Last night must have been the all-night birthday party because I swear, we were eatin Japanese fried-chicken with kare-raisu an’ playing Bakugan ’til the dawn of today.

My son is snoring like an old man now, so here’s a small update on Miyazaki and a few other notable tid-bits.

I bumped into a couple of my neighbors who had just caught the Miyazaki double-feature playing right around the corner from us at Symphony Space.  They screened Kiki’s Delivery Service and Castle in the Sky and showed a few clips from Miyazaki’s upcoming American release of Ponyo, Ponyo. They’re always screening something cartoony at Symphony Space so if you’re in the area, bring some popcorn and let’s go to the movies.

Miyazaki’s event at Berkeley’s Zellerbach hall is sold out.   Zellerbach Hall seats over 2,000 people so it will be an intimate talk with Miyazaki-sensei and his closest friends and fans.

If anime/cartoons aren’t your thing, the New York Asian Film Festival is kicking off next weekend.  Grady Hendricks and his band of 40 thieves have posted the schedule and a list of this year’s movies making it a few weekends of double-features for yours truly.

And if you’re the literate type, poet Sesshu Foster is coming to town to do a reading at the Bryant Park Reading Room (btw 5th/6th Ave.) on June 30th, 6:30-8pm.  This event is free and open to the public. I really, really love his poetry and in fact, wrote my senior thesis on L.A. and his book City Terrace Field Manual.

Cathy Park Hong is also reading with him.  I may have gone to Oberlin with her but we don’t talk about that.  Cathy won a Pushcart Prize for her first published book of poetry Translating Mo’um.  She’s a Fullbright Scholar, recipient of an National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and all sort of other awards for her genius.

I, on the other hand, received a beat-up laptop for my efforts in 2006, amassed a collection of comics that even I am impressed with, and am proud owner of a poorly maintained Facebook page.  We have all earned our victories.

And with that, here’s a little something I discovered online: an interview in Bomb Magazine with Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai from 1998.  This was back in the day when Lawrence Chua was managing editor of Bomb and I read it religiously.  This interview I kept a copy of with me on my person at all times – wandering from NYC to the BKK, to HK and my own stay in Chungking Mansions.

I still remember how that paper felt between my fingers, the way the creases frayed when I folded it, and how it went from being an article holding information and transmitting a voice, to an object that I simply carried around, sandwiched between the stamps on my passport.

10 years past and I’m still hanging on his every word.

A lot of hits and a lot of people linking to my post about Miyazaki-sensei’s visit. So, to clarify, Mr. Miyazaki is visiting in July and will be making a public appearance in Berkeley on July 25th. There are plenty more details to come and I will be updating this blog as the information becomes available.

One note I need to make: I jumped the gun in saying that scholar and author Roland Kelts would be in conversation with Mr. Miyazaki on the 25th. As it turns out, he is not yet a confirmed guest, but the organizers hope to have him. My mistake for the error which I do hope to clarify through this update.

Kelts interviewed Haruki Murakami during his public appearance after accepting the Berkeley Japan award. From what I hear, that talk was dreamy and Kelts did a fine job. Here’s to keeping fingers crossed that it will be him again.

When it comes to long essays, I normally do a lot of beating my head against the wall or my desk or any other hard surface that can withstand repeated impact from my thick, thick, fortified skull. But when the muse is a stylish 73 year-old Japanese man in a freshly pressed shirt and lightly distressed denim with thousands upon thousands of pages of work under his belt, and thousands more to come, I try to forgo the headbanging and just dig deep to make it happen.  At this point, given the type of attention he’s been getting for A Drifting Life, I hope that Yoshihiro Tatsumi is everybody’s muse – at least for a day.

Massive love to my saintly editor in Abu Dhabi who did a stellar job of guiding me and trimming down my 3500 word submission to a neat and tidy 2000 words. (*Note: he asked for the unabridged version.)  And to D&Q  for all their help.

My article, Gladly Drawn Boy, on Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s graphic memoir, A Drifting Life for the Review section of the Abu Dhabi National.

My interview with Tatsumi-sensei for Publishers Weekly.

And no, as long as sensei is crankin it out, I will never be done with gekiga.

I’ve been putting some long hours into a mammoth essay that I’m writing about Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s gekiga memoir, A Drifting Life.  One thing that helped, aside from John Dowers’ history of post-war Japan, Embracing Defeat, and the tomboy shojo manga series High School Debut, was bummin around the city with Mr. and Mrs. Tatsumi.

The most stylish couple in comics: James Dean and Yoko Ono.

The Tatsumi’s were visiting NYC from Japan for the PEN World Voices festival over the weekend – they’re now in Toronto for TCAF – and sharing a plate of nachos with them – and Peggy Burns, and Anne Ishii, and this other reporter, Casey from the New York Press who I wasn’t all that thrilled about having around – was really quite dreamy.  Peggy set up this interview for the two of us journos with Anne translating and between bites of vegetable fajita,  Mr. Tatsumi just answered our questions.

