Work’s been busy. I’ll update more soon.

In the meantime, check out what I did to my living room over the past two weeks. I’ve gotten so domestic!

Photos from my trip to New York City.

I took a somewhat impromptu trip to New York City last week and had a stunningly wonderful time. I also took about 300 photos and have decided to join the digital revolution by setting up a Flickr account. I may hate Twitter, but I’m not a savage.

Anyhow, I tested out the Flickr account by posting pictures of a recently-constructed Beef Wellington. Adding and annotating pictures to Flickr is rather delightful and easy – one of the advantages of hopping onto a new technology at the 3.x stage, I suppose.

Would people be at all interested in my uploading old photos from my time in Japan?

My first curry review went up at Americurry. Comments are welcome; preferably over there. I’ll be at Go! Go! tomorrow in New York City and will try to get a glamour shot of the staff with the site logo.

Oh, also, uh, if anyone lives in New York City: HI! Can I crash at your place.

The JET Program is, like, the snooze button for real life.

– Apocryphal JET saying

They change their climate, not their soul, who rush across the sea.

– Horace

life is like a rollercoaster
it does flips and throws you over
board your ship thats going nowhere
if you stop, you’ll end up somewhere

everybody wants to go to japan
everybody wants to go to japan
everybody wants to go to japan
everybody – just hold hands

everybody wants to go to californ-i-a
to live their life on a sunny day
dreaming of someone else’s kids and wife
but they’ll be bringing you the same old strife

everybody wants to go to japan
everybody wants to go to japan
everybody wants to go to japan
everybody – just hold hands

– CocoRosie, “Japan”

I am not a huge Spike Jonze fan. He’s good, sure, but my director odds are like 2:1 Michel Gondry and 5:1 Chris Cunningham.

Still. This is a great video.

You may think it’s boring and want to skip ahead. You shouldn’t. And don’t read the description to find out what the big deal is. Let it surprise you.

Sorry for the delay. I was rereading The Invisibles. Now I’m rerereading it. As mentioned before, these posts are going to be my musings on the series at this point in my life, rather than a “deep” reading full of ne’er-before-seen insight. If it’s annotations you want, check out Barbelith’s The Bomb or the Disinformation Guide.

This post is entirely spoiler-free; later posts will be mostly so. Some parts of this overview may be misleading, others will be outright lies. If you want the unvarnished truth then go read the books. So:

There is an eternal war between the forces of Order and Chaos that has been going on for time immemorial. On the side traditionally thought of as “good,” less traditionally as Chaos, are The Invisibles – a loosely-knit group of ontological terrorist cells dedicated to overthrowing Status Quo, freeing mankind from the mental shackles of modern society, and shooting the ever-living hell out of any ultraterrestrial beings who make the mistake of invading our physical plane. Or at least those who work for said ultraterrestrials.

And in this corner, we have the nasty beasties of the Outer Church, servants of absolute Order, total control, and the enslavement of all mankind for all eternity, forever. For argument’s sake, we’ll call them the “bad guys.”

Also also: every conspiracy theory you’ve ever heard is true; all moments in time are simultaneous; there is a red, circular satellite called BARBELiTH orbiting the dark side of the moon and sometimes it beams messages into our brains; and the world is going to end on December 22, 2012, 8:00 A.M. GMT, as the walls between self and not-self break down and all of humanity is born into the higher state of unified consciousness that, because we have to call it something, we’ll call the Supercontext.

Get ready!

There are a lot of Invisibles, but our five core characters are:

• Jack Frost, a.k.a Dane McGowan, teenaged Liverpudlian hooligan, possibly the reincarnation of the Buddha, certainly a powerful sorcerer, maybe the most powerful. Doesn’t really give two shits, though. The newest recruit.
• King Mob, de facto leader of this Invisibles cell. Wears leather, shoots guns, behaves like life is an action movie and he’s the star.
• Ragged Robin, a clown-faced red-head, Has some psychic powers. Has some other powers.
• Lord Fanny, a powerful Brazilian shaman and a fabulous dancer. Also, a transvestite.
• Boy, who is a girl.

Okay, enough background.

