The Day I became Filipino at 35 Thousand Feet

In the corner of my eye I catch a gray furry thing moving. It’s a dog, the one that looks like Benji. I don’t know what you call that breed. It is kind of strange though. A dog can’t be here. I’m on the plane. Yet there is little Benji trotting down the aisle. It stops right next to where I sit. I peek down and find it looking right up at me. Hello, little doggy. With lightning speed it jumps up on my face. Wet dog smell. I can’t breathe. And before I do anything, it craps in my mouth.
“Are you Filipino?”
I open my eyes. To my right, there sits a comely little Asian lady, looking at me, smiling. I still taste you-know-what in my mouth. My back hurts. My eyes are all gooped up. I hate air travel.
“NO.” I say curtly, and close my eyes again. But I can’t go back to sleep. The jet engine is too deafening. I look at the lady again. She is still eyeing me expectantly.
“I’m Korean.” I say this while half covering my mouth.
“Oh.”

“Chicken or beef?” asks a flight attendant. As it is usually the case, the airline food is inedible.
“Chicken?” It doesn’t make any difference to me.
“Chicken,” says the Filipino lady.
“Oh, we are terribly sorry, we have only one chicken left-“
”Just give it to her.” I relay the tray to the lady. She is grateful.
“It doesn’t make any difference to me.” I say.
After a while, they come to collect the trays. The Filipino lady hasn’t touched her chicken. I haven’t touched my presumably beef meal either. We look at each other.

I nod off again. No Benji please. I hear someone crying. Am I dreaming? With this deafening whirring sound, I don’t even know where this sobbing is coming from.

It’s the Filipino lady. I shouldn’t be bothered with other people’s business. But the sobbing continues.
“Are you ok?”
She takes out a photo from her pocket and hands it to me. It’s a photo of a lanky young man in a military camouflage get up, smiling.
“It’s my son…he was in the army.” She wipes her tears with a handkerchief. “There was a helicopter crash and he was killed.”
Well, what do I say in this kind of situation? I really do not know.
“I’m so sorry.”
“He was about your age.”
All sorts of thoughts rush in. I get angry at the military for putting her in a coach seat of a crowded airplane. What the hell, she deserves better than this. She is flying over to the Philippines to her son’s funeral, for godssakes. I hold her hand for a while. She falls asleep. Poor woman.

I’m listening to the radio with a head set. Julian Lennon’s Salt Water is playing and I catch myself singing along. I look at the lady and she is looking at me. Embarrassing.
“You remind me of my son.”
Personally, I think there is no resemblance between tall lanky Filipino guy in the picture and myself. None. But what the hell, I sing along a little louder, for her to hear.

Fruit porn:

Lemon Plums. I'd like very much to touch those...plums



Crab Apples Them bite-size, perky pink apples, mmm...



Persimmons Look at those big...leaves



Forelle Pears Raunchy



Dragon Fruit Beautiful outside, freaky inside




Rambutan Hairy and moist



Seckel Pears Cute and tarty




Pommegranate Dirty and messy

To be Continued...

And Happy Pumpkin Season Everyone!

Smudge

Come look at this. Elena Said.
There was a big black smudge on the white wall. Finger prints?
The whole palm print is more like it. She said. A hint of fear in her voice. Look! Look over here!
More smudges along the wall. What the hell is going on?
It was mid December. A short, 'in-between shows' time for the gallery. Because the walls and floor were bare, it looked even more humongous than usual.

This second floor gallery in the heart of Soho was at least a hundred times bigger than the tiny studio apartment Jodi shared with her boyfriend in Washington Heights. Ever since she started interning here as an assistant to the curator, she'd been daydreaming about living in the gallery. She’d imagine how she’d decorate this gigantic space into her own liking; a sofa right here, a bed aaaaaall the way over there near the windows, a TV stand in the middle of that beautiful parquet floor, etc.

As a former ballet student, Jodi felt a strong urge to dance around upon seeing the empty gallery. The space could’ve made a handsome dance studio. This must be what dogs feel like when they see a spacious grassy meadow. She thought.
It was decided that they would install security cameras to monitor the gallery. It turned out that nothing was stolen. But the smudges jangled Elena(owner/curator)’s sense of security really hard.