I’m going to quantify the next statement by first admitting to having only interviewed a handful of people, but outside of Mr. Tatsumi, I have never met anyone as prolific who is so gracious, so modest, so sincere, and so captivating. I was hanging on Tatsumi’s every word and I don’t speak or understand a lick of Japanese.

At the Austrian society where Tatsumi first spoke on Thursday, the man moderating had set up a slideshow of the short story, The Pushman.  As we all looked at it, Tatsumi offered commentary like “I don’t remember this story” and  “The artwork isn’t very good”  In the scene where the women are ripping off the pushman’s clothes, Tatsumi said “Hmm. I really don’t know how to explain this” then added “I guess I had some issues with women.”  At the last slide, Tatsumi commented “I’d really like to see what happens next.”

I can’t say much about the interview or the talks – you kinda just had to be there – since my story hasn’t run yet, but here are some photos of Mr. Tatsumi signing my copy of A Drifting Life:

The evening ended with a Szechuan dinner where the Tatsumi’s were telling stories about comics and life in Japan, and teasing Adrian about his facial hair.  My grandmother used to tease me the same way, and I hated it.  But watching Mr. Tatsumi do it to Adrian was mad funny.  I started laughing so hard I thought rice was gonna come out of my nose.

Big love to Peggy Burns of D&Q and Anne Ishii of herself for making this happen.  Check out the James Dean+Ono stylings of the Tatsumi’s in Toronto if you can.  This blog post is boring as hell given how good the weekend went – but it was so good that I don’t even want to share.

I just finished up a hellish week where I took a day trip to D.C. for a meeting (and essentially sat on the train the whole day, got up to take my lunch break in a D.C. law office conference room, then re-boarded the train to sit some more), gave a talk with Ali Kokmen to a handful of SVA students about manga, and finally, had the opportunity to chat about manga and biography with Emotional Content founder and Biographic Novel publisher Eiji Han Shimizu in an auditorium full of academics at CUNY Grad Center’s Leon Levy Center for Biography.

It’s been busy and now that it’s over, I’m alternately exhausted and famished.  It feels as though there is not time enough for all the sleep I want, nor food enough to satiate the tapeworm in my tummy.

Interestingly, too, this is the first time I’ve spoken about comics, about manga, and felt like I was speaking into this void, into this black hole.  I have to first thank my friend and old college roommate Imani Wilson, who is director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography, for inviting me to participate.  The funny thing is that she had warned me thoroughly and repeatedly, about the mindset at the Center – and this is not to say that the attendees and biographers in the audience were close-minded, although many of them were, I only mean to relate a general feeling of….”comics are stupid” that seemed to prevail.

I’m being too judgemental.

Really the feeling was more “comics don’t matter” or “why do comics matter” (notice there is no question mark to close this question because the assumption is that comics don’t matter).

I am so lucky to have shared the stage with Shimizu-san, who opened the talk with a sampling of the types of manga that he publishes – the first, a manga biography of the 14th Dalai Lama, the second a manga biography of Mother Theresa, and third, a manga biography of Che Guevara.  The first thing that Shimizu-san told this audience of purists and academics is that whether they like it or not, today’s reader has a short attention span and demands instant gratification.

Oh yes, we were very popular.

At the end of our discussion, one historian/academic/biographer asked if manga really was a viable form for biography since it is reductive.  I had no idea what she was talking about.  Or I do, but I don’t buy it.  What was so funny about the question, is that Eiji-san had presented four examples of biographic material – historical footage of a scene, an exerpt from a history book, a scene from a movie based on the history, and then a scene from the forthcoming manga (about Ghandi).  Out of all of the examples, the exerpt from the book was shortest – a paragraph long.  I’m sure this is taken from an entire book or something like it, but I thought the question, about manga being reductive, was hilarious.

When I think about the number of history books, of biography, that flatten and reduce events and lives into a timeline or dead words on a page, all I can think of is the potential of manga to enliven biography.  One thing that I mentioned in the beginning of our discussion is that manga opens the reader to a sensual world, one that is visual, tactile, emotional – and alive.  As corny as all that sounds, I genuinely believe it.  Reading Eiji’s books only made me more interested in the subject matter.

After it was all over, this one biographer/historian spent a solid 10 minutes trying to convince me that Eiji-san’s books were fictional biography, not biography, since they include dialogue.  And while that may be true, all I could think about is how it was a weak argument if the overall story of this person’s life and accomplishment’s and their place in history, was being conveyed.

Well, I say let the experts debate.  While they’re yammering, Eiji-san and his studio will be methodically churning out these books, putting out these manga histories that anyone can read, that anyone can find interesting and educational.  Just another way to skin that cat and keep people interested in reading/learning.

Anyhow, this is my favorite shot of our talk:

Here, I’m doing my damndest to speak articulately and comprehensively about manga to the Ivory Tower, and all the while, I’m sitting in a way that allows everyone to see up my skirt.

It was a good day.