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Helsinki Complaints Choir

dude. this is funniest thing i've seen in a while.. lol. and the most true to the lyrics singing i have ever seen haha... they really look like they mean it. of course they do.

also from the composers' website:
The First Complaints Choir of Birmingham became a surprise success and soon after we received many requests from people who hoped for a complaints choir in their hometown as well. They expressed (almost with a certain pride) that in their particular town people are especially talented complainers: either by quantity (Belgrade), existentialism (St. Petersburg) or sophistication (Buenos Aires).

enjoy!

Women of the world, raise your right hand.

Ad campaign by A Diamond Is Forever has been around for a while. It says:
Your left hand says 'we.' Your right hand says 'me.' Your left hand rocks the cradle. Your right hand rules the world. Women of the world, raise your right hand. A Diamond is Forever. The New Diamond Right Hand Ring. Romantic, Modern Vintage, Floral and Contemporary Styles at ADIAMONDISFOREVER.COM

How clever.

Far from being the rarest stones in nature and certainly not able to last forever (try burning that stone), diamonds are just another not-so-apt embodiment of some constructed ideology. The invention of engagement ring in the early twentieth century was a huge commercial success. Now that feminism is in, the diamond giants have to move along too. Hence the right hand ring campaign, and finally the corporations have sussessfully captured 90% of the world's affluent women. It is ironic that in this case feminism is being rubbed into the one of the most prominent symbols of capitalist exploitations. Diamond mining and cutting have often been associated with slavery for good reasons. A feminist would be an idiot to buy that ring from adiamondisforever to MAKE A STATEMENT. What kind of statement would come out of that?

All said, I would not hesitate to raise my right hand. But just not with a stone from de Beers or adiamondisforever. For decoration, my fingers would at the most have on them a blinding cubic zirconia from Icing for 5 bucks.

there's something wrong with the music that the silk road ensemble produces. but i can't pinpoint it.

awesomeness.

monogamy is evolutionarily advantageous

formation of monogamy ensures diversity in the human gene pool.

my reasoning is as follows.
a human male in the case of reproduction is in the position of choice because females are limited by pregnancy. given the freedom, a human male will spread his sperms as far as possible, which is the seen today as the animcal instinct, and have multiple children concurrently. females however will have the burden of waiting for one child to come before having another. without monogamy, only the strongest and smartest guys get laid. soon the human gene pool will be filled with the traits of a small fraction of males. therefore the species would be less adaptive towards the changing environment.

when monogamy is enforced through cultural and social structures, however, a great many more guys can get laid due to removal of monopoly.

this also explains another problem that i have been thinking about for a long time. that is, why humans have evolved to wear clothes. by covering up the private parts, humans are less aroused sesually when they meet the opposite sex. on one hand, this may shift our attention to more "constructive" activities such as the development of civilization, which will benefit the survival of the species. (although i do not see how we could have known this before we created civilization). on the other hand, this could also be a by-product of the desire to keep monogamy, so that each person is only aroused by his or her partners in designated situations. and therefore benefit the species.

there might be a nother reason for clothing. maybe it acts like a dam, so that a human only conducts sexual acts when they meet the most desirable partner. this is because?

it's good to get up in the morning. (although i didn't really sleep much.) after my vector calculus midterm, i am sitting at sierra summit savoiuring a good omlette with the company georges brassens' adorable songs. and i'm looking at the pretty picture i took yesterday. and i think to myself, life can't be better :)

squared circles

touring bike
Originally uploaded by LeoL30.

seeing people's fascination about squared circular object is fascinating.

look at this!!!

circle poster

In the colorful reflection we have what is life. - J.W. v. Goethe

i want to see the world!!!!

quote of the day

My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I'm happy. I can't figure it out. What am I doing right?
- Charles M. Schulz

shouldn't i ask the opposite?

kongerei.

have you ever heard any overtone singing? have you heard tuvan and mongolian singings, like singing into the mountains and the grassland? i have only heard overtone singing once and have only heard mongolian long songs, but not throat singing. it's overwhelming.

kronos quartet got the throat singers from the land of Tuva to sing this kongerei for them, and for us. the ancient and sorrowful yearning therefore rings in my headphones. the strings keep a stead pulse, with the cello crying like the horse head fiddle alongside. immediately visible to me is a picture of vast plateau, on which a shepherd and his herd move steadily. he sings a low fundamental tone, heavy and coarse. suddenly there's this other sound. a whistle, a bird song, or a flute, floating indeterminably at the top. and then his sound becomes part of nature. and he moves on, a person without home. a people without home. a lonely people in the midst of the vastness. singing, and moving.

maybe great people shouldn't get married. maybe each great man should marry a housewife and each great woman should get herself a househusband. or, a great couple should just get a maid. damn.

»Clara has composed a series of small pieces, which show a musical and tender ingenuity such as she has never attained before. But to have children, and a husband who is always living in the realm of imagination, does not go together with composing. She cannot work at it regularly, and I am often disturbed (Oh Really?)to think how many profound ideas are lost because she cannot work them out.«
—Robert Schumann in the joint diary of Robert and Clara Schumann.

»Composing gives me great pleasure...there is nothing that surpasses the joy of creation, if only because through it one wins hours of self-forgetfulness, when one lives in a world of sound.«
—Clara herself on composing.

»I once believed that I possessed creative talent, but I have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to compose — there has never yet been one able to do it. Should I expect to be the one?«
—Clara Schumann at 20

-wikipedia

revisiting saint-saens

don't you ever wonder what kind of person he is? he must have been capable of such tender feelings. or how could he have written something like the swan? no matter how overplayed this piece is, it never fails to rouse the deepest awe in me.and he must have been a very interesting person, judging from the colourful aquarium. i want to know him in person! (sorry about sounding so cheezy)

there you have it, the difference between the two different kinds of creations, the sciences and the arts. the arts are so exposing. you have so much of you in it. (like wilde discussed). you only need to look at or listen to a piece to know the persona of its creator. it's like all the feelings channeled to you through broadband connection. but science. you can read so many papers by the researcher and not know who he's like. he would be this entity in your mind, without a face, without a character. the only thing you get to know after all is if he is clever. so different.

have to say this before i stop

i watched tokyo trial yesterday with my friends. we also discussed war in general as we watched the movie. history is written by the winners. trials are carried out by the winners. humans being humans, i guess it is hard to judge anything on purely moral grounds. maybe there need not be a moral theory. maybe the world can only be run on economic principles and their extensions - political theories.

anyways, i wiki-ed the trial and found the following:

Radhabinod Pal, the Indian justice at the IMTFE, argued in his dissenting opinion that Japan was innocent. He wrote, "If Japan is judged, the Allies should also be judged equally." However, his opinion was not shared by the majority of the justices at Tokyo.
-wikipedia

i wouldn't say that japan was innocent, but the quote is good food for thought, isn't it.

seems that it will be extremely difficult to maintain a normal lifestyle with the five classes and one thesis i'm taking upon myself, therefore, this blog is tentatively closed down until further notice.

also, it's hard to maintain any level of consciousness with my regular diet, therefore, a 200ml dose of 52µM caffeine has been added to my recommended daily value.

so do you also have the feeling that many people get cynical, jaded, tired, no longer excited about science after they have done a lot of it. some old phd students and postdocs from the many labs i've been in seem to be so. or maybe they are just stressed/exhausted at the point they make comments with such cynicism.

