Book Review: "Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World" by Matt Alt

 Holy cow Japan...you guys have a lot to unpack. You are a complicated country.

 My friend Garrett gave me this book for Christmas this year because we often discuss Japan and their place in history (generally WWII) and the unusual (to us) societal quirks that may have come from the shock of the nuclear bombs and the upsetting of their empire. If this is something that interests you I can't possibly recommend Dan Carlin's podcast and his series on the Supernova in the East enough. 

Also a beautiful independent theater in the Milwaukee area has started doing Anime April and Miyazaki March so I (reluctantly at first) went to a couple of movies the last few years during those times with Garrett and our friend Gage and while a couple of them weren't my favorite I have enjoyed far more than I have disliked. Totoro, you cute sonofabitch.

This is a lot of words to basically say that, before reading this book I would say "I mean, I dabble in a few Japanese things but that's really about it". Now that I have read this book I realize that I have: sang karaoke, know who Hello Kitty is, almost ran over people staring at their phones playing PokemonGo and played with a Tamagotchi I guess I know more about Japanese pop culture than I thought I did. And I bet you do too! 

As usual, as follows are things that I found interesting or questions that I have after reading this book.

-For a time, and maybe still now, women were expected to graduate from college, work for a couple years, and then get married and quit their job. That's what happened to the woman who designed Hello Kitty did. And then the company was kind of like "uhhhhh so should we just let hello kitty die out even though it's really popular because we don't know what girls/women want?". The assistant to the original designer bucked tradition, stayed unamarried and at her job and became Hello Kitty's human "manager" and helped keep the company out of bankruptcy and maintaining and worldwide phenom. Hello Kitty makes a half billion dollars in revenue at year. The company that makes her is the 8th biggest licensor in the world - ahead of Pokemon, the NFL and Playboy.

-The guy who created Pokemon loved playing outdoors as a child. However, one day his favorite fishing spot suddenly had a new building built there, an arcade. He went in, became obsessed with Space Invaders and it changed the direction of his life. The irony on this kills me because a lot of little kids probably were yelled at by their parents to put down their Pokemon stuff and GO PLAY OUTSIDE. Though I bet the PokemonGo everyone goes outside and wanders looking for invisible critters kind of balances the scales back. I've also decided that Lickitungs is the grossest sounding Pokemon name. 

- Prewar Japan was like, a huge producer and connoisseur of children's toys. This obviously screeched to a halt during the war. 6 months after the war a man who was a toy maker before the war started collecting the tins that occupying Americans trashed (we are preeeettty great at generating trash) and made little toy American Jeeps. They were a sensation. It was one of the first little luxuries that Japan had after the war. 

- There are a lot of pages devoted to Dragonball Z, early origins of anime (RocketBoy) and how it came to America, some super shady stuff on the internet, the invention of the Walkman and karaoke machines. 

Most of the information on this book was completely new to me, so it made reading a little slow going and a lot to digest but I learned so much! If you have an interest in pop culture this would be a great book for you!

Book review: "What Are You Looking At? The Surprising, Shocking and Sometimes Strange Story of 150 Years of Modern Art" by Will Gompertz

I don't know how I got SO lucky that I read two books that almost back to back that I really really enjoyed. I'd give it an incredibly enthusiastic 4.5 stars. 

So the author of this book was the curator of the Tate in London, if there is someone who can try to make sense of modern art it's him. If you look at a Jackson Pollock painting, with it's seemingly random drips and swirls and think "This is so dumb, my 5 year old could do this". (First of all, it's not dumb, second of all no they couldn't and no they haven't so stop saying things like that) Then this might be the book for you. One of the most amazing things about this book is that the inside of the covers contains a map, and it looks like a London Tube map but instead of finding Piccadilly Circus and Islington, you find Pollack and Monet and Damien Hirst and how they all fit together and who leads to who. I love it. I want it blown up and on my wall.

There's so much information in this book that I don't even know how I'm going to condense it, but whatever that's the job so here's my effort :)

• Many impressionists, specifically Manet and Monet, were influenced by Japanese wood block prints. Japan was just coming out of it's self isolation and this was some of the first art anyone in the world people saw coming out of Japan. You miiiiiiight know this one. Mostly the influence was in perspective.

• I really thought the couple of pages on Degas were super interesting. He was the most non-Impressionist Impressionist of the bunch. He didn't like painting en plein air, he was meticulous about his prep work and sketching, he cared more about his subject's movements then the lighting. You may know Degas from things like ...
• 

• Seurat was El Capitan of color theory and pointillism. Though Da Vinci did it first because #GOAT.  Pointilisim means that you use dots not strokes and the dots don't touch. You may know Seurat from such things like...

Here's a quote that I liked: "The truth is that abstract art is a bit of a mystery; one that plays havoc with out rational brains if we believe paintings and sculptures need to tell a story. It is a complex idea that is typically expressed in a simple way....subsequent generations of artists eliminated yet more visual information in an attempt to capture atmospheric light (Impressionism), accentuate the emotive qualities of color (Fauvism), or look at a subject from multiple viewpoints (Cubism). "

Here's another quote I like, it's in reference to museum curators describing art in a kinda pompous and incomprehensible way sometime because  they are trying to cater to a broad constituency. "It's a fact of life: rock stars trash hotels, sportsmen and women get injured, art folks talk bollocks". 

Rene Margritte is one of my favorite painters, and when I explain him to people I'm like "I like his stuff because if you glance at it everything looks fine but then you look closer and things are not fine". The author says "(he) inhabits a world of the everyday and the mundane where the ordinary is extraordinary-in a very bad way... he was the prince of paranoia, the doyen of dread". There are so many great examples of this, but this is the picture that they highlight in the book. Take a long, long look at it the worse it gets.

 

There's a discussion of a painting by an artist I'd never heard of before. The artist's name is Marcus Harvey and the painting is called Myra. It's a portrait of a British woman who killed some children and instead of brushstrokes the painting is made of palm prints....of children. The actual face I made when I read that. 🤯

Anyway, I loved this book, I was massively entertained, I learned so much.