Silver Screen Samurai
Cocoro Books, $19.95

The samurai is an icon of Japanese cinema, standing for many of the same attributes that the cowboy does in Hollywood. His popularity may wax and wane as the decades go by, but will never die out completely, not as long as there is a yearning for simpler times, when a sense of honour and a weapon were all a man needed. The genre is undergoing something of a renaissance at the moment, with Takeshi Kitato’s Zatoichi and Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, Volume 1 showing the concept still has relevance in the 21st century.

It is thus a fitting time for Cocoro Books’ third volume of Japanese movie posters, after their general edition, and one devoted entirely to anime. Its 116 full-colour pages cover films from 1935 up to Kitano’s entry of last year, along with side-essays covering topics such as Zatoichi, or women in samurai films. These help explain what to look for in the posters, and the significance of the various elements therein.

For fans of the genre, this is an absolutely essential work, with many of the photos likely never before seen in the West. The sense of a auction catalog that permeated the first volume is toned-down, though prices are still attached to each item. Actually, they seem pretty reasonable: a 20×28-inch poster for the 1959 film, The She-Devil Lineage is only $35. Few original posters for Hollywood movies of that vintage can be had at such a low cost.

As more of a dilettante when it comes to these films – who, if truth be told, doesn’t like cowboy movies much either – there was a certain sense of sameness about a lot of the pictures. A samurai, with sword and top-knot, stares out of the frame while projecting an expression of intense seriousness; red text sprays down one side of the image, like an arterial gush from one of his victims. Woman are rarely seen, active ones, even less frequently – and if you’re looking for miles of smiles, this is the wrong volume entirely.

In such homogeneous company, the odd one that bucks the trend stands out more than usual. Kurosawa clearly didn’t need to use traditional imagery for one of his takes on Shakespeare, Ran. Similarly, Nagisa Oshima’s Taboo [Gohatto in its native land] portrays an androgynous figure, in keeping with the unconventional nature of its story. I also noticed that more recent entries seem to be favouring black as a colour – guess it must be the new red…

The presence of no less than three indices – by Japanese, Romanized and English titles – is definitely a welcome addition, even if I’m certain this book merely scratches the surface, rather than making any claim to be comprehensive. While more narrowly-focused, and thus personally less interesting, than its predecessors, it is still worth a look for anyone with the slightest interest in Japanese cinema, design or even if you simply appreciate unusual art.

For more information, see the publisher’s website – the book is also available from Amazon.

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Kaiju Big Battel
A Practical Guide to Giant City-Crushing Monsters
Hyperion, $14.95

If we were neutral – though we certainly aren’t – we might have to admit that Kaiju Big Battel is a one-joke idea: “What would happen if you mixed the worlds of professional wrestling and Japanese monster-movies?” And, let’s be honest, neither of those fields are exactly deep in themselves. Yet, somehow, Kaiju is becoming far greater than the sum of its parts, and this book shows, without a doubt, that there is more life to the concept than perhaps even its creators expected.

What started off as guys in bizarre costumes hitting each other with cardboard buildings in Boston has become a merchandising juggernaut offering T-shirts, stickers, DVDs, even little packs of meat harvested from dead monsters. [The last idea is borrowed from Japan – I got Chris a tin of Mothra eggs for Christmas. On the other hand, a Kaiju sticker graces the previously pristine bumper of the Trash City PT Cruiser] And now, a 170-page volume that explains the basic concept for beginners, yet is sure to delight any existing fan of Dr. Cube, Silver Potato, Dino Kang and the other Big Battelers.

It begins with the origins of Kaiju, as an epic battle of good vs. evil, that previously destroyed cities, but is now constrained within the ring – despite the evil efforts of Dr. Cube and his posse to achieve world domination. It then segues into two-page pieces focusing on each Kaiju creature, and also describes previous Big Battels, the weapons used therein, how the monsters work, plus quizzes to test your “Kai-Q”, and handy survival tips for what to do if a Battel suddenly erupts nearby.

Like we said: there’s a lot more to this than you probably thought.

