monoceros blogsIt's Halloween tonight, and also my brother's birthday. He turns 30 this year, and leaves me behind in the district of late 20s. LK is already 31. However we all look younger than we really are, which can be a good or bad thing, depending on how we choose to argue the matter.
I dug out my running shoes and went up and down the Siglap link today. By the time I reached home, I was rather pleased with myself. It's been a long time since I last ran. A long time. It was a little hard on the left knee though. You'd think that after eight years, those ligaments I tore at Whistler would've mended by now, but I'm still feeling the ache.
Today seems to be a day of revisiting the past. I read an essay about Frodo and Aragorn, the two very different heroes in Lord of the Rings, and remembered how nutty I was about the movie trilogy from 2001 through 2003. I used to wonder what life would be like after the movies, and it hasn't been so bad really. The Chronicles of Narnia are round the corner, although I'm not as bad a nutjob as I was during the Rings period. I've mellowed, I suppose. These days, I edit, I read, I daydream about places I'd like to go, but I feel a little less energetic. Something within feels smaller, stuffed into a crevice, sagging and shrinking with every day. I hate to be this way. I hate to be the withering adult.
So LucasFilms Animation Studios has opened in Singapore. Changi, to be exact. I was so thrilled about the opening and the studio's proximity to my home that I looked for open positions. Unfortunately, the only one I'd qualify for is "receptionist." If only I could edit films! Or write scripts. Could I work on press releases, please? At one low point on Friday afternoon, I felt desperate enough to submit my resume for the position of receptionist. If George Lucas ever visits one day, I'd get to welcome him to the studio.
But as my brother says, since it's a major animation studio in Asia, everyone in the animation industry and every Star Wars fan around the region will be sending in numerous applications. With my luck, even the position of cleaner would already be filled.
I told my old boss - for whom I'm currently working as a freelance editor - about my dreams, and he was insulted I'd leave him for LucasFilms. Why would I want to give up more ELT projects for a TV show called "Clone Wars"? Why indeed?
At any rate, even if there were an open position for me, I'm probably going away again for the next half a year with LK. And there's no way I'm passing up this opportunity. Perhaps by the time I return, LucasFilms will need a voice talent for an Ewok.
When a l expressed an interest in Clara Schumann, whose life story I'm now reading, I recalled a small poem that I taught my students earlier this year. It was the week for poems about love, and I wanted to show them that restraint can sometimes reveal more than overblown emotions stamped in every line of a poem.
This was selected by man-with-excellent-taste-in-poetry, Garrison Keillor, for NPR's The Writer's Almanac. Unfortunately, the poem says nothing about Clara as a person, but about Clara and Brahms, a close friend of the Schumanns who was said to be Clara's love in her later years. It just reminds me how Clara Schumann isn't quite forgotten, even if she isn't famous. People will continue to discuss her marriage to Schumann, who was afflicted with insanity, or her alleged relationship with Brahms.
Here's to Clara Schumann then, for all the things she was. Wife, mother, lover, and musician.
Romantics: Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann
by Lisel Mueller
The modern biographers worry
"how far it went," their tender friendship.
They wonder just what it means
when he writes he thinks of her constantly,
his guardian angel, beloved friend.
The modern biographers ask
the rude, irrelevant question
of our age, as if the event
of two bodies meshing together
establishes the degree of love,
forgetting how softly Eros walked
in the nineteenth century, how a hand
held overlong or a gaze anchored
in someone's eyes could unseat a heart,
and nuances of address not known
in our egalitarian language
could make the redolent air
tremble and shimmer with the heat
of possibility. Each time I hear
the Intermezzi, sad
and lavish in their tenderness,
I imagine the two of them
sitting in a garden
among late-blooming roses
and dark cascades of leaves,
letting the landscape speak for them,
leaving us nothing to overhear.
Sometimes music is so tied up with a film that it makes the movie or surpasses it. As far as blogging goes, I can't figure out how to classify some of my posts. A good score may lead me to the film (I have a habit of buying soundtracks before seeing the film - at times not seeing it at all - because I know and love the composer's work) or a movie will introduce an previously unknown scorer, musician, or singer.
