hyphenated - Filed under 'books & art'

January 19, 2010 12:10 PM

rien n’arrete nos espirits

Reading about and seeing pictures of the earthquake aftermath in Haiti is devastating. I can't even fathom how hellish it must be there right now. And I can't imaging the helplessness Haitians living outside Haiti must be feeling, not knowing the fate of their family and friends on the island. I find myself thinking of the large Haitian population in Montreal. According to StatCan:

...the large majority of Canadians of Haitian origin live in Montreal. In 2001, 83% of Canada’s Haitian community made Montreal their home. That year, there were almost 70,000 Canadians of Haitian descent living in Montreal, where they made up 2% of the metropolitan area’s overall population.

The video for Arcade Fire's song, Haiti, is particularly moving as it showcases images from Haiti that depict the country's poverty, but also the strength and spirit of the Haitian community.

And the lyrics to the song are so powerful, especially when interpreted in the context of the devastation caused by the earthquake:

Haiti, mon pays,
wounded mother I’ll never see.
Ma famille set me free.
Throw my ashes into the sea.

Mes cousins jamais nes
hantent les nuits de Duvalier.
Rien n’arrete nos espirits.
Guns can’t kill what soldiers can’t see.

In the forest we are hiding,
unmarked graves where flowers grow.
Hear the soldiers angry yelling,
in the river we will go.

Tous les morts-nes forment une armee,
soon we will reclaim the earth.
All the tears and all the bodies
bring about our second birth.

Haiti, never free,
n’aie pas peur de sonner l’alarme.
Tes enfants sont partis,
in those days their blood was still warm

As an aside, note the french pronunciation of the country's name (as per the second line of the song)... Ha-EE-Ti versus Hate-Ti.

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January 8, 2010 11:27 AM

cotton candy overdose

Sometimes 140 characters isn't enough. And this is one of those times:

'Eat, Pray, Love' reads like a very long article in Cosmo, O mag, or a compilation of self-absorbed yet insincere blog posts. Not a fan, but

That's how far I got on Twitter. Even after deleting some words and trying to rephrase the tweet, I still wasn't even close to articulating my thoughts. Hence, the blog post.

Basically, my criticism of Elizabeth Gilbert's book can be summed up by going to Amazon.com, reading the reviews of customers who ascribed 1-star, and compiling them. Or, you could just read this one (and the comments in response to it) because I think it best captures how I feel about the book [1]:

So, I'm not going to provide my own in-depth review of the book here. I will say that if you read Eat, Pray, Love and liked it, maybe I understand why. It might be the same reason as why I sometimes find myself watching Oprah (and enjoying it on some level) and why I used to religiously read magazines like seventeen, Sassy, Jane, and O cover-to-cover. Guilty pleasures that I'm not proud to admit to (although Sassy and Jane are less embarrassing than the other two). I'm actually cringing as I type.

Somehow, I can justify magazines - fluffy content that is quick and easy to digest - as guilty pleasures. I find this harder to do with books. In my mind, books are supposed to be intellectually stimulating, hearty, and ought to require additional inputs (i.e., thinking) to digest. While I do enjoy small amounts of cotton candy periodically, Eat, Pray, Love is like being served 108 sticks of artificially-coloured pink cotton candy and being asked to consume all of it without feeling nauseous. Perhaps I'm an elitist when it comes to books. I can accept that, though, without cringing.

As an aside, having perused Amazon's reviews of this book, it's clear to me that the online experience is much more valuable than what is offered in-store when it comes to buying books. Traditional methods of selling books relies on the assumption that everyone who bought the book subsequently liked it and the discretion of the publisher to extract and showcase the most favourable reviews (or sections of reviews, or parts of reviews that can be made to sound favourable with the replacement of text with ellipses). By offering transparency, Amazon.com changes the game.

The accolades printed on the covers of Eat, Pray, Love, combined with its best-seller status, present the book as a safe bet. But, less than half of Amazon reviewers loved the book, while 20% hated it. Overall, the book garnered 3.5 stars out of 5. I probably wouldn't purchase a book based on those stats. Would you?

[1] I have not read The Human Stain but now think that maybe I should. Cows on an organic farm as a metaphor... sounds interesting.

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December 15, 2009 12:21 PM

cinémathèque

In the past, I watched a movie every couple of weeks - roughly twenty-five movies per annum. I think I've watched at least that many movies in the last six weeks. My movie intake has substantially increased thanks to a roommate who watches movies like other people listen to music. While he works with movies playing in the background, I get sucked in and, voila!, I find myself watching yet another movie.

Of the movies that I've watched in the past months, a few stand out. Inglorious Bastards, Moon, and Empire of the Sun rise to the top of the list. I hadn't seen the first two movies before, but I had seen Empire of the Sun and watching it a second time confirmed for me what a great movie it is.

Christian Bale, who was thirteen when the movie was made in 1987, and John Malkovich are great in their respective roles, but the cinematography, the story, and the themes underlying the story ultimately steal the show and resonated with me (this might have something to do with my affinity for books and movies set in historical China and Japan).

Empire of the Sun provides a captivating perspective of the occupation of China by the Japanese in WWII. Elements of the war are relayed to the audience through the eyes of a rich, spoiled foreign boy who is suddenly transplanted to an environment where his affluence and status become instantaneously irrelevant yet his sense of entitlement takes time to fade. His childhood innocence evaporates rapidly in the POW camp and is replaced with a cocky adolescent naiveté that is simultaneously endearing and exasperating. I found this paragraph from a 1988 article in the New York Times to be quite interesting:

''I was attracted to the main character being a child,'' says Mr. Spielberg [...]. ''But I was also attracted to the idea that this was a death of innocence, not an attenuation of childhood [...]. This was the opposite of 'Peter Pan.' This was a boy who had grown up too quickly, who was becoming a flower long before the bud had ever come out of the topsoil. And, in fact, a flower that was a gifted weed.''

I also appreciated the humanity instilled on the Japanese as a result of telling the story from the standpoint of a boy whose outlook hasn't been tainted by political rhetoric and wartime propaganda. Rather than being a black-and-white war story of good-versus-evil, the lines are blurred and the audience is left having to reconcile with various shades of grey. The subtly clever title alludes to