Destined for Greatness

 
Destined for Greatness
Passions, Dreams, and Aspirations in a College Music Town

by Michael Ramirez

photos by Mike White

Rutgers University Press

2018 

 

 
Destined for Greatness is a sociological study of rock musicians in Athens, Georgia. Ramirez interviewed 48 musicians across 22 bands about how they got started in music, what their music career has been like, how they imagine their future. His interest here isn't in the artistic content of the songs, but in the job of being a musician. The book is organized around the stages of the lifecourse (and their intersection with the stages of having a career) with a special emphasis on differences between men's and women's experiences.
 
Although all Ramirez's interviewees were based in the same town, his research is not ethnographic, and there's no thick description of the Athens music scene, of what it's like to play or listen there, of what any of this music sounds like, beyond that it's rock rather than some other genre. If you go into the book expecting that, you'll be disappointed. His study is written up much as it would be if he interviewed people from across the country, about almost any kind of work. Though just as Ramirez isn't trying to be Gary Alan Fine, he's also not trying to be Michele Lamont, so there are no elaborate selection criteria for making a half-dozen comparisons between various 'halves' of the sample. Gender is the main point of difference between the musicians. Most of the rest of what Ramirez finds is similarity across them (or differences with little systematic basis).
 
The musicians Ramirez talked to aren't nationally famous; most are probable little known outside of Athens. Their level of success varies. A few make enough from playing local shows and regional tours to treat music as their full-time job; most are musicians in addition to other work, usually service jobs, occasionally office work. To be included, the band had to rehearse and perform regularly, and to either tour or have an album. The weakest part of each chapter is actually the introduction, when Ramirez tries to link whatever he's talking about to something a nationally famous musician has said in a public statement. He's on far firmer footing writing about his actual interviewees.
 
Ramirez frames his work primarily from a lifecourse perspective, and he's especially interested in the idea of emerging adulthood - supposedly a recent stage of life that sits between the end of adolescence and the start of full adulthood, when people have mostly achieved independence from their parents, but not yet achieved a marriage, mortgage, career, and children of their own. (As I understand it from authors other than Ramirez, the idea that people commonly wed and start having kids in their late teens or very early twenties is an expectation set in the historically abnormal 1950s. We hold ourselves to an imaginary standard set at a weird time.) 
 
Like many people their age, young adult musicians tend to delay forming their own families. Unlike most, their chosen career isn't seen as a 'real' or 'grown-up' job by others, so they have added difficulties in feeling like full adults, rather than like they've 'fallen behind' their peers. I think the extended apprenticeship of grad school might produce a similar feeling, and there are probably other career trajectories with the same problem, particularly in any creative field.
 
As I mentioned, the organization of the book centers on the stages of the lifecourse. We get a chapter about how they discovered their love of music, how they learned to play an instrument, and how they started playing rock music. We get a chapter about forming their first bands and playing their first shows. We get a chapter about the challenges of making a career out of music, especially for those who have to integrate musicianship with other employment, and about how they think about their identities as musicians and as adults. We get two chapters about gender - one about men in rock music, and one about women. And we get a chapter about how musicians envision their futures, whether they'll keep performing, and how they plan to continue their careers.
 
I started reading this hoping for an ethnography of the Athens music scene, but I appreciate Ramirez's research, and his insights into how people negotiate informal careers in creative industries. There are a handful of black and white photos of the scene; I sort of assume these are from around the same time Ramirez was doing his interviews, but that they probably don't show anyone he actually spoke to.

The Creepy Case Files of Margo Maloo

 
The Creepy Case Files of Margo Maloo

by Drew Weing

First Second

2016 

 

 

The Creepy Case Files of Margo Maloo is a kids' comic about a boy who moves to the city, discovers it's full of monsters, then learns that monsters aren't as scary as he thought. 
 
Our viewpoint character is Charles, an aspiring journalist whose parents have just moved into a fixer-upper apartment in a former hotel. Echo City is on the coast; it's a bit economically distressed, though maybe things have recently improved. The titular Margo Maloo helps out other kids who have monster problems. Her main rules for helping are that the monsters were here first and have at least as much right to a peaceful life as the human kids do, and that you can't tell any adults about the existence of monsters. 
 
