German sneaker maker Adidas rolls out a new line of Adidas Originals that will have all the kidz from London's Hackney to Tokyo's Naka-meguro to the Lower East Side of New York City salivating madly to get their mitts on a pair of these.

We especially like the Nizza Xtra Hi Camo shoe, pictured above, center. These are sweet, but just remember that these kicks will set you back $175.00.

The new Originals shoe line includes an awesome pair of graffiti-inspired sneakers called the SStar Graffiti M (above, left), which sell for $80.00, and the Originals APS shoe (above, right) that comes in "dark sand," orange and coffee colors and retails, like the Nizza Xtra Hi, for a cool $175.00

Of course, Adidas have been making well-designed athletic footwear for a long time. But since they started opening the Adidas Originals concept stores two years, first in SoHo, New York, then in Tokyo and Berlin, the German company has taken shoe design to the next level and heightened its profile through a series of expensive, stylishly clever commercials and hip advertising campaigns.

Like Puma, Adidas discovered several years ago that the huge and ever-growing market for athletic footwear was one where consumers were buying sneakers not for athletic use, but rather as a matter of personal style and fashion.

Especially popular in recent years were the company's retro sneaker designs. Retro styles not only became popular but have become "classics," with some sneakers having attained vintage status among a growing international legion of collectors. In some case, such shoes have greatly appreciated in value and have sold for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars on Internet auction sites like eBay.

And also like Puma, Adidas figured out that it could make a whole lot of money and promote its brand even better by setting up its own limited retail operation in key cities to showcase its latest designs and its fashion-forward style.

By the way, in case you didn't know it, Puma is also a German sneaker maker. It was founded in mid-century by Rudolf Dassler, the brother of the guy who started Adidas, Adolf "Adi" Dassler." (Puma was launched after the two Dassler brothers had a big dispute.) Adidas was founded in 1928.

Walk around in a pair of the Nizza Xtras or the SStar Graffiti sneaks this spring and you'll be sure to get a lot of envious looks. But, hey, keep 'em clean! These are destined to become vintage classics some day, so don't let 'em get dirty.

--Shibuya Kid

RELATED LINKS

Adidas Official Web Site
Adidas Originals Concept Stores Review [Design Boom]
A Brief History of Adidas [Sadida.com]
Adidas Commercials (14 Video Clips) [AdCritic.com]
Adidas Originals Nizza XTRA Hi
Adidas Originals SStar Graffiti M
Adidas Originals APS
Puma Official Web Site
Crooked Tongues Sneaker Resource
Sneaker Culture Web Blog
"My Adidas" Lyrics by Run DMC [LyrcisTimes.com]
Run Announces Death of Run DMC [Amsterdam News]

You've been waiting for it. Now it's here. Kill Bill Vol. 2, the anxiously awaited sequel to director-screenwriter Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill Vol. 1, opened last Friday and went straight to the top of the box office.

If you had any doubts about Tarantino's genius and the substance (or lack thereof) of the first installment of Kill Bill (and quite a few critics did), then Vol. 2 will put those doubts to rest. Combined, Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2 add up to a masterwork.

Kill Bill part deux is the meat-and-potatoes to Vol. 1's high-calorie, low-vitamin and gratuitously sugar-coated pop-cultural junk-food feast. Or, if you will, Vol. 1 is an exquisite hamburger served up by an exquisite French chef, say Jean-Georges Vongerichten, and Vol. 2 is filet mignon as part of a seven-course meal by the same chef.

The story begins with The Bride, played to perfect pitch by Uma Thurman, racing along in a convertible with her Hattori Hanzo sword by her side. While roaring down a back road, the Bride, also known as Beatrix Kiddo, looks polished, resolute and sexy as she speaks directly into the camera and briefly brings us back up to speed on where we are in the story and where we're going, which is to find Bill and hunt him down like a dog and kill him.

Though The Bride manages to exact revenge directly and indirectly on at least as many of her former colleagues, the Deadly Viper Assasins (or DiVAs), in Kill Bill Vol. 2 as in Vol. 1, she does so this time without having to cut her way through 88 psychotic Japanese and Chinese assasins nor a handful of other disposable henchpersons and other human obstacles.

The swordfest that seemed to have left rivers of blood flowing off the silver screen as limbs flew, veins burst and heads rolled in Vol. 1 has been racheted down in the second part of Tarantino's tale of revenge. There's plenty of violence, but very little actual swordplay.

Nevertheless, the tension is intense. And Tarantino being Tarantino, we're never ever sure what's around the corner. Kill Bill Vol. 2 is as full of surprises as the first movie. Unlike its predecessor, which posed many unanswered questions, Vol. 2 is full of answers.

