The Stuff of Dreams is yet another bit of the map in the atlas of the Vampire Hunter D universe, one where we see the first real test of the strength of D’s spirit instead of just his sword. The book gives us a new facet of the D mythology and explore it through a character we’ve come to know well—even if the sum total of D’s reactions to things is still stolid indifference. He’s more a mirror of his surroundings than an active hero, anyway, a catalyst for things to go wrong. He disturbs the equilibrium of evil more than he righteously seeks out the good. And while I’d rather see a character who’s more proactive than that, Hideyuki Kikuchi wraps enough goings-on around him to make him interesting by proxy.

The Japanese term for a freelancer, no matter what the occupation, is the English-derived prefix free-, and that’s how the two main characters of Vibrator introduce themselves to each other. They’re “free”, in the sense that they have no real obligations to family or friends, no connections with even the society that sustains them, however casually. They’re free to float around like unpaired oxygen atoms in the void, which explains why they bond so violently when they meet. They have nothing better to do.

Her name is Rei (Shinobu Terashima), and she’s a freelance magazine writer; his name is Okabe (Nao Omori) and he’s a former gangster hanger-on, now a truckdriver. They run into each other at a convenience store where Rei is looking for the right kind of wine to drown out the self-hating roar in her head. Nothing in her life seems real outside of the feelings she keeps bottled up inside—and in a country like Japan, where so much depends on the face you present to people, who wants to know you’re an emotional wreck? But she’s drawn to Okabe, with his dyed skullcap of blond hair and his easygoing manners, and she walks out into the parking lot where his truck’s idling to find him waiting for her. He had looked at her and felt the same electricity she did, and with that she climbs up into the cab and roars off with him into the night.

Film and TV soundtracks are often the bastard children of popular music. The best composers in the field, like Jerry Goldsmith or John Williams, are regarded as hacks by the classical community—a rather short-sighted view, given that many of their own favorite composers did many of their best pieces as for-pay hackwork in their time. Fans of more conventional popular music may recognize the names, but rarely seek out the music on its own. The closest most people get to this sort of thing is showtunes, which are fine but terribly limited in scope: it’s a little like narrowing all of rock’n’roll down to only what came from England (or the USA itself).

The choices become all the more esoteric when you leave the United States, or English-speaking territory altogether. Japan has long had one of the most vibrant music scenes of any country, and within the narrow-sounding field of soundtracks for their live-action and animated TV / movie productions there’s a striking amount of activity going on. In that field, one name comes to the fore more than almost any other: Yoko Kanno. Put aside the fact that she’s a woman (even if she’s working in a field that as far as I can tell is predominantly male—in itself no small thing in Japan); put aside the fact that her main forte is soundtracks for animated productions like Cowboy Bebop, Wolf’s Rain, Arjuna, Macross Plus, the anthology film Memories, and many others. The one fact that matters: out of all the other musicians in this space, she is the only one I could describe as a genius without flinching. Her work so comfortably spans so many styles and modes of expression, and so well, that I’m not sure any other word will fit.

Once upon a time, a record company was a brand of distinction—you could pick up a Motown record and know to a high degree that you were going to get not just a certain kind of sound (or soul), but you’d be picking up something that was highly reflective of a given person’s taste. Motown is now part of Arista, which is now part of BMG, and likewise many other former “labels of distinction” have been absorbed into the same collective whole and rendered fairly faceless. A great many indies have similarly followed suit—Wax Trax! is now nothing but a marketing logo used by TVT (itself part of Time/Warner)—and the end result has been a lot of extremely bland music with no particular purpose.

There are still a few holdouts, though, and it probably isn’t surprising to hear that at least one of the most important ones is not in the United States. P.S.F. / Modern Music is headquartered in Setagaya, Tokyo, and after having listened to a fair smattering of their catalog over the past decade I don’t flinch when I hear people describe them as “the most aesthetically perfect record label in the world” (Forced Exposure). They’ve earned the label by sheer dint of selecting, publishing and curating one remarkable artist after another, and as a result every time I’ve picked up a P.S.F. disc—even one of their compilation albums—I’ve been at the very least impressed. Typically I’m left speechless.

How quietly and starkly this film tells a story that still has such horrible immediacy. Without politics, without cant or hypocrisy, and without even much fanfare, this film shows us a dramatization of a scarifying incident from real life and gives it meaning and focus. When trailers for the film first appeared and audiences (and pundits, and critics) shouted “Too soon!”, I had to ask: Since when do they need your permission to proceed? An artist that does not provoke is nothing more than a sycophant.

And as it turned out, director Paul Greengrass (Bloody Sunday) had already gotten permission from the people who were most in the position to give it: the relatives of those who had died onboard United Airlines Flight 93, hijacked by terrorists who ostensibly planned to fly it into a building in Washington, D.C. From everything that has been reconstructed about that event, they died so that others on September 11, 2001, might live. To wait for the “right moment” to tell such a story is simply asinine. The right moment is always now, and some day there will be people who were not alive at the moment and will need to remember what the moment was like.