Issue #405: Art is Alive in Tallahassee, Florida
The first season of Music League has come to an end with a win by me in a very competitive season.
No more Music League intros for the next couple weeks, but they’ll be back. If you want to join in the fun, follow this link: https://app.musicleague.com/l/5fd55cb72716473faec1a5715699d91f/
I’ve been on vacation, back in Tallahassee for the first time in two and a half years. It doesn’t seem very different to me. A lot of my favorite restaurants closed, but a few are still surviving. There are several new fast-food restaurants, many of them chains.
I got the lowdown on them from my friend Joe, but didn’t try any myself. If you have opinions on these very strange looking restaurants that I would be unsurprised to see in a modern Grand Theft Auto, sound off in the comments.
Tallahassee also continues to support some great non-food businesses, Cap City Video Lounge and Flippin’ Great Pinball. Cap City Video Lounge is a video rental store with a screening room. Geoff rented Double Indemnity (1944) on blu-ray and I bought a GQuuuuuuX (2025) poster. Flippin’ Great offers freeplay on arcade and pinball machines at an hourly rate. Attractions include a DDR machine that houses a litany of songs through Stepmania and Jubeat. Jubeat on freeplay. There’s also plenty of fighting games and “driving” games like Initial D, Outrun, Mario Kart (the arcade machine), and F-Zero GX (the arcade machine). It’s great.
I also got to visit the North Florida Fair. If you see an A&M Concessions at your local fair, stop there. I was blown away.
Somehow, I got a lot of new subs over the past week. This will be a non-representative letter because of the travel, but you are truly new, you can read for the first time some of my best work from the past year:
There’s even a listicle in there. Thanks for reading.
The Apex Edgelord of Japanese Comics
I’ve been reading Blue Lock (2018). A lot of Blue Lock. I was reading it last summer, and wrote about a few times, but then fell off.
Now, I am truly up to date on the still-ongoing manga and have read a little more of Muneyuki Kaneshiro’s corpus. He’s interesting, although I can’t say I wholeheartedly recommend anything other than Blue Lock. His work from 2017 on seems to take inspiration from Chainsaw Man (2018), Pushing Daisies (2007), Gantz (2000), Homunculus (2003), and even Taxi Driver (1976). His art reminds me of Gantz’s author, Hiroya Oku. For Kaneshiro, the body is almost always a disgusting, distorted mess. Blue Lock downplays this tendency, but even there the body is sometimes disfigured in its confrontation with athletic performance or an obstacle to some ideal, imagined possibility.
His other work is much more extreme in its somatophobia.
Kaneshiro is also paranoid about invasion, frequently dealing with invisible or undetectable invaders. He embraces desire. His characters are repressed people pleasers who have given up some individuality for the sake of a collective. In this way, he seems to be repeatedly critiquing some of the most enduring strains of Japanese culture. Kaneshiro has not yet made a dent.
But the moral and libidinal universe Kaneshiro sets up again and again is not as subversive as it appears. His work is anti-social (in the sense of queer theory, not the Japanese sense of boryokudan) but endorses what is a very recognizable ethic to those entrenched in United States ideology: desire, but not too much. Indulge, but not too excessively. In Jagaaan, his heroic characters are separated from the villains only to the degree that they can control their desire.
I’m still interested in how many different ways Kaneshiro can tell the story of the nail that sticks out getting hammered down one too many times. There’s something fascinating about an artist with such a singular focus. There are no manga authors I can think of who reject the notion of conformity and collectivism as extremely as Kaneshiro. Along with that sensibility, he often includes shocking and salacious topics in his seinen work. It is edgy and perhaps gimmicky, but I am riveted enough to keep reading.
Weekly Reading List
Smiley released Don’t Box Me In (2025) back in June. Never Box Me In (2025) is a deluxe edition, adding five songs at the front of the record — Spotify calls it “Disc 1.” These new songs are pretty amazing. From “Bob Curry”:
I’m in Paris with a long stick
Free the guys, they did a long bid
You wasn’t there, you don’t know what I came from
You not my bro, don’t have the same mom
He got a headshot with his braids done
I’m so lit, I knew the day’d come
She in the telly, bought a pink gun
Shit get serious when the fames gone
Me and French will share the same gun
There’s a stream-of-consciousness quality here. Smiley reflects on the circumstances that result in “the guys” incarceration and his own coming up, speaking to someone who he insists should not judge him or his imprisoned compatriots. And there is both the irrevocable distance of someone not being there or not having “the same mom,” but also the closeness of Smiley to “the guys” and French — pulling through the thread of the line about Paris. The adlibs are good too. Highly recommended.
Mephitic is a hardcore band from Tallahassee, Florida made up of relatively young kids. I don’t know them. One is from Crawfordville who I think I met once. But they released a great record. Ten minutes in one uninterrupted digital file containing multiple songs.
It starts with a soundclip that might be from Aqua Teen Hunger Force (2000). The recording is really good with songwriting mostly reminiscent of the modern, full-bodied d-beat. There’s some drumming on “Don’t Know You” that sounds distinctly youth crew, kinda like a slightly sped up version of the drum intro from “Break Down the Walls.” “Napalm Strike” has a good sing along with lyrics that are both descriptive and genre appropriate. I love it.
It’s never to early to start planning your holiday gifts, and my friend Em has assembled a pretty great an unique list here.
Event Calendar: More Brattle Than Ever
Added some of the updated December Brattle programming, including a showing of Call Northside 777 (1948) that I am very excited for.
Until next time.