let me have a turn

LGBT
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Here’s a simple story of what happened when a young, uncertain on whether he was gay and what it meant, thinking about self harm, called his local queer bookstore and found a community eager to help him:

And SHE, this 50-something lesbian talks to this stranger on the phone. And a LINE FORMS BEHIND HER. Every customer in that store knows that call, knows that feeling, and every person takes a turn talking to that man.
That story comforts me so much to this day.

Joe also told his story to the queersplaining podcast, going into some more detail. A heartwarming story even if, as the podcast host notes, he shouldn’t have had to call a bookstore to get somebody to listen to and help him.

Your Happening World (clean out your tabs! clean out your tabs!)

Anime, Comix, Music, Your Happening World
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Some of these tabs have been open for months.

  • We’ve Made a Rare Animation Artbook Free to All — The author of Cartoon Modern, Amid Amidi, owns the book’s copyright and digital rights — and has written that he wants to see it reborn. “Would be delighted if someone scanned in and made available a high-quality PDF of Cartoon Modern,” he tweeted in 2019. “Book has been out of print for a long time and should be readily available to all.”
  • Download Cartoon Modern: compressed .PDF — 319 MB or uncompressed .CBZ — 4.6 GB.
  • Out of Touch/Out of Time — We remember the ghost of Lucky Star, so representative of what it meant to be an anime fan at that time. What was contemporary fan service is now a time capsule. Before legal streaming and simulcasts, before anime was something Netflix would spend millions remaking into live-action, when anime was kind of, well, cringeworthy. Maybe that’s why more problematic elements stand out these days. At the time, you had to take the embarrassment as par for the course, even a badge of honour that you could take it, unlike the normies. Lucky Star is a bit cringe.
  • Iraq, The Last Pre-War Polls — The final polls to be published before the war in Iraq started, conducted last weekend, all found a shift in public opinion in favour of British involvement in the war but still found a majority disapproving, both of military action and of Tony Blair’s handling of the Iraq crisis. Still relevant twenty years on as evidence that no, not “everybody” was in favour of the War on Iraq.
  • Dub Influence Vol 3: Snoopy — Yes! For our third installment of ‘Dub Influence’ we are very lucky to have a chart from the legend that is Snoopy. What Snoopy doesn’t know about reggae, dub and music in general… ain’t worth knowing. This got me on a dub/reggea kick a few months ago when I read this.
  • Transformers UK — the comic that (nearly) cheated death — This is the story of the comic that never was. Or, more accurately, the comic that nearly was.
  • bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/lists/50-key-anime-films — From the breakthrough of Akira in 1988, through the exquisite films of Miyazaki Hayao and others, Japanese animation has captivated audiences around the world. But anime’s history runs deeper still. Here we select 50 titles that celebrate its full, fascinating riches.
  • We’ve Got A File On You: Insane Clown Posse — VIOLENT J: And the amount of gay Juggalos out there is really surprising. I think about them doing their research and getting the old records, getting excited about it, and getting their hearts broke or something, you know? I tell my daughter, “For the rest of your life, when your friends ask why your dad said that, say it’s because your dad was a fool. Don’t defend me. Say I was a fool then, but I’m not now.” There’s no excuse. I was going with the flow, and that’s the very thing we preach against — being a sheep. And that’s what I was doing.

WWIII is big fun!

Warfare & Military history
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Somebody on Twitter pointed me towards Third World War 1987 where one Mike has been doing his own version of Red Storm Rising by blogging a day to day account of what WWIII could’ve been like in 1987. It started in 2017 and he’s currently up to D+22, not even a month into the fighting. I admire his dedication and this sort of thing is right up the alley of an eighties kid like me. However, it does look like the way he and I experienced growing up under the shadow of nuclear annihilation was very different:

As a young boy growing up in the 80s, the idea of large armies and fleets engaging in titanic battles to decide the fates of nations never failed to get my heart pumping, or inspire my imagination. I played soldier along with the rest of the neighborhood kids. With our trusty plastic toy M-16A1s and AK-47s we staged late night raids on neighboring developments in the summertime, and fought endless small unit actions amid the 7-11s, schools, parks, and strip malls that made up the suburban landscape of Central New Jersey circa 1983-88. I dare say that we (Generation X) were more imaginative, and better-informed children than were those who came after us, although this might not be an entirely fair comparison.

