"When you're down to nothing, God is up to something."

a bit of life...

read this on John Chris Jones' designing designing some time ago. as i revisited it today i was touched again.

I'm driving along on the road
and I always have a sense of gratitude that the road continues

it was an amazing moment for me in my life
driving across America for the first time and realizing that

"I kept going"

that no one

that the road didn't stop because people went to have dinner or
it didn't stop because people got tired of digging and hauling
and living for other people

it just continued

and i was able to follow that
just like that old image of the king
being walking down the path that is unrolled for him
by the servants

the amazing thing about life is that
when it functions best
each of us is a king for all the other servants
and each of us is a servant for all the other kings

it's one of the reasons that I've gotton very sensitive
to the thought that the only goal worth pursuing is to

love people very much

and that requests for new ideas

and new ways of thinking
and new things to make
is just part of breathing
part of my biological process
but that

the thing that isn't part of my biological process

which is most human

and the most difficult to ascertain and to attain
is this feeling of being really loved
being in love
by someone else

with someone else

that most old idea
seemingly of being in love
probably is the newest idea

and not an idea at all

又一年六四

「中國無數計非正常死亡多半是死於一種制度、一種觀念。中國政治制度維護的是權力和金錢，除了權力和金錢，不存在更需要維護的東西；觀念中缺少一個對生命的尊重和關愛，一個對死亡的敬畏與戒懼。」

-「天安門母親運動」成員徐玨《明報6月5日》

雷聲太大

Conquering the last terrain of analog - Amazon's Kindle (Part II)

No windows persuading me to make all sorts of consumption pop up from my book. And no one knows that I am reading at a particular time in a particular place. But once the device is stuck onto your body, you are constantly under tracking by these big brands. Every body is accessible. They learn about your movement, your next stop and your next encounter. They hold the key to your minds. Readers will only be blinded with the ideological excitement of possessing this so-called freedom of connection to the infinite space of knowledge. You think you are now communicating with many more people around the world at any time any space but on the other side of the coin, you are actually being barred from connecting with groups that are less up-to-date. The immediacy of update widens our information lapse from person to person. Information one possesses easily deteriorates. The common ground for discussions is gradually shrinking due to this temporal difference in information reception.

"Book clubs could meet inside of a book." (Newsweek, 70) To a certain extent, yes, readers are no longer confined to a physical space for book salon or discussions but in turn, they are now confined to that virtual space which is highly manipulated by the space administrator, which is Amazon in this case. Instead of "making the entire works of humankind available to all people", they are now only available to those born in the digital age, more affiliated and knowledgeable mass. The rich poor gap is constantly widening, not only between the analog and digital camp, but also among those in the digital net. It is no longer a fair game. Within a global scale, those living in the third world will never get a taste of such technology. Even they are willing to read, their knowledge simply depreciates compared to other parts of the globe. Capital thus flows from around the world to those knowledgeable elites who are now connecting among themselves and sharing all sorts of information at an ever accelerating speed.

The whole evolution from analog to digital is a coercion that builds upon excessive needs and constantly making one feels that he or she is out-of-date. They will not point a gun at your head to force you to buy the new edition. Yet by gradually limiting and finally ceasing to release that previous edition, buyers had no choice but to switch to the newer one. This will certainly happen to the production of books in the near future. Books will not extinct but perhaps not each and every piece of writings will have the chance to release a book version. As Amazon's database expands, fewer and fewer publishers could resist the entire digitization movement.

Conquering the last terrain of analog - Amazon's Kindle (Part I)

Last Christmas Amazon has released its first electronic book (e-book) which is already the 2nd generation of its kind into the market. Newsweek has devoted a total of 6 pages to cover this story on November 26, making a sound feature on The Future of Reading that might be shaped by the attempt of this device. How revolutionary is this Kindle? Is it really going to "change the way readers read, writers write and publishers publish?"

As claimed by the CEO of this online bookstore giant, Jeff Bezos, their mission is to digitize entire libraries of the world, to create "the world's only book" so as to "make the entire works of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages, available to all people, all the time." (Newsweek, 70) What he meant by "all the time" refers to their newly developed wireless connectivity which surpasses all its ancestors including Sony Reader, the pioneer of e-book. With just a glimpse, one can hardly tell what makes the device so different from the PDA or mobile phones from which we read our everyday news and documents in transports. And what makes these big corporations so sure that they will be able to conquer this last terrain of analog, the print media which has been the bedrock of our civilization for centuries, but not another fashionable product that roars in the short run?

