Dual

went for the concert named DUAL: An American Salute, for which a friend was guest playing. Dual is the Distinguished Universities Alumni League, covering alumni clubs of 17 schools in the US and the UK, which you can guess. (that's about the lamest way of connecting people together, to create extra connections naturally. ) They were the organiser of the concert. the lousiness of the concert is beyond description, and my friend's item, was the only thing worth hearing.

what a typical american thing. it started with grand and bland patriotic pieces such as american salute by Morton Gould, and Lincoln Portrait by Copland (of all the works he wrote!) being amateurs does not give the band excuses for the unpolished, impersonal and sluggish playing despite the conductor's immense effort in mobilising them. bad. bad. best still, they had to play Lincoln Portrait, incorporated in which a narrative about Lincoln and excerpts of his speeches. they got an american man to speak it, who did it with absolutely zero passion. how could they portray such a great soul with so little soul? Only the piano in Rhapsody in Blue brings the concert a little life. he actually plays with a lot of colors and wit and is actually in context. that is what i just discovered. i think he's grown. well, i'm not so much a piano critics, but then i liked it.

and then, there was a light-hearted women's chorus, singing a bunch of songs in major keys with a lot of cheerful phrases repeated and not much color change anyways. they have to put this cute little women's chorus item after the grand masculine pieces, to show that while the men are concerned about big issues, the women are just petit and sweet? (which reminds me of the victorian idle women. surprising how closely contemporary american culture resembles that of the early 20th century england.) can't help but think that the concert is an apt portrait of the conservative side of american cultural landscape. there's no wonder that dual mainly consists of the major old distinguished universities on the east coast of the country.

and above all, of course, this concert is for charity. the kids from the Cannossian School Percussion Band were good though, considering that they are kids with hearing impairment. simple pieces, but almost played to perfection, in contrast with the main band. such spirit with which they played their pieces, and the enthusiastic conductor seemed full of passion and love. i think they won the loudest applause from the bored audience.

say hi

the day before yesterday, i saw a choir junior on the mrt train. i couldn't say hi cos he was sound asleep, totally unaware of anything happening around him. i tried for 5 min and remembered his name. but what's the use, he didn't wake up until the train got to my stop. so i alighted. when i was getting out of the station by the overhead bridge, i saw a chior senior moving down on the escalator. was too fast, i didn't have time to say hi. and yesterday morning, on my way to work with mandarin pop playing to my ears, i caught a glimpse of a girl walking past me. another of my seniors. but that encounter was at the turn of the street. by the time i realised who she was she was already gone. and i walked on. no time.

sometimes, like today, i go shopping just to lose myself in the crowd. just go wandering, get lost in the lights and the shades, the moving and the stationary, the colours and the shapes, the glitters and the shimmers. just walk on. occasionally buy a thing or two. but not having to think about myself, or anyone else. it's not about the things. it's not about me. it's about roaming itself. solitude. i shall always enjoy solitude.

i used to be the opposite. i go to the shop, and buy the thing. finished. and return to where i came from. task-oriented was i. used to be so busy. and didn't like idleness. maybe that time i didn't feel the need to get away. or to get lost. but change came inevitably. part of growing up maybe? part of getting old maybe.

ten years down the road. what would i be? what would you be? i know where i'll be. but i don't know what. what would i be?

Clean

just not so good to watch 3 depressing movies in a single day. get too depressed. Clean is an interesting movie. all too real. no wonder she got the palmes...not for beauty, but for the realness in her acting. i'll write more some other day.

sense and Sensibility

it's so much faster to watch the show than reading the book. i never read S&S, but well, judging from my speed with P&P it wouldn't have taken just a couple of hours. good show. even hugh grant looks poised and charismetic in the movie. i've always liked winslet, and here i discovered two other talented actors. emma thompson who acted as elinor dashwood, and alan rickman who acted as colonel brandon. (oh well, and that half blooded prince.) ooh that voice! and yesterday, engagement reminded me of the super duper ever charming jodie foster. oh how subtly they act! if only i could so accurately express ideas and emotions like they do. interestingly, foster attended yale and thompson was from cambridge, both did english literature. thompson's talent in writing is especially credited when her S&S won the best screen play in both the academy award and the golden globe. and apparently, grant read english at oxford.

i was walking on orchard road, and i thought, singapore is not a cultural desert lah. a lot of my friends say so, but i think, no lah, it's not. it just needs nurturing, which takes a bit of time. but from the people i know, there's hope for singapore. as long as the government doesn't push too hard and cause reverse effect...