For one thing, we finally get to meet the much-talked-about and mysterious Bill. Portrayed by David Carradine, Bill is the leader of the DiVAs and is The Bride's former lover (as well as the father of her child). Bill is a veteran killer-warrior who comes across as a mythic East-West combination of philosophical kung-fu-cowboy, and ronin gunslinger for hire.

Carradine's performance is brilliant. Watching him on screen, we had to remind oursleves that this was the same Carradine ("Grasshopper") of the Kung-Fu TV series re-runs we used to watch as kids growing up in America. Carradine looks great for his age. His build is lean but he looks agile, and he's a very bad, mean-ass dude, the kind who might shoot you just for snorning too loudly. If he got himself a haircut and put on a Brookes Brothers suit, he might make one hell of a great CEO.

Without spoiling the story, suffice it to say that when Uma Thurman's Beatrix finally catches up with her prey, Bill recounts the chain of events that led him to a desert chapel some four-plus years earlier to put a bullet in The Bride's head and seek his own revenge.

Where Kill Bill Vol. 1 was part homage to the Japanese samurai movie tradition, as well as a heavy nod to Japan's post-war pop culture and cinema, Vol. 2 is homage to the classic Chinese kung-fu movie traditions and the traditional and spaghetti westerns (which, incidentally, are called macaroni westerns in Japan).

There's a lot of kung-fu in Kill Bill Vol. 2. The real star appearance in the movie is Gordon Liu as Pai Mei, an aged martial-arts master of the old-school Shaolin style. Liu is an icon and in Kill Bill he is a composite of various characters he's played for decades in a long line of Hong Kong martial-arts flicks, some obscure, some classic, including one of the genre's all-time greats, The 36th Chamber of the Shaolin (released in 1978 and in the United States as The Master Killer).

With his shock-white long hair, eyebrows as long and thick as hand-rolled Cuban cigars, and a long, stringy goatee (which he strokes religiously to much hilarious and symbolic effect), Pai Mei may look like he's ready to enter a managed-care program, but in reality he's as lethal a weapon as they come, capable of killing a man with a single hand-chop to the chest.

In an important backstory sequence in which The Bride recalls her brutal and intense training under Pai Mei (which Bill had arranged in the hopes of making her an even more efficient killing machine), Tarantino has pulled out almost all the stops in a series of kung-fu action scenes culled from old-school martial-arts movies. It would be worth seeing Kill Bill again if only for the Pai Mei-Gordon Liu segments alone--they're both funny and integral to the spirit of the film.

Whereas Vol. 1 had minimal plot underlying the amazing cinematographic panache and polish, the second installment of Kill Bill tells its story with greater depth and a thicker narrative thread.

Kill Bill Vol. 2 is not really a sequel in the major-studio, movie-franchise sense. Taken together, Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2 are more like a very long single movie divided neatly in two for the sake of audiences (and maybe maximum profit, too--the DVD for Vol. 1 was released a week ahead of the theatrical debut of its sequel and reportedly sold over two million copies.)

Both volumes of Kill Bill are filled with more pop-cultural references than the average moviegoer can probably catalog, of course, after Vol. 2 has milked its theatrical run for all it can, we'll see it on video store shelves fairly soon. We'll wait until then to see it again. But see it again we most certainly will.

--The Kid from Kyoto

RELATED LINKS

Official Kill Bill Website
Charles Taylor's Kill Bill Vol. 2 Film Review [Salon.com]
Charting the Tarantino Universe [NY Times]
Kung Fu CatfightsÑThe Bride Returns... [NY Observer]
Qunetin Tarantino Biography [IMDb]
Quentin Tarantino Filmography [IMDb]
A Band Apart Company Website
Tomohiro Machiyama's 2003 Quentin Tarantino Interview
Gordon Liu Biography & Filmography [KungFuCinema.com]

The Massive are Squarepusher fans of long standing, that is, ever since we first heard the frenetic, bleepy, self-destructing drum-and-bass tracks of "Hard Normal Daddy" seven years ago while being rocketed across the Japanese countryside on a speeding bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto. Since then we've subscribed to the promise of more and even better music from Squarepusher.

"Ultravisitor," Squarepusher's ninth (or seventh, by some people's tally) disc is a good ride, but not one without some potholes and speed bumps along the road. The disc verges on greatness, but the overall impression is that as a collection the album at times feels like a hit-and-miss affair.

Like many artists exploring and exploiting every nook and cranny and pathway of their musical palette to find new challenges, solve new musical conundrums and erase boredom, Squarepusher (otherwise known as an English bloke named Tom Jenkinson) keeps fiddling and noodling and looking for some new underdeveloped territory by his mind and Fender-Rhodes-bass-plucking / knob-twiddling / sequence-programming / drum-playing hands.

