Karl Marx At The Sunset Of Classical Economics

Adam Smith

For such a famously humble man, Adam Smith left a complicated legacy. A friend and student of David Hume and Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith took it upon himself to inquire upon the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations since the wealth of a nation had so much obvious bearing upon the quality of life of its inhabitants.

David Ricardo

Within Wealth Of Nations, there are mixed up two very different forms of analysis which are not easily reconciled. On the one hand, there was analysis of the "state of nature" and "stationary state", both concepts learned from Hume. In these states, there was a labor theory of value and life was static. On the other hand, there was the dynamic life of growth that he saw in England and America, where he applied a more lax "Supply and Demand" analysis. In so doing, Smith was the father of both classical economics as developed by Ricardo and neoclassical economics as developed by Alfred Marshall.

Thomas Malthus 

The stationary state is one in which land and capital have been distributed and innovation is low enough to be negligible. It is a very unpleasant place: "Though the wealth of a country should be very great, yet if it has been long stationary, we must not expect to find the wages of labour very high in it.". Without movement or innovation, capitalism would then take on many of the aspects of feudalism - Adam Smith examined the late Chinese Empire as a model stationary state.

Without innovation, wages would become a decreasing function of population. This state is often now called "Malthusian", even though it was first developed by Smith and its reality and immanence was not questioned by any classical economist (including Marx). Ricardo (and Malthus) differed from Marx in their predictions about the stability of the stationary state. All agreed that it was, in Marx's famous words, the center of gravity about which capitalist prices moved. Ricardo and Malthus believed that it would be stable, and that life would be horrible forever.

Karl Marx

I promised in a previous post to explain Marx. This can now be done. The price of a good or service (I will say "task") in the stationary state is called by Marx its "value" and by Adam Smith its "natural price". Again, in the stationary state technique, resources and factor cost is fixed for each firm. It is easily seen that in this case, aggregate output is solely a function of the quantity of employees hired. In addition, with fixed technology, a given level of employment for a given task fixes the return for that task. Since the price of a task is  simply the ratio of the total income each unit rewards to the count of units, price in the stationary state is solely a function of labor allocation. This is the "labor theory of value" stated in a fashion both simple and acceptable to anyone.

One can go further than this. In the stationary state, each child born is born to a given task. That, under capitalism, laborers beget laborers, and Irishmen Irishmen was unquestioned by Marx (he despised it, which is different than questioning its truth). This means that price was, in fact, a function of total population. One could not ask for a stronger labor theory of value than the value of every task being solely a function of total population!

Marx went so far as propose a theory that part of total population was left idle in the stationary state, what he called "reserve army of labor". This is no small achievement, it was probably the first quantitative theory of unemployment!

Leon Walras

What about the neoclassical economists? They fit into this scheme just fine. Let me explain. I think it is likely that the Smith-Ricardo-Malthus description of the stationary state that culminated in Marx is correct. Karl Marx also insisted constantly throughout his life (in all three volumes of Capital, for instance), that supply and demand determines the fluctuation of prices. (Wage Labour and Capital suggest that he had in mind something like a cobweb model in mind, but that is a digression)

What does this mean? From a mathematical point of view, Marx's thoughts are a special case. It holds when land, technique, resources and factor cost are all fixed and laborers will be distributed in a unique way between different industries. Marx would, if he were not in a nasty mood, agree whole heartedly! Marx's point is that the Ricardo-Malthus analysis (he would be upset to see Malthus there) is the economically central case. Not the more mathematically general or logically most important. Marx believed that this was a globally asymptotically stable equilibrium, the only results of the economic laws of gravity was to approach it. This is a perfectly logically consistent way of viewing the world. Marx would be pleased with his "critic" who would point out that we can also think of other societies that have different equilbria - that's why Marx was a communist after all!

Robert Solow

Recall that I said Adam Smith had two legacies. The classical economists expanded on his Humean analysis of two possible static equilibrium. But there was another, less developed but more original side to Adam Smith. This was the Adam Smith of supply and demand; the Adam Smith that noticed that England, the United States and probably all of Europe is nowhere close to a stationary state. The Adam Smith who was perfectly capable of noticing that demand curves slope down.

The early neoclassical models of Cournot, Alfred Marshal and Leon Walras were one period models. As a result, their relationship with the theories of Ricardo, Malthus and Marx were terribly unclear. Austrian economists had a particular interest in extending these models to many period, however this line of thought had its greatest culmination in an American economist - Irving Fisher. However, this only increased the murkiness of the relationship of neoclassical models to the Marxian stationary state. The reason was that the Fisher/Austrian models had "periods of time" (and therefore an interest rate), but no growth per se.

The first theory of stable, exogenous growth was proposed by Robert Solow and Trevor Swan in 1956. (I will ignore endogenous growth, which is irrelevant to Marx) Possibly the best introduction to the model and neoclassical thinking about it is here, but Solow's original paper is excellent. Finally we had a model that could accept changes in the supply of labor and the intensity of capital! The analysis of this model may seem to lead to a very Marx-esque solution, asymptotically only technical change produces growth. Since - as noted above - in the long run of Marx there is no innovation, this is okay. But as a matter of fact, this model, and virtually all modern growth models, propose a path of steady growth with no end in sight! There is no cap on the population, no steady state wage stagnation and capital can be accumulated unlimitedly! There are Solow models with fixed inputs, such as land, but the possibility of unlimited growth is baked into the analysis.

How is this possible? Where Marx set economic growth to zero in the steady state, Solow looks to a more economic and less mathematical definition. An economy's growth is called "balanced" if its capital stock divided by its total output is constant. That means each machine is asked to stamp goods at only a certain, reasonable rate. Holding a ratio still means that the numerator and denominator go to infinity - as long as they do so at the same rate. What makes Solow's analysis brilliant is that he is able to find mathematical meaning to that fact and get a quantitative model out of it! The result is clear: economic center of gravity is at infinity, and value in Marx's sense is simply unimportant.

Marx (and his hated enemy, Malthus) would think this analysis is foolish. The crash is going to come - either in population (Malthus) or capital (Marx). This brings us to the sunset of classical economics. As the years and generations - much more than a century - has gone by, this stylized fact and great prediction has failed and failed again. I don't say that the day is over for it, but its light is going out...

Going To Drown Yourself Again? - The Culture Hero And Book Of The New Sun

Book Of The New Sun is one of the great fantasy novels of the 20th century and a great accomplishment in literature more generally. In my brief review, I highlighted a lot of the personality of the main character and how he connected to Jesus and touched on the "Postmodern Catholicism" of the series. Gene Wolfe is one of the great writers in this category, along with - one of Wolfe's major inspirations - Jorge Luis Borges.

