Theatrhythm Final Fantasy Curtain Call (2014)

Platform: Nintendo 3DS
Publisher: Square-Enix
Genre: Rhythm Game

I was a bit skeptical when I first heard about Theatrhythm. By the time Square-Enix dropped this proverbial hat into the proverbial ring, Guitar Hero and Rock Band had ridden well into the sunset, to the point where they could no longer be seen without a telescope. But I was still drawn to it anyway. I was fond of those other two rhythm games and this one doesn’t require any clunky plastic peripherals. More importantly, I also have a deep love of Final Fantasy’s myriad of over-produced scores. But could a portable system with tiny tinny speakers manage to engross me in the rhythmic experience the same way as, say, an obsessively precise home theater experience? I wanted to find this out.

The core of the game is, of course, the music. Square-Enix has went full-on Nostalgia Celebration Mode here, providing as many as 200 songs from nearly every Final Fantasy game, including obscure titles like Mystic Quest. Most of the tracks are unlocked at the start of the game too so you can overdose on call-backs immediately. The 3DS also perfectly transcribes the audio; there are no ‘As Performed by Nobuo Uematsu’ bullshit covers here and everything plays as originally cut, including pieces from the NES games. You should have no trouble getting instantly transported to those times in your life where you Final Fantasy games were important. And if you haven’t played the series at all? Well, some of the tracks might be interesting enough to go on a hunt for more.

Nostalgia certainly plays a big role in Theatrhythm, but without some decent gameplay it’s just a thirty dollar jukebox. That’s where the rhythm comes in. The player’s objective is to restore a substance called rhythmia to the world because Chaos and Cosmos are arguing about something. Rhythmia is acquired by using adorable chibi versions of Final Fantasy characters to bash in monsters’ heads, traverse through classic fields, or watch full-motion-videos culled from around the multiverse.

All performances are carried out by tapping and sliding around the 3DS screen with the stylus or pressing a button or doing both of those things at once in time with whatever music is playing. As more songs are played, the heroes you’ve selected gain experience points and abilities that allow for better durability in the expert difficulties which, to their credit, are outrageously hard. There is also a quest mode that assembles a smattering of songs to play that end with a siege of some bosses in a dungeon, kind of like a treasure map. I like these quests a lot; it adds a lot of depth to a game that on its face appears to have none. It’s also really exciting when a favorite song comes up; I found myself really wanting to prove my devotion to the Final Fantasy series by beating its ass over and over.

My biggest gripes with the game come down to the nature of the songs and their presentation. Not *all* of my favorites are in this package and are likely only offered via DLC through the Nintendo eShop. Also, several songs (I’m looking directly at you, Dancing Mad) are cut very short to preserve the fundamentally casual aspect of an admittedly casual game. There are also timing issues to contend with, a common problem for all rhythm games. Note latency isn’t always right and the ‘hold then slide’ sections in the field pices sometimes cut off early, resulting in missed Critical hits that can disrupt the music’s flow. StreetPass is incredibly underwhelming–what are the chances someone else will be walking around with this feature turned on, even in the nerdiest of nerdy stores? None, I checked. The game also doesn’t make much use of the 3D qualities of the 3DS, opting to float the track above the action while the paper cut-outs duke it out underneath. These gripes are minor though.

If you ask me, Theatrhythm Final Fantasy Curtain Call is a game that holds up to scrutiny incredibly well. It does this franchise a wonderful service; and even though non-FF gamers probably won’t see much value in it, the nostalgic demographic Square-Enix is clearly targeting have no need to remain skeptical. Give music a chance!