Right out of the starting gate comes the album-titled first track, "Ultravisitor," a track straight out of the Squarepusher playbook with the signature high-speed, drum-and-bass patter and blips and bleats and breaks and organ riffs all rolling out ahead of themsleves and on top and pricking up our ears again with the derailed collage of random-like noise and samples stitched together with barbed wire and velvet. We are transported to heaven.

This is hardly new ground for Squarepusher, but tracks like this and "Menelec" and "Steinbolt" still have the atomic power to riddle our fibers with excitement and surprise and keep us guessing in a way that jolts the synapses (ideally staving off future risks of developing Alzheimer's disease in the process).

Despite this, "Ultravisitor" is a strange, mixed blessing. On the one hand, the disc puts Jenkinson's stamp on the proceedings, an alternating combination of tracks with his usual extraordinarily frenetic, fragmented and alienated drum-and-bass tracks and his jazz-bass-fusion-like forays that dive into long prog-rock-ish interludes, extended bass solos and meanderings that otherwise come off as plain instrumental wanking. "C-Town Smash" and "An Arched Parkway" take this ball and run it past the goal posts out of the stadium.

It's during tracks like these and parts of the second tune, "I Fulcrum," that we can't help but think of a scene in the 1980's Rob Reiner mockumentary "This is Spinal Tap," in which the aging, irrelevant dinosaur British rock group, Spinal Tap, loses its lead guitarist, who runs out on the group in a huff just before a concert and in doing so strips his bandmates of performing 99% of their material. But the fans are waiting and the show must go on, so the Tap copes by staging a performance not of their string of now-nostalgic rock hits from the '70's, but rather an obscure and best-forgotten full album's worth of instrumental jazz-prog-rock centered around long bass solos.

This is what we were thinking half-way through "Ultravisitor." Or to put it another way, after a dozen listens, we pushed the skip button on these tracks time after time, though, eventually, curiosity got the better of us and we went back to listen to them again.

But then we come to mysterious track No. 12, "Circlewave," wherein we get a taste of something we've never heard before from Squarepusher and something we've never heard exactly this way from any arist.

The track is a disorderly layer of gentle drums, like a spastic percussionist with a serious timing problem singlemindedly and quickly struggling to to rescue a basic beat from the sonic rubble until that magical instant when it breathes to life quietly and slowly and the track is angelically resolved with the arrival of a slow somber, funereal organ melody that builds subtly to the heavens and sounds as if it could be at home in some vast European cathedral.

At the tail end of Ultravistor we also get the beautiful "Tommib Help Buss," the title of which suggests something in common with a Squarepusher track called "Tommib" on the "Lost in Translation" film soundtrack. But this is not seem the case. The tracks are of the same mood, but sound different and are painted with different shades.

The rest of "Ultravisitor" falls predictably into place at points in between the slow-and-quiet and the speedy-and-chaotic, with the exception of the fourth track, "Andrei," which has a warm and gentle classical Spanish guitar buoying the tune in sharp contrast to the rest of "Ultravisitor."

"Andrei" is more like what you'd hear in a ridiculously expensive boutique selling high-end, but low-key-looking, home furnishings hand-built by the Dutch furniture designers who dreamed them up. Soundtrack music for the Wallpaper set's consumer experience. But damn, it's beautiful. Hearing it makes you want to quit your day job and fly off to the Costa de Sol and spend the rest of eternity idling romantically in front of dreamy sunsets.

Part of what sets "Ultravisitor" apart is its pseudo-live-recording, with audience whoops and cheers imported into the mix when the music quiets or has just rounded a difficult corner.

And as most live recordings go (whether real of fake), it has that "live" sound, where the audio alternates between being just a little too tinny and just a little too muddy to just plain sounding like your're listening to "Ultravisitor" off to the side in a big cavern, which in a virtual sense you are and in a real sense is also the whole point. We rarely get to hear this kind of music in this way.

Leave it to Jenkinson to keep us guessing. Listeners until now unfamiliar with the Squarepusher ouevre may shake their heads in confusion to "Ultravisitor." Squarepusher's music evokes largely love or hate responses. While it may be a mixed bag for some, on balance this disc ranks up among the best, most provoking Squarepusher work yet.