But I didn't manage to get across how wide this series is. It isn't just an inverted cross stretched over five books. Book Of The New Sun works within, plays with and expands ideas that are found across fantasy literature. We gonna take a long detour through that literature to make that point.

Joseph Campbell's name is associated with the thesis that all cultures have a "Bildungsroman" story. That means that each culture has a story in which a culture hero begins as a boy, learns to overcome challenges and ends as a man - in control of himself and his surroundings. We can apply this analysis to, for instance, The Odyseey. This story begins with Odysseus, wisest of all men, weeping and missing his home - a child-like state. It then goes through his mythical adventures fighting horrifying creatures and wicked societies including: the indolent Lotus Eaters; the monstrous, wheel-eyed giant Polyphemus; the cannibalistic Laestrygonians; the possessive cannibal-witch Circe; and finally the fearsome abomination Charybdis. Odysseus defeats them by combining strength and stratagem (except Circe, who even Odysseus needs divine aid against). For instance, Odysseus clings to a tree to avoid Charybdis's maw and uses his knowledge of the tides to get his raft back. But this is only half the story. In the second half, he reconciles with his wife and son and defeats those who abused his hospitality in his absence. After father and son defeat the false fathers (Freud would be proud), Odysseus takes his place as husband, father and King Of Ithica, lord of himself and all he surveys.

There is much packed in this story. There is, of course, the implications that foreigners are lazy, dangerous cannibals and you should thank your family god you are in Athens. The most obvious to a modern is the culture hero Odysseus's underhandedness. But there is a moral lesson: to the Pre-Socratic Ancient Greeks, wisdom was power just as muscle was power. "Knowledge is itself power" as Hobbes (who was very influenced by the Greeks) said. Muscle allowed you to exert your will over the world by force, wisdom by stratagem. A harsh ethic for a harsh existence. Indeed, the poetical tropes of Homer required there to be a death in every chapter, even if it makes no sense.

As an aside within an aside: Socrates's students and followers devoted a lot of time and ink explaining why their master allowed himself to die rather than use his wisdom to exert his will on the jury - a shocking choice to the Ancient Greeks. This is, itself, a sort of Bildungsroman with this moral: The childlike pre-philosophical boy fears death, the philosophical man does not. Even Plato cannot conceive of wisdom without power - there is no doubt in his mind that Socrates could have escaped if he wished.

I don't want to go on too long about Greek Mythology. There's a lot of it in Book Of The New Sun (perhaps a philologist would be able to recover Theseus from a thesis and Minotaur from Monitor). But we had to highlight the Bildungsroman aspect of The Odyssey, how it followed Odysseus into his life as the ideal Greek Man - the culture hero - to define what Book Of The New Sun develops. Of course, other stories have followed similar patterns (if they didn't, it would have been Hero With One Face). There's Rama, who was Campbell's initial inspiration. Moses, of course.

In modern times, the "growth of the culture hero" story has taken on new forms. One of the most interesting artistic works is Wagner's Ring Cycle, which is about the decline and fall of one culture hero - arrogant & duplicitous supernaturalist Wotan - and the rise of a new one - the natural ubermensch Siegfried. SPOILER NOTE: I know Siegfried dies in the last opera, but his naturalist culture lives on.

Barzun once said that there was a time when he was young in which one could learn a man's every opinion based only on his opinion of Wagner (it was - to use language he would not approve of - a sufficient statistic). Tolkien was initially quite influenced by Wagner, though as he developed as a philologist soon abandoned him for the real thing (mythology and ancient poems), at least consciously. Tolkein's great epic The Lord Of The Rings has a similar end of one culture hero/start of another plot. The biggest difference is that Tolkien's humanism allows him to be comfortable with ordinary men inheriting the Earth, and his conservatism allows him to enjoy the Mythic Age. Wagner's Wotan is a backstabbing hypocrite - personally, sexually and politically. Tolkien is able to be much more subtle in his depiction of the age of myth (more subtle than Wagner - there's some weak praise!).

But let's concentrate on Tolkein's earlier, simpler story: the fairy tale The Hobbit. This is a story of an obstinate, prejudiced and proudly dull upper middle class Englishman (oops, I meant to say "hobbit"!) forced to see how the world really is on an adventure. In the end he's: seen the world; survived a war he tried to stop; had to steal to save lives (including his own) - and out of convenience; made friends of all races and backgrounds; discovers real, scary, beautiful, powerful nature; gone without food; learned the difference between a furrier and a fur-changer - and maybe even learned a bit of humility. The lesson is obvious: go see the real world and you'll learn something, dammit! With Tolkien's background, the culture hero starts out lazing about smoking a pipe - today he'd be drinking something trendy and reading things on the internet he already agrees with (it's lucky I don't have readers).

This concludes the quick dip into the history of culture hero stories.

Of course, I have no way of knowing whether Gene Wolfe learned culture hero stories from Wagner, Tolkien, Campbell or The Church Fathers. Likely it was all of them and more beside. No matter where it came from, Book Of The New Sun is consciously developed as Campbellian Growth story - but not by Wolfe. Instead, Severian - the author, narrator and main character - develops the story as a tale of his rise to the throne. As noted before, Severian's inability to see through his culture and upbringing makes this difficult in ways similar to, though more extreme than, in The Odyssey.
Severian writes his story as his own journey from being an unimportant apprentice to becoming the Autarch - literally "Self-Ruler". But he doesn't understand (until possibly book 5) his predecessor's hints about those behind the Autarch, nor does he ever put together who it is behind the sinister Group Of Seventeen.

But this is not the full extent of Wolfe's game, nor does it even hint at it. Wagner was able to play with the culture hero by depicting him (Wotan) as an emblem of everything that is detestable about Old Culture. Tolkien was able to go further and more consistently. Wolfe outdoes them all, telling a psychologically convincing story of a man who thinks he triumphed and has become the culture hero but fails to see the real forces behind him (until the fifth book, which is a slightly separated narrative). This is a powerful conceit that gives Severian real psychological depth. He thinks he's learning, and - after all - he keeps succeeding! It would have been easier to make Severian - a torturer, executioner, etc - a backstabbing hypocrite like Wotan, justifying the divinely stacked deck as merely part and parcel of his own awesomeness. Instead, Severian is able to question himself and wonders about his often miraculous victories and tries to learn from them. It is something like humility and one of Severian's very few good points.

