Bless You is one of the Court and Spark's very earliest records (is Ventura Whites earlier? it sounds earlier) and I was surprised to hear of its existence. After all, I had Witch Season and Dead Diamond River and Hearts, so I thought I was doing pretty good. It wasn't until I was reading the article about them on Last.fm that I discovered their two early albums, and I was surprised by an Amazon review that declared this their best album ever, since surely it couldn't be better than Witch Season. But I was plenty excited to get it anyway, and when I put it in, boy, was I pleased.

While Witch Season is a little more up-tempo than Bless You, it doesn't really outshine the record in terms of energy, because a lot of the instrumentation in Bless You is somewhere between intense and frantic, especially some of the lead guitar work. The drums are also way up in the mix, which gives the slower beat a little more emotion.

But of course, with the Court and Spark, it's the songs that carry the day, not the arrangement. I submit that if you don't like "Rooster Mountain," we probably cannot be friends. Ditto "National Lights."

Actually, I probably don't proselytize enough for the Court and Spark, so I should point out here that some of my all time top 100 songs are scattered across the handful of C&S disks that I have. Check out "Suffolk Down Upon The Night," "Out on the Water," "Sundowner, You," "Berliners," "Titov Sang the Blues," and more. Like.. now. Check them out right now.

Baian the Assassin is a television show from the late eighties/early nineties in Japan, set in the Edo period, about an acupuncturist who has a side business as an assassin. He's definitely an anti-hero (one of the actions he takes in the very first episode is pretty shocking), but still, he finds himself drawn into the backstories of the people he's going to assassinate for the episode–always with the suggestion that it is rare an unprofessional to ask questions about the victim–which goes a long way to presenting him as something more ethical than a regular run of the mill hired killer.

It isn't bad, but I'll tell you right now: if there are still gaps in your Zatoichi collection, either the movies or the TV shows, pass on this for now. You get two episodes in the first volume here, and although that works out to something like two-and-a-half hours, that's not much for the price you pay. The quality is also pretty iffy, shot for television, direct to video, and it shows. Ken Watanabe as Baian is… competent, but the role doesn't give him a lot of room to act. His sidekick is actually more compelling, in my opinion.

This weekend I also picked up a couple of early Court and Spark records, Ventura Whites and Bless You, which are good, but won't make you forget Witch Season, and also Get Him Eat Him's Casual Sex demo. I would have signed them.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, was written by brothers Chip and Dan Heath, and attempts to get to the root of ideas that are memorable, often so memorable that you can remember significant details about them after hearing them once. They propose a framework for such ideas that involves simplicity, concrete details, unexpectedness, credibility, emotional appeal, and storytelling aspects, and the book is littered with examples of such sticky ideas, used to draw out one or more of the framework components.

I think they've got a pretty good handle on some things that truly attention getting stories, commercials, &c., have in common, but I don't think the book does a particularly good job of explaining how to turn your boring idea into a sticky one. If you knew how to make your idea have more emotional appeal, after all, wouldn't you have done it? Still, the book is an interesting read.

Of course, I realize this is not my usual reading material. Chip Heath came to speak at one of our educational sessions, and the book was free. But as with Lawrence Lessig's book, I didn't have any trouble getting into it, even if it isn't about English politics of the 1860s or imperial China in the Tang Dynasty.

The game was Hotel Dusk: Room 215, a sort of graphic adventure game for the DS, in the mystery genre. As many people have noted, it is almost more like reading a book than playing a game, and you will like it to the exact extent that you like film noir. I liked it a fair amount, though I certainly didn't intend to play it for 6 hours on Sunday. Get it, or, you know, don't.

The 6th volume of the Zatoichi TV series was released at the end of January, and I put away all four episodes this weekend. There was some good stuff in here, and some very different stuff. Most Zatoichi movies (especially the early ones) and most of the previous TV episodes can generally be described as "Zatoichi shows up in a town, Yakuza bosses fight over whose side he will be on in the coming fight, he sort of gets disgusted with both sides, but for some personal reason, usually shows up to the fight, often killing both bosses." I don't want to make it sound like every episode is the same–there's a lot of room to move in that format and the show has been pretty enjoyable so far–but that probably fits the majority of them.

In this volume, however, there are a couple of very different episodes. One is the story of a blind female musician and her lover, in which Zatoichi plays a pretty minor part. Even the assassin who is sent to kill the girl is told not to bother killing Zatoichi. Of course, there is eventually a fight, but this is basically not his story. He is an observer. In another episode, two men are on a mission to avenge their boss, whom they acknowledge was a scumbag, but whom Zatoichi killed and to whom they promised loyalty. Of course, when they meet Zatoichi, they get to like him, so it's more tragic when they decide they have to go through with it anyway. Finally, there is an episode where Zatoichi returns to his home village, only to be chased down by dozens of Yakuza eager to collect the 500 ryo bounty on his head. When they make trouble for his village and kill the head of the temple where he was learning to be a priest, Zatoichi realizes that he will never have a quiet life and leaves to avoid emperilling the villagers. Sad stuff.