Jodi was on the ladder getting a box of documents from a closet. The box was heavier than she expected. With a skirt and high heels on, she was having a hard time getting down the ladder with the heavy box.
Do you need help with that?
Jodi looked down.
Don’t worry, I’m not looking up your skirt.
Some of the workers giggled from the floor in the corner. Jodi felt her face getting red. It was Adam, the foreman of the workers prepping the wall, at the bottom of the ladder.
Adam walked up the ladder.
Here, let me help you.

So Elena’s really concerned about those smudges, eh? Adam asked.
I guess so. Jodi answered.
Well, we will paint over it. No problem.
The wall painters were taking a break. All the staff were gone. Jodi was sorting through old invoices alone. Adam looked at his crew and back.
Alejandro says he saw you the other day.
Excuse me?
You live in Washington Heights? He does too.
Alejandro, eating his sandwich in the corner across the room waved his hand.
Oh.
You don’t hang out with the people here? I saw all of them going out together. Adam regretted asking this.
Don’t answer that. None of my business.

It dawned on Jodi that since she started working at the gallery, she’d never met a single person from it outside work. This question hung around in her head for days long after the conversation ended.
What a place, eh? So huge, you just want to run around. Makes you feel like a kid. He smiled.

There was a mechanical beeping sound. It took Jodi some time to figure out where it was coming from. It was the newly installed security camera recording system with the monitors in the office area. The red light on the recording machine was blinking and the tape was on eject position. As always, Jodi was the first one to get to work. She popped in the tape into the machine. The grainy green night vision footage from previous night came up on the screen split in four squares; the bird’s eye view of the gallery at night, and three other angles of different areas of the gallery. Nothing. She pushed the fast forward button. For a while there was no activity. Then there they were, Adam’s crew. The images were startling at first. Men gliding through the air with glowing eyes like ghosts. It took some time for Jodi to realize that they were rollerblading in the darkness around the huge gallery. They would bump into the walls and into each other, grabbing the wall with their dirty hands. They were all smiling, having the time of their lives.

This made her laugh. She quickly ejected the tape and put it in her bag while checking if anyone was looking. Then she put a blank tape in the machine.

She walked toward the windows. The soft morning sunlight was hitting her face. She looked back at the huge empty space. She took off her high heels and placed them neatly near her feet. Then she danced, twirled around the huge space all over. It felt great. Then she took a bow, directly toward the tiny camera on the ceiling. She thought she’d heard applauses coming from somewhere.

Call Number: PQ4809.A45.S3713.1993

Press play to listen.

Jump

I once saw a neighborhood kid jump off from the balcony of his second story house with two umbrellas- one in each hand. It was a bet. Of course, I betted on him not succeeding. It wasn't on whether he would die or not. Those were innocent times.
Twok! He walked away with a sprained ankle.
He grew up to be a successful restaurateur.

Lindsay was a sullen girl who worked at an office not far from mine. She was a grad student working as a receptionist. She always wore black. Her short hair was unkempt. Her blue-ish eye makeup made her look even sadder. One day, she jumped out of her twelfth floor dorm room window.
Twok! She didn't make it.

This is one conversation I remember having with her once, outside our office building during our cigarette break.

What happened to your eyes?

What this? She pointed to her small, angular face. Dark bags under her pale penetrating eyes.

I had two hours of sleep. I was out all night. She smiled sheepishly.

Dancing?

Danced, danced, danced the night away. She exhaled.

You gotta take care yourself. It's bad for your health.

It's good for your soul. She winked.

I never asked what her major was, what her aspirations were, her plans...anything.
I wonder what she could've become if she decided not to jump.

Radio Daze

Martin (1977) - Romero

A surprisingly classy vampire(?) film by George Romero. The film starts out on a moving train where Martin(John Amplas), a cat like young man, attacks a pretty middle-aged woman. Unlike typical vampire, he uses a syringe full of sleeping agent. He is very clumsy at what he does too- woman goes down kicking and screaming. Martin lives under the watchful eye of Tada Cuda, an old religious Colonel Sanders look-alike who believes his cousin Martin is a damned soul, Nosferatu.

