Envy of the Female Species?

Oh. My. God.

"A woman who has up to 288 orgasms a day is seeking medical help, because she says too much pleasure is a pain."

I can't even imagine what that might feel like. When most women can't get no satisfaction, and this poor woman is getting way too much of a good thing. I can't help wonder if the Higher Beings are silly pranksters, playing practical jokes on us aimless wondering microbes in a petri dish.

21 Grams:

Excruciating to watch. Don't get me wrong, it was a brilliant film, non-linear narratives and all, but it was heartbreaking to see the characters' lives fall apart, bit by bit and ever so slowly. Good reflection exercise for the brain though, after a whole day of excessive stuffing (as in me, not the turkey). Thx much to Yao and Taka for the yummy turkey Japanese style.
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Him: tall dark and handsome
Me: trying to appear sophisticated but failing to fill in awkward silences .... xP

From the pages of Playboy advisor:

Q - My girlfriend asked why me save all their back issues of Playboy. I told her that every guy, growing up, had a friend whose father had a stash. The friend would share this bounty with his buddies -- a rite of passage. I'm saving my issues so that my future kid will someday be that well-connected friend.

A - Keep in mind that it won't be any fun for your son unless you "hide" them at the bottom of your sock drawer. And you thought your friend's dad was so dumb.

It's more embarrassing if your grandkids find your stash.... as is the case with BOTH of my grandads :P

Is it a bird? Is it a plane?.... oh wait it's a bat!!!

Encountered a very lost BAT today in the Visual Arts dept. I thought it was a sparrow at first, but upon more careful looking, saw bones in the flappy wings. Eeeeks!! The poor, albeit ugly and gross bat was flying in circles looking for a way out. I was pinning up photos, and it took mucho effort to resist the reflex to scream and run at top speed everytime it neared me. Sharon, the admin lady spotted it, shreeked, ran into her office, pulled a coat over her head and ran to find the equipment TA.

The Visual Arts / undergrad Architecture studio building is a weird clump of dilapidated factories and converted old military research labs. With age, it seems to house more and more interesting critters. I've heard tales of birds flying in and picking off wooden sticks off people's models for their nests. In my sophomore yr, one TA used to bring her cat in, and Moshka, the cat would jump around ppl's models. Pigeons have flown in and pooped on people's models. Sharon brings her tiger-striped dog, Cody, to work. Whenever lunchtime comes around, Cody would stare pitifully at those who bring food, hoping to get a bite from anyone who sympathises.

On another bat-related note, the last time I saw one, I was seven. A bat flew into my home in HK, and I remember running with my brother Chin Yee into our bedroom, locking it, and waiting whilst my mum and the Philippino maid chased the mammal with a broomstick.

cultural contradictions: Chinese - bat = good luck / wealth; Western - bat = evil / bad luck. Hmmm....

Lil' Miss Norma No-Mate:

.... went to a Belle and Sebastian concert on her own
.... spent a Friday night in New York, watching Elephant all by herself
.... tossed and turned in a hostel cubicle next to a loud-snoring man's.

then saw some nice sculptures at the Dia: Beacon with her class. Sometimes it's a relief to be in school with other people.

I'm waiting for lightning to strike my pea-sized brain:

arg. the dreaded block. I've been trying to look at all sources of inspiration for my sculpture project. It's not working very well. Perhaps I'll just mold lots and lots of my less-than-sexy derriere as my mum suggested out of a whim :p
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Floor installation, Korean Pavilion in the 2001 Venice Biennale
I came across works by Korean artist Do-Ho Suh. His works deals with issues of transcultural dislocation, and the individual vs. an annoymous collective. I found the intricately detailed replicas of his dwellings made out of nylon eery and hauntingly beautiful. Supposedly one can pack a whole fabric house in a suitcase. Something about this touched my nomadic core, even if it's encumbered by earthly possesions.


life-sized nylon model of Do-Ho Suh's apartment in Chelsea, NYC
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Why did I dream of you last night?

Why did I dream of you last night?
Now morning is pushing back hair with grey light
Memories strike home, like slaps in the face;
Raised on elbow, I stare at the pale fog
beyond the window.

So many things I had thought forgotten
Return to my mind with stranger pain:
--Like letters that arrive addressed to someone
Who left the house so many years ago.

