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.

The last great eBaying has begun.

I’ll keep selling stuff, of course, but all the really valuable low-hanging fruit has been taken care of, at this point. I’ve been giving my apartment a deep, deep cleansing and this is the last of what needs to go.

There are some rare Japanese game posters from my stay over in Japan. Genma Onimusha, Viewtiful Joe, Mushihime-sama, OUENDAN, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, Shin Megami Tensei III (SIGNED!), and Digital Devil Saga. I’m particularly fond of the Genma Onimusha poster,even if because the visuals have nothing to do with the game.

I also have some rare Japanese games and goods up for sale, including some Club Nintendo products, as well as as some nifty comics collections – the full run of The Invisibles, the full run of Watchmen, and a complete set of hardcover Sandman TPBs.

The starting prices are pretty fair so get on over there and bid away!

I installed a plugin that claims to update my Twitter account with a link to my blog everytime I make a blogpost. This is a test of that plugin.

I figure this will notify anyone only using Twitter these days when I update my blog – though the idea of not using Google Reader in 2009 is, frankly, baffling. Plus, it’s excellent revenge for all the unblockable Facebook forwarding I have to suffer through these days.

So, dear everyone who is visiting from Twitter, I invite you to come over, stretch your legs a little, and to leave a comment on my blog. Please don’t write me or leave comments on Twitter. I will never “tweet” you back and, like everything related to Twitter, receiving a personal message will just irritate me. Just remember – your 140-character-plus feedback is always welcome here!

SIC SEMPER TWITTERVERSE! etc. etc.

Reading The Umbrella Academy, an Eisner-award winning 6-issue limited series from Dark Horse comics, was the most fun I’ve had with a comic in years. Period, full stop. I can’t summarize the book any better than the publisher already has, so:

In an inexplicable, worldwide event, forty-seven extraordinary children were spontaneously born by women who’d previously shown no signs of pregnancy. Millionaire inventor Reginald Hargreeves adopted seven of the children; when asked why, his only explanation was, “To save the world.” These seven children form The Umbrella Academy, a dysfunctional family of superheroes with bizarre powers. Their first adventure at the age of ten pits them against an erratic and deadly Eiffel Tower, piloted by the fearsome zombie-robot Gustave Eiffel. Nearly a decade later, the team disbands, but when Hargreeves unexpectedly dies, these disgruntled siblings reunite just in time to save the world once again.

Grant Morrison’s an unapologetic fan, and it’s easy to see why; no “superhero” book has been this consistency crazy and clever – not to be confused with Wacky! Zany! Fun! – since Morrison’s legendary Doom Patrol run. The comic’s quirky pacing, offbeat characterization, and attention to surreal detail make it read like a superhero movie as directed by Wes Anderson. Which, incidently, is exactly the tone the author was going for, so props to him.

No, more than props; an apology. See, the author of The Umbrella Chronicles is Gerard Way, lead singer of emo wunderband My Chemical Romance. And despite people whose opinions I respect speaking out in favor of The Umbrella Academy – despite the Eisner - I couldn’t bring myself to believe it was any good. It sounded too much like a rock star’s ridiculous vanity project, doomed to be mired in Coheed and Cambrian sound and fury. Well, I was wrong.

After finishing it, I went and read up on Way to try to figure out how a bratty emo kid could produce something so mind-blisteringly enjoyable. It turns out that Way holds a BA of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in NYC (check out that instructor list!), and that he spent the years before My Chemical Romance working as a comics store clerk. He clearly has the talent and the bonafides, so the fact he produced a great series shouldn’t be surprising. And yet it is.

So I feel bad that I’m prejudiced against famous people; that I assume that just because someone is on the cover of Spin and popular with 14-year-old girls he must be a vacuous, inartistic sellout. Bzzt! Celebrities are people too; if most of them are trite and boring and petty it’s only because the vast majority of people are so. But some of them are interesting, a few of them are nerds, and at least one of them had a great comic up there in his guylinered noggin. The good news is it managed to escape, so you can join me in having your preconceptions proven delightfully, ambitiously wrong.

I’ve never quite understood the Room Escape adventure game sub-genre: the player finds themselves in a small room with a handful of objects they can interact with and a door that won’t open; pixel-hunting madness ensues. The first and most famous of these is probably CRIMSON ROOM, though the number of imitators now numbers in the hundreds. Sadly, the majority are terrible nightmares of heartbreaking inscrutability. Like all gaming genres, this one has trended to the hardcore and long since alienated the sane.