To be read in public

Border's is pathetic. there was one copy of Einstein's Ideas & Opinions, which i bought, and a thousand copies of Harry Porter and the Half Blooded Prince, piled up like a wall in the middle of everything.

anyways, after i bought the einstein, i was reminded of a friend telling me that Chupack's (producer of Sex and the City)The Between Boyfriends Book has a tag line on the back cover, saying "To be read in public, so men will know you're available." i was thinking, this einstein book probably is "to be read in public" too, "so men won't care to know if you're available."

read an essay on the jews, he said,

"In any case it is a nationalism whose aim is not power but dignity and health. If we did not have to live among intolerant, narrow-minded, and violent people, I should be the first to throw over all nationalism in favor of universal humanity."

in all such essays, surprisingly there is not excessive bitterness. instead of hatred, it is hope for the well-being of the entire humanity that he speaks of. from this point of view, although both peoples of great sufferings, the jews seem more open-minded and nobler than the chinese. and maybe that's the reason why the jews are so successful even though the trauma they've been through is much dealier than that we have.

but saw a bad review on amazon :see the one on ideas and opinions. you see, einstein's grand brain was fueled by a very small heart. is this a little too mean? or that this reviewer is a attention seeking poser. hm.

which i shall read to find out.

A very very long engagement

After 3 people recommended to me this film, i bought the vcd. always a fan of jean pierre jeunet and audrey toutou, expectation sort of build up when new film comes out and subconsciously avoid seeing it. this is a real tear jerker, and the brutality in some of the scenes was not what i could prepared myself for. one of the films in telling a war story from a female perspective, engagement is not the first one, but a successful one. the strength of the ladies in the story just makes me tremble. beautiful picture. as usual. and audrey is really good! isn't she beautiful!

in the roman languages, to sing is to:
cante (spanish)
chante (french)
canti (italian)
cante (portuguese)
and in chinese, to sing is to
唱(chang)
how fascinating! there must be something about the syllable [a:ng]

my modern world

i've been criticising everything old. and sorry to friends who were offended in any of the critic sessions. :p maybe it was that modern art hist course, maybe it's the music. maybe it's the modern atmostphere in ucsd. or feynman whom i just got to know. (jade's post on feynman). or even maybe Ling Shan (Soul Mountain) that i'm reading right now. whether i like it or not, modernism is here to stay, with me.

it's the state of the mind. in this world, all these parallel storylines. all the relationships. all these struggles against the world and the self. obviously there's not a unified subject in us, or a single narrative that can describe it all. it's meant to be deconstructed, our lives. and it's this life that we are living, why look back and long for that beautiful canonic melodies, or beautiful archy doors, beautiful representational paintings. what for look at those, when life is rarely so straight-forward and beautiful? why do we complain about concrete jungles so much? why not let life be streamlined, cold, concrete, glassy, abstract, simple yet difficult to understand, and taste the flavours of our time. why, must we be so critical of modern art, or modern music, by artists living in our time, and say all too effortlessly, "you call that trash art?"? why not try contemplating how much we have thought about life compared to all these people ahead of their time, our time? why do we have to be such hypocrites who, while entitled to all the conveniences that technology brings, curse and sware about technology? why can't we appreciate the fruits of human intelligence and just be open-minded about the brand new way of living? why can't we accept progress? are humans by nature reminiscencing animals? why not just grow up and accept the fact that we've grown!

new desktop

Acknowledgement: 胡不归画廊 who does beautiful digital paintings. beautiful!
these are my favourites of his portraits. i put them together, in a way that's almost similar to the cover of the colour trilogy bleu rouge blanc. looking in different directions, having different thoughts.

perfect for roaming

i believe pple like us who email, msn, google for info, blog to share info etc are used to the life style in which we freely roam on the world wide web. with any random link, the web carries us a long way in expanding our knowledge because of its radiating structure, ending up somewhere we never expect to be. don't you just like life like this! Wikipedia is perfect for our habits and thirst for knowledge. well, not that other websites do not have such structure, but this one is growing fast and big.. :)

wondering aloud

there's just this lightness and clarity in the stuff i'm listening to. maybe it's french. or maybe it's just poulenc. after listening to russian's stuff so full of drama and dark humour, innitially poulenc's work is so light it seems to me a little flirtatious. (:p) he doesn't seem to do a lot of layering of sounds. (now that i listen to it again, it's not so ture. but still, the general impression is much lighter than his russian contemporaries.) if they were persons, the russian would be a big sailor, witty and heroic, and the french would be a little dancer, slender and elegant. wonder what image chinese music projects, someone like libai, a skinny and lunatic poet? wonder what experience of the country has to do with stylistic composition, the nationalism thing. but one thing for sure, the music sure is consistent with the art and literature in that particular period.

i'm taking my time to digest this album. again it's just poulenc. it took me a long time to notice his works in gens' album. but once i started listening to them, i couldn't stop. my fav: 2 Melodies de Guillaume Apollinaire: I. Montparnasse.

hmm. but the sixteen is nice, except a few places sound a bit straining. the other version of figure humaine i have is by Rundfunkchor Stockholm with Eric Ericson. they are warmer. but not as intimate.

p.s. i think maybe the russians are more like dancers, while the french are like singers.

again. i will be able to catch the renovation in school and miss the renovated part. dammit. UCSD expands it's Price Center

on flight - Birdy!

on the way from SF to tokyo...

