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Thank your deity of choice that it's Frey's Day! In fact, I'll thank Frey® it's Friday! Thank you, o great god of phallic fertility! So here we go... new digs for Culturology; are you as excited as I am? Wow! ... All this talk of excitement and phallic fertility is getting me all worked up!

I feel some sense of obligation to really knock things out of the park with this post, since I asked off of Mondays and Nick & Neal accommodated within a week, but we all know that that's not necessarily going to happen.  I think, though, that by February I should really be rolling again. You've got to give me a break, Culturology is now an entire entry-year old, and a little bit prone to a wee sophomore slump here. But we soldier on.

Since Nick, I believe, has finished his massive Jean-Claude Van Damme movie watching marathon--though we may still sneak in one more JCVD Roundtable to cover the Oughts (and we also have some other awesome JCVD offshoots coming up soon)--I do still want to mention that nothing that JCVD ever did is nearly as entertaining to watch as Jackie Chan when Chan was at his peak (I'm thinking Drunken Master and Police Stories I & II here). Especially the Police Story comparison needs to be made (or even Rumble in the Bronx, for that matter) because it's the exact genre that Van Damme never managed to do as well as Jackie Chan (and Chan's amazingly-willing-to-be-injured stunt team). This ties in, more or less, with my sense that the most important part about Van Damme is that he was 1) white and 2) not American (Nick and I already discussed this to some extent in the first roundtable), since it's my sense that the boost of martial arts stars in the States, as much as it had to do with the rise of Hong Kong film-making and Bruce Lee's lasting impact, was really about the fact that the US had waged three consecutive wars against various Asian countries.

You can more or less map Edward Said's "Orientalist" readings of Victorian literature as it pertained to British imperialism (say, especially, for this case, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda) onto Kickboxer as it relates to post-Vietnam War blowback. Where JCVD, in way that Chuck Norris never could, becomes Thai (learns the "ancient ways"), but still, despite his apparent willingness to adapt to a new culture remains the "White Warrior".

As opposed to Jackie Chan, who just did awesome stunts all over the place.

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Also, I feel like, since I wrote about it back in the summer, I should weigh in on this whole Tonight Show situation. Of course, back in my previous post, I basically said that, excepting a few rare occasions where guests like Norm MacDonald (who should have his own talk show) or William Shatner are hilarious, Conan O'Brien had gotten incredibly boring and bland (and that, really, as Nick pointed out, Conan hadn't been really funny for a decade already). The platform probably is outmoded. So I'm not really on O'Brien's side. I watched the show last night, just to see what it was like now, what with the controversy, and Conan's interview w/ Rob Lowe was really pretty hilarious, old form for Conan. Too little, too late, I suppose.

I'm sure Bob Odenkirk wishes he was doing more, but I almost think Conan would be good in a position with some new show similar to Odenkirk's with Tim & Eric Awesome Show Good Job, where he'd be the guiding light to some comics that were doing more interesting things, obviously inspired by their mentor's glory days. (It's a suitable comparison as well because, apparently, back in the day at SNL, O'Brien, Odenkirk, and Robert Smeigel shared what was the funniest office in Manhattan at the time.) Or Conan doing weird comedy for the internet, at least, instead of bland corporate shilling for NBC (or for Fox, or where ever he ends up).

Though my guess would really be that Conan just grew up at some point and doesn't really want to work very hard any more (I'm sure he works hard to maintain his new bland self, I realize that). So I guess i still don't really care, but I'm pro-funny. Bring the funny.