和尚歌

煩惱的一天。聽這歌， 快樂過來。

和尚歌

唱：佟妍、仁科
詞：佟妍 曲：仁科
插画： 區區500元先生

從前有座山
山裡有座廟
廟里有個老和尚
和一個小和尚
有一天老和尚對小和尚
講著一個故事
故事內容是：
從前有座山
山裡有座廟
......

C: Christmas

The anatomically correct, funny, but usually rather glum bull sculpture in my building's lobby just got a seasonal makeover.

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.