Once settled in, Martin sets his bright eyes on pretty, lonely housewives as his targets using his youthful looks. At night, he pours his heart out to an all-night radio talk show host(this is the 70's folks) who, in turn, calls him 'count'. The thing is, he's socially awkward and not really into 'sexy stuff'. Unlike movies, he says, "people don't let you what I want to do to them."

Set in once-a-great-steel-mill-town of Braddock, PA- the industrial wasteland, where the American dream had died, where only the old and superstitious are left, serves as another character.

There are some very well coordinated, effectively suspenseful scenes where Martin with syringe in his teeth, does a cat and mouse act in a big house with its inhabitants. Black and white flashback scenes are often gorgeous too.

One can read Martin as an early examples of socially awkward, lazy teen's existential angst film and it may as well be. Since we don't know if what he's doing is really for perverted kicks or out of necessity. By all accounts it is a very special film.

Black & White

NYFF screening of White Material was preceded by a short, Chicken Heads by Palestinian filmmaker Bassam Ali Jarbawi, a Columbia Univ. Film student. A film about a shepherd and his two sons in the Occupied Territories. Touching and beautifully shot.


White Material (2009) - Denis *Q & A with director afterwards

This may possibly be my favorite Denis film and a front runner for my favorite film of the year. Denis goes back to the colonial Africa and tells a story of a coffee plantation owned by a white family caught in civil war. Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert), a matron of the family is perhaps a clueless, arrogant white woman, as she tries to hire fleeing locals to finish coffee harvest, oblivious to total chaos around her. But we are definitely not watching some helpless puzzle piece in an overwrought, meticulously planned Haneke movie. Vial is not quite the white devil. It's her ingrained sense of entitlement that makes her a curio as she refuses to leave and calling other whites undeserving of the beautiful land.

We are in the Denis territory and there are some amazingly blissful sequences- Maria riding a motorcycle on the dirt road, piles of child soldiers all doped up with pills and junk food spread out in the Vial house...just to name a few. Huppert fits perfectly in the white woman role. Her glaring whiteness is used well against the black continent. Isaach De Bankolé's Ché like rebel leader the Boxer, Michel Subor (The old man with the dogs in L'intrus) and Christopher Lambert as the deceiving husband, Nicolas Duvauchelle as the wacko son round up the elusive supporting cast. White Material is not her most abstract film yet Denis still manages to keep the film absorbing and enigmatic without ever being didactic or boring. It's definitely headier and feels more substantial than her other works. And the sense of freedom I feel when I watch a Denis's film that I like the most is still intact. It's invigorating.

Again at the Q & A session, people started asking stupid questions: What's her motivation behind such and such? Why the transition of her son? What's your motivation for making this film?
Denis was very gracious and answered each questions. I don't think about the motivations of the characters, she said. She comes across as a very thoughtful filmmaker. The most poignant question was about children who portrayed child soldiers. Denis told us the way she went about it: There was a school nearby the location they were shooting in Cameroon. She talked with the teachers and kids had to be trained as to how to hold the gun properly and whatnot. They were told the basic storyline of the film and all aware of what they were doing. She got amazing performances out of them.

Jamusch regular Isaach De Bankolé who worked with Denis previously(I can't Sleep, No Fear, No Die) and a young black actor, William Nadylam, who plays a charismatic Mayor in the film were present for the Q & A too. Good times.

A Night with Cissé and Marty

Min Ye/Tell Me Who You Are (2009) - Cissé
*Conversation with Martin Scorsese afterwards

First of all, on our short Italian man Marty. I gotta admit, regardless of how I feel about his films, I admire him as a true cinephile, as a preserver of old films, for his My Voyage to Italy series and for releasing Les Amants du Pont-Neuf in the US after 9 years since its debut.
Scorsese was so taken by Cissé's previous effort Yeelen, he invited Cissé and his actress Sokana Gakou to present his new film here at Director's Guild Theater in NY. It was touching and funny as Cissé recalled Scorsese emailing him that he was coming to Mali and when he told all his colleagues, no one believed him until the famous director showed up at their doorstep. Jovial and chatty, Scorsese comes off as a very likable, personable man.