All of this is written in an utterly engaging mix of sarcastic English and Japlish – if you cycled the same text repeatedly through an automatic English-Japanese-English translator, you’d be in the right ballpark for that delightful hybrid. Hence, phrases such as: “Dr. Cube is mostly evil plastic surgeon helps hide him and in real is monster man with amazing bloody spattering squares type head.” The full-colour section in the middle is a repository of many such gems.

Should you be one of the ever-diminishing number unaware of the Kaiju phenomenon, this is an ideal place to start. If you have, you’ll still learn much from this tome, which received (and fully deserved) Chris’s highest award: being taken to the Post Office to amuse her while she’s in the queue. If it can calm, soothe, and entertain under such a stress-provoking situation, imagine what it can do for you…

For more information, see the Kaiju website – the book is also available from Amazon.

The Lingo of Bingo

Bingo. If you’re like me, the word conjures up images of seaside amusement arcades, largely populated by blue-haired old ladies. Sure, in Britain, there are bingo halls, but has anyone you know ever been in one? Still, our step-daughter Vanessa had been commissioned by her boss to investigate the game at a local casino – for reasons which, being honest, still remain kinda obscure to us. But it was a quiet Friday, and the prospect of spending the afternoon gambling at someone else’s expense, is not to be sneezed at. Sure, we’d prefer high-limit poker, but we’ll take bingo, if necessary.

So we headed out, only vaguely knowing what to expect. “What if there’s just the three of us playing?”, asked Vanessa. At 12:30 on a very pleasant Friday afternoon, it seemed like a valid question. At least, it was until we walked into the aircraft hanger which is the bingo hall at Fort McDowell Casino, and saw row upon row of players – and this was before the games had even started. We realised we would be far from alone. Except that is, alone in being born in the latter half of the 20th century.

Yes, while bingo in the UK struggles to escape the stereotypes, in the US, no such attempt is made and this is a game played by the near-dead. You may think I exaggerate, but I’m not joking when I say that we saw several people attached to oxygen tanks. This is probably partly because it is a remarkably cheap form of entertainment, and since you pay up front, you know in advance exactly how much you’re going to lose. We splashed out and bought the Level 2 books, which cost more and double the amount paid out, but you could play an afternoon session for as little as $5, and that would last a good three hours. Add in the free drinks and cheap food, and you have something that compares very favourably with, say, the cinema.

However, can’t say we found it a very social experience. There’s not much breathing space between the games, just enough time for them to check the winner’s card, and then it’s straight on with the next one. Even the games themselves were scarcely leisurely experiences: our buy-in got us eight cards per game each, and, especially at first, we struggled to keep up. Ten minutes in, I was feeling like a lab-rat, daubing out numbers in exchange for the slim chance of winning a piece of cheese.

And not all that big a piece of cheese either, especially in comparison to Britain, where jackpots are competed for across the whole country, and can create instant millionaires. Most games here had a maximum of $600, and if more than one person called “Bingo!” on the same number, the prize was split. Other differences: grids were five by five, with the center square a freebie always covered, and the numbers only went up to 75, rather than 90. No “two little ducks” either.

Adding to the complexity, we anticipated simplicity: play until someone gets five in a line, then go on to a big prize for the first to cover all their numbers. I think only one game was like that: instead, presumably to speed things up, you had to get a small subset of your numbers. For example, the four numbers in the top-right of your card, plus the left hand column and bottom row. These even had special names; that one was the “Love Letter”. There was also the “Hamburger”, the “Crooked Bow-Tie”, the “Semi-Erect Penis” and so on (okay, I made the last up), some of which could occur in more than one way.

And they had wild cards – one game, everything ending “9” was a freebie, in another it was every even number. So you had you to cross off numbers before the game, then as they were called, and then had to look at the resulting Pointillist abstraction, and try to work out if you were close to a winning combination. If so, the 2% of your brain not already burning up was then allowed to start getting excited.

Thank heavens for the little old lady sitting next to us with her husband, who took pity and explained what the hell we were supposed to do with the million pieces of paper in our game pack. She had the endless patience of a grandmother, serenely playing away, even as we quizzed her during the games (a serious breach of bingo etiquette, I’m sure). Without her, we’d have been dead in the water.