Creepy Case Files has three chapters. In the first, Charles sees a troll in his bedroom at night. A neighbor kid, who really wants to set a world record for like hopping on one leg or standing on his head, gives Charles Margo's business card, and she shows up to help negotiate a peaceful resolution. The troll's annoyed that the hotel's getting remodeled, but he and Charles find common ground in their love of little stuffed toys that definitely are not Beanie Babies. In the second chapter, inquisitive Charles gets Margo to agree to let him tag along while she helps find a lost kid in an abandoned restaurant that's haunted by a ghost. In the third chapter, Charles is falsely accused of kidnapping a baby ogre. (He's been seen snooping around, and monsters have trouble telling humans apart!) Margo finds the baby and clears his name, with Charles taking on a Watson-like role.
 
Charles's parents dress like former Gen X alternative kids. They're excited by the DIY opportunities, and the fact that unlike in their old small town, the can get quinoa in the grocery store here, and carry-out from Korean restaurants. I feel like author Drew Weing included those details for parents who are reading with their kids to enjoy. Also for grown-ups' benefit - Charles's dad trying to explain the fraught ethics of gentrification to an disinterested 10-year-old, and dad clearly worrying that his White son isn't getting along with the neighbors before realizing Charles is talking about monsters, which are obviously just make-believe. The neighbor kid who wants to set a record is Black, and it seems like they will be friends. Margo looks Mediterranean to me. She's too much of a loner to consider Charles a friend, but by the end of the book, she might accept him as a partner in this monster business. 

Witch Hat Atelier 12

 
Witch Hat Atelier 12

by Kamome Shirahama

Kodansha

2024

 

  

The previous several volumes of Witch Hat Atelier set up all the pieces of a comprehensive disaster. Now they've been set in motion, and everything's in chaos. The girls have traveled to the annual Silver Eve festival, attended by witches from all over the countryside and by even more onlookers. The festival is a chance for witches to show off their newest spells and compete for royal patronage, and for the public to enjoy the spectacle. 

 

The king is there, ready to meet with the most promising inventors, publicly affirming the agreement about witches' role in society, while privately studying old forbidden healing magic. The Pact, you see, says that spells should only be cast on objects (never on people), prevents ordinary people from knowing the truth about magic, and bans witches from learning anything about first aid or medicine. The Knights Moralis enforce the Pact by erasing the memory of anyone who violates it (the only spell they allow to be cast directly on a person). So the king's secret is a serious breach of the law!

 

Coco and Tartah have started realizing they have feelings for each other. They also have serious doubts about the Pact. It's not just that Coco fears that saving her mother (who's been turned to stone) might require forbidden magic, she's also increasingly uncomfortable thinking about all the other people magic could help if it were used for healing. Coco feels especially guilty about Custas, who was injured and lost his dad in a landslide. The accident was partially caused by one of Coco's spells, which came out much stronger than it was supposed to. 

 

Custas is at the festival too, angry and volatile, using forbidden magic to compensate for his injured legs. And his dead dad is here, returned to a kind of cursed half-life by forbidden magic. The forbidden witch who taught Custas is here - she looks young and innocent, like one of the student witches. She wants an audience with the king, and extorts Coco to try to get one. Among her threats is the tantalizing promise that the king could truly heal Custas and his father.

 

The Knights Moralis are at the festival of course, there to prevent any breach of the Pact in the setting with the most contact between witches and ordinary people. They've arrested a very important witch, the old ambassador to the king, accusing him of taking bribes. And they've arrested a dirtbag witch who was selling magic glasses that can see through clothes (a very timely bit of commentary on Shirahama's part, considering one common use of AI image generators). One knight tried to arrest the forbidden witch who tutored Custas, but she turned the tables on him and erased his memory, taking almost everything he knew.

 

Now, in Witch Hat Atelier 12, in the king's jail, the old ambassador and the dirtbag plot to escape. The whole castle is warded against magic; it simply doesn't work inside. The ambassador draws a spell on the skin of the creep, with the idea that he can stick his hand out the window and get it to activate. (Apparently the ambassador already knew forbidden magic even if he didn't use it before his arrest.)

 

And that's what starts the disaster. As is so often the case, the king's jail has a guard monster, a leech that lived between the walls. When the creep sticks his hand out, the leech bites him, his blood mixes with the ink used to draw the spell on him, and everything goes wrong. The leech and man merge into one gigantic being, an impossibly vast multi-headed creature, like a net thrown over the entire festival biting at everyone there. 

 

The ambassador wryly observes that this is the secret reason for banning magic medicine and spells cast on bodies - that blood mixed with ink produces extraordinary, unpredictable results. This is a totally different justification than we've heard previously! (The avalanche that injured Custas happened after a forbidden witch replaced Coco's ink with something much more powerful. Could it have been as simple as ordinary ink mixed with blood?)

