Category Archives: Media
My Friend Irma
I’ve been collecting important papers for a trek north to Atlanta. I’m not sure this is necessary and it sure isn’t going to be fun, but my Son-In-Law says we’re headed for safety. In this area the power might go out in a stiff breeze so there’s a better chance to have lights to read a book, power to toast a burrito, and that glorious and addicting air-conditioning.
Let see: Passport, Last Will and Testament, Pink Slip, Dog Inoculation Record, iPhone, two-weeks worth of medicine, ten cans of dog food, The Collected Poems of Allen Ginsberg, sleep mask, C-Pap, … and the dog, of course.
Dr. Fu-Manchu
Despite its less than successful release, I include the film Big Trouble In Little China on my list of guilty pleasures: high on my list. It tells the story of Jack Burton, who helps his friend Wang Chi rescue Wang’s green-eyed fiancée from bandits in San Francisco’s Chinatown. They go into the mysterious underworld beneath Chinatown, where they face an ancient sorcerer named David Lo Pan, who requires a woman with green eyes to marry him in order to release him from a centuries-old curse. [Wikipedia]
David Lo Pan is certainly not the first nefarious villain from the mysterious and inscrutable land of ultra-long fingernails and wicked martial arts. You could even include Ming the Merciless in this batch of bad hombres. But isn’t it an easy cliché to engender a fictional villain with unknown magical powers from a distant and unknown country? Remember, Lamont Cranston didn’t learn the secrets to cloud men’s minds of the corner of Flatbush and Avenue J.
