maybe

I've outgrown this livejournal and I don't intend to get a new one. I'm contactable via pathisi@gmail.com. Otherwise... so long and thanks for all the fish!

I am looking at the updates on CNN.com and it doesn't look so good for the Republicans. Fingers crossed it stays that way.

...there has been a lot of movie-watching, book-reading and minimum out-going. Saturday morning, the house is empty. Cold water and rain fall in fat, voluptuous drops. I open the windows wide so the wind pushes away the collective stench of cigarette smoke (it has lined my clothes and walls). I wake up at 7AM after spending an hour last night watching The Wire, the weight of whiskey on my eyelids threatening to overcome my will, Halloween spent in a frightful daze of psychological alienation from the rest of the human race. What is this pathos, this acute sadness, I asked myself. Under a block with a bottle of something, books on the table and weighing like rocks in my bag, just minutes away from home, I have summarized my condition in a few words and begin fretting over the sentence, turning the words over and around, wondering if it could be better edited to express more succinctly, more acutely, more anythingly, that abject state I found myself in last night, quite drunk and with no wish to go anywhere nor stay seated at the dirty, crusty bench I found my backside rooted to. But this morning is freshly scented with wet grass and rain, my body and teeth are scrubbed and brushed, the room swept and dusted. Light falls and skips over the surface of things. I wonder how everything hangs sometimes by a tentative thread and other times, securely, our lives fastened to a thick rope, circumstances and thoughts alive and lit in hope. What is this magic, who weaves it and how perfectly.

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery -- even if mixed with fear -- that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man... I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence -- as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature"

- Einstein

I want to start a book club. I wanted to join one in February and emailed the National Library Board about it. They forwarded my email to another address, which said hello etc and when I asked about the details, they never got back to me. 

So I am going to start a book club. As most book clubs go, this one, too, will convene regularly (say once a month or so) to talk openly and honestly about the book(s) on the list. The Singapore Writers Centre has one but unfortunately, it ceased to update (last meeting in March 08) and has too strong a focus on the local literary scene. Which is great. Except that I'm not interested in it.

Writers I am interested in are: Barthes, Anthony Burgess, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, William Shakespeare, Georges Bataille, Anais Nin, J. R. R. Tolkien, Kahlil Gibran, Dostoevsky, Oscar Wilde, David Lodge, Peter Carey, Katherine Mansfield, Jack London, Vladimir Nabakov, Kurt Vonnegut, Sir Author Conan Doyle, Lewis Carroll, Salman Rushdie, children's literature, science fiction... It doesn't really matter what I like since it's a club and every week it'd be nice if a different member of the group decides what to read next. I'm still wondering if it should go in a fascist direction or a democractic one, i.e., READ THIS OR ELSE or Let's take a vote...

Anyway the point is this: any of you interested? If there are enough people, we can put this thing right into action!

50 greatest fictional villains according to the UK Telegraph. So it seems, unsurprisingly, that a good handful of memorable fictional characters are villains. Iago, Patrick Bateman, O'Brien, The Joker, Mr. Hyde, Hannibal Lecter, Milton's Satan - I've had obsessive crushes on the everyone except O'Brien. Also, notice there are no females. Again, unsurprising.

I'm on some kind of crazy movie frenzy. I've finally seen Wong Kar Wai's My Blueberry Nights. Norah Jones is not bad an actress; she's awfully photogenic and incredibly cute. Natalie Portman does a great job although she balances on a precarious line between honestly selling her character and becoming a caricature of it. I thought the plot was terribly boring and the only reason I kept though it was because the entire movie was visually stunning.

Also Frank Oz's Death at a Funeral was a bag of laughs. Kris Marshall is one of my favourite faces to see in a British film so no complaints. It's one of those comedies that starts with one small disaster - in this case, a bottle of suspect Valium - and avalanches into a crazy fucking funeral.