 

This is a disaster that could kill countless people. Olruggio and other adult witches use fire spells to burn the monster. The Knights Moralis try to fight the leeches and evacuate the public. They want to keep people safe, but they also fear too many people witnessing just how easily all the helping magic they've been seeing at the festival can be used as a weapon of war. In a moment of irony, the forbidden witch who looks like a school girl gets rescued from the leech by the knight whose memory she erased - he doesn't remember her, or anything really, but he still feels a duty to protect others.

 

Tetia and the other girls feel helpless watching ordinary people bandage the wounds of the injured, and start having doubts just like Coco's. Why shouldn't they do something to useful? In the chaos, Coco confesses what she's been thinking to Master Qifrey. His reaction isn't instant rejection as she feared it would be. He understands her doubts about the Pact.

 

Right now everything is chaos and everyone is in danger. The leeches can just barely be held back, but seemingly not truly injured or defeated. It's an ongoing disaster, and it'll continue in the next volume.

Gnomon

 
 
Gnomon

by Nick Harkaway

Knopf

2018

 

  

Gnomon is a very literary scifi mystery novel set in a dystopian near-future Britain. We follow Inspector Neith as she tries to determine responsibility for a death in custody of an elderly privacy advocate. Was she simply too old, stubborn, and frail? Or were her interrogators at fault for pushing her too hard, beyond what anyone could endure? To find the answer, Neith downloads a recording of victim's thoughts during the session - but instead of just one woman's memories, she finds four other people's stories too. Is it possible they could be true, or are they just a trick the woman used to avoid revealing herself? 

 

The System is a surveillance state that styles itself as a perfect democracy. Everyone is being watched all the time, not only by ubiquitous cameras and their own smart phones, but by their whole internet of things, fridges that know what they eat, washing machines that monitor alcohol intake and run pregnancy tests. But only the machine sees any of this, unless it flags something for human review, which will be conducted by a member of the Witness, like Inspector Neith. 

 

Everything is decided by direct democracy - sometimes by a jury-like subset, and sometimes by a plebiscite of the entire public. The machine decides who will vote, tallies the totals, and enacts the results. The machine, we are told, is perfectly fair and impartial, seeing everything and treating everyone the same, without the possibility of discrimination or corruption. (Though later we are asked to contemplate what it would mean if some people got preferential treatment, or if the electorate for some votes were chosen to ensure the result.)

 

Sometimes the System marks someone as suspicious and requires them to submit to questioning. If human Witness agents can resolve the suspicions, they will. But if the suspect refuses or seems dishonest, the machine can quite literally read their mind. The death Neith is investigating was someone who died while her thoughts were being recorded; in addition to traditional modes of investigation, Neith plays the transcript, meaning she experiences everything the dead woman thought from the moment they hooked her to the machine until she died. The substories framed by this main plot are narratives the woman was thinking at her interrogators, tales she was telling to avoid revealing herself, and perhaps to communicate another hidden message.

 

The title of Gnomon refers to a tool for drawing right angles, or a thing that is perpendicular to its surroundings, like the upright hand of a sundial, or it could refer to one who knows. The gnomon will recur in one form or another in each of the substories, and that's really just the start. There are a host of recurring images that repeat across the tales and accumulate new meanings and significances as they reappear, including five-factor authentication and the idea of a truth that can only be understood by superimposing multiple allegorical reflections, which doubles as advice for how to understand this book as a whole. There are frequent incidents of metalepsis, when events in one level of the story seem to affect another, and the kind of 'rhymes' Fritz Lang often used as scene transitions, like when one story ends with a character being kidnapped with a sack over his head, and the next starts with a different character being kidnapped the same way.

 

The structure of the book is a much-extended version of a traditional detective story, and that familiar formula helps you avoid getting lost along the way, which is important, because the substories are probably collectively longer than the frame story, and certainly they're long enough individually that you could lose track of where you are within the whole. Cloud Atlas famously used recurring themes and images across several stories that spanned over time and place, but in Gnomon, the substories are much more explicitly linked together. Remember that each of these stories supposedly has the same teller - the woman being interrogated by a machine that records her thoughts - even though there are multiple narrators, each so fully realized that they feel like an authentic person in their own right.

