Clamming Down

Has it been more than two months since I have posted something to this blog?  Yes.  Not that I haven't been indulging in lots of Asian film and serials, but I have been under pressure with a professional project and have neglected chronicling the whimsical side of my life.  So on another three-day weekend,  during which we are celebrating a holiday the rest of the country doesn't, King Kamehameha Day, and having completed the intense deadlined project which had been giving me mild anxiety attacks (thank goodness for Taoist breathing exercises),  I can finally clam down.

Intentional typo that, "clam down."  In my current wuxia series one of the subtitled bits of dialogue admonished a raving character to "clam down."  I have often been advised to "clam up," with its vaguely mafioso innuendo, but no one ever told me to "clam down."  Although I often say I am "happy as a clam," a phrase which usually omits the meaningful part: "at high tide." A sort of Taoist clam.  A bivalve not at risk of being dug up and steamed and drenched in clarified butter.   Maybe that's what clamming down might mean.  Like hunkering down. Clam creeps down.

Still, I would like to have had this as a tool during my project to clam everyone up or down.

Now this is a clam digger!

It's very creepy that this sword allegedly is infused with a spiritual aura as a result of having been crafted with human bones in the mix.  Personally, I would clam up about that.

Spirit of the Sword, typical wuxia, but not the greatest (so far, I'm only at episode 18 of 40),  has been kind of fun, featuring Nicholas Tse with a funky haircut, which distracts from his usual minimalist display of a maximum of two expressions in his acting.  Nick is always very pretty to look at, but his emotional range appears somewhat limited.  Here's a sample from the series:

Since April, I have also enjoyed several Korean dramas (including one with the delectable Bae Yong Jun that my Chinese DVD version's title, Wang 4 Credited Gods, should have alerted me that the subtitles might be truly bizarre: whenever the dialogue would have been "want to" it was rendered, Beijing-inflected, as "wanner").  There are also several movies that I watched, largely as escape mechanisms from the professional project, but I honestly can't easily recall what they were; since I was not particularly clam, I didn't even take time to jot down the titles. (Although it's beginning to
come back to me--fodder for a subsequent post.)  It's as if between the last holiday dedicated to Hawaiian royalty and this one, I have been in some space/time warp, all clammed up or clammed down.

But now I am emerging from my shell.