Yes, Severian fails to notice that the story is not a Bildungsroman - which makes it a far more interesting Bildungsroman! Okay, you might think this is a bit pretentious. I claim that Severian models his tale of his life story on the myths culture heroes, not knowing that he is really telling a story of greater powers working through him. Hegel is supposed to have called Napolean "The World-Spirit on horseback.". The World Spirit working through Severian is quite a bit bigger than that!

But there is more than just a vague feeling of similarity that points to this. Scattered throughout his memoir, Severian reveals that he simply enjoys reading about culture heroes. I've noted one above, another would be "The Tale Of The Boy Called Frog". Severian enjoys mythology, fairy tales, etc. and so I submit that he has unconsciously adopted their form even when he leaves their genre. That this applies to the reader has implications that are left as an exercise.

This accounts for Severian's writing, but let's end by pulling back and talk about Gene Wolfe's writing for a bit. Wolfe's accomplishment here is worth noting: not only did he invent a culture with a culture hero (in the vein of Tolkien) but he invented a culture with a false culture hero. He asks us not just to see a new culture, but to see it skeptically. Another book that attempted something similar is Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream. But where The Iron Dream is so disgusted that it can't take it's characters "morality" seriously at all (that character being Hitler himself might have something to do with it), Book Of The New Sun is more able to sit within its character's skin. It also helps that Wolfe's expansive vocabulary and Borgesian imagery is much more fun reading that Hitler's diatribes. To put it short, Book Of The New Sun is a great accomplishment as an artistic work that can be read many times, always growing with the reader.

Kantian Origins Of Peircean Frequentism

Immanuel Kant

Charles Sanders Peirce was an early "evolutionary" philosopher. He believed that while our knowledge was now imperfect, correct science would - as a whole - learn to reduce those imperfections. He was a serious student of German Idealism (famously, he studied philosophy by reading one page of Critique of Pure Reason a day). He also helped found statistics, experimental psychology, modern logic and much else. Today, I want to look into how his interest in philosophy and statistics cross-bred.

CS Peirce

How much of an evolutionary philosopher was Peirce? He went so far as to define "truth" as the outcome of an ideal scientific process. For instance, imagine we didn't know Peirce's first name. We could look it up in a book, you say. That's the best scientific practice, therefore that's the truth. Let's be more extreme. Say that, for some reason, direct records of his first name had been lost. At first we would only know that his name is in a certain set. By our knowledge of human language we know that his name isn't "Hmxfrzt". By historical considerations we can eliminate "Cao Pei" and "Christina". Through long search and careful philological textual criticism, eventually we figure out it was probably "Charles". Therefore, it is true that Peirce's first name was "Charles".

This is eccentric because we normally think of "Charles" as being Peirce's first name because of actions done in the past (namely, his being named by his father), not because it is an outcome of actions of philologists of the future. This definition will even have an important effect in his statistical prescriptions.

Peirce's definition didn't come out of thin air. To recapitulate: On the one hand, he was an experimental scientist inspired by his work in physics, psychology, etc. On the other hand, he was a serious Kant-inspired philosopher. In particular, Kant's image of the sensible world of experience and the unknowable world of things-in-themselves was an inspiration to Peirce as a statistician. The world we can see, hear, smell, taste & feel is called the "phenomenal world" (as in, it's where phenomena occur), the deeper underlying world is called the "noumenal world" (we'll get to why in the next paragraph).

How do we gain knowledge of the noumenal world? Remember that this is the old days, before some young Germans questioned Newton & Euclid. So most people believed we did have knowledge of the underlying world-in-itself. Kant did not. Kant believed that the phenomenal world was basically psychological and sociological. Human beings evolved to perceive the abstract world-in-itself in Newtonian/Euclidean ways, he thought. We - our society - adopted conventions constrained by those evolved capacities. This mode of thought was further developed by Schopenhauer and I've covered it on this blog before.

Peirce (and, earlier, Hegel) disagreed with Kant. They hoped that perception of the things-in-themselves would turn out to be solid and objective rather than subjective and biological. Hegel defined truth as the outcome of a long social process - one which, unfortunately, only existed in his mind. Peirce defined, as we saw above, as the outcome of a convergent scientific process - processes that he then went out and tried to do.

In Peirce's theory, the real world-in-itself is a set of interacting (possibly/often non-measurable) facts and relations between these facts. These facts can be constants, such as the 19 parameters of the Standard Model, or they can be variables, such as the total population of a country or temperature. These facts can be basic, like energy, or "emergent", like temperature. That underlying world could only be approximated sadly phenomenal studies. Therefore, even crafty experiments surrounded the true values (of, say, the fine structure constant) with error bars. Pierce called these error bars the "probable error", today we call the equivalent notion "confidence interval". Peirce's work is, in many ways, the beginning of statistics.

Peirce first developed his statistical ideas when studying the experimental errors of using pendulums to study the acceleration due to gravity, but it is equally valid to consider coin-flips. The facts of a given sequence of coin-flips are statistically related to the underlying reality of governing the coin. In the case of coin-flips, we can appeal to Bernoulli's theorem to prove that the scientific best practice leads to The Truth, the coin-in-itself.

This is a mathematical version of the general example I gave above, when we learned Peirce's first name. You then might again notice that Peirce's definition of truth is eccentric. Mathematically, one must posit a true value and prove convergence toward it. I think Peirce would reply that this is a mathematical convenience and the truth was the reverse, a coin is known as fair from the throwing. Peirce developed this definition in scientifically relevant ways. For instance, he would say that Bayesian methods are not scientifically relevant unless paired with a robust convergence proof. One can construct instances in which a Bayesian procedure does not converge. From Peirce's point of view, this would mean that for such agents, the truth is meaningless.

So we see how philosophy affected statistics. Peirce's forward looking definition of truth ruled out Bayesianism, his love of Kant made Frequentism attractive. Notice that these are logically quite separate!

All this would have been by itself interesting, but Peirce actually went further. He gave a specific quantitative guide to such reason in his "Note on the Theory of Economy of Research". The essence of Peirce's reasoning is here. Peirce's discovery is even more remarkable because not only did he notice the parallel with the ratio of marginal utility - he also did so in 1879, making him the among the first important American Marginal theorists of any kind!

Given the importance of Marginalism in his thought, one should not be surprised when he says: "The truth is a kind of efficiency.". Surely someone who could say that can be called a pragmatist.