 

There's Constantine, a Greek math genius who became an investment banker. We join him as be has a life-changing encounter with a shark, which sends him on a stock-trading hot-streak, turning his life into a bacchanal while he ascends to multi-billionaire wealth. There's Athenais, an alchemist from Carthage and the former lover of St Augustine, who's asked to investigate an impossible murder and realizes she has a chance to make the mythical Alkahest. There's Berihun, a retired Ethiopian painter living in London who gets inspired to paint again by his genius granddaughter, who's making a video game about mass surveillance. Both Constantine and Athenais are mourning a dead loved one, and are offered a supernatural opportunity to be reunited. Constantine and Berihune's stories take place at the same time, starting before the Brexit vote and continuing a few years after. And then there's Gnomon, an artificial intelligence from the far future who has supposedly traveled back in time and occupied a human body on a mission to kill the other characters.

 

While Neith starts out convinced that these stories are nothing but a distraction, of course, I as a reader want them to be more than that. Granted, the whole novel is a work of fiction, actually entirely written by Nick Harkaway - but within that larger fiction, the stories are sub-fictions or hypo-fictions, they are presented as bring fictional even within the 'real' world of the larger fiction, and so I found myself questioning how 'true' they were supposed to be. I spent a fair bit of time considering that Gnomon the narrator might genuinely be a consciousness from the future. I do think that one of the narratives originally came someone else who was interrogated by the System, understanding how that story got inside this suspect's head is one of the many, many revelations you learn along the way.

 

I think of success of Gnomon the novel depends on the substories; if they were just a distraction, if they were merely well-told tales that are fun to read, then the book as a would be less successful than if they are (within the larger fiction of the novel) in some sense 'true'. Within these stories is hidden an account of how the System came to be, the story of someone who was horribly mistreated by it, and an account of why the woman being interrogated came to be arrested. Some of it is lightly fictionalized, some very allegorical, some extremely literal, and all of it told in such a way that the meaning and significance of what you've learned is revealed only after you've learned it, so the truth of each story propagates backward in time, changing the meaning of the stories in your memory as you think back over them. I think Harkaway was very successful here, in a way that's clearer now as I write this than it was when I first closed the book.

 

Lest you be worried, Harkaway did not cast Inspector Neith as a true believer in the perfection of the System, only to have her finish the case convinced she's right, that distributed democracy can't be manipulated, that total surveillance is good, that privacy and secrecy are inherently unacceptable, and that having certain knowledge of what people have done means the accused deserve no rights. But giving the System a robust intellectual defense and a defender whose own conduct is above reproach makes the later turn against it more satisfying. It takes no special insight to oppose a society that's obviously capricious and unfair. Like any good detective story, Neith's own tale will see her finding flaws with the side she serves and seeking to correct them, a quest that will put her into alliance with the interrogated woman and opposed to the System that interrogated her to death.

Quiet City (2007)

 
 
Quiet City
directed by Aaron Katz
written by Erin Fisher, Aaron Katz, and Cris Lankenau

Benten Films
2007

 
 
Quiet City is another early mumblecore film, about young people not long out of college, struggling to find their way, and looking for an authentic emotional connection. This one is almost like a fable, a serendipitous encounter between two lonely people, who spend time together, and surprise themselves by developing a genuine bond with a stranger. Perhaps it's a bit like The Breakfast Club, or Before Sunrise in that respect.

 

Jamie flies to New York and takes the subway to Brooklyn to meet a friend. The early shots are saturated with the orange of sunset and the tunnel lights. Her friend isn't there, and can't be reached by phone. Jamie asks directions from the only person around, Charlie, who first walks her to the diner that was supposed to be her meeting spot, then waits with her. Then, when it's clear her friend isn't coming, he invites her to come stay on his couch, and she accepts.

 

In Charlie's apartment they talk, have a drink, play a duet on a small keyboard. Jamie cuts his hair, then falls asleep in his bed while he's showering. Charlie sleeps on the couch. The trust and intimacy of this part is breathtaking. Both of them are taking a terrible risk, and both are rewarded for it.

I don't think it's an accident that everyone in this film is White. Jamie and Charlie are both vulnerable and naive, but also safe. They're two people who could easily hurt each other, but don't, who create a little world for themselves, fragile as a soap bubble, where the dangers out in the real world don't even exist as ideas, as possibilities. I don't know if I've seen people of color being depicted in a film being at once so innocent, and so secure that their innocence is rewarded instead of punished.

