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Name: Myra
Country: United States
State: California
Metro: Berkeley
Interests: eat, drink, sleep -- in between these i read, write, and pretend like i have interests.
Expertise: avoiding change, cutting bangs, making dumplings from scratch, using dictionaries... there are probably other stuff i'm good at, but who cares.
Message: message me
Member Since:
5/11/2004
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| back for nowI really want to get off xanga and blog elsewhere, but the prospect of starting yet another online account with usernames and passwords and profiles is seriously depressing. and so the status quo shall prevail for now.
In other news, I am back from a month of traveling in China, and will be moving to Japan in August. Details [of both] to come.
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| Last night, went with Deb to an SFIFF screening of a mockumentary called "The Heavenly Kings" (2006), directed by popular HK actor Daniel Wu.
Basically, Wu, with three of his model/actor friends, formed a boy band, released an album, put on concerts, gave press conferences... for the sole purpose of making this film, which satirizes the present-day HK music industry, and spotlights the intricate games of manipulation between musicians, record companies, and the media. You can already see the problem, can't you? An elaborate scheme, conceived and executed over something like three years, all to prove that the media is unreliable at best, and that modern day popstars are simply advanced sound editing technology wrapped up in shiny designer packaging. The point seems to go without saying... so did it really need to be said in an 86 min production?
The experience of watching this film is comparable to looking at one of those contraptions in which a marble ball drops down and sets off a mesmerizing series of chain reaction among gears, funnels, pulleys, and levers, but all it does in the end is flick on a lighter or some equally anticlimactic result--an original process with an unproportionally inconsequential finale. With all the recent buzz over this film, I can't help but wonder if all the yay-sayers are simply too caught up in the fancy mechanics to notice a lack of depth in the film's contemplation of various problems in the HK music industry. Important questions were raise--how to deal with the age of music download; how to reinstill faith and trust in the industry--and not answered nor seriously attempted. Ultimately, the movie did not reveal anything the general music-consuming public did not already know. It was a well conceived project, but the fragile element of surpise, the variable of viewers already knowing the gag seriously undermines the effectiveness of the whole blurring-the-boundary-between-the-real-and-the-unreal gimmick.
The cynical side of me wants to point out that many are behind the project because of its star, whose success in recent years is so undeniable that he can do no wrong at this point. And adding three more handsome ex-models to the mix is hardly a deal breaker in my book.... we won't talk about the irony of four good looking guys succeeding at a film project that satirizes four good looking guys becoming a popular boy band. But did I mention it works?
And along with this point, other merits should be duly noted: a slew of talking heads interview appearances by Hong Kong's biggests stars such as Jacky Cheung, Miriam Yeung, Karen Mok, Nicholas Tse are revealing and unsuperficial. There were a couple of smart and hilarious scenes involving choreographers and stylists. The lighthearted cheekiness compensates a great deal for the rough patching between scripted and unscripted scenes. And the mockumentary format, which allocates a destablized point of view to the audience, keeps us just unfocused enough NOT to examine the likelihoods (and unlikelihoods) of various actions and reactions, be they rehearsed or not. This last point, I'm happy to say, constitutes the cleverness of "The Heavenly Kings," and perhaps more importantly, the fun of it.
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| 'old' ageMy it's been a long time since I've written! What have I been doing all this time? To tell you the truth, the only thing I remember about last semester was me frantically working on my thesis (which has finally reached the editing phase as of recently) and neglecting the world which was my social life, friends, and normal amounts of sleep. So basically, I have no memorable stories from my hiatus to report. Well, I don't know, maybe I'll remember something later on.
Anyway, so the point of this post! Getting old, and the horrors of realizing it.
Remember when you were a kid? And everytime some adult asks about your age, you made sure to let them know both verbally and visually? "FIVE!" you'd stick your open palm and pudgy fingers in their face. Yup, you TOLD them alright, made sure they knew how smart and grown up you were, having lived nearly half a dozen years in the world. Then about a decade passes, and you learn the meaning of the word "redundant" and "childish" so the gesture work and voice inflection get dropped... but privately, age becomes a even bigger deal: 16 = being able to drive your own restless ass (and your friends' lazy asses) anytime and anywhere; 18 = being able to scream, in a fight with your parents, "I'm an ADULT, you can't tell me what to do!"; even 21, well you all know what that means...
The point is, before turning 21, which was really not that long ago, I NEVER, for a second, lost track of how old I was. But after 21? Not so at all. A couple months after I turned 22, somebody asked how old I was and I mistakenly told them 23. And right before turning 23, I blanked out when a bouncer holding my driver's license asked for my age (yeah, that was good timing). And just last month, a friend of my mom's asked the same question, and I blurted out "24" even though I'm 8 months shy. So I either have a very bad case of proleptic short-term memory loss, or age is just no longer a frontrunner on the list of things that identify my person. I don't know, has this happened to anyone else? Is it just me? I mean, I'm not saying mid-20s is old, I just wonder if this is generally what happens to people...
haha, this is me with free time... thinking too much and asking useless questions. hmmm. okay that's it. 
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| Accept these facts of life and you'll be happier:
- When waiting for a bus, the one going the opposite direction ALWAYS comes sooner, faster, and much more frequently.
- If you go out shopping with the intention of buying a specific thing (such as round-toe pumps or white linen skirts), then said thing will inevitably cease to exist, or exist only in ridiculously large sizes on/in racks and stockrooms everywhere.
- For anyone with long hair, "a trim" never stops at a couple of inches as one would expect... because the universal hair-cutting conversion rate requires that 2 inches = 5 or 6 in the real world.
anyway, school starts again tomorrow! 
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| From an old entry:
"I guess you can say I'm feeling
pretty trapped. Stuck in a monocromatic picture that I know I don't
belong in. But I just don't feel completely here, half of me waiting
for the other half to wake up. It's as if the impending absence of
those who are checking out has already created a void in my heart..."
It's strange how life can be like a broken record, inflicting the misery of repeating over and over again that glitch of notes and meaning. Except in life, the unpleasantry goes beyond acoustics, because you can't turn off the machine and put in a new record. You have to deal with the negative experiences that repeat themselves, every time like it's the first time. And so here I am again, painfully aware that this is going to be a summer of goodbyes. Goodbyes for now, for a while, and dare I say it, for good? That last one is difficult to swallow. Because unlike the last time, I'm completely awake to the panic. Because unlike the last time, those heading toward the exit signs are not only moving on to new places, but also to the next stage of their lives, while yours truly remain singularly lodged in the Here, the Now, and the soon-to-be Past (for everyone else).
Thus, this fresh round of goodbyes feels particularly nasty, especially when Shelley moves out, and I'll have to find ways to fill up the new vacant spaces with my own furniture, music, and obsessions. It's times like these that I wish cats are more needy (but that's clearly wishful thinking; I'll be lucky if Mystic gives me more than three meows in one day).
Anyway, I don't really know where I'm going with this... except some sort of emo commentary on universal loneliness and all that bullshit. So I'll spare my loyal audience, which, to my knowledge, consists of no more than half a dozen people (I love you guys!). Alright, it's late. So I'm gonna leave off here and carry on with postponing my life.
Skip, skip, skippidy skip. 
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