B: Blue

The colour selection mode can really produce an atmospheric image. I used to live in this building. Its strip of blue always catches people's eye. On a grey, soggy morning, it just refuses to be ignored.

A: Angles

As I start the A-Z Project, I happily realize that it is in fact much more than a photography project. As I search for subjects that start with A to photograph, I start to observe things in more details: Is that foyer an Atrium? Does that nativity scene in the next door building have an Angel? Is that child carrying an Arithmetic book and don't the parents look like they are having an Argument? Is the man in the elevator wearing Argyle socks? I also have to think about how to express more abstract concepts: Can the trees still represent Autumn or do they look too wintry with all the leaves gone? Can I express Agony and Anguish with this facial expression? I am an Aunt and an Adult but how do I show that in a picture? I also start thinking about taking myself to the subjects: Should I shop for Apples in the store or visit the Arrival area at the airport? I can look for outdoor Advertisements on the street or check out new Art at the art gallery. The ideas keep rolling in and my vocabulary (in A at least) seems to expand as the day wears on.

Eventually, I settle on Angles. It's both abstract and concrete and it got me looking at objects in skewed and unexpected ways. I wish I had more time today to go out and explore different kinds of angles as it's a subject that would work well in all kinds of surroundings. I did find that lots of perspectives from my apartment are quite angular. I under-exposed the image to give it a slightly ominous feel. It's not the most interesting of pictures but the best I could manage on a busy day. And it does capture something of my mood today: haphazard, lopsided, and a little gloomy.

Project A-Z

This nifty little Nikon is the birthday present I bought for myself this year. To make sure I try it out properly, I'm going to take up a creative project so that I'm using the camera every day. I was inspired by a lot of great ideas on photographer Jennifer Jacobs's blog. I've decided to try out the A-Z project, hopefully finishing it within 24 days (or thereabout). Wish me luck!

Blue Valentine

I let Blue Valentine sit on my PVR for over a year before I finally watched it last night. Maybe I intuited how painful the experience would be and procrastinated from it. There is nothing new to the film's plot, which details the deterioration of a love forged on youthful desire and an accidental pregnancy. With two brilliant performances at its heart, the film stands out with its close-up (both literally and metaphorically) of two people falling in and out of love. Exceptionally skillful is the way it alternates two temporalities - the beginning and the end of the relationship - throughout the narrative. Scenes of raw sensuality and genuine sweetness of a youthful romance intercut with that of fatigue, aggression, and the stale desire of a faltering middle-aged marriage. Watching these two "bookends" of a relationship shift into each other, it suddenly occurred to me that the birth and death of love have always existed as parts of each other. At the very height of desire there is an edge, the cresting of something that will inevitably decline. And in the coldest moment of love's death, flashes of warmth linger and refuse to be entirely obliterated. If we look hard enough, we see that love's ecstasy and its terror seep imperceptibly into one another. Blue Valentine is one of those very rare films that dares us to experience this interstice, of love at its truest - and its most unbearable.

McDull

Although not as brilliant as the previous McDull films, McDull: Pork of Music still manages to tickle your funny bone while twisting a knife in your heart at the same time. An homage to "music teachers everywhere," it celebrates the power of music in kids' life with a sweetness that never gets overly sentimental. After all, the sweetness is always amply cut with the series' signature wild, free-wheeling, and frequently scatological humour. The running gag in the film is that whenever beautiful music is heard, people think they want to crap. The doctor's expert advice: you don't really want to crap, you're just feeling moved - it's the same feeling of something churning intensely in your gut! A lot of the animation is two parts grotesque, one part cute, which also protects the sweet moments from becoming syrupy. There are some amazing and lovingly drawn sequences featuring "old" Hong Kong, which makes one sympatheize with the ex-architecture student in the film who quits because he hates all the new buildings and wishes they would just all vanish. And like all McDull endings, this one is resilient but brutally frank. Things are what they are, it's just life. What's left might just be that wanting-to-crap feeling that still churns once in a while when we hear a familiar song. The screening was in a big theatre but it was not very well attended, and many non-Asian (I would venture, non-Cantonese) audiences did not stay until the end. Like much else in Hong Kong, its cinema does not sell so well anymore. How can it, when the juggernaut that is China now dominates the world's attention. My generation of Hong Kongers has seen so many changes and upheavals, yet not of the revolutionary kind. Just dull, aching changes that chip away at all collective memories until not much is left except the feelings, and those no outsiders care too much about or understand. When I hear forty-something Anglophone Montrealers talk about their youth in pre-Quiet Revolution Montreal, I often feel a very similar sense of loss. It's not "correct" to yearn for a colonial past, for a society seen as unjust or oppressed. But everyone needs memories, and there is no pain quite like living under a dictum that one must forget. At least we are lucky because, for now, we still have the cinema (although perhaps not for long). And as I listened to McDull and his friends belt out "My Braised Pork" to the tune of Pachelbel's Canon in D, I totally experienced that do-I-want-to-crap-or-am-I-feeling-moved feeling that the film portrays with such glee and abandon.

