Book club meeting. Lord of the Rings. Book One. At Yama Sushi. This book has taken all summer to finish and i can safely say that only two of us finished the book...when i say us i don't mean me because i didn't finish the book in time. Sad. The meeting itself was really fun though, as they always are. We got huge piles of sushi and then tried to intelligently talk about a book that everyone was in various stages of reading. It was pretty easy to get sidetracked and start talking about the upcoming movie and then segway into a totally random conversation not involving books but i guess that's the beauty of our book club. We're a book club composed of non-readers who gather for the purpose of eating and entertainment.



We went to go watch Iron Monkey afterwards and that was really really good. I expected people to be rude and stuff like they were at Crouching Tiger but there was nary a snicker when people flew from rooftop to rooftop. The movie was definitely one of the best martial art films i've seen and it is sort of a prequel to all of the other movies involving Wong Fei-hong. There was just fighting fighting and more fighting broken up by short spurts of plot. Perfect. The little boy in the film is played by a girl and i didn't know that until after so that was kinda interesting. With this mass exodus of martial art movies into the US and the subsequent public acceptance of them, i wonder if that is only negatively reinforcing the Asian image we've had for so long. Of course we're "breaking through" in entertainment right now but all of that success is hinged upon using martial arts as our entry pass. That isn't exactly very different from the acceptance we've engendered up to this point. If you get a chance, go read Beau Sia's poem "the asians are coming, the asians are coming."