A

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds (2013)

Published by: Nintendo
Platform: Nintendo 3DS

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds is a video game that tells the story of a young boy who is forced to save the world when all of his friends are transformed into paintings by a mad clown or something. The hero is himself turned into a painting, but is allowed to escape eternal purgatory with the aid of a smelly leather bracelet acquired from a shady-looking bunny man. The bracelet allows him to turn into a painting and walk around on walls; the rest of the game explores this fascinating new superpower in a myriad of creative ways. In fact, many of the ancient dungeons of Hyrule appear to have been built specifically with this ability in mind, even though no one else in Hyrule has ever been known to use such unusual magic before. The Ancients are truly an awesome and wise people.

So the game is especially great for those nostalgic fans sighted clearly in Nintendo’s crosshairs. A Link Between Worlds is the direct sequel to SNES golden child A Link to the Past and pays homage in a way I can only describe as consistent. The landscape and the monsters and the set pieces are familiar enough, but now jazzed up with a nice 3D look and a little tighter AI where appropriate. It feels really nice tromping around the ol’ stomping grounds again, and the 3DS is well suited to this task with its 3D mode turning Hyrule into a beautiful diorama. You get this desire to merely pluck enemies off the screen with a pair of tweezers and put them on a shelf or something. That’s pretty neat. The effect really shines in the Water Palace stage; pulling a switch and watching the water levels rise and fall is one of those obvious but brilliant design touches. Seriously, it looks amazing.

Gameplay is on the same level as the graphics: there’s enough nostalgia to get you into it and then the experience veers in a new direction with a wholly new core mechanic. Link gains an ability to turn into a painting and walk along the walls, which comes in handy for most if not all of the game’s puzzles. If you get stuck, look around for a flat wall you can merge with and that is the most likely solution. The fact that the game is built around this mechanic means that dungeons can be technically challenged in any order. Nintendo understood this enough to allow the renting of most of the game’s items. This is okay, but oft-times wall walking is the only working solution, which dampens the joy of using your wit to find alternatives with the items you spent good money renting.

Finally, the game’s script and score are pretty much par for the course. Zelda is in trouble. Link is the only one that can save her. The world is a big, scary, place that requires its scores of monsters to be enthusiastically put down. Various MacGuffins are sealed away inside various gimmicky dungeons for tax purposes and they must be recovered. The same overture with a slight change in the bridge blares on through reedy 3DS speakers. It’s a tried and true formula, the comfort food of the gaming world; and if you find a fault in A Link Between Worlds it’s likely going to be this. I agree with Nintendo’s trepidation re: formulaic gameplay. After all, why fuck with a formula that works? You don’t see people bitching about E=mc^2 or pi*r^2, you know?

A

American Hustle (2013)

Directed by: David O. Russell
Starring: Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence

American Hustle is a talkie about some small-time grifters getting swindled into becoming stool pigeons for a hotshot copper.  This copper wants to shylock some bastard politicals into accepting bribes that will land him a promotion and maybe even a boat.  This john is ballsy enough to try and slip some of the D to the leading dame played by American Treasure Amy Adams, who is no dumb dora.

Terrible 20s slang aside, what I remember most about this excellent, excellent picture is a Daily Show interview that Amy Adams had where she and Jon Stewart talked about how talented Jennifer Lawrence is during the whole thing.  Having seen this interview, and having then watched this movie several months later, and having realized how excellent of a film it is indeed, I now understand what they were talking about and have no choice but to agree.  Jennifer Lawrence steals the fucking show and, in a film packing some serious heat already, that is really saying something.  The other performances are good too–Christian Bale is going full on method again–but there is something seriously amazing about what she does with her role as a trashy and manipulative trophy wife.  It must be seen to be believed, especially when she and Amy share screentime together.  These two should do another movie together, and soon.

David O. Russell packs a lot of energy into a runtime of two hours, the kind of energy that demands your attention at all times with its high strung ambition.  As a film about con-artists, a few twists, double crosses, and swerves are to be expected; so if you blink, you are probably going to miss something.  But this isn’t a bad thing; you’ll just have to go back in time and relive some incredible performances over and over again until you get it right. 

