Polymerization

~ I have an artistic way of looking at the world.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about art, and the fact that there are so many … good pieces of it. I would go as far as to say we are living in a Golden Age of art. And I don’t mean the 2010s or 2020s or whatever, I mean the 20th and 21st centuries. So much great cinema, the invention of TV and new modes of writing and production, rise of animation and evolution of on-screen acting, the creation of video gaming technology and fresh forms of storytelling style.

It’s all here for us to experience and be inspired by.

This got me thinking about how my personal appreciation of art is totally multimedia. I enjoy — and have written about — stuff from many mediums of dramatic fiction and literary creation. I wade across the spectrum of possibilities — literature, movies, music, manga, TV, anime, video games. Fantasy and sci-fi, philosophy and politics, high and low brow, people and albums.

I am continuously seeking *peak* fiction. And I am finding it.

To fully visualize this, I decided to make a collage of every major title I have appreciated enough to write something about on this blog.

I wanted to reflect on the fact that everything I write about is a polymerization of … everything I experience. Everything in my life, and everything in the world of art I love enough to call favorite. It all contributes to how I view the world and what I choose to create.

“Polymerization” is, of course, a Yu-Gi-Oh! card that lets you Fusion Summon 1 fusion monster from your Extra Deck, using monsters from your hand or field as Fusion Material. This is where I learned the word, in 3rd grade, after buying the Kaiba starter deck and some booster packs from my local Wal-Mart. Watching the anime on Saturday mornings depicting mystic card dueling played for souls and ancient Egyptian technology delved me further into the mythology of Yu-Gi-Oh! Thus, it and “Polymerization” hold an important part of my childhood memory.

Polymerization, scientifically-speaking, is “any process in which relatively small molecules, called monomers, combine chemically to produce a very large chainlike or network molecule, called a polymer.”

There are 12,456 *Yu-Gi-Oh!* cards and counting.

To me, polymerization has another meaning. I’ve always loved the word and when possible use it to describe a diverse combination of factors, or ideas. Like many, a manifold. More than just two monsters fusing as one, with my description you’d have a fusion of possibly dozens of notions. Example sentence: Michael Mann‘s movies are a glorious polymerization of his working class upbringing, his early love of cerebral cinema such as Dr. Strangelove, and his apparent and constant belief in “ordinary people under extraordinary pressure.”

I especially appreciate the cartoonish yet compelling art on the card itself, a spiraling transformation of dragon and daemon. The brilliant art design of Yu-Gi-Oh! is drawn from its source material, a manga by Kazuki Takahashi.

Yu-Gi-Oh! is the Japanese strategy card game started in 1999 and continues to this day. The complex card game is borne of the manga by the same name, authored / designed by the aforementioned Takahashi. I played it with friends growing up and I have a moderate collection of decks and cards (not nearly as much as my Magic: The Gathering collection… Many “Elder Dragon Highlander” 100-card MTG decks to my name).

My favorite card, like Kaiba, is Blue-Eyes White Dragon.

Tragically, beloved mangaka Kazuki Takahashi died earlier this year at age 60. Heroically, as reports now detail — Kazuki drowned trying to save people caught in a riptide off the coast.

Rest in peace, king 👑.

I create this in honor of Takahashi’s memory.

Here is what my collection of favorites looks like. I am proud to add Yu-Gi-Oh! to that list. Rather haphazardly, I chose 1 singular image — covers, cinematography, gameplay imagery, portraits — for each piece, across 3 styles of collage.

Altogether, this is the visual polymerization of my unconscious mind, the cloverleaf crossway of my personal taste in the artistic: