YKYATMFYMW*
Jul. 30th, 2002 10:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwyn(*You Know You've Absorbed Too Much From Your Movies When)... your natural reaction to picking up a 6' long, inch-across curtain rod for tab top curtains is to twirl it in both hands and wonder if it'd grow longer or shorter were you to yell 'change!' at it - and how many monsters you could beat up with it.
Those of you who've been reading my journal for a while know that I'm a big fan of Hong Kong action movies, and that this combined with a natural curiosity about other cultures, plus my heavily Asian-slanted set of anthropology courses in college, to produce a rampaging case of Sinophilia. I think something like one in three of the books I own - possibly one in two, but it's hard to tell - is about China in some way, or else comes from there. I've got a chest of drawers on wheels from the local Linens & Things that's divided into 'gaming books' and 'Chinese stuff', and thanks to the sheer size of the Chinese books esp. Journey to the West, the gaming books actually take up a minority of the space. Given that the books include the Hackmaster Player's Guide, GM Guide, Hacklopedia of Beasts, two or three White Wolf main books, and the GM guide to Legend of the Five Rings, that takes some doing.
I do not know where this interest came from; I know that it existed when I was very little (5 yrs. old) and had two books on foreign countries. One was Holland. The other was China. My friend Danielle made me very happy for quite some time as a little kid by assuring me that there was a gateway to China behind her grandmother's pool, and that people on the other side already knew about me and that I would be famous if I went there. (The area behind the pool, like all respectable portals that must never be entered, was mostly blocked off by rusty bits of metallic trash, spiders fit to scare any New York City kid, and God knows what else. I never tried to go through because of these obstacles, and thereby maintained a very pleasant belief for quite some time.) I tell people that it all began when my mother looked at me the day after I was born, and thanks to painkillers, blood loss, and the fact that I was black-haired and scrunchy faced, told the Asian nurse that I must have been her baby, or the lucky money in the red envelope that my grandfather's Chinese friend gave Mom when I was brought home... truhfully, though, I don't know. It's just one of those things.
Anyway, the thing is that recently I sat down and watched Lost Empire on DVD. This is a miniseries produced by the Halmis, who generally produce miniseries that are best described as 'crap-tacular' (then again this applies to nearly all miniseries so who am I to talk). The tagline on the box is 'Reluctant hero, beautiful goddess, three days to save the world'. It's about a scholar with a deep and abiding fondness for Chinese culture, albeit one that almost ruined his life when his lady love left him b/c he was spending more time on it than her, who gets roped into rescuing the original manuscript of the Chinese classic Journey to the West by the Goddess of Mercy, Kwan Ying. Turns out to be rather more complicated than it sounds, since he has to go into the magical realm built by Qin Shihuangdi the First Emperor to replicate all of China in relative miniature, gather up three of the main characters from Journey to the West to help him, and not only find the manuscript but convince its still-living author that his book was not worthless and counter to true Chinese traditional values after all. (Five hundred years of brainwashing will do funny things to even the most dedicated of authors.) There were stories, there were legends, there were cheesy digital effects, there were fight scenes... I was absolutely, positively in love with this DVD within half an hour. For the first time in more years than I care to count, I was watching something made as entertainment in this country (the USA, in case you didn't know) for which I was the target audience. The critics might have said all kinds of horrible things about it, but that didn't matter - they didn't know the stories, they didn't know the styles, this wasn't meant for them, it was meant for ME....
Journey to the West prominently features a character variously referred to as Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, the Stone Monkey, the Great Sage Equal to Heaven, or just plain Monkey. There's nobody quite like him in Western mythology or even the stories of the Americas, with the possible exception of Raven in the tales of the Pacific Northwest. Raven was a trickster who caused trouble and embarrassed himself many times, but he also found the first humans cowering under a shell on the beach and took pity on the poor things, and stole the sun and the moon for them and taught them many things. Monkey is perfectly happy to steal, pull all kinds of pranks, and turn Heaven upside down to get something he wants, but he's also brave, loyal to his people and his friends, and capable of feats of enormous dedication and self-improvement. Throughout both Journey to the West and Lost Empire, Monkey's weapon is a magical rod, a weapon that can be just about any size Monkey wants so long as he blows on it and says, "Change". It was originally used by one of the legendary Sage Emperors, namely Yu, to measure out the oceans and help with his flood control projects (visit http://www.megaloceros.net/hist.htm for more on Yu, if you haven't already). The one in Lost Empire was just about six feet long, black, with gold on both ends as per the description in Journey. And with this rod, Monkey kicked MUCH ASS.
So to finally properly explain the title (bet you thought I'd forgotten, didn't you!), yesterday afternoon my rack of longbows and recurve bows fell off the wall over my window. In the process it hit my curtain rod and tore it out of the wall. I'd have nailed it back up, but it's an ugly curtain rod, and I'd bought tab-top curtains a while ago and wanted a rod that'd work with them. I went to Linens & Things and found the curtain section. As I was snorting to myself about how pretentious-sounding the terminology was (oh nooooo, it's not enough to be called a curtain, it has to be a sheer illusion voile panel), I got to the rod section. Ooo, six-foot-long good solid wooden curtain rods, not this crappy metal stuff I'd had before. Ooo, nice heft, it fits perfectly in my hand. Hmmm, wonder if I could use one of these...
I didn't yell 'change!' at it, and I didn't try to hit anything with it; in fact, I put it back and bought a different rod, one which had to be screwed together in order to be six feet long. But that's okay. I have the new one in place over my bed, with the curtains on it, and if there's one thing that the movies of Hong Kong have taught me, it's that in a pinch ANYTHING can be used as a weapon. So if any legendary demons come stroming through New Jersey, I'll be ready...