i'm raising this not because i recently discovered this cynicism and lethargy, but because of my discovery of enthusiasm in many scientists around me. things like science is boring but the findings are glorious and i'll be able to take the boredom are easier said than done. and only after you work and fail and struggle do you come to appreciate the enthusiasm that has somehow survived.

i passed out at 8pm after i came back from school. been a long day. when i woke up i could hardly figure out the time-space i was in. with the many projects on hand, i had to get up and resume work. but somehow i wound up at my old blog on livejournal. i was entirely surprised at how lucid and flowy my writing was. it seemed to be a more open-minded, inquisitive and less prejudiced me, with a greater and better and less cynical sense of humour, and many more thoughts. what has university education done to me? lol

but my lonertrip entries. i never failed to be moved when i read them again. and i'm so glad that i wrote all that experience down.

ctrl+tab

after the final and complete move from safari to firefox, i had to get used to many things. (the move took very long cos safari was really one good browser. but it was inevitable because safari started crashing like nobody's business some months ago.) i was googling for the shortcut keys for swapping between tabs in firefox, and encoutered this chap asking the same question in the firefox forum. some other guy replied that ctrl+tab will do and i got the answer i wanted. thing is, the guy with the question replied again to say that he knew about ctrl+tab but he wanted a one key access like F2 or F3. nobody replied further.

i don't quite agree with that guy. i'd rather use the keyboard than the mouse because i think the keyboard gets things done faster. i think the whole point of using keyboard access is to make things faster. and the whole point of most people using modifier keys such as shift ctrl alt fn and command is that we keep using them and their locations are like second nature to us. i might have to look to find the number 5, but i don't in the case of modifier keys. there also enough of them that the combination between these keys and a limited number of other keys could indeed excecute many many commands. therefore, even if it involves 2 keys instead of one, it's still faster.

How do you it's too much

after a full plate of indian food, two sodas and 4 talks later, i realised that the neurodinner is not quite the after work retreat i thought i was going into. maybe four talks in one go are a lot, even if they were straight from one lab. by the end of the whole thing i pretty much forgot everything except one or two problems i had with the data. and five minutes later, i could hardly remember them. there were about 100 questions raised, some were brilliant, but soon i found myself forgetting not only who asked the brilliant questions, but what they were. good for me. when you experience temporary brain death after a session like this, you know it's enough. it feels exactly like the day i took three bio finals.

some take home points though, out of the only residue memory i had of the talks.

1. everything really has to make biological sense. one of the speakers proposed options that were not biologically logical, and kept emphasising that those were merely "possibilities", or "extreme options". she reminded me of this quote i saw earlier today: "It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true". I thought the quote was duh when i read it in the morning, but now i see that there might be a point to it.

2. when you try to show a thing, you might want to use the most appropriate tool. for example, if a categorization of a population of cells is to be done based on genetic profile, an in situ might really be a better option than trying to record from them under different biochemical environments. so a colleague said, sometimes you are so in love with the technique you do that you forget the problems you're addressing. that, clearly should not be the case.

quote of the day:
If the human mind was simple enough to understand, we'd be too simple to understand it.
- Emerson Pugh

pugh assumes that the process of "understanding" definitely implies that the entity to understand is of higher order than the entity to be understood. therefore. isn't it also true that no matter how simple/complex the human brain is, no matter what it is, it can never understand itself?

during the precious hour break this morning i quickly went to sierra and ordered myself a delicious steamy plate of breakfast special. as i started simulating the orchestration of gustatory stimuli by the mixture of hashbrown and ketchup my taste receptors will receive soon, i discovered that the ketchup tub was empty. that is just the greatest dismay that can ever happen to me.

by the time the newbie in sierra replaced the ketchup bag i was halfway through the plate, cos as much as i love ketchup, i dislike cold food. as a result, i had half of my food without ketchup and the other half cold.

or, would you say that, at least i had half of my food hot, and the other half with ketchup?

maybe not that good after all. after drinking too much tea in order to keep myself awake on this early bird day, i could hardly hold my scalple steady for a second. sigh. :(

Conjunto Céspedes is fabulous. and john hall is fabulous. and facebooking at price center at 938am knowing that there's a day ahead is fabulous. ah life is good.

after taking the performance making class some observations have dawned on me (me being a slightly post-layman pre-amateur music lover). the modern music history, especially the emergence of "new music" is largely trying to liberate music from it's present "elitist" form, i.e. granting the access to a body of esoteric means and materials to only a handful of trained professional/affluent amateurs. new concepts have been introduced, new instruments and new ways to play them are added to the repertoire. housewives who make sounds on household itmes and toys are now considered serious musical groups. there are objections to the trend, of course. but the objection comes surprisingly, from laymen (of course, or extremely conservative musicians) more often than from a well-informed and trained musician. the concept of serious music as being elitist by definition is so deeply rooted in a layman that its abolition seems ridiculous. more than once have i heard such statements "this can't be considered music" or "it's like a license to doing anything on earth by calling the music modern" from laymen in reaction to a contempory piece. isn't it a little ironic when the laymen who would potentially benefit from the de-elitization of music object the most readily to this process? same goes to modern art, i have to add. the rate at which an art piece is dismissed without being scrutinized upon is astonishing.

maybe we have been tuned to a certain form of audio/visual stimuli, and it'll take us much longer than a few hundred years to start appreciating something new? maybe that just proves that the artists are always on the frontier of the society. i wonder.

ralph lauren has only 3 stores in california - sf, beverley hills and la jolla. what kind of place am i living in.

the link

ugh! love the internet.

i chanced upon a webpage with an article Shu Ting wrote about Gu Cheng. Both are comtemporary Chinese poets. The former is one of my favorite poets. The latter killed his wife and committed suicide afterwards. On that page, there was a scanned in newspaper cutting with pictures of Gu Cheng and his response in an interview. He said.
"Having your poetry read is like being a fish displayed frozen on a fishmonger's slab. People say it tastes good but no one would like to swim in the sea with it." (how true...)

i haven't read his stuff for ages, but one of his lines would always give me the shiver whenever i read it.

A Generation (Translation by Joseph R. Allen)

Even with these dark eyes, a gift of the dark night
I go to seek the shining light


一代人 (顾城)

黑夜給了我黑色的眼睛
我卻用它尋找光明

in this case i wouldn't translate the verse with "Even". I feel that the original poem has a sense of irony in it, which is lost in the translation(although it rhymes). and i hate the "shining" part. too much unnecessary ornamentations. make the poem lose its transparency. I think the translator would be better off just literally translating it. like,

the dark night gave me these dark eyes,
but with them, i go to seek the light.

mozart's piano quartet in G is quite nice. especially the first movement. i've never been particularly affected by mozart's music, for the same reason why i thought bach was boring. both are geniuses, but there are simply "too many notes" (from movie amadeus). both feel like a kind of show-off, and neither one stirs my emotions very much. such music i would categorise into the group which cannot be appreciated until you take the score and read and enjoy all the craftiness in the structure, and is a delight to perform. but after all is music a craft or an art? the function of art... what's the form for if that art cannot stir?

but the quartet in G is actually quite angry in the first movement, (and therefore sounds like beethoven a little bit). mozart's music is too pretty, except for some of his later works. i somehow feel that this clever man wasn't alive long enough to live life proper. his life ended shortly after the hedonistic youth, which he spent crafting pretty pieces, before he could experience any of the major emotions that he potentially could have exprience had he grown to be 40, 50 or 60. minimal bitterness in his composition. no frustration. not much anguish. nothing too profound. if he'd been through what beethoven did, i'm sure he could have written something brilliant. and it's indeed a pity. nevertheless, he's a genius, and above all, an interesting person, in the world of two categories of people. ah, and all interesting people are hated, all the time.

