The BFS Recommends

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The BFS Recommends The Dragon Prince

Television and Series Reviews The BFS Recommends

(AKA “Asking Someone Not to Have to Make a Choice is Still a Choice”)

It’s actually become a critical trope in and of itself to say there are no new stories (in other words, every tale is simply made up of well-known narrative techniques). I’ve never been a fan of such over-generalizing, but it is worth noting how a newly created movie or book makes use of all the stories that have come before it. Some can approach things in such a fresh way that they seem completely unlike anything before, much like The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars: A New Hope did when they first arrived. And others can seem hopelessly imitative, like Eragon: it’s still an impressive story for a teenager to write, but the patchwork quilt of its influences is mighty noticeable.

Other stories have such fun with their influences and take them in a powerful enough direction that you don’t much care how standard some of its base elements are. The visuals of The Dragon Prince will be familiar to any watcher of well-known fantasy tales (the Moon Elf kingdom looks a lot like Lothlorien in The Fellowship of the Ring, or the realm of The Night Elves from World of Warcraft), and Frederik Wiedmann’s score would feel right at home in the world of Middle Earth as envisioned by Peter Jackson and co.

What makes The Dragon Prince such a standout for everyone to watch (it is NOT just a children’s animated series, no matter how much the Daytime Emmy’s want it to be) is how it takes these familiar elements in powerful new directions. One in particular that stands out from many previous fantasy films and shows is its inclusivity: Humans and elves are drawn in ways that will remind viewers from this reality of various Earth cultures and regions, but no one in the world of The Dragon Prince notices or makes a comment about another person’s accent or skin tone. That’s just how they look.

Instead, the show uses the very real divisions between the humans and magical creatures of its universe (e.g., elves and dragons) to probe at problems that will very much remind a viewer of our own world. Disgusted and horrified by how some humans gained magical abilities, dragons and elves have banished all of humanity to the non-magical half of their shared continent.

While this action is understandable (human wizards gained their abilities from Dark Magic, which derives its power from the life force of a magical creature: a process that generally means killing the creature for its body parts), there is an element of elitism and arrogance to how dragons and elves treat humans. “You weren’t happy with what you were given,” is a line said in varying ways throughout the show when Dark Magic is brought up. Humans bristling at this separate but not equal treatment is easy for a viewer to appreciate, even if Dark Magic is clearly unsavory and unethical (though its practitioners don’t necessarily see it that way).

Probably the most powerful statement the show creates from its familiar elements is about choice: why are you doing what you are doing, and to what end? Not thinking about the true end of their choices is a consistent problem for its characters, and sets up the crux of the storyline for the show’s three seasons. At its beginning, a group of elvish assassins have been sent to kill a human king and his heir, the human king having himself killed the King of the Dragons previously (out of revenge for the death of someone else). As the viewer learns more, they begin to see that this is just the most recent in a long history of humans and magical creatures pursuing vengeance or power (the one sometimes mistaken for or blended with the other).

Perhaps the most heartbreaking commentary on choice comes through two clear decisions made by one of its characters. At both times, the character wants to avoid the decision: the pain of choosing one direction or another is too great. And at both times, the show’s statement is clear: avoiding a decision is still a choice, in and of itself.

A powerful reminder to viewers from our world, where choosing not to know something is a statement (and a choice) all of its own.

The BFS Recommends Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami

Book Reviews Recommended Reads The BFS Recommends
Seriously, look at that guy. How can he not make you smile?

Dance, Dance, Dance is the rare book that makes you completely, thoroughly happy. Not stupid happy, ignoring the sadness and pain life can throw your way, but happily aware: fully cognizant of all the flaws in this world, but still finding it improbably beautiful.

Why does Dance Dance Dance make me so joyful? Well, first, there’s that book cover, which is the edition my local library had, If that doesn’t make you smile a bit, well, umm, what’s wrong with you? It’s a sheep wearing a collared shirt, tie, and plaid sweater vest, for crying out loud.

But in all honesty the thing that makes the book so happy-making is what happens for its unnamed narrator. This is the fourth book he’s been in by Murakami, and in all of them he’s been emotionally withdrawn (something you can immediately feel and appreciate in his character, even if this book is your first encounter with him). In the first book the narrator appears in, Hear the Wind Sing, another character notes that he’s “Very zen.”

