Liner notes for the Dragon Rock 2 DVD. Figured since they may not appear in English anytime soon, this would be as good a resting place for them as anywhere else. Sex and Death in Tokyo resumes tomorrow...
“I don’t know karate, but I know crazy,” James Brown once sang during that hot, funky, stinky, and utterly sexy time known as the seventies. Brother James’ song, The Payback, where those lyrics originally come from, played like a vision from a soul-dipped prophet. Even if James didn’t know karate, he certainly saw a definite link between the two, which was worth further inspection. And that’s just what the decade that followed did.
There was Bruce Lee, of course, but it was really Tsurugi – not Tsurugi Goten, but Takuma Tsurugi, played by Shinichi Chiba in a series of films for Toei Studios - that really nailed the combination down just right. In every step of Chiba’s black bell-bottoms pants, and every twitch of his massive caterpillar eyebrows came karate AND crazy in equal amounts. Like Tsurugi Goten, some thirty years later, Chiba walked a sublime line between macho and buffoonish, more manga character than man, a territory that even Bruce dare not to approach, because the final result was not just awe-inspiring, but rather… hysterically funny.
Suddenly, the laughter stopped big time: Lee dropped dead, Chiba got older, and so did we. And in the age that followed, Karate and crazy somehow got misplaced in the vast spectrum of popular culture. What sad little lives we had to live then during that epic impasse with only Steven Segal offered up as a kind of compensation.
It wouldn’t be until 2003’s Kill Bill Vol. 1 that people around the world suddenly remembered Japan in the ‘70s had actually been a very outrageous and funky place, what with all those movie stars like Chiba and Kaji Meiko running around. But Dragon Rock 2, debuting on the stage in 1999, was far ahead of this mass marketed, retro-cool curve.
Instead of just merely sighing “natsukashi” and trying to recreate the past, like in a wax museum, Dragon Rock 2 shows us exactly how pop culture went astray. Like a kind of stage-bound Sengoku Jieitai, it contrasts the images of Tsurugi, Jyoshu Sasori, and men in fundoshi waving samurai swords against the sort of people that tragically eclipsed them: waves of talentless idols phenomenon, push-button video game jockeys, and (god help us) what appears to be the entire cast of The Lion King.
But all this makes Dragon Rock 2 and Goten Tsurugi sound as if they had some sort of intellectual axe to grind against the present state of things (in reality, it’s only me). It’s clear after about 30 seconds that the whole thing is about as high-minded as a well-executed, perfectly timed fart. And to not laugh at the moment of impact - and to maybe take a small whiff around you - is to deny your own imperfect, half-crazed humanity.
For me, the key scene happens early on when Goten Tsurugi interacts - dancing really - with his own atsui opening title animation, running across a hand-drawn desert landscape like he was an ultra-masculine hairy Roadrunner. Here’s hoping that we haven’t seen the last of his kind and that he never reaches a final destination, because it sure sucked the last time karate and crazy went missing from this particular planet.
I had been thinking how I can't wait to get my hands on those cool liner notes, so I appreciate your posting them here. It may be said that another example of karate/crazy that unfortunately remains forbidden to us is SAYONARA NIPPON, which has gone through, I don't know, eight billion printings in Japan, but still never a one in lands deemed outlier.
Posted by: Carl Horn | January 05, 2006 at 02:23 AM