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Tom Marioni left Cincinnati as a young man to do conceptual art in San Francisco. Then he wrote a memoir that ends (close to) here:

I don’t like to sound pedantic but I believe art is a poetic record of the culture with the power to inspire people to a spiritual awareness. I also think art represents the culture’s most excellent examples of visual ideas.

That’s pretty straightforward. I like it. Art’s spiritual and never transcendent. It’s always stuck in the mud it came from. Put differently: it always has its context. Marioni gently speaks to the context of each decade in the book. Say, the pendulum swing in contemporary art from the 70s to the 80s.

The book’s straightforward, too. It’s a pleasure to read such such a plain-spoken work from one of the more radical conceptual artists. He’s on Duchamp’s path, with curious installations and performances. Of late that’s the art school path, tenure and whatnot. For Marioni and his peers it was the opposite. He organized an alternative gallery, SF MOCA, and made a signature sound work by peeing in a bucket from a ladder. (With his back to the gallery crowd. Modesty enough to make the Queen City proud~ a paradox!)

So naturally he pranked the San Francisco Museum of Art as they looked for a director. After a year and a half, knowing they’d make a too-conservative choice, he sent out cards announcing he’d been appointed:

The art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, Alfred Frankenstein, wrote that there ought to be a limit to the pranks that a Conceptual artist can pull. Twenty-six years later a collector bought one of the cards from me and gave it to the museum for its collection.

Circles, like the ones he draws. Marioni’s like the straight man in the book. His art’s the comic, only very very smart. His greatest work’s an ongoing beer salon on Wednesday nights. With rules like:

• Two-drink minimum: this means at least two.
• No beers in cans except Tecate.
• No smoking, except writers and cigar smokers.
• Leave the bathroom light on.

The book’s peppered with his drawings, cartoons really, of this and this: Guernica, his first car, Brancusi’s studio. Like the cover, they’re a delight.

(Over on his site you can download a PDF of the exhibition catalogue of his 2006 solo show at the CAC in Cincinnati, too, and sample his drawings, his installations, his video work)

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When did selling people as sex slaves become “human trafficking?”  How awful it’s common enough to get its own euphemism.

Jake Adelstein uncovers the reality behind the euphemism in his memoir and expose, Tokyo Vice. He’s the only American ever to work as a beat reporter in Japanese, covering crime for the Yomiuri. It seems like a boring job if you just look at Japan’s crime rates. Adelstein’s hometown of St. Louis has about ten thousand times as many violent crimes as Tokyo with 1/12th the population. Yet the math might not favor Japan if it accounted for the underworld, sex industry, and corruption that goes up very high.

Tokyo Vice could be a Nikkatsu thriller if it were less human. The story’s a classic arc of lingering by the abyss.  Adelstein left for Japan twenty years ago to find enlightenment at a Buddhist temple, yet wound up reporting on prostitutes and crime in Tokyo.  He soon stumbled on a story about UCLA, a liver transplant and the FBI.  Which did not please the crime boss with a new liver.  The book’s a life insurance policy.  You can get a flavor for that whole world at his Japan Subculture Research Center, the most valuable online resource on Japanese crime.

And Tokyo Vice is remarkable for more than the story its breaks. It holds the arc of Adelstein’s life, one that’s impressive even if I wouldn’t choose it. He goes from a naive, invulnerable kid reporter to a wearied man who never sees his kids and might die on the job. The early moments when he’s impressed himself give way to regrets for the victims. It’s a far cry from the long tourism of travel lit, whether masterpieces like The Roads to Sata or compost like Learning to Bow.

However, compared to the travel lit, memoirs like this usually suffer. Living a life worth a book typically means you can’t write. (Travel writers actually don’t get out much.) Adelstein’s a journalist: problem solved. The book covers so much ground that on the first read you miss the grace notes, like his wearing the wrong suit to his job interview.  Black’s for funerals, silly.

And the travel lit, like much writing on Japan, misses the unraveling. Japan’s society has had a rough time of it lately, yet the official image still projects safety, family and middle-class comforts. Perhaps because most Westerners who’ve been to Japan of late get there by teaching English, a middle-class job if ever there was one, they only rarely glimpse the problems. In my own experience, the two actually brushed against one another.