It serves him well, in a way, to float along and not be completely overwhelmed by the waves that come his way: he certainly is put through a lot. But it also keeps him emotionally distant, incapable of reaching his potential or really even feeling love. In the third book to feature the narrator, A Wild Sheep Chase, his wife leaves him at the start, most likely because of his emotional unavailability. But here, finally, in Dance Dance Dance, he is able to awaken: winter has fallen away, spring has sprung. You can see it stirring in the narrator as he reaches out and makes new friendships and even goes through the starts and stops of a new relationship with a hotel clerk.

If I could make a comparison, it’s like seeing a sad friend or relative suddenly grow, changing and reaching out, becoming that thing you always knew they could be. Even now it brings an almost inexplicable smile to my face, and that’s something to note in and of itself. Good literature, good art, should help us understand our fellow humans and appreciate their growths and triumphs.

This is made all the more palpable due to the darkness to be found in Dance Dance Dance. Just like its preceding three books, sadness lurks, as does death, Maybe even more than in the previous novels, and they were hardly carefree affairs.

Despite this, however, the book’s title is always at its center. Early on in the book, the narrator finds and has a discussion with the Sheep Man. Yes, there is a character called the Sheep Man (and despite the book cover above, he probably is only a guy in a sheep suit). But in that improbably Murakami way, he is very much real and very much not ridiculous. His otherworldliness is suggested in how all of his sentences consist of no spaces between the words: strange, but understandable.

In this early conversation, the narrator and the Sheep Man are tired. Withdrawn. The Sheep Man himself is feeling old. But he tells the narrator he can make his way back to life. “Yougottadance,” he says (86).

The narrator takes the advice to heart, and so does the book. Weird stuff keeps happening to the narrator, he keeps making friends (or renewing friendships), but then depression and loss also come along, threatening to derail it all. But he’s justgottakeepdancing, His finding a way to do this and encourage others to do so is part of the book’s magic.

An additional piece of magic happened for me with my library book, however. A former reader had co-opted the old checkout tag to leave a note for future readers, in a manner that feels almost trademark Murakami. His narrators are always getting odd messages or stories told to them, and this one is no different. The weird energy of that note is wonderfully sublime and needs sharing with the world.

“This is an incredible book. Don’t read the blurbs, don’t read the publisher’s description, just read the book. It blew me away. Of course you must read “A Wild Sheep Chase,” first. Then this. Both books are compelling as hell. Right on, brothers and sisters. Knock yourselves out.”

As my fellow reader notes, it’s probably worth checking out A Wild Sheep Chase first, if not Wind/Pinball as well. You can appreciate this one without reading them, but it hits all the harder if you have the experience of all the narrator’s previous trials and tribulations.

Wherever you might be, however good or bad life might be going for you now in the moment, you need this book. You need it like a friend you just discovered and really should have known for your entire life.

Right on, my internet brothers and sisters, right on. Whether you do a little shuffle like this big, awkward Swede or something more graceful, we just gotta dance.

Wejustgottadance.

The BFS Recommends: Wind/Pinball by Haruki Murakami

Book Reviews Recommended Reads The BFS Recommends

Wind/Pinball, by Haruki MurakamiMood. An important factor in any book, but Haruki Murakami is a master of it. “He’s kind of weird?” people like to say, “but he’s cool, too, I couldn’t get this story of his out of my mind.” If you want to get technical in literary terms, he’s a surrealist, which is the fancier, upmarket way of saying he uses fantastic elements in his work (or a kind of magical realism): his books start out feeling like normal, everyday life, but before you know it, there are crazy conspiracies and alternate realities being fitted into the plot quite neatly and naturally.

If you’re a fan of the mesmerizing effect such TV shows as The X-Files, Fringe, or Twin Peaks have (though I have to go from hearsay on the latter), chances are you’ll like the mood Murakami projects in his writing. And there is always something more to Murakami than surreal/genre elements: a truly accessible author, the human condition is always at the heart of of his stories.

There are recurring themes and motifs in all his books (with a quick internet search, you’ll hear quips about lost cats, mysterious women, and a fascination with wells), but each one of his works has a unique focus. They generally have intricate plots and are quite long as well, with one of his more recent novels, IQ84, clocking in at about 900 pages.

