{"id":1945,"date":"2013-02-12T01:05:52","date_gmt":"2013-02-12T09:05:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/?p=1945"},"modified":"2013-06-12T14:59:09","modified_gmt":"2013-06-12T21:59:09","slug":"forest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/2013\/02\/forest\/","title":{"rendered":"Forest"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Sonny Chiba is Hattori Hanzo<\/p><\/div>\n

One of my All Time Top Five movies,\u00a0Kill Bill,\u00a0<\/em>has this monologue by Sonny Chiba, playing retired swordsmith Hattori Hanzo.<\/p>\n

Revenge is never a straight line. It’s a forest. And like a forest it’s easy to lose your way…to get lost… to forget where you came in.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This leads me to make two specific observations about myself and my life.<\/p>\n

One: I find it very hard to respond to the question “what kind of books\/movies\/music do you like?” It is hard because I have never been able to figure out why I choose\u00a0that\u00a0<\/em>particular book to read next, or\u00a0this\u00a0<\/em>movie playing in theaters gets my pulse racing while I am cold towards another, possibly equally-good film. Or steadfastly refuse to listen to some albums until … I don’t know … I feel like it.<\/p>\n

Warning: this may sound pretentious and somewhat obvious. It’s like I am in this forest full of trees blooming with psychedelic flowers and populated by mysterious creatures, and I am trying to find my own way through. I forget why I came in, what I am doing in that forest, and where I am going, but it just works out that way. I like it. I guess that’s all that matters. I am reading two books now –\u00a0Do Gentlemen Really Prefer Blondes<\/em>, a title that sounds too frivolous than what it is, a bunch of scientific observations about sex, human nature, relationships and biology. Questions like “how do your parents’ age determine what kind of partner you will be attracted to?” and “Why are blue-eyed men attracted to women of the same eye-color?” are answered seriously, with a dash of statistics and an odd tongue-in-cheek comment every now and then. It does get repetitive sometimes, but it’s fun. Why am I reading this book? Because I went inside Piccolo – the second-hand bookstore opposite my office – last week and paid attention to my favorite shelf (yes, I have a favorite shelf there, it displays the weirdest books, especially hidden behind others, most of a dubious nature. I found David Carradine’s\u00a0Kill Bill\u00a0<\/em>memoir there too, which led me to watch the movie again, and ergo, the quote above – a nice game of connect-the-dots, don’t you think? Oh, and all books at Piccolo are a dollar each.) This book was hidden behind one on steamboats, and it took me a few seconds to flip through it and realize that it was going to be read next, even though I was pretty darn sure that morning about beginning to read David Byrne’s\u00a0How Music Works<\/em>, on my e-reader.<\/p>\n

Then yesterday, I attended a Suzanne Vega concert, my first concert of the year, and I reached one song too late. Which in my book was okay-late, not omg-late, I took a minute or two to park the car and walked inside the venue a little faster than I usually would have, because there was nobody standing outside. I still do not know what the first song was, but ‘Pale Blue Thing’ was playing when I got in, and ‘Caramel’ began next, which turned my knees into jelly and made me forget that I had driven 600+ miles in the last 36 hours. When we were nursing our teas in the foyer of the building during the break, I not-so-unpredictably found myself next to the merchandise table, and my wallet not-so-unpredictably unloaded its contents in the general direction of the cheerful volunteers there, especially when the magic words “signing” was mentioned. Among what I got was\u00a0The Passionate Eye: The Collected Writings of Suzanne Vega<\/em>, and today, when waiting for code to compile and run, I opened it up. Boom, next book on the reading-immediately pile. Did I know about this book’s existence a day ago? No. Is poetry\/essay\/interview collections my thing? Not unless it’s – y’know – Suzanne Vega.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

Umm yeah, so my reading habits are sort of a forest too. A Totoro forest, not a Baba Yaga forest. Ok, maybe a Baba Yaga forest where Hellboy and Price Ivan team up.<\/p>\n

Two: I really\u00a0really\u00a0<\/em>like revenge as a sub-genre. This probably dates back to my appreciation and love for\u00a0The Count of Monte Cristo<\/em>, which I have talked about in the past. But it is amazing how many of the films I run to watch at the theater without a second thought, or rewatch any day have this as the theme. Think about your favorite revenge flicks. Chances are very high I will have watched them, and liked them, and that I will like you for having liked them.<\/p>\n

(For the record,\u00a0Taken 2\u00a0<\/em>is a terrible movie.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of my All Time Top Five movies,\u00a0Kill Bill,\u00a0has this monologue by Sonny Chiba, playing retired swordsmith Hattori Hanzo. Revenge is never a straight line. It’s a forest. And like a forest it’s easy to lose your way…to get lost… to forget where you came in. This leads me to make two specific observations about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[384,382,385,386,383,387],"class_list":["post-1945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-forest","tag-hattori-hanzo","tag-kill-bill","tag-reading-habits","tag-revenge","tag-suzanne-vega"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1945"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1945\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1948,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1945\/revisions\/1948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}