Griot

Opening night at VIFF. I had a long day at work and was tired, so wasn't even sure if I was up for the festivities. Luckily, my first film was one that delighted the senses while not making too much demand on the brain. Made by trumpeter Volker Goetze and featuring his friend and musical partner Ablaye Cissoko, "Griot" is a low-key, laconically filmed documentary that brings to life the historical role and contemporary fate of the Mande griot: oral historian, musician, negotiator, mediator, master of ceremony and so much more all rolled in one. When I was studying postcolonial West African literature and film in grad school, I frequently encountered the griot as an enigmatic and fascinating figure in the works of Ousmane Sembène, Camara Laye, Yambo Ouologuem and their contemporaries. The gentle and soft-spoken Cissoko does not play up this mythical role, either in the film or in person. He simply and movingly shows us his respect for a tradition under threat and his quiet passion for the music. The kora, in his hand, is indeed a "magical instrument" and the highlight of the screening undoubtedly was the short but sensational live performance he and Goetze gave at the end.

Loose Sounds

I made this piece for a creativity workshop and found that I loved the painstaking task of editing: piecing images and sounds together, condensing half a lifetime's feelings into a few crisp minutes. It's comforting, like shepherding found fragments of the past into a safer future where they need not become so lost.

Evening Over The IJ

 

Posted with Blogsy

Crossroads, Paris: Missed Opportunities

What should one do in an academic conference when no one on the podim wants to or is able communicate and everyone in the audience whispers discontent amongst themselves but nonetheless pretends that knowledge is being transmitted and worthwhile conversations are happening? I found myself in this dilemma on day one of the Crossroads conference. It's one of my favourite conferences because it always takes place in an interesting city (often truly a "crossroads" city like Istanbul and Hong Kong) and cultural studies remains one of the most interdisciplinary, socially engaged, and genuinely creative academic fields. Yet, lecture after lecture, from gifted intellectuals many of whom are giants in the field, very little efforts were made to engage the audience, let alone inspire, move, or just surprise them! In some cases, there was not even a transmission of ideas or information, either because of an incomprehensible accent, poor room acoustics, or just an inability to speak at a speed or in a manner attuned to the ear, not the eye. In many cases, it's sadly a combination of all three. Having given lectures to large groups, I understand how much effort it takes to truly try to communicate. It's often tempting to just read out a piece of writing that's there already, heading for publication, admittedly the "true" destination of the work. Yet, in a conference, one is given an opportunity to connect with people who might never read your work, whose only potential contact with one's ideas is just this moment, in the auditorium. When gifted with such a precious opportunity, an invitation from an audience to reach out, to enthrall, to persuade ... why do most academics, especially those who are most accomplished, choose to ignore?

 

 

Posted with Blogsy

July 1 On The Thalys

The scenery whizzes by outside but I can only see fragments from my aisle seat on the Thalys from Amsterdam to Paris. My Canadian friends affectionately wish me a Happy Canada Day. I wonder how the July 1 protests have gone in Hong Kong. My best friend is about to undergo major surgery in New York. There is someone I miss in Vancouver. And pieces of my heart are left in Amsterdam.

Everyone on the train is engrossed in their mobile devices, fingers touching screen, eyes glued to flipping images. They seem connected to the world. I just feel fragmented. What lies at the journey's end? At least I am staying curious.

 

 

Posted with Blogsy