And no nonsense about angels and being good

My poem "The Chymical Marriage" has been accepted by Strange Horizons. It was written for Elsa Lanchester, Boris Karloff, Ernest Thesiger, and teenybuffalo, and I like to think it qualifies as one of my rare science fiction poems, even if the science is mostly Kenneth Strickfaden and alchemy.

Zatoichi (2003) is not science fiction, but I think some of its strangeness would have been appreciated by James Whale. A blind masseur who is also a supernally talented swordsman and cheats a lot at dice is a terrific leading man even before he's played by Takeshi Kitano, who also directs this latest take on the iconic character. I can't speak for the rest of the tradition, which I am told encompasses novels, television series, and something like twenty-seven movies, but I loved this particular entry.

The plot is classical: Zatoichi arrives in a small village where two rival gangs are fighting out a turf war, demanding ever more protection money from the farmers and killing one another in the middle of their fields. He is taken in by one of the farmers, an older woman with whom he gravely and slyly flirts, and presently her shiftless nephew; he meets a pair of vengeful geisha; he crosses paths more than once with the "bodyguard" of the more powerful gang, a skilled ronin who has taken a thug's job for the sake of his seriously ill wife. You can predict how much of this will turn out. But getting there? The story has something for everyone—the kind of past that feels lived in, tragic strands and comedic ones and the random bits that are just people's lives, deadpan and offbeat humor, and stylization that Brecht would be proud of. The fight scenes are brutal and efficient, but the blood is computer-generated, flowering and patently unreal, as if to jolt the audience back onto its own side of the screen. Everyday noises like hoes or rainfall or carpentry accumulate into syncopation, their own percussive melodies; it is not wholly a shock when the harvest festival of the finale bursts into gloriously anachronistic tap-dance, like Bollywood slid up and over a few Mercator degrees. And Kitano's Zatoichi is not your average wandering antihero, either: white-headed, not young and not tall, with one of those snub knockabout faces; with his odd chuckles and grimaces, he seems to be listening to a different world than the other characters inhabit, a playful trickster from the next folktale over, until the blades come out and then he's sure, swift, dispassionate: the film still has the last laugh on him. I shouldn't have to mention the nonlinear and unreliable aspects of the narrative, should I?

In short, a good transition from Avatar back into Movie Night; and not much like anything except itself, which always makes me happy. I would like to see more films by Takeshi Kitano, or at least hear recommendations. I might even be curious to see some of the original Zatoichi movies with Shintaro Katsu, just for comparison—I have the impression Kitano is to Zatoichi as Daniel Craig is to Bond, in revision if not franchise. (Also that I should have seen more jidaigeki, because I'm sure there were conventions being pretzeled that I couldn't even recognize.) But mostly I'm sorry I can't hear how dice fall, odd or even. Toph would approve.