I’m not sure it’s more imaginative or better-informed to think of WWIII as some exciting adventure rather than as of you slowly dying of radiation poisoning, but that might just be the difference between growing up in America versus Europe. What I remember where the endless nuclear nightmares I had, which only abated after Gorbachov came to power and it seemed at least one side had a sensible leader in command. I do understand the allure of all the fascinating weaponry and such, but I can’t remember ever playing WWIII like he describes. That only became appealing once the threat of it actually happening receded. Another difference:

My friends and I knew the Russians were the bad guys. Maybe we didn’t fully grasp what that meant, but we incorporated the evil communist enemy into our neighborhood battles. Good vs Evil. Eagle vs Bear. Sam vs Ivan.

This is completely alien to me. My biggest worry always was that Ronald Reagan one day would confuse his nuke with his nurse button. It was never a fight of good vs evil so much as two groups of elderly, mentally deteriorating men with their fingers on the button who might accidentally blow up the world. I never really believed in the underlying assumptions behind Third World War 1987 or most other WWIII what-ifs: that a) the war would be started as a deliberate act of aggression and b) that this would’ve been done by the Soviets. The Able Archer scenario — where one side would up the rhetoric and aggression but not intend to start a war, but the other side misreads the situation — always seemed more likely to me.

And history has proven me right. Even during its greatest existentialist crisis, the USSR chose to dissolve rather than start WWIII. You can say about the Soviet leadership what you want, but all the crisis points NATO worried about in the early eighties — the death of Tito, the war on Afghanistan movign into Pakistan, martial law in Poland — never led to Soviet military adventurism. And when the much larger crisis struck the Warsaw Pact countries in 1989 – 1991 their leadership was made clear it was their problem to solve. In the end the USSR choose a peaceful end to the Cold War over its own existence. I won’t make comparisons to current Russian leadership, but yeah.

If you’re of a similar age to me and have kept that fascination with WWIII since childhood, this site is great fun but keep in mind that it is and was an extremely unlikely scenario. If you want to be retroactively reassured nuclear war was never on the table, read this oral retrospective on the Cold War (PDF) held between various ex-Warsaw Pact and NATO bigwigs, all convinced it never would’ve happened.

Food & Geisha — Maiko-San Chi No Makanai-San — Anime 2022 #012

Anime
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Kiyo and Sumire wanted to become maiko, apprentice geisha, and came to Kyoto from snouwbound Aomori in the north of Japan. Sumire succeeded, Kiyo ..didn’t. Instead she became the live-in cook of the Maiko house Sumire is attached to. To be honest, it suits her much better than attempting to become a maiko ever did.

Sumire in maiko outfit and makeup shares an ice lolly with Kiyo

Maiko-San Chi No Makanai-San then is a slice of moe series that focuses on Kiyo’s daily life at the maiko house she shares with Sumire. A look behind the scenes of Kyoto’s geisha industry, if you will. It’s based on a manga series by Koyama Aiko. Unusually it was released as a monthly rather than a weekly anime, with the first episode released in February 2021 and the last in January 2022. That slower tempo of release suits the series well, with each episode taking place in the same month it’s released. In this way the series offers an insight in the rhythms of a maiko’s life.

Squid mince: squid and vegetables mixed together, battered and deep fried, eaten with brown sauce or ketchup or soy sause

Each episode is divided into three short, bite sized parts with each part separated by a short segment that discusses the food showcased in the previous part. Because this is a heavily food based show, not to be watched if you’ve skipped lunch. The cooking scenes have the best animation in the show, with close ups of food sizzling in a frying pan or Kiyo kneeding dough. Quite often the food on display is also much more obscure than the onigiri or takoyaki you get in other shows, the squid mince shown in the first episode, obscure even in Japan outside of Aomori prefecture. The connecting segments bracketing each chapter therefore have the useful function of explaining these foods and their history. They’re also done in a much simpler style; more illustrated than animated.

Kiyo hugs Sumire against the background of the kitchen

When talking about the quality of animation, we tend to concentrate on character design and the fluidity something is animated. Where Maiko-San Chi No Makanai-San‘s strengths lie is in something different: the ways in which it depicts its setting. The character designs are a bit simplified from the manga, but the backgrounds they act against are drop dead gorgeous even when completely mundane. It of course helps that it’s set in Kyoto, gorgeous in its own right, but what really struck me where the interiors of the maiko house, especially the kitchen. It is exactly the sort of somewhat old fashioned working kitchen that you’d expect yet it looks almost lush the way it has been drawn.

