MONDAY MORNING

SOME MONSTERS (6): A HAIRY FISH

Let me tell you now of a marvel that occurred while Bayan was besieging the city. It happened after King Facfur had taken to flight, that a multitude of the townsfolk were fleeing by way of a broad, deep river that flows by one side of the city. All of a sudden, while they were actually on the river, the water completely dried up, so that Bayan, on learning the news, came to this part and compelled all the fugitives to return to the city. And a fish was found lying high and dry across the river-bed -- and what a fish! For it was fully one hundred paces long, but its girth was by no means proportionate to its length. Its whole body was hairy. Many people ate of it, and many who did so died. Messer Marco, as he relates, saw the head of this fish with his own eyes in a certain temple of idols.

The Travels of Marco Polo

Edited by R. E. Latham

Penguin Edition

(The hairiest fist I could find was the Hairy Frog Fish. It is not 100 paces long, but it is very hairy, most unappetizing, and quite aggressive. It even stalks a flounder.)

MANGA MANIA: BLACK JACK by Osamu Tezuka

Black Jack is the manga series from the creator of Astro Boy that is most popular among adult readers.

I don't know what that really means. These stories of a mysterious surgeon, a young man whose hair is part white and part black and whose faces is marked by a diagonally stitched scar, are perhaps somewhat more sophisticated than some of Tezuka's other work, but there is nothing particularly adult about them. Black Jack is an unlicensed surgeon who charges outrageously high fees and insists on working alone in the operating room. He accomplishes the seemingly impossible, and he is not above a certain level of deception. In this first volume we get his back story -- he own hopelessly shattered body was saved by a remarkable surgeon. We also learn that the one true love of his life has been forced to live her life as a man since he removed her womb when she had cervical cancer. These stories were written in the 1970's, so that bit of biological determinism is completely indefensible as a sign of its times. Jack's assistant is a little girl with the mind of a young woman. She was a vestigial twin rescued from the body of an 18 year old. She is also quite irritating.

BREAKFAST BOOKs (2): DEAR NEW GIRL OR WHATEVER YOUR NAME IS

(Part of an ongoing series on books that make excellent substitutes for the morning paper. Follow the Breakfast Books label for more suggestions.)

Editor Trinnie Dalton worked as a substitute teacher in Los Angeles from 1999 - 2003. One of her duties, as it is of all teachers, was to confiscate the notes passed among her charges. She saved these, maybe those she considered the best, maybe all of them. Eventually she turned them over not to the principal's office but to artist friends and let them have a go at transforming them into this book of drawings.

How, you might wonder, do you improve on perfection? When it comes to the contents of the notes, the artists know not to tamper with such raw beauty. Fragments or complete texts from the notes appear unaltered and offer up a mind-numbing, misspelled stew of venom and angst delivered in grammar that often suggests borderline brain dysfunction. Using this source material, the 20 or so artists and artist collectives Dalton selected took a variety of approaches. Many participants have mastered the kind of crappy drawing that apes the scratchy images adolescents scrawl onto notebook covers but that just a few years later can be reproduced only by someone with an MFA. Other have styles that come from advertising and commercial graphics. Some are baroque while others are brutally direct. Leanne Shapton places a line drawing of a face in the upper center of the page and below it quotes a simple message: If I see her on the stairs I am going to throw gum in hair. Or, I dare you to ask Steven do you ever wish you looked cute and that lots of girls liked you. Paper Rad, a collective based in Pittsburgh, PA and Providence RI, often channels Peter Max for their contributions. The ubiquitous Marcel Dzama is a contributor, and I am sure that just as I recognized maybe four or five other names, anyone who follows the contemporary art scene, especially on the West Coast, will recognize familiar styles. 

Leanne Shapton

Gay accusations are common, and particularly punchy phrases attracted more than one artist. OK cute or OK ugly receives several visual treatments, as does the ever hopeful Thank you for your quick response. Many entries are sadistically hurtful, but Dalton's compilation would make a poor excuse for an anti-bullying tract. None of the contributors appear to suffer from survivor's guilt. They relish the chance to dig into this material, whether they intend to create images that are as vicious as their sources or as poignant as many of the feelings that underly it. And none of the artist match the visual power of one note in red marker that begins 2:Victoria, goes on for fifteen increasingly illegible lines, and ends with the injunction: P.S. PLEASE W/B.

Jason Holley

MONDAY MORNING

SOME MONSTERS (5): A VETALA

Walking up to the sinsipa tree, the king climbed it, cut the rope by which the corpse was hanging and let the body fall to the ground. What was this corpse like?

     Dark blue as a rain cloud,
     the hair on its hair standing erect,
     goggle-eyed, no trace of flesh on its frame,
     marked with the signs of a ghost,
     it was a horrid sight.

No sooner had the king climbed down than the corpse was up again hanging from a branch. Again the king climbed the tree, placed the corpse on his shoulders and set out on his journey back. The corpse was possessed by a genie and as the king walked along, the genie spoke, 'Listen, O king!' it began

     'Time passes for the intelligent
     in the enjoyment of poetry and martial sports;
     but for the foolish and ignorant,
     in sleep, mischief or vicious pursuits.
     What good is good fortune without discipline?
          What good is night without the moon?
     Without true wisdom, what good is skill without words'

"So, listen, O king, while I regale you with a tale,' said the genie.

from The Five-and-Twenty  Tales of the Genie,  by Sivadasa

Translated and with an introduction by Chandra Rajan

Penguin Edition

MANGA MANIA: GYO by Junji Ito

And we're off!

Junji Ito's last outing involved a remote seaside village overcome by a geometric shape. That idea may not leave you shaking in your boots, but by the time Uzumaki reached its transcendent conclusion, Ito had literally put you through the wringer. The story gave new meaning to the idea of getting tangled up with your neighbors, and you shared with the protagonists the finer points of how to balance prohibitions against cannibalism with the fact that your little brother had turned into a very tasty looking snail and you were starving.

Gyo, titled in English The Death Stench Creeps opens on Okinawa. Tadishi and his really pretty awful girl friend Kaori are spending an unfun vacation on the island. There is a smell of rotten fish floating about, but no one expects the cause to be fish with legs crawling onto the shore and into the city. As for the smell? The fish are dead, it is only their tiny mechanical legs that keep them ambulatory. And actually "tiny" is not consistently correct. Great white sharks have great big legs.

Takshi and Kaori make it back to Tokyo but soon the fish are appearing on the Western beaches of the main island. And Kaori will not shut up about the smell. And she seems to blame Takishi for everything that is happening. Note to Takishi: Get a better girlfriend. 

But poor Kaori. She suffers the fate worth than death when wounds from the mechanical fishy legs prove infectious in a most disgusting way. 

Things go from bad to worse, and one thing I like about Ito's manga, at least the one's I've read, is that he wraps everything up in two or three books. This first volume ends with every possible worst case scenario coming to pass, and I can hardly wait to see how much worse things get before they get very much weirder in Volume 2.

It is not going away