Your head’s like mine, like all our heads; big enough to contain every god and devil there ever was. Big enough to hold the weigh of oceans and the turning stars. Whole universes fit in there! But what do we choose to keep in this miraculous little cabinet? Little bokren things, sad trinkets that we play with over and over. The world turns our key and we play the same little tune again and again and we think that tune’s all we are.
- Tom O’Bedlam, to Dane McGowan

Our story begins with Jack and his initiation into the secret world of the Invisibles. I’ve always associated strongly with Jack; we were born in the same year (1980) and, as Invisibles was set in the “present” of the book’s publication, that means Jack was always my age. During the 90s, that is; reading this series in non-real time, I can’t help but notice how young he is. Not to mention a righteous wanker. What once seemed like youthful rebellion now just comes across like being an asshole. As Tom tells him, “you think you’re an outlaw but you just do what they want you to do”; his rebellion is trapped within the superstructure of how a young, violent rebel is expected to behave. At this point in his development, Jack isn’t actually rebelling, he just thinks he’s rebelling. Mostly, he just wants to break things.

I felt a lot more sympathy for the character of Tom O’Bedlam, the older, homeless sorcerer who oversees Jack’s initiation. My first few times through the series, I felt more like Jack: “Hurry up, old man! What’s all this prattling about the nature of things? When are we going to get to the good stuff?” Now, I find him to be one of the series wisest, most sympathetic characters – in great part because he’s willing to put up with Jack’s undercooked nonsense. Tom’s ramblings about reality aren’t just for Jack, they’re for the reader: Don’t let the world distract you from what’s important. Look with your heart, not with your eyes. You are a person and you can accomplish anything - so why settle for anything less?

Tom may be mad, but he’s sane where it counts. Like the best Fools, he can say what he does because he knows he won’t be believed. The irony, as always, is that he speaks nothing but the truth.

Jack soon passes through the first stage of his initiation, puts the bulk of his attitude problem (if not his foul mouth) behind him, and meets up with the rest of the cell. Then they go to a windmill in the middle of the English countryside and sit in a circle for five issues. Okay, not really, they’re actually travelling back in time to France’s Reign of Terror to bring a psychic projection of the Marquis de Sade back to the future where he can architect a new world order based on Absolute Freedom. And to hang out with Byron and the Shelleys, because, you’ve already gone to all the trouble of travelling back to 1794, so why not?

Thus begins the series’ infamous “Arcadia” arc that nearly got the series cancelled . Truth be told, it’s difficult stuff. There’s not much action; the main characters, in the present day, are literally in an immobile trance as they project back in time. There’s a lot of talking and philosophizing. On the other hand, it’s at least interestingly difficult and thematically coherent. Furthermore, like most second arcs in Morrison’s long-form comics, it provides a secret road map to the entire series to come.

My enjoyment was helped a lot by my own expanded pool of knowledge, this time around – I knew more about the French revolution, about the historical significance and symbolic import of the guillotine, and about the Marquis de Sade and 120 Days of Sodom – thanks, Keith. I was also more willing to approach each arc of The Invisibles on its own merits – does it accomplish what it’s trying to accomplish? I mean, there’s plenty of ultradimensional warfare and time-travelling hypernarratives in the issues to come. This arc – a philosophical treatise on human freedom, the subjectivity of prisons, and the false security of either-or, us-them Manichean dichotomies – succeeds mightily. Compare the Marquis’ freedom, even imprisoned, to the self-imposed incarceration of the libertines, or the stark difference between what Robin and the Ciphermen hear during glossolalia. There’s also the dalang, a most skillful puppeteer, and the Blind Chessman, playing both sides for want of a suitable opponent.

I used to think the Blind Chessman was Satan, given his penchant for apples and affiliation with the Outer Church, but this time around I considered him as the Gnostic Christ. He claims he is “not the god of your Fathers,” and that his stories were made heresy by the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. The idea of the Gnostic Christ – a spiritual Christ dwelling within a human host, rather than a Christ divine both in flesh and spirit – resonates strongly with the series’ recurring image of a person or creature from a higher state of existence becoming “trapped” in a lower. So, I’m going with that.

Comments, please!