A

 

Turn Me On, Dammit! (2011)

Directed by:  Jannicke Systad Jacobsen
Starring:  Helene Bergsholm

Turn Me On, Dammit! is a Norwegian coming of age story about a small town girl named Alma who is overwhelmed with the desire to bang everything.  She finds herself the laughing stock of the community after confessing that her childhood crush put his dick on her thigh (not kidding) at a party.  He denies everything of course, and now Alma must find a way to restore her good name while still doing her best to contain her relentless restless horniness.

While the description suggests that there might be some really heavy themes going on with this film, that is definitely not the case.  Turn Me On, Dammit! puts a more comedic and light-hearted spin on what might otherwise be a very serious matter.  It eschews social justice by containing Alma’s problem into a quest, prompting her to solve everything herself.  It’s a bold move for a small movie to avoid such social commentary; but if you ask me doing so was the right decision.  Not every production has to be an ostentatious Hollywood affair.  A small story comes as a relief sometimes, like comfort food.

Charm is the underlying heartbeat of this film.  All of the characters feel normal and real; and the situation might bear some resemblance to things that really did happen in a small town out in the middle of nowhere somewhere.  Helene Bergsholm does a great job emoting her frustrations and expressing her feelings as Alma the sexually frustrated deviant.  Having grown up in a small town myself, I could certainly understand being in her situation would be rather difficult, one far worse than a voodoo shop curse the Wiccan witches could think of.  And Alma is dignified in the face of things.  She does what any smalltown girl might do, given the same situation.  I wanted to see her succeed because I wanted to help and comfort her.  She could not be blamed for anything.

Turn Me On, Dammit! is a fine film that contains a big problem comfortably within the confines of a small story.  It is not overbearing, it is not pretentious, I’m not even sure if it is trying to say anything.  It is a thing that is, and it aims to warm your heart by reminding us of the ways that we are human.  Give it a go; it’s definitely not all in the poster.

A

 

The Hunger Games (2012)

Directed by:  Gary Ross
Starring:  Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson

The Hunger Games is a movie that’s based on a book that’s based on an idea that nerds have been arguing over the origin of for decades.  Katniss Everdeen volunteers as Tribute from one of the poorer districts of a dystopian country named Panem in place of her super adorable younger sister.  As Tribute, she is whisked away from her Amish slummy hunter-gatherer lifestyle into the upper echelons of a fabulously wealthy society where people consume shitloads of calories and have weird hair.  Here she prepares for the titular Hunger Games competition in which teenagers annually slaughter each other while the crowd screams for their blood.  The winner are declared when only one is left standing.

The movie is split into two parts.  Part one is what I like to call “The Exposition.”  It is here we get a good look at a totally crapsack world where poor people live in squalor and filth while the rich people live in utopias (a utopia?) far removed from those who suffer.  It gives a sense of why the Games exist and just how fucked the lower classes of Panem are, even though it looks like these lower classes do all the labor.  And then there’s part two: what I like to call “The Ol’ Ultra Violence.” In which The Hunger Games begins in earnest and a bunch of teenagers start to murder each other with sparkling medieval weaponry and unusual enthusiasm.

Overall, The Hunger Games is a film that works in both concept and execution.  Jennifer Lawrence lives as Katniss both in poise and personality.  As for the rest of the cast, I have no misgivings about any of them; they all do a fine job, though Ms. Lawrence clearly carries the majority of the runtime.  It has more grit than the typical young-adult film especially once the Games begin.  Allowing teenagers to be killed violently on screen was an important and interesting move.  I’m mostly sure other directors or editors would have liberally used jump cuts to communicate this necessary roughness down to a mere implication.  But amping the stakes this way made the hour long build-up to part two really matter.