We were told that the product is in fact no different from an actual book. It can even lead you into the state of ludic reading – the rabbit hole that heavy readers enter when consuming books for pleasure. (Newsweek, 68) What Bezos was trying to convince readers was that it is not the medium that brings one into that hypnotic state. What have been paramount are in fact the ideas of writers. The aura of a book can be substituted by any medium and this time, this device, this machine. Instead of mingling with papers – static and 3-dimensional, now we were told to mingle with all sorts of screens – interactive and 4-dimensional. With their power in the media (they are in fact the media), they stir up noises and create talking points through platforms like blogs and forums, and thus slowly immerse oneself into the need for change. But how could the two mediums be possibly the same?

798的神話

剛看過今屆的香港國際藝術展，更參與了其中的一場研討會─時移勢易：博物館與文化慾望，沒有太多的驚喜，卻有許多值得思考的地方。

雖說這是一個藝術展，但現場的佈局跟展銷會沒多大分別，參展的畫廊也不介意把售價一併展出，務求盡用那百餘尺的空間。根據官方的資料，現場有來自二十國的畫廊，但在我看來，主要來自歐美及亞洲主要城市，國內的佔上大多數，推介的作品也源自這些發展中的大都會，少有中東甚至非洲等地的作品，不無可借。值得一提的是我國作品滲透率之高叫人訝異，隨處可見岳敏君、焦興濤的作品，還有許多帶有濃厚政治色彩的畫作，中國風吹得還真盛。

就連研討會本身也是面向中國的說，期望從來自世界各地的策展人身上取經，帶動香港與國內的文化工業，說是工業一點不為過，可不都是各國建構自我形象的一個手段？博物館的建築成了國際都市的必然象徵，高傲地佔據着逐漸萎縮的公共空間，扭曲的不止是文化本身的意義，更是人類生活的根本自然，很認同Tate Modern的首席策展人Sheena Wagstaff的一席話：Museum is not built for profit-making。是的，香港的政客就是不大願意去接受這個事實，所以不斷地追問如何經營一個自給自足的博物館，老實點說，還不是當爸爸的不願意負上這沉重的擔子，生下來了，就自己學會獨立吧！難怪做兒女的天天都在鬧，不大長進。北京的798藝術園地卻恰好相反，太獨立了，還闖出了點名氣，老父也就不得不支持，順勢叨點光。

看來，香港還得花上一段頗長的時間，才會學好走路這一課。

"A-Glow-Glow" Interactive Media Arts

早前看過兩件互動裝置，第一件來自英國的United Visual Artists (UVA)，名為Volume，一眾由LED組成的感應柱因應觀眾的行動作出反應。當觀眾遊走於柱子之間時，聲音的跌踫奏出一陣和諧的共鳴，然而LED的反應卻沒有預期的理想，似是被過多的預設程式操控着，自顧自地發揮；又因現場觀眾太多，反應欠缺即時性；相對地，觀眾得停留較長的時間來觀察裝置的反應，尋找當中的語言，沒多少耐性的或把裝置當作玩意兒的總不得要領，很快便離了場。

同樣的情況亦出現於第二件裝置上─Teddy Lo的《稀孔》，這個的情況更糟，皆因玩法太複雜，需要你手機的藍芽之餘（較落後的可沒份兒了），七條的訊息發放頻道亦未能滿足眾多好奇的觀眾，等待不久便宣佈放棄，就是收到訊號的也搞不懂當中的意思，失望而回的佔了大多數。

相信這仍是創作互動裝置的一大挑戰，得在觀眾失去興趣前引導對方進入與作品自行溝通的狀態，從而進行對話、交流。當然，首要的是觀眾願意進行對話，藝術品不是商品，它不強迫你來簇擁它，而是靜靜地待在那兒，等你來接近，收穫多少，全看你願意在它跟前付上多少的時間。

快啦快啦...