IN THE LAB

since i've written it down, i dont' want to type it again.

change

i have decided to change the painting's caption to:





太阳干枯地升起，
于沉睡中惊醒的树，
战栗不已。












and sorry about my low production rate and putting up again. i just really wanted to change the words that go with it.

Hail! Nietzsche!

How much truth can a spirit bear, how much truth can a spirit dare? that became for me more and more the real measure of value. Error (-belief in the ideal-) is not blindness, error is cowardice...Every acquisition, every step forward in knowledge is the result of courage, of severity towards onself, of cleanliness with respect to oneself...I do no refute ideals, I merely draw on gloves in their presence... Nitimur in Vetitum (We strive after the forbidden): in this sign my philosophy will one day conquer, for what has hitherto been forbidden on principle has never been anything but the truth. -

--Nietzsche, Why I am So Wise from Ecce Homo

random

how can anyone believe in religion and science at the same time? how do such people reconcile the conflict between the doctrines of the two? my mentor told me that one tells us why and the other how. but aren't they on different logic and narratives?

and i had no idea a box of small 280ply kimwipes costs over 60 bucks until i stumbled across the price online.

why is consciousness private? why is mine not known to another individual. if so, how is it possible to find a like mind!

Yann Tiersen - Les Jours Tristes Lyrics

some songs only grow on you when you listen to them close to your ears, i.e. listen to them on earphones instead of loud speakers. or you wouldn't have noticed how beautifully written or beautifully sung they are. in this case, this song is beautifully written and sung. thanks to zhu for introducing me to the album a chance of sunshine that contained this song.

Yann Tiersen - Les Jours Tristes mp3(i couldn't find the mp3 with the guy singing. so sorry.)

It's hard, hard not to sit on your hands
And bury your head in the sand
Hard not to make other plans
and claim that you've done all you can all along
And life must go on

It's hard, hard to stand up for what's right
And bring home the bacon each night
Hard not to break down and cry
When every idea that you've tried has been wrong
But you must go on

It's hard but you know it's worth the fight
'cause you know you've got the truth on your side
When the accusations fly, hold tight
Don't be afraid of what they'll say
Who cares what cowards think, anyway
They will understand one day, one day

It's hard, hard when you're here all alone
And everyone else has gone home
Harder to know right from wrong
When all objectivity's gone
And it's gone
But you still carry on

'cause you, you are the only one left
And you've got to clean up this mess
You know you'll end up like the rest
Bitter and twisted, unless
You stay strong and you carry on

It's hard but you know it's worth the fight
'cause you know you've got the truth on your side
When the accusations fly, hold tight
And don't be afraid of what they'll say
Who cares what cowards think, anyway
They will understand one day, one day.

Free Will/ Determinism

i heard from my friend the theory of determinism, but i didn't know it was part of the famous debate over free will/determinism. shame on me not knowing anything about it until i was 21.
a summary of the debate
what do you think? what about randomness? where does real randomness come from? does chaos involve randomness?

An argument

it started with my debate with my housemate with regard to whether biology is fundamentally different from the physical sciences. i essentially believe that the discrimination against biology as an "arsty" science or a lesser science is unjust because biology usese the same data collection and logical deduction process as the rest of the sciences, and also involves great extent of reproducibility. the reason why many people dissmiss the equal scientificity of biology is just that they cannot understand that the difference in extent/degree of complexity does not mean the difference in nature. biology as the investigation of the living system, necessarily studies a more complex object and being a young subject, necessarily has fewer tools to use. the overwhelming information that flux out of experiments all too easily lead people to believe that this science does not run on logic, but tends to be more of a descriptive and arbitary science. e.g. logical processes such as prooving cannot be used. in fact, this should be attributed to our limited understanding of the subject. just step back and look at the bigger picture, since biological systems comprise of physical substances, there should not be any difference between the principles that an organism operates and a clock, apart from that the organism is more complex. and anyway physics and chemistry started as observatory sciences and developed into quantitative and deductive phases that we now see them in. (think alchemy.) so my conclusion is that biology is essentially no difference from the other sciences.

that said, i was myself lead into a new contemplation. how about social sciences? we routinely look at social sciences as fundamentally different from the natural sciences, and, are the "lesser" sciences. but if we follow my logic in the preceeding passage, we would be compelled to acknowledge that they can be real sciences. see, we are talking about material systems such as a human society. with my presumption that there is no God or other supernatural power, our society is no less physical than an e field, all composed of atoms anyway. so when our understanding of the human unit become substancial, there is actually potential for real scientific investigation by the laws of physics on the society, a collection of humans, which are collections of physical atoms.