~Philip Larkin

stubbled upon this... It's so fitting since several friends and myself seem to be having similar oneiric troubles.

Crocodile Dundee.... in HK?!!!!

This has got to be the funniest news I've heard from home in ages. Is totally ridiculous.
What's a croc doing in Yuen Long??? I thought all top-of-the-food-chain carnivores are extinct in the S.A.R.?!! [via Gweilo Diaries]

Michel Camilo:

WOW. I have to be the luckiest girl on earth when it comes to jazz concerts. Every concert I go to gets better than the last. This man is... BAD ASS, for the lack of a more sophisticated description. I've never seen anything like it. No one plays the piano the way he does - he was literally whacking the keys at full strength AND speed as he played his compositions with different twists - jazz, latin jazz and classical, in his own dynamite way. (see Calle 54, the Latin jazz documentary and you'll get what I mean)

Tunes that caught my heart are his more sedate ones - such perfect aural bliss: The Magic in You and Twilight Glow [Real Audio]

The concert had 3 parts - one by the Michel Camilo Trio, one by the Berklee Concert Jazz Orchestra, and the last by the two. The last part was p-h-e-n-o-m-e-n-a-l in every single way. Camilo would be conducting and playing the piano at the same time, sometimes jumping around the stage, over speakers to do both just in time. The set opened with One More Once , with percussionist Eguie Castrillo. When I say percussionist, he's more like the human sound-effects-library. This rotund, genie-looking man (dressed in a kaftan-y tunic thing and a huge gold hoop on each ear) made of a whole sonic rainforest from whistles, bunch of coconut shells, chacha and a bunch of his sound props. Oh and he plays the bongos.

Thx much to Yao, who waited 1.5 hrs in the concert hall to get us front row seats.

Bonus: the very, very cute alto saxophonist in the big band...kakoii!!! He played really well too. @,@ Yao went to ask for his autograph afterwards and dragged me along so the hottie can sign my ticket *giddy laughter*

older.... and not a bit wiser (not even a leetle beet):

arg. 23. aaaaarrrrrgh. *in denial*

Judging by conventional measures of success for a person in their early 20's, here's a brief summary of how I measure up:

Degrees earned: none
Long-term Jobs held: nil
Significant other: nope
Driving License: nope
Automobiles owned: nil
Properties: nil
Offsprings: none - my mum HAD me when she was 23. *shivers*

Hmm... falling into the faux-pas category of - Underachiever.
and Mum was telling me how my distant uncle got his PhD when he was 21 >.<

Europeans Vs. Americans msg board deathmatch:

As usual, there has to be one ultra-defensive American harping about their coutry. Dude, the book the NY Times article was referring to wasn't even about that. The contraversial book claims to be "a mathematically precise global assessment of human achievement"... and Murray, the author concluded from his "findings" that "In all, Europeans and North Americans account for 97 percent of scientific accomplishment". See Shortfuse's post.

Yet another definitive sign of aging:

Fuck. Had the biggest hangover this morning. Haven't had one in 2 yrs I think. Not that I drink often, but getting a dull thudding headache from merely 2 Midori sours & a few sips of Amaretto + Coke is totally unjustifiable... it's too lame for words.

Made meself a full English breakfast to feel better - crumpets, sunny side up, sausages, tomato, bake beans and all, but have no one to eat it with. =( I wonder if they sell doting affectionate handsome bf's on ebay....

Geek art at its best:

Geodesic dome sculptures by George W. Hart, "sculptor, mathematician, engineer, researcher, writer, computer scientist, and educator". All of his sculptures are made from complex mathematical models; some are constructed with rapid prototyping technologies like laser-cutting and 3D printing.
He has been commissioned to make a laser-cut wooden piece for the Gehry-designed Stata Center.

Botany through photography:

Have acquired unnecessary bundle of exotic blooms for photo project. (I'm photographing geometric patterns and arrangements that occur in natural and manmade things). Am happy cos I have pretty flowers:

Star of Bethlehem, Ornithogalum arabicum
These are very, very cool. The flower buds sort of sprout out from the central inverted-pear-pineconey blob, tearing the blob apart as they bloom into a ball of flowers. The small white flowers smell sweeeet too.




