« March 2005 | Main | May 2005 »
April 29, 2005
Death of A Playwright
I remember his kind, encouraging words to me when I was feeling inappropriate writing a script for a bunch of spoilt, elitist brats. I remember talking to him and not feeling so much of a freak. I remember thinking of him like a grandfather I never had.
Dear Krishen,
I don't know if you had a good life, but you sure did leave a good impression for me. I've developed a latent respect for you since I was 15. Rest in peace.
Posted by lainey at 09:13 AM | Comments (0)
April 27, 2005
Alien Nation
My last film of the film festival happened and I felt a tinge of sadness as I walked out of the grimey, smelly Jade 1. Wilby Wonderful was understatedly wonderful. Not too heavy for a heavy mind, funny enough for a morose state of mind and none too depressing for a stoned-out night.
This year's film festival feels less intense. It's like, for a while, film and books enveloped my entire life and everything else is secondary. Now, they have taken backseat to other things happening to me. I feel odd. Strangely displaced. And I miss - miss hiding behind sub-realities created by films or pages.
Nen is posted to Bangkok for two years. And so I look forward to the Bangkok International Film Festival in 9 months' time with utmost forlorn.
Posted by lainey at 12:30 AM | Comments (0)
Cho Lon. That nice extravagant store on Jalan Merah Sega is having a book sale on books you can't quite find elsewhere in Singapore (or so they claim). I might not buy anything, but I do hope to get some time to go down and have a look.
One of the best times in life is walking through Cho Lon, looking at the various interesting knick-knacks they have and laughing at the ridiculously priced Indian spices they have.
Afternoons of nothingness at Jalan Merah Sega, I miss them so.
Posted by lainey at 12:27 AM | Comments (0)
April 26, 2005
Map of Manhattan
So it seems I am not such a weird walking freak after all. Everytime I read an Auster or Wharton or any novel set in Manhattan, I would dream of taking the book and tracing the steps of the characters in the books. As I devour the characters' routes, I will imagine New York City in my mind and my own crazy walk from one end of Manhattan (112 St) down Fifth Ave to Battery Park simply because I didn't have enough change to take transport.
Randy Cohen writes about creating a literary map of Manhatten, detailing the haunts of, not the writers, but of their characters. And since I live vicariously in my literary world through the protagonists of books I love - I say, go for it! Create a literary map! I will buy it! And I will pack my bags to NYC again and trace those damned steps!
-calms down and breathes-
Posted by lainey at 09:59 AM | Comments (0)
Drowsy Cambodia
I'm utterly sore that I've not been reading the past two weeks, but at least we sneak in the NYT from time to time. Here, NYT writes about Sikhounakville and Kampot attracting more and more tourists. I didn't get to join them last Christmas, but my fellow expedition mates went to Sikhounakville for Christmas and were totally delighted that they were the only visitors of the beach (plus resort).
Posted by lainey at 09:57 AM | Comments (0)
April 25, 2005
I succumbed and ended up at the CD Sale cuz I was early for my Far Side of The Moon screening. Bought Leonard Cohen's Songs from A Room. Slightly regretful cuz I still have so much unsampled music at home and really, I've been in the mood for upbeat music of late.
Far Side of The Moon was lovely though. What a lovely way to end a weekend. Will write more about it soon - hopefully.
My idea of upbeat music? Blasting The Killer's Somebody Told Me and having mom beg me to lower the volume and let her sleep.
Oops. :)
Posted by lainey at 12:50 AM | Comments (0)
April 24, 2005
Nancy Drew Lives On
Oh, how I used to voraciously devour the Nancy Drew series! She turns 75 today, but remains 18 still :)
NYT tracks her exciting life.
Posted by lainey at 04:12 PM | Comments (0)
April 23, 2005
Brief Notes
Save & Burn was interesting. It was extremely exciting to see people who are so passionate about libraries, books and knowledge. The documentary moved on to be rather political when Iraq and its literary heritage is talked about. But generally a lovely documentary that shows that knowledge is power and libraries are treasuries of knowledge and since power intimidates, libraries are destroyed when there is war.
Appleseed was definitely not my cup of tea. Transformer/Matrix-like anime which was typical. Save the future world soon to be destroyed. Fight between humans and half-humans. Blah blah blah.