One more thought: someone else mentioned that this film should have served as some kind of commentary about our society.  I don’t think it should be held to that standard.  If you ask me, this film doesn’t have that kind of responsibility.  Yes, there are some creepy visuals about some nuclear war or whatever but this is more of an underdog story than it is anything political.  The people have all accepted this bizarre reality in which they were bred.  It’s too early to rise against it right now.  Let’s have an adventure and push that particular melodrama onto the sequels.  That’s what sequels are for: for when the initial shock wears off and for when these impressionable young teenagers become boring old adults.

A

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)

Written by: Oscar Wilde
Published by: Canterbury Classics
ISBN: 978-1-60710-732-3
DIDACTIC FICTION

Lately I’ve noticed people talking about people and they’re all like ‘this guy is totally a Dorian Gray, doing the whatever he’s doing.’  I had no idea what the hell they were talking about.  Who is Dorian Gray?  So I resolved to find out.  Now I get to pass on my newfound old knowledge to you, oh humblest of readers.  Did you know there is a thing called Dorian Gray Syndrome?  Wikipedia has an article about it.  It’s a pretty good read.  You know you’ve made it as a writer when your ideas find their way into international consciousness.  Surely it is an honor.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is a novel about a guy who paints a portrait of another incredibly rich guy who exemplifies beauty and innocence.  Looking over the portrait upon its being finished, the rich guy is influenced by a third guy to make a wish on the portrait that the person in the portrait would age while in the flesh while he would not.  Unbeknownst to him at first, the wish comes true and the transgressions of his lifestyle mar the painting considerably as he becomes influenced by a hedonistic, ruinous lifestyle completely free of consequences.  It lends credence to the wonder of whether or not timeless beauty is really a blessing or a curse.

Themes of beauty and age lie at the heart of this book.  The desire to stay young forever is something a lot of people, especially in today’s age with its cornucopia of cosmetic surgery and make-up and lasers and penis pills and whatever else, aspire toward.  To be young is to be accepted, to be ‘in’ with the masses at large.  To be young is to be beautiful, and when you are beautiful nothing else matters.  The moment that first wrinkle develops on your face is the mark of your own doom, but remember that that moment is inevitable for any living and breathing person that wanders the face of the planet today.  It will always remain this way, in spite of the biggest and bestest efforts of big pharma or whoever else  who toils to unlock the secrets of the real fountain of youth.

Dorian Gray never finds aging to be a problem because he doesn’t age at all once his portrait is finished.  His ultimate tragedy, however, is that rather than using his dashing good looks to be a good man, he instead heeds the advice of the relatively sociopathic Lord Henry to embrace a life of hedonism and decadence that is most foul.  He does drugs, is a heartless womanizer, holds vicious contempt for both upper and lower classmen, he tricks, he steals, he murders… He becomes this remorseless thing that takes his beauty for granted, knowing that it could get him anything that he wants.  But even with a heart as black as coal, he has the propensity to do good.  And yet still he resists the urge to be a good man, principally because of Lord Henry’s fascination with turning him into everything he isn’t.  I’m sure we all have a friend like that, too.  You know, that one who always wants to go to a strip club or drive fast cars or do nothing but loose women 20 years younger than he is?  You don’t?  Oh.  Whatever.

Good literature is all about embracing the impossible and relating it to the larger world that surrounds us.  It fills us with ideas about what is moral, what is immoral, what is true, and what isn’t true.  And the cool thing about all of this is that it allows us to decide if the lifestyle we are reading about is really what would be best for us; a sort of way to test the waters and ascertain the consequences of what could be our stupidest choices.  What kind of people should we be, then, if we know we cannot be forever young?

A

Choice Passages:

Dorian smiled and shook his head. “I am afraid I don’t think so, Lady Henry. I never talk during music–at least, during good music. If one hears bad music, it is one’s duty to drown it in conversation.”

Lord Henry: “My dear boy, no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.”
Dorian Gray: “Harry, how can you?”

He rubbed his eyes, and came close to the picture, and examined it again. There were no signs of any change when he looked into the actual painting, and yet there was no doubt that the whole expression had altered. It was not a mere fancy of his own. The thing was horribly apparent. He threw himself into a chair and began to think.

