Zatoichi

Move over, Daredevil...now there's someone meatier. The inventor of Radar Sense before it became fashionable...I bring you....ZATOICHI!!!!!

Zatoichi, in case you didn't know, is the blind Japanese swordsman so ably played by the late great Shintaro Katsu in over 25 movies and 100 TV episodes. The character of Zatoichi is a Japanese pop culture icon-the closest American parallel I can come up with off the cuff is Indiana Jones (although the two are nothing alike and Zatoichi has made way more appearances). Actually, he's a lot like Robin Hood, minus the merry men and the archery. He was blatantly ripped off in a Rutger Hauer film called Blind Fury, which sucked ASS, and was recently played by Takeshi "Beat" Kitano, best known as "Vic Romano" on Spike Tv's MXC, in a remake entitled, appropriately enough, Zatoichi.

The movies are wicked fun and are now available on DVD from two separate companies, which can make it kind of a pain in the ass to collect the series. One company is pricier than the other and their quality isn't as good, either, but it looks like one company owns the rights to some films and the other owns the rest...a licensing nightmare, I'm sure.

Zatoichi makes his living as a wandering masseur, although he was once a yakuza, part of the criminal underworld in Japan. He's a bit of a social outcast because of this and because of his blindness, which makes him a target for bullies (but not for long). Zatoichi maintains a cheerful outlook most of the time, despite his afflictions, and never fails to help those in need. He is generally above selling his blade as a mercenary, although that's not always true...

The movies tend to focus mainly on his amazing skill with his trusty sword-cane despite his handicap, which you wouldn't even know was there based on the body count he racks up every movie. Zatoichi is forever hounded by enemies, although none of them stick around long enough to be considered a disadvantage. For all his vaunted swordsmanship, Zatoichi is continually beset by people who wish him ill for one reason or another....usually because someone they know tried to kill him and wound up on the business end of his sword-cane intead. An often overused line: "He's just a blind man! How much trouble can he be!!?"

Zatoichi is also hounded by people who are just annoyed that he's so good despite the fact he's blind. It's an insult to them; they can't seem to let it go no matter what, whether they've actually met him before or not. Many try to test their mettle against Zatoichi because of his reputation; some just because they find it a disgrace that a blind man has such skill. They all wind up dead in the end.

For all his truly badass-edness, Zatoichi tries like hell to avoid trouble and takes a lot of abuse. In fact, it's not usually until people actually make the mistake of attacking him that he even draws his blade. When he does, the person who messed with him is usually dead by the time Zatoichi returns his blade to his scabbard (average time: 1.6 seconds). Despite the cool swordplay in the films, these aren't kung-fu movies...each one has a definite plot. That being said, it's certainly not necessary to see them in order, which is what I tried to do last summer until my trusty comic-shop owner Wayne set me straight. They're all subtitled, so if you're the type of person who can't abide subtitles then forget it. (I feel bad for you-you miss a lot of great movies.) Each movie is stand-alone, you can dive right in without needing as much familiarity with the character as you already have by reading this blog.

Cool places like my comic shop (The Annex in Newport, R.I.) may have some or all of the Shintaro Katsu Zatoichi movies for rent, or you can buy them at places like Virgin Megastores, Suncoast Video, or Newbury Comics. The lastest Takeshi Kitano Zatoichi is available at your local Blockbuster. It probably contains a dubbed version too. It's a lot more violent than the Shintaro Katsu originals and Zatoichi isn't as nice a guy, but it's still a cool movie and I hope he makes more.

Enjoy!

The Book That Changed My Life

One of my favorite NPR shows is The Connection. This week they did a series of shows on "The Book that Changed My Life" and had a bunch of contemporary authors on talking about what books inspired them the most. (You can listen to the shows themselves at http://www.theconnection.org in the Archive section.) It made me think about all the books I've read over the years, and it didn't take me very long at all to come up with one that did change my life in a concrete, tangible way. It didn't make NPR's list, but I'm hardly surprised by that.

There have been many works that have affected me profoundly, among them: Equus by Peter Schaeffer, Going to Meet the Man (and pretty much anything else) by James Baldwin, The Way of Aikido by George Leonard, I, Claudius by Robert Graves, and the works of Tolkien. But the one book that messed me up inside and changed how I think and affected me more than anything I've ever read before or since was Bluebeard, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. While it was rewiring my brain it also made me laugh my ass off, which is no mean feat.