the first time i listened to steve reich, i thought what a genius. the more i listen, the more i feel that he's just a minimalist poser. like everyone else. Innovation can only be done once?

but dawn upshaw singing yanov-yanovsky's lacrymosa is just right. just right. so hauntingly beautiful. my hair kept standing. i would really like to see the score, cos i'm sure there's special instruction for the way the voice slides. upshaw slides on purpose for most of her performances and gets away with it with her celebrity license (and i do like the way she slides.) this piece, however, is slightly different in that she has virtually no steps between any two notes. all is sliding. (ok, maybe except for 2 places.) it's creepy.

fyi, the classical italian bel canto does not allow sliding of voice from note to note, although the central feature of bel canto singing is legato, meaning joining the notes. in fact, legato singing without much sliding is a very difficult technique. i see this a very unnatural phenomenon as most cultures have sliding in their singing (the so called "vocal"-ness in singing and playing). you see, singing without sliding is like mimicing an instrument because most western instruments cannot slide (except for strings). while the western europeans spend that extra effort to sing like an instrument, other cultures try very hard to play like a singing voice. the sliding lines in many chinese, indian, middle eastern and east european instruments, show such tendencies. i used to be criticised very frequently for sliding into and out of my notes, which i then concluded to root in my exposure to chinese music, in which virtually every instrument, especially voice, slides in and out of almost everything. i like it better that way, it gives the music much more room for subtle manipulation. don't you agree. it's beautiful when you have all that pitches in between.

Something i didn't know before, the part about how camera works. on a related note, i just got a new email address sangyu at flyeye dot ucsd dot edu. feel free to utilize my lab server space.

had to get the tv series crave out of my system way before sch starts or i'd just die. so i watched tokyo love story again. i thought maybe i was sillier 10 years ago, but no, i wasn't. the show is still good. you who have watched it know what i'm talking about.

but for sex and the city. the more i watch the more i don't get its point. it was supposed to be suggesting a new lifestyle for women, but the statement gets lost along the progress of the 6 seasons. in the end everybody was happily married or at least settled down for a better life to start. miranda and samantha might have avoided being a cliche like carrie(with big, ugh) or charlotte(with both men, ugh!), but they too were pressurised by either their biological clock or whatever that drove them into a settle relationship. in the end you get the feeling that such stress from life is inevitable and the only way women can find a better life is to succumb to it and conform. no more cynicism, of course, and sarcasm.

and so much for feminism.

Maths 'Nobel' prize declined by Russian recluse

So Perelman declined the Fields, but why wouldn't Nature just call it the Fields? considering the reader group of this science journal, is nature afraid that the readers won't be able to make out the significance of this piece of news had they put the title "Fields medal declined by Russian recluse"? what's wrong with them.

and leave the russian recluse alone.

This is quite amazing

after finishing running a gel at 930 and dragging my exhausted self home, i savoured an excellent pack of instant noodles. now i'm watching family guy on the computer, while snacking my friday night away on a horrendous looking but delicious white flesh nectarine, juicy californian raisins and a glass of instant Tang mango drink. oh, and wondering why i don't have a boyfriend.

while my professor was analysing beethoven's sonata in A for cello and piano today in class i was reminded of sth else that a musicologist said at the ethnomusicology conference.
- there's a common misconception, that music theory is actually a real theory.

Flipbook

/

send-offs

we are familiar with parting scenes in poems, stories, movies and all that. the depiction of a send-off is of course flooded with the all-absorbing emotions, as if that is the only thing occupying the minds of the persons being sent off and the persons sending off.

in reality, when kk stood in the LA airport beside us, flipping through the stuff in his waist pouch- passport, i20, airtickets and so on , -careful and focused, i realized there was little room for sentimental thoughts. whether it is a feature of modern life, or of real life itself, sending-offs are very much less romanticised than what we know them as. endless things to pack and time constraints on packing bring tremendous stress to the traveller. therefore lack of sleep. therefore more stress due to fear of missing anything important to traveling. travel has become such a hassel, with the heightened security checks in response to more terrorist attacks. those who are sending the traveller off also become nervous, and spend most of the time worrying about reminding the traveller about things to bring, about catching that flight, or just worrying. packing, driving, send-off lunch, send-off dinner, getting to the airport, queuing to check in that luggage, queuing to swap ticket for pass, queuing for security check. by the time everything is done, it's already one hour from boarding. so everyone sits down, heaving a sigh of relief. and then silence and occasional jokes to break the silence. and a brief good-bye. and off he or she goes. at this moment yesterday i was thinking maybe after all, it was better to have that hassle than not to have it. or the combination of heavy hearts and the long hours might have killed us all.

Minty Acquisition

Before we sent our dear friend kk off the gang lunched at farmer's market in LA, and i chanced upon this beautifully designed tin of mints in a french store called Monsieur Marcel. Apparently it is part of a limited edition artist's series. I loved how green and transparent it looked, and the fairy tale like abstraction. The mints are fine. When am i going to stop buying candies for the tins?

Opportunity

Sad but true...

Ota Bengo

New York Times featured a photo story of Ota Bengo, the Congolese pygmy that was once exhibited with an orangutan at the Bronx Zoo. It is shocking how blatant the scientific racists were merely 100 years ago. More information on him at wikipedia.

There he stood in the parlour of the poky little house where she had taken him, waiting for her, while she went upstairs a moment to see a woman. He heard her quick step above; heard her voice cheerful, then low; looked at the mats, tea-caddies, glass shades;waited quite impatiently; looked forward eagerly to the walk home; determined to carry her bag; then heard her come out; shut a door; say they must keep the windows open and the doors shut, ask at the house for anything they wanted (she must be talking to a child) when, suddenly, in she came, stood for a moment silent (as if she had been pretending up there, and for a moment let herself be now), stood quite motionless for a moment against a picture of Queen Victoria wearing the blue ribbon of the Garter; when all at once she realised that it was this: it was this: -- she was the most beautiful person he had ever seen.

With stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild violets -- what nonsense what he thinking: She was fifty at least; she had eight children. Stepping through fields of flowers and taking to her breast buds that had broken and lambs that had fallen; with the stars in her eyes and the wind in her hair -- He took her bag.

"Good-bye, Elsie," she said, and they walked up the street, she holding her parasol erect and walking as if she expected to meet some one around the corner, while for the first time in his life Charles Tansley felt an extraordinary pride; a man digging in a drain stopped digging and looked at her, let his arm fall down and looked at her; for the first time in his life Charles Tansley felt an extraordinary pride; felt the wind and the cyclamen and the violets for he was walking with a beautiful woman. He had hold of her bag.

-- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

ok this is much easier than putting the clip on template and having to change template all the time. i would change the music when this post reaches the bottom of the page :)
forgive me for doign such illegal things.

vinci

i suck at writing book reveiws. ick

so i have just finished my long overdue reading assignment Da Vinci Code. I think dan brown is a reasonably interesting fellow, but i strongly feel that his command of the english language is rudimentary, his characters shallow and unattractive. after a while, his narration just started to bore me. there is absolutely no element of humour in the writing. nothing in it brought me even close to a faint smile. maybe it's the cliche of commercialization again, but the book feels like a mass-produced thing to me. like, telling the story for the sake of it, much like a certain dear friend's later oral creations such as the watermelon story . the plot is cool. and i enjoy reading about all the stuff from the book. but the reading itself, has no special pleasure in it. the movie certainly did a much better job in telling this story.

i have never thought of the word "alphabet" as "alpha"-"beta" before. which simply means A, B. not until i saw the hebrew word for it "alefbeit" "alef"-"beit". it's like a revelation. more than the time i saw dis and ease in disease many years ago.