Blue Delphinium
These have a crazy deep blue / purple hue when the flowers mature. Right now my bunch looks pale violet cos all the deep coloured flowers fell off. The flowers have crinkly tails, where the subtly sweet nectar sits :d

(Author's note:
My parents did not raise me as a hippy flower-eating child; I just eat anything edible-looking that's in my way.)
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Aaaaah! Just found out that these teeny weeny little red spiders are eating my beloved ickle chocolatey plants away....
get your filthy little feet off my plants you.... *goes to power hose / half-drowning plants*

America: on the path of self-destruction? [article from the Guardian]

[On environmental protection and fighting against global warming]

"...The attitude of the White House to global warming was summed up by the online journalist Mickey Kaus as: "It's not true! It's not true! And we can't do anything about it!" What terrifies all American politicians, deep down, is that it is true and that they could do something about it, but at horrendous cost to American industry and lifestyle.

In the meantime, all American consumers have been asked to do is to buy Ben & Jerry's One Sweet Whirled ice cream, ensuring that a portion of Unilever's profits go towards "global warming initiatives". Wow!"

There are many things in this country that I'm still not used to: the way environmentalists are depicted as liberal leftists in the press, the way ppl drive everywhere when you can walk for 20 mins instead, the backwards and inefficient public transport system, the disposability of all things plastic, the gargantuan portions and ppl, and their even bigger appetites for consumption.

To me, there's something fundamentally wrong about this American lifestyle, and it makes me want to move elsewhere where people have a better sense of eco-consiousness and awareness of sustainability.

Catch it if you can...

Just watched Chicken Poets 像雞毛一樣飛, directed by Meng Jing Hui 孟京輝 , newbie Mainland Chinese director / veteran avant-garde playwright. It was so brilliant, I'd recommend it to all cinema lovers. A heady vanguard blend of witty visual puns, fast and furious dialogue, (if you understand Mandarin) playful colour-tones and theatrical sets.

Dad won't be naming my kids...

Dad came up with the name 來福 (Loy Fook) for the Dog, which is rifle in Hong Kong Chinglish; it can also mean "luck come hither" in Chinese, which can either be appallingly old-fashioned or almost uber-hip cos it's so very, very retro. It would be the way really uneducated bourgeois Cantonese name their kids.

Dad started getting silly after thinking about this retro-unfashionableness, (what ppl call "leung" in HKese) and decided his grandsons will have names like 祿來 (Luk Loy) - Rollei, the camera brand or "come wealth"; 壽來 (Sau Loy) - "come longevity". Grandaughters would be called 大嬌 (Dai Giu) - "Big Cutie"and 小嬌 (Siu Giu) - "Small Cutie". English names would prolly become something like Leica, Holga, Nikon, Pentax, etc etc., knowing my dad's obsession with cameras.

Dad, don't you even DARE try that on my offsprings.

Currently obsessed with....

Buying art.

Not postcards or posters, but the real deal (or more like limited edition prints / miniatures that are within my affordability). Very very bad. For wallet and for my level of concentration on more important things in life. (like graduating and finding a job) To add insult to injury, I'm using eBay as my portal to the collectors' sphere.

Works in question -

Martin Parr: Common Sense series, 1998


Takashi Murakami: Kerotan print, 2001


T.M.: Superflat Museum toy figures, 2003

Update: {10/28/2003}

My own set of Takashi Murakami shokugan has arrived!! Shokugan means snack toy, or literally eat play in Japanese, and is usually free toys that come with kids' snacks. Murakami wanted his shokugan's to stimulate the public's interest in contemporary art, and these are intended as a "starter kit" for beginner collector's. [I can tell you the intent is working ;) ]

The Roppongi Hills edition has 6 figures and is produced in an edition of 15,000. Each figure is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity and a small brochure giving the inspiration or history behind each figure. Murakami also cited in detail his different sources of inspiration on each brochure, which I thought was a nice touch.

Audio-Visual Bliss:

| 10 MB | Quicktime required |

[img from Illegal Art]

Michal Levy's Giant Steps builds happy colour lines and cubes to the rhythm of John Coltrane's Giant Steps, creating a fun imaginary space as the music progresses.

A sweet bit of animation done in Maya.
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This + a hot bath with one of them Lush bathbombs + 9 holes of golf next to the red-golden woods = Perfect Friday afternoon :)