Oh to Be Able to Type in the Pool

Went for a swim just now. By the time I tumbled off the bed, had a cup of tea and some breakfast, went through my morning ablutions, and got myself organised to leave the house, time had already skipped into the second half of 11 o'clock. Getting to the pool at lunch time, possibly combined with a steely, dusty, fluffy threatening sky, meant that I had it all to myself, and it was nice to have a swim for the first time in more than a year. While loping along through the laps, I was struck with an interesting short story idea, and as I swam along, the sentences and images took form in my head and unfolded and unfurled and darted around. I even came up with an ending for it. As the words scuttled through my head, I couldn't help wishing that I could write it all down at that very moment, so as to not lose these sparks ricocheting off the walls of my skull. I really think that so much good (?) composition of mine is done in my head when I have no means of preserving it, and almost all of it gets lost in the murky depths of my mind as it leaps onto another source of external stimulation or decides to traipse down an entirely different thought avenue. I tried to keep the plot bunny alive and hopping in my mind over lunch and on the way back, but it inevitably drifted to less prominent parts of my brain (like how rabbits slowly make their way across the field in their shuffly, sniffly grazings). After hitting the power button of my laptop, my fingers decided to check up on the various sites that enjoy my just ever so slightly obsessive-compulsive checking and surfing, before finally starting up Word. All I've managed to produce is 98 pathetic words that cover a mere splinter of the grand plan that unravelled itself through my brain while in the pool. I'm using the same font as I did for my dissertation, and it is now triggering oh so lovely memories of sitting hunched before the glowing screen and staring that the Word Count That Refused to Budge. I am also being slightly hypnotised by my animated lj userpic.

Maybe I'll get back to trying to reproduce and preserve those swirls of inspiration.

Vroom Whine Squeal Zoom

I tried formulating (hurhurhur) an anthropological reading of Formula One earlier today. I got as far as thinking about how the drivers can be seen as portraying a seemingly physically immobile ('just sitting in the car' - an erroneous impression, in actual fact), and yet highly mobile (high speed racing, jetting over the world) form of masculinity, and was thinking about the equation of men with shiny, fast machines. I was vaguely wondering if any of this represented a shift from any perceived so-called 'traditional' forms of masculinity. Then my brain gave up, and I decided to happily devote myself to trying to memorise the drivers' helmet covers. Shiny lights, ooooh.

Stumble Mumble Trumble

So we have tripped our way into the final quarter of 2008. A couple of days ago, I was involved in a conversation where I was convinced for a moment that Teachers' Day (1st September) had yet to come. Denial or mental degeneration - you decide.

Anyway, I'd been meaning to type out something vaguely like a review for a film I saw about a week ago, The Murder of the Inugami Clan (犬神家の一族). While googling and imdb-ing about after seeing the film, I realised that it seemed really familiar to me because it was showing at the 2006 Tokyo International Film Festival, and I saw it while looking through the line-up. It's a 2006 remake, by Ichikawa Kon, of the film he did in 1976. 

The film was whodunit murder mystery, set in the days just after Japan's defeat in WWII, in the Shinshuu region, which is where the Japanese alps are. The patriarch of the wealthy Inugami family dies, leaving behind three daughters, each mothered by a different woman, and their progeny. When the details of his strange will are disclosed, blood starts being splattered, literally, in wonderfully kitsch old school red-pastel-paint style, and it is up to the bumbling (and just ever so slightly unhygienic) self-styled private detective, Kindaiichi, to unravel the mysteries that stretch back in time, and solve the case.

I suppose the film was slightly stylised, as evidenced by the ostentatiously fake blood, and the state of some of the murder victims. It did have rather happy dollops of humour as well, despite some of the splatter elements. If you squint at the picture I placed above, you can see a creepy white-headed fella sitting near the middle. That's Sukekiyo, the eldest grandson who had his face destroyed in the war, and wears that mask to hide his wounds, which he does show the rest of the family, provoking gasps of alarm and disgust both on and off screen. 

All in all, I thought it was a pretty good film, and really enjoyed the atmosphere and the setting of the story. The luxuriant green of the Japanese summer, the fraying wooden building-lined streets, the click-clack of clogs as our hero runs down them. I love period pieces, though this doesn't go that far back in time. The mystery plot was also rather good, though not exactly the most wonderfully brilliant of revelations. But it was good enough for me to enjoy. ^-^ 

I went to see the film all by my lonesome, quite possibly a first for me in S'pore. It was the last day of school before the one-week long September break, and so the cinema was teeming with packs of uniform-clad teenagers. I think there's something akin to a stigma attached to watching a movie or eating out in a restaurant alone in this society. In Tokyo, I remember eating out alone or sitting in a cafe alone was a tad too common. I think London probably felt like it had the best balance and atmosphere for solitude. Hmmm.

