Weekend Reads: Weird Al, John Scalzi, Satoshi Kon, Classic Anime
Recommended weekend reading material for April 18, 2020.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting, thought-provoking, and enjoyable articles, blog posts, and reviews. I hope you’ll find they’re good weekend reading material.
I might have grown a little emotional while reading this profile of Weird Al Yankovic and his enduring legacy of weirdness.
Yankovic has turned out to be one of America’s great renewable resources… In 1996, after Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” became a national earworm, Weird Al took its thumping beat and its heavenly choir and turned it into “Amish Paradise,” a ridiculous banger about rural chores. When Chamillionaire’s “Ridin.” hit No. 1 in 2006, Weird Al took a rap about driving in a car loaded with drugs and translated it into a monologue about the glories of being a nerd. Whatever is popular at the moment, Yankovic can hack into its source code and reprogram it.
I love Weird Al’s music. The fact that it seems disposable and trivial because of its goofiness, and yet also feels timeless because of that very same goofiness, fills me with an inordinate amount of joy.
If you’re a sci-fi fan looking for something fun and breezy to read, then I can’t recommend John Scalzi’s “Interdependency Trilogy” enough. The third and final book arrived this week, and Scalzi discussed the book’s timeliness with NPR.
[T]he human animal is not going to change. And so what happens is we're going to still be able to relate to the people 1500 years in the future, just as we relate to the plays of Shakespeare or what's going on in the Iliad or the Odyssey — because those people, separated out, even though they are, by millennia or centuries, are still recognizable to us by what they do and how they feel.
Funimation, who recently secured the rights to Satoshi Kon’s only TV series, Paranoia Agent, writes about the anime director’s work and legacy.
[E]ven with such a comparatively small body of work, Kon is regarded as a giant of not just anime, but world cinema, with no less than Black Swan and Mother! Director Darren Aronofsky penning a tribute that was included in a retrospective book, The Art of Satoshi Kon… and all of his projects are seeing more rereleases in the West.
Related: All of my reviews of Kon’s work, including Paranoia Agent, can be found here.
Here’s more pandemic viewing material to pass the time: must-watch episodes from both Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Because sometimes you really just need to venture where no man has gone before.
The good people at Christ and Pop Culture have put together a list of “emotional support artifacts” to help you get through the pandemic.
Oftentimes, when bombarded with much sorrow — as we are these days — we push those truths even deeper, where they linger and swirl, until we have the capacity to sort them out. This is how creative works can help. Artifacts that showcase beauty, tragedy, love, loss, fear, sacrifice, and the like tap into the depths of our souls, pulling out what’s been stuffed inside, helping us see and name the things that need to be seen and named.
In addition to being one of the greatest movies of all time, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai can inspire a perfect D&D adventure.
What makes Seven Samurai such a great story is its simplicity and the wonderful characters. We can capture this exact same benefit in our D&D game. The characters matter more than the story in our D&D games. The story can be simple: protect the village from marauders. The excitement comes from the choices the characters make, their interaction with the village, and the results of their defense.
Here’s a list of the 50 most important American independent movies of all time.
Not all of our selections would rank among the best American independent movies ever made. Instead, the films on this list are the ones that broke new ground, created genres, or first introduced important artistic voices and subjects into American film.
Films on the list include Plan 9 From Outer Space, Night of the Living Dead, Easy Rider, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Pulp Fiction, and Primer.
Thanks to some key technical decisions made 50 years ago, the internet has proven to be incredibly reliable even as usage has surged because of the current pandemic.
Some of the early Internet architects — Cerf among them, from his position at the Pentagon — were determined to design a system that could continue operating through almost anything, including a nuclear attack from the Soviets.
I’ve been in the mood for some vintage anime lately, and so I’ve really been enjoying Tetsurō Amino’s Iria: Zeiram the Animation.
[I]f modern anime titles have left you feeling a bit underwhelmed these days, then perhaps watching Iria: Zeiram the Animation might be the fun diversion you need to remind you what original anime can look like.
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