Bad Lieutenant

選角選對了.
這樣的角色才適合Nicolas Cage去演.

Meaning of Life

I left him a question before I left the car:
What's the meaning of life?
The next day,
He read me a quote on the first page of James Maskalyk's Six Months in Sudan,
it says...

"I am not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it." - John Didion Commencement address at University of California, Riverside, Califonia, 1975

THE COVE

不再貪吃
不再濫吃
這是我跟自己許下的諾言

Cherry Bomb Coffee

Before we headed down to Niagara-On-The-Lake, he took me to the Cherry Bomb Coffee for a cup of coffee and some fresh baked goods. After moving back to Toronto for 3 months, I finally found a good cup of joe with taste of beans.

看畢陳寧的翩娜，請不要回頭
對自己說: 舞舞舞吧，不要回頭。

Long-Gone-Past

A few forgotten images were found in my camera. It was the first day of snow in London. I got a day off but he had to stay at work until 5:00pm. On the way to his office, I saw many people gathered under the London Eye building snowman. This very fairytale like scene I will never forget. Why fairytale like? It's just a feeling which I can never articulate in words. I miss the simpleness. I miss the pure happiness.

When I look at these pictures again, I realize that I miss the time when I were in London a lot. I felt much younger while I was abroad. I was not worried about aging. Reaching 30 was a splendid joy to me which I proudly celebrated. But once I returned home, I realized that most of the people around me have a collective fear-of-30 syndrome. Age is a taboo. They make you feel ashamed of being 30. But why? I feel very lucky that I have done and found something I truly love before I reached 30 with no regrets.

這一瞬間

Paris May 11, 2009.

按下快門，卡嚓，所有的過去與未來都不在重要，只有此刻，此妙，所有的美，所有的秩序、慌亂、情感、都凝聚在這瞬。前一格不是，下一格也不是，就只有這刻，才是。有的，生命中總有這一格底片，這完美無瑕的存在。生命裏總有這一瞬間…(八月寧靜,p80)

重讀陳寧的 <八月寧靜> ，想起巴黎的街，想起在街上夢遊的那晚上。

Haruki Murakami | 村上春樹

I am very touched by Haruki Murakami's powerful speech in accepting the Jerusalem Prize at the 24th International Book Fair in Jerusalem.

By: Haruki Murakami

February 2009 | I have come to Jerusalem today as a novelist, which is to say as a professional spinner of lies.

Of course, novelists are not the only ones who tell lies. Politicians do it, too, as we all know. Diplomats and military men tell their own kinds of lies on occasion, as do used car salesmen, butchers and builders. The lies of novelists differ from others, however, in that no one criticizes the novelist as immoral for telling lies. Indeed, the bigger and better his lies and the more ingeniously he creates them, the more he is likely to be praised by the public and the critics. Why should that be?

My answer would be this: Namely, that by telling skillful lies -- which is to say, by making up fictions that appear to be true -- the novelist can bring a truth out to a new location and shine a new light on it. In most cases, it is virtually impossible to grasp a truth in its original form and depict it accurately. This is why we try to grab its tail by luring the truth from its hiding place, transferring it to a fictional location, and replacing it with a fictional form. In order to accomplish this, however, we first have to clarify where the truth lies within us. This is an important qualification for making up good lies.

Today, however, I have no intention of lying. I will try to be as honest as I can. There are a few days in the year when I do not engage in telling lies, and today happens to be one of them.

So let me tell you the truth. In Japan a fair number of people advised me not to come here to accept the Jerusalem Prize. Some even warned me they would instigate a boycott of my books if I came. The reason for this, of course, was the fierce battle that was raging in Gaza. The U.N. reported that more than a thousand people had lost their lives in the blockaded Gaza City, many of them unarmed citizens -- children and old people.　

Any number of times after receiving notice of the award, I asked myself whether traveling to Israel at a time like this and accepting a literary prize was the proper thing to do, whether this would create the impression that I supported one side in the conflict, that I endorsed the policies of a nation that chose to unleash its overwhelming military power. This is an impression, of course, that I would not wish to give. I do not approve of any war, and I do not support any nation. Neither, of course, do I wish to see my books subjected to a boycott.

