Will pimp for gainful employment

Booyakasha. It's truly bizarre how roller-coaster-up-down my days are becoming, depending on whether I hear anything from prospective employers. After days of fruitless electronic and telephonic harrassment to HR bods at Art + Auction and Christie's, I got an e-mail for an interview at.... THE MET! Repeat after self, must wow their pants off, must wow their pants off....

Bostonian sunrise:

Check out the amazing view at the fabulous (albeit temporary) pad. Too bad this place isn't mine. Am staying at Jess's while she works on a project in NYC. Thanks a tonne!

Pictorial Space

Decided to jump onto the donkey carts of Flickr, as Blogger's own Picasa is just a pain in the arse to use. The catch is that I'd have to pay to use their unlimited bandwidth version, and right now, I have no credit cards, as my one and only has been hacked and cancelled. Bummer.

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With luck like mine, it's only natural that the movies I've been wanting to see for the past six months only screen in HK AFTER I leave. Tony Takitani 東尼瀧谷, adapted from Haruki Murakami 村上春樹's short story of the same name, and Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle are gracing the screens of the HK International Film Festival. I couldn't even recognize Rie Miyazawa 宮澤理惠, the female star of Tony Takitani, who doesn't look at all bad for an 90's has-been.



Tony Takitani Official Site and Apple Japan Trailer

Eye candy for my daddy

Lovely curvy vintage motors from Ralph Lauren's personal collection at Speed, Style and Beauty exhibit at the MFA. Not a car buff myself, I didn't take notes on model numbers or anything, so just enjoy their shapes.

the Bentley Bowler. Love the big 8 at the front. Very Chinese.


A 1930's Alfa Romeo


Black Bugatti's from the 20's / 30's


a 1938 Black Bugatti. Buggie beauty indeed!
Will learn to drive when have enough $ for one of these.


A 1950's Mercedes Gullwing.
This was H's fave out of the whole show, for it had the perfect Gatsby-esque touches, caramel leather interior and luggage, silver-gold champagne exterior and all.


My fave. Jaguar in racing green. Loved the Art Deco streamlined insect look. The fin made it very Rocketman or Ultraman (aka Salty Egg Superman to us HKers.)


Another Jaguar beauty.


the 50's badass car - 1951 Porsche Spyder. James Dean died in one of these when he crashed his car. H noted that the interior finishes was left raw - no carpets, wood panelling etc. I liked the yacht-like steering wheel.


Another red Ferrari. H and I couldn't figure out what the coke-can looking things at the front were. Are they part of the engine?


Another red Ferrari. The slanted windows are cool.


A 1984 McLaren. The car has an unusal 3 seat arrangement - the driver seat with the steering wheel in the middle, slightly in front of the two passenger seats. Very 80's in that all out look-at-me way.

Michel Gondry to speak at MIT!!!

*gasp* The genius behind the early Bjork videos, all that wacky stop-motion music video yumminess [see Steriogram's Walkie Talkie Man], and Eternal Sunshine on the Spotless Mind to speak on

April 5, 2005
Co-sponsored by Office of the Arts
Michel Gondry
Music-Videomaker, MIT Artist-in-Residence
"Exploring the Mind of Michel Gondry"

Oh man oh man oh man...*almost spazzes of pleasure*


These two week are certainly looking very eventful, what with Lang Lang performing with the Boston Symphony Orcherstra on Weds 3/30 and Wong Kar Wai +Steven Soderbergh + Michelangelo Antonioni's Eros screening at Kendall. I heart Boston!

Back to Blogsphere

Apologies for going M.I.A. for almost two weeks. Have been living out of a suitcase in NYC / Connecticut, where I went to an interview and visited my bro respectively. Many thanks to Ssshuang who hosted me inspite of her crazy 24-7 work schedule as a $$$-making i banker. Due to the inclement snow / sleet / winter drear induced non-stop eating, I only managed to squeeze in two cultural outtings.

1a. The Gates at Central Park

Managed to catch them before they got dismantled. Seeing them in person was a pilgrimage experience for me, who before this only got to see Christo's work on slides for art classes. It so happened that a snowstorm happened the night before, so I was lucky to see them in their full glory - I'd like to call it that, 'cos the installation had the perfect backdrop of a crystal blue sky and sparkly white snow to contrast the neon orange: perfectly complementary colours. Best of all, Ssshuang gave me a piece of cloth used in the work; she got it from a guided tour, and the said piece of neon orange rip-stop now makes my wallet its home.

[sorry no pics of my own here, I snapped away with my old skool film camera.]

1b. Ashes and Snow at the Nomadic Museum, Pier 54, Chelsea



This is a show that will forever be stamped on my brain with a red-hot burning iron. It helps that Gregory Colbert's large scale sepia tone photos were jaw-droppingly beautiful, but the truth was the venue (and the long walk there) was biting cold. A -15'C windchill does not prepare you for quiet art appreciation. Shigeru Ban's mobile structure, the Nomadic Museum, built out of shipping containers, large cardboard tubes and stretched fabric, would have been a fantastic idea had it not been sitting on the windy East River in mid-winter, with only three tiny lamp heaters to warm up the vast interior . There was a stunning film at the end of the spirit-moving photo exhibit, but if I had stayed to watch it all, my companion and I would have gotten frost bites and / or hypothermia.


Now, I digress from the fantastic must-see photos. The whole show I learned, took Colbert 13 years to put together, and his special-super-secret technique, where he uses a galactic number of teabags and the image is developed on handmade paper, took seven years to perfect. The result was absolute perfection. His pictures, where individuals are juxtaposed with elephants, leopards, whales, eagles and so forth, reminded me of endless legends, folklores, stories going back to the infinite past, the origin of man. They have a powerful timelessness about them that move people to their cores. The show left me in sheer awe, and I thought it complemented nicely with my current reading, The Life of Pi, where an Indian boy who is Hindu, Christian AND Muslim survives a shipwreck with a tiger, a zebra and a hyena on a lifeboat.

2. African Voices at the Wadsworth Atheneum


I've decided when I die, I'd like to be buried in a Ghanian Super Coffin. Ghanians like their coffins Claes Oldenburg-like; they blow up or shrink an everyday object related to the dead person's trade or life to a casket. How nice would it be to have a colourful sculpture that doubles as a visual epitaph; call it my last laugh if you will.

Last Life in the Universe:

This has got to be my first superb non-mainstream film of 2005 [to be fair, I haven't seen many so far, as the selection in Hong Kong, where I spent Jan. and Feb, is rather limited.] Pen-ek Ratanaruang, the director and the co-screenwriter, is genius. Everything in the film came together nicely: the eccentric OCD-clean-freak-suicidal male character; a plot that drifts between realistic fantacies and absurd reality; the comical yazuka cameos; the awkward tension in the long silences between the minimal, but skillfully crafted dialogue; the slow pacing and the washed out palette; the setting in a Japanese expat's Bangkok, (How is it possible to make Bangkok look so non-descript???) and a rural Thailand that seems to be stuck in a 70's time capsule. Only at the end of the film did I realise Chris Doyle was responsible for the cinematography, which might explain how the images manage to feel rich in texture, even when the colours look grey and washed out. And it's quite a mystery how Tadanobu Asano manages to look so introvert, so nerdy and so hot at the same time.


Watch trailer here