Dorian Gray smiled to himself. How little the man knew of the true reason! And how strange it was that, instead of having forced to reveal his own secret, he had succeeded, almost by chance, in wresting a secret from his from his friend! How much that strange confession explained to him!

The Great Gatsby (1925)

Written by: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Published by: Scribner

The Great Gatsby tells the story of super wealthy Jay Gatsby during the “most expensive orgy in history” and his obsession with winning the hand of the ravishing Daisy Buchanan.  It is told primarily through the eyes of Daisy’s distant cousin, Nick Carraway, who is brought into the Jazz Age’s celebration of excess from a life of relatively abject poverty to draw the two long lost star-crossed lovers together and make a happy ending betwixt sheets woven of pure gold.  The novel is considered one of the perennial works of American literature and has been studied by countless classrooms and scholars across the world, ostensibly laying much of the groundwork for generations of literary novelists to come.

Yeah, it’s kind of a big deal.  You have probably seen it on a shelf somewhere or heard that they made a movie about it that stars Leonardo DaVinci.  As such, it is pretty much impossible to review this work without bias, either because of the work itself or the author himself.  You’ve probably heard that it was a studious exercise in the furthest abstracts of human language, with punctuations purposely placed that caused a certain rhythm and flow to emerge within Fitzgerald’s elegant prose.  You’ve probably heard that it was revisioned and revisioned and revisioned; you might have also heard that it didn’t make its deadline ultimately because of all of this obsessive revisionism.  You’ve probably also heard Mr. F. was a raging alcoholic, and of all the true things I’ve said so far, this last point is the untruest.

The Great Gatsby is a work that arguably lives up to the greatness to which its author first envisioned.  Every word, every passage, every action is carefully crafted to drive the story forward and no syllable is wasted on even the excessive celebrities in which it remarks.  The weight of the narrator’s words, of Fitzgerald’s words, is calibrated precisely to draw you, the reader, into the magnificent world of 1920’s New York, to gape in wonder at the lavish exuberance, but also packs some pretty insightful knowledge re: the dangers of nostalgia; this idea that with the right amount of money and patience, even the most futile of lost destinies can be recovered and restored.  After all, it’s easy to think that those we love are not simply stuck in some kind of bubble, preserved within the silence of time.  That’s probably why getting back with your ex is a bad idea, so you should quit thinking about it.  Read The Great Gatsby instead, and take some time to reflect on some of the stupid things you’ve done for love, and maybe put those stupid things behind you for good.

A

Choice Passages:

“he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and far as I was from him I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward–and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock.”

“Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York–every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour, if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler’s thumb.”

“Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.”

The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003)

Written By: Audrey Niffenegger
Published By: Harcourt Books

The Time Traveler’s Wife is a love story about a woman who is perfectly normal in every way and her husband who is not so normal.  He happens to be a time traveler, but not in the traditional mad scientist sense.  Instead, he time travels to places he’s been before when beset with any amount of stress.  This means that any trip he makes to the past or future is strictly involuntary and unpredictable.  The novel focuses on how the husband’s time traveling is both the cause of their relationship the source of all its problems.  And it’s brilliant.

So when two people get married, the general consensus is that the relationship will have a bunch of ups and downs.  There is a lot of sex, a lot of fighting, and a lot of compromise, sometimes kids.  Countless generations of families have beat around this bush for so long that there isn’t a whole lot of intrigue, a whole lot of “newness” in it.  Sure, you got your basic questions: “How did you two little lovebirds meet?” being one such question.  And, with perhaps starstruck eyes, one of the askees will tell you, “well this one time we met at a Holiday Inn Express, s/he was going that way and I was going that way…” and then they would keep running their mouth about how awesome or how horrible things turned out.  Yawn.

