text by DAVID GORDON 1. NEW YORK As always, it began at the movies: The samurai travels the road of carnage, every inch skull and bones, and it is on the night before we die that we are most cheerful, for life is but a light thing after all, to be shrugged off like a kimono, a thing that passes, a cloud, a film. And when I chose this demon life, I too became ready, be it alone and forsaken at the gates of hell or among falling cherry blossoms and girls who float backwards like dreams, to slice a ninja in half like a bamboo stalk, run a man’s belly through like a sack of rice, and lay a foe’s skull open like a peeled orange to split the pulp within. I studied in moldy 42nd street theaters and practiced at home in a bathrobe, wielding an umbrella:…