Finally, however, after careful consideration, I made up my mind to come here. One reason for my decision was that all too many people advised me not to do it. Perhaps, like many other novelists, I tend to do the exact opposite of what I am told. If people are telling me -- and especially if they are warning me -- "Don't go there," "Don't do that," I tend to want to "go there" and "do that." It's in my nature, you might say, as a novelist. Novelists are a special breed. They cannot genuinely trust anything they have not seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands.

And that is why I am here. I chose to come here rather than stay away. I chose to see for myself rather than not to see. I chose to speak to you rather than to say nothing.

Please do allow me to deliver one very personal message. It is something that I always keep in mind while I am writing fiction. I have never gone so far as to write it on a piece of paper and paste it to the wall: rather, it is carved into the wall of my mind, and it goes something like this:

"Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg."

Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will decide. If there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be?

What is the meaning of this metaphor? In some cases, it is all too simple and clear. Bombers and tanks and rockets and white phosphorus shells are that high, solid wall. The eggs are the unarmed civilians who are crushed and burned and shot by them.

This is not all, though. It carries a deeper meaning. Think of it this way. Each of us is, more or less, an egg. Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell. This is true of me, and it is true of each of you. And each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is confronting a high, solid wall. The wall has a name: it is "the System." The System is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and then it begins to kill us and cause us to kill others -- coldly, efficiently, systematically.

I have only one reason to write novels, and that is to bring the dignity of the individual soul to the surface and shine a light upon it. The purpose of a story is to sound an alarm, to keep a light trained on the System in order to prevent it from tangling our souls in its web and demeaning them. I fully believe it is the novelist's job to keep trying to clarify the uniqueness of each individual soul by writing stories -- stories of life and death, stories of love, stories that make people cry and quake with fear and shake with laughter. This is why we go on, day after day, concocting fictions with utter seriousness.

My father died last year at the age of 90. He was a retired teacher and a part-time Buddhist priest. When he was in graduate school, he was drafted into the army and sent to fight in China. As a child born after the war, I used to see him every morning before breakfast offering up long, deeply felt prayers at the Buddhist altar in our house. One time I asked him why he did this, and he told me he was praying for the people who had died in the battlefield. He was praying for all the people who died, he said, both ally and enemy alike. Staring at his back as he knelt at the altar, I seemed to feel the shadow of death hovering around him.

My father died, and with him he took his memories, memories that I can never know. But the presence of death that lurked about him remains in my own memory. It is one of the few things I carry on from him, and one of the most important.

I have only one thing I hope to convey to you today. We are all human beings, individuals transcending nationality and race and religion, fragile eggs faced with a solid wall called the System. To all appearances, we have no hope of winning. The wall is too high, too strong -- and too cold. If we have any hope of victory at all, it will have to come from our believing in the utter uniqueness and irreplaceability of our own and others' souls and from the warmth we gain by joining souls together.

Take a moment to think about this. Each of us possesses a tangible, living soul. The System has no such thing. We must not allow the System to exploit us. We must not allow the System to take on a life of its own. The System did not make us: We made the System. That is all I have to say to you.

Source: http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2009/02/20/haruki_murakami/

The Golden Notebook

Excerpt from the preface of The Golden Notebook:

It may be that there is not other way of educating people. Possibly, but I don't believe it. In the meantime it would be a help at least to describe things properly, to call things by their right names. Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this:

'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself - educating you own judgement. Those that stay must remember, always and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.'

-Doris Lessing, June 1971

Strasbourg: Tram and the City

In the City of Sylvia

Before we visited Strasbourg, we watched In the City of Sylvia (2007) at London's BFI. We knew the film is set in Strasbourg; but we didn't expect that our hotel would appear in the very first scene of the film. Sitting in the front row of seats, we looked at each other and laughted when El, the main character, stepped out of 'Hotel Patricia'. A few weeks later, when we were in Strasbourg, we tried to shoot the same picture of the hotel as it appears in the film.

