Written by The Curmudgeon S un-drenched Hollywood hills and a symphony of car horns. Enter a loaded freeway, brimming with vehicles. And then the music starts; various faces singing the glories of how they left their old, perfectly sound lives behind in favour of the glitz and glamour of Hollywood dreams. Meanwhile, a traffic jam. Everyone is, both literally and figuratively, going nowhere. Such is the introductory sequence of Damien Chazelle's 2016 musical La La Land . For those unfamiliar with the plot, La La Land tells the story of an actress, Mia, and a jazz pianist, Sebastian, searching for success in Hollywood - to little avail. It doesn't take much to decipher the inherent irony of the opening scene of La La Land.  So many people, so much ambition, yet all that L.A. has in return is stasis, if not stagnation. While they warble their obliviousness to that fact in "another day of sun", the brutal difference between their expectations and reality becomes...

Written by The Curmudgeon T here’s this fantastic video by the YouTube essayist “ Channel Criswell ” which dissects the episodic nature of Shinichiro Watanabe's 1998 series  Cowboy Bebop (check it out here ). The piece satisfyingly interrogates the narrative distance that forms between the protagonists and the stories which they inhabit, from which the episodic structure stems. While I think everything in the video is pretty spot-on, it got the gears in my brain turning, and I guess I'd quite like to try my hand at discussing the existential angst of Cowboy Bebop . In as few words as possible, I would go on to suggest that the most important effect that the episodic structure has on Cowboy Bebop is an everlasting sense of ephemerality. This ephemeral tone (although not exclusively symptomatic of episodism) is what I intend to unpack. In case anyone reading this is unfamiliar with Cowboy Bebop , it essentially revolves around a group of space bounty hunters in th...