I taught in Wakayama, where yakuza have been known. Fortunately, I have no story of skipping Taiji Town at 3 a.m. when my girlfriend let me know her dad was a local boss who’d just saved the date.  (Though I’ve heard a version of this, perhaps apocryphal.)

Instead I’ve got my coworkers’ arrest, on TV no less:

One of the "Blackmail Teachers" I sat next to at work

This still from the Fuji affiliate, fretting about the digital voice changer the “Kyoukatsu Kyoushi” used in an attempt at extortion. They repeatedly called their target, a principal across town, telling him to bring 30 million yen (about US$275,000 in ‘04 rates) to a certain train station and don’t tell the cops! He told the cops. 100 times over two months they called, usually during smoke breaks at school.

Why? Debts. Who risks jail for debts? Whoever’s borrowed from the wrong people?

For as long as I followed the story, yakuza weren’t mentioned. They didn’t have to be. As Adelstein’s book makes clear, the profits in gambling, high-interest lending and finance have caught the yakuza’s eye. One chapter details a payday loan outfit that, for all intents and purposes, is just like the legit outfits. And these crimes are abstractions, hidden in ledgers and hard drives. So too “human trafficking.” The actual stories surface only on occasion, as they do in Tokyo Vice.  Read it already.

(& I should mention my friend Bo tipped me to the book; she’s thanked in the thanks, no doubt making me appreciate it more.  Actually no; it’s a great book)

Salinger died.  Just four books and fragments we know of. As Sontag said, the point’s not to keep writing books.  It’s to write a book that lasts.

I got split as a teen not by the Catcher but Franny & Zooey, all sure on breath and falling out of the world.  Now I think I’ll go back to it for the first time.  Maybe see how it hit me like a cue ball and warped my trajectory. Yeah, for me it’s that book.  I’m pretty sure without it I’d have spent my time in a lab coat rather than the unemployment line with a book to kill time.

No I won't read this on a screen Steve Jobs you phoney

Catcher came later– I’d never read a novel I liked before, much less one I had to track down everything he’d written. Thank God I didn’t fall for Louis L’Amour.  Or Balzac.

Now I get to reread F&Z to see not, as we say, “how it’s held up,” but how I’ve held up.  16-year-old me.  Him looking over my shoulder, anxious for the metaphysics, oblivious to the East Coast class consciousness I see now in the first paragraph.

My memory of it until now is one big chunk, all Franny on the couch.

This could take a while.  Maybe I should just track down Dariush Mehrjui’s Pari instead.  Thank God for Iranian groceries!

This review of Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s Good-Bye first appeared in the January 2009 issue of The Comics Journal (#295). A few things have changed since then– Tatsumi’s book A Drifting Life has won some acclaim home & abroad, but my read of his work’s the same.

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Using ink and metaphor like cudgels, Yoshihiro Tatsumi never lacked clarity.  His world reeks of open sewers and dank bars.  With no hope in work, sex or family, his broken protagonists inevitably disappear into the city’s bowels, just as his stories have gone missing in Japan.

Few Japanese remember the man who invented gekiga, the “dramatic” version of manga.  Just two volumes of his solo works are now in print from Seirinkogeisha, the premiere (and small) avant-garde publisher.  The trends in manga have led away from the ponderous, grotty style he pioneered.  In the introduction, even manga expert Fred Schodt admits not knowing the work well.  That’s no surprise: in his day Tatsumi was overshadowed by the other founders of Gekiga Studio, like Shouichi Sakurai and Takao Satio, whose violent fantasy Golgo 13 now defines “gekiga” more than Tatsumi’s grim realism.

In the West, the view differs.  Tatsumi’s work appeared in English over twenty years ago, well before the manga boom, and Drawn and Quarterly’s lavish editions lend him considerable prestige.  Their Good-Bye includes three stories from the first version.  They look altogether better, with new translations by Yuji Oniki and fine design by Adrian Tomine.  These stories—“Good-Bye,” “Just a Man” and “Life is So Sad”—retain their blunt impact, now with a little finesse.  New stories include “Hell,” set in Hiroshima after the war, and “Night Falls Again,” set in the peepshows of south Osaka.  These are bitter stories from a voice outside Japan’s reconstruction, who does not believe in economic miracles.

