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Uncle Orson Reviews Everything
April 7, 2011
First appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC.
Cowboy Bebop, Reversal, Mystery, Audiobooks
When I first saw the word "anime" on a schedule at a science fiction convention, I thought it was
French -- ah-NEEM. It was with utter scorn that a fan (of anime, not of my work) told me it
was Japanese, and it was pronounced AH-ni-may.
I didn't even like live-action sci-fi movies in those days. Why would I watch animated fantasy?
Especially since all the characters looked alike -- big eyes. And they sounded alike, too --
high-pitched yammering voices that ranged from whiny to screechy.
Then my youngest became an anime fan. Which means she became an anime snob, preferring to
watch most series in Japanese, with subtitles, rather than suffer the pain of a bad English dub. I
could hardly walk into the room when she was watching one; it hurt my ears.
But times change. The dubs got better. The animes got better, too. The premise of pioneering
anime Sailor Moon still makes no sense to me; but more recent animes are first rate.
"Recent" can mean 1998, but that wasn't so long ago. It was a year of good movies like Deep
Impact, Shakespeare in Love, Ever After: A Cinderella Story, The Prince of Egypt, and -- best
by a mile -- the classic romantic comedy You've Got Mail.
It was also the year of Cowboy Bebop, an anime series that is better than all but a handful of
science fiction films, ever.
It's set in a future when an experimental hyperspace gate blew up the moon; debris is still
raining down on Earth, making large sections of our planet uninhabitable. (Yep, that's right:
The sky is falling.)
So people have moved out into the Solar System, with populations centers on various moons and
asteroids and a planet or two. And with hyperspace gates now safe to use, you can get from
world to world pretty quickly.
It's a wild place, one big frontier. No government can police the whole Solar System -- so
bounty hunters go after criminals, risking their lives for a chance at some big bucks.
But that's the big picture. The story we follow involves a group of bounty hunters on the
spaceship Bebop. Our main hero is a dangerous wisp of a man named Spike, who used to be
an enforcer for the Syndicate, but moved to the right side of the law. He also has a tragic past,
complete with a lost love and an old friend who now is his worst enemy.
The owner of the Bebop is Jet Black, who left official law enforcement because he was sick of
the corruption. As a bounty hunter, he can live by his own rules. He and Spike have opposite
backgrounds, but they get along fine.
Together, they ride the Bebop from world to world -- then hop into smaller runabout spaceships
that allow them to land stealthily where their targets are. Mostly, though, they have to deal with
the fact that when you're running out of money, spaceships don't repair themselves and fuel ain't
free.
They are joined by an uninvited guest/stowaway, a drop-dead-sexy female bounty hunter
named Faye Valentine, who keeps leaving them to go out on her own, only to be forced to
return when her addiction to gambling blows all her money.
A couple of other characters join them in the process of the series, but I'm afraid I never found
"Ed" (the androgynous hacker genius/annoying free-spirited flower child) terribly interesting,
and the "data dog" named Ein never amounted to as much as I had hoped.
Doesn't matter. The stories of Jet, Faye, and Spike are compelling, for though each episode is
full of mystery and adventure, in the course of the series they all keep running into their past.
For Faye, that means eventually recovering some of the memories she lost in a traffic accident.
For Jet, it means finding out who it was who betrayed him back when he was a cop. And for
Spike, it means finding his lost love -- and facing down his nemesis and former partner, named
Vicious.
What can I say, except that to my vast surprise, I found this series brilliant. It's often funny,
sexy in a mostly chaste kind of way -- these are drawings, after all -- and the action is gripping.
But what held me was a combination of strong relationship-based storytelling, a moody visual
style that never got old, and really smart dialogue.
I'd compare this to the great TV series Firefly, except that since Firefly came out in 2002, and
resembles Cowboy Bebop in many ways (including quality), I can't guess whether Firefly creator
Joss Whedon was influenced by Cowboy Bebop, was deliberately doing an hommage, or created
such a similar series by sheer coincidence.
So ... who's going to enjoy Cowboy Bebop? My wife did, and she likes film sci-fi even less than
I do. Not everybody is going to be comfortable with the sometimes eye-popping costumes
(though there's no nudity and only rare implied sex).