The Time Traveler’s Wife is pretty similar, but features way more interesting people at its core.  The characters of Henry and Clare DeTamble are both charming, cultured, and overall very pleasant in the way one would hope a young married couple would be.  They aren’t superheroes or supergeniuses in spite of one’s ability to move through the ether of time.  Actually, Henry is very humble about (if not totally resentful of) his condition in spite of knowing that it is the source of all the happiness he would ever know.  Clare is a pistol, well-off but not obnoxious, maybe a little naive at times, surprisingly gutteral at others, but makes for a sound pairing with her chrono-impaired soulmate.  Their personalities are distinct and compelling as they make their confessions over the course of the whole lifespans together, and their stories come through at the hands of some really terrific, careful, and inspired writing.

The time traveling aspect is also treated with great care, having evolved a personality unto itself.  There is some self-awareness carefully weaved into the narrative that aims to keep your eyesockets from rolling out of your skull, lest you are used to stupid heroes not capable of selfishly applying their powers for the betterment of their station.  This novel has plenty of that, even boldly addressing certain issues that would be unique only to time travelers in some rather surprising ways.  But it also adds some restrictions to Henry’s ability to move around time, even adding some danger in the mix to offer yet another facet to his already carefully manicured personality.

But what really makes this novel work is how it meticulously sets up and pays off even the smallest little character quirks or traits, harnessing the power of time to open and close the loose ends of what is ostensibly a closed loop of a story.  You are given just enough information to presume you know how it will all turn out, but even as more things are revealed, you are never quite sure if that’s really going to happen.  Or, more frequently, some time traveling thing will happen and you’ll keep that filed away to see if it ever gets resolved, no doubt to write an angry email to the author once it never comes.  And so, you keep turning and turning the pages, wondering if what you are expecting will come to pass, whether this future that this book reluctantly shares is actually going to be real.

One of the big questions of The Time Traveler’s Wife revolves around this idea of fate.  Think about it, if some guy or girl entered your life from another dimension and told you that you were married to them in the distant future, how would you feel about that?  Both characters more or less grapple with that, and the joy from reading this novel is grappling with that concept ourselves.  Are our futures already written for us?  Do we have a chance to change them?  Or is changing them part of the plan?  Should we ever know our future? And if we do know the future, should we at any point share that information with anyone?

In a good work of literature, there are underlying themes that challenge us to explore the world in a different way, to become people that we are not and possibly could never be.  To ask the important questions and to get us to think about the differences of our lives and how our unwritten futures toddle ahead, forming endless possibilities just as endless possibilities are snuffed out every waking second of every day as we decide a yes or a no or a maybe.  The Time Traveler’s Wife asks these questions by giving us the ability to see the world unfold through the eyes of two charming and lovely individuals who may carry the answer within themselves, who might offer some reassurance that defying fate might be possible, even for them.  It is nearly perfect.

A

Choice Passages:

     “Clare takes the Thermos cup away from me. She pours herself half an inch of coffee and takes a cautious sip. ‘Ugh,’ she says. ‘This is disgusting. Is it supposed to taste like this?’
     ‘Well it usually tastes less ferocious. You like yours with lots of cream and sugar.’
     Clare pours the rest of the coffee into the Meadow and takes a doughnut. Then she says, ‘You’re making me into a freak.'”

     “I’m stomping the living shit out of a large drunk suburban guy who had the effrontery to call me a faggot and then tried to beat me up to prove his point. We are in the alley next to the Vic Theater. I can hear the Smoking Popes’ bass leaking out of the theater’s side exits as I systematically smash this idiot’s nose and go to work on his ribs. I’m having a rotten evening, and this fool is taking the brunt of my frustration.”

     “I’m standing in the bathroom, shivering in my slip and brushing my teeth. In the mirror I can see Henry lying on the bed. He’s snoring. I spit out the toothpaste and rinse my mouth. Suddenly it comes over me: happiness. And the realization: we’re married. Well, I’m married, anyway.”