Though Peirce had a chance to become one of the great economists of his time, he didn't take it up. In addition to the above, he was also the first to state the axiom of transitivity of preferences (he had to be - he also invented relational algebra). Interestingly for the proto-frequentist, he was also the first to measure systemically subjective probabilities and among the first to rigorously define probability in terms of economic decisions. Unfortunately, he rarely took the time to find deeper implications of his economic thoughts (the above being the only exception to this rule). Certainly, his rival Simon Newcomb (interestingly, the rivalry, while well-attested, was unknown to Peirce...) would not have appreciated it.

Karl Marx

All that brings me to the next 19th century philosopher/economist to explain: Karl Marx.

Cowboy Bebop Review #6: Sympathy For The Devil

It's interesting how expectations can work. I kind of had memories of this one being mediocre, maybe even skippable but damn was I wrong. This episode has great use of music, a solid script by head writer Keiko Nobumoto,  great boards by Tensai Okamura and fine direction by Ikuro Sato. Tensai Okamura is a big time director now. His big series is Darker Than Black , which ... I've never seen. Ikuro Sato, like a lot of the Bebop crew, went on to do a lot of moving and shaking in The Big O, the cult classic giant robot series.

I haven't really talked about Bebop or its director Watanabe's enormous influence in the industry. Studio BONES was founded using money from the movie and was originally mostly Bebop production staff and their friends. Watanabe's next series, Samurai Champloo, was the first series made by Manglobe. Watanabe also directed both the first series and the first original series made by MAPPA (both series were also made for Fuji Television's prestigious noitaminA block). Though he's never been "famous" in Japan in the way Miyazaki or Anno is, he's a bona fide industry legend. I'll try to keep more track of Bebop's industry influence in future reviews.

Your Ramblings Bore This Fish

Oh, right, the episode! This episode has a plot that is a lot more obviously SF than the previous episode. So, being a crafty one, Nobumoto uses this as an opportunity to organically work in a few metaplot points. One is Spike's artificial eye, a metaphor so ingrained into my brain cells that I inadvertently talked about it last review in spite of the fact that a first time viewer won't know he even has an artificial eye until this episode. We don't learn what it symbolizes for him until much later. The presence of the eye in the falling montage from the last episode was for those rewatching. Bebop constantly reminds one of Gene Wolfe's definition of a great story: "One that can be read with pleasure by a cultivated reader and reread with increasing pleasure.".

The other is a bit of a spoiler for this episode. I'll get to it in a bit.

Wenn

"Oh Death, done stole my mother and gone"
- Charley Patton

Spike awakes from unpleasant dreams to find himself in a blues club. A kid, a child virtuoso is playing the harmonica masterfully. The song he is playing is called Digging My Potato,

I can't help but notice that Wenn is dressed like Lupin III. Interesting, since Spike himself is also influenced by Lupin. Why would they set up a parallel between these characters? Anyway, Spike and Jet are after a Yakuza looking guy named Giraffe. When they try to make their move, they notice their friend Fatty has shown up.

Fatty

It's such a weird, real moment. It isn't that they are upset to see Fatty, it's just that they didn't want to hang out right now. Look at his reactions too, he doesn't want to hang out with them either. We'll learn later that he's also hunting Giraffe. Maybe it's just me, but I found this part of the scene hilarious. I also love that Fatty makes a joke almost exactly like Jet's joke, so you can even see why they'd be friends. Also, Nobumoto keeps great control of the emotional movement in this scene. From Spike's nightmare to the joke about Fatty isn't whiplash from dark to funny (cue George Lucas: "It rhymes"). It's a control that I feel is lacking in many anime. Most anime go for one emotion - Comedy, Horror, Drama - and spend their entire running time trying to build it. Others, like Trigun, deliberately mix two, leaving thick globules of comedy in between layers of drama. Bebop much more skillfully stirs emotion together.

Ein & Faye

Faye eats dog food in this episode. That's a thing that happens in an episode where I felt it was appropriate to break out the Samuel Johnson. What's great about her eating dog food isn't just that she eats dog food because she's broke, but how she and Ein act about it. When she starts eating it, Ein reacts with stunned silence. Then Faye gives a whole speech about how, as a woman she needs to be pampered (with dog food). She calls Ein a "hunting dog", though Ein is a Welsh Corgi and therefore a herding dog (such depth of insight these reviews). This is another example of one of Faye's traits that I've mentioned before, her love of long-winded justifications for selfishness. A very human trait, one that I'll go into more detail when it is played more dramatically.

Ein could bring up that she is also a woman, but she is too polite and also a dog.

Spike hunts down Giraffe, who is stalking Wenn and his (SPOILER) "father". He catches Giraffe's falling body with the Swordfish II, which is impossible in so many ways that I can't even begin to describe them. Well, I'll mention one: physically. Still, the important thing is that Giraffe gives Spike a mysterious crystalline plot coupon.

Hmm ... mysterious crystal? That looks like a job for

The Bebop Universal Analyzer!

Yes, some universal analyzing gets done. Jet and Faye begin to do research on the Bebop as Spike goes after Zebra and Wenn. Jet gives a little speech about men being bound by iron codes of honor, Faye calls him out on this and his response - "I'm trying to believe it." - is perfect. Jet, Spike and Faye are all bearing burdens of their secret pasts. What is Wenn's burden? Spike finds out what he's in for his way, while Jet and Faye find this:

Faye recognizes that in this newspaper clip Wenn isn't with Zebra (hey, good thing we brought her along). This newspaper clip is actually a collage, little bit of formal experimentation on this episode's part. The sick man is supposed to be Vincent Gigante, who in our world faked mental illness to try to escape prosecution. His counterpart in Bebop's world really was paralyzed and - here's the catch - used by Wenn to construct a criminal empire.

Wenn is immortal due to the explosion of a hyperspace gate. Yeah, those things that open most episodes are actually pretty important to the the series. The explosion somehow made Wenn immortal. Jet is able to put together that Wenn does this repeatedly, using his immortality to attack violent organizations, taking them over to protect himself from being experimented on any more. This explosion has basically destroyed the Earth ecologically, economically, socially, etc.

The decimation of Earth has a deep alienation effect. Bebop is filled with ephemera inspired by American Culture, Chinese Culture, and so on. To it's original audience, those were foreign cultures. Part of the message of this is that there never will be an episode set in Japan, Japanese culture no longer exists. Bebop keeps trying to convince you to hold it at an arms length instead of inviting the viewer in. This is an important part of that.

In the series itself it's an important plot point in many ways. As you'll see, it's impacted many characters lives directly. There is no capital of the Bebop world, local governments float freely and bloat. There are no native cultures anywhere. It's even created a generation gap between those who remember the Earth and the hard-scrabble world of , even vaguely, and people like Spike & Jet who do not.