I came to love Yoko Kanno's explorations of every kind of jazz, beatnik, and 50s rock all woven
through a delicious new age sensibility; there's more bebop in this series than just the spaceship
of that name. In fact, because of the jazz sensibility, the episodes are called "sessions," as if the
story were a mere accompaniment to a jazz jam. And maybe it is.
Mostly, though, this series is for people who love good storytelling -- and plenty of surprises in
every episode. The glory of animation is that you can show things that otherwise could never
exist, and the writers, artists, and voice actors of Cowboy Bebop do an unforgettably good job.
New copies of the complete series aren't cheap, but you can get used DVD sets for 50 to 70
bucks. Up to $400 if you want new.
Parents, listen to your children about art. You'll hate a lot of things they like -- that's why they
like them. But by definition, they're cooler than you are, and some of the stuff they find will
enrich your life. Culture is at its best when it's a two-way street.
*
I recently read -- well, downloaded from Audible.com and listened to the unabridged recording
of -- terrific installments in two of the best ongoing detective series around.
I suppose that technically, Michael Connelly's series of novels about "Lincoln lawyer" Mickey
Haller are "legal thrillers," but come on. It's a hard-boiled detective/film noir kind of story that
Connelly tells. I'm downloading Connelly's latest novel, The Fifth Witness, as I'm writing this;
what I recently listened to was last year's book, a tour-de-force called The Reversal.
Oddly enough, the book is listed as the 16th installment in the Harry Bosch series. And I suppose
it is, because author Connelly has brought together the heroes from both series into the same
book. After all, they're half-brothers, so it makes sense for them to rely on each other now and
then.
Weirdly, though, the Harry Bosch sections of the book are in third person -- like the Harry
Bosch novels -- and the Mickey Haller sections are in first person.
You may think you don't care about such things, but it's actually quite jarring. In first person,
the character tells his own story. Presumably at some future date he's writing it down.
But when those first person chapters are juxtaposed with third-person chapters focusing on a
different character, it's enough to make you wonder if Michael Connelly and the fictional
Mickey Haller got together for lunch one day and decided to collaborate.
It doesn't help that reader Peter Giles has kind of a contentious tone when reading the first
person sections, as if someone had just contradicted him and he's insisting that yes, this is how it
happened. That tone isn't there in the third-person Harry Bosch sections.
I noticed these problem, but they were very slight and were quickly overcome by the quality of
the story. Haller is a defense lawyer whose first marriage broke up over the fact that his wife, a
prosecutor, worked to get scumbags off the street while Mickey worked just as hard to get them
off.
So it's a surprise to everyone when the district attorney hires Haller as an independent
prosecutor. It seems that a convicted child rapist/murderer has just had his conviction
overturned, based on DNA evidence that wasn't available at his trial back in 1986. But the
prosecutor believes (or at least pretends to believe) that even without the DNA evidence, the
guy's guilty.
That means a new trial, and Haller is going to be on the other side of the courtroom for the first
time in his career. He asks for his ex-wife to be his second chair (but really to lead him through
the jungle of the prosecutorial side of a trial), and gets his cop half-brother, Harry Bosch, as the
investigator to find old witnesses and gather whatever new evidence might show up.
The trouble is that the bad guy is a jailhouse lawyer who always seems to be one step ahead of
them. And some of Haller's cleverest moves turn out not to be half so clever as he thought.
The book kept me, not just guessing, but deeply involved from beginning to end. There's not a
lot of deep characterization -- we know these guys and they have a job to do. But there's plenty
of angst and self-doubt when it matters to the story, and some witnesses and side characters
whose stories are sometimes quite moving. This is one of Connelly's best.
The other mystery novel I just listened to was Mystery, by Jonathan Kellerman. The title isn't
a generic name -- the murder victim went by the name "Mystery." It happens that series hero
Alex Delaware happened to be in the restaurant where Mystery spent her last evening before she
had her face blown out by a shotgun.
That makes him a key to helping his friend, Lieutenant Milo Sturgis, find out who the murder
victim actually was. We're led on a tour of a new kind of internet prostitution -- a kind of find-your-own-whore on a social site. But there's a lot more going on than meets the eye. A very
rich family seems to be involved somehow, and -- as always -- Kellerman takes us on a theme-park ride through the psyches of the slightly sociopathic.
