PopBetty

A Love Letter to Pop Culture

Floor-to-Ceiling Bookshelves

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When I get my own place, my first and only must-haves are windows and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Not a bed, not a Sub-Zero, but windows and bookshelves:

Dining room designed by Diane Bergeron Interiors

Best bookshelves ever. Dining room designed by Diane Bergeron Interiors (via Orange Beautiful).

Fitzhugh Karol and Lyndsay Caleo's home

Fitzhugh Karol & Lyndsay Caleo’s beautiful (I’d call it perfect) brownstone. See Design*Sponge for the full set of pictures.

Scott Engler’s house, shot by Melissa Kaseman

Another favorite is this still from Scott Engler’s house, shot by Melissa Kaseman (via Design Sponge). One day, man, one day.

Twilight Manga Is Good for Comics. Also, Water Is Wet

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twilight manga
Last week, EW.com reported that the Twilight series’ will get a comic book adaptation, to be published by Yen Press (sample illustration above). Korean artist Young Kim will provide the art, and Twilight’s author, Stephenie Meyer, is supposedly reviewing the comic panel by panel.

You can gauge general reactions by reading the comments on Entertainment Weekly’s post; for manga/comics fan reactions, see the comments at MangaBlog &  ANN. To boil it down: you’ve got excited Twilight fans, some comics fans who realize how great this is for Yen Press & manga/comics as a whole, some people moaning about Twilight’s quality, its fans, & its role in the destruction of culture, and plenty of people bitching about the art based on 1 or 2 panels.

From a bookseller’s perspective, though, this is pure BRILLIANT.

No matter how you feel about the series’ artistic merits, Twilight sells. Women of all ages (not just teenagers) are addicted to it (Lucy Knisley’s comic take is dead on). They buy Twilight from bookstores rather than online or the library, because they need those books right now. They pay for hardcovers because they can’t wait for the paperbacks. They come to the register with a 40% off coupon, and upon discovering that said coupon has expired, will still buy the books at full price, because again, they need them. And they will smile at you while they do it. They scare me (kidding! I love you all).

twilight posterMore to the point, Twilight fans buy the books AND related merchandise. At my store & most others, Twilight books are not just shelved in the YA fiction. Instead, the series has its own table, stocked with all the books, plus the branded t-shirts, key chains, Edward lunch boxes & action figures, jewelry, and any other vampire series staff can stick there. We even sold Twilight perfume at one point (it was blood-red and overpriced).

That’s why Twilight manga is such wonderful news for Yen Press, and consequently for comics. Unlike other manga publishers, Yen Press still offers high quality products for relatively low prices. It’s also one of the few publishers still taking risks, like licensing manhwa & manhua, adopting orphaned licenses like Yotsuba&!, and putting out OEL titles (Nightschool, Maximum Ride, etc). Its presence is vital to the manga industry.

So if, as ICV2 noted, printing Twilight manga is the closest publishers can come to printing money, then even Twilight haters benefit. Money from Twilight manga will subsidize the Cat Paradises of the Yen Press catalog, and everybody wins.

Twilight manga is also good news for manga, specifically shojo manga, and more specifically Viz’s Vampire Knight. Vampire Knight is already described as the manga version of Twilight; the series is a bestseller, too, so most bookstores have it in stock, making it easy to up-sell.

Whether or not other series or non-manga comics will benefit is less certain, but I think we’ll see a nice ripple effect as women (and maybe a few guys) learn how effective the comics medium can be. It’s ironic that a series cited for manga’s declining sales in 2008 should become manga’s white knight apparent, but there it is.

Even for those who hate Twilight (I confess, I read some book excerpts, saw the movie, then promptly gave up), the manga might be decent. Or at least, not terrible. Twilight’s plot & audience always seemed very shojo (during the last Boys Over Flowers craze, it was described as the Twilight of Asia), and a comic adaptation lacks both descriptions of Edward (“porcelain god”) and bad acting. We shall see.

edward bella manga
Read more: Melinda Beasi’s take at There It Is, Plain As Daylight; Johanna Carlson’s take at Comics Worth Reading; Deb Aoki’s take at manga.about.com; and an excellent roundtable on Twilight, SDCC, and gendered fandom snobbery at Robot 6.

Currently Enjoying…

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PopBetty - Currently Enjoying...

Clockwise from the upper left hand corner:

a) Illustrator Nell Brinkley’s women were the Roaring Twenties’ answer to the aloof Gibson Girl. Curly-haired, rambunctious and more than a bit naughty, the Brinkley Girls were a national sensation, referenced in the Ziegfeld Follies and copied by young women everywhere (they even spawned a popular line of hair curlers). Biographer Trina Robbins has worked hard to reintroduce Brinkley’s work to the mainstream, and her latest effort is Fantagraphics The Brinkley Girls: The Best of Nell Brinkley’s Cartoons 1913-1940, $29.99 (or pre-order it for $18.86 at Tower.com). You can read more about Nell Brinkley and her work at Paul Gravett’s site & the Ohio State University’s Cartoon Research Library.

b) We have gardenias growing outside our apartment, and they smell heavenly. Annick Goutal’s Gardenia Passion comes the closest, in my opinion, to capturing their scent; like most of the line, it costs, but online sellers like Perfume.com offer substantial discounts (30-40% off).

c) Shiny Squirrel pointed me to DearGoldenVintage, another wonderful Etsy vintage seller. I particularly like these red heels with flame detail ($44.00).

d) This J. Crew pleated lawn skirt ($59.50) makes me think of tennis matches & ice cream.

e) Every time Kid Cudi’s “Day N Nite” comes on the radio, I think “I love this song.” Also awesome: the video, with its trippy rotoscope animation.