His first two novels, Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973, were recently re-translated and re-published after being out of print for 30 years (in a fun double book set, with one novel printed on the first half, and the other printed “upside down” on the other half). And if you’re curious about Murakami, you should definitely give these a look.

These two novellas stand out from the rest of Murakami’s body of work in how short and poetic they are, which makes them an excellent starting point for anyone wanting to see if they’ll like his writing.  With only 100-130 pages each, you can focus on how Murakami crafts his characters, language, and mood. Both novellas also have a similar structure, as they are made up of short, chronological vignettes that focus on an unnamed narrator in his college years (or a little after, in Pinball), and his friend, nicknamed The Rat.

Hear the Wind Sing
For those who have ever felt a little lost or unsure if people get them, for those who have ever felt like they were losing connection with those they were once close to, Murakami gives you Hear the Wind Sing. Set during a summer interlude where the narrator is back home from college (but soon to leave again), the narrator and The Rat are feeling equally unmoored. People come into their lives, then leave. The mood is longing, transitory, even when the two are just shooting the breeze in the local bar. The narrator finds himself wondering about past relationships, particularly with one woman who committed suicide a year or so after they broke up. He starts seeing a girl that seems equally troubled, equally precarious.

Wind is the recurring motif, as the title suggests. It makes characters feel more connected to each other and the world than they ever have before; it makes them lonelier than they could possibly believe. It’s a characterization I can appreciate, as I’ve found there are few things like wind to suggest a person’s current mood and emotion. On a good day with the sun shining, there is little better than to hear the wind soughing through the needles of a pine tree—the world and you are in communion, connected. But on a bad day the same wind might blow hollow, reflecting the emptiness inside you in an echo chamber of depression.

For all its quiet loveliness and truth, there are some odd vignettes and inclusions in Hear the Wind Sing. It’s not as well-crafted as Murakami’s later work, but it’s still the writing of a masterful author. In his introduction, Murakami notes that he wrote the novel in the early hours before dawn, after returning from work at a jazz bar he and his wife owned. The bar was struggling and just finding its feet, while he was in the last years of his 20s and trying to find his way.

This book is the feeling you have when you awake (or can’t fall asleep) in the small hours of the night, mind humming with ideas, filled with a nameless longing.

Pinball, 1973

For those who have ever wondered where they were headed or if what they were doing matters, for those who have ever wondered why things have to change, Murakami gives you Pinball, 1973. Told in short, chronological vignettes similar to Hear the Wind Sing, we once again follow the small biographical ins and outs of the nameless narrator and The Rat. It’s set a couple years after the previous book, and the nameless narrator lives in Tokyo, while The Rat is still bumming around the narrator’s hometown, drinking beer at the local bar and living off of his rich father’s money.

The unmoored feeling of the previous book continues, but with a feeling of loss and damage, accentuated by the fact that the narrator and The Rat never meet. We get the feeling they’re still friends, but they’re apart. And the season is fall: change is in the air.

In one haunting segment, The Rat stares at an old, small lighthouse at the end of a pier. He’s longing for something, but something also feels wrong: as another section notes, “we could sense something nasty lurking just out of sight.” When I read, no, when I saw The Rat watching the old lighthouse, I was like, “This is me, at the end of grad school in 2004.” My maternal grandfather had passed away earlier that spring; I wasn’t quite sure what to do with my life or what it all meant. I spent hours walking by Lake Superior, staring at the waves and Duluth’s lighthouses. I didn’t yet know that my father had cancer.

It’s a feeling I’ve had at other times in my life as well. The truth told in the mood of this book still astounds me.

There are still weaknesses, I suppose. Being Murakami’s second book or novella, there are some bits that seem a little off to me. But even then you can see his progression as an author: themes and images are coalescing for him, which will reappear, fully formed and developed in his later work. Surreal elements which were not about in his first novella begin to make their appearance in the unnamed narrator’s hunt for a pinball table he was obsessed with playing during college. I think every reader will have a different take on the meaning of the strange warehouse the narrator eventually finds the pinball machine in, but there are undoubted echoes of his relationship with a woman that is now dead (possibly the same woman mentioned in Hear the Wind Sing). There is always some doubt or guessing to Murakami’s work, as with all great literature, but more is probably unclear here than there should have been.