Wednesday Night Movie

was recommended the thomas crown affair to watch for a wednesday night's entertainment. it was a kind offer since i continually drool over pierce brosnan openly. :p but i forgot that he only acts in cliche chauvinist movies such as bond and the likes. and the movie was getting a little unsettling.

slick and smooth. those are the exact words my friend used referring to the movie. no, one more thing. rich and slick and smooth. "fugitives with means, it makes all the difference." he obviously has the means to make many things happen. amusing himself, or the woman he likes, by stealing paintings, causing panic in the museum, playing hide-and-seek with the cops who have better things to do, or hiring eastern european despos and send them into the police station. after all, why are the rich people so bored?

the most irritating thing, is that the director actually gave the woman some brains, no matter how artificial they look on her. but, nay, no matter how clever the woman gets, the man has to be cleverer, one jump ahead of her in everything she does. and this time he even has some heart. with the expected turn of events with forger's daughter to whom Crown was the guardian, the movie just went straight down into the insipid pitch of darkness.

it's after all a male fantasy. power, status, intelligence, money. and the ability to keep everything in control, including when a woman should smile, when she should cry.

Where in the list is your motherland??

In the List of countries by income equality, China ranks 88th according to a 2001 survey, whereas Japan ranks 2nd according to a 93 survey. The States ranks 92th, among the developing countries.

try your hands on this...click on picture to enlarge

Look at how other people shoot.

the new israeli weapon, CornerShot that enables you to shoot around the corner.

Evolution

the key to pretty nail polish finish

is to put a lot layers of clear topcoats.

it's the independence day in argentina today. just a thought. if argentina had carried through and won the final of fifa world cup, this day would be so much more joyous.

and another piece of news that i stumbled upon on wikinews
Jarosław Kaczyński, the twin brother of President Lech Kaczyński, is nominated to be the next Prime Minister of Poland.
think about it, a pair of twins leading a country. isn't it comical.

bill maher

it's flight tale time again.

so i was waiting for my flight back to shanghai at LAX... a young caucasian boy struck a conversation with me. he looked about 18, was of very fair complexion and had ultrablue eyes. he asked me why my power cord was wound up in a horrible mess and i replied that i had finals the whole of the that week and didn't have time to unwind my cord. as i was was undoing the knot, he asked me where i went to school. "i just came out of high school", he said. and he took out a yearbook.

-- i was trained to be a marine. a marine. no, not a soldier, a marine. soldiers are from the army. i am a marine. this is my school. this is the book that we got from our school when we left. (pointing to a photo between the pages,) this is my wife. see, this is the rifle we had. you have to clean it and assemble in 5 mins. that's PT. they keep making us do it. everyday. everyday. it's tough. pull-ups. push-ups. this is tear-gas training. you'd think that with the gas mask you'd be fine. oh no. they make you go into the room full of tear gas with the mask on, and then they make you take it off and spell your name aloud. you could vomit from that. so strong. this is obstacle course. see this pond? there are alligators in there. really. before we went in, they had to go poke with a stick to scare them away. and we went in. this is the medal you get for shooting 190-200, this one for 200-225. but if you are like me, and shoot between 225-250, you get this. the highest score possible is 250. oh yah, there are women too. but we are not allowed to see females. when the females came over to our platoon for something the commander will make us move the other way. we are not allowed to see females. yup here's the family day. that one day we get to see our family. look, this is our graduation. yah we are looking serious and all that. yeah. cos it's our graduation. once you get out of this place, you're a marine. and you never ever want to come back here again. we all live together, my company. 90 men. living together. look these are the photos of all the men. 1, 2, 3, .... we all live in one room. we are like brothers. we are the best. if there's a base, we take over the whole damn city. oh yeah, i'm going to iraq in a month's time. and yeah, USMC.. is the united states marine corp. --

the whole time that kid was talking to me, the father looked away. couldn't quite describe his expression as indifference. maybe impatience. i don't know. the mother kept smiling at me apologetically.

Tarot

	how you feel about yourself now (The High Priestess) You are very aware of the feminine power within, intuitive and conscious at a spiritual level, looking for guidance and answers, a secret to be revealed. You desire a wise guide to help address your questions, and your intuition is just that. If you are male the appearance of The High Priestess can represent a woman who you care for very much and who truly inspires you.
	what you most want at this moment (The Lovers) The cards suggest yofish, that what you most want at this time is to know what choice to make - carry on as you are or take a risk? The risk offers excitement and change and staying as you are .... Well you know what that has to offer. Dare to love, dare to live?
	your fears (The Tower) You are afraid your world is falling apart, you're experiencing sudden changes and disruption and you don’t quite know what to do. Perhaps subconsciously you’ve wanted a solution to an issue but didn’t quite expect things to have turned out as they have. Use this change as an opportunity for a new beginning. If you have been planning to move home you will be experiencing setbacks.
	what is going for you (Justice) There is a karmic power to the Justice card, reward for the good deeds you have done in the past. This is a period of good luck even if you don’t know why you are being so favoured. You will approach any issues concerning relationships or business affairs with calm, balanced logic and any claim will go in your favour.
	what is going against you (The Devil) It's like you’re in a drug-induced haze - it feels great and always leaves you wanting more. This is addiction pure and simple, whether it's an obsessive sexual relationship, money deals that are too good to be true, materialism at any cost or recreational drugs. Take care - it won’t lead to a happy ending.
	outcome　 (The Hierophant) Help is at hand. If you want wise counsel and moral guidance put your trust in someone you have a lot of respect for. Don’t allow others to influence you too much with what they want you to conform to, be true to yourself. When considering your options go with tried and tested traditional values, rather than the unconventional novel approach. For example marriage is more likely to be your desire than a living together situation.

spore

so i was reading Steven Johnson's blog who recently wrote a book called everything bad is good for you, or something. ok fine. he was talking about gaming on jon stewart's daily show. so he mentioned the new game Spore, whose demo video me and another supposed-to-be-mugging soul wasted about half an hour watching. it's the coolest thing you can find on earth. take a look.

thus begins life

started sunday jun 4.
miscellaneous flower seeds. half sewn outside our apartment around the patio. half being observed in my transparent cubic jelly bean box that says "happiest homecoming on earth - 50th anniversary, disney", on a layer of wet cotton, covered with another.

today, june 7.
In the box
most of the bigger seeds are soaked. seedcoat start to split open. embryos visible. radicals out of several.

i feel like an elementary sch kid again :)

thinking aloud.

ever wonder what education does to you? for me, 16 years of education, i ended up with a brain that cannot think, a total lack of humor and creativity and a spirit that is barely alive and does not want to know anything more

rethinking my life.

