night of the hunter

Shades of black. which is technically impossible. but they were black, not grey. against the soft spotlighting. suede benches and flickering projections, along with the faint murmuring of overlapping soundscapes. voices, noises. i wander along the path, not sure where i was headed. there's a dead end, with a sign that was too far and too dark to read. a little lost, i was about to walk closer to the sign when a voice came from a dark corner. "along that passage way to your right".

"...I'm sorry?"

"the last exhibit? along that passageway there". and with that i could make out the shape of an arm pointing towards a hidden passage.

I was at ACMI this afternoon. every once in a while i like to go there on my own to see the exhibits. not because i actually care about the exhibits, but just to experience the darkness. the isolation. there's always a dreamlike quality about that place. it doesn't matter what show is on, it conjures the exact same feelings, always. you wander from piece to piece, not particularly engaged in anything. every so often an image or an idea comes up that catches in your throat uncomfortably, and all you see of the other people there experiencing with you are the blank faces reflected in the cold flickering light, and the dream turns into a nightmare. but not the ones you wake up screaming from, it's more like an accepted discomfort which you carry through the rest of your journey. you don't run away from it, but rather you let all the mixed emotions flow over you. and through it all you're intensely aware, conscious of your own distachment. because there is no way of experiencing the exhibit without fully realising the fact that YOU are the one experiencing it all. why else do they spotlight the seats?

i followed the distached arm through to the last exhibit. sitting under the spotlight, i watched the three screen projection. An elderly black man was reenacting the story of good and evil, love and hate. you know the one, stolen from spike lee's 'do the right thing', which was stolen from the 'night of the hunter'. except it was in french. and i laughed. hysterically. alone. in that dark room at the end of the passage way.

_____________________

Let me tell you the story of "Right Hand, Left Hand." It's a tale of good and evil. Hate: It was with this hand that Cane iced his brother. Love: These five fingers, they go straight to the soul of man. The right hand; the hand of love. The story of life is this: Static. One hand is always fighting the other hand; and the left hand is kicking much ass. I mean, it looks like the right hand, love, is finished. But hold on, stop the presses, the right hand is coming back. Yeah, he got the left hand on the ropes now, that's right! Ooh, it's the devastating right and hate is hurt, he's down! Left hand hate K.O.ed by love. --Radio Raheem "Do The Right Thing" (1989, Spike Lee)



5 things that made me smile today:

- having someone new make me coffee and realising that it was really good
- throwing a whole bunch of change into the photocopy machine and coming up in perfect number of pages
- christian (or xian as he calls himself) wrongly named the screen shot in the lecture today as The Man when it was Touch of Evil, and realising that i'd recognised it correctly. the fact that i haven't seen either films was just a bounus.
- $7.50 movies all week. ALL WEEK!!
- pictures of marlon brando. that's it.

i have a hair appointment tomorrow. one that i can't afford and probably don't need. but because we've rearranged it already i can't cancel. yes yes i'm a pushover.

hmmm...since i've been writing things down as i come up with them, i can't be bothered going over the same points in this blog...but if i go back to blogging regularly i keep forgetting things that i think of throughout the day. conundrum.

so, dear reader (who suck in audience participation), you're just going to have to make do.

(images, intertextuality AND self reflexivity? it's postmodernism 101! wOOt i rock!)

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joy of writing

I was shifting through the notebooks section of borders last night, and i found the paperblanks range of journals. I've seen some of these before, but the larger bulky ones that i have no use for. I've always admired how beautiful they looked, but hell, large blank pages scare me, and under such ornate covers it begs for elegant prose which my hand simply cannot produce. But i found some pocket sized books. they looked like flashy moleskine imitations. the elastic band? check. the accordion pocket? check. the acid free archival off white paper? check. the bloated price point? check. but the covers. the range. so i had to get my hands on one to see how well they write. and since i had no pen with me i had to buy a pen also. and what better contender than the coveted G2?

surprisingly, both the pen, and the pages, made the writing process extremely smooth. maybe because these notebooks don't have elaborate mythological marketing scheme behind it my words spilled onto the paper and very very quickly filled up almost twenty of the pretty creamy water marked pages. I noted down some random observations, my views on stage to screen adaptations of musicals, and a dream i had last night. I'm still in some heightened hack writer state of mind, and i'm already excited by the prospect of taking some time to write in it tomorrow before class. Unlike a chronological diary, i don't have the pressure to note down each event in succession and feel guilty if i miss something. This is good for me. finally, a change for the better.

this weeks list after jump

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looks like i'm going to have to move my fives to another day of the week. But to think i'm going to have to break up the alliteration! maybe i'll just take license on the weeks i've missed it and still aim to be good and deliver.

anyway, here goes nothing

3 moments i still feel shockingly bad about to this day. Since there are only these three things i've ever regretted, that's going to be it for today. What it lacks in quantity i like to think that the confession factor makes up for it.