Visions of Europe was rather disappointing. I expected better from Christopher Boe(Director of Reconstruction) and Faith Atkin (Director of Head-On & Im Juli). I guess it ain't too easy to churn something out for minutes, less easy when it's on something as BIG as Europe.
Gave up watching Samaritan Girl because I was so tired. Ended the evening having dinner and hanging out with friends at Holland V instead. I'm sure I will get a chance to catch Samaritan Girl somehow. In the meantime, I need to find time to catch the other Kim Ki-Duk movie, 3-Iron, before it scoots off the theatres.
Nonetheless, weekend's been good so far. This evening was well-spent. It's been a long time since I did the dinner-chill-walk around at HV thing with friends.
Note-to-self: Must not fall asleep at any more movies.
Posted by lainey at 11:50 PM | Comments (0)
April 20, 2005
Update
In other news, I've caught Agnes Varda's Cinevadaphoto (enchanting), Tarnation (heartwrenchingly painful) and People of Angkor (slow but nostalgic) from the film festival so far.
I know I oughta write about them. Perhaps when I stop coughing.
More to come and I'm tempted to get more tickets.
Mom wonders what I can do in place of the money.
Lainey thinks the money is mostest wellspent. Cinema is the perfect Escape.
Posted by lainey at 01:03 AM | Comments (0)
A colleague stumbled upon this blog. So I'm quite scared to blog. But yeah, hi you.
bleah.
Posted by lainey at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)
April 12, 2005
They said we were lost, mad and immoral,
And interfered with the plans of the management.
And today, millions and millions, shut alive
In the coffins of circumstance,
Beat on the buried lids,
Huddle in the cellars of ruins, and quarrel
Over their own fragmented flesh.
-Kenneth Rextroth, Between Two Wars
Posted by lainey at 12:07 AM | Comments (0)
April 11, 2005
Stranded in Time
Between the old and the new, East and West, time stopped while she stood frozen between identities.
Posted by lainey at 11:31 PM | Comments (0)
April 10, 2005
I hope I don't walk like that...
Four Belle & Sebastian albums to plough through. What a fun time my iPod and I are gonna have this week! :)
1) Dear Catastrophe Waitress
2)Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like A Peasant
3) The Boy With The Arab Strap
4) If You Are Feeling Sinister
Posted by lainey at 11:36 PM | Comments (0)
Reading List
Got this off some other site.
* have read
** partially read
*** want to read
#1 The Bible**
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain *
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes ***
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights **
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain*
#7 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift *
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer **
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne*
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman ***
#11 The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli***
#12 Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe**
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank *
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert *
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens*
#16 Les Miserables by Victor Hugo***
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker*
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne***
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck*
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy **
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin**
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce *
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell *
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell *
#29 Candide by Voltaire *
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee *
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce ***
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck *
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Kapital by Karl Marx***
#37 Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire**
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence *
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley*
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx**
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding *
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy *
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant**
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller *
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 The Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger *
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke ***
#60 The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison***
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck***
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou*
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau***
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes**
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau***
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence ***
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler**
#75 A Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath ***
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh***
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl *
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov *
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut*
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse *
#91 The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner *
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ***
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud*
#98 The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood*
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess ***
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Emile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Emile Zola***
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
Posted by lainey at 02:11 PM | Comments (0)
Book Haul
Why Borders is bad for health:
I bought This and burnt a hole in my pocket.
Why Borders is great for health:
The BF bought This for me and I've always wanted to own my own copy. :)
Posted by lainey at 12:43 AM | Comments (0)
April 09, 2005
Weather Change
"I once fell in love with you just because the sky turned from grey into blue."
-Coco Rosie, Good Friday
Saturday morning: Washing, hanging, ironing, scrubbing. Cleaning up a week's worth of mess. Chopping, cutting, dicing, boiling. Cooking lunch for a malaised mother.
Saturday afternoon: Music, Vikram Seth and Vanilla Tea procrastinating work. Listening to Coco Rosie, I begin to suspect perhaps I fell in love with you for all the wrong reasons.