the rethinking came from a conversation i had with a postdoc today. I was telling him (ok i'll just abbreviate him BC) that i don't know what project i would be given for my honours thesis.
ME: i want a bite size project!
BC: what do you want to know?
ME: what do you mean what i want to know. i want a project.
BC: well if you don't want to know anything then you should go work in a bank. no point doing science. you only do science if you want to know something.
ME: erm. but i'm just a little person. how am i supposed to know what i want to know. and whether it'll work out in ONE year. i'd leave it to my PhD career to train up my "question asking".
BC: nah.. you'll be saying the same thing in your PhD. and your postdoc.
ME: ...
BC: there's no "little" or "big" person in doing science. only in technical competence. since you don't want to become a technician, start asking the questions now.
ME: ...
BC: so what do you want to know? come on. science is only about asking the questions.
ME: er well. i am interested in general how sensory perception works. in this lab obviuosly all i can work on is taste.
BC: ok. so what do you want to know about taste?
ME: erm. how it works? (at this moment, obviously i have honestly no idea what i want to know about taste.) receptor?
BC: no. no way you can find another receptor in a year.
ME: ok.
BC: ok. go home and come up with 10 questions about sensory perception. by next monday.
ME: ...er.. o-kay.
BC: wait, make it 5 questions about sensory perception. the other 5 questions that you want to ask that have already been answered in visual perception but not in taste.
ME: ...
BC: or you can become a technician. you know. maybe with a "professor" tagged in front of your name.
ME:...ok...
BC: Think about it. (whch another postdoc MG also told me to do, about why small tendom repeats in a stretch of nucleic acids like ACACACACACACAC is hard to transcribe/replicate accurately. ) and let me see the queations on monday.
so yeah. i ended up with this homework. sometimes i wonder if i really don't have the time to think, or just lazy. but the result is the same. no more contemplation, no more thinking. no more wondering. merely coping with school work. what is the point? maybe i really should take next year off work and devote it to thinking.

MG: how much do you sleep everyday?
ME: 5 or 10 hours. depending if it's MWF or TTh.
MG: you sleep too much.

so why does cortex have maps anyways?

My Birth Report (Sample chapter duh)

Chapter 3. Your Inner Self and True Nature

Because you are supportive and nurturing, and also practical and well-grounded (as described below), you are a great source of solace and emotional support for other people. You are actually more stable and solid than your rather soft appearance would indicate.

You are a steadfast and patient soul, capable of tremendous devotion, dedication, endurance and constancy. The ability to follow through and stick with things is one of your greatest assets. Once your course is set, you pursue it tenaciously until it is completed, stubbornly resisting any attempts to sway you from your purpose.

You have a very practical nature and want to see concrete, tangible results for your efforts, and you are not one for spinning wild dreams that are unlikely to come into fruition. Most of your "wild dreams" have to do with material achievements, well-being and security, for you have a great love of the physical world and you want to experience and enjoy it to the full. Though you will work long and persistently, you also have a strong sensual and comfort-loving side, and you want to enjoy what you have worked for. In fact, you can be enormously lazy at times and have a tendency to overindulge in good food and other earthly pleasures. You also love the beauty of the natural world and probably prefer a serene country setting rather than an urban life style.

At heart your needs are simple and you are easy to please. You have a strong desire for security, stability and peace, and will rarely make changes unless you are forced to do so. You are not very demanding emotionally, though you do crave lots of physical closeness and affection. Because of your faithfulness, emotional steadiness and gentle strength, others often depend upon you for support. Though you hate upheaval and sudden changes, you usually maintain your poise and equanimity. You also have an innate sense of harmonizing with nature, allowing things to grow and unfold in their own time, and the patience to nurture something into being--be it a garden, a child, or some creative project. You make an excellent mother or father, especially if you follow your instincts more often than "the experts".

You have three major faults: one is your bullheaded obstinacy. The second is your unwillingness to deviate from your safe, predictable routine. And the third is your tendency to always insist upon realism and undervalue the imaginative, speculative, and fanciful--in other words, you lack the ability to play with ideas and possibilities, to open your mind to the new.

Leading groups and classes, and being involved in community efforts, social activities, events or movements are areas where you really shine and express your creativity. An awareness of politics or the larger social impact of individual actions is natural to you.

You are assertive, energetic, active, courageous and vital. You have a very strong physical drive which expresses itself as sexuality and passion, a desire to compete with others, and a tendency to fight. You have a victorious spirit and the will to win.

what?

i have callouses on my fingers, from pipetting?!

bday

A trillion thanks to buddies who came today. and for the wonderful wonderful surprises!!!! the cd's really nice!!! thx jess..and man that bike's cool.. with that pantie ribbon lol... yay this is the best birthday! :) fantastica.. yoohoo!

share your calendar

being a slow tech user as i am, moved myself onto 30boxes only today, (omg i haven't been blogging for so long almost forgot how to put links.) share your calendar with me, and feed it into your google home. :) and have you been on the quest?

I don't mean to rant

i don't mean to rant really. haha. there's a group on the facebook called "i'm taking too many units and now i'm f***ed." i would've joint the group if not for the very obscene profile picture. lol.
life goes on with me packing myself to max. even i don't know why i'm donig that.. well. at the same time the temptation of laziness and decent social interaction is like flies buzzing around my head. most of the time deprivation of sleep catches up as fast as school starts. sometimes i confidently think of dropping a particular class and smile at that very glorious decision, in a semi-conscious state when i'm about to pass out or before i fully awaken. only to realize that it is not as realistic as it appeared after i regain my consciousness, together with the realization of the coming of another disastrously prepared midterm to be taken one hour later.
i'll work.lol. i'll work.

on a lighter note, another reason why i'm feeling so slack might be that spring is finally here. well, it's been here for about a month or so, but lately the weather has gotten so warm that people've started wearing dresses and skirts. i love it when girls come out in skirts. :) with the sun and all, it just feels so refreshing. lovely sun...

and our spring has been fun, hiking and all into the warm sun in the montains and deserts near san diego. can't wait for summer to come and rid the place of that ramaining chill!

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.
- Kurt Vonnegut

I'm so out of the blogging thing.

There it goes.

friendship day was fun. so got a rose from the guys justs like last year. and the rose was pretty.. thx :)

flunked cell bio. ate nothing. swam 750 meters today. ah life sucks.

for the first time, i envy those kids born in a country other than their parents'. they are so lifted from their cultural space. they don't have a history because they are not obliged to know any. they thus shed all burdens, which come penetrating into me from my place, my people, my history. i used to think of myself as being fortunate for the exact same reason, but now i don't any more. i envy them instead.

then this thing about cultural and socio-historical niche. i feel that this is what holds me back. nationalism and ethnicity. both hold me back from being completely freed into general objectivity. i cannot shake off prejudices and preoccupations because i was born and have been living with them. continue to fall into the trap of relativism. continue to discriminate. continue to be a hypocrite.

but i try very hard... :(

check server

My New Adium

the sunset is so nice

that i feel compelled to post this picture once again. oh geisel.

i was going to convert my air ticket from usd to sgd... and was too lazy to open calculator in my comp... so i was sorta thinking, google should be able to do it.. so i typed 1193*1.7 into the google search box on my safari. and the answer just loaded... cool

from the beautifully informative wikipedia:

The name Montparnasse stems from the nickname "Mount Parnassus" (In Greek mythology, home to the nine Greek goddesses — the Muses — of the arts and sciences) given to the hilly neighborhood in the 17th century by students who came there to recite poetry

Like its counterpart, Montmartre, the neighborhood of Montparnasse became famous at the beginning of the 20th century, referred to as the Années Folles (the Crazy Years), when it was the heart of intellectual and artistic life in Paris. Between 1921 and 1924, the number of Americans in Paris swelled from 6,000 to 30,000. In the years between 1910 and 1940, Paris' artistic circles gradually moved from Montmartre to Montparnasse.