Speaking of “dead”, there was a scary moment at one point. We heard cries for help coming from another table, and paramedics (no doubt permanently on standby) rushed to the assistance of a player who was choking. “Ah, so that‘s the Heimlich maneouvre…”, I thought, having only ever learned it theoretically in my St. John’s Ambulance class. As Chris pointed out, not certain you’re supposed to lift the victim bodily into the air, but it clearly did the trick, and fatality was averted.

Two things impressed me: one, the rest of the players hardly noticed – must be an almost everyday occurrence, when you have several hundred old folk operating in a state of high tension for several hours. Even more amazingly, the victim went right back to her game. This did draw appreciative nods from the players around us – she was truly hardcore. Personally, if God dropped a bomb like that on me, I’d have taken it as a hint that this was not my lucky day.

Though given the frequency of good-luck charms throughout the hall, no-one was trusting to mere fate. Our deficiencies in this area are perhaps why it wasn’t our lucky day either. Chris let out a stifled shriek of “BIN…!” at one point, but that turned out to be a false alarm, and was rapidly converted to a clearing of the throat. Still, by the end, we were daubing away with the best of them, and indeed, were so into it that we were even discussing the possibility of a return visit. Now, we at least have a clue…

Janet Jackson. Superbowl. There. That should ensure a rapid increase in the number of hits this site receives. Bizarrely, it’s already shot up recently – been averaging 750 visitors per day this week – I think in part because we are ranked #36 on Google and #10 on Yahoo when you search for ‘Aileen Wuornos’. May Charlize Theron’s run to the Oscars prove long and successful…

The Superbowl last week has already largely been forgotten – quick, what was the score? – except for Justin Timberlake ripping off part of Janet Jackson’s top. Initially claimed as a “wardrobe malfunction”, this was clearly bollocks, and everyone knows it was a wildly successful publicity stunt aimed at reviving the career of one has-been well past their sell-by date. And perhaps helping Janet Jackson too.

We were up at Chris’s sister’s for the game, saw the incident, and then largely forgot about it – Rob, my brother-in-law was out of the room, and expressed mild sorrow about missing it. Kid Rock wearing an American flag as a cape raised more eyebrows, to be honest. We then moved on, and it was something of a surprise to wake the next morning to the resulting, er, fall-out. If you didn’t know what it was about, you’d probably have assumed, at the very least, that Janet had given Justin a blow-job on stage, rather than exposing a breast.

And not an entire breast either, since the nipple was largely covered by a metal solar medallion [which is what gives the lie to the “wardrobe malfunction” claim]. The not-entirely visible breast was on-screen for about two seconds, tops. Yet that sound you hear is, apparently, western civilization collapsing all around us.

My perspective, as a Brit, is one of bemusement. I come from a land where broadcast television is full of tits (and I don’t just mean Jeremy Beadle and Matthew Kelly), and the Sun’s Page 3 Girl was a formative influence when I was a teenager, in all her grainy, newsprint glory. [I still remember the stunned silence in the common-room at school, when the Daily Star had theirs in C O L O U R ] Thus, Jackson’s boob made no real impression on me.

Everyone involved is, of course, acting all shocked and horrified, but that stench you hear is one of rank hypocrisy. Barely a day goes by without some NFL player being arrested – usually for drug offences or beating their wife – while MTV has made its niche with edgy programming like Jackass. Worse of all is CBS’s reaction, given their willingness to let advertisers get away with anything once they’ve paid their $2.25m for a 30-second ad slot.

If the multiple penile dysfunction commercials somehow counted as “appropriate family viewing”, there was the Budweiser commercial where a couple are seated in a horse-and-carriage. The guy hands the woman a candle; the horse then lifts its tail and lets out a thunderous fart. The woman ends up looking like Wile E. Coyote after the dynamite has gone off. Or there’s the other one where a talking monkey tries to convince a woman to head upstairs. Given this, CBS’s claim to be the guardians of taste and morality is somewhat suspect, to say the least.

Despite the backlash, I like to hope that it actually does mark a watershed in American attitudes, just not in the moralistic direction certain commentators wish. Maybe in twenty years, we’ll be looking back with a much more healthy attitude to the human body, and wondering what all the fuss was about.