Perhaps I fell in love with you just because my skies turned from grey into blue and I mistook that you had something to do with it.
Posted by lainey at 01:54 PM | Comments (1)
April 08, 2005
Keeping Track of My Calendar
At Rising tide
You're looking fresher than a July bride
We're picking up what our mothers always stigmatized.
-The Decemberists, Oceanside
Song of the week is Oceanside by the Decemberists. And I wonder...what about the other months?
Are you a Januarian? Februarist? Marcher? (ha!) Aprilette? Maybe? (ha! ha!) Junella? Julyette? (Me! Me!) Augustine? Septemberene? Octoberote? Novemberess?
As you can tell, I'm so exhausted I'm posting delirium-induced nonsense.
Posted by lainey at 12:01 AM | Comments (0)
April 07, 2005
Artistic Integrity
Writer of O is not going to be shown at SIFF because it was passed with cuts and films should never be shown when their entirity is compromised.
Shan will be disappointed - and me? I never intended to watch it so I applaud the director, who responded that "the film should not be censored and should be withdrawn from Singpore, especially considering that censorship is such a big part of our story", and Philip Cheah for their artistic integrity. As for MDA, I guess they are doing their job, eh?
-shrugs-
Posted by lainey at 11:57 PM | Comments (0)
April 05, 2005
Foie Gras is Evil
I didn't know they force feed (tube feed) ducks and geese to get delectably juicy livers for panfrying at fancy restaurants. I guess Foie Gras is off the menu now - like Shark's Fin and Tuna.
Oh wella, delicious it might be (White Bait & Kale!), it's too expensive to be worth it anyway.
Posted by lainey at 01:55 PM | Comments (2)
Pulitzer Winners
My obsession with awards and recognition continues. Here is the list of Pulitzer Winners.
Posted by lainey at 01:44 PM | Comments (0)
Well, I guess all of us have enough to read for the rest of the week.
:)
Posted by lainey at 12:12 AM | Comments (0)
Running Saves
For Shwang - another wonder of running.
This week's NYT is making me hypochondriac - but I 'm glad I run and I'd better run despite the demise of my gym membership.
Posted by lainey at 12:11 AM | Comments (0)
Not Eating Japan
Pico Iyer (one of my fav writers/journos/travel writers) writes about eating and food (or not) in Japan. I love how he wonderfully writes about his displacement in a world where his home doesn't resemble his looks, or dietary habits. I love how displaced he is and how he embraces it wholeheartedly.
Posted by lainey at 12:08 AM | Comments (0)
A Full Circle
Fabulous article on how the world is coming to a full circle (is pun intended?) as America might lose its edge to countries with cheaper labour costs.
Posted by lainey at 12:06 AM | Comments (0)
Being Casual
Apparantly, in New York (quite unlike the NYC of Sex & The City), casual sex is OUT but casual relationships are in.
I still can't quite decide what kinda relationships I want.
Posted by lainey at 12:04 AM | Comments (0)
Memory Book
Sometimes I'm afraid I might be suffering from alexia sine agraphia - a rare brain disorder of forgetfulness. But until then, I can't wait to read the book about a detective with the affliction.
Posted by lainey at 12:01 AM | Comments (0)
April 04, 2005
Save And Burn
I believe I will have more to say about Libraries being destroyed due to the lack of funds after I catch the screening of Save & Burn at SIFF. In the meantime, it hurts me to even think the Steinbeck library might be no more. It is but one of the reasons why I love California.
Posted by lainey at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
Kungfu Wisdom
It pleases me to see NYT giving one of my favourite films of last year due credit.
Posted by lainey at 11:57 PM | Comments (0)
Still on Ishiguro
In other words, I still want to it!
Posted by lainey at 11:56 PM | Comments (0)
Last weekend was filled with Fellini and family melodrama - this weekend was chamber music and intense conversation from all around. In between it all, I found time to dance hip-hop (Saturday night sans alcohol no less), get down to planning for the FILM and feel somewhat rested.
Checked out Menotti's too which is overhyped, garish, pretentious and crowded. I don't see the big deal about the food and I definitely don't see myself going back there anytime soon.
So yes - I need to fill my life up with things that matter.
But frankly, what matters?
Posted by lainey at 12:38 AM | Comments (1)