Virtually penniless painters, sculptors, writers, poets and composers came from around the world to thrive in the creative atmosphere and for the cheap rent at artist communes such as La Ruche. Living without running water, in damp, unheated "studios" often as not overrun by rats, many sold their works for a few francs just to buy food. Jean Cocteau once said that poverty was a luxury in Montparnasse. First promoted by art dealers such as Henry Kahnweiler, today works by those artists sell in the millions of dollars. (how romantic! i wish i lived there..)

They came to Montparnasse from all over the globe, from across Europe, including Russia and Ukraine, from the United States, Canada, Mexico, and from as far away as Japan. Manuel Ortiz de Zárate, Camilo Mori and others made their way from Chile where the profound innovations in art spawned the formation of the Grupo Montparnasse in Santiago. A few of the other artists who gathered in Montparnasse were Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, Ossip Zadkine, Moise Kisling, Marc Chagall, Nina Hamnett, Fernand Leger, Jacques Lipchitz, Max Jacob, Blaise Cendrars, Chaim Soutine, Michel Kikoine, Pinchus Kremegne, Amedeo Modigliani, Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, Marcel Duchamp, Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti, Constantin Brancusi, Paul Fort, Juan Gris, Diego Rivera, Marevna, Tsuguharu Foujita, Marie Vassilieff, Léon-Paul Fargue, Alberto Giacometti, Andre Breton, Pascin, Salvador Dalí, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Joan Miró and, in his declining years, Edgar Degas.


Montparnasse friends. In the 1915 photograph in front of La Rotonde seen here, is (left to right): Manuel Ortiz de Zárate, Henri-Pierre Roché (in uniform), Marie Vassilieff, Max Jacob and Pablo Picasso


Montparnasse was a community where creativity was embraced with all its oddities, each new arrival welcomed unreservedly by its existing members. When Tsuguharu Foujita arrived from Japan in 1913 not knowing a soul, he met Soutine, Modigliani, Pascin and Leger virtually the same night and within a week became friends with Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. In 1914, when the English painter Nina Hamnett arrived in Montparnasse, on her first evening the smiling man at the next table at La Rotonde graciously introduced himself as "Modigliani, painter and jew". They became good friends, Hamnett later recounting how she once borrowed a jersey and corduroy trousers from Modigliani, then went to La Rotonde and danced in the street all night.

more things to add on to my 1/23 post
come to think of it, i think the translation is crappy. the interpreter might have read too much into the poem, and said too much out loud. thus losing the poem itself. i shall get a dictionary and translate it myself. esp the last verse.

but oh, the more i listen to it the more i love it!

*** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** ***
i'm editting this post so that i can add in stuff.

the following poem is what i'm singing now. a poulenc setting on apollinaire. the poem talks about a poet, from Leipzig... curiously leipzig was described as "a small paris that educates its people".
why is the poet from Leipzig exploring paris?
of course there's the very familiar concept of the "gaze" which definitely reminds one of "flâneur" and every 20th century french artist. the unpredictableness. the eyes.
but why? where is there anything to do with bearing fruits? planting oneself?

and who is the bearded angel?

Montparnasse
--Wilhelm de Kostrowitsky

Ô porte de l'hôtel avec deux plantes vertes
Vertes qui jamais
Ne porteront de fleurs
Où sont mes fruits? Où me planté-je?
Ô porte de l'hôtel un ange est devant toi
Distribuant des prospectus
On n'a jamais si bien défendu la vertu
Donnez-moi pour toujours une chambre à la semaine
Ange barbu vous êtes en reálité
Un poète lyrique d'Allemagne
Qui voulez connaître Paris
Vous connaisez de son pavé
Ces raies sur lesquelles il ne faut pas que l'on marche
Et vous rêvez
D'aller passer votre Dimanche à Garches

Il fait un peu lourd et vos cheveux sont longs
Ô bon petit poète un peu bête et trop blond
Vos yeux ressemblent tant à ces deux grands ballons
Qui s'en vont dans l'air pur
À l'aventure (goodness! that glissando poulenc wrote! it's enchanting! )

Montparnasse
--Apollinaire

Hotel door, amidst verdure
Verdure never to produce
Vast, luscious bouquets
It must vex me - shall one bear fruit? can one plant oneself?
Hotel door, a lone angel stands adjacent
And issues prospectuses
Virtue's never been so protected
Allocate me a small weekly room for ever
Unusual bearded angel, in truth
An eloquent Leipzig poet
Sent on a momentous quest to explore Paris
Be sure not to step upon lines on the pavements
And dream of
An exquisite Sunday rendezvous at Garches

It turns excessively humid, long-locked
Juvenile poet, jejune and so pale
An unusual gaze resembles a pair of vast, oversize bubbles
Set to venture upon pure, tranquil air
With evasive, quiet unpredictableness

i know what's wrong with aroian. he looks like mr bean

From wikipedia:

His inclination towards relations with younger men was relatively well-known, the first such relationship having probably been with Robert Ross, who proved his most faithful friend and would be his literary executor. Ross, a boy of seventeen when Wilde met him, was already aware of Wilde's poems and indeed had been beaten for reading them. By Richard Ellman's account, Ross, "...so young and yet so knowing, was determined to seduce [Wilde]."

the last sentence... i don't know why. there seems to be such beauty in what's described... gave me the shivers when i read it.

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900). Poems. 1881.

32. Chanson


A RING of gold and a milk-white dove
Are goodly gifts for thee,
And a hempen rope for your own love
To hang upon a tree.

For you a House of Ivory 5
(Roses are white in the rose-bower)!
A narrow bed for me to lie
(White, O white, is the hemlock flower)!

Myrtle and jessamine for you
(O the red rose is fair to see)! 10
For me the cypress and the rue
(Fairest of all is rose-mary)!

For you three lovers of your hand
(Green grass where a man lies dead)!
For me three paces on the sand 15
(Plant lilies at my head)!

from wikipedia: After graduating from Magdalen, Wilde returned to Dublin, where he met and fell in love with Florence Balcome. She in turn became engaged to Bram Stoker. On hearing of her engagement, Wilde wrote to her stating his intention to leave Ireland permanently.

this poem must have been written then. i was guessing at the masterclass today that this poem should not be read as morbid, because wilde is such a person who would beautify and romantisize death. looks like it's only an ordinary love poem and indeed should be morbid. but undeniably, i think wilde is romantisizing the whole out of love business, and making it sound more morbid than it actually is. in fact, i read a seduction in the lines. the seduction of death, and a bewilderness, rather than morbidity. well. depends on how you look at it.

sigh
for once i got up for my biochem lab lecture which is frickin at 8am i couldn't find anybody in the classroom... went to the lab no one's there either... i checked my timetable again, no mistake in room number or anything. where would the lecturer hide the class?
so i called for help and was told that there was no lecture on mondays even though it was printed on my timetable cos the excessively naggy lecturer said that she didn't need it--in the first class. the first class was the only class i went for... even then i didn't hear it being said. (and considering how naggy she is she might have said it 3 times.)(well i might as well not go for classes since i don't hear anything.) moral of the story, when i have a naggy lecturer, i shut down. so. must be careful next time when i sign up for classes.

winter job and internship fair on library walk
microsoft has the biggest banner
ibm
lawrence livermore nat lab only has a piece of paper with name printed
there was also hcbc, hitachi, blah blah
no google, no apple

a guy standing in front of the recruitment booth of "the great seal of the state of california" (what's that?) and made an inquiry, the recruitor replied "teaching chinese? no.. we don't have that...em, what other languages do you speak?" that guy shrugged and answered "er.., taiwanese?"
er, excuse me, that's not a language.

which reminds me of another joke. when i was applying for social security number, i habitually signed the paper with my chinese signature. that officer looked at me and said, no you have to sign in american letters.