Cissé's story is truly inspiring. The famed old Malian director couldn't get another film made for 12 years because of the lack of money and support. Min Ye was a true labor of love(everyone involved was paid a symbolic one cent to work on it because it was Cissé film. It was shot economically with small video camera.

Set in modern day Mali where polygamy is still rampant, Min Ye tells a story of a loose woman who has an affair and has to face consequences for it. Mimi(Gakou), a woman in her fifties, is having her fish delivered(apparently some kind of sexual innuendo in Mali), by her married(with two wives) childhood sweetheart. Her husband who has other wives and his children all grown up, is fed up with Mimi's deceits. He informs police of her adultery which is punishable by law in a society where 80 percent of the population is muslim. Mimi is not a likable character. She's quite obnoxious. She's regarded as a woman who can't help herself when it comes to men, like some sex starved teenager.

The film is an honest depiction of jealousy, lack of equality and imperfect people. It's not sentimental nor judgmental in any way(which is part of the problem of this film, at least to me). Some of the long dialog scenes prove to be exhausting(yes you can do very long takes with videos but come on!). Its visuals are not lyrical but rather economical.

Mimi, played by a full figured, first time actress(Gakou is a Mali news anchor woman), is a woman trapped by the society and equivalent of a tragic heroine from some Henry James/Flaubert novel. All she needs is a little bit of playtime herself.

Wonderland

Encounters at the End of the World(2007) - Herzog *rewatch

Trailer
Antarctica attracts both knickknack of eccentric transients from all walks of life and passionate scientists. It's a perfect place for Werner Herzog, a filmmaker who is known for making films about extreme environs and extreme personalities. This being a Herzog doc, visually it's a treat- both under and over water of the wonderland that is Antarctica.

Herzog is obnoxious as ever, as he cuts in his subjects' rambling and narrates over them. He then asks a solitary zoologist nutty questions like, "Are there any gay penguins?", "Does insanity exist among penguins?" and cuts to a disoriented penguin walking briskly toward the inland, then he grimly points out that it's walking to its obvious demise. The thing is, I can listen to his cynical view(with his thick German accent) on the fate of humanity in the unforgiving nature, all day. It's music to my ears. It gives me hearty belly laughs every time.

Encounter is thoroughly entertaining. Herzog's music choices to go with otherworldly visuals are exceptional as always. It ends with one of the eccentric residents of the icy continent, forklift operator/philosopher saying, "through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself, and through our ears the universe is listening to its cosmic harmonies, and we are the witness through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory." Indeed.

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A Movie Night in Two Chapters

{Adam}


I am going through DVDs that are in front of me. Something he says makes me stop.

“Really?” I say.

“Yep,” he says, “the rescue team didn’t get there fast enough to save her.”

He tells me his friend died in a hiking accident in the Shasta Mountains in California. She lost her footing while climbing up a rocky hill. The dead girl was a friend of his since childhood. Her family naturally saw it fit that he inherit her movie collection since he is a film student.

Awkward. I am rummaging through a dead person’s movie collection. I regret asking him so insistently as to why he was giving them away.

“I’ve combed through and taken what I liked already but I didn’t want to throw away the rest. So don’t feel bad,” he says, “she died doing something she loved.”

They are mostly Japanese animations and samurai martial arts movies. I understand why he brought these for me. He doesn’t like them but I do. He’s that kind of a guy.

Once I put up Your Preferred Way to Die poll in a web forum that I belong to. The choices were:

1. You go to sleep in a freezing place (Snowy mountains, South/North Pole, etc)

2. By rain of arrows

3. In a skydiving accident

4. Getting shot through the heart

People overwhelmingly chose 1. The second choice was 3 followed by Rain of Arrows. Nobody chose 4. I wondered why, I thought it was a fine choice as any other. But hiking accident in the mountains would’ve made a fine choice too.

He had to fly back to attend a Buddhist ceremony on the 49th day after her death. Apparently, the Tibetan Buddhists believe that after 49 days of transitional stage called Bardo, your soul will move on to another realm. The day was yesterday.


* * *

{Ellen}


He throws down a DVD case on the coffee table. I look up.

“What’s this?”
“It’s Izo.” He says.
“Yes I can see that.”

On the cover, there is a lone, dark figure standing in the middle, holding a long sword, looking away from us. Judging by the title written in oriental calligraphy, it’s a Japanese movie.

