PopBetty

A Love Letter to Pop Culture

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 Saint 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) or at onemanga.com.

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.

Manga Preview: Moyasimon

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Like, oh, everyone, I’m thrilled that Del Rey licensed Moyasimon: Tales of Agriculture. Winner of the Kodansha Best General Manga award for 2008, the manga also spawned a brilliant anime series, available piecemeal on YouTube. Most American fans familiar with the series discovered it through the 12 episode anime (which covers the first four tankoubon).

moyasimon bacteria
Image/manga by Masayuki Ishikawa.

Moyasimon centers on Tadayasu Sawaki, an agricultural university freshman who can see and talk with bacteria. To him, however, the bacteria resemble a cross between microbe plushies and Princess Mononoke‘s tree sprites. They’re adorable, and like the manga itself, marry the technical with the irreverent.

It’s that marriage, between scientific curiosity and mischief, that distinguishes Moyasimon from other seinen or edu-manga series. It’s a peculiarly childlike approach, and therefore designed to appeal to anyone with an inner child, preferably one seeking the gross, bizarre, and extraordinary.

In the first chapter, for example, we see human-size radishes and unearth a dead seal. We watch Sawaki’s professor suck a sea bird’s fermented guts out of its rear (a delicacy known as kiviak). Later story lines include various cutely rendered infections, all conveyed through Masayuki Ishikawa’s distinctive art. The characters are first-rate, too: unusual, flawed, and funny. UPDATE: Kate Dacey has an excellent full review here.

Del Rey will the release the first English volume November 24th. For more info, check out these related posts at Riuva, Japanese Book Reviews & Kids Web Japan.

Book Suggestion for 8-Year-Olds Who Like Gross Things

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Chewy Gooey Rumble PlopAnother last-minute gift recommendation: Chewy, Gooey, Rumble, Plop. My cousin Jamie is into “gross stuff” at the moment, so a pop-up book on the digestive system seemed appropriate. This one features a 3-D tongue with a realistic sticky texture, plus action tabs of people burping, vomiting, or using the restroom.

It also features fascinating trivia, for example, did you know that poop is 10% dead bacteria? Or that the reason your mouth waters before you vomit is to protect your tooth enamel from stomach acid?

At the same time, the book provides a structured, linear view of digestion, all in language that’s understandable and yet not dumbed down. Highly recommended; I only hope Jamie likes it as much as I do.