But GUMP’s Terminal House series won me over, despite my disdain for the genre. The games are short (most can be completed in 30-45 minutes), the puzzles are solvable (I ended up consulting a FAQ twice in five games), and the invisible hotspots, while present, are reasonable. Most of all, the clean vector artwork is strangely evocative in a way that lends itself to the genre. All games are solitary endeavors, but GUMP’s design infuses that essential loneliness with a Lynchian sense of unease.

Three of the games (Rental House, Guest House, and Boat House) even form a loose, wordless trilogy. Start with those.

Tips for first time Room Escapers:

• Your biggest enemy is your point-of-view. Channel your inner Grover and look around, behind, over, under and through every object. If there’s half-a-centimeter between a piece of furniture and the wall where someone could have dropped a clue, you better believe there’s a clue there.
• Your biggest enemy is your point-of-view. Once more, for emphasis. Look around you!
• Your inventory is just as geometrically suspect. Got a new item? Did you check the bottom of it? Why not?! There’s another object taped there, or an awkwardly scrawled clue, or an opening you couldn’t see before.
• Everything has meaning. There are, generally speaking, no red herrings in these games. Everything you see or find has a part to play in your ultimate escape.
• Don’t be afraid to Tab-cycle hotspots. This last one is probably Room Escape heresy, but hey, you totally have my permission to tab your way through a screen’s available hot spots. I won’t tell.

(Aside: The best and most memorable Room Escape games are all from Japanese creators. I’m willing to wager this is completely due to Japanese apartment size and layout. Any takers?)

Writing about of Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s A Drifting Life feels strangely superfluous; this 840-page manga autobiography, ten years in the making, was published last week and has already been codified as one of the masterpieces of the comic form – Japanese or otherwise. It’s really good, so if it sounds interesting, go buy it already. Twenty dollars for 840 pages of manga from one of the all-time greats is a ridiculous value.

Tatsumi’s autobiography covers the period of 1946 through 1960, from the first “postcard manga” contest submissions he drew in middle school, through his excitingly prolific high school years and early twenties, through his disillusionment with monthly “manga-for-hire” and the creation of the “gekiga” label for more serious works. Like Will Eisner and the “graphic novel,” Tatsumi was dissatisfied with the short, childish stories which dominated the medium and wanted to tell cinematic, long-form stories suitable for adults. This book is the story of his struggle to reach that point.

Tatsumi was fortunate enough to be at the ground-zero of manga’s cultural takeover of Japanese society, and his autobiography is full of dishy details. How many high school students got to hang out at Osamu Tezuka’s house and pore over pre-release prints of Jungle Emperor Leo? To work alongside a who’s who of Japanese manga artists in a thrillingly competitive publishing environment? His autobiography captures the “anything goes” excitement of people – teenagers, mostly – working in a new, barely understood medium, where every month was quite literally the new Best Month Ever for the form.

But what surprised me most about the book was the level of cultural detail placed around the edges of the narrative. The timeframe of Tatsumi’s story – 1946-1960 – are Japan’s “lost” years, between the end of World War II and the beginning of modern, post-occupation Japan. This is a period modern Japan tends to ignore (they were tough years, with little to be nostalgic about), but Tatsumi remembers the time in loving detail. His book wanders into stories about pop stars, movie theaters, memorable sporting events and professional wrestling matches, even the introduction of Japan’s first mechanical washing machine. For me, at least, it is these humanizing digressions that elevate the work from an excellent autobiography into an essential tome.

Who is better? Fight in the comments. Click through for HD.

I thought about writing a post about how much I detest #hashtagged Twitterpiles as a substitute for actual discourse and how the whole #amazonfail brouhaha represents the Internet hivemind at its knee-jerk worst, but it’s probably just best to remember: “Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.”

So, congratulations to Amazon on a boner so huge it took Web 2.0 and microblogging to make it happen. And the French.

I recently learned of It’s Better With Your Shoes Off, a collection of cartoons first published in 1955. The author, Anne Cleveland, spent several years living in Japan in the 1950s with her husband, a British trader. She took her experiences and turned them into a series of charming cartoons that poke good-natured fun at the daily foibles of living in Japan as a foreigner. Though out of print now, the book was relatively successful at the time and went into nearly twenty printings.