1. year 11 formal, when Karen Chan walked up to me and jeremy and said quite audibly "Oh he's not THAT short." he was silent, and couldn't look me straight in the eyes for a good while

2. After school one day, at the bus stop. I was telling someone how ugly this little ornament on her school bag looked while Pallace was standing next to me. only to have the girl tell me that Pallace had given it to her. Thing is i actually didn't think it looked that bad, I just didn't like the girl with the bag. I had to take the train with P, and she was the sweetest girl i know. and i just didn't know how to apologise, because whatever i said, i can't take back what had already been done. for thirty minutes, i seriously wanted to die.

3. once when i was about 15, i found a fifty dollar note in my mothers jacket pocket. I thought she must have forgotten about it so i just took it and bought something utterly meaningless. That night she came home quite in a state, saying how she had distinctly remembered putting that note away for fuel so she didn't need to bring her wallet. She even thought she was going senile. I was too much of a coward to tell her, and she still doesn't know.

i'm a terrible person, and i like to think that i've changed but deep down i know, i'm far more vindictive and skeptical than that girl in high school.

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under the milky way tonight

my my miss goodrem, i guess this marks the official end of backlash fiasco of '05. god save us too.

i'm glad i sat through the giant koala crap. nice as it was for ceremony directors to think of curly flat and his duck (curtesy of the fantastic mr leunig), i somehow doubt very much that giant koalas floating in midair sitting on giant thongs is the crux of his social commentary.

regardless, melbourne has never looked so pretty (HOW did that happen?), and The Church number was, well they couldn't have really done much wrong. i even bought the space bikers. and yes, a sudden rewind moment in my itunes, back in my favourites playlist for now.

somewhat proud of our fair city, and slipping god save the queen in like that, good job johnny boy.

there're no good photos up yet so, that'll come later.

openings are always s exciting, now if only we could bypass the next 11 days...

:update: it seems there just aren't gonna be any decent photos of under the milky way number =( and i loved it so

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another must blog video

oh natalie, you badass chick you, you're still my role model

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forgotten fives!

oh crap, just realised i forgot to post my friday fives for this week!

so here goes, making this up as i'm going along so won't be any good...

five things i (feel like i) desperately need, and the associated things i'd like

1. those black boots with the kinks and laces in the window in a shop at como, and the buy who owns that butt which happened to be sticking up while he was adjusting the window display

2. the altech boombox for ipod, preferably with a brand spanking new ipod inside it as mine has gotten into the habit of pausing itself for no reason lately =S

3. an agent. hahahaha. and someone to hit tony ayres over the head on my behalf

4. all the channels back on my foxtel. and a new tv (780p LCD is perfectly fine for now) because i can feel the life force of our current slowly ebbing away (quite noticeably too...)

5. my childhood back. no, that's it =D

seriously. saw a really cute school boy today, coz you know, been programmed that way, gut reaction. had to seriously hit myself in the head. get a hold of yourself woman! you're 20. TWENTY. dangerously close to toy boy territory there. but a calvin klein billboard smiled at me a while back, and took me a full ten minutes walking behind him to realise i wasn't walking up my street anymore. i'm not pathetic really, just easily swayed by a pretty face.