Well, back to this episode. Zebra and Giraffe used to be part of a vigilante group, which was attacked by pirates controlled by Wenn. Wenn crippled Zebra and took over the group. Giraffe tried to save Zebra, but Wenn killed him too - you saw that earlier.

Zebra & Giraffe

"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."
- Dr Samuel Johnson

Wenn's immortality has forced him into immorality. Spike decides to do him a favor and take him out. Jet gets stuck with infodump duty. Beau Billingslea, Spike's English language voice actor, is a master of infodump. In Outlaw Star, he would do little speeches at the beginning of each episode to introduce a new concept in a way that wouldn't slow down the plot. Before Spike rides off to fight the invincible and immortal demon, Faye gives him her first "I'm glad you're dying anyway." speech. You'll see these a lot.

Faye brooding

Spike faces down Wenn, and needless to say the episode doesn't end with Wenn going supernova. Wenn's surreal life has an obvious reflection with Spike's past. They both live strange, unanchored lives after something that should have killed them. In another life, Spike could have descended to Wenn's level. Instead, he bears the pain of being a man. Spike throws Wenn's harmonica in the air and mimes shooting it. An effective ending (and one that will echo through the series) to a powerful story.

This was a really good episode! Episodes 5-8 are the power trio era of Bebop, and this episode is one of the stand outs - not just in the show, but in all of anime. The lion's share of credit has to go to Keiko Nobumoto's powerful script. And it certainly helps that Yoko Kanno's music really is good enough to make Wenn's emotional outlet through music believable. If I had to make a complaint, every scene in this episode seemed like a slow pan. Ikuro Sato seemed to be trying to add dynamism but only had one trick up his sleeve. That said, there weren't as many blatant off-model moments as episode 3 (there are a few times they deliberately give Faye weird expressions). A solid episode that will continue to be heard through the rest of the series.

More Light! A Review Of Book Of The New Sun

"My first thought was, he lied in every word"
- Robert Browning

Who are the great writers to use unreliable narration? Robert Browning, Vladimir Nabokov and Gene Wolfe. One can compare Gene Wolfe and Browning - Wolfe has a greater vocabulary, a finer education (Browning believed that "slughorn" was a real instrument and "twat" was once polite) and a larger scope. One can compare Gene Wolfe and Nabokov - Wolfe has greater imagery, less formality and (let's be honest with ourselves) more thrills.

The best trick of unreliable narration is basically moral. Nabokov's most famous book, Lolita, is about a child rapist who uses his erudition to avoid the reality of his monstrous actions. The careful reader has to find the seams, how he shifts Dolores's characterization from coquettish when she is trying to escape from him to - and I am phrasing this as ugly as possible to highlight the horror of the situation - slutty when she submits to his demands. The narrator dances around, shifts blame, waxes poetic, he does anything he can to avoid admitting his unforgivable brutality. I remember one writer describing Lolita as inspired by totalitarianism and from what I've seen of such regimes, Humbert differs from them only in writing better.

Indeed, what makes a great unreliable narrator? It is, of course, reliability.  An obvious con-man (such as the three card monte sharp) interests us for a second, then the feeling passes. But the great con-man or con-woman lies in how he or she says it, not at all in what is said. Sam Spade sees right through Brigid O'Shaughnessy's lies, but her delicately worded truths? Those are poison. The first line of "Childe Roland To The Dark Tower Came" quoted above is an example. Roland is wrong: the old man gave true directions. It would be ridiculous if the poem ended with the revelation that the above was not his first thought, but he said it was! That would be unreliability, surely, but it would not be human.

The main character and narrator of The Book Of The New Sun is Severian, who we watch rise from an apprentice torturer to the "Autarch" (essentially, the emperor) of the land and go beyond. Severian is gifted with great strength, perfect memory, complete honesty and real courage - he is damned with the critical skills of a kindergartner, the cruelty of a tyrant and the self-control of an alcoholic. He lives on a world, Urth, where the sun is dying out (if I may be allowed an important spoiler, it is not dying of natural causes). Gene Wolfe calls Urth "the future where we sit around and wait for the money to run out.". It is a world so old and so lacking in innovation that mining is not done to get raw materials, but to fish up superior ancient artifacts. In this, it is very different from our world. It is a world where incomprehensible cruelty is ignored and those really responsible are never blamed. In this, it is very similar to our world.

Severian is easily, trivially manipulated - especially by women. One particularly determined peasant woman repeatedly cons him and eventually is crowned Autarch in his absence. Severian would torture and murder anyone if told to in a relatively stern voice, in fact he does so repeatedly. On the few occasions that he does take a moral stand, it seems to destroy his life. He often hallucinates respect when there is only fear. Severian was made this way - it is a useful trait in professional torturers and executioners. Like much else, Severian fails to notice even this.

"He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire."
- Matthew 3:11

Should I reveal the joke? Severian is, to a large extent, an inverted Jesus figure. I say this advisedly, in the complexities of Urth, land of the dying sun, he certainly is a savior - a Christ figure. Let's look at their most obvious traits as literary characters. Jesus was a carpenter, a creator of things. He even draws on beautiful carpentry metaphors ("A house divided on itself..."). Severian is a torturer, capable only of rending. That he understands the world through torture metaphors heightens our distance from him. Jesus was a preacher whose sermons are respected even by those who don't believe in his divinity, he often has to explain metaphors to his thick headed followers. Severian is a reclusive executioner who has great difficulty with abstract concepts - and even greater difficulty applying them. Jesus is tempted explicitly, but never commits a wicked act. He performs miracles, healing the sick and even raising the dead. Severian is capable of such things, but instead mostly maims, murders and perhaps even rapes, occasionally sneaking in a good act. Jesus was born in a miraculous virgin birth. Severian is a mostly forgotten orphan. Jesus was killed on a cross - Severian kills with a cross (Severian calls it an "iron phallus", a hilarious inverted Freudian thesis until you find out what iron phalli mean to him and imply about his world...).
 
Jesus was the son of the God of the covenant, who specifically promised to never drown the whole world (Genesis 9:11). Severian the unwitting servant of immensely powerful entities. When Severian brings the New Sun (I don't think that is too much of a spoiler for The Book Of The New Sun) and baptizes us in fire, it triggers a deluge.

"Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say ice."
- Robert Frost

One of the most interesting Severian never really understands the deeper conflict happening through him, between the secret masters who wish to control this world even as it freezes and those who wish to renew it with a new sun. Those who know anything about contemporary fantasy literature will notice that this is the exact theme of A Song Of Ice And Fire: the pointless cruelty of the Game Of Thrones has completely distracted those in power from the fact that the world is about to be destroyed by ice demons. Further, George R R Martin also uses first person unreliable narrators. If Martin ever said that he wasn't deeply influenced by Gene Wolfe, I would only wonder Martin lied this time (after all, he's told the truth before).

Before I move on, A couple running gags about Severian that I never see anyone notice: He can remember directions perfectly, but never once travels without getting lost. He seems incapable of being near large bodies of water without ending up underneath them (eventually the gods give up and give him the power to breathe underwater).

The world of Urth is beautiful, complex and mysterious. The plot of Book Of The New Sun only spans one year, but the powers behind the stage use multiple realities and time travel to stretch the story across tens of thousands of years. This is only one layer of deception. My favorite thing in speculative fiction is when an author is able to give the feeling of a vast world with a small line or one drawing. Gene Wolfe draws upon his immense vocabulary to do this. For some, this technique might be a distracting gimmick. But for me and Wolfe's dedicated following, this arsenal of words creates a world one can imagine living in. The smell of nenuphars will be forever ironically innocent. Gene Wolfe, a dedicated Catholic, uses the vast imagery of Catholicism (especially Medieval Catholicism) to imbue life into every aspect of Urth's culture.

As an aside, I honestly don't think a non-believer could make an inverted Jesus figure like Severian. Severian's massive cross-shaped executioner's sword - Terminus Est - wouldn't mean anything to someone who had no dedication to what the cross means. Another example is the official name of the Torturer's Guild: the Seekers Of Truth And Penitence. This name is meant to make clear that they are an inverted priesthood. But if one did not believe that the priesthood was not (in some sense) a guild of Seekers Of Truth And Penitence the inversion loses all power. To be clear: this is not proselytizing fiction at all. This is an artistic work deeply informed by Catholic philosophy and culture, but not of the Catholic Church.

Gene Wolfe's accomplishments in Book Of The New Sun are immense. He is the greatest living Catholic writer in the English language. If there is a greater living novelist of any background, I can't think of their name. In spite of all this and all that I have said, I can only say one thing in praise. Gene Wolfe often expresses bewilderment that Book Of The New Sun is so respected, even though he admits that he worked hard on it. What that means is this was a story that had to be told, not something that he wrote so that he would be appreciated. The whole of this book is built on that fundamental honesty, one necessary for all great art.

Fawning, Worshipful Pseudo-Review: A Moveable Feast

Ernest Hemingway

Somewhere in the early chapters of this book, a memoir of a the middle period of his life, Ernest Hemingway describes the way he wrote his short stories - start with the truest, shortest sentence you know and tell the story it implies. Hemingway is constantly writing in this book. Writing comes easy for him because he had learned so many true sentences. We tell young writers to write what they know. We should add that they must strive to know interesting things. This memoir begins when Hemingway is 25 years old. At that point he was or had been a war hero, an alcoholic, a great hunter, a poet, a husband, a journalist, a father, a fishing guide, an editor at a powerful literary journal, a nurse and an unabashed fanboy of all modern art.

Gertrude Stein

A Moveable Feast may be Hemingway's memoir, but it is not about him. We learn many things about him, sure. That he was propositioned sexually by an older man while stuck in the hospital, that he thought nothing of having bottles of wine with breakfast, that after he quit journalism he would skip meals and tell his wife that he'd eaten to save money, and that he knew how much more time to wait for a thermometer with a large volume. But these are all incidental asides, stories that he tells the other, more central characters. This book is organized around his friends, his many great friends that he learned so much from. There is Gertrude Stein, a conservative, homophobic old man who happens to also be a hypermodernist intellectual lesbian woman. She expected as a matter of course that the wives (including Hadley Hemingway) would go to the other room while the "men" talk. She is an inveterate advice giver and Hemingway - being a young man - hangs on her every word, even as he knows they become absurd (particularly, her homophobia). Hemingway recounts that she pushed aside friends who could not help her career, and counts himself lucky that he was able to get her published.

Ezra Pound

There is the energetic Ezra Pound, always coming to the rescue of some poet or another, such as some American expat in England named Tom Eliot. He is a warm man who never fails to support a friend - oh yes, and also a raving fascist convinced that usury is the cause of all wars and Jews the cause of usury. There's Joyce, the half-blind family man who Hemingway and the others (except Stein) consider the greatest writer in the world. Hemingway even frequents a restaurant after hearing Joyce eats there. There's a host of other characters whose names do not ring in the halls: bartenders who served the world's great artists but remembered nothing but their favorite sandwiches, duplicitous literary editors who are just about to grant you a prize, old men who could fish in the River Seine and that famous garage owner who shouted at his laggard mechanic "You are all a génération perdue!".

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Perhaps the most famous word painting is the caricature of Scott Fitzgerald, the low functioning alcoholic to Hemingway's high functioning. Hemingway gives Fitzgerald full marks as a writer. "His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings.", he says (so dry and grey that hemingway prose, haven't you been told?). Scott Fitzgerald ignites within Hemingway a passion to write a novel, a somewhat important little ambition in Hemingway's life. The sober Scott Fitzgerald is a kind, helpful man and a great artist with language. It's too bad that being around Hemingway means absorbing a small bucket of alcohol, which chemically converted Fitzgerald into a rude, paranoid jackass. One passage that would be funny if it weren't sad is Hemingway describing his attempt to not get Ftizgerald drunk - they would only have one bottle of the lightest wine Hemingway could order with their breakfast. They could not conceive of a day without alcohol, even though they knew the consequences. If you keep in mind that Hemingway talks about his friend and rival at low points in their lives, you'll see that the conception of Fitzgerald is not mean spirited. But perhaps it is a bit unbalanced.

Hadley, Bumby and Ernest Hemingway

It goes without saying that this is a Great Book, something immortal even if it is grounded in a specific time, place and culture. It is a book filled with brilliant passages and insight, written in that often attempted, never imitated rapid, clear Hemingway style. Like Shakespeare, after reading this book you'll want to quote it's quips and observations in every situation. Like The Dream Of The Red Chamber, it is the tale of a tiny, beautiful and self-destructive subculture that you cannot help but admire even as you ponder its alien values.

The French translation of the title is Paris Is A Feast, and it is. This book too is a feast, a spiritual feast that can move to any time that you need.

Steven Universe Segment 11: Rhythm Is A Gamer

So, this episode has three storyboard/writer/whatevers and watching it I have to wonder "Which is the good one?" because the last third of episode is like way better than the rest. Seriously, once the little monsters come back, it gets way better. Did anyone else notice this? Maybe it is just me.