“Scoot over.”

I begrudgingly make room on the couch. He sits down soundly, puts his arm around me and pecks me on the cheek.

“Aw, you need to shave.”

He touches his face as if he just noticed the stubble on his face for the first time. He’s a goofball like that.

“Are we watching this tonight?” I ask.
“Do you mind?” He counters, while flipping the channel.

I check the back cover unenthusiastically. Images of violence and scary looking Japanese men.

“Well honey, I don’t know about this.” I say.

I like foreign movies as much as anybody. But it’s Friday night and we just had a nice dinner. I just want to vegetate a little on the couch without thinking too much. I look at him and there is his typical, I-want-very-much-to-watch-this look. He is a movie fanatic and I know that look. With a sigh, I give in.

“All right. But it better be good.”

We start watching the movie. And it’s terrible. Amidst all the blood and gore, I barely make out a storyline: Izo, the time traveling samurai, is the spirit of a medieval warrior who was tortured to death and now has to slash his way through salvation that may not come. It seems his soul can’t rest until everyone around him is dead.

After an hour of mounting loose limbs and heads by Izo’s blade, I’ve had enough. I turn to him to protest. Even before I open my mouth, I feel his hand squeezing mine. His eyes are still fixated on the screen.

“We will have some tea and cake after this.” He says without looking at me.

The movie is godawful. The splatter party continues until the very end. There is no resolution, no salvation, nothing. I’m seriously pissed off now.

“That was time well spent!”

He smiles and tries to hold my hand. I don’t let him.

“I’ll put water in the kettle.”

He takes off to the kitchen. I’m sitting there, my arms crossed thinking, no more of this foreign nonsense. He comes back with tea and cake. Then he tells me about the dead girl.

“So this belonged to a dead girl.”

He nods.

“And she moved on to another realm.”

Another nod.

“That’s good. Better than Izo’s fate.”
“Poor Izo.” He says.

I put the disc back into the case. And I ceremoniously put the DVD on our small DVD shelf next to our TV. Nice fit between Dawn of the Dead and The Thing. I look back at him. He’s sipping his Earl Grey.

“Let’s go hiking one of these days.” I smile.
“Let’s.” He smiles back.

Kissed

It happened in the school library during the finals.

How goes it?
Huh?
I said how goes it?
Uh, okay.
I found this on the floor here the other day.

She held up the silver necklace. At the bottom of its delicate silver chain, hung an amulet- a Chinese character for water.
She rolled her wheelchair deftly with one hand, toward me, for my benefit. I could detect a slight lilac scent as she approached. My eyes met hers. Those dark clear eyes. I could easily lose myself in them, I thought. Then I refocused my eyes on the necklace. I could feel my face getting red. My heart was beating fast and my throat was getting closed up. I felt dizzy.
No not mine. I thought I barely managed to say.

Oh, I thought it must’ve been yours. I don’t know why. I just thought you’d be wearing something like this. She smiled bashfully.

Beverly was her name. I’d seen her around in school. It was hard to miss her. She had long auburn hair and a beautiful, small, angular face. Half of her face was scarred and her voice was hoarse, as if she swallowed a fistful of sand. I didn’t know her back story at all. She could’ve been a victim of fire, disease…. I had no idea and didn’t really care.

The thing is, I had never been in love with someone before. She exuded certain vulnerability that brought this crazy strong maternal instinct out of me. The thought of her consumed my entire freshman year. I wanted to stroke her long strawberry hair, wanted so much to caress the scars on her face. I fantasized about lifting her up from her wheelchair and carrying her to a toilet when she needed to go potty. I saw myself devoting my life to her.

When my parents visited me during the first semester and asked me if I had a boyfriend yet, I couldn’t help myself but laugh. Thanks mom and dad, for not noticing my boyfriend-less, miserable high school years.

To my shame, it was her who talked to me first, not the other way around. I was born in March. So I was a Pisces.

Yes. It is mine.

I slipped onto her lap and before either of us realized what was happening, I kissed her.