Anyway, I've also seen Wall•E since, and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I suppose Naomi's slightly hesitant response to it made me lower my expectations, and so the film didn't disappoint. 

The not so latent Sci-Fi geek in me lapped up the desolate futuristic scape, and I wouldn't have minded if the film spent an hour nuzzling its way through Wall•E's little 'home'. I think this was the best Pixar film since Finding Nemo. And one of the more inventive ones. 

Speaking of Sci-Fi, I -finally- got down to watching the first episode of Gankutsuou, the anime interpretation of Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo, one of my all time favourite books. I'd heard of the series before, and was interested, but after finding out that a certain voice is in it, I was determined to watch it. However, it took me something like 2 months to finally get down to checking it out, and I'm glad I did. The setting was transferred to a fascinating space age that retains a period air. The animation was full of rich textures and they employed a strange technique where by the patterns of clothing stayed stationary even when the characters moved. So you'd get the bizarre feeling of feeling as if the characters were walking through pattern-scapes. At first I thought it was a fault with the video, but I'm now pretty sure that was the desired effect. 

The series opened with the moccoletto scene, which I loved in the book. I was inspired to dig up my old notebook where I'd copied out bits from Monte Cristo all those years ago. Will get down to watching the next episode soon. :3 They're releasing the DVD box set in November, and I'm toying with the idea of either buying it, or asking for it for my birthday. Haha. 

My phone is currently attached to the 'umbilical cord' a bit too far for bluetooth to work, so I can't transfer pictures to my computer. The pic-spammage will have to wait, I suppose! 

Photo Flow

Just going to pic spam a little since I've been a jolly snapper with my phone. The one above was taken on my way home on Tuesday afternoon.

The following are from lunch at the Island Cafe yesterday.


And now for a little rage: I hate how it's noisy in residential areas in the day. Leaf-blowers are usually what drive my frustration levels up, and today there's some hammering going on punctuated with the sound of wood making contact with other hard surfaces. Grrr.

The Butt that Itches

No, I do not have some skin ailment in an embarrassing and inconvenient location. The title refers to a Chinese turn of phrase used to describe the impetus for the ill-advised biting off of more than one can chew, foolhardily overstepping boundaries, and the like. For example, perhaps, "Saddam's butt itched, so he decided to provoke the States with lies about weapons of mass destruction, and so ended up swinging from a rope instead of carrying on as a happy (not so) little dictator."

Well, in my case, I decided that I wasn't spending enough time in front of the computer as it is, and so volunteered my services for an online translation (fan) project. Japanese to English. On lj. Of a certain someone's blog. So I spent something like 4 hours last night labouring over bizarre sentence structures and even wierder katakana words [katakana: the alphebet/script used in Japanese usually for foreign words and loan words]. I'm heavily dependent on the online J-> E dictionary, and am struggling to make the text sound natural in English. Booh.

In other news, I spent quite a long while (maybe amost an hour?) in Kino yesterday looking at manga and trying to find stuff by Yuki Kaori (she who wrote the Count Cain series I was blithering on about in an earlier entry). Was about to give up scouring the shelves when I found her books nestled right next to Hino Matsuri's (of Vampire Knight fame) and realised that she was for some strange reason out of the alphabetical order. But anyway, I chose to go with Neji, a single volume standalone, as they only had the fifth title in the Count Cain series, God Child.


It has 3 seperate but continuous stories, and I've finished 2 so far. It's science fiction as opposed to the fantasy/horror/gothic genres I know her for, but I'm enjoying it a lot. The stories centre around Neji, a young boy who was cryrogenically frozen along with his girlfriend after they were brutally killed in 1992. His corpse is appropriated by a government body that carries out research into ESP and other powers, and they experiment on him. When he finally wakes up 40 years later, his memories are wiped, and they coerce him into training his powers and try to make an assassin out of him. Her art's pretty, but it has the problem of having characters that are hard to distinguish from one another.

Edit: I forgot to add that I was really surprised to find that the volume I bought was from the first print run, way back in 2001. So does that mean that the book's been sitting on the bookstore's shelves for the past 7 years or so? Hmmm.


And here we have a shot of a yummy green tea flavoured mooncake!!! Bought our first box of mooncakes a few days ago. Gosh I love green tea mooncakes! Anne and Pygmy might recognise the saucer in the picture. :p I realised it was the perfect size for these miniature mooncakes! Wehey!

Oh, I -did- manage to get a clam/flip phone in the end! I threw my vague sense of brand loyalty into the air and went with Sony Ericsson. ^-^ I'm still not used to their predictive text platform, though. Hrmmm.

Looks like the rainy (more like stormy) spell we've been having is still going to continue for a while. It was annoyingly sunny for a while earlier this morning, but the felines and canines are now descending upon this tiny little splodge of a country once more.