For those not familiar with the fairytale of the same name, let me sum it up for you: There's an old, rich guy who likes to marry young girls, who then mysteriously disappear soon afterwards. His name is Bluebeard. He picks a new PYT to be his wife (she's like wife #9 or something) and tells her she can have anything she wants and the run of the house except she can't go in this one door. Natch, being a woman, she waits until he's not around and goes inside and finds the corpses of all his previous wives. Bluebeard comes home and finds out she went in there and adds one more corpse to the room. Moral of the story: curiosity killed the cat, so do what your husbands say, ladies. (Actually, I'm not really sure what the moral is, but that seems to be chauvanistically accurate.)

Anyway, aside from a slight similarity in theme only, Vonnegut's Bluebeard is nothing like the fairytale, meaning the surprise at the end isn't nearly as gruesome as a corpse-filled room. Vonnegut's Bluebeard, Rabo Karabekian, is an old man looking back on his life and not having very much to show for it; he has always taken the easy way out of almost everything and finds himself alone at the end of his years, scorned by his wife and family, but rich as all hell, mainly from the product of others' work. He is an artist of the Abstract Expressionism type, and although Vonnegut puts a disclaimer in the beginning saying Bluebeard not a "responsible history" of that school, his opinion of it (one I share, incidentally) comes through loud and clear in the text. Abstract Expressionists are the painters who, like Pollack, splatter paint on a canvas in the name of art, or worse, cover a canvas in one color and consider their painting finished. I'm sure there are some folks out there who enjoy this sort of thing. But if that's all it takes to be a successful artist, hell, even I can do that. (Please, O readers of artistic genius, don't deluge me with reasons why Abstract Expressionism is great and I'm an ignorant Philistine. As to the first, I don't agree, and as to the second, I admit it, ok?)

Karabekian meets a woman who basically invites herself to live with him. He finds her infuriating because she's extremely nosy and asks personal questions that make him examine his eventful and often hilarious life. She, like Bluebeard's wife, has the entire run of the place (because she gives herself that privilege) except for one "door" she can't go into: the potato barn behind the house. Despite her constant efforts to gain entrance and/or find out what is inside, Karabekian manages to keep his secret until the climax of the book. What's in the potato barn? Something "bigger than a breadbox and smaller than the planet Jupiter." To give it away would obviously ruin the surprise and enjoyment one would get out of reading the book, so I won't do it here.

The book begs the question of the reader: "Are YOU doing all you can with your life? Are you truly living up to your potential, or are you wasting what time you have?" The book isn't heavy-handed about it, meaning you'll have to arrive at these questions yourself, I suppose, but the symbolism is fairly transparent, particularly with the revelation at the end of the book. At the time I first read Bluebeard, I certainly wasn't living up to my potential. I'm still not, but at least I can truly say I'm on the way now. I'm not an old man like Rabo Karabekian, but I don't want to be at the end of my life, however long or short it may be, and have nothing to show for it.

I've passed the book on to friends and family and can't say enough of how much I love it and what it has done for me. Of course, not everyone sees it that way; Bluebeard is not popularly considered one of Vonnegut's best books, especially when held up to classics like Slaughterhouse Five and Cat's Cradle. Despite that, Bluebeard is far and away my favorite book by Kurt Vonnegut, and I've read them all. It's also among my favorite books of all time, which proves reading is a very subjective experience. What dazzles me may do nothing for you, but then again, it might.

This is the book that changed MY life. Do you have one that's changed yours?

NPR

I sure do love my Playstation 2, but I wouldn't say I'm a gaming fanatic. I go through bouts of playing it daily and then not playing for months. The fact that I'm pretty much a solitary gamer has a lot to do with this...it's just not as much fun to play a game like Tekken against the computer rather than a real-life opponent. I tend to go for RPG or horror games. Usually, I get a few games for Christmas and my birthday and I'm good for a year or so, with maybe a purchase here and there over the course of the year. I'll say it again-I'm not a hardcore gamer.

So you can imagine my annoyance when my PS2 shit the bed around Christmas time last year. Shortly after Christmas, to be exact....like December 28th or so, which didn't leave me much in the way of time to enjoy my holiday game loot. Adding insult to injury: on Dec. 1st (as some of you may recall) a tree fell on my car, effectively destroying it, so I was in pretty piss-poor financial shape to replace a game console that I regularly used, but certainly not enough to cause a meltdown.

