raise yr swords

Jim Jarmusch is an adored figure, but he runs hot and cold with me. His movies are uniformly gorgeous, so that's a plus. He creates profound cultural juxtapositions in the form of deadpan comic sketches, which is nice. Occasionally, however, I just get the impression that he has thrown together different hipster* archetypes or cultural anomalies and had them pause interminably between dull, flat statements as a default formula for "understated comedy".

This is not the case for the one movie of his I consider a classic, 1999's Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai. This gem does everything a Jarmusch joint is supposed to do. It incorporates an original score by a modern master (RZA here, who also gets the best 30-second walk-on ever as "Samurai in Camouflage", a role he embodies effortlessly). This score oddly suits an unlikely tapestry of characters with specific cultural settings and affectations. In this case, Forest Whitaker leads as an urban bear living in a shack on a tenement rooftop keeping a pigeon coop and living by the code of the samurai.

Also the retainer Ghost Dog has selected is a flunky Italian mobster in a floundering crime family. And his best friend is a black immigrant ice cream vendor who only speaks and understands French. As they talk, not understanding each other, they consistently are saying and thinking the same things. The way events transpire have both Ghost Dog and the crime family passing their torch to young women in a feminist touch that was sneakily always there.

In any case, one of the greatest services a Jarmusch movie does for me is inevitably teaching me some cool old shit that I never would have taken the initiative to look up on my own. The movie is framed around quotes from Hagakure: Book of the Samurai by Yamamoto Tsunetomo. From these leaves:

Among the maxims on Lord Naoshige's wall, there was this one: "Matters of great concern should be treated lightly." Master Ittei commented, "Matters of small concern should be treated seriously."

We here at Fat Little Monkey are many things. None of us all of them, but all pertaining to most of us. Pop culture junkies. Seasoned drinkers. Compulsive liars. Children of hip hop. Flowers in the attic. Virginians. Haters. Lovers. ELO fans. Plenty of other things that will come to light as we bloom. We are all willing to write at the risk of inviting accusations of frivolity and irrelevance. This pop culture shit is real for us. Personally, if I write at length on my stories (mostly NBC's Thursday night sitcoms), please know that I take it as seriously as yr lonely, aged, single aunt takes her daily soaps.

I take it as seriously as a heart attack (which I don't take terribly seriously, so it goes). This pop culture infatuation is a way of getting at something (and everything potentially). Like all forms of art and life and philosophy, it all winds up becoming an ether of referents through which we can express ourselves without even knowing what we're saying about ourselves. Pop happens to be a pool we like to swim in. I hope you might join us...the water's warm, Lisa.

And what of the name? What does it all mean? What is it about? These are questions I dodge, sometimes artlessly. The public craves definitions and parameters, but it also demands prequels and tell-alls that it ends up gagging on. I don't want to say what this Fat Little Monkey is. I will share that it hopes to include writers we like writing what they like. Still, I don't want to take anything away from any image or feeling that name gives you. Yes, I know it's likely to involve a portly, diminutive primate.

If you take anything from the Fat Little Moniker, take this: this thing is alive, with all of the thrill and frustration that entails. The Fat Little Brand is in its infancy, and will grow and transmogrify until it dies, spectacularly or in a slow burn of mundane anticlimax. It's a living thing. It's a terrible thing to lose.

*We here at Fat Little Monkey have no negative baggage with the term "hipster". I use it here for lack of a better word due to my limited imagination. For anybody still caught raging against "hipsters" (which is so 2002 anyway), just know that yr resentment tacitly makes you one of them. That's not a problem for us. Is it for you? Ask yrself why then go cry in the shower.