So, this is a very simple episode where Steven, after an adventure with the other Gems decides to bring them into his world - the arcade! A cavalcade of laughs that. So they try out some games and the one who gets the most addicted - and this is gonna shock you - is the deadpan one! Like George Bernard Shaw, this deserves both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar.

Okay, okay, just because a plot outline is a little cliche doesn't mean the episode is bad, and this episode isn't bad at all. I just realized that the evil aliens have all been crystalline, which means I was supposed to realize that all the aliens are gonna be crystals. When they are stalking their enemy, Pearl shushes Steven which reminds me of the tragic early death of Saki, who was killed by a sniper he was loudly warning another soldier about. There's some funny "Pearl is a fuddy-duddy" stuff in this episode and Amethyst even managed to not disappear (though she does nothing of any importance). Because of the simpler plot and the lack of meta-plot reveals, they seemed to generally hit more of their goals this episode. I say that and I'm sure that long time fans know that Garnet's rhythm hypnosis is the secret to life ... or something. That's the risk I take.

I didn't notice any animation "moments" that stood out, but as I said earlier the last third of this episode gets really good direction-wise. Perhaps this is because the episode concentrates more on the deadpan Garnet and not the other more theatrical Gems. The artists seemed to go out of their way to not draw Steven consistently, which is an interesting choice.

To clarify: when I say "direction", I don't mean literally "things done by the director", but all the visual choices that are not specifically animation drawings. Blocking, "lighting", etc. I haven't been mentioning it, but this show has some killer colors. I'm generally not a fan of digital colors, but this show is a strong argument for them. Music was also very good in this episode, especially the sort of Drum N' Bass piece that plays as Steven, Pearl & Amethyst run from the little monsters.

 Overall, I'd say this is probably the strongest episode of Steven Universe I've seen so far. I'd be willing to use this episode as a baseline to judge the others, but I've been told that it is going to improve a lot really quickly.

Cowboy Bebop Review #5: Ballad of Fallen Angels

Personal Note: Yeah, I haven't blogged in a long time. During this time I had to do a lot of attention consuming work, navigate several international bureaucracies and generally put my life in order. Reviewing Bebop has also inspired me to try to get back into art, and I'm trying to learn animation from the good ol' Preston Blair book. I'm returning because I want to though, and so you should expect more activity.

"I'll play it and tell you what it is later."
- Miles Davis

So, this is a difficult review. Somethings are so legendary that they say more about you than you can say about them. Citizen Kane, for instance. It's a great movie and there is a ton to say about it - how it used simple special effects to hit way above its budget, how it inspired so many different filmmakers to believe that you didn't need a ton of extras to make a movie, its brilliant writing/acting/music...

But that's all been said. There are plenty of other examples - Miles Davis's Kind Of Blue, Super Mario Bros. 3, the best Shakespere plays, the best cartoons of Bob Clampett - things that just stand above everything else in a manner so natural that it is strange that they used to not exist. When you try to critique Shakespere, you just end up condemning yourself. SMB3 is just how good platformers feel damn it all! And so on.

Session #5 of Cowboy Bebop, "Ballad of Fallen Angels" is like that. Written by Michiko Yokote, storyboarded by Shinchiro Watanabe, directed either by Watanabe himself or Tetsuya Watanabe (both are credited), this episode is one of the all time classic episodes not just of Bebop but of anime. I once said of Relaxin' With The Miles Davis Quartet that if you don't like it, jazz probably isn't your thing. There's nothing wrong with that - find something you do enjoy! If you don't like this, probably don't bother with anime - at least not at the more dramatic stuff. I don't mean that in an exclusive way, you were game, gave it a shot and you can now live your life without regrets.

Spike Spiegal

Now, technically, the story of today's episode stretches all the way back to episode one. The montage of violence episode was the first glimpse of The Spike Spiegal Story, which is the Official Main Plot Of The Show (TM). Bebop is at its most interesting when riffing far beyond the normal routes, but it does to set up what is going on. The OMPOTS comes back again today

Vicious

That this episode is going to concern Spike's story is actually a twist in the cold open - one of several. Sorry about that. The episode starts with Mao Yenrai of the Red Dragons and Carlos of the White Tigers signing some sort of peace treaty. The Red Dragons are a powerful Triad and Mao is happy to have finally made peace. As you can see above, a character named Vicious ruins it - blowing up Carlos's ship and personally murdering Mao. Mao's dying words reveal that Spike, Vicious and Mao have a long history. This is a very well made scene with lots of big, neat shots and good use of editing.

We've talked about Spike, so let's talk about The Black Bird. Vicious's black bird is obviously inspired by Captain Harlock's similar pet. The overall concept of Cowboy Bebop was influenced by Lupin III and it doesn't take a detective to realize that Vicious evolved out of Goemon from that series - especially if you know that Goemon was originally one of Lupin's enemies. Similarly Spike is somewhat based on Lupin, Faye has some similarity to Fujiko and Jet has a couple of Jigen's traits. None of these resemblances are very close. For instance, when Goemon was a bad guy, he was a hot blooded over-actor just like all of Monkey Punch's characters. Vicious is a stone cold, stone faced killer, we've already seen this. We don't know much of his personality yet but I'll leap ahead a bit and tell you that Vicious is obsessed with betrayal and Darwinian conflict. He is very much for both.

Back on The Bebop, Spike & Jet discuss the situation. The Bebop is a boat/spaceship like the Arcadia, but less awesome. This is the first time that Spike & Jet have a serious confrontation. Yes, they disagree constantly, but this is less jovial. Jet wants out of the latest bounty scheme - he smells a trap. The information is too easy, if such big money was such low hanging fruit somebody would have scooped it by now (he doesn't say this, but it is implied). He's right, of course, but he doesn't know about Spike's connection to -

Oh hey, it's Faye. She has a bunch of bags, clothing bags. She walks in on the fight and tries to get caught up on what is going on by asking perfectly reasonable questions - which annoys everybody, including herself.

 Watanabe's storyboard/direction involves a lot more acting than others, there's a lot of complex non-model sheet expressions in this episode. Faye is particularly funny here. After the boys leave, she gets a hot tip from a violinist tells him that Mao is going to see a showcase at a theater. Faye wasn't present for any of the research that was done, but decides to gamble on swiping the bounty from her "comrades" after drawing a lucky card from a deck that Spike was playing with at the beginning of the scene.