Meanwhile, we get to see the mostly-retired Dr. Delaware work with a child whose mother hires
Delaware to help her son deal with her death -- cancer has a tight grip on her and her days are
numbered. It's an intriguing and sometimes moving situation, though the woman is bitter, angry,
unfair, funny -- and completely devoted to her child.
One of the best things about Kellerman novels is that actor John Rubinstein has a permanent
gig as the reader of the audio versions. Rubinstein originated the title role in Pippin on
Broadway back in 1972, and he's been working continuously ever since, on stage, film,
television -- and audiobook.
Most people don't understand that just because you're an actor doesn't mean you'll make a good
narrator of books. There's an intimacy of style, a clarity of speech; over-acting is a cardinal sin
and most actors commit it. Never Rubinstein! On the contrary, when I listen to a Rubinstein
recording of a Kellerman novel, I remember it as if I saw a full-cast movie instead of listening
to it while exercising or shopping.
I've had the privilege of meeting Rubinstein, and I know some people he's worked with over the
years, and it's nice to know that somebody so wonderfully talented is also generous and a joy to
work with.
If you want to hear what audiobook narration sounds like at its very best, then listen to an
unabridged Kellerman novel, because Rubinstein's performance will be astonishing -- and
Kellerman's books deserve the golden treatment.
*
The audiobook industry is going through a strange transformation. For years, this new and
compelling art form was never quite profitable -- on top of the price of the book, you had to pay
for the production of the recording. It meant that audiobooks -- books on tape, we used to call
them -- cost so much that most people couldn't afford them.
Rentals or loan-outs solved the cost problem for some consumers -- but didn't help the
publishers a bit.
Then there was the complete changeover, a few years ago, to books on CD. They took up a lot
less room than tapes and they never jammed. But there was still that cost factor -- you had to
produce the CDs and package them whether anybody ever bought them or not.
In other words, you had to pay for inventory. Thousands of copies just so there could be at least
one in every major bookstore. And then you didn't know whether you'd sell all, half, or none of
them.
So when you go into the bookstore, you might notice that there are fewer books on CD than there
used to be. No sooner did CDs replace tapes than the CDs themselves were replaced by ... what?
Audio is finally getting way more popular. But it's not because of CDs.
In fact, I used to go running with a book on CD in a Walkman, or a book on tape in a portable
player. I'd hold the machine in my hand while I ran. And what if I ran longer than the length of
the one tape or CD? Horribly inconvenient. A book had to be great to keep me going. (That's
one of the reasons I hated John Irving's The Fourth Hand so much -- it wasn't worth the
annoyance.)
But a few years back, my brother-in-law told me he was downloading audiobooks from
Audible.com and then listening to them on an iPod Shuffle while he ran.
I already used a Shuffle for music, and I knew just how much room it didn't have. So I bought
in iPod Nano and experimented until I found a secure way to clip it to my clothes. Now I have
two dozen or more complete audiobooks with me almost all the time; if I get tired of one, I have
a full menu of alternates waiting for me to pick them. ("Choose me! Choose me!" they all
murmur in teeny-tiny Nano-voices.)
I don't just listen while exercising. I keep the Nano clipped to my clothing and listen while I
drive (while XM radio's classical stations provide background music). When I get to my
destination, I keep on listening without a break as I walk in, shop, and walk out. I only turn it off
to pay.
The result is that I go through about eighty to a hundred audiobooks a year. I listen a lot. And
because Audible.com has such a large collection, I can almost always find something I want to
listen to. And it downloads it automatically into iTunes, which handles transferring it to your
iPod painlessly.
And besides, there are all those brilliant lectures from The Great Courses -- I've completed four
college-level courses since Christmas, besides the three I completed before. I wish I'd had this
electronic equipment and all these great audiobooks and courses since I was a kid. Think of all
the books I could have read by now!
Audiobooks are better than ever. But you don't really need to get them in the store anymore. As
in-store selection shrinks, online selection expands exponentially. That's where the audiobook
industry is moving, because it's the most convenient way to get and read books.
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