I found a copy of Yishu - Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art in the library, published by Art & Collecution Group Ltd in Taiwan. i have seen some of the works in the exhibition of chinese contemporary art in the UCSD art gallery last year. i found them impressive then, and am exhilarated to see them again now.

we can look at some of the works in this and my subsequent entries. today i will look at xu bing's works.

xu bing was born and educated in china, has been through cultural revolution, and received an MFA from the central academy of the arts. after many works had been censored by the central government, he moved to new york, and continued to live and work there till today. he appears to be one of the group of chinese artists/musicians in whom i've newly developed a strong interest, i.e., whose who were trained and were active in the 80's immediately after the end of cultural revolution. (another example will be tan dun.) the clash of completely contradicting values at the interface between eras gave them distinctive world views and philosophy of composition.

the interview in Yishu mentioned a number of his works. one of them is a book from the sky, which was created while the artist was still in china.

(i forgot to bring a camera with me. well i have to type the thing down. but it's worth reading.)

Q: starting from your earliest works, such as the creration of a nonsensical language in a book from the sky, the nonsensical theme has been prevalent in your work. how did you first conceive of this theme, and why were you interested in this notion of "meaninglessness"?

A: Acutally, these ideas arose from my personal experiences in china. for one, i felt a sense of boredom and cultural ennui, a feeling that culture was meaningless. this was at a time when mainland china was going through a period of "culture fever". that was during the eighties, and the cultural revolution had just ended. government policies were becoming more relaxed, and many new forms of culture were flourishing on the mainland. we were simultaneously flooded with new books and ideologies, from traidtional chinese thought to contemporary western culture. this period produced a profound effect on the thining of chinese youth. i was a graduate student who participated in the many cultural debates and popular movements during those days . after attending so many events, i became tired of the process and felt quite disillusioned by culture. during the cultural revolution there was a starvation of knowledge and culture; once the revolution ended, ther was an overabundance of it. somebody who overeats right after severe hunger will end up feeling very sick. there was a huge gap betweeen our expectations for culture and what was received in the end. this resulted in a feeling of emptiness and powerlessness in the face of culture.

Q: when you were a student, what were your thoughts and feelings about the foreign ideologies coming into china?

A: it was a very ambiguous experience because many of the new ideologies were presented in fragments, in little bits and pieces. the ideologies being discussed wer very incomplete. there was no way to ground the ideas, nor was there a clear direction for the future. all we knew at the time was that we were coming out of our old ways of thinking and our old ways of art making. but we had no idea of how to proceed or where the new art would take us. it was a period of chaos and confusion. speaking from my personal experience, it was very easy to feel bewildered and lost.

(comment: i believe, his personal experience is easily everyone else's.)


according to xu bing, the work was censored because the government was over-interpreting it's political message while the work itself had little such intention.


Q: Why did the chinese government censor your works at that time?

A: at the time, the chinese government was still strict in its policies, especially after the events of TAM square. before TAM, the poliecies were more relaxed and therefore many young intellectuals and artists came onto the scene a book from teh sky also appeared at this tiem. yet shortly after, the TAM protests bro out and the poitical crackdown caused an extreme reversal of teh stae's relaxed policies. contemporary artists came under political critique. while a lot of contemporary art appears on teh surface to be whimsical adn transparent, a book from the sky was different because people could not figure out what it was saying, yet it was meticulous, rigorous, and monumental in effect. officials thus assumed that it embodied the most sinister elements of contemporary art and singled it out for public critique. the authorities branded it as one work that embodied all ten wrongdoings of new wave art. (comment: i'm confused here. was there a new wave movement in chinese contemporary art? i've only heard of the new wave mvm in french cinema la Nouvelle Vague.)

Q: instead of exposing the formal structures of language through nonsensical characters, square word calligraphy

creates work with meaning and functional use. can you comment on this departure from your earlier works?
(comment: to clarify, square word calligraphy is a way of writing english words in chinese strokes assembled in a way similar to the square characters in chinese writing. but the words together, reads like an english sentence.)

A: actually, this work involves my artistic experimentation in the contemporary art scenen of the west. i became troubled by the hierarchical relationship between contemporary art and its public audience. when people enter an art museum it is as if they have entered a place of worship. too many audiences feel bewildered by the art they see and react with a feeling of guilt, as if their confusion reflected their own lack of education in art of culture. in fact, many works of contemporary art art lacking in thought and creativity, although they present a shocking appearance to teh audience. i hope that my works are clear and easily accessible to audiences. once they are engaged in it, i hope that the audience can discover the deeper meanings in teh work and become inspired in their own ways of thinking.

Q: How do you explain the hierarchical relationship that has been established between contemporary art and its public audience?

A: i think this relationship is a basic aspect of contemporary art. one can trace it to duchamp, who levelled the relationship between art and life. this was a powerful revolution, however, in the process of levelling the relationship of art and life, he left the artist with a certain privileged status. because i am an "artist", anything i do is automatically given value and maning. this notion actually caused the decline of creative though within contemporary art. since i have this status as "artist", anything i do is vlid. i'm making art if i sweep the floor as a performance artist, and this may be considered different from a regular sanitation worker who sweeps the floor. in reaity, there isn't a whole lot of difference.

(comment: i think his view on the hierarchy is quite objective. i have heard enough of sweeping statements about contemporary art. mainly one side saying that modern art is all crap and the other saying that the first side is illiterate in art appreciation. in fact, there are definitely artists who do not live up to the creative and serious thinking of avant garde, but there are still a great many of them who take the business of creativity seriously, whose works involve a great deal of hard work.)

because of my mother's recommendation, i watched this film. incredible performance and production: Wit by emma thompson

as professor vivian bearing was diagnosed with and hospitalised for stage 4 ovary cancer, she was caught in the overwhelming battery of tests and treatments, taking tremendous pressure both psychologically and physically. as she makes her way through the daily pain and humiliation, she started to reflect on her fascination with english words, her life as an "uncompromising scholar", her cool and strict teaching, and the meaning of life and death in a concrete way.

the subtlty of the emotions depicted in the film was extraordinary. emma thompson, as usual, was more than apt to act as an intellectual with incredible depth of thinking. moreover, her gradual revealing of the vulnerability of professor bearing and change of her mindset, or even world view from the earlier part of the film to approaching the end was just done to perfection.

wonder why this film was only screen on TV and why it didn't win many awards. anyway, very thought-provoking. worth watching.


"The sonnet begins with a valiant struggle with death, calling on all forces of intellect and drama to vanquish the enemy. But it is ultimately about overcoming the seemingly insuperable barriers separating life, death, and eternal life.

In the edition you chose, this profoundly simple meaning is sacrificed to hysterical punctuation:
And Death-capital D-shall be no more—semicolon!
Death—capital D—comma—thou shalt die— exclamation point!

If you go for this sort of thing I suggest you take up Shakespeare.

Gardner’s edition of the Holy Sonnets returns to the Westmoreland manuscript source of 1610, not for sentimental reasons, I assure you, but because Helen Gardner is a scholar. It reads:
And death shall be no more, comma,
Death thou shalt die.

Nothing but a breath, a comma, separates life from everlasting life. It is simple really. With the original punctuation restored, death is no longer something to act out on a stage, with exclamation points. It’s a comma, a pause.

This way, the uncompromising way, one learns something about this poem, wouldn’t you say? Life, death. Soul, God. Past, present. Not insuperable barricades, not semicolons, just a comma."-professor e.m. ashford

religious content aside, this is still true. nothing but a breath, a comma, separates life from, well, i would say, death. lol. but yah, this paragraph here was excellently analysed.