Bizarre Love Triangle

Cidade Baixa/Lower City (2005) - Machado

A typical fatalist ménage à trois set in the slums of Rio, therefore, far more refreshing and vibrant. Deco(Lazaro Ramos) and Naldinho(Wagner Moura) are couple of childhood friends/young low lives squeezing by in the urban jungle called El Salvador. They give a ride on their boat a sexy girl, Karinna(Alice Braga of City of God, Blindness), who willingly negotiates the price with her body. Karinna takes a job at a sleazy exotic dance club and sells her body to fat ugly gringos while having steamy relationship with both Deco and Naldinho. Soon jealousy takes over them and rifts their friendship. Deco dabbles in boxing and is trying to go straight while Naldinho is still dreaming of small time crook success. Karinna is attracted to both of them and aware of her possibly destructive power she has over them. She's expecting a baby. What is she going to decide?

All three principal actors are very good: Lazaro Ramos, Wagner Moura and Alice Braga are all top notch portraying dreamers in the slum looking for better and quieter life. The energy and immediacy and color are just amazing. I just wished Machado focused more on naturally beautiful surroundings as much as he did on Braga's barely concealed breasts most of the running time.

Designer Korean Underwear

Something funny to share with you. God bless my mom. She's been sending me packages from time to time from Korea; books, magazines, pre-packaged food(instant noodle, dried seaweed, etc.) and clothes. My sister and brother said no to mom long ago. They have no use for them and would hate to see them go to waste, but I didn't have the nerve to say no. So things keep piling up in the corners of our already cramped apartment. Story of my life.

This time, she sent me a box full of underwear. If the idea of me still receiving underwear from mom from overseas isn't funny enough, the contents of the package made me and my wife laugh out loud.


They came in this ominous black box. It reads: Lie Sang Bong, the designer's name. Apparently, he is a big shot in the world of fashion. He looks like this:




Hmmm. I think I will go for Jackson Pollock look today.


These are not too bad. I can wear these. Except I'm not Lie Sang Bong.


These can be worn outside my jogging pants at night to deter the traffic.


Peace, dude. Pass the doobies.


At a glance, look like a harmless black pair. You can't really see in this picture, but have a see through front!


These are THE PAIR I'd happen to wear when brought and exposed in the ER in case of accident. They'd say, "this man knew how to live life!"

Thank you mom!

Iron Maiden

La Nana/The Maid (2009) - Silva

Raquel(Catalina Saavedra) has been working for the same Buenos Aires upper class family with 4 children for the last 23 years. She is a tough, no nonsense housemaid. From suffering a chronic headache and enormous house chores day in an day out, she has a fainting spell one day and her employer, Pilar, decides to hire another help. But Raquel is a little more than territorial when it comes to sharing her duties. It is hinted that she had another helper get fired.

After watching Headless Woman and reading about This film beforehand, I was sort of expecting another biting satire of Bourgeois life in the well to do Argentine society. Is it love she has for the family or is it that she is institutionalized after all these years? These questions turn out to be unimportant in the film. The Maid is more of a character study which is funny and warm without being coy or sentimental. Silva has an eye and ear for details and natural dialog that is very humanistic. Raquel favors the cute teenage older son of the family who is a chronic masturbator over the older daughter in college, of whom she sees as a threat(against what, we can only guess). All the tits and tats of domestic power struggle are often funny but not exaggerated.

After Raquel drives out 2 other 'competitors' with intolerable cruelty, she meets her match in Lucy(Mariana Loyola), a bespectacled younger woman with a winning smile and wholesome personality who is different in every aspect from her predecessors. They hit it off- uptight Raquel slowly opens up and we see her smiling. Lucy even invites her to spend christmas with her family in the country.

The Maid features one of my favorite movie endings in recent years. Slice of life that is both touching and real.

Sound of the Summer

Since it's getting cold, I'm putting this up to say good-bye to the Summer.
Am I the only one who finds video crass and ugly most of the time? The idea is for you to imagine the surroundings from the still photograph while you listen to it.

Walking around Washington Square Park *approx. 8 minutes

Click play on the player

Night Swimming

Funny how 23 years of your life fit in a small car. There you were, on the Interstate 5 on the way to Vancouver, B.C.. Your temporary home on the beach was waiting. You were just out of college and got a job at a tape-duplicating house for the broadcast TV networks. Your supervisor at the interview described it matter-of-factly as a “dead-end” job. It didn’t really matter to you because you needed a change of scenery- just had a colossal breakup with your girlfriend of five years and couldn’t stand Seattle. Everywhere you went, it reminded you of her.


