Kung Hee Fat Choy

Kung Hee Fat Choy! Or, Happy New Year! Chinese New Year 2010 is just around the corner, and Elle and I went to Chinatown for the kick off weekend. We headed to the Chinese Cultural Plaza for the food mostly, but we also took in some cultural presentations.

Here's the view from the second floor overlooking the stage and the people. When we first arrived, I thought it looked pretty dead. However, by around 8 p.m. the place was pretty packed.


There were a handful of crafts booths throughout the Plaza. They were selling toys for the kids, jewelry, Year of the Tiger t-shirts and other trinkets.






One booth was selling these little lion replicas.


Another had these lion heads on display. Pretty neat stuff.


Here's the main event . . . the FOOD! It all looked really good. This was the vegetarian food vendor. I think it was run by a Buddhist temple, but I'm not completely sure.




The ladies making jin dui (a fried pastry with different types of filling) really looked like they knew what they were doing. I love the one with coconut inside, even though I normally don't like coconut. There's something about the crunchy, chewy shell that makes it so ono!




On stage, there were many types of performers. There were Chinese opera groups, children's choirs, tai chi performers, kung fu demonstrators and lion dance troupes. The lion dance guys were pretty cool. They came with their own little drum section.

Shaolin Warriors, Blaisdell Concert Hall

I just got back from the opening night of the Shaolin Warriors performance at the Blaisdell Concert Hall. The show started at 7:30 p.m. and ran till about 9:30 p.m. There was a 15 minute intermission at about the halfway point.

Overall, I thought the show as interesting but not terribly original. If you've seen a kung fu-like performance by Chinese acrobats before, it'll probably be okay if you skip this show. While there were moments that were extremely jaw-dropping, those moments were few and far between. There was a lot of focus on the technical elements and not enough tricks.

I realize that the form and function of their martial art is a very important aspect of learning the artform. However, as a layperson, I found it to be quite boring. Give me the showmanship and the "wow" factor. It could just be that I'm from the YouTube generation, but I found myself thinking that I could be at home and have watched this entire performance condensed to a nine minute video and be perfectly happy. All the good stuff would've been captured in a video clip and the acrobatics would've been just as good . . . or maybe even better. Oh well, it was a good experience anyway.

RIP David

Wow, just got online and the first thing I saw was a story reporting the apparent suicide of Kung Fu star David Carradine. He was found hanged in his Bangkok hotel room.

It seems his career was going well and that he was in Thailand for a new movie. According to imdb.com, he had six movies in post-production and one in pre-production. He also had an illustrious acting career and had been in a ton of movies. This is an unfortunate tragedy.

Growing up I loved watching Kung Fu: The Legend Continues. Carradine had a kind of calmness surrounding himself as Kwai Chang Caine. Very zen-like. I loved his relationship with his tv son Peter, played by Chris Potter. Their fighting styles, one ancient and one contemporary, complemented each other well. It was a great show.