Because it belongs

The Passing of Kwai Chang Caine

I am abroad at the moment. Having witnessed the clear aqua marine furlings of the Aegean Sea from the rocky beaches of the Greek Isle of Santorini last week, I spent the last two days skimming across the choppy waters of Gryts skärgård, ankle-deep into the Baltic. With both, my (secondary?) companion was a quickly-becoming-battered copy of Melville's weighty Moby Dick. This was perhaps appropriate, though it is also certainly better addressed at another electronic place and I shall do that straight away but my purpose here is to raise the cup and lower the brow to that signaled by the makeshift bookmark I have been using since Friday. A brief stop in Milan between the Mediterranean and Nordic Sea stops gave the chance to grab the abbreviated, complimentary USA Today for its NBA Finals Preview and it was there that I first saw the news that David Carradine had died - by suicide or awkward miscue it apparently remains unclear and the Carradine family is likely to keep the cause, no matter the determination, a family concern. There is much about the gaunt, long but thin-haired character actor that is in many ways at the heart of the concerns of TFoSF. His voice, deep and metallic but somehow possessed of a quality that even if a duck's quack does echo his words would not - as if a command from him need not be heard twice to be heeded, was immediately distinguishable by most any (male?) of my generation, whether he was offering up the existentialism of Superman or the pathway to advertising enlightenment. He didn't just walk across the borders and gulfs that make up the entirety of the misty and hazed contours of hotel cinema - those spiky peaks between high and low culture, camp and rigid posterity - he strode across them, they did not exist for him. How could they for the man who was both the revenging Frankenstein and the man to star in the only Hollywood film made by Bergman? We'll leave aside the less savory bits for now - though we won't dismiss the potential role of secret kung-fu assassins - and hope only that the grasshopper has returned to the side of his beloved Master Po

-fp