And trailers are terrific vehicles for doing all of this - introduce the movie, showcase some of the score (or bring to attention the beauty of another film's score; trailers often use existing music), and highlight new songs written for the movie.
Bee Season is a terrific book written by Myla Goldberg, and now it's a little movie opening this fall (so little that I wonder when - or if - it will reach Singapore). Are you tired of seeing Richard Gere in those Visa ads? This time he gets to pull some dramatic weight along with Juliette Binoche and newcomers, Max Minghella (son of Anthony, the director), and Flora Cross, who plays the little girl who seems ordinary for the first several years of her life and then stuns everyone around her with her spelling talent. From the trailer, her character appears sweet and homely, thoroughly genuine, without the indulgent cuteness that often accompanies young actors.
After seeing the trailer a couple of months ago, I couldn't get its song out of my ahead. When the soundtrack got released (look for it on Itunes for sampling), I was hoping it would contain the song, "What are we made of." Although the score itself - written by Peter Nashel - sounds promising (I'll probably pick this up), I was disappointed that the only vocal on the album is Ivy's "I'll be near you," not bad either, but not quite the loveliness that is the trailer song.
But never mind all that, you can easily download it here, thanks to the generosity of Scott Mallone, the performer.
And for the movie - watch the trailer and then the movie if it ever shows near you.
I guess I went a little overboard in my previous entry. What started out as a trailer mention became a book review and then morphed into something larger than I expected. It's a hard issue to tackle, this race-and-prejudice business, especially when there's a lot passing between both sides in both directions.
Better that I stick to the news-in-note-form entries that I'm so fond of:
- My grandfather is moving home today! He's finally done with rehab but will probably need a walking stick for a while. At least he comes home in time for his birthday.
- I got back from Chengdu and Jiuzhaigou late last week. Had a bit of a viral infection on the last day of the trip but it didn't dampen my enthusiasm one bit. I had a great time in China, or Sichuan to be precise. I ate plenty, hiked, took too many photos (my memory card has been kidnapped by my father who wants to prettify everything; read - photoshop), made friends with a Chinese girl who acutally said my Mandarin was spoken well (what little of it I know), admired the ruggedness of Tibetan men (they look very well in robes and blue jeans and cowboy hats), watched Sichuan opera (the changing mask act was astounding), braved the public toilets, bought TCM products (a cream for my eczema, but whose instructions I can't read), paid my respects to Zhu Geliang and Liu Bei at their respective temples, and did a little bit more but this particular note is getting too long. More in another entry.
- I love Jiuzhaigou. The lakes were surreal - so many shades of blue. Aquamarine, turqoise, prussian blue, cobalt blue, cornflower blue, bluebell blue, bluebottle blue, the blue of a robin's egg. Lake after lake, I never tired of them. There were mountains too, rows of them, laid out like marbled slabs of grey, silver, black, white, red, brown and green. I kept thinking, someone should make a movie here. And someone already has - Zhang Yimou filmed part of Hero at Arrow-Bamboo Lake.
- By sheer fate, I met an old friend, YH (formerly of Michigan and now of Shanghai), at Jiuzhaigou. Of all the days I should be at the park, his company sends him on a holiday to the same place on the same day. That I should come off the bus, wonder if I would see him somewhere in the acres of tourists, turn my head and find him walking four meters away from me is one of the strangest coincidences in my life.
- Have left behind racial reading material for musical history. Clara by Janice Galloway is about Clara Schumann, usually known more as Robert Schumann's wife than as piano virtuoso. Rather poetic stuff, but all very, very good.
I'm glad that Zhang Ziyi - or must we now call her Ziyi Zhang? - is finally playing against type. She won't be a bratty, overly gifted practitioner of martial arts but a much sought after creme-de-la-creme geisha in this fall's Memoirs of a Geisha. Okay, she'll still be a character who rises above her peers, is skilled beyond compare, and attracts heaps of attention. But I think she won't be bratty in this film.
The trailer in high definition is up on the Apple website and it looks marvellous. I'll certainly be catching this for the costumes, the music (John Williams!), the cinematography, and Gong Li, even though she unfortunately plays Sayuri's rival. Wasn't Ziyi once called the little Gong Li? In this film, she leaves Gong Li's faded geisha deep in the dust as she achieves great success as the geisha du jour. But I'm certain Gong Li in real life is no faded film star.