I had a bunch of sealed games Santa brought me and no way to play, so about a week later I broke down and decided to buy a new PS2. Why? Because it's still the best game console out there (don't whine to me about the XBox having better graphics-it may be true, but until the Xbox can match a system that can play all my PSone games as well as my PS2 games, it's a lesser value in my book). Plus, fixing the problem, which turned out to be a "bad motor", would have cost me almost as much as a new PS2 and would have robbed me of mine for up to 6 weeks. Of course, finding a PS2 right after Christmas was nigh impossible, but I managed to get one eventually and so far, it works fine. All of which brings me to my point...

I've recently discovered National Public Radio. Of course, I always knew it was there, but it's only within the past year or so that I've been listening regularly. I have a job that requires me to be on the road a great deal, and I loathe 99% of what passes for music nowadays. And although I love my cds, they get repetitive after a while. I stumbled onto WBUR, Boston's NPR station, by accident, and it's pretty much exclusively what I listen to now.

NPR has some great programming, and it always surprises me by holding my interest with things I never thought I'd be interested in-kinda like that time I watched that show on Alaskan King Crab Fishing on the Discovery channel. Case in point: today I listened to a show all about Make magazine, a new magazine dealing with ways to do-it-yourself. Most of the stuff the magazine covers is about electronics and mechanics, and it's a lot of step-by-step stuff, like how to fix a phone or how to MacGuyver things that supposedly don't work anymore so that they do. Those who know me probably realize I'm the most mechanically ignorant person on the planet-I can change a tire, but I don't change my oil- I have someone else do it. If you want someone who can launch a satellite with a toaster and some bike parts, talk to my brother, because he's the one with all the know-how. (Maintaining a set of bagpipes is its own challenge altogether, as evidenced by the fact that mine don't currently work all that well. That's why I'm an angry piper, goddammit.) The fact is I never cared. My interests lie entirely in other areas.

But boy do I wish I could have fixed that "bad motor" rather than shell out another $150.00 for a PS2.

My point is that I was surprised I was as interested as I was. It's not the first time this has happened while listening to NPR, several weeks back I caught The Connection, and one of the guests was a guy who collects, of all things, dictionaries. I thought: "this guy must be a blast, a real social tyrannosaurus." Turns out it was one of the most interesting shows I've heard once I found out why he collects them: he studies what words mean in different languages. For example, the German definition of love is far different from the definition that appears in French dictionaries. There is no distinction between "upset" and "angry" in Spanish. It was a show that looked at the origins of words, how they change meaning, and how they mean different things across cultures and languages. All this from a guy who collects dictionaries.

I'm aware that all this stuff probably sounds boring, I know if I was reading it without having listened to it beforehand, I wouldn't be much impressed. But keep in mind NPR is home to shows like Fresh Air and The Connection (two of my favorites), shows that showcase authors (like Kurt Vonnegut, Saul Bellow-may he R.I.P. and some I've never heard of but are eager to read now), poets, scientists, politicians, musicians, and guys who collect dictionaries, to name a few. I've learned more about the war in Iraq from NPR than any other news source, both through NPR's coverage and through the BBC which reports things from a perspective that's not our own.(Yes, I'm aware of how pretentious it sounds to say I get my news from the BBC-but I guess if I thought things weren't being censored to death around here I'd feel differently.) In other words, we get to see what the rest of the world thinks about us (and let me tell ya, that there Guantanamo Bay is quite the sticky wicket.)

NPR in the Boston area is broadcast on WBUR 90.9 FM. You can listen to it on the web anytime too, at http://www.WBUR.org , if you're out of the area or if you live in, say, Texas for example. Plus, the site has a keen search engine so you can look up past shows...my favorite thing to do while I'm doing other stuff is to listen to an old show I may have missed. I punched in Kurt Vonnegut, one of my favorite authors, and got a great Vonnegut interview from 1999 or so on Morning Edition; I listened to it while I organized my computer room. Ditto for Neil Gaiman, PJ Harvey, Ray Bradbury, Alan Moore, Paddy Keenan, and R.Crumb. Give it a shot with someone or something you'd like to know more about-chances are it's been on National Public Radio at one time or another.

Hey-don't look at me like that. The title of the post says NPR. Sorry if you thought it was gonna be about the PS2.

