Work in Progress: Japanese Game

By Charlie Kondek

I've been working on and off on an article on my main physical activity, kendo. Working title is "Japanese Game." I haven't got a real game-plan for where I'd like to submit it. I'd really like to submit it to a men's magazine of some kind. Below is the intro.

* * *













Describing kendo to the uninitiated, I should do so from the outside in. After all, to someone who has never seen it, it must seem bizarre. Two opponents, gauntleted, in bright, hooded chrome masks and flowing, skirt-like pants, wield with two hands long pieces of bamboo that resemble unopened umbrellas and, screaming, try to slash each other, their bodies smashing together like marionettes after the cut. I should describe this from the outside in, but maybe because I experience almost everything of kendo from behind that metal face, looking out at my surroundings through lines of steel, I feel compelled to describe it from the inside out. If you were to go inside my mind, to the heart of my kendo, what you might find is this.

I'm twelve. I have just read in the paper that one of our small movie houses is showing The Seven Samurai. I ask my mother if I can go. For whatever reason, I can't find a friend to accompany me. On a rainy Saturday afternoon, my mom drops me off alone at the matinee.

It's an old theater, since made over into an "art house." With the rain outside, the inside, carpeted, gold and dark, is warm. Besides the staff, I am the only person in the lobby. I get some popcorn and a pop. There is only one other person in the audience when the movie begins.

It's a three-hour movie. You may have seen it or, if you haven't, you should. It's about a small village in pre-industrial Japan. Every year the village is attacked and raided by brigands, and the village has no protectors. This year, unable to take it anymore, the villagers try to recruit freelance samurai to defend them. They have nothing to offer the samurai except meager food and shelter, yet they are able to obtain seven, who agree to fight for reasons of their own, including pity, altruism, adventure, impersonation and skill.

There is an intermission. I go into the lobby, play a video game and watch the rain. When I return to the theater, I am the only audience member. The samurai have become involved in the lives of the villagers. There are several skirmishes and a mud-splattered climactic battle in a rainstorm. When the movie is over, I am changed. As I said, it's a very good movie.

Skip ahead to my young adulthood. I have lead a life not always sedentary, but not particularly active, either. At the age of 26, I quit smoking. I want to get in reasonable shape and I know instantly how I want to do it: martial arts. I try my hand at mixed martial arts, learning punching, kicking, takedowns and grappling. I'm no prodigy, not particularly tough or strong, but I am passionate and disciplined. It sets the stage for what I want to do next. Ever since I was 12, I have harbored a fantasy that I might be one of The Seven Samurai. I put that fantasy with all my other notions about swords and swordsmanship. I decide I want to participate in fencing of some kind. The university in my town has both a kendo club and a western-style fencing club. It's almost a flip of a coin. Almost.

Ode to Strong Verse

By Charlie Kondek

Some people horde their literary prejudices
like nuts are stored in a squirrelry.
But I would just like to state for the record that I enjoy the poetry of Ogden Nash thoroughly.

Bogie

By Charlie Kondek

was a Bogart fan growing up. My favorite movie, to this day, is Casablanca, and I make no apologies for that. I recently revived my interest in this actor and read a couple of books I had.

The first was the coffee-table book, Casablanca: The 50th Anniversary by Frank Miller (no, not that Frank Miller). One of those books that seems commemorative and you got it as a gift (I did) and you kind of glanced through it, unsure whether it had any depth to it. This does, describing the short happy saga of the making of the film, sketching in the personalities at play, from producer Jack Warner to director Michael Curtiz to the screenwriters, the Epstein brothers and Howard Koch. A very thoughtful, thorough and enjoyable book about a great movie, giving an insight into how they used to make movies. It clears up a few misunderstandings I was aware of; namely, that everyone thought it'd be a flop, that it's a miracle of accidents it was made the way it was. No, they pretty much knew what they were doing, they just weren't prepared for how big it would be, nor its legacy in American film.

Bogart was assembled by biographist Ann Sperber and finished by Eric Lax when Sperber died before she could complete the work. An excellent, interesting Hollywood biography, one of those weighty ones that I pick up thinking, "How'm I gonna read all this?" and then end up devouring with ease. I never knew much about Bogie growing up, only that I wanted to be like him: calm, tough - I can blame him for my smoking career, actually, him, James Bond and James Dean. (I've been quit for ten years.) The Bogie of this biography reveals that he was a native New Yorker, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, that was really unsuited for anything except drinking and sailing til he found a home in theater and eventually migrated to film, along the way honing a character actor into one of Hollywood's most endearing leading men.

That, I realized after reading this and the 50th anniversary Casablanca, seems to be Bogie explained: he was a character actor in the leading man role, a backgrounder thrust into the spotlight, retaining the basic sense of virility (there's that word again) even as he navigated the aisle usually reserved for the more gentile, top-hat set. That's the quality he brought to Rick Blaine, the man without a country, the reluctant hero, and established his prototype - often imitated, never quite duplicated. But why would you want to? There was only one Bogie.

So, the Steve McQueen, the Elvis, or the Peter Fonda?

by Charlie Kondek

I grew up reading Esquire, GQ, Details, People and my mother's Cosmopolitans. I used to really escape into these magazines, especially Esquire - they seemed to offer access to another world. Not just the world of adulthood, but the world of sophisticated adulthood, of adventure, romance, glitz.