These stories are also as subtle as pissing in someone’s face.  The key text, “Just a Man,” shows an impotent veteran failing again and again to cheat on his wife.  In the end, his only relief is climbing atop a useless cannon at Yasukuni Shrine, venerated by ultranationalists, and relieving himself.  Given Japan’s resurgent jingoism today—shown in outright threats against Yasukuni, a 2008 film on how its veneration has damaged foreign relations—“Just a Man” offers a certain satisfaction.  Nonetheless, these pleasures are not found in plot, character or metaphor.  I once referred to Tatsumi’s stories as “vicious shorthand,” an apt phrase that is not praise.

That is not to question their place in history.  Tatsumi gave the keys the Garo artists of the 70s, like the Tsuge brothers and the “three retainers” of Shinichi Abe, Ouji Suzuki and Masuzou Furukawa.  Their works offer more complexity and range, and have thus been remembered.  Tatsumi’s work lacks their virtues; nonetheless, Good-Bye shows exactly why he should not be forgotten.  His accomplishment lies in his images, none better than in “Sky Burial.”  The story follows a man who, hearing of a Tibetan tradition of sacrificing the dead to vultures, is hounded by birds.  The story’s final image, a full page worthy of framing, says more than all the plot and narrative before it.

Jason Epstein ran Vintage Books and Anchor, co-founded the NYRB.  Lately he’s involved with the company behind the Espresso Book Machine, a POD device, and appeared on Charlie Rose with a slump when forced to admit that yes, many (most) book industry jobs are just about obsolete.

He looks far less uncomfortable than the superannuated media barons while talking about it.  He actually understands (much of) the tech and the processes, for one thing. He talks of meeting Larry Page, Google’s co-founder, and swats him away gently: “He didn’t know much about books.  He’s an engineer. He thinks of books as manuals, as containing information. …but the book itself is the information.”  Search that, Page boy!

But you can still kill the sound and just watch the body language.  Apologetic, resigned, beads of flopsweat leaping from his brow (almost).

Charlie Won’t Let Me Embed So You Must Click to Watch

I’m not sure why I watch these things.  From my far-off vantage point (former freelance reviewer, now blogger, contractor for a university press, anti-coastal) it’s just an old infrastructure fragmenting. And the people matter more than the structures around them.  Besides, these little pockets of mind come and go after the few decades they get.  Epstein’s lasted longer than most.  Cities could foster these small ecologies well last century; I’m not sure where to go in this one.  At any rate, I appreciate Epstein’s continued entrepreneurial push.  Book industry exploding, form a POD company.  He did found the NYRB during a printers’ strike, after all.

And the poor guy came on the air to promote his book Eating: A Memoir.  Wants to talk about apple pie and Charlie won’t shut up about big issues.  Typical.  Still, Chez Panisse!

I fell for Nouvelle Vague movies for the shelves…

…thinking, “everyone in France must have shelves in their walls. Truly a land of wonders.”  So Virginia Gardiner’s profile of a French apartment in Dwell magazine reminds me of them in no small way:

Gardiner compares the rhythmic boxes and white spaces between to comics panels.  One thinks first of Richard McGuire’s fragmented domestics in “Here:”

And second of how I live, far from French shelving solutions, in a growing stack of books half-read and less time to get to them:

Damn Proust.  And Saul Bellow once said, “People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.”  The red’s a tipoff.

Did the decade end?  Well, crap.

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Gary Sullivan has a magnificent list of his favorite movies of the decade over at Elsewhere.  It’s a reminder that I’m way behind on watching all the best Korean movies, which he notes duly owned the oughts. In the 90s it was Taiwan & Iran, all those slow, long-take movies: Hou, Tsai, Kiarostami.  South Korea had a protected film industry for half(?) the decade, with government-imposed quota system.  Every theater had to have half their screens show homegrown movies. So a film industry sprouted, the most vital popular film industry since Hong Kong’s heyday.  (I’m probably fudging the numbers, Darcy at Koreanfilm.org surely has the real skinny)

I know free marketeers crow, but if you’re not Southern California and want movies about you and your world, you’ve got to legislate it.