 

The next day, Charlie and Jamie try to visit her friend, who isn't home, then break in using the fire escape. (Can you imagine!?) They look around, but find no clues. They go play in the park. They visit a friend of Charlie's, then go to the gallery opening of another of Jamie's friends. They go to the after-party together, and learn more about each other, by seeing each other interact with someone else, by asking their friends about each other. Both are alone, both lonely, neither fully fits in with these friends, or feels at home where they live. Each maybe already knows the other better than anyone else does.

 

It seem notable that no one in this film has a smartphone. Of course, it's because they don't exist yet. Jamie is initially preoccupied trying to call her friend, but once she and Charlie are alone together, they have no distractions except the ones they make. No television, no internet. They each get the full force of the other's attention for hours and hours. It's a recipe to cultivate connection, and something that seems hardly possible anymore (I say, by typing these words into an app on my smartphone...)

 

After the after-party, the two ride the subway back to the airport together so Jamie can fly home. The scene of intimacy that ends the film isn't sex, isn't even a kiss - it's Jamie falling asleep resting her head on his shoulder, and Charlie falling asleep resting his head on hers. The final shot is the plane taking off in the orange of another sunrise. We don't know what either will do next, but we can hope their connection will somehow last.
 
 
Originally watched March 2023.

The Art of Memory Collecting

 
 
The Art of Memory Collecting
15 Scrapbook, Collage, Trinket, and Zine Projects for Crafting Treasured Moments
by Martina Calvi

photos by Petrina Tinslay

Quadrille

2024

 

 

The Art of Memory Collecting is a craft book with advice for contemporary scrapbookers and other mementos, emphasizing collage and ephemera. Martina Calvi has a second book about 'junk journaling', and I feel like you can see her advice here already leading in that direction. I would contrast this way of documenting memory with an earlier style of scrapbooking that was mostly about displaying photographs and writing meaningful captions, although Calvi herself never makes this comparison.
 
Calvi given advice for journals, a few kinds of boxes (including time capsules), a few kinds of personal zines, and a few kinds of greeting cards (including advice for making letter-art pen pals). Because several of these projects are quite similar, just at different sizes or with different themes, Calvi has a couple chances each to teach the crafting techniques involved. Her broader vision of how to make any of these projects, however, remains consistent throughout. The projects in The Art of Memory Collecting are ultimately quite similar to the mail art in Good Mail Day.
 
Save any trinkets, scraps of paper, physical photos, or other odds and ends, especially (but not only) ones that have some sentimental value or look cool. Set them out along with any stamps, stickers, fabrics, prints, or washi tape you want to use. Pick a subset that go together based on person, place, event, or even just color. Try arranging them until you find a layout that pleases you, then cut, glue, layer, and embellish until whatever you're collaging is completely covered and your star objects are displayed to good effect.
 
In general, I think Calvi does a decent job steering her instructions between the two shores of 'simple enough to understand' and 'technical enough to be useful' without running aground on either side. I would've enjoyed a few more example photos of finished projects. And I think Calvi assumes her reader pretty much already has a collection of things to scrapbook with. She spends a little time giving examples of the kinds of things you might collect, and more to discussing how to choose from among your collection for a given project, but that's an area I might've liked a bit more advice.
 
Calvi mostly assumes her reader already wants to do these projects and already sees them as worth doing, but I found myself thinking about how I would justify them. My defense would be twofold. First, anything worth doing is worth doing poorly. If you are only willing to scrapbook when you can do everything right, you'll hardly ever do it at all. A finished page that's messy or ugly is still better than a blank page, or a perfect page that only exists in your head. Second, objects tell a story. They provide context and trigger memories. Whatever scraps of paper you've acquired recently tell the story of your life right now, even if they seem insignificant in themselves. You can make a perfectly curated page for an important occasion another day. For now, right now, use whatever you have on hand to commemorate your ordinary life at this moment.
 
Calvi and photographer Petrina Tinslay also deserve credit for how good all the photos look. I'm not really sure about the division of labor here. Calvi got a book deal because she has a popular Instagram, and I sort of assume she usually takes her own photos. And photographers usually set up their own shots, so I don't know if Calvi just provided the projects and materials to shoot, or if she helped pose them at all. Anyway, however they did it, the result is a book full of photos with almost supernaturally good composition. My personal shorthand for this look is 'Wes Anderson style', but what I mean is bright cheerful colors, eclectic mixes of materials, things arranged neatly with consistent spacing between objects, the use of negative space as a frame. The photos in a book like this are obviously supposed to look good, but these photos look really really good. 