一年就這麼過去了

時間

美漢24年冤獄獲賠逾百萬

美國佛羅里達州當局因為錯誤作一名男子定罪，令他坐了24年冤獄，向該男子賠償125萬美元。該名現年46歲的男子，在1982年被法庭裁定2項強姦及1項持械行劫罪，被判入獄130年。但到了2006年，透過脫氧核糖核酸（DNA）測試，證實他跟案件無關，當庭釋放。佛州州長克里斯特在簽署賠償令時表示，明白到無論多少錢也不能彌補對方失去的時間。該名男子在獄中修畢一個教育學位，並且擔當園丁，獲得滅蟲牌照。（明報2008/4/18）

今天看到這則新聞，想起了早前在電影節看過一套由周防正行執導的電影《儘管如此我沒做過》，引起了我一些回響。不禁到處問身邊的朋友：作為一位法官，釋放了一名罪犯罪大還是冤枉了一個無辜的人罪大？大部份的答案均是後者，因為大都認為犯罪者脫了罪，有二分一機會不再重犯，但捉了一個無辜的人，罪犯仍舊可以逍遙法外，那為何要多害一人？

對於受害者來說，誤以為罪犯已經繩之以法當然感到安慰，但對於無辜者來說，失去的不單是自由，還有那永遠追不回的時間，是無論多少錢也補償不了的生命。我想，這才是一位法官最罪無可逭的；而可悲的是今天有多少人，不是時間給剝奪了，而是自己甘願捨棄。

Cultural Revolution

Perhaps it is not so much about hauntology that we had discussed in class but I really wonder why the three films (The Blue Kite, Peacock, The Sun Also Rises) about Cultural Revolution we have discussed so far were structured in such a similar way that each of them was clearly divided into at least three main parts. When I thought it was telling a different story from time to time, it would then hint on me that the story was going on within the same circle of people and both the temporal and spatial settings had intertwined so closely that they actually came together as a holistic piece of work finally. But why it was like a formula that the 5th generation Chinese directors had to split their films in parts?

Each time when a new part began, a different perspective was suggested. For example in Peacock, the story was basically told through the perspectives of two brothers and their sister. Above this layer of three stories was another onionskin made of the memory of the youngest brother who happened to be the narrator to wrap up this entire bluish memory. As the surface slowly peeled off, we not only learnt about the grow-up stories of the three but also the daily trivial life of ordinary Chinese people after the Cultural Revolution, which could only be made objective and significant through multiple points of narrative. Simply no one caught a full picture of the incident and that any single point of view towards such an important traumatic history would be a disregard.

Changes take time. In order to capture the visible, the temporal framework of the films had to be expanded to, say, at least one year in The Sun Also Rises and 10 years in Peacock so as to pick up some diamonds in this spectrum of social change.

美國人心中的第三大敵人

是有點兒鋒芒太露吧…

Newsweek

Mar24, 2008

http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1636_chinadesignnow/

《孔雀》﹣顧長衛

Readymade Magazine

January/February

2007 Vol.08

千年善禱

While I was still thinking of the way Ann Hui constructed memory and cultural identity in Song of the Exile, another newly released film by Wayne Wang titled A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, which is screened in this year's Hong Kong International Film Festival, served as a good reference for me to think out of the box.

Both of the films were about parent-child relationship but instead of using lots of flashbacks, this later film by the director of Joy Luck Club talked about memory basically through dialogues and the acting of the father and daughter only. They were all being told in the present tense, which seemed to convey the fact that past is already past. Though it shaped what we are now, there is no use to be troubled by those bygone memories. Instead, we should think of the better side, just like what the father has said to the old lady in the park.

We used to think that conflicts between generations were mainly created by cultural differences and it is. Yet apart from this aspect, Wang's film has highlighted other aspects that could best parallel to Hui's film. The heroines in both films were situated to receive education abroad which provided a preconceived base of difference between their mindset and that of their last generation. Stuart Hall's idea of "diaspora identity" was mentioned as one "produces and is produced by a specific cultural environment." However, these external social factors are often emphasized to such an extent that other moral or psychological factors have been undermined. These factors had been the main focus in shaping one's memory in another recommended film for discussion–Atonement, in which the heroine's memory is constantly struggling between real and constructed fragments due to her guilt for her sister. The real and unreal interlaces each other in a way that even the heroine is gradually losing hold of her true memory.

Both Hueyin (Song of the Exile) and Yilan (A Thousand Years of Good Prayers) refused to talk to their parents face to face due to their guilt of misconduct in the past (basically their own character), not necessarily about their country, their homeland.