Esquire and GQ have really suffered lately, in my opinion, reverted to world-weary, seen-it-done-it-what-do-I-invest in next elan. Worse, the magazines more completely resemble web sites - no articles, just lists and sidebars and images, endlessly. I don't want my magazine looking like a web site. But I have a new champion for men's magazine writing: Men's Vogue. I started reading the magazine about a year ago and have been very happy with each issue. Besides Men's Journal and Sports Illustrated and a few others, usually of the zine or cult variety, this is my favorite glossy.

Really, Men's Vogue includes, in every issue, stuff I think any magazine of the sophistiacted globe-trotting kind should have. Take, for example, what was in the first issue I read.

-an article about the tradition of gambling on Macao and how that's being changed by new international investors

-the travel adventures of model Sophie Dahl

-a story about a shop in Milan that specializes in recapturing the romance of being a rich man in the 1920s and 30s by selling vintage watches, travel items and other accessories

-an article on tennis star James Blake that also featured pics of him in various coterie

-an article on the new "Bond girl," Eva Green ("when French women are beautiful, they hurt with their perfection")

-an article about different barber shops. This one chap in London says there are three basic haircuts for men: the Steve McQueen, the Elvis, and the Peter Fonda. I thought that was just great. This barber was the stylist on Snatch and Layer Cake.

...and more. It seems like all my interests are there. Crime? Check. Books and film? Check. Travel? Check. Sports? Check. Sure, I skip the architecture section and the food section but reading a magazine is not usually about reading it cover to cover. Another issue had an article about how art is being stolen out of the Italian countryside. Isn't that awesome? Not just an article about crime - cool, weird crime. I enjoyed it like I did when I was a teenage kid.

I had some of the same reservations as when I was a kid, though, and some new ones. When I was a boy, I felt partially disgusted at what I read because it involved the world of the moneyed and I knew that was, at best, a lie, at worst, evidence of the economic unfairness that plagues the world. (I was a bit clasisst even then and have always hated materialistic people.) This time around, what I noticed was the quality of the writing, something I've paid more attention to as I've grown as a writer. Each piece in the magazine was smooth, clear, clever - and they all sounded the same. Further, they lacked a certain quality and I finally figured out what it was. Authenticity. They lacked authenticity. In fact, I caught parts that I thought were out-right lies. (Sophie Dahl was trapped for days on a drifting ship with Chechen mobsters and spent the days "teaching them Aretha Franklin's greatest gospel hits?" Ah, no, I don't think so. Another writer claimed that he got into so much gambling trouble during his first semester at Cambridge he was "forced to take a job on a North Shore oil rig." Right.)

But it's still a pleasure, perhaps a guilty pleasure, to read these. And I realized something else about how magazines make the magic they do. The ads - and there are tons of them - the ads tell a story in images, an ongoing story woven into the narrative of the entire magazine. It's the same kind of story told in airports. You look at all these people going places with all this promise and you make up stories about them in your head, about who they are, where they are going, and what will happen to them. The narrative of Men's Vogue is: You are rich. You are going places, internationally, with alluring, attractive and potentially dangerous people. You are attractive. You are the star of this movie. And the director and the screenwriter. We are the art directors, the prop makers, and the editors. Here are the pictures to prove it.

That's what thrilled me when I was 16. As a man of 35, it's nice to revisit that, even if I have a different perspective. That's a topic for another day!

By the way, this post was based on something I wrote at the wonderful message board Voices from Beyond.

The Best American Sports Writing of the Century

Review by Charlie Kondek

David Halberstam edits the annual Best of American Sports Writing anthologies and put this together with Glenn Stout in 1999 to commemorate the best of the previous century. There are some unusual choices in here, especially in the Writing on a Deadline section, but most of the others kept me up nights.

Among the great reads in this tome is what lead me to the book in the first place, "Brownsville Bum" by the recently departed W.C. Heinz, a 1951 piece for True magazine that, according to some (including Jimmy Breslin), is the best piece of American sports writing ever written. Heinz' style was flowing, somewhere between conversation and internal, and in the kind of common, bar room patois I've always enjoyed and which, due to its specifically 1950s style, we'll probably never see again.

Other pieces in this book that got under my skin include Richard Be Cramer's 1986 piece on great American hero Ted Williams ("How Do You Like Ted Williams Now?"), Roger Angell's thorough 1985 meditation on the mystery of pitching ("Gone For Good"), Thomas McGuane's 1965 ode to fly-fishing ("The Longest Silence") and Al Stump's 1961 piece on a dying, bottle-throwing, cursing, violent Ty Cobb ("The Fight to Live," later the basis for his book and the movie based on it).

I also have to call out some other remarkable stories. Get your hands on these in this or any other collection for some incredible writing:

• Frank Deford, "The Boxer and the Blond," Sports Illustrated, 1985. Tells the story of Billy Conn and his upbringing as an Irishman and a fighter in Pittsburgh.
• Paul Solotaroff, "The Power and the Gory," an incredible 1990 piece for The Village Voice about steroid abuse in weightlifting. You will not be the same after reading this.
• J.R. Moehringer, "Resurrecting the Champ," The Los Angeles Times Magazine, 1997, about an LA Times reporter who befriends a homeless man who may or may not be a former boxing champion. A great boxing story that probably not many fight fans know about because it comes from a non-fight writer. Makes me wanna read this.

Really, this is an amazing collection, an inspiration to me as a reader and a writer. There's even a John Lardner piece on golf that kept me interested and a George Plimpton piece on Ivy League football that made me want to read more Plimpton. My dad and my brother have birthdays coming up and are gonna get this from me.