The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All 1

 
 
The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All 1
by Sumiko Arai

translated by Ajani Oloye

Yen Press

2024
 
 
The cover of The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All stands out for its eye-catching electric green background, and while most manga are black and white inside, cartoonist Sumiko Arai deploys the same neon green in the interior, often in the background or between panels, but also to highlight moments of emotional intensity, like when one if the teen characters speaks from the heart and Arai briefly colors their irises green.
 
The color-scheme, the theme of high school girls in a burgeoning but still undefined relationship, and the long title that invites some sort of shorthand has led to TGSWIIWAGAA getting nicknamed "green yuri" online.
 

The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All is really something special. I was expecting a sitcom-like comedy of errors where circumstance and coincidence conspire to maintain a case of mistaken identity far beyond the realm of plausibility, the sort of thing you really only see in old superhero comics (or parodies of them), where a woman swoons over the handsome superhero and has no time for her boring, oft-absent coworker and never suspects the connection. 
 
Instead, The Guy She Was Interested In is much more emotionally-realistic, with its setup mostly serving to set events in motion before allowing them to unfold in a more believable way. Arai really captures the intensity of teenage feelings, the way finding a song or a musical style feels like discovering something brand new, like something could define your whole identity if you wanted it to, the way making a new friend or getting to spend time with your crush feels like the most important thing in the world, even if you don't know what to call these exciting new emotions, or how to describe the way you spend so much time thinking about them and wondering if they're thinking of you. The fact that Arai's characters are often confused or hesitant or overwhelmed makes them feel all the more like real people, especially real teens, for whom all of this is completely new.
 
Popular high school girl Aya looks and acts a lot like her popular friends, but she's got two things special in her life right now. First, she's gotten really into American rock music from the 1990s. She talks it up to her friends, but they don't really see the appeal, so she always listens privately, at home or on headphones. The second big thing in Aya's life is that she's got a huge crush on the cute, mysterious guy who works at the CD shop. The guy has a goth or emo fashion sense, wearing all black, including a hoodie and dust mask, and likes the same music Aya does, even playing Nirvana at the store the same day she listened to them at school.
 
Aya tells her friends all about the guy, not noticing that the shy, nerdy girl sitting next to her is having a panic attack hearing this, because while Mitsuki tries to go unnoticed at school, she gets to dress how she wants at her after-school job at her uncle's CD shop... Mitsuki knows she should tell Aya right away, but she's too shy to do it at school, and at the store later, when Aya comes up to flirt with her, Mitsuki can't resist flirting back. She finds that she likes Aya too, and she likes that Aya likes her. Their friendship builds naturally, chatting at the shop, exchanging phone numbers and playlists, and all the while, Mitsuki knows she needs to get up the courage to tell the truth, even as she fears losing her new friend when she does...
 
Rather than using comedic mishaps to drag things out, Arai has Aya begin to suspect, then discover the truth, and has Mitsuki confess even after she worries Aya already knows, and then allows the girls to continue their friendship once the truth is out. Aya freely calls her feelings a crush when she thinks Mitsuki is a guy; later neither one seems to know what to call what they're feeling, except that they want to spend time together, and share their love of music with each other, as much as they can. I kind of think this might still be a romance, but it could also be a passionate friendship between two unexpected kindred spirits. It's clear the girls don't know what it is yet either. It feels authentic to a high school relationship, especially if neither girl previously thought of herself as queer.
 
Arai writes in 4-page scenes, which allows her to vary her chapter length in a way that most other manga artists can't. She varies the viewpoint across the scenes, mostly showing us things from Mitsuki's and Aya's perspectives, but sometimes others as well. We see them through the eyes of Mitsuki's uncle, who's simultaneously happy for his niece and feeling very old watching her grow up, and who intially fears the playlist Aya sent Mitsuki might've come from an adult man, a realistic concern that helps establish that not every possible young crush is appropriate or safe. 
 
We see them from the perspective of a good-looking boy in their class who's shocked that neither girl seems interested in him, but who gets over himself enough to become a friend (and to "ship" the two girls once they start hanging out more). And we see them as one of Aya's popular friends would, watching her bestie spend more and more time with a nerdy girl she seemingly has nothing in common with. Aya's friend might just be jealous, or she might be homophobic, but not everyone in the story is as happy about this new relationship as we in the audience are.
 
I was very pleasantly surprised by The Guy She Was Interested In, and recommend it to anyone who likes this kind of story.