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Midget Mayhem
The Swamp Stomp,
Scottsdale, AZ
January 24th, 2004

Our ongoing role as unofficial patrons of pro-wrestling in Arizona has taken us to some unusual places: skating-rinks in Tucson, high-school gyms, and downtown Mexican dives where you ask if they have any aspirin, and are told, “The person that sells the pills isn’t here at the moment.” This is why Saturday night saw us at the Swamp Stomp, a bar on Scottsdale Road, for an evening of, and I quote, Midget Mayhem.

Immediately we heard of the event, we were all systems go, though our attempts to buy tickets in advance were prevented by the vampiric presence of another pimp-bastard-ticket-agency, with their “convenience fees”, “service charges” and rules preventing even the venue from selling direct. But I have ranted about this elsewhere, and anyway, nothing could spoil our anticipation at the prospect of watching little people hit each other over the head with trash-cans.

To enhance the experience, alcohol is essential, of course. We’ve seen this kind of thing sober – the “minis” are a staple of the Mexican lucha libre TV shows we watch, Chris frantically trying to provide a running translation for me – and it’s amusing. But those who say, “I don’t need to drink to enjoy myself,” clearly haven’t been to midget wrestling. So our teenage son ‘offered’ to drive us there and back – quotes used advisedly, since initially we had to use the “You do remember who’s paying for that car?” gambit as leverage.

We rolled up half-an-hour before the scheduled start, ready for the heaviest session since our post-wedding party in London. The first thing we discovered, to our (and particularly Chris’s) delight, was that the venue was non-smoking. A personal “Well done” to the management for this, which almost guarantees we’ll be back there, in preference to places which leave you feeling like Hurricane Higgins’ ashtray [the whizzing sound you hear is that metaphor hurtling above non-UK readers’ heads. Higgins was a professional snooker player, almost always seen with a cigarette in one hand – and often, another in his mouth…]

Almost immediately, we discovered a fellow midget aficionado, though in deference to his status as one of the veterans in Arizona’s best-known pro-wrestling federation, we’ll withhold his name here. We agreed that said federation needed to expand and include midgets, forthwith.

The Swamp Stomp is the kind of place where customers get up and dance on the bars, usually encouraged by the MC. Potentially, this could be enormously irritating and/or tacky (see Coyote Ugly – or rather, don’t), but there was such a good-humoured spirit present that you couldn’t avoid getting swept up in the carnival atmosphere. I even got bought a beer by a complete stranger, in apology for his having to squeeze past me to get to the bar. After a decade of London pubs, where surly aggressiveness is part of the culture (and that’s just the staff), this was a shock.

They were also handing out raffle-tickets for various challenges – first person to show them their belly-button piercing, or wearing brown shoes – and Chris acquired one, somehow managing to convince the MC she had some grey hairs. Well, we were probably a decade plus older than the average attendee, and had fewer tattoos and piercings. Chris got all motherly in the ladies’, helping one over-indulged customer sober up – with miraculous results, we spotted her five minutes later, squirting another syringe full of alcoholic jelly into her mouth. Like I say, it’s that kind of place.

 

The warm up was some Midget Limbo outside on the patio, in which they acted as the stands for the poles. We had, by this time, firmly established ourselves at the bar, and felt disinclined to lose our spot, so opted to sit that one out, and wait for the hardcore wrestling. It was hardly a chore, between the bartop dancing, the people-watching, and the steady consumption of alcohol. Chris seemed to think the vodka was watered down, but without going into details, it’s safe to say her position on that had changed by the end of the night. By about 90 degrees. 🙂

Finally, the moment we had all been waiting for arrived: Puppet and Mad Mex stepped onto the bar-top and began to brawl. Fortunately, it was wider than average, but even so, it wasn’t the kind of surface onto which I would like to be thrown. From there, they eventually headed off into the crowd, the fight continuing, and were lost from view – when you’re four feet tall, this tends to happen quite easily. We went back to our drinks, imagining the entertainment over.

