Ombird

A fairly lackadaisical weekend it was. Hung out with my brother Friday night and Saturday morning, then spent the rest of the weekend procrastinating. Yesterday I hauled six gallons of water to the cedar tree in the traffic circle at the bottom of the hill, and I pulled a bale of weeds there too. Then I picked up my suit at Nordstrom's and watched half of the Mariners game at the Big Time. After this exhausting work I watched all six episodes of FLCL again, which I'll be writing about separately.

Around 8:30pm, I stepped out on the back porch to look at the garden in the gloaming. I planted an orange Chilean glory vine in the spring, and it has been blossoming the past couple of weeks, very pretty. And what did I see hovering by the flowers but a green hummingbird! (Well, it looked green in the half light, anyway.) The nursery tag had said that the plant would attract hummingbirds, but seeing is believing. I'd never seen a hummingbird in our yard before, so it was a real thrill. It dipped its beak into each flower, than flitted over to the raspberries, gave me a look, and vanished.

First a giant dragonfly, and now a green hummingbird. The backyard wildlife has been pretty danged cool this year.

FLCL (2000) Never Knows Best

I've been on a bit of an anime binge lately, after seeing Satoshi Kon's Paprika in the theater a couple of times and then exchanging anime suggestions with reverendjim. I've watched Miyazaki's Laputa: Castle in the Sky, which is a wonderful steampunk adventure. Then I watched Kon's 13-episode series Paranoia Agent, which is a quite dark look into the psyches of a large cast of characters who are attacked by a kid with a baseball bat whenever they get stuck in an existential crisis. In the past week, I've watched Gainax Studio's six-episode series FLCL twice, after discovering that it's now available in a beautiful box set that's twenty bucks cheaper than the series was when it was first released here on three separate disks.

I first saw FLCL (pronounced Fooly Cooly or Furi Kuri) as part of an anime night that a friend used to host fairly regularly at his house. I was completely bowled over by the frenetic energy and protean imagination (not to mention terrific design) of the animation, and I instantly fell in love with the hard-rocking soundtrack by a band called the Pillows. I wasn't willing to spring for the DVDs, but I bought both disks of the soundtrack. Those two CDs, and especially the first one, remain favorites, full of punk energy and J-pop hooks. Like the show, the songs are all over the place generically and fuse all kinds of influences.

So about the only thing I took away from the series on the first viewing was that this girl kept beaning this boy with her guitar, and giant robots kept coming out of his head. Plus a lot of other weird stuff happened in rapidfire succession, causing a great deal of cultural whiplash. Now that I've seen the series a couple more times, I think I've got a better grasp on the story. It is fundamentally a coming of age story about a 12-year-old boy named Naota who lives with his father and grandfather in the nondescript city of Mabase. There is a lot of sexual innuendo and subtext as Naota is pursued for various reasons by his brother's ex-girlfriend (who is five years older than he is), the class president at his elementary school, and a crazy woman from outer space named Haruko who keeps beaning him with her Rickenbacker. Whenever he's beaned by her, a robot starts coming out of his head, and there is usually a great deal of sexual imagery involved in these emergences. Haruko and the giant robots seem to come out of a science fictional universe more typical of anime, but one of the intriguing things about FLCL is the ways that these SF elements are used to communicate issues of adolescence and the onset of puberty.

The style of the animation is all over the place, including two sequences that are done as slightly-animated manga panels, heavy use of stylized cartoon expressions, parodies of other shows such as South Park, use of photographs, etc., etc. There are a zillion references to pop culture, much of which is beyond my ken (although Wikipedia is helping), and lots of punning use of language, which makes the translation into English difficult. However, I think part of why I love this show is because of that sense of references and in-jokes gone amuck and left to entice the curious and tickled imagination. It's part of what we try to do in Chunga, too. Still, there has to be a core framework to give the madness some shape, and the coming of age story works really well for me. The sense of inappropriate feelings, of being completely out of your depth, of blind hormonal madness, of being simultaneously bored and enraptured, frustrated, confused, and cocksure, of broken hearts and heart-rending loneliness, of excitement and ecstatic discovery -- all rendered at 90 miles an hour with gears constantly shifting and the nature of the story constantly evolving and the meaning of it all always in question. And then the guitar comes down with a power chord -- kah-Chunggggg -- and your head starts to swell embarrassingly.

Almost makes me feel nostalgic for my own adolescence, which is really saying something. Boy, did I hate it back then.