The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

Written by: J.D. Salinger
Published by: Little, Brown and Company

Part of the joy of reading a novel comes from stepping outside of your day-to-day life and slipping into the mind of someone else.  For just a tiny sliver of a moment, real life no longer matters as you are whisked away to a world of wonder and intrigue.  Without even leaving the safety of your bedroom, you can explore the crowded streets of New York with aplomb or stare out beyond the edge of the Abyss with a fetterless defiance.  I would argue that there is no better outlet for the imaginative mind—movies and video games and drawings can’t even begin to compare with the infinite vastness of the written page.  It’s why books are timeless; it’s also why they have endured for so long and why they will continue to endure long after you and I are long gone from the world.

A good book will hook you, absorb you, and keep you mostly interested; but a great book can go much further than that.  A great book can help you decide what kind of person you are, or what kind of person you want to become.  It can make you put some distance between your mind and your body, and you can ask yourself things like “Am I this person?  Is this what I’m supposed to be?” A great book can transform you into a better, moar enlightened, moar attractive individual.  It can imbue you with self-confidence.  It can broaden your world view.  It can teach you to love.  It can teach you to hate.  It can teach you to become someone else entirely.

The Catcher in the Rye is a great book, though it may not be immediately apparent on the surface.  It tells a basic story from the perspective of an insufferable nitwit named Holden Caulfield, who decides to bum around New York City for a few days after getting expelled from school.  He is a kid that has a lot of baggage in that he hates pretty much everything and everyone, constantly makes unfounded and unwarranted judgments about people that suggests a sophisticated lack of immaturity, and has the gall to wonder why people don’t want to listen to him.  It is a book in which hardly anything happens, but also in which a lot of things happen, and it can be quite difficult to sit through if you find yourself unwilling, unprepared, or unable to analyze its nuances with any sort of depth.

Like many great literary works, it doesn’t spend much time establishing every minute detail of the scenery.  It opts instead to carefully select just the right words and just the right tone of voice to keep the reader engaged.  While visuals certainly exist, they are largely subdued in service of staying grounded inside this kid’s head.  It’s an interesting risk to take; in today’s visual-hungry culture, a novel without much in the way of important and obvious visual cues seems very counterintuitive.  But J.D. Salinger sets the stage not within the boundaries of the outside world, but within the trappings of Holden Caulfield’s mind.  Rather than walking beside him as he crosses the street to the Museum of Natural History, we are that person who is walking across the street to the Museum of Natural History.  We are that confused adolescentish boy who is perhaps afraid of growing into a man, who can’t believe that people exist who are going about their lives completely ignorant of the fact we exist at all or that the world is filled with all these phonies too phony to sit down and have an intelligent conversation about where all the ducks go in the winter time.  We become him, in a way.

To read this novel and NOT be frustrated seems completely unnatural, if you ask me.  Caulfield really is an insufferable twerp, even before his various cringe-worthy moments that throw an empathetic bone to his situation.  Nonetheless, drastic changes to his personality definitely don’t occur overnight and he is prone to remain just as pathetic as he was prior to leaving school even well after the story concludes and just as liable to make the same mistakes over and over again.  And yet, there is a persistent sliver of hope that things will eventually work out for the kid, that he’ll get his shit together, and maybe mend some terribly broken bridges along the way.

There is a little Holden Caulfield present in all of us, I think, and how we deal with him is an important capstone in defining who we are and who we will grow up to be.  Will we accept the fact that we are no longer children and go out into the brave new world with a resolve to make it (and ourselves) better?  Or will we withdraw into the realms of our own minds, portraying the world as lousy and phony and not up to our standards?  If the latter is the case, should we be bothered to make a change?  Is it even a problem at all?  Whatever makes us happy and content, right?