I'll just have to yank the curtains off first.
Those of you who've been reading my journal for a while know that I'm a big fan of Hong Kong action movies, and that this combined with a natural curiosity about other cultures, plus my heavily Asian-slanted set of anthropology courses in college, to produce a rampaging case of Sinophilia. I think something like one in three of the books I own - possibly one in two, but it's hard to tell - is about China in some way, or else comes from there. I've got a chest of drawers on wheels from the local Linens & Things that's divided into 'gaming books' and 'Chinese stuff', and thanks to the sheer size of the Chinese books esp. Journey to the West, the gaming books actually take up a minority of the space. Given that the books include the Hackmaster Player's Guide, GM Guide, Hacklopedia of Beasts, two or three White Wolf main books, and the GM guide to Legend of the Five Rings, that takes some doing.
I do not know where this interest came from; I know that it existed when I was very little (5 yrs. old) and had two books on foreign countries. One was Holland. The other was China. My friend Danielle made me very happy for quite some time as a little kid by assuring me that there was a gateway to China behind her grandmother's pool, and that people on the other side already knew about me and that I would be famous if I went there. (The area behind the pool, like all respectable portals that must never be entered, was mostly blocked off by rusty bits of metallic trash, spiders fit to scare any New York City kid, and God knows what else. I never tried to go through because of these obstacles, and thereby maintained a very pleasant belief for quite some time.) I tell people that it all began when my mother looked at me the day after I was born, and thanks to painkillers, blood loss, and the fact that I was black-haired and scrunchy faced, told the Asian nurse that I must have been her baby, or the lucky money in the red envelope that my grandfather's Chinese friend gave Mom when I was brought home... truhfully, though, I don't know. It's just one of those things.
Anyway, the thing is that recently I sat down and watched Lost Empire on DVD. This is a miniseries produced by the Halmis, who generally produce miniseries that are best described as 'crap-tacular' (then again this applies to nearly all miniseries so who am I to talk). The tagline on the box is 'Reluctant hero, beautiful goddess, three days to save the world'. It's about a scholar with a deep and abiding fondness for Chinese culture, albeit one that almost ruined his life when his lady love left him b/c he was spending more time on it than her, who gets roped into rescuing the original manuscript of the Chinese classic Journey to the West by the Goddess of Mercy, Kwan Ying. Turns out to be rather more complicated than it sounds, since he has to go into the magical realm built by Qin Shihuangdi the First Emperor to replicate all of China in relative miniature, gather up three of the main characters from Journey to the West to help him, and not only find the manuscript but convince its still-living author that his book was not worthless and counter to true Chinese traditional values after all. (Five hundred years of brainwashing will do funny things to even the most dedicated of authors.) There were stories, there were legends, there were cheesy digital effects, there were fight scenes... I was absolutely, positively in love with this DVD within half an hour. For the first time in more years than I care to count, I was watching something made as entertainment in this country (the USA, in case you didn't know) for which I was the target audience. The critics might have said all kinds of horrible things about it, but that didn't matter - they didn't know the stories, they didn't know the styles, this wasn't meant for them, it was meant for ME....
Journey to the West prominently features a character variously referred to as Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, the Stone Monkey, the Great Sage Equal to Heaven, or just plain Monkey. There's nobody quite like him in Western mythology or even the stories of the Americas, with the possible exception of Raven in the tales of the Pacific Northwest. Raven was a trickster who caused trouble and embarrassed himself many times, but he also found the first humans cowering under a shell on the beach and took pity on the poor things, and stole the sun and the moon for them and taught them many things. Monkey is perfectly happy to steal, pull all kinds of pranks, and turn Heaven upside down to get something he wants, but he's also brave, loyal to his people and his friends, and capable of feats of enormous dedication and self-improvement. Throughout both Journey to the West and Lost Empire, Monkey's weapon is a magical rod, a weapon that can be just about any size Monkey wants so long as he blows on it and says, "Change". It was originally used by one of the legendary Sage Emperors, namely Yu, to measure out the oceans and help with his flood control projects (visit http://www.megaloceros.net/hist.htm for more on Yu, if you haven't already). The one in Lost Empire was just about six feet long, black, with gold on both ends as per the description in Journey. And with this rod, Monkey kicked MUCH ASS.
So to finally properly explain the title (bet you thought I'd forgotten, didn't you!), yesterday afternoon my rack of longbows and recurve bows fell off the wall over my window. In the process it hit my curtain rod and tore it out of the wall. I'd have nailed it back up, but it's an ugly curtain rod, and I'd bought tab-top curtains a while ago and wanted a rod that'd work with them. I went to Linens & Things and found the curtain section. As I was snorting to myself about how pretentious-sounding the terminology was (oh nooooo, it's not enough to be called a curtain, it has to be a sheer illusion voile panel), I got to the rod section. Ooo, six-foot-long good solid wooden curtain rods, not this crappy metal stuff I'd had before. Ooo, nice heft, it fits perfectly in my hand. Hmmm, wonder if I could use one of these...
I didn't yell 'change!' at it, and I didn't try to hit anything with it; in fact, I put it back and bought a different rod, one which had to be screwed together in order to be six feet long. But that's okay. I have the new one in place over my bed, with the curtains on it, and if there's one thing that the movies of Hong Kong have taught me, it's that in a pinch ANYTHING can be used as a weapon. So if any legendary demons come stroming through New Jersey, I'll be ready...
I'll just have to yank the curtains off first.