One minor criticism on the subtitles. Because the translation refuses to use honorifics, the varying levels of respect and familiarity the maiko have with each other and Kiyo is not reflected in the subtitles. Kiyo for example consistently calls Sumire Su-chan, even after the latter’s debut as a maiko with a new maiko name, while the rest of the cast do address her with her new name. In a series on such a quintessential Japanese subject like geishas, you’d expect the subtitles to be a litte bit more daring rather than flattening everything to basic English.

John Boyne: setting back Holocaust education since 2006

"Literature"
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If my novel about the Holocaust resulted in such pig ignorant takes on it, I wouldn’t write a sequel, but John Boyne is made of sterner stuff.

Boyne protests that his work is “just a fable,” but this doesn’t detract from the views of children after reading the book, many of which are quoted in the study mentioned above. “We always think of the Nazis as the bad guys and this shows that the Holocaust didn’t just affect the Jews (…) but the problems that Nazi families might encounter and what their problems were,” said Dan, a year 9 student. “It is too easy to feel sorry for the Jews (…), I don’t mean that in a rude way, it is just like, everyone is always (…) going to sympathize with the Jews (…) when you see it from like Bruno or the mother’s perspective it seems a bit different because they had to live with that,” said Jack, year 12. The most egregious quote though is “they (the Nazis) couldn’t do anything about it because they (…) basically got killed off if they didn’t do what he (Hitler) said (…) it doesn’t matter who was the bigger victim, they (Nazis and Jews) were all still victims of Hitler’s control in some shape or form,” from Erica, year 11.

This is why I distrust Holocaust fiction. Or any fiction revolving around recent genocides written by the un-involved. Even when done with the best of intentions it’s disrespectful. You’r e turning a history that isn’t yours, with all the pain and suffering associated with it and turn it into a setting for what’s usually just a trite morality play, giving your story a grandour and seriousness that it hasn’t earned. In the process the actual victims — Jews, Roma, Poles, others — are reduced to background bit players in their own tragedy.

It is bad enough when it’s some fundamentalist Christian hack writer using Auschwitz as a background to showcase the moral struggles of the SS Kamp Kommandant as he converts to Christianity, but much more dangerous when it’s a renowned literary writer like John Boyne. As Ally Goldber writes in the Kveller article cited above shows, because it became a bestseller and because of the cachet given to it by who wrote it, the Boy in the Striped pyjamas is widely used to teach the Holocaust to children, therefore doing enormous damage to their understanding of what it was like. That’s what leads to ideas that both Jews and Nazis were victims, that Nazi pain is more interesting, somehow better or more real than the pain of their victims. It reduces the Holocaust to a nice tearjerker that doesn’t blame anybody and we don’t need to worry about because, as the last lines of the novel states: Of course, all of this happened a long time ago and nothing like that could ever happen again. Not in this day and age.

No wonder John Boyne ended up in a slagging match with the Auschwitz Museum on Twitter, who stated that “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas” should be avoided by anyone who studies or teaches about the history of the Holocaust. The main problem with the book is well pointed out by Hannah May Randall writing for the Holocaust Exhibition and Learning Centre: Because the focus of the story remains on Bruno’s family, the book does not engage with the main tragedy of the Holocaust: that none of the people in the gas chamber should have been there. The lines between victims and perpetrators are blurred, the Holocaust is reduced to almost a natural disaster that nobody could really be blamed for. and while it’s sad what happened to the Jews, the real tragedy is when a real person like Bruno is caught up in it.

If you compare Boyne’s output with something like Art Spiegelman’s Mause, you really notice how anodyne and two-dimensional it is. Vladek, Spiegelman’s father and main character is not some cardboard saint, but a real person, somebody who comes across as a bit of an asshole to his son. Spiegelman himself is not an entirely sympathetic figure either, struggling with the heritage of his parents’ experiences as Holocaust survivors and how that fucked up his own life as well. It doesn’t pretend to let you understand the Holocaust, but rather an attempt by Spiegelman to understand his own personal history, imperfectly as it may be rendered in a comic. That appeals a lot more to me than the pretentions with which Boyne approaches the subject.

But the best way I’ve found to glimpse even an inkling of the true horrors of the Holocaust is by following the Auschwitz Museum on twitter. Each day they tweet out the biographies of some of the people that were sent to Auschwitz and their fate. The four quoted here were just the first four I saw today when looking at their timeline, but most of them read like this. Somebody is born, grows up, is sent to the camp and is murdered there. Jew, Roma, Pole, Russian, an endless stream of promising lives destroyed. That to me is more horrifying and enlightening than any fictional story could ever be.