A Mean Meander Followed by Mildness

 
I can't concentrate properly on typing this when I can hear my maternal ancestor yakking on the phone. I miss having the entire house to myself. Haha. :p 

But anyway, lately, I've been ranting quite a bit about the lack of cultural stimulus and creation in this country. Literature, music, art, or film. Only smatterings that don't seem to rise above a certain level of quality.  When I was in Iceland, I saw that there was a flourishing publishing industry. The total number of Icelandic speakers in the entire world hardly rises above 300,000 individuals, and yet, they are able to sustain a literary scene, AND produce a Literature Nobel Prize laureate. Sunny litte Spore, with her overcrowdedness of 4.5 million people, is in an appalling state when it comes to literature. There was an article in the newspapers (All hail the oh-so-wonderful Straits Times) yesterday, I believe, about book circulation statistics for the National Library. It appears that what my fellow countrymen enjoy reading most are ghost stories. One of the most popular local writers is Russell Lee, who authors the True Singapore Ghost Stories series, which has been floating around since I was a kid. There's also this Mr Midnight series for children, which ranks right behind Harry Potter. If my memory serves me well, I think Mitch Albom's books as well as The Kite Runner were at the top of the adult fiction list. 

Oh, I am filled to the brim with trembling patriotism when I think of my beloved motherland and her glorious ethos of good grades, business, finance, and banking. Hooray! Let me conform! I want to volunteer for lobotomy and make the transformation into a reproducing drone~! \(^o^)/

-

Hmmm. I think that came out a little bit harsher than I expected. But whatever. Haha. I am filled with envy when I look at some of the Japanese creative industries - publishing, animation, and music. Ok, fair enough, wikipedia informs me that Japan has a population of 127 million. Hardly a fair comparison. But still. Also, books are dirt cheap there, and there is that lovely huge second hand industry. Oh well.

My two-year old mobile phone is starting to die on me. It was already at a certain stage of being handicapped, but now, the screen has displayed (haha) a tendency towards white-outs. Not good. I desperately want a clam/flip phone, and have something akin to brand loyalty to Nokia, but the only model that is a clam phone has yet to be releas

ed, and is bound to be rather pricey when it eventually is. Boo. 

I am now the proud owner of a 500GB external hard drive. Rather excessive, but since it only cost $10 (approx. £3+) more than a 320GB one, I decided to plan ahead for the future. :p

Another purchase I made that made me happy, was the August issue of Cure, which subtitles itself "Japanesque Rock + Visual Styling Magazine". As you can see, Ayabie are on the cover, and the photo shoot was done in a carnival/funfair setting. I read part of the interview, and at one point, they started talking about their various pets. Intetsu has a floppy eared rabbit! Haha.  

I think I'm going to have to sit around on my butt at home for the next few days to save some of the not-exactly green stuff. Oh wait, there's something called 'Studying for the Japanese proficiency test" which is supposed to be my primary occupation. 

I can't seem to get the formatting of images right. Grrr. Well, this is on the right, but I wanted it in the centre, and now I can't seem to change it. *shakes fist* Oh well. Anyway, it's a pretty pretty picture of a pretty pretty pick (yay, I score for my wide range of vocabulary!) from Intetsu's blog. Picture thief I am. 

By the way, the "ceiling fan" tag here shall serve as my tag for random-ness. 

Oh, and the picture right at the top of the post I snapped while walking back home yesterday evening. It was a nice and atmospherically (in both senses of the word?) overcast day. Also somehow managed to be drenched or splattered by too many raindrops while we were out.  

"And the clouds will open for me"

I feel an urge to redeem this blog from the frivolous, babbling posts that have filled its archives so far. Haha.


It is now raining in that wonderful way it can only do so properly in the tropics. There was the build-up to the storm, with overcast and cloud crowded skies, with the wind whipping it all up. And now it's all coming down, accompanied by the languid rumblings of the thundergods. Lovely. We had rain yesterday as well, which made the bus windows mist up when I was riding down south for a class gathering. It was my class for only less than three months, and I hadn't seen almost all of the people there in real life for something like 6 years. Deliberated for quite a bit before asking Jg to tell me to go. Haha. I am stupid like that - I'd be indecisive, more or less make up my mind, but would want someone to tell me to commit to the choice, or to ask me to do so.

Here's a snap of the view from the bus, with the lights dispersed by the misty windows:


And the view from the boardwalk of sorts where a very stoned Jg and I hung out:


I told Jg "You and I make a very good combination when you're stoned", which is so true, because when Jg has full command of her mental capacities, we'd both end up wanting to talk. A lot. So I take advantage of her vacantness and happily prattle on.

Ok, really need to get out of these pyjamas before Cc arrives.