Puta...

Want to die after receiving the contract for the Met's internship. For a meagre salary of US$22,000 per annum, as per 50 35-hour work weeks, I receive:

- no health insurance
- no paid holidays
- no pension plan
- no housing assistance (!!!!)

Which basically makes NYC-living close to impossible, as my apartment search has revealed that I need to:

- have an annual salary 40 times my monthly rent [av. rent costs approx. $1000-$1400]
- or have a guarantor who lives in the Tri-State area who makes more than 80 times my monthly rent.

I might as well go live on the streets in a cardboard box. What oh what did I get myself into? WTF?! Even the MFA in Boston, a regional second-tier museum, offers better terms. Prestige doesn't feed empty wallets or stomachs.

Making "compact" living work for you

Another hurdle crops up after I clear my first towards ideal-living in NYC.
With a limited budget, and even more limited space, I need some serious inspiration for creating my dream pad in a shoebox. Apartment Therapy's Smallest Coolest Apartment Contest gives some great examples (and some mediocre ones too) of how real people (ie. non-interior-decorators-or-architects) make spaces work.

But before I even do any space-planning, I have to find a cheap studio / 1 BR in or around the Upper East Side / Astoria / Williamburg first. Guard your doors, landlords of rent-stabilized properties!

EMPLOYED AT LAST~~!!!!

HAVE BEEN ACCEPTED BY THE MET FOR THEIR 12 MONTH EDUCATIONAL MEDIA INTERNSHIP! Woohoo!!! *jumps around the house*

It's a huge relief to know that I am a worthy human being after all. Thank you everyone for your tremendous support over the past year. It's been very trying for my self-esteem. I've had good and bad working experiences, and I've learnt from all of them. Thank you to my mum and dad, my grandad, Uncle David, Uncle Steven, Uncle Peter, Auntie Linda, Lisa P., Fan and David for doing everything they can to help me out.

WKW Week

Been on a non-stop Wong Kar Wai binge this week, with Eros screening at Kendall and the big Retrospective at Brattle Cinema. Watched As Tears Go By 旺角卡門 on Sun, Eros 愛神 on Mon, then Fallen Angels 墮落天使 + Chungking Express 重慶森林 today.

The Hand, WKW's bit in the Eros trio of shorts was as gorgeous and lush as expected. As a spinoff of 2046, his signature 60's style and Chris Doyle's unmistakable palette is as consistent as the longer film. More physical and psychological clautrophobia, more covert desires, more unconsummated relationships. As always, the opulent cheongsams alone make paying to see the film on big screen worthwhile; on the curvaceous Gong Li those dresses can easily put many so-called couture designers to shame.

WKW's prolly going down in film history as the genius who makes even masturbation look divine. Before watching Fallen Angels and The Hand, I didn't realise how shockingly good WKW is at portraying explicit masturbation, without making it tacky. In The Hand, wanking a partner has never looked so poetically excruciating on screen: Gong Li's feathery touch sent tingles down MY spine, and Chang Chen's face looked like he was a mute being castrated. You can literally see the sweat droplets forming on his forehead - the man deserves an award just for those 30 seconds.

I wonder if WKW has worked unfulfilledness out of his system yet. Out of all his flicks, only Chungking Express and Happy Together have happy endings. Alienated urbanites deserve happiness too.

Cookie Monster to cut down on cookies?!

Man, that's just atrocious. All that low-carb nonsense has to come to a stop - what's the fun in gorging on fruits and veggies?

If it's fat kids you're trying to target, ditch MacD's, switch off the computers and TV's, kidnap them outdoors and make them throw frisbees and ball-shaped objects around. Denying any kid of their occasional cookie only creates grouchy sour pouts.

Unintentional sci-fi-comedie-noir in the kitchen:

Blue grey goo batter
Note to self: Do NOT use frozen blueberries for pancakes EVER AGAIN.
In a gleeful bout of euporia after a meeting with my freelance project bosses that went surprisingly well, I ambitiously decided to make blueberry pancakes, with a Food and Wine recipe that I had cut out at Yao's, at 6.30 pm as a late-brunch-carb reward to myself. I should have known better. Six months out of the kitchen, my hard-earned ingredient improvisation intuition and pancake-flipping skills simply vanished without a trace. Must hone my cooking fast, so that I can throw a big dinner party when I land a job and find an apartment of my own.


the benign intentions Vs. the extraterrestrial looking result
*sigh*
Actually, the results were suprisingly palatable. If you ignore their appearance.


The Attack of Intergalactic Space Turds

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.

--------------------------

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

In anticipation of the brutal Bostonian cold:

Am wearing my 16-yr-old white fur hat in lukewarmish HK at 16'C. Call me a freak ( and a fur-wearer! *o the horror*) but I NEED to make that kid-sized hat fit my giant head, so I won't die of cerebral hypothermia when I land in Beantown.

Catching up on culture

The HK International Poster Triannual at the HK Heritage Museum - Only caught a glimpse of the show, but I liked what I saw:



witty collage posters by Alain LeQuernec.


Christo's The Gates at Central Park - I'm sure on the other side of planet, every self-proclaiming artist and their mothers must have seen the installation by now, and I'm likely to miss it all by the time I get back to the States. Darn.

To compensate, I am viewing the miniature Somerville, MA version online. (lovely gates, cat, and apartment I must say) [via Unbeige]
Cars from the Ralph Lauren Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston - something to look forward to for my return, amidst the dreadful cold and snow. I love curvy vintage motors... sheer Olde Worlde elegance, daaahling.