae.

Finally watching Ozu’s Equinox Flower reminded me that David Bordwell’s Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema has been reissued as a PDF file. Bordwell has the story on his blog, which bizarrely enough has stills from… Equinox Flower. I feel strangely reflexive.

The book is one of the best pieces of criticism, film or otherwise, that I know; download it and see for yourself. It goes for like 500 bucks on eBay, so help destroy the collector’s market.

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As usual, late to the party:

In Washington, D.C. at the Japan Information and Culture Center at the Japanese Embassy. The road from unruly kids’ stuff to Official Culture, it seems, takes less than 53 years.

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GeGeGe no Kitaro just reminded me of an old GeroGeriGeGeGe 7″ I have lying around. I don’t even own an record player. 45 rpm, 11 incomprehensible bursts of noise. Which reminds me of this photo slide show of Osaka noise band Hanatarashi’s most infamous live gig. “The backhoe show.” Did he hotwire it? Where were the cops? In 1986 Tokyo had no foreigners, and so no need for cops.

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And: my Japanese is eroding quickly. Reading Kamimura Kazuo today, I thought Jiro said to Kyoko, “Kyoko! Give me a toilet! Quickly!” Really, he wants a towel.