When I teach film, I always show something I’m passionate about, like Tarr or Ozu and everybody dozes.  Then in with a genre-splicing Korean blockbuster and it’s like the Rapture.  Someone needs to bottle what they do and sell it globally.

I’ve got a short essay in TCJ #300, the last before they burn down and ash up as a new site and biannual book. I wrote it in a flash of great happiness in a borrowed, humid apartment in a small town south of here.  I didn’t know it then, but it’s a swan, i.e., my last piece of critical writing on manga & comics for a time, two times and half a time.  Noah’s got an excerpt and kind words over at the Hooded Utilitarian.  When I decided to step out, I thought I’d write one last essay for my column.  Rereading this one, it seems redundant.  All I was going to do was point to the books on my shelf I haven’t covered and grouse about a stylish, moronic Maki Kusumoto book to close a loop from my first column anyway.

Which included the phrase, “like an expat Richard Petty.”  And I don’t know when Noah got on a Thaipop kick, but I’m not complaining.

I have a lot of changes underway here, including improving the site (yeah, I broke WordPress at 3 am Friday, and had to SQL My-self to fix it, hoho) and adjusting my focus.  So drop by now & then to see the changes.

And when in Harrodsburg, visit the Old Owl Tavern for the chicken livers.  Best I’ve ever had.

I just returned from North Carolina’s mountains and pines, swinging my arms around my mind with Havi Brooks and all & sundry. Doing the Dance of Shiva, of which I am a practitioner (poor) and fan, just as I’m a fan of Havi’s quite personal take on personal (ahem) development. Also, it’s like kung fu without the killing.  The dance, not the personal take.

Actually, it’s a system of 8 basic arm positions grown into a sort of language, perhaps, or at least an algorithm for “conscious liberation,” as they call it.  Patterns get built and systematically taken apart before they’re rebuilt.  It messes with your head and the rest of you too.  I’m still processing it all, especially as all the personal things I took with liked to collapse before I even got out of the car in Lexington, my commitment to be more frivolous dashed against the limestone, alas.

But no worries.  Here’s a memory, one of several burned spinning in my mind:

Saturday night as the sun’s slipping behind the trees, Havi at the front of the space, leading 20 or so people in a complex Shiva Nata form.   Music, getting lost and swept up, going mad a little keeping up.  Dropping mistakes left and right, really flailing.  I stood in the back, befitting my poor practice, so Havi’s head appeared to bob on a sea of twirling arms.  And she was gone.  Not lost among the arms, just gone.  “She” had disappeared inside or outside somewhere, lost as when you get lost doing exactly what you’re supposed to be doing and the world sublimates away.  There were just arms flowing through the eight positions, left to right, up and down, top bottom strange charmed.

Punchline: Shiva Nata is a yoga practice, which reminds of this quote my friend Tom Crippen pulled from the ether.

Last night at a (great) party, I had a rambling chat with a freakishly talented poet about our mutual friend, James Baker Hall.  Today an old friend let me know that he’s just died.

Jim wrote poetry, at its very best in Mother on the Other Side of the World and Praeder’s Letters.  He took fine art photographs. Then, back when it was all new, a little group of writers sprouted at UK, among them Jim, Wendell Berry, and Bobbie Ann Mason.  Jim’s work was the most radical, and took the longest time to get recognition.  He wrote from tragedy, his strange family history and his own struggle of decades to get his tongue untied, as he would say.

He taught, too.  I studied with him in grad school for just one class.  I was messed up then and didn’t know it, so my writing betrayed me.  He called me one Saturday early to save my writer’s soul.  I’d been out til 4 the last night, so I sounded like a half-comatose mess when the phone woke me.  We met a couple of hours later, after he’d driven to Lexington to run on a treadmill (which I still find funny).  He met me in a blue track suit with a stack of my writing.  We made small talk and then he started going through it.  He held up a couple of pages and swept his hand over them: “this is soo good!”  He held up a stack: “But this is all shit!”  Eventually we got to the stuff I didn’t know, which had nothing to do with writing.

There’s more. I haven’t seen him in years.  He’s often in my head (better yet my ear).