A great book will do more than just tell us a good story.  A great book will help us ask the questions we may forget to teach ourselves, even if it doesn’t try to offer any of the answers.  We may realize that life has a lot more to offer than merely the innocence of youth or the complacency of adulthood, that maybe those two things can coexist comfortably in the middle.  And then we can effectively step outside of ourselves, seeing assets and flaws objectively enough to become the people that we want to be (though not necessarily the people we are meant to be).

Or maybe we all could just get ourselves a Phoebe.  She is super adorable and if you don’t let out a huge ‘awwwwwwwwwwww!!!’ when she shows up then you’re not a real human.

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Choice Passages

“Women kill me. They really do. I don’t mean I’m oversexed or anything like that–although I am quite sexy. I just like them, I mean.”

“One thing I have, it’s a terrific capacity. I can drink all night and not even show it, if I’m in the mood.”

“All that crap they have in cartoons in the Saturday Evening Post and all, showing guys on street corners looking sore as hell because their dates are late–that’s bunk. If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she’s late? Nobody.”

“‘You can’t just do something like that,’ old Sally said. She sounded sore as hell. ‘Why not? Why the hell not?’ ‘Stop screaming at me, please,’ she said. Which was crap, because I wasn’t even screaming at her. ‘Why can’tcha? Why not?'”

“I thought what I’d do was, I’d pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. That way I wouldn’t have to have any goddam stupid useless conversations with anybody. If anybody wanted to tell me something, they’d have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. They’d get bored as hell doing that after a while, and then I’d be through with having conversations for the rest of my life.”

Safe Area Goražde (2000)

Written By: Joe Sacco
Published By: Fantagraphics Books

When reading a traditional novel, it can be challenging sometimes to glean the “correct” message from words alone, especially if the common style of writing has changed significantly over the previous 300 years. A weaker author might use imagery that is rather ambiguous for one reason or another and, depending on the reader, the author’s intention behind a set of carefully selected words might fail to connect even in the most pivotal of moments. For as language changes, the images intended for the reader’s head might blur as generation after generation evolves the human condition.

Using a graphical approach can evoke more specific feelings about the situation since the ambiguity is not as much of an issue. After all, if one picture is worth a thousand words, then what is a book of a thousand pictures worth? Within the pages of Safe Area Goražde there might be an answer.

The imagery provided by Safe Area Goražde is at once surprising and magnificent. Every single frame is layered with incredible detail as author Joe Sacco describes the things going on with each of the characters he encounters within the titular safe area.

Within this imagery, there seem to be a few things going on. First, there is the issue of relieving the reader’s imagination of all that hard work involved in imagining things. This is evident throughout the entire novel; as the narrative drifts from character to character there are usually short intermissions that show the reader the strife that has occurred to bring things full circle in the way they have, or even to pull the “camera” out so we can more easily glimpse the story in a larger context. A good example of this occurs on pages 14 and 15 when the journalists are being interviewed in the classroom. People are milling about as usual, and even though life is certainly hard for them, the scene is a poignant demonstration of the desire to live.

The graphical approach can also be all up in the reader’s face, immediately establishing a tone in a few pages whereas a regular novel may struggle to accomplish for many and more. In the case of Safe Area Goražde, author Joe Sacco goes a little bit further and applies his cartoonist skills in creating unique caricatures for many of the players, especially when humor or merriment is involved. This technique is established pretty early on in the party scene on page 8, where faces are exaggerated and contorted in comical ways. In later pages, such as the section on Brotherhood and Unity (20-23), the images are far more normalized in an obvious attempt to cancel out the overall comic effect and get serious for a little while.

The story that seems to emerge is that even though the plight of the Bosnians is not an especially good one, there is a sense that the survival instinct is emergent in the whole of the remaining population. It becomes clear that these folks are doing everything they can to survive in spite of the odds of endless persecution by the Serbs and still have the propensity to be humorous about it. It leaves one to wonder, “just how could they possibly do it?”

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