A Must See Photog Site

a feast of images

i'd always thought the beauty of ucsd campus should lie in its colours, maybe because of the sunny weather, if not in the buildings, at least in the trees and the flowers and the sky. maybe not. from this guy's photos, the beauty of the campus seems to lie in its geometrical appearence, in its angular presence, of not only the buildings, but also the trees and everything else.

and ah, perspective. perspective. always different perspective.

Sweet and calm moonlit regents parking lots


and then there was an alien invasion!

i've never particularly liked the clarinet until i heard messiaen's quartet for the end of time today. that clarinet solo in the third movement Abime Des Oiseaux is just stunning- i have never imagined so many different effects and texture coming from that instrument..resembling birdsongs. so rich in expression, so much life. actually constructs a sense time and space...cool. so THAT is what a clarinet can do!

i had a bad audition today. never imagined myself in such a situation before. i was actually, a real object worth detesting, a vocalist out of tempo... i mean, i'm really not that strong in rhythm, but to be embarrassed in front of a ton of instrumentalists is too much. i felt that everyone looked at me as i was some pathetic person who needed help, or worse, was beyond help. janos didn't comment much, he didn't comment on anyone's playing except a violinist, about whom he said good. of course, that guy played tchaikovsky's concerto no. 1 and made it through. well. here i am, out of the comfort zone of voice lessons (really, with a bunch of forgiving and equally out of tempo friends, and an accompanist patiently following me through thick and thin, fast and slow) into the harsh reality of mus 130. at least at the end of the audition, i have already got a partner and a piece... lakme that is. flower duet. i've wanted to do this for a long time.

ok. here's the thing, Mo. and mo, you still do talk to strangers don't you?
From Mo the Psycho Princess

Rules of the game:1. Post 5 weird/random stuff about yourself.2. At the end, list the names of 5 people whom you want next to do this, and leave a comment "YOU ARE TAGGED!" in their blog and tell them to read your blog for rules.

1. I have weird thoughts often, when i am about to fall asleep. such as, a huge blade cutting across me and then me being lifted up. or me being inserted into a metal tube that has a blade edge and is smaller than my cross section. it's not that i feel or see it. but i think about it and wonder what it would've been.

2. sometimes when it gets to the sad part in movie i can't help smiling. well. don't think that's unique though.

3. i don't like neat and tidy rooms.

4. i am plowing very slowly through da vinci code. and am still half way through...

5. i'm really not weird..

i'm tagging: zhu, ya, mg, carine, an.. :)

School is starting in two days. i'm again hugely successful at procrastinating.
1. montparnasse, not learnt (let's wish fiona doesn't kill me)
2. ivf still not working
3. da vinci code, still not finished
4. lab website, still kind of empty
5. feynman's EASY pieces, still half done
6. essays for faces, due tue. still not started.

wonder how come i am so calm sitting here typing these things down.
and i'm sleepy. off i go.

it's nearly one year since i moved my blog here.. ooh. new backdrop for a change :)
i took the picture of this birdy near international house on campus. the sky is of an impeccable colour... and the bird has very nice posture :) good for me. hee.

The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.
- Stephen Jay Gould

well said, indeed. what i have always meant to say put in words nicely.

Wah lao. msn actually designed its photo album function in msn space only for IE6, the lousiest browser on earth. man what would pc users feel if ipod were exclusive for mac users...

failed to get up. must do ivf tmr!

such is the view outside my lab on a foggy winter night. i somehow feel that there's some kind of presence on the chair.


oh yah, and i just spent the last couple of hours redoing the lab website... here it is. my first website ever. well..at least all the hyperlinks worked

today i tried in vitro fertilization for my fish for the 3rd time. still didn't work. how hard is it to fertilize a bunch of eggs with the sperms right?

but i saw the most amazing thing under the microscope at 80x mag. the sperms are inactivated at high salt concentration (hank's balanced salt solution with 4.2 mM sodium bicarbonate) so they just looked like tiny dots not moving. once i added egg water into the solution, they instantly got activated and started swimming. cutest thing in the world! i could hardly see their tails, but i would think they have them...

which means the sperms i collected were fine. that means the eggs were bad. fine. i'll get up early tomorrow, i mean today, morning to do the dissection at the egg's prime time. well... sighz..why is there such a thing as biorhythm!!

and i don't suppose any of you guys sequence fosmids of 40 kb size right? just in case you do.. how do you yield results with fosmid sequencing? it just doesnt' work. i've tried different primers. maybe i need to digest it. anybody?

since i quoted that paragraph in the last thread, here's another great exerpt from Colm Toibin's The Master:

Gradually, then, over the days, Minny Temple made a choice. She chose subtly and carefully so that no one saw at first that she had done so, but what was no apparent to Gray or Holmes or her sisters became clear to Henry because she wished it to be clear to him. She chose Henry as her friend and confidant, the one she trusted most, could speak to most easily. And she may have chosen Holmes for something, too, because she never ignored him, or shone her light on the others more than on him. But she chose Gray as the one on whom she could have most effect, whom most needed her. She paid no attention to his military talk and his gruff, practical comments and his clipped witticisms. She wished to change him, and Henry watched her gently cajoling him, without allowing herself to become offensive.

how apt.

Solitude

i thought i like solitude more deep inside.. seems that i'm not enjoying it very much these days that i'm alone at home... been only half a week since i was left alone in the apartment and i'm just really bored. solitude.. not my cup of tea.

but travelling alone is still a romantic idea. on my way back from san francisco on the amtrak train (again), i wrote:

it's only on the train i feel that i'm traveling at all. you never feel this way on an aeroplane, solely for the brevity of the trip itself.

right now i'm traveling down from sf to sd, on an amtrak train through the californian country. there would've been some good view outside the window, if only it wasn't so rainy today. but the overall gray tone of the fields does give a serene feel. too bad my camera won't take much of the calm atmosphere. all that it captures is the gray and dead gloom.

i like the romantic notion of a drifter, which i pretend to be whenever i'm traveling alone. it's only during those lonely trips that i can imagine that i'm the heroine in some kind of art film, a drifter, hugging my bag in a slow moving train, among the strangers, with no destination in mind, only involved with the scenery, only involved in observing what's around me. a lost person. a flaneur. a break from the always directed and always purposeful life.

and was also reminded of a paragraph i read before:
He put the letters aside and sat with his head in his hands. He did not help her or encourage her, and she was careful never to ask out-right. If she had insisted on coming, he forced himself to complete this thought now, he would have stood aside or kept his distance or actively prevented her coming, whatever was necessary. He had himself, in that year, escaped into the bright old world he had longed for. He was writing stories and taking in sensations and slowly plotting his first novels. He was no longer a native of the James family, but alone in a warm climate with a clear amibition and a free imagination. His mother had written to say that he must spend what money he needed in feasting at the table of freedom. He did not want his invalid cousin. Even had she been well, he was not sure that her company, so ful of willful charm and curiosity, would have been entirely welcome. He needed then to watch life, or imagine the world, through his own eys. Had she been there, he would have seen through hers.

i dislike people for exclaiming "Ooh this place/person/thing is so classy" and looking fascinated to death just because the object described is:
1) old
2) expensive
3) snobbish
4) french

Behold! the last painting i do before a long period of futility

I thought i should start to explore other colour schemes... this one not particularly successful. but well... who likes pastel anyways.
..and school is starting again. bye to brushes and paints.