Ronchamp: Notre Dame du Haut

Bordeaux: Tram and the City

Cancale: The Oyster Feast

The little fishing port is famed for its offshore oyster beds. Near the lighthouse, there is the famous marché aux huîtres where cluster of stalls sell oysters from €3.5 per dozen for huîtres creuses n° 3 to €10 for plates de Cancale . For an extra of €0.5, the oyster mongers would carefully open each oyster for you. For another €0.5, you would get a lemon. We ended up having 3 dozens of fresh oysters of various sizes from different stalls. We tasted them with a bottle of Cidre Bouché Brut Cru Breton. The sweetness of the cider was surprisingly a perfect companion for the oysters. We sat by the coast, watching the sea to go from high tide to low tide. When the sun broke through the cloud, we could see the silhouette of Mount Saint-Michel floating on the sea. All of a sudden, our thoughts drifted back to our first trip together to Europe, when we were both 19…

That period of time seems as far away as the silhouette of Mount Saint-Michel.

St. Malo: Sunset

Outside the city wall,

Under the clear blue sky,

I sat on the rocks, looking at his back.

He had his lens pointing to the undulating surface of the sea

When the waves broke over the rocks, I heard ‘click’

He looked back

I couldn’t see his face

But I knew he was smiling at me.

He began to talk about Mount Sinai.

I listened and imagined watching sunrise over the mountains;

while we were waiting for the sun to fall

behind the fortress on le Petit Bé.

Dinard: promenada du Clair de Lune

Burgundy: Côte d'Or

We said...

One day if we could find a 2009 Echezeaux
no matter it's a good or bad year
we would store it in our cellar and
open it one day
when we both turn 60.

Dijon - Covered Market

It was lunch time when we arrived in Dijon. We went straight to the covered food market and found a traiteur 'caterer' selling all different kinds of food from pate to tarte aux pommes. Many locals went there to buy small quantities of food to take home and we had a delicious melt-in-the-mouth quiche with escargot and a few slices of terrine for lunch.

Recollection

To draw a conclusion to our expatriate experience,
Together, we visited more than 20 European cities in 37 days
before we returned to North America.

By trains, we moved from one city to another,
from border to border,
from inland to ocean,
from serenely tranquil lake to snow-capped mountain.

Together, we admired the well designed Benz Museum in Stuttgart.
Together, we made a pilgrimage to Notre Dame du Haut.
Together, we experienced Hadid's sculptural architecture
/architectural sculpture in Innsbruck.
Together, we learnt about l'art brut in Lausanne.
Together, we strolled around Cote d'Or in Burgundy.
Together, we savored the different regional wine and oyster in France.
Together, we hitch-hike on D704 to Sarlat-la-Caneda.
Together, we discovered the fashion stores of the Antwerp 6.
Together, we walked in the rain along the D-day Beaches.
Together, we dreamt about utopia after visiting the Dutch cities.
Together, we stood up close to the original photos
by Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris.

Together, we dreamt.
Together, we made it real.

Goodbye London

09:00 waved goodbye to mum at T4
12:00 final cleaning of the flat
16:00 Mr. Reeve rang the bell and picked up one set of the keys
20:00 left some used clothes in front of the oxfam store.
02:00 last bag of garbage to the bin
02:20 final picture of the street corner
02:30 keys on the table and door closed

Farewell to our little flat above cafe Bohemia.