Manga Preview: Saint Young*Men

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saint oniisan Saint Young*Men (aka Seinto Oniisan) starts with a unique & sacrilegious premise: Jesus & Buddha, needing a break from heaven, end up sharing an apartment in present day Tokyo. Each chapter features the pair discovering some new modernity (manga, public baths & swimming pools, roller coasters, bargain shopping) with silly results.

For example: Jesus parts the waters of the swimming pool. Buddha weeps while reading Tezuka’s Buddha, which inspires him to write his own manga (no one gets it). Jesus tries to put aside his selfish desire to see a parade (Buddha wants to go souvenir shopping), but fails (and terrifies bystanders) when his stigmata spurt blood. At the public bath, a Yakuza gets the wrong impression when he asks Jesus who wounded him, and Jesus cheerfully answers “The government.” You know, typical stuff.

jesus is a player
Jesus has admirers at the konbini (source).

Saint Young*Men succeeds largely because manga-ka Hikaru Nakamura pushed aside any urges she had for religious commentary or criticism, and went straight for comedy. That decision created a minor miracle: a religious comedy that manages to be funny without ridiculing either faiths or their followers. Instead of irony, Saint Young*Men offers a “grandpa joke” vibe, emphasizing puns and nudge-nudge in-jokes (like Jesus’ horror at being offered a dead fish). It’s such a light touch, in fact, that some Catholic & Protestant churches in Japan have distributed the comic.

saint oniisan tickets
Buddha & Jesus debate if they can get the senior discount at an amusement park.

So when English language write-ups of Saint Young*Men note the unlikelihood of a licensed American version, I don’t see why. We have sensitive believers here, but manga readers rarely fall into that group. Also, compared to pop phenom South Park, whose pilot featured Jesus & Santa in a death brawl over Christmas, Saint Young*Men seems positively wholesome. Considering the series’ popularity and critical acclaim in Japan, and the amount of blogger buzz it has already generated (sans an anime series or long print run), I’d be more surprised if someone doesn’t snatch up the license.

You can read more about Saint Young*Men at MangaCast, watashi to tokyo, kyuuketsukirui, & Otaku Champloo. The first five chapters are available in English at Megchan’s Scanlations (the source for the excerpts).

saint oniisan on a rollercoaster
Jesus & Buddha try a roller coaster.

Review: Harumi’s Japanese Home Cooking

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harumi japanese home cooking For Christmas, I received a copy of Harumi Kurihara’s Japanese Home Cooking. Kurihara has been dubbed the Japanese Martha Stewart (no doubt by her publishers), and this book, with its bright images & chic layout, definitely has Stewart’s flair.

Kurihara is more immediately endearing, however. Chatting with her over a beer doesn’t seem impossible, as it does with Stewart. You can also see why Kurihara’s fans look up to her while simultaneously identifying with her: she’s a 60-something woman who looks two decades younger, and in her own words, is “not too beautiful.” She learned cooking as a housewife, but has a perfectionist streak. While her recipes are practical and built for speed, she still suggests making your own sauces & noodles. Convenience isn’t king, domesticity isn’t a burden. If anything, Kurihara makes it look easy & fun.

harumi vegetables

As for the food, how do I put it…

Some of it is great. I’ve made the teriyaki chicken twice now, and both times everyone loved it. The sweet egg roll was tasty. Her recipes are elegantly simple & straightforward, and I like that she reuses many of the same ingredients without losing variety. On those strengths alone, I recommend the book.

Half of what I’ve made, though, fell short. The miso soup worked once, then flopped. The sesame dressing felt heavy. The ginger pork was delicious, but the accompanying salad dressing only so-so. The rice with peas (below) was terrible. Half of it was gooey, the other half crunchy, and I still don’t know what happened.

harumi rice disaster

Part of the problem is Kurihara uses a gas stove, and I have hot plates, plus we have different pans. That’s a hurdle with any cookbook, but it means I can’t trust her cooking times, essentially providing me with more room to err. That is, when Kurihara provides cooking times; too many recipes feature vague instructions like “fry the garlic until you can smell its aroma” or “place salmon under a hot grill until just cooked.”

Another issue may be personal: no cookbook can match a user’s tastebuds exactly, and I may have started off with the wrong recipes. For example, the miso soup uses a bonito flake dashi, and I think I prefer kombu or another kind of vegetarian dashi. I’ll try more recipes and post an update to this point later.

harumi pork

Finally, a more general difficulty may be the ingredients. You’ll need a specialty grocer, mainly for non-perishables like mirin, chili oil, & shichimi togarashi. Even then, you’ll have to improvise (e.g., several recipes call for Chinese soup paste, which I can’t find). Plus, the ingredients you do find may not be the right ones; while Kurihara provides notes for foreign ingredients, they aren’t extensive and she leaves out basics like mirin & soy sauce. I understand why she would; that said, many Americans have never used mirin, and some don’t know the difference between Kikkoman & La Choy soy sauces. If users don’t already have some grasp of Japanese cooking (and some knowledge of what things are supposed to taste like), they’ll find themselves veering further and further away from the intended product without even realizing it. With cookbooks like this one, where pared down dishes emphasize the combination of a few key flavors, that’s extra problematic.

Verdict: Presentation & personality distinguish Harumi’s Japanese Home Cooking, and while the recipes aren’t fool-proof, they’re still worth trying. Just adhere to the instructions & avoid substituting ingredients when possible (and have a backup plan if that fails). Read more about Kurihara at The New York Times, East West, SantaFeNewMexican.com, & BNET.