But, lo! What was this? A good 20 minutes later – though concepts like “time” were becoming steadily hazier by now – back came the deadly duo back through the place, still going at it hammer-and-tongs. Up onto the bar in front of us once more, Puppet caught Mex across the head with a garbage can lid, then tossed him inside the bin itself and pounded away some more. Finally, Puppet got the three-count for the win, to the cheers of the crowd. We left soon after, having seen all we needed to see, despite the victor’s inquiry, “Who wants to get drunk with midgets?”

Let’s be clear about this: even in our (by now, fairly drunken) condition, we felt nothing but enormous admiration for Puppet and Mex. They have what society perceives as a “disability”, and could easily sit around, waiting for government handouts, demanding concessions like the Americans with Disabilities Act, which requires cubicles for shower-dancers in strip-clubs to be wheelchair accessible. Some may call it demeaning, but their life lets them tour the country, brawl, get drunk, dance with women on bar-tops, and get paid for it.

What single man wouldn’t want to trade places with them?

[For more info, check out the Midget Mayhem website]

Big Fish Pub,
Tempe, AZ
January 13th, 2004

Yes, America may be the land of the free, but that information didn’t appear to have percolated down to the local licensing board, who apparently threatened to close the venue down if the show went ahead. Phoenix has a strange schizophrenia in this area. Nudity is okay, alcohol is okay: the two combined are An Evil Which Must Be Stopped At All Costs. But nothing gets me more stoked than censorship: no-one has the right to tell me what I can and cannot watch. So when we found out the show had been moved to a smoke-free venue in the (allegedly, more liberal) neighbouring city of Tempe, attendance became mandatory.

Yes, America may be the land of the free, but that information didn’t appear to have percolated down to the local licensing board, who apparently threatened to close the venue down if the show went ahead. Phoenix has a strange schizophrenia in this area. Nudity is okay, alcohol is okay: the two combined are An Evil Which Must Be Stopped At All Costs. But nothing gets me more stoked than censorship: no-one has the right to tell me what I can and cannot watch. So when we found out the show had been moved to a smoke-free venue in the (allegedly, more liberal) neighbouring city of Tempe, attendance became mandatory.

A few thoughts on Suicide Girls in general. It’s a website, founded in 2001 out of Portland, which has more strip-clubs per capita than any other US city. The basic concept is the same as any other pay-per-view site: nekkid chicks. But the models here are tattooed, pierced, goth, punk, indie chicks, and the initial concept has exploded to something which claims to be as much about the community of like-minded individuals, as getting the viewer hard/wet. [One wonders how long the site would remain a going concern without the skin, however…]

I have mixed feelings about this. The idea of politically-correct pornography (“sex positive”) is contradictory; eroticism is inextricably linked to a sense of taboo-breaking, which is why we can enjoy smut and animals can’t. [Ironically, burlesque illustrates the central concept nicely.] Half the fun is that it’s not squeaky-clean and socially acceptable. Besides, what’s better than porn for pissing off religious fundamentalists? There’s also a smug sense of superiority to SG, as if its approach is somehow intrinsically “better” than everywhere else on the Internet that sells skin. In truth, while I’m all in favour of diversity, it is just another fetish: some like nurses, some nuns, and others gloomy girls dressed in black, with ripped fishnets.

The women on the site simply fit a different set of stereotypes – you’d find more coloured women at a KKK cookout than on the Suicide Girls press page – and the fact that they write poetry about themselves doesn’t make any significant difference. The illusion of accessibility is hardly anything new in porn, going back at least to the “Readers’ Wives” section in the magazines of my tender youth. [I sense I’ll be quizzed on this revelation by Chris!] Of course, after a decade of surfing, the only web content I’ve ever paid for is my fantasy baseball – unless you have very specific wants, there’s so much free ‘Net nudity, you’d be a fool to pay for it. But no matter how pretentious it may be, it’s mostly harmless fun, despite the claims to be “a contemporary lifestyle brand” on their website.