Mystery and History

About 10 years ago I stumbled onto an episode of PBS's Mystery showcasing Ellis Peters's Brother Cadfael, and I was completely hooked. By the end of the week I had bought the first 3 Cadfael chronicles, and the books are even better than the excellent TV productions. Cadfael is a Benedictine monk in 12th century England who has a vast knowledge of herbs and is worldly enough to have a canny understanding of human nature. On TV, he was played by Sir Derek Jacobi, who can pretty much do no wrong in my book.

Cadfael got me interested in mysteries as a whole; at the time I hadn't read many mystery stories outside of Poe and Conan Doyle. I was instantly taken with the historical mystery. There's something I love about the research and knowledge that goes into writing a period piece of fiction. Perhaps it's the fact that I'm learning things as I'm being entertained-always a plus in my book.

I would guess I have close to 100 anthologies of short stories, many showcasing mystery fiction. About a year ago I elected to compile a bibliography of all the short stories I have, sorted by author and publication (yes, I am that anal), in order to avoid buying anthologies containing stories I already have. Nothing irritates me more than buying a book, gettting it home, and finding out the Harlan Ellison (or Ray Bradbury, or William Nolan) story I bought it for is one I've already read in another book I own.

Despite my propensity for story duplication, I had only come in contact with 2 Jaques Futrelle stories featuring his detective The Thinking Machine; these stories were rather infrequently reprinted until this year. Now, Modern Library just published the entire collection of Futrelle's Thinking Machine tales in one volume, with an introduction by Harlan Ellison, and man-oh-man, I am loving it. The Thinking Machine is a man: an incredibly brilliant, egotistical, arrogant sonofabitch. He is contemptuous of anyone with less intelligence than himself (which is pretty much everyone), and he is a detective in the manner of Sherlock Holmes, following at all times the rules of logic. The stories are very entertaining, but they're not the kind of mysteries you, as a reader, ever have a chance to solve. The Thinking Machine doesn't reveal his thoughts on anything until the end of the story and when he does, he reveals the entire case from start to finish. There really isn't time for the reader to ponder clues and make educated guesses before the story is over, which is kind of a brilliant literary device, when you think about it- it just reinforces that the Thinking Machine's brain works so much faster than anyone else's. Makes you wish Futrelle had lived a bit longer, but he literally went down on the Titanic, and that, as they say, was the end of that.

Other great historical mysteries I have enjoyed include the works of Laura Joh Rowland, who writes a spectacular series of tales about Sano Ichiro, a samurai detective in feudal Japan. Sano has to constantly solve mysteries while fighting corruption and maintaining his own tenuous social position in the court of the Shogun. He has several loyal allies, most notably his wife, who often takes a hand in helping to solve crimes. But Sano is a man beset by enemies at every turn who seek to discredit him in the eyes of the court. All the political intrigue only adds to some great mystery stories, as Sano is often in the position of investigating dangerous people-people who could ruin him.

Iain Pears wrote a phenomenal mystery entitled The Instance of the Fingerpost, which is without a doubt the best historical mystery I have ever read. It is the account of a murder told from 3 different points of view, each with a variant perspective and with unique information that keeps you guessing until the end. It takes place in England during the 1660's. Pears also writes a series of "Art History Mysteries", which, while they take place in the present time, deal with the history of paintings and artists, as well as the art world in general. It wasn't a world I thought I would be interested in (being the uncultured Philistine that I am), but Pears is a remarkably talented writer who spins what J. Peterman would call a "ripping good yarn".

Ray Bradbury wrote an entertaining novel in the tradition of the Private Eye genre: Death is a Lonely Business. It takes place in Venice, California, in 1949, after they've torn down the amusement pier. In addition to being one of the best writers of speculative fiction in the world, Bradbury is hands-down one of the best writers I have ever read. One needs look no further than this book, with its imagery of the decrepit amusement park in its heydey and the conveyed sense of loss and abandonment felt in the present, to see why.

Got any good mysteries, especially historical mysteries, you'd recommend? Let me know. I'm not a Patricia Cornwell/ Mary Higgins Clark kinda guy, and I'm not a fan of the blue-haired, tea-sipping old lady type of sleuth either. If you've read any of these that I recommend (or if you decide to take my advice and read them) let me know what you think! I'm always interested in discussing good books.

Maybe a post on Private Eye fiction is in order soon.