As the promotional team hammers us with images of Zhang Ziyi, Gong Li, and Michelle Yeoh - one journalist labelled them as "Asian dolls" - I wonder about the image of Asia that the film will send to western audiences. As it is, the original geisha whom Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs of a Geisha, consulted was up in arms about his inaccurate portrayal of geisha (and she wrote a book in direct rebuttal). Geisha of Mineko Iwasaki's district, High Gion, were of the highest class, and were never deemed as prostitutes, nor did they ever have their viriginities auctioned off the way geishas of lower districts might have had. Other minor details like kimono being hung up - they are actually folded and stored in drawers - rang false to those in the know. Presenting geisha as girls little better than forced or willing victims of men's desires isn't going to help the current image the West has of the East.
And what is that image? Think about our famous Singapore Girl of Singapore Airlines. Beautiful, clad in a tight sarong, ever ready to prop up your pillow, store away your carry-on luggage, and obtain the meal of your choice. Asia in all its feminine glory (why did we never have a Singapore man?) beckoning to the masculine West. Sex and service. According to Sheridan Prasso, the author of The Asian Mystique, few westerners can look at the East without prejudice, without preconceived notions of exoticism, sexual fantasies, and power (theirs, never ours).
Sheridan Prasso served as BusinessWeek's Asia editor for about fifteen years, and for this book, she travelled around the region interviewing women and men, both white and Asian. Several chapters deal with the real geisha of the Gion district - that would be Ms. Iwasaki, and not the fictitious Sayuri - and what a Vietnamese woman would do if she were in the place of Miss Saigon, woman of the famed musical. Miss Hoa did have a one-night stand with an American GI and she did bear a child, but of killing oneself, she remarked, "Why would I want to kill myself?" According to her, Vietnamese women are stronger, far more persevering and determined than what the musical portrays. The character in Miss Saigon is merely another interpretation of Puccini's Madame Butterfly, the long-suffering, self-sacrificing Asian woman who lives and dies only for the strong, white man. It's what many westerners used to - and some still do - believe of Asian females. For that reason, I love M. Butterfly, the play by David Henry Hwang, which tears apart these stereotypes and reveals them to be the shallow and ignorant beliefs that they are.
I've nearly finished the book and Prasso has certainly covered much ground - why Asian men are viewed as asexual or worse, as wimps; why Asian actors never get to kiss the girl; how foreign investment bankers of the 90s made goals out of bedding Cathay girls (of Cathay Pacific Airlines); how women in Southeast Asia know exactly what white men want, and eagerly sell it to them (demand always creates supply). Prasso even tackles the martial arts aspect - are female practitioners really emotionless creatures who live only by the sword? - when she speaks to three women from the Singapore Wing Chun Kuen training center, asking them for their views on females studying kung fu.
Anyone else interested in such topics would do well to read Edward Said's Orientalism. Sheridan's work has already been favorably compared with it. What I wish she'd explored further is the idea of occidentalism, the way Asians perceive and stereotype westerners in turn - white fetish, the Pinkerton syndrome, the belief that westerners are hedonists etc. For that, there is a little-known book titled Occidentalism by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit. It's an apt companion for Said's work.
The East has its own positive and negative assumptions of the West - the white man who is allegedly funnier, wittier, more of a gentleman than the meek, vertically challenged Asian man who expects his wife to cook and clean all day (actually, many white men who suffer from the worst kind of yellow fever expect the same too). Or how about the evil West that indulges in debauchery and decadence?
While I like to think that we've come a long way from colonialism, white supremacy, Aryan dominance and the likes, many people still harbor strong feelings about the folks on the other side of the world. I'll confess that when I see an aging Caucasian man with a young Asian girl clinging ferociously to his arm, I tend to wonder about the sincerity of that union. Folks might say I'm prejudiced, but many of us are, even if we don't admit it. I'll say too that I question the girls who unabashedly claim they will only date white guys because Chinese guys just don't cut it. Surely a guy is just a guy. And even if the girls - often extreme Anglo- or Europhiles - insist it's a matter of cultural preference, that they just happen to fancy someone with a posh accent and it's no different from how men prefer women with huge breasts or blonde hair, their preference for white males goes beyond aesthetic and often suggests a desire mainly for what the men symbolize.
