"hello world\n"

geeks rock, in UCSD :)

wall~e~

It's been a memory loss since I was last in a movie theater. Catching Wall~E~ (read with pauses and curled tones) before he disappears into DVD was worth a TGIF evening.

He is at least 700 years old, inquisitive, persistent, sentimental, and more than a little lonely.

Love, life -- the theme contains simple things of universal pursuit, and has been laid out well.

small pleasures at the Guggenheim

I spent the Sunday afternoon off at the Guggenheim. The main attraction was the impressive "I want to believe" by Cai Guo-Qiang, which certainly warrants another post (soon hopefully). I almost walked out of the museum door before half-heartedly picked up a museum catalog -- and that drew me back to the 3rd floor annex for the Karl Nierendorf collection. It seemed at first sight to be "just another dose of modern art" but ended up exceeding the modest expectation. There were several sparkles from a rather extensive Paul Klee collection along with his peers that very much placed thing in historical context.
Another one that attracted my eyes with the vibrant colors and shapes was Kandinsky's Small Pleasures (Kleine freunden). Pleasures are colorful, they come in all different shapes, and the overall picture is a mess once life is full of them! Aren't we all constantly indulging in many small pleasures: cook a few experimental dishes, read the economist, surf facebook, take pictures, post them to flickr and watch the new comments with excitement, read the audiobook Long Tail while waiting for my train ride, secretly taking note that most of my likes and dislikes are also in the "long tail", and spending a spring afternoon watching urban flowers, and fill my brain with imaginative museum pieces. Why not?

Paradise and the Peri

what is this, a free ad? yes, you smart. I'm singing this oratorio with the hudson valley singers in two weeks, and why not use my uncensored (and also unread) internet corner for a little publicity?

Only recently did I read and understand this epic oriental story. Making lists is a cliche way of summarizing experiences, let me put up with three items of threes for now:
There were three layers of stories in Thomas Moore's original Lalla Rookh: the traveling princess and the poet-storyteller, the quest by the Peri, and the three human stories intertwined with the Peri's own fate. Reminds me of the Arabian Nights. Three different artistic flavors in the original English, translated German, and the musical language, all more or less foreign to my ears. What I only heard in CD and has yet to be seen, is the magic coordination that Eugene make out of the three parts: the soloists, the orchestra, and us the chorus.

I'm proud to be part of this creation -- from a corner of the second soporanos, and I look forward to the performance:

What	Paradise and the Peri, an Oratorio by Robert Schumann
Who	Eugene Sirotkine, Conductor; Soloists - Carissa Castaldo, Natalya Kraevsky, MaryAnn McCormick, John Bernard, David Eckstrom and Robert Garner; Hudson Valley Singers, Chorus; New York Metamorphoses Orchestra
When	Saturday, April 26, 2008, 7 PM
Where	New York Society for Ethical Culture 2 West 64th Street (at Central Park West), NYC

Tickets? just email me or leave a comment here for a discount :)

Finally, I'd like to share a vivid listening experience by 张一帆 (in Chinese) three visual dipictions of the original poem, coutesy of J. Vail. Both of which I very much enjoyed.


left to right: Peri, Peri and the fallen warrior, Peri and lover's last sigh.

the "kite runner"s

I meant the 2003 best-selling novel and the recent film, of course.
Did not want a picturesque movie image that was plastered all over the web, and found the cheerful cartoon boy.

This is a reading note long overdue. With Hoseinni's second book lying on my cabinet with cover turned, I was afraid that my words for "Kite Runner" and its movie adaptation would decay to epsilon and overwhelmed by the new readings if I don't put something down now.

Both are beautiful. But maybe I saw the film when I was at ~20% down the book and I knew almost nothing about Afghan or central-Asian culture, I felt that many important cues were missing from the brief visual account. For example, what is different being a Pashtun or a Hazara, why are kite-running important, the backgrounds and culture that lies behind to answer "why" for the happenings. I enjoyed both presentations, nonetheless, and much more for the book for its simple language and authentic Afghan narratives. Borrowing a literary cliche from my old chinese textbooks: most characters (except Amir) are flat in the film, but they are three-dimensional in the book. They laugh, they cry, they think, ... and you are with them there.

On the other hand, this book, together with "China Road" mentioned earlier and the Iranian film Persepolis, gave me a fresh angle towards nationalism, globalization vs separatism ... but that would be the topic of another post.

Crossroads of the West

"Crossroads of the west"
-- does anyone recall the origin of this phrase? Similar to the game of 50-state license plates, this is part of my game of the state quarters.
-- no surprisingly, this is the tag line for Utah, the fifth and last 2007 quarter that made its way onto my collector map.

Let me also peruse this excuse to restart year 2008, why not: Chinese New Year isn't over yet, and I will be looking out for the first quarters imprinted with 2008 :) Of course shrugging off disappointments in 2007 and early 2008 and indulging in a few new wishes would also be nice. Say, actually visiting the marvelous sceneries in Utah, or the attainable: gathering all state quarters, only five more to go :)

Tomorrow will be another sunny day, for sure.

the half-decay periods of blog ideas

Once a while, an itch to write creeps up -- be it inspired by reading, stimulated by travel, or stung by actual or imaginary mosquitoes. Some ended up being a post on an infrequent blog, like this one; some continued to itch for sometime but ended up nowhere, like most.

I wonder how long the itches would last with the normal wear-and-tear of life. Is there a half-decay period for the urge to express in writing? The geek in me wanted to launch into a three-sectioned discussion about the nature of motivation, and what the internal fading and the external grinding can do to writing itches, while the blogger in me said that this is utterly unnecessary. The commonsense in me hopes that the happy thoughts and positive revelations would fade slowly, while frustrations, anger and disappointment would decay fast -- since they are supposed to just stay as itches, albeit being no less true to ourselves than any of the better feelings.

I had thought the revived blog would focus on external subjects such as books, films, gadgets, and maybe food and travel to come. This is certainly a diversion. This said, I am hoping to salvage and revive some of the nicer itches from over a month ago, and one thing about exponential decay is that it will never be exactly zero :)