--Adrian "Pushsquarer" Tharani

RELATED LINKS

Warp Records Website

Squarepusher Minisite at Warp Records

Squarepusher Discography [Discogs.com]

Musicplayer Forum Discussion on Squarepusher

Perfect Sound Forever's 1999 Squarepusher Interview

Squarepusher "Go Plastic" Audio Streams [Warp Records]

Pitchfork's "Ultravistor" Review [Pitchfork Media]

The Guardian's "Ultravisitor" Reviewed [Guardian Unlimited]

Question: What do you get when you mix skatebording (minus the actual skateboards) with martial arts, gymnastics, suburban boredom and some French joie de vivre?

You get "parkour." Or rather le parkour, as they say in the fine land of croissants, café créme and pomme frites.

The New York Times' Sunday Style section recently devoted a feature article to parkour just as the French phenom establishes a foothold in North America and seems poised to become the next big subcultural urban-athletic trend in the United States.

Also known as "freerunning" in the United Kingdom, where parkour has firmly taken hold and spawned a large underground following, the sport, if one can call it that, involves navigating urban terrain and architectural obstacles.

One does parkour by employing a single (or combinations of ) physical movement such as jumping, climbing and twisting one's body and playing off railings, walls, stairs or platforms.

The simplest moves can be something as common as leaping from a low wall onto the ground and falling into a prat roll. At its riskiest, the most adept parkour practitioners traverse steep, angled rooftops and leap from building to building.

In recent years, Parkour has spread throughout continental Europe and the United Kingdom, with British practitioners --those who do parkour call themselves "traceurs"--providing a plethora of English-language resources, via numerous websites, for inspired American youth eager to immerse themselves in the ways of freerunning.

One of the best websites is Urban Freeflow, which notes that it is "Run by traceurs for traceurs." There you'll find loads of links, photos, tips on parkour techniques and--best of all--short homegrown digital video clips documenting parkour moves by various traceur crews throughout the U.K.

Parkour, which means "circuit" in French, is not new. It was developed 16 years ago in Lisses, France, by a couple of understimulated suburban teenagers named Sebastien Foucan and David Belle. Although they are no longer a team, both founders are still relatively active traceurs. Foucan recently appeared in an entertaining and energetic commercial for the Scion in which he does his parkour thing to Spiderman-like effect. Belle has also parlayed his parkour fame into television work. He appeared in a BBC promo a couple of years ago.

The Times' Anna Bahney writes:

"These days, Mr. Foucan, who is now engaged to be married and is living in the Parisian suburb of ƒvry with a 1-year-old daughter, has taken a more philosophical view of his sport-cum-art, which he refers to as a 'discipline.' He said he is working to carve out a future for parkour that includes the construction of training parks but no tournaments."

For her story, Bahney hung out with a couple of infant freerunning "gangs" in town from the New York City suburbs. The reporter tagged along with them as they explored the parkour potential of Manhhattan's urban jungle-gym, from Grand Central Station down to Wall Street. One of the gangs Bahney followed is called the Gravity Pac, the other the Street Ninjas.

As semi-regular habitués of the Financial District on weekends, Air Massive can attest to the fact that the area surrounding Wall Street seems to have a lot going for it as a freerunners' paradise, at least more so than Midtown Manhattan.

On weekends, the Financial District is virtually a ghost town, so would-be traceurs would have a lot of space to themselves, though they might be competing with skateboarders who have long used the mini-palazzo around the First Precinct Police Building near Water Street as a kind of sanctuary (it's public property--so no hassle from corporate security guards.)

But here's an inside tip for you budding parkouristes, if you will. The Massive has done a little scoping out of ideal parkour playgrounds in Lower Manhattan and surveyed some local parkour wannabes as to their thoughts on the subject. In fact, we've even felt inspired enough to give the freerunning thaaaaang a try.

The consensus is that two places that might be great for for parkour are (1.) the South Street Seaport complex at Pier 17 (check it out here), which is a multi-layered structure with lots of railings and outdoor staircases; and (2) the Winter Garden complex with its huge ampitheater-like stairs, imported palm trees and brass railings at Battery Park City, just across the street from the World Trade Center site.

The big question, however, is Will parkour or freerunning amount to much of anything in the United States? Are we witnessing the beginning of a trend--something of some lingering substance? Or merely a fad? (speaking of which, remember flash mobs?) Or is parkour the birth of a U.S. movement akin to the one in the U.K.?

Whateva the case, we're confident that sadly, sooner or later, someone is going to get hurt freerunning in Lower Manhattan. And when they do, this being New York City, there will be a big, fat, ugly lawsuit. That's one osbtacle nobody wants to have to jump over, not even the world's fittest traceur.

--Le Bob

RELATED LINKS

+ The Art of Le Parkour [BBCi]
+ Urban Freeflow Website
+ South Street Seaport
+ PKUSA: Urban Freeflow's U.S. Parkour Message Board