You found the new home in the local newspaper. It was a whole basement of a house on the other side of the water from downtown Vancouver, near the University of British Columbia. The main attraction was of course, the beach. Traditionally, the water in the Pacific Northwest was too cold to swim no matter what season, but the inlets in Vancouver area were calm and not too cold during the height of Summer. You were never a good swimmer, but there was nothing like floating in the water. It seemed only in the water you felt secure enough you could completely relax. Water therapy is no joke. There is something about just being in the water, on a primordial level, that soothes us.


After going through the U.S./Canada border and getting a 2 year work Visa stamped on your passport, you felt officially out of the grim shadow of your past. Vancouver back then, as it is now, was a very beautiful city; a great combination of the splendid outdoors and the comfort of cosmopolitan living. Rumble in the Bronx, a Jackie Chan movie shot in Vancouver made you laugh, seeing the city with majestic mountains in the background doubling as the Bronx.


You picked up the house keys on the way to the city. When you pulled up there, you couldn’t believe your luck. The two-story house was beautiful and it was only two blocks from the beach. There was even a basketball hoop on the side, right outside the entrance to your new home. You could already see yourself shooting hoops against the setting sun. Life was going to be good.


Then through the veiled narrow windows on the lower side of the house, you saw something inside your new residence. It was as if someone was still living there. You opened the door to your own private entrance in the back of the house. To your great surprise, the room was filled with someone else’s life: a bed, computer, TV, dresser, dining table, all the kitchen utensils, books and magazines, complete with an ashtray with cigarette butts. It was as if someone who was living there just stepped out to get a cup of coffee somewhere. You panicked and shouted empty hellos but no one replied. After you checked every nooks and crannies of the room and found no one, you called the landlady.


Upon hearing what you had to say, she sounded just as surprised as you were. “All his stuff are still there?” she kept asking. You told her that you didn’t have anywhere else to go. And that your whole life was in that beat up small Chevy of yours. She told you she’d send someone and hung up on you. Ten minutes later, Gerri, a daughter of your landlady pulled up. Before you got a chance to open your mouth, she glanced at the room and got on the phone with her mother right away. After a heated exchange, she got off the phone and told you what was up; the man who had been living there stopped paying rent 3 month ago. Having a lot of different properties in various parts of the city and busy taking care of them, they just assumed the man simply moved out, and they never actually came to check the place before renting it out to you. You were beyond mad at this point and demanded the situation rectified right away. Gerri got on the phone again. Then she handed the phone to you. “Why don’t you move everything out of the room?” the landlady asked you. You were flabbergasted. “You need a place to sleep tonight, don’t you? Why don’t you start moving stuff out of the room? Gerri will help you.” You tell her that you’d do no such thing. You weren’t about to touch another person’s personal belongings. You didn’t want to be responsible for any of that. She assured you that the man was MIA and she would be one hundred percent responsible for any hassles in the future.


You don’t know why you went ahead the way you did. You were young and stupid you suppose. Maybe it was your landlady’s promise of one rent-free month or you were too exhausted with the ordeal, you wanted to get it over with. You started to move the stuff out of the room with the help of Gerri. “Just put stuff in these large garbage bags.” She instructed. What about all the personal stuff? “We’ll put them in boxes and store them in the shack.” There was indeed a storage shack in the back of the house. Gerri and you worked well into the evening when the early June sun was finally setting. It was ridiculous any way you looked at it, there you were, throwing away someone’s life out on to the curb in huge black garbage bags- about 12 in all. Photos, documents and computer were going into the shack. Gerri took some with her as she left, never to be seen again.