I'm glad that there are interracial relationships which are true, lasting, and transcend cultural and racial boundaries; several of my friends are terrific examples. But even these have at one time or another received unfair accusations from both ends. Either the girl is a green-card-seeker, potential Delilah or the fellow is a faithless Asian fetishist. The other view would be the female is a sweet, submissive darling of a girl and the male is a white knight who will bring her to a fairer pasture. This reminds me of one of LK's friends at Michigan, a Japanese girl, who actually had to hide from her parents the fact that she was living with a Singaporean man. They told her that when she went to university, she had to date and eventually marry an American. Anyone of Asian descent would not be acceptable. And so the races continue to overestimate and underestimate each other.
At DSD's vehement request, I've decided to write a short - it may turn out to be longer - post. I could waffle on about the random ideas and issues that cling to my brain like stubborn moths or I could do my usual point-form update. Since I have several drafts - they've been around for quite a while now - focused on those matters, I suppose I'll stick to the reliable lists of recent events and doings.
1. I've been visiting my grandpa almost every day. He's getting stronger, but he still can't walk. I realize that he's been in the hospital for about a month now, which wouldn't be so bad if he hadn't been bedridden all this time. He'll probably spend another two weeks in a rehab clinic to help him walk again. The good thing is that we got him a place in a clinic quite near our home, back to the first hospital to which he was admitted - Changi General Hospital.
2. Treks to the office are a daily occurrence now , even though I'm just a freelance editor. I asked the boss for use of a spare desk and now I get to sit next to Ms. Dimsumdolly and gossip through MSN messenger because the office is so quiet that even whispering would be an intrusion upon the aural space of our colleagues.
3. I have completed the 800-page tome of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and I can safely say that it is the most enjoyable read I've had all year. It was so entertaining - it appealed to both my inner fantasy fan and literary fusspot - and consuming - in a splendid way - that I didn't feel the two weeks spent on one book a waste at all. In fact, I want to read it again. One of the benefits of reading such a long book is that when you start over, the beginning seems such a long time ago. Favorite lines and images feel familiar but aren't as sharp so it's very pleasant to revisit them. I also have a new literary crush (I'm the sort of person who occasionally forms unhealthy attachments to well-drawn characters in films and books) - John Childermass. It doesn't matter that he's servant to one of the two great magicians in 19th century England. It doesn't matter that he has greasy hair. He's smart - a magician in secret - very knowing, equally cunning, looks very "at home on a windswept moor," and possesses a dark streak of independence. I get the odd impression that he would be very good-looking if he were to wash his hair and don a less patchy coat.
4. I've been agonizing over the kitchen design. But at the time of writing, I think I have it about right at last.
5. Tango shoes arrived. Sweetly scarlet. Sadly too small. I must have fudged my foot measurements. Will send back to store.
6. The recent movie LK and I watched was "Corpse Bride." And may I say how thrilled I was by the macabre images - dangling and detaching human bones; blue, dead things; grey, ominous buildings, thin and sharp silhouettes of trees and cadavers. How comically gothic everything looked, very Edward-Gorey-esque. And how pretty the piano music from Victor, the shy bumbling groom and Emily, the sexy and quite-dead-but-oh-so-lively bride. But I wanted very much for Victoria, the living bride, to get her man. I wish the film were longer, I wish the piano cues were longer. I very much like puppetry now though I suppose I'll have to settle for the action figures from McFarlane.
7. I miss tango.
8. I am going to China for a week in mid-October.
9. I am taking my mom to see Michael Buble this coming Monday.
10. I've been meeting several of my colleagues from my previous job. Two arranged over the past two weeks, and one a surprise on my morning train ride today. I was very, very happy to see them again.
11. There was a wedding, and two friends flew in from Ann Arbor to attend. Peiming and I took them eating and shopping. I hope we haven't scared them away.
12. I miss my husband, who is shackled to the army for Reservice at the moment, and will be for the next three weeks. We may be taking a long, long journey soon.