The theater has a bunch of great stuff! First Faye parks like a complete jerk, then when she goes inside we see a great array of new background characters

The fat cat with the cigar is very Lupin III, and look at the neat dress on the purple girl to the right! This show spoils us. Faye is deliberately acting annoying on the theory that if she does people will assume that she has a reason to. Unfortunately, as Jet pointed out earlier, this is an obvious trap. Perspective is used very well in the scene on the balcony. Several shots are made from the perspective of what we already know to be Mao's corpse, which doesn't make sense. Only after the scene shifts to Faye's perspective and we see where Vicious is standing to the other shots make sense from a perspective ... perspective. They were what Vicious was looking at! This is obvious, of course, but it makes you realize how much less thought out shots are in other shows.

As Faye walks into Vicious's trap (in her defense, she was kept out of the loop that would have made the trap more obvious) Spike goes to meet a contact. Some kids try to shoplift dirty magazines from a store. Interesting trivia, the black kid's character design was recycled from an early concept for one of the leads! A character that hasn't been introduced yet, though. The dirty magazine girl is labelled Judy. Though the "Judy" character from Big Shot has blond hair and the girl in the centerfold has brown hair, I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't trying to imply she was an ex-gradol. It would be typical of Bebop's subtlety.

I don't know to what extent I can or should continue recapping the plot, since it becomes very suggestive here. Spike and his contact Annie talk, but they know each other and don't feel the need to expodump for the audience's sake. For the plot of the episode, the only important thing is that Annie knows that Mao has been murdered, foiling Vicious's plan to flush Spike out by leaving a bread crumb trail into traps. Meanwhile, Faye is captured.

That Shinchiro Watanabe can't do anything without tying someone to a cross. Well, you'll know that if I ever finish these reviews and go to his other stuff. Faye doesn't take the whole kidnapping thing seriously - in fact, she reacts pretty much how Fujiko does in Lupin III. She gets kidnapped a lot, Fujiko, but - HUGE SPOILER ALERT - Faye doesn't make so much of a habit of it. Faye asks for help and to her shock gets it. It makes you wonder what was going through her head. Did she really think Spike would leave her there? Well, they don't know each other very well yet...

You remember I was typing just a few paragraphs ago about how imposing this episode was to review? How much of it has become iconic, not just of the series but of the genre? Well, in particular the rest of this episode is like that. It's so big that it can be difficult to write about. Perhaps I should talk about the color, which is more stylized here. It is interesting, Bebop is such a well colored show that nobody ever bothers to mention it. It's stylized and often dark, but never does it succumb to what John K calls "piss & shit color" syndrome. In other words, it doesn't dull the colors down. Look at the church above, it's purple! Real churches aren't purple, but it matches the scene so beautifully. Go back to the part where I talked about the guy with the cigar and look at how that opera house is painted. The biggest anime of 1998, the year Bebop came out in Japan, was Cardcaptor Sakura - based on the hit CLAMP manga. It looked like this:

Well, it doesn't usually have YouTube crud around it. But look at how much more flat the colors are compared to all the other screenshots of this post! I don't mean to pick on this show. If you want a cartoon to watch with a little girl that doesn't make you want to kill yourself, Cardcaptor Sakura should be high on your list (other choices: Powerpuff Girls, Unico, I've been told My Little Pony is better than it sounds...). The manga is the best thing CLAMP ever did and they know it. What I want to say is that this what a show with a good budget and large audience looked like - colorwise - in 1998. Oh, and there are limited palette flashbacks coming up, they're real neat.

Oh, and the music. When Spike approaches the church, knowing it is a trap a song plays called "Rain". It's actually a demo version - the intended final singer has a throatier voice and more gospel interpretation, but Shinchiro Watanabe and Yoko Kanno seemed to decide that the purer voice was more appropriate. Yoko Kanno's first musical memories were of playing an organ in church. Obviously she's playing the organ on this track, but she's also - through the miracle of multitracking - the choir on the even more iconic "Green Bird" that ends the big scene.

So, Vicious and Spike talk for a bit and one of Vicious goons tries to talk down Spike by using Faye as a hostage. Spike, channeling Dirty Harry in Sudden Impact doesn't deescalate the situation. In a waaay later situation, we'll see an even more obvious homage to that scene. Then, right on the last organ note of "Rain", right where Sergio Leone taught us to put all gunpla

BLAM

And the network complained this show was violent...

So, this sets up a huge shoot out in the church, John Woo style. Once again the production team comes up with numerous interesting faces and characters where they really could have just had generic thugs. I particularly like gangster Black Jack here:

Of course Spike takes these guys out and then fights Vicious. Faye escapes and calls Jet, who is taking care of his small forest of Bonsai trees. He seems to actually get the message of Bonsai and leaves to help them. Then, the most famous montage in anime history happens, capping the most iconic part of this most well known of episodes. When Spike is falling, attention is paid to his right eye - which has symbolic significance to him, but the first time viewer won't know why yet...

Yeah, there's those limited palates

I won't say much about the flashbacks. One is that there is only the one tall blond woman in the flashbacks and you will learn her name, Julia, later. I once had a friend that was completely confused until I realized that he thought all the blond women were random people in Spike's life. The other is that similar flashbacks are in every episode in the form of the end credits. Knowing this will probably help you get a pretty good grip on that pesky OMPOTS despite Watanabe's "show, don't tell" aversion to adding too many words to things.

Spike survives this confrontation with Vicious, presumably scraped off the ground by Jet. Faye is waiting by his bed. Usually this is played romantically, but Faye ruins it by demanding to be thanked for her presence and Spike double ruins it by complaining about her presence. Faye's attempt at not-stomping while stomping off after this is hilarious. The episode ends with Spike contemplating the same ambiguous card Faye drew earlier.

Obviously, this episode ranks as one of the all time greats, not just in the series but in the entire genre. With a well thought out plot, naturalistic acting, great action, brilliant art and wonderful music how could it miss? One of the great things about Bebop is its restraint in keeping its hands off the OMPOTS to keep its lead genuinely mysterious. So we aren't going to see Vicious or the enigmatic Julia again until the halfway point of the series. Well, if you think that overly detailed narratives are the hallmark of high art, well there's always Bleach for you. Still, I'll give a quick preview of what to expect. For the next three episodes, Watanabe explores more early Bebop - mostly bounty driven episodes around the core power trio of Spike, Faye & Jet. Some people think Session 8 is where the show really found its voice. That might be true, but the cast won't fill out completely until Session 9. Beyond that lies an even more interesting and artistic series. I hope to bring it to you soon!