The Coen Brothers' Fargo, which was long long overdue but was well worth the wait. They're one of those unbeatable combinations. I haven't seen many movies but I can safely say that they are one of the few people who can take a movie about a bunch of incompetent idiots trying to stage a kidnapping and make it rich with nuances. I love the way it starts with 'Based on a true story' and ends with 'All characters and events are fictional'.

Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone is another visually stunning gothic horror movie. I've got a huge soft spot for directors with an aesthetic eye. But unlike My Blueberry Nights, this one has some great substance and symbolically rich characters/scenes. The movie is set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War; the orphanage becomes a nice microcosm for the horror unfolding in the rest of Spain. del Toro said, also, that Pan's Labyrinth is the "spiritual sequel" to The Devil's Backbone. It's fanatstic, the idea of a sequel in spirit.

I like The Darjeeling Limited mostly because India is one of those places that's so easy to film in. The colors come out great, it's a land of such rich character and almost always ends up getting romanticized in most works of fiction (literary and filmic). To Anderson's credit, he exploited the country, so to speak, very minimally; he had a great script and actors to work with and the location did nothing more than to compliment the movie. Three estranged brothers meet a year after their father's funeral in a train that will take them to the foot of the Himalayas. Very self-consciously, this movie showed exactly what's so wrong and so funny about the West's approach of Eastern spiritualism. The only problem I had was regarding one of the reviews I'd read, which said (and I'm paraphrasing) "Anderson does not engage in Orientalism. Even the waitress in the train speaks in an American accent and smokes a cigarette." This comment kept me up until indecent hours of the morning. In the wake of the world post Edward Said, is it ever possible to accurately represent a culture without necessarily Orientalizing it? Is an Indian speaking in a local accent guilty of exoticizing the culture? Why is Asianness immediately put under the Oriental microscope when it comes out of Hollywood? Very bothersome. But Adrien Brody looked so hot in his pink boxers and 80's sunglasses that I eventually couldn't help but forget about the whole Said jazz.

Oh, and The Man From Earth was such a fucking mind trip! I absolutely have to watch it again. The dialogue starts awfully but eventually works up to great brilliance!

Also, first two seasons of Sex in the City made me feel terribly nauseous, what with the countless tongues down countless throats and massive amounts of sex and tits and ass. But it's great time pass.

Sometimes I see the transience but mostly hope surrounds. Ironic how idealism will one day be what kills everything. It's like Orwell's doublethink: I learn and I don't; my cycles go round and round the bush and I keep finding lessons to learn to forget soon enough but I still remember.

Another day, another existentialist crisis. Where is this (life, universe, everything) going, how do I say what I mean, etc..

I have been reading lots of T.S. Eliot, though. Maybe that explains. Do I dare / disturb the universe?
Sometimes.

There is nothing interesting I can say any longer. Drunk? Check. Music? Check. Awkward? Cgeck. Same? Semi-check. My hair is longer, though. I miss my locks.

Death Note starts out quite nicely. The plot is uncomplex, the motivations are simple and clear. Although there is an occasional hint of government bodies interfering, it does not go completely out of hand. It is a psychological thriller, not at all a horror story, with deeply introspective, far-sighted and intelligent characters (it would be wise, however, if you choose not to question their far-sightedness because that would make everything quite unbelievable). The questions raised are provoking (How far will you go for a better world? Do ends justify the means? Can an amoral god exist? Can we frighten people into being good, and how genuine is that reaction?) and that was the point until I liked it very much, kept me glued to my seat for 3 whole days and nights. And suddenly it got so bad, I lost sight of the plot entirely. New characters and unexpected deaths were introduced, it seems, entirely for the purpose of driving a growingly stagnant plot forward. I think of it as a really old car, spluttering engine, hardly working gears and equiptment that keeps getting remodelled - the end result is a boring, bumpy ride with a driver who's lost the plot entirely.

Monster, however, now that's something that's living up to the review of it I read in Time magazine. Chapter 22 and still going strong..