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December 23, 2006
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December 22, 2006
New Year's Resolutions
1. Be more decisive.
2. Hmmm....
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December 19, 2006
Buddhist temple in Hong Kong.
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December 17, 2006
Faves
I'm always saying I'm not a musical person but...here are the most recent acquisitions at the iTunes Store for slatkushee's iPod :)
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Henry Mancini - "Pink Panther Tune" - coolest music ever.
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Harry James - "You made me love you" - first heard on Woody Allen's "Hannah and her sisters". In fact, Hannah has the best movie soundtrack ever.
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Fatboy Slim - "Bird of Prey" - because I love Jim Morrison's voice and The Housemartins were one of my 80's favourite bands.
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Geoffrey Burgon - "Brideshead revisited (Main Theme)" and "Sebastian's Summer" - most beautiful TV series ever; the rare case, or probably the only case, where I find the series better than the book.
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Beastie Boys - "Ch-Check it out" - I love the concept of jewish rappers.
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Miles Davis - "So what" - second coolest music ever.
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December 15, 2006
Macau
The bottle next to this one was Portuguese wine. Very odd.
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I had just read an article on the New Yorker about how the Las Vegas millionaire Steve Wynn had poked an elbow (and ruined) a 139 million dollar Picasso - Le rêve pictured above - he owned.
Wynn opened a luxurious casino in Macau. While walking around the obssessive looking gamblers, I said to R. I had no idea how did the roulette thing worked. Just to show me the mechanics of the thing, he bets on my birthdate. The roulette spins and the ball falls on 7 - I was born on Oct 7th! We collect our money and leave immediately; oh the joy of taking money from the I-have-so-much-money-I-can-dig-a-hole-on-my-own-Picasso Steve Wynn!
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Macau has the feeling of a ghost town or something out of a twilight zone episode. There are signs written in Portuguese everywhere but I couldn't see any portuguese people neither meet anyone who spoke the language.
A pharmacy and Portuguese custard pies, a traditional pastry. Apparently it's a Macau specialty too.
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December 14, 2006
Amadeo Amadeo
There's a fantastic exhibition going on in Lisboa at the Gulbenkian Foundation! A very complete showing of Amadeo de Souza Cardoso's works, some of them held in private collections and unseen by the public until now. Fell in love with his drawings.
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Amadeo de Souza Cardoso was a Portuguese modernist painter; he went to live in Paris in 1906 and was friends with Modigliani and Brancusi. He participated in the famous Armory Show:
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December 12, 2006
Wabi Sabi
"Imperfection is in some sort essential to what we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. In all things that live there are ceratin irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed." -- John Ruskin, On Art and Life
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It just came to me the memory of reading a Roman Polanski biography, that description of the moment he got the news of Sharon Tate's murder and couldn't stop thinking about a little scar she had on her knee and how he wouldn't see it ever again.
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December 11, 2006
I was thinking how I was such an avid reader as a teenager partly because I wanted to know so many things and books seemed to be the best source for instruction for whatever I didn't know yet, intellectually or emotionally. In part all this reading was helpful, in other ways I suppose I got some prejudices on matters I didn't have enough real experience to have an opinion on. Yes, I was - and I still am - an impatient person. And one of my favourite quotes is still Einstein's "There's nothing as practical as a good theory". Or something like that.
The best part of getting older, book wise, is rereading. If you're fairly smart, you'll understand the book on a first read. For instance, I read "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" when I was 17 and thought it was brilliant. I read it again 12 years later. As I finished it, closed it and laid it on the bed of a hotel room in a distant country that smelled of musk & sea & dirt, I put my hand on my forehand and realized how naive I had been. I imagined Milan Kundera, somewhere in France, in a control room filled with TV sets from floor to ceiling, monitoring his readers reactions, spying on me and going: "Ha! Silly girl! Did you think you could grasp the meaning of my book the first time you read it without having been through love & jealousy & desire & heartbreak?"
I wonder what will it tell me if I reread it 10 years from now?
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Before & After #4 (the last of the series)
Macau, Largo do Senado, 1930's and today
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December 10, 2006
Before & After #3
Macau, Post Office Building, 1930's and today
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December 05, 2006
Before & After #2
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My maternal grandfather was stationed in Macau in the 1930's as an infantry soldier. The army duties weren't heavy since he was also one very good wing back at soccer and played for the Macau Army Football team. The childhood memories I treasure the most are the quiet afternoons when he would tell me stories of Macau, of football matches and of the goals he scored, the Chinese ladies he dated, how he found impossible to eat with chopsticks and when he'd show me the scar on his leg, the imprint of a boot stud a Hong Kong player left on him during a ball dispute.
So, my first visit to Macau felt like a revisit.
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Macau, Camões Garden and Grotto, 1930's and today.
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December 03, 2006
Before & After #1
Macau, border with mainland China (Portas do Cerco), 1930's and today.
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