You started unloading your life from your car. It was late, and you slept on the carpeted floor surrounded by boxes. Obviously, this wasn’t a good way to start out in a new city, but life is not that dramatic. It went on- this little incident becoming a distant memory, a little blip in your life. Indeed, life went on its course, the job was dull but it paid the rent. You got to work on some films that were shot in Vancouver (the Hollywood up north) and even managed to make a documentary on the side. There was even a brief romance with a French intern you met at a movie set. Your life in the new city was pretty good. But most of all, you like the beach the best. Just a couple of blocks from the house, the not so crowded beach was a perfect place to hang out in the 3 gorgeous summer months that only the Pacific Northwest could produce. You swam daily in that cold water. The best time to take a dip was at night. You lunged yourself into the cold Pacific Ocean. You floated alone, among the thousands of blinking stars in the sky and the city lights on the horizon. The dark water wasn’t scary, but calming. You had aspirations. You had a future out in the open with limitless possibilities. You were restless. But when you were in that dark water, all the worries and anxiety melted away. You let yourself go and surrendered yourself to the flow of water.


* * *


It had been more than a year since you’d been living in the new city. It was a rainy autumn afternoon. You were doing some freelance editing work, transcribing and logging the dialog for a documentary project. There was a knock on the window and you looked up. A gaunt, tall middle-aged man was looking through the window. He was wearing a baseball cap to hide his baldness and had thin eyebrows. “I used to live here,” He said. Your heart skipped a beat.


You helped him retrieve what was left of his life from the shack. He had AIDS and had been deathly ill. He’d been in the hospital all this time. You offered him a cup of tea. He reminisced as he held up a picture of himself from the rubble for you to see- him as a young man: a nerdy looking teenager with a big Jew-fro.


“I was in a coma for the last six months.” He said.
“What was it that made you to wake up?” You asked.
“Don’t really know. It was about time I suppose.” He responded.
“Welcome back.”
“Thanks.”
“What was it like, being in a coma?” You asked him. He thought about this a bit before answering.
“It was like swimming at night. Like you are back in your mother’s womb, feeling completely secure…”


He no longer had the contact number for the landlady. You gave it to him. You exchanged good-byes.

Power of Cinema

If you have ten minutes to spare, please watch this. Magical.
Ten Minutes Older (1978) - Herz Frank

Love, Actually?

Lovers on the Bridge/Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991) - Carax
Experienced it for the first time on the big screen, 9.25.09

Ever since I saw Lovers on the Bridge in the early 90s on a bootlegged VHS tape, it has become my favorite film of all time; vibrant images, young Juliette Binoche, manic uglyman Denis Lavant, amour fou, naïveté... what more can I say?

This unlikely love story btwn a young homeless man, Alex(Lavant) and a heartbroken painter with serious eye problem, Michele(Binoche) gets to me every time I watch it. For me, Carax was the only one who successfully articulated the first love with all the trimmings- its selfish nature, its unimaginable happiness/pain, on the screen. I haven't seen anything like that before or since.

Lovers is ridiculous in its scope- the most expensive French film made at the time because they couldn't get the permit to shoot on the Pont-Neuf bridge(the oldest in Paris), they had to build a replica of the bridge nearby. But I'll save you from all the well-publicized details here as it is an old news. The night of the Centennial celebration in Paris with fireworks and water skiing serves as a backdrop for Michele and Alex to get drunk and dance around like maniacs - the scene is truly a visual feat. I don't know how Carax managed to pull all of that off. Logistical nightmare it was I'm sure.

I remember an interview with Binoche where she broke down and cried when asked about the film and Carax. She and Carax were romantically involved during the filming(They did two films together). Hey, if anyone could make Binoche cry, he/she earns my respect.

Do I really care about Lovers ending in an upbeat, overly optimistic mood? Not really. But whenever I defend cinema as an artistic medium(I generally don't) against literature or music, I usually mention Lovers on the Bridge. The film is really one of a kind- the energy, the physicality of it will never be duplicated in cinema or in any other form. Watching Lovers on the Bridge on the big screen was a blissful experience, to say the least (thanks to Martin Scorsese who helped release the film in theater in the US).

best birthday gift I ever got

Birthdays are drag. I hate birthdays. Just a reminder you are not getting any younger. Then I received this from my lady:



A handmade Kaspar Hauser (in)action figure!!!

On the Highline under the umbrella

Highline is abandoned elevated tracks turned city park in Meat Packing District in New York City.



This experiment still needs work. You might have to turn the volume way up or use earphones/headphones for your maximum pleasure.



http://www.thehighline.org/