윤

It’s not like coming across Hawk the Slayer (which, holy shit, is available on DVD), but I did catch this, from that string of great movies Rutger Hauer made in the 80’s, on TV yesterday, and thought immediately of that fucking cow Sarah Palin gunning down wolves like she was in ‘Nam or something with her decrepit running mate.

I tried watching Fringe between House and SVU, but find myself tuning back into Get Smart instead, as accessible as it’s become over digital. Last night’s included the first of the great Don Rickles two-parter and before it, Max & 99’s dance-off against the Groovy Guru and the Sacred Cows. Notice how they’re sporting some less-than-hip slacks and shoes (apparently Kaos standard issue) under their stage outfits. And has anyone else connected their lyrics to My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult? No cause for sensation back then, but it’s funny I prefer their sound to the pretentious wailing that’s passed as legitimate artistry since.

Gimme 張立萍 (yikes) over 章子怡 anyday, at least as a geisha. “Un bel dì vedremo” always choked me up, but luckily I could hide among all the colds from the temperature drop. Alarming as the pre-show announcement was that our soprano, too, was suffering from one and begged our indulgence, she showed up her audience by withstanding the Zen theatrics without so much as a sniffle.

First try: a Visa rebate card from Staples, which wasn’t accepted because either the twenty dollars face value somehow was reduced a dollar and therefore insufficient funds for the wallet, or, as I’d learn later at a Fresh & Easy, it isn’t good anywhere. Then at a 7-Eleven, whose Indian or Pakistani proprietors had never heard of a PlayStation, much less a Network Card for one. At Blockbuster it rang up with sales tax; I could live with the extra cent for peace of mind, but $1.56 wasn’t worth not handing over the credit card online. Seriously, though, I dug up some old e-mail like this one and noticed I’d fretted over the cost of it back then, too.

From ???@??? Sun Nov 03 00:19:37 1996
To: Brother Gantela
From: jyun@concentric.net,joeyjojo@juno.com (J.)
Subject: Re: I Hate WipeOut XL
Cc:
Bcc:
X-Attachments:

I pounded the controller into the ground, this time being careful not to place my thumb between the two. There ain’t no way I’m gonna finish off that last Phantom course. Those boys at Psygnosis really have to fix that clipping problem–sure, Mario 64’s got it, too, but here you’re penalized for it, i.e., with the agonizingly long time it takes them to return you to the track. You know what else bugs the hell out of me? The way the other cars take the most difficult corners, well, every racing game’s got that, but when I bump them into the walls, they don’t come to complete stops like I do. Okay, maybe I’m just complaining because I suck.

(I wonder what those non-ASCII characters were?) Contrary to my Simon Pegg-like performance on the road this morning—which concerns me less than recurrence of the acetabular dysplasia, or misdiagnosis thereof—I impressed myself with a first-place finish on only my second go with a Feisar in more than a decade. Maybe they’ll have the original tracks available for download on the store; I remember Underworld’s “Tin There” made for some all-out racing moments.

GPS, internet, even the haptic touchscreen, all these features aren’t gonna be used as much (as on any phone) as the clock. And I like the Storm’s.

Its Wiki warned me that this new print, as pristine as it looks, is missing enough to be considered a new work—”under Chinese law”, it adds—but I guess I can’t see how the original could add any more to the limited premise, unless maybe Lo Meng showed up in those 20 minutes, to categorize this another Chinatown Kid calamity. (Come to think of it, “Iron Face” did disappear at the end. He just didn’t live up to his name, like Brass Head, or even having one.) The final scene, which alas requires too much setup to be included in my tribute video, came back to me from the awful Mandarin-language VHS copy I bought from a collector in New York more than a decade ago; what times we live in now, having the English dub a button away!

Seeing Kuo Chui and Lu Feng go at it again is worth a hundred Jacky Chan-Jet Li first time-togethers, but The Forbidden Kingdom did have a nice opening credit sequence harking back to the good ol’ days, when choreography prevailed over editing, an assembly line statistically guaranteed a gem or two instead of working backwards, and movie poster collections were a bookmark away. Chinese laws, maybe.

…Segue from yesterday’s Tom Baker Doctor to his earlier role (looks like from a year before) as the hardest-working villain, ever. Ray Harryhausen’s Kali is fantastic. And Caroline Munro was the woman of my dreams for the next decade.

Too much praising of Allah to get aired in the US today, so praise be to Canadian satellite.

Sometimes YouTube doesn’t come through: I couldn’t find the awesome Street Fighter II commercial, I think it was for Super Turbo, with the techno track I never identified (would be so easy now with the Internet), but did come across this Japanese one that wasn’t on the laserdisc. This classic MK TV spot I’m sure I caught with my itchy VHS button-finger back then; remind me to dig those tapes up for some more gems!

懐かしい。。。 Makes me anticipate the DC crossover not so much, but rather the fighting MMORPG of my dreams, which of course must include a town called Zhuzin.