Unfortunately, “fun” is probably about the last word we can use to describe their burlesque show, which sucked on almost every conceivable level. We could start with the organisational; if you’re going to put on a public striptease show, it makes sense to check, well in advance, that all potential authorities are okay with the concept. Instead, just four days before the performance, the New Times wrote about the show without a hint of trouble – it’s very possible that this article caused the furore, and so we discovered it had been abruptly moved only on the day of the show, while trying to find out the start time. How many less-informed attendees turned up at the original location? As for the new venue, I appreciate it was late notice, but who decided to move to one half the size, with a a stage about two feet high?

Next, let’s discuss the support bands. Yes: support bands. I guess it’s part of the community thing previously mentioned, but it was clear from the audience reaction – “polite disinterest” at best – that they weren’t there to listen to crap guitar-rock like Bloom, who replaced skill with volume. Local band Peachcake opened, and were kinda amusing with song titles like I Hope We Don’t Get Exploded, and had the good sense not to stick around for long.

Then there’s the audience. While I appreciate Suicide Girls have no control over this, those measuring 6’4″ and more should have better grace than to push their way to the front; especially in a venue like this one, they acted like the moon during a solar eclipse. I was immensely pleased to see the bald, bespectacled jerk who’d crammed his way directly in front of me get reamed out by security for taking pics with his digital camera – personally, I’d like to have seen it used to give him an impromptu colonoscopy.

Finally, at around 11:15pm, after seven false starts on the music – more evidence of the level of professionalism here – the girls themselves appeared. But hang on, where was the “punk-rock soundtrack” promised in New Times? Instead, we got Shirley Bassey’s Hey Big Spender, which is about as clichd and predictable as you can imagine. Back in London, I’d seen strippers use Nine Inch Nails and the Revolting Cocks, which was far more imaginative than what we heard here. I mean, Jessica Rabbit’s song from Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Please…

Making things worse, it looked like the evil repressive hand of the licensing board had reared its ugly head, even in Tempe. We’d wondered why there had been so much cutting of duct-tape going on, but when the tops came off, a sense of disappointment rippled back from the lucky few at the front who could actually see. Eventually, we realised why. Just as at the Rockbitch concert, their nipples had been concealed with tape. The show was now reduced to an MPAA rating equal to that for Pirates of the Caribbean.

Most damningly of all, what we saw (admittedly, significantly less than everything, since we were peering through the rows of heads in front – a criticism also levelled at other SG appearances on this tour) was about as erotic as watching your daughter play dress-up. Newsflash to the Suicide Girls: taking your clothes off for a web-site in no way qualifies you to be an exotic dancer. There is an art involved, and it’s entirely separate from looking morosely cute in still pictures.

The crushing banality of the performances, particularly when coupled with the crushing crowd, left us with only one alternative. Now, we don’t run away. Call it touching optimism, but be it music, sports or theatre, we have never departed before the end of any form of live entertainment, no matter how terrible it might be…

At least until that night.

I turned to Chris, and said, “You know, I really wouldn’t mind if we left.” She didn’t need to be asked twice. We squeezed our way through the maddening crowd, popped out the door like a cork leaving a bottle and headed home. Now, I suppose the show might suddenly have improved. The duct-tape might have come off. The choice of songs might have become less banal. The Biblical Rapture might have taken place, and thinned the crowd out a bit. But on the whole, it was a chance we were willing to take.

About the only plus-point I can find to the whole evening – and believe me, I’m trying – is that, at $8, it was a cheap night out. It’s possible that, at another venue, in a city with a more liberal code, and with a better audience, this could have been entertaining. As is, it was a miserable failure that has succeeded in ending any TC interest in burlesque for the foreseeable future.

There is a valuable moral to be learned here, albeit one I probably should have picked up and taken to heart, from my encounters with the forces of darkness (a.k.a. state and national censors), which have been an ongoing battle since the 1980’s. We can now add the Suicide Girls Burlesque to the list of things – Italian cannibal movies, the 2 Live Crew, and Fanny Hill – which all help prove that just because something is banned, does not necessarily mean it is actually any good…

[Subsequent information from the New Times suggests the liquor board were not responsible, and that claim may have been a fabrication by the promoters. Needless to say, if true, this pisses me off even more… Though at least the NT writer also bailed early because of the utter lack of visibility.]