Serdar | Genji Press

The Hidden Blade is not about a secret sword technique that saves a hero in the face of terrible evil. If anything, it is exactly the opposite: it gives us a samurai, Munezo (Masatoshi Nagase) who has never drawn a weapon to kill, is more mild-mannered and unassuming than anything else, and is unhappy that his job consists of learning, badly, how to use the new weapons of war that Japan has just imported from the West. He would like nothing better than to simply put all this stuff away and live without it, but his life demands otherwise of him.

Blade is in a sense a sequel, or maybe a companion, to Yoji Yamada’s The Twilight Samurai. That movie was set in the same time period—the 1860s, when Japan was opening up to Western influences in a precarious and turbulent way—deals with many of the same social implications, and even has a parallel plot device which I will go into later. For me, though, Blade is a better movie in some ways: it uses some of the same ideas but extrapolates on them further, and examines them with less preachy sentiment. It also features one of my current favorite Japanese actors: Nagase was in Gojoe, the Maiku Hama movies and many others I’ve looked at here that I’ve taken close to heart. Here, he plays a somewhat glum Everysamurai for whom the samurai code and its attendant honor and glory seem more like distasteful burdens than ideals to aspire to.

Now we’re getting somewhere. Tale of the Dead Town, fourth in the Vampire Hunter D novel series, is a big step up (and forward) from the going-through-the-motions of the previous book, Demon Deathchase. This time around, Kikuchi mixes things up in some new and enjoyable ways: he gives us a nifty new corner of D’s world to explore, he pairs him up with both rivals and potential allies who are also that much more interesting, and gets most everything else right. Kikuchi even gives us a glimpse of what makes D tick as a person, something we se so little of throughout the series that any bit of that we end up with is welcome.

Spheres is somewhere between mesmerizing and frustrating, not least of all because it’s not the record that was originally made. This is a severely edited-down version of a much larger work, Hymns/Spheres, an album which spanned two LPs when originally released in 1976, but did not appear on CD until 1997 or so. When it finally did turn up, it was shorn of all but four of its tracks, with a fifth one turning up on another disc and the rest still only on vinyl. Maybe, in a strange way, it was for the best, since Spheres is one of Keith Jarrett’s most distinctive but least accessible records, and might have benefited from some careful editing. I just don’t know that this was it.

Spheres compiles a series of improvisations recorded on the gigantic Karl Joseph Riepp Trinity Baroque pipe organ at the Benedictine Abbey in Ottobeuren, Germany. Those familiar with Jarrett through the warmth and intimacy of his piano improvisations will be shocked at how positively alien this record sounds, not only because of Jarrett’s atypical playing but the sound of the organ itself. It brings to mind Tangerine Dream’s very early Virgin-era records, which consisted not only of electronic instruments but conventional ones that had been heavily processed with studio effects and tape manipulations. Here, no effects or transformations have been applied; what you hear is exactly what it sounded like the moment it was performed. Most of the peculiar “vocalizations” accomplished with the organ were done by opening and closing some of the stops partway, an effect that almost all pipe organs have had since their creation.

Nobody today objects to the idea that you’re still making art if you create a painting or a sculpture that doesn’t represent anything “real”, so why do we still assume that the only things we can safely call “music” are akin to what we hear on the radio in four-minute bursts? John Cage tackled that problem head-on during his career, and reached a kind of compromise with his critics: you didn’t have to call what he did “music” if the term shocked them. But Cage was working within the relatively formal confines of a composer, even if his music reached and influenced a great many people who were outside of those circles—Todd Rundgren and Frank Zappa, for instance.

Over the last thirty years a lot of that has changed, as artists who work in more commercial formats and venues work to redefine music. They’re lumped in with popular music as a whole, even if they don’t sell to one-one-thousandth of an audience that size—probably because they appeal most directly to their respective audiences by making and selling records instead of more “traditional” venues like creating works on commission for galleries or orchestras. Not to say that they don’t do such things, but most of how they’re recognized by an audience comes from producing and selling recordings, and touring and performing in the same manner as more mainstream artists. The end result of this is a very broad, very active but extremely cluttered underground of experimental music, and the weight of decades has slowly weeded out anyone who’s not actually bringing anything original or creative to the table.

The shame of V for Vendetta is that it has a lot more on its mind than it knows how to handle. Here we have a film that is a stylized visual fantasy about the Individual vs. the State, a la The Matrix—courtesy of the same writers and executive producer—and that should resonate deeply with the spirit of the times, but instead it feels smug and obvious. Ostensibly the filmmakers wanted to provoke thought about one man’s terrorist being another man’s freedom fighter, but the movie stacks the deck all wrong. The end result is brazenly confused, invoking a great many things—the Holocaust, the War on Terror, etc.—without ever really building on them.

V is an adaptation of Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s graphic novel of the same name, and one of the odd things about the film is that its own distinct flaws further illuminate the problems I had with the original story to begin with. Moore is a visionary and an artist, but no great shakes as a political thinker, and so his story was essentially a fever dream in which a fascist and inhumane Britain gets its comeuppance thanks to a lone jester with a mask. The story’s most credible insight is that ideas are bigger than individuals, and that you can blow out a candle but not a brush fire, etc., but the movie takes even these few notions and trivializes them. The Wachowski Brothers seem to be consistently fascinated with the idea of the individual transcending the collective, but each time they’ve made a movie about it the results have been messy, to put it politely.

I can think of two things that most immediately piqued my interest in Japan: their movies and their popular fiction. My first “Akira” was Kurosawa, not the Akira of Neo-Tokyo, so when I finally did come to anime and manga—the most common forms of Japanese popular culture that non-Japanese encounter—I’d already had some education into what fascinated the Japanese natively. It’s been said many times before that most of their own popular culture wasn’t intended to be appreciated by any other audience, which makes it all the more surprising for them when it does happen.