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mood elevators

i am curiously happy today. for no reason at all. the whole day i was just in a ridiculously good mood. once for teeny second did i get annoyed by this horrible woman at work, but then a cute maori boy was standing behind her and i was all better again. i seriously can't figure it out. the weather was brilliant, but i like gloomy days when i can wear scarves. and i had to get up at an ungodly hour again for work. by all accounts i should be really crabby, and it's been officially 16 hours since i've been up and i'm still smiling. i really want to work out why, because what ever it is it's fking brilliant. being happy is really kinda nice

so therefore i'll do a proper post, like the ones gone by, where i crapped on and on so much that i had to make a

jump

so as to not daunt anyone coming to this page. (whole slabs of text scares me also)

***

i had to make my entire photobucket account public to serve karen's photos. gah. i forgot last time i set up a new account for wenyi. and now i'm too lazy to switch it over so, i guess i'll set up a new account for future blogging purposes. nothing too embarrassing in there, a lot of history, since every picture was uploaded for blogging i can associate everything in there to particular happenings these last few years. sensory exercises, like in method...

it's funny, i think method and i think marlon brando. and whenever i think of marlon brando, even if his name is barely mentioned in that questionable song by robbie williams, i think of G for some unknown reason. aaaaaah i hear you say, haven't heard that name mentioned in a while huh? yeah. i know.

***

lately i've found myself in-between obsessions. i can now officially control my urges to go out and buy more moleskines (no, the fact that i own every format i could possibly want doesn't make a difference at all). and the whole "have to step on cracks on the same position of each foot to even things out otherwise avoid cracks altogether" thing is not making me look like a total ass anymore. could it be? society has finally conformed me? the triumph of the superego and the death of the id?

trouble is, i no longer care strongly about...anying. maybe that's what i'm feeling today, lightness.

the unbearable lightness of being. my hacking through that book has been suddenly put on hiatus due to previously unanticipated influx of reading material that actually has baring on whether or not i'll graduate this year.

however

Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect some day to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? Then why do we feel it even when the observation tower comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts us and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

i see so much of myself in the characters that it makes me sick. so i'll hit the pause, and begin slaughterhouse 5.

***

my mind's a funny thing. it keeps going back on one point lately. T. i know that went no where, and at the time i didn't want it to. he actually wanted to know more about me, which was what made it so scary. so why now? just that gawky indie boy charm coming back to bite me i guess. and that slight nz accent which slips in every now and then.

speaking of indie boys and cute accents, i tried really hard to not like the arctic monkeys. no really. the first couple of tracks i heard here and there didn't actually impress me all that much, and watching the clips was actually a little painful. but the album. my my. anything that debuts at number 1 on the arias shouldn't be worth a toss right? nothing can deserve the hype that they got. well ok, they probably don't deserve all the hype, but the album as a collective is still an exciting thing. super cute decent vocals.

so yes, on repeat - A Certain Romance, Arctic Monkeys

that's enough slobbering for one night i think. screw proof reading, why should i be more meticulous with my blog than my essays?
sorry for the lack of eye candy

hmm.....i'm still happy, this is a very good thing.

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Karen's 21st

So today.

my thursdays absolutely suck. i have in total all of 12 hours a week. 6 of them happen to land on thursdays. and i got some shitty news so, i listened to my elf boy lecture for a while, and skivved two tutes. in my own defence, the last tute was missed because i had to go home to get ready for the party.

good clean fun. the boat basically went round and round and i got to catch up with all my girlies. and no wardrobe malfunctions, hollywood tape rocks my world.



there was a lot of huge-assed pro camera action going on so i just stayed in the background doing what i do best, taking shockingly bad snaps of everyone.

view entire album here

note to self: must take a picture of elf boy so you could see what i mean.

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kpop madness

this is just too funny to pass up. it seems my taste for random clips from korean tv shows has not been sated as i had thought...



craziness!

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Friday Fives~

in the run up to the oscars, what better list than my lamn arse predictions?

1. Best Supporting Female: Amy Adams for Junebug (it's so not going to happen but...)
2. Best Supporting Male:...i wanna go for jake here, so what the hell...Jake Gyllenhaal for Brokeback Mountain
3. Best Actress: I'm probably going to be wrong but Reese Witherspoon for Walk the Line
4. Best Actor: i think this one is pretty obvious, Capote baby
5. Best Film: i'll go against type and root for Crash, even though it's lost steam but by god was it good.

So uni's started. i've already missed a lecture and a tute (for the same subject.... crapness). should be a good semester. but damn arts, for once can't they throw someone i know into one of my classes?

feeling restless...waiting...not really wanting to update but i had to put up the weekly segment...i think i'll go read some

background music: les cannibales - papillon

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