Thanks to everyone who offered advice on how to bid on Yahoo! Auctions Japan. After way too much research into deputy bidding services, I ended up going with Japan Auction Center due to their high level of Japaneseness and low level of suspicious skeeziness. That, plus a reasonable, easy-to-understand fee structure.

I ended up winning an auction for the 1968 Japanese poster for Jean Luc-Godard’s Alphaville. I absolutely adore this poster.

Anybody in Japan who is willing to help me purchase a 30,000 yen item off Yahoo! Auction, please send me an e-mail (andrewvestal-at-gmail-etc) right away. I’ve been looking for a Japanese movie poster from the 1960’s for about 18 months, and someone’s finally listed one.

The auction ends in about 36 hours. I can handle the communication with the seller, I just need someone to furikomi the seller the money, and to receive the package before sending it on to the U.S.

I can Paypal you the cost of the item + shipping + “thanks money” (lol) as soon as the auction ends (or write you a check, or however you want to get the money). Thanks so much!

I’ve started rereading Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles for the first time since 2002. I’m going to blog it on a per-trade basis.

This is my fourth or fifth full reading of the series, and I’m curious to see how my feelings toward it have changed in the past few years. The series was – is – enormously influential on me, in the way that other, saner people probably feel about sacred texts. Morrison claimed that he wanted to write “a comic about everything: action, philosophy, paranoia, sex, magic, biography, travel, drugs, religion, UFO’s”; to create a “hypersigil” that encapsulated the human experience in toto and its ongoing evolution. I think a strong argument can be made that The Invisibles is the work of the 1990s – I can’t think of another book, movie or album that better encapsulates those premillenial homesick blues.

I’ve read a lot more comics – and a lot more Grant Morrison – since my last time through the series. Some of it’s great (We3, Seven Soldiers, The Filth, All-Star Superman), some of it’s not-so-great (Final Crisis, Batman). But reading so much Morrison has engrained in me a theme I feel I missed the first time around: everything has value, and that value is equal. You can see this in We3 (and earlier in Animal Man) where no distinction is made between human and animal life; in Seven Soldiers, where D-list superheroes are shown to be as great as the Justice League, and the Gods of the Fourth World are reduced to homeless vagabonds; in The Filth, where the death of a lonely, middle-aged bachelor’s cat is an event of equal pathos to the end of the world.

Even Morrison’s less successful works fail due to this eagerness to place everyone on the same pedestal. Both Final Crisis and Batman are crushed under the narrative weight of treating decades of contradictory stories from hundreds of crazy writers as all true. Identically true. And while there is a mad democratic glory to treating the Zoo Crew as Superman’s animal equals or bringing back the extraterrestrial Batman of Zur En Arrh, it makes for better meta-commentary on the nature of serialized storytelling than, well, storytelling.

Even so: it is in this spirit of narrative magnanimity I resolved to reread The Invisibles; to treat every part of the sprawling conspiracy mythos as equally true and valid. I normally skim over some parts: the Arcadia arc, anything related to the alien Greys, 70’s Brit-Cops Division X, and, well, the first 11 issues of the final volume — to get to what I internally think of as “the good stuff”: anything with Jim Crow, the end of the first volume, the Hand of Glory arc, and of course the single best last issue of anything, ever. This time around, I’m going to work hard at believing everything. At wanting to believe everything.

Impressions will be spoiler-light, but full of detail. My goal is to spark discussion amongst those who have read the series, and interest amongst those who have not.

My friends Chris and Karen have launched a fabulous website dedicated to spreading the power and the glory of Japanese curry to us poor, deprived Americans. Their mascot is Ōtisu, minor god of Japanese curry. His creation myth is both inspirational, because it is beautiful, and instructional, because he ordered his curry with cheese topping.

I am working on getting Joe and myself set up as their Southern California “men on-the-street,” and by “on-the-street” I mean “in a curry restaurant,” and by “a curry restaurant” I mean “Hurry Curry, hopefully this weekend.” Mm, Hurry Curry.

Also, if anyone is thinking of posting that they like Indian curry better, they are about to step right into the dumbest Internet argument since “Japanese RPGs aren’t really RPGs.” So: don’t.