The artistry is really top-notch, with a clean and dynamic line, and the humor, while slightly dated by the accompanying text, is still easily understood, frequently hilarious, and thankfully free of racial stereotypes. Copies can be easily found online for less than $10 (including shipping). Any foreigner who has spent time living in Japan would absolutely love a copy of this book.

Mike Lynch has scanned in several pages at his blog. Check ‘em out!

I have, somehow, spent the past two three-day weekends in Las Vegas; the first time for a friend’s wedding, the second time for a work celebration.

This is too much time in Las Vegas.

Still, some highlights from the Vegas roads less traveled:

I saw the Beatles-themed Cirque de Soleil show, LOVE, which was (unsurprisingly) excellent. I went through a Beatles phase in about 2004 where I listened to their music exclusively for about six weeks. Beatles songs, at this point, are like Homer or the Bible – it doesn’t matter if you like them, they’re part of our shared Western cultural heritage. Fortunately, I like them.

A lot of my interest in LOVE was to see Apple’s first step into this brave new multimedia future – they went back to the original vaults to remaster and remix the tracks for the show. The result was great, and bodes well for September 9th’s Beatles relaunch – The Beatles: Rock Band, of course, but also the recently announced full catalog remaster. The remaster comes with a long-overdue global reset to the UK album system, which suggests The Beatles trust is finally dropping American Baby Boomers as their primary audience. It’s 2009 – we’ve all already met the Beatles.

I enjoyed the 16-course tasting menu at Joel Robuchon (full menu behind the link). I’ve spent a long time trying to figure out what to say about the three-and-a-half hour meal – I even took some notes, afterward – but in the end I can only say it was the best meal – with the best service – that I have ever had or ever will have. I will, however, mention that the meal was not only full of amazing tastes, but featured a much wider range of temperatures and textures than I normally expect – and that the uni was the freshest I’ve ever had, including 7:30 A.M., Tsukiji fish market. If you have any questions about specific dishes, please ask in the comments.

I discovered a rare books store in the Palazzo that was like Needful Things for book lovers – everything was a first edition in excellent condition; most of it was also inscribed. They had a copy of The Waste Land from 1922, of Huckleberry Finn, of Blake’s Poems, of Ulysses (both first pressing and special Book Club edition with illustrations by Matisse). On the nerdier front, they had Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Man in the High Castle, The Martian Chronicles. Verne and Wells, of course. They had a 1909 Japanese translation of the Book of Mormon, which uses crazy archaic kanji and was surreal to flip through – like a Japanese book that slid over from a sideways universe.

The problem, of course, is the price. The cheapest book I found was $985 for a signed copy of David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Most were $4000 plus, with the real eye-openers north of $20,000. Still, if you have an hour or so to kill some Vegas afternoon, there are many worse (and costlier) ways to do it than browsing rare books.

The final adventure I took was about a mile east of the strip, to the Pinball Hall of Fame Museum. If you like pinball or classic games at all, you must visit this place! 150 pinball machines in excellent condition, and all of them playable. Machines are $0.25 for classic electrostatics, $0.50 for “classic” pinball, and $0.75 for modern pinball machines. All machines are set to max balls per credit (either 3 or 5 ). Many have a small notecard with information about the machine’s rarity, release dates, and historical significance. There’s something cool about learning a machine was the first to introduce skill shots on ball release or the end-of-ball score bonus. I also greatly enjoyed the late 60’s electrostatics, most of which had an art-deco or pop art theme, c.f. “Op-Pop-Pop”:

At the other end of the historical spectrum are two unreleased prototypes from the 1990s, when the industry was floundering and companies were trying to “save” pinball. Pinball Circus is an impossibly complex “vertical” pinball game, with five stacked playfields, seven flippers, and an unbelievable amount of moving objects. It’s like a pinball machine and Rube Goldberg device in one. There’s also Pinball 2000, which “holographically” reflects a graphical display onto the end of the pinball playfield, resulting in a crazy hybrid of pinball and video pinball.

In addition to modern machines (there’s a new Batman machine released post-Dark Knight, and an Indiana Jones machine covering all four movies) and old favorites (Twilight Zone! Addams Family! Indiana Jones 1993!), I got to play some older machines I’d never heard of before. The most impressive of these was probably Gottlieb’s Haunted House, a 1982 machine featuring eight flippers – four on the main playfield, two on the elevated “upstairs” playfield, and two on the recessed crypt playfield – an upside-down playfield beneath the main playfield. That sound you hear is you freaking out SO HARD right now.

Anyway, yeah, Vegas.