Notes from a fascinating world.
The world is like a bazaar, full of interesting odds and ends, and I've been exiled into it. This is my all-over-the-map (literally and metaphorically) attempt at capturing some of the world's many wonders.
 What do you mean you didn't watch it? So the new Mission: Impossible movie came out. Yes, Reader, I saw it, and I liked it.
It must have been in September 1990. A year earlier the Berlin Wall had come down, and now the Gulf War was starting. One day my mother, excited, announced to us what she must have just read in the papers: a new Mission: Impossible series would soon be broadcast on Taiwanese television. I doubt many of you remember the 1988 TV revival of the original 1966-73 series. Apparently ABC green-lit the revival because of a threatened Hollywood writers’ strike, which prompted the studios to go back to the vault for existing scripts. And the fact is that, although the 1966 original might be considered something of a classic in the annals of American television, the 1988 revival was... not good. It was not surprising that it only ran for two seasons. With Netflix’s no good, very bad, culturally appropriating “Iron Fist,” Hollywood is again dipping into the martial arts genre that comes out of China, known in Chinese as “wuxia.” I assume that the makers of “Iron Fist” had no idea that the genre in which they were working arose from a 10th century short story. Indeed, I assume that hardly anyone knows this to be true. The wuxia genre, in its cinematic incarnation, especially in those old Hong Kong films with low budgets and visible wireworks and obvious fight choreography, can seem risibly silly. But the fact is that wuxia is a venerable literary tradition. And just as, according to Dostoevsky, all of Russian fiction came out from under Gogol’s “Overcoat,” all of wuxia derives from a single story of under 2,000 words written in the late-9th or early-10th century by a Taoist priest.  A wall panel from the Summer Palace in Beijing depicting 風塵三俠, "The Three Knights of Wind and Dust." Creative Commons. |
AuthorWriter, traveler, lawyer, dilettante. Failed student of physics. Not altogether distinguished graduate of two Ivy League institutions. Immigrant twice over. "The grand tour is just the inspired man's way of getting home." Archives
January 2019
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