Another Murakami trope, mysterious women, appear in the guise of two twins that live with the narrator for awhile. They seem real and they do not seem real at the same time. Their entrance is unclear: did the narrator meet them somewhere one night and just wake up next to them in the morning, unable to remember how he met them? Or did they literally appear out of nowhere? You could read the text either way. They do have substance, other characters in the book see them, but they are undoubtedly not like the other women in the book, who are struggling just as the narrator and The Rat are struggling.

Whoever or whatever the twins might be, they seem to be there to help the narrator deal with an unnamed trauma (probably the woman who has died, but again, the novel is a bit unclear on the details), and then they go away when he is able to deal with it, or at least bring it to terms. I’m still not sure if the twins are a weird thing for Murakami to include or if they are a perfect fit for the novel’s feeling of transience, but I do know I feel more ambivalent about them than the other mysterious women that tend to pop up in his books.

Regardless of its shortcomings, however, Pinball is a beautiful read. What feeling is it? Unlike with Hear the Wind Sing, I’ll let Murakami take us out on this one, as there is no way for me to capture it perfectly.

“{The Rat} was as powerless and lonely as a winter fly stripped of its wings, or a river confronting the sea. An ill wind had arisen somewhere, and it was blowing the warm, familiar air that had embraced him to the other side of the planet.

One season had opened the door and left, while another had entered through a second door. You might run to the open door and call out, Wait, there’s something I forgot to tell you! But no one is there. When you close the door, you turn around to see the new season sitting in a chair, lighting up a cigarette. If you forgot to tell him something, he says, then why not tell me? I might pass the message along if I get the chance. No, that’s all right, you say. It’s no big deal. The sound of wind fills the room. No big deal. Just another season dead and gone.”

The BFS Recommends: Moonlight

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Methods of Film Movie Reviews Recommended Views The BFS Recommends

Moonlight Theatrical PosterFriday night, Jessica and I had a decision to make: were we going to see Lego Batman or Moonlight? We ended up choosing the latter, partially under the logic that plenty of people were going to see Lego Batman, and we might as well reward the theater for picking the less popular but more serious movie, which had just won an Oscar for Best Picture.

The logic behind the choice has come back to hit me harder than I thought it would: Moonlight is an important movie, one that we need now, more than ever.

This isn’t going to be so much a review of Moonlight (you can find an excellent review on Roger Ebert’s site), though I will say Moonlight may be one of the most perfect, character-driven dramas I have ever seen. Instead, it’s going to be a plea of sorts, an argument, for why you need to see it, sooner rather than later. Why the argument? I’ll get to that in just a moment.

As often happens with a movie as powerfully immersive as Moonlight, it lingered with me, and I found myself needing to bounce my thinking about it off of others. After talking it over with Jessica, I found the above-mentioned review. Even though I knew what I probably would find there, I scrolled down to the comment section and found this sad little post:

“Can anyone explain to me why this film is “important?” Because there are crack-hos and gay black people and drug dealers with hearts of gold? How am I not a complete human being if I don’t absolutely adore this mediocre trash and weep inconsolably whenever I think of poor little Little or Chevron or Black or whatever his real name is? My life was not “affirmed” by somehow surviving this torturous, dull, self-indulgent and amateurish melodrama. The emperor has no clothes!”

Yes, it’s a comment on the internet (Beware: here there be trolls). But it’s not an out and out troll comment (there’s at least some struggle to know what they’re missing), and more, I know that a movie that focuses on the coming of age of a gay black man in Miami is going to be tough content for some people. Let’s face it, we don’t see many movies like this, particularly one that has won major awards.

I’m actually a big believer in saying that not every movie and not every book is for everyone, no matter how good it might be. And you sometimes have to be in the right mood to handle an excellent movie or play (if you’re wanting comedy, you probably shouldn’t watch King Lear). But for someone to have apparently sat through the whole of Moonlight as this commenter did and have it pass clear above their heads is absolutely depressing.

Moonlight is about identity and trying to find it. About being crushed by others as you try to find it. And no matter how 100% awesome and sure of yourself you might be at this moment, every human struggles with identity. Everyone. So for someone to watch a movie that shows that struggle in a fellow human as perfectly and understandably as the film medium can allow, but still only focus on the externals of its characters? There is something wrong with that viewer.