A Giant Squid

家的附近有一個market。
屬於露天，小型的那一種。
在這裡， 可找到生活上的基本需要：
麵包，蔬果，魚肉，或 雜貨。
每一個Saturday，每一次經過賣海鮮的檔口，
我們也會很自然地走到檔口前看看今天有什麼新鮮的。
就是這樣，我們的錢包也會很容易被破。
今次, 看中的是一條giant squid,
數量不多，但看似很新鮮。
魚檔老板，法國人，猜中我們的心思，
馬上從排列整齊的烏賊中挑選一條染滿墨汁的，
顯示到我們面前，他說：“This is the best.”
我們沒多想，點點頭，便接受了。
他把烏賊磅一磅，算一算，說：“8 pounds, okay?”
八鎊一條烏賊!! 我們交換一下眼神，笑一笑，便接受了。
反正是新年，也應該好好對待自己。
藉口，多易找。

A Piece of Cake

不需要多餘的奢侈
只需要
一分心思 +
一句祝福 +
一件蛋糕 。

Christmas Trip

Babylon, 090111

Babylon: Myth and Reality
British Museum, London
November 13, 2008 - March 15, 2009
Official Website: http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/all_current_exhibitions/babylon/exhibition_overview.aspx

The Revolution Continues, 090101

The Revolution Continues: New Chinese Art
The Saatchi Gallery, London
Official Website: http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/new_art_from-china.htm

Japan Car, 081213

Japan Car: designs for the crowded globe
Science Museum, London
November 29, 2008 -April 29, 2009
Official Website: http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/visitmuseum/galleries/japan_car.aspx

La vie sur terre, 081207

"Life on Earth is one of the most searching and poetic meditations on Africa at the beginning of a new millennium. On the eve of the year 2000, Sissako returns to his father's village Sokolo - a few houses in teh heart of the Mali Savannah. The passage to the new century comes about without major changes in these places where time seems to have stood still." p.42, BFI Guide (December 2008)

Gomorrah, 081108

Official Website: http://gomorrahmovie.co.uk/


"Based on Roberto Saviono's acclaimed non-fiction book, this sprawling account of the Naples-based Camorra crime syndicate was one of the stand-outs of this year's Cannes. Interweaving four loosely connected strands, involving both the criminals and their victims, this is a resolutely unglamorous portrait of mob culture, rooted in a gritty portrait of some of Naples' most impoverished districts that mixes an unflinching sense of documentary realism with moments of striking visual strangeness. a gripping, harrowing movie." - p.50, BFI Guide (November 2008)

Venice 081115-18

Click here for Photos of Venice Biennale 2008

Conegliano, Italy 081116

I remember It was a Sunday. A beautiful Sunday. No cloud but only blue sky. Slowly, the train pulled to the station, Conegliano. There, we stayed for two hours before our next train arrived. We got out of stazione, walked under the archway of Scalinata degli Alpini and reached an open piazza of Teatro Accademia. Beside it was a winding footpath, we followed the sign and reached the top of a hill. There was an umbrella pine, bending low in a car park in front of the church. Not far away from it was a bell tower, stood tall in the sky. We strolled around and descended the same footpath back to the piazza of Teatro Academia, the place where families gathered after Sunday church. In a newspaper store nearby, we bought a Casabella and a Domus and chilled out in a cafe. We ordered some snacks and two chocolata, a thick and rich cocoa drink. We flipped through the magazines but not long after we were distracted by a familiar aroma. A man, from the grocery right next to the cafe, was roasting chestnuts outside the cafe. We were both very excited and rushed out to see. We couldn't resist and bought a full bag of chestnut.

* * *
It was a pleasant 2-hour train ride from Conegliano to Belluno with a rewarding view of the mountain. I pushed down the upper window, rest my head and arms on it, and imagined I was flying in the wind.

Belluno, Italy 081116

We did not expect a winter fair. It was a bonus to our trip. All the main streets and piazzas were filled with people, music, and colours from the market stalls selling candies, honey, coffee, handmade clothes, meat, anything you could possibly find in any Sunday market. All the local people must have left their casa and gathered on the streets. We followed the crowd, walked in one single direction and stopped by some stalls to check out the local specialties. We bought ourselves malt wine and two porchetta (roasted pork) panino to satisfy our appetite. What a perfect combination, especially in the cold. But, what interested us the most were the honey from the mountain and the coffee. Without hesitation, we decided to carry a bag of freshly ground coffee back home; but the honey, we could only keep its sweetness in our memories.