I can’t shake Five Centimeters Per Second. Toono’s experience as an adult — I identify with it. Feel it as my state. The details of how we got there are very different and appear far less breathtaking, but we wind up in a similar place, going through motions, not knowing how long we’ve been on auto-pilot. It’s a common story. That wont sit well with some viewers who look for extraordinary things in the stories they watch and/or read. The rest of this might be spoilerish.

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What makes Beck connect with me is how it can remind me of the dreams I had before joining the real world. Nowhere in that dream of red guitars, three chords, and the truth was the idiocy of Leon Sykes, which is where Beck kind of loses me in volume 5. It almost feels like the writer was unaware of how good that story he was writing was and felt scared that without some heavy man vs. man basic plot action the audience would leave.

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There are many reasons why I find Beck amazing. One of the things I really enjoy is how Beck tries to show the cycle that many creative people go through from inspiration, perspiration, to knowing that it’s over and the dream has ended without the desired ending. What does one do after taking the shot and failing?

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Something like Air TV would probably crumble if watched with other people, but I found the stories touching. I think these stories in Air are for sentimental people or people who understand loneliness — maybe it even panders to loneliness a little bit and sharing it. There’s certainly a feeling of late night conversations with Air, the kind of conversations you might share in the smoking lounge of your dorm at four in the morning with the only other person awake on the entire campus and it’s so quiet you can hear the florescent lights hum.

The first story in the second volume of Air TV is Minagi Tohno’s (ep 5 & 6). Minagi pretends to be somebody else for the sake of her grief stricken mother. Her story appears to be easier to relate to than Kano’s. Many people at some point in their lives find themselves in conflict with being honest and possibly hurting someone or playing along with a lie to spare another pain or doing something that causes one misery to please a parent. As with Kano in the previous volume, Minagi’s story has a supernatural connection that’s somehow related to the girl in the sky that Yukito is trying to find.

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A quick rundown of what happens in Beck volume III: Koyuki meets The Dying Breed; Beck cuts a demo; imagine John Lennon as a garbage man; and, things get screwed up with the ladies. Oh yeah, and finally, via Momoko we find out that Saku isn’t gay for Koyuki, I think.

Ever since Maho’s introduction in the first or second episode, I’ve been dreading the impending romance stuff hijacking Beck for a while. I breathe a sigh of relief in that it’s not overly dramatic and mostly we see it from the outside instead of living inside the character’s heads.

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