Our society is increasingly focused on walls now—literal, political, or emotional—maybe more so than it has been at any other time in my thirty-eight years. Maybe the 80s and that part of the Cold War is on par or even worse, but it’s impossible to argue something hasn’t been going down the drain more and more the past couple years. And this problem isn’t due to one group or another, either. Take your pick of the current news: no matter where you look, it’s easy to see humans refusing to listen to each other, whether it’s conservatives ignoring/attacking those who don’t agree with them or this protest/attack on a conservative speaker at Middlebury College. We’d rather shout each other down, or win an argument or election than listen.

What beauty we are missing. I’ve never been to Miami; I’ve never had a parent struggle with addiction. I’m just a straight white guy that has lived his whole life in the Midwest, but I could feel and understand Chiron’s life, the protagonist of Moonlight. The movie is told in three parts, with Chiron in childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. Each section pivots on a key scene, with Chiron reacting to the ocean. The joy Chiron feels as he learns to swim as a child, with ocean waves washing over him and the camera, is palpable. The hope or love or longing he feels when an ocean breeze passes over him in adolescence is impossible not to register: it’s the most happy we’ve seen him since he learned to swim. And the look on his face when he returns to the ocean as a young adult (he has been living in Atlanta for some years)? It’s the look any human makes when they see something they have missed more than they could describe.

I’d want Chiron to understand me. I know he’d understand the look on my face when I saw my wife for the first time in weeks. It shouldn’t matter that he’s never been to Minnesota or lived as I have lived.

And it really doesn’t.

BFS Recommends: Angela Melick and Wasted Talent

Recommended Comics The BFS Recommends
Because Jam is "tha very bessst!"
Because Jam is “tha very bessst!”

Straight behind my love of the written word is my love of visuals: photographs, movies, drawing, painting, and… comics/graphic novels. In writing, there’s little better than an author’s distinctive voice, which adds another layer to the story or narrative of the piece, moving it beyond mere information. With comics and graphic novels, the artist’s renderings add a whole other dimension to the ideas being communicated, whether they are laugh-out-loud hilarious or profoundly insightful. I’ve loved this ever since I started reading Peanuts and Calvin & Hobbes, and this love has only deepened as I’ve discovered so many wonderful artists in the webcomic community.

One of my favorites (which my wonderful wife, Jessica, introduced me to) is Wasted Talent, which is written and drawn by Angela Melick, also known by the nickname Jam. You’ve been introduced to her work already. See, over there? On the right side of the screen? I lucked out and commissioned an avatar by Jam, and you can see the wonderful added dimension her drawing and coloring style bring to her work (she is really good at Viking beards, too, since she drew one of her husband and a truly epic hockey playoff beard before she drew mine).

In her online archives, it’s also a true joy to see her rougher beginnings in black and white ink, her uses of color as her ability deepened, and her style shiftings as she found her own artistic voice. Whether she’s making use of markers or watercolors (or a mix of the two), Jam’s style is now something that is uniquely her own, though there are definitely anime/manga influences. **

Jam’s commitment to excellence and desire to push her abilities are also things any writer or artist can learn from (and be inspired by). While working full time as an engineer, she practices her art regularly above and beyond her weekly comic for Wasted Talent, tries out different comic forms (she has some travelogues and other short comics), and also pushes herself whenever she publishes Wasted Talent in book form. When publishing her earlier drawings in We Are the Engineers! (her first book), she went back and redrew them all, showing how much she had grown over a few years of honing her craft.

But what truly seems to drive the thriving vitality of Wasted Talent and Jam’s work is humanity at its best: joy and love. Wasted Talent is an autobiographical comic, so while Jam generally aims for a humorous take on life, she doesn’t hide from its ups and downs, whether it’s a lost job, the pains of a job search, a desire for something more from life, or the almost annual trip to the hospital for her or her husband, thanks to the broken bones mountain biking seems to encourage.

I’ll take the humor, though, whether it’s this wonderful malapropism of “for all intents and purposes,” a bit of everyday silliness, or a scene that seems right out of my own household. Seriously, if you ever want to know what my marriage is like (and I know everyone was wondering about that), you can get it within the pages of Angela Melick’s work.

*coughs*

Or you can just read it for Jam’s wonderful take on working and living.

**I’ll also note that the original of that last watercolor example is proudly displayed on our wall: it’s a perfect synergy of Jam’s artistic and comedic capabilities.