我的復活節假期

10:08am

我正在工作。

這是復活節假期的最後一天，
得為自私的時間安排作點補償。

腦袋是這般想的

卻是千萬個不情願。

數天下來
時間    是怎麼過的？

完成了最磨人的功課，
慶祝了主的復活，
除了電影節
還有《客途秋恨》和《愛、誘、罪》
認識了新朋友，也會了舊的，
沒有真正的休息，

卻在光與影之間

找到了真實。

The 5th paper this year

I finally came up with the film I want to analyse for the coming paper - The Brave One - with one of my most admired actresses of the day Jodie Foster. Though not many positive reviews were found over this film, it stirred up my mind for quite a while as it's actually justifying, at least trying to, what Amercia has done after the 911 assault. Yet this time my focus will be on its nostalgic sentiments...right, sth that no critics had even mentioned and hopefully I'm not going in a wrong direction for my paper. After all, it's about my persuasion skill, right? Language plays.

最近的心情爛透了

休息沒多久又到新一季paper的死線，總覺沒完沒了的，幾天下來腦袋依舊空空的，情況嚴峻得很...工作嘛，也不太順利，東西翻來覆去仍是老樣子，沒絲毫進展，難纏透了；很想離開這個環境，歇一歇，卻又理性地知道問題不在於環境本身，而是自己的心態...我想：得找個機會讓腦袋輕鬆一下了......

HK Film Festival 2008

it's the annual gathering for all film enthusiasts again. every year there're just too many good films you wanna watch that time crash seems unavoidable. i've tried not to be influenced by those film excerpts but you just can't select one among the pool without a glimpse of the catalog. surprise only happens when you don't have too much knowledge or expectation on the event.

anyway here's my schedule this year, not too much but enough for me already. see if we can bump into each other in any one of the occasions :) see you all~~

18th, 7:15pm 儘管如此我沒做過, p23
21th, 8:00pm 我們的天父, p60
22th, 9:30pm 翠絲的碎片人生, p55
23th, 6:00pm 鐵木真, p10
24th, 6:00pm 警察樂隊來訪時, p62
25th, 7:15pm 千年善禱, p24
27th, 7:15pm 華麗安琪兒, p16
3rd, 7:00pm 出入人口, p22
6th, 8:45pm 電光滾石, p9

More on "Lust, Caution"

I am not a fan of Eileen Chang, nor am I a student with strong Chinese literary base, but Lust, Caution gave me a feeling that Chang was trying to play down, not to say 'hide', some parts of the content deliberately, particularly the sentiments between Chia-chih and Mr. Yee. The original story was largely narrated from the perspective of the heroine Chia-chih and basically only about an assassination. Other events within the story were part of Chia-chih's memory. We can hardly know the breast of the hero Mr. Yee, except the later fraction which contributed the only hint of his emotions towards Chia-chih. We were told that the two got two meetings before this last one but what has been done besides sex? And what has constituted to their intimacy in the very last scene that even hindered Chia-chih from her long awaited plan? How come such an old hand like Mr. Yee would fall into this trap of femme fatale? What has Chia-chih done to win over his trust? And above all why did Chang choose to omit these episodes? Obviously Ang Lee has tried to fill up the gaps with his own propositions, from which I would say most of them were reasonable and had in turn enriched the original story.

I agree with what Robert Stam mentioned at last in Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation that as critics 'our statements about films based on novels or other sources need to be less moralistic, less panicked, less implicated in unacknowledged hierarchies,' but 'more rooted in contextual and intertextual history,' and above all 'less concerned with inchoate notions of fidelity.' (75) There could always be accuses for being unfaithful to a source text if one has to be picky on every single difference found under direct comparison, not to mention the two mediums are intrinsically different in nature. In fact, I found the cinematic version a more thorough reading and interpretation to Chang's story from the focalization of Ang Lee, which has added more ingredients to the text but of course certain kinds of ideological transformations were suggested at the same time constituting the major difference between the two.

Mr. Yee has been a more humanistic person in the film, at least from the way he reminisced Chia-chih in the final scene. She certainly was not the one and only femme fatale in his life. We did not have such a bad feeling towards traitors–primarily with Tony Leung's long established positive image–which might probably not be the initial idea of Chang. The most controversial of all for sure is the three 'extra' sex scenes supplemented by Lee. They had amplified the fear of Mr. Yee as a traitor, which made the violence of the first sex scene perfectly sensible. He could trust nobody because everyone wants his head off for patriotism. The fear of death has tortured him to such an extent that only through sex could he find his true self, his own existence. Whether the sex scenes were a must is beyond our discussion because it was by and large a personal decision of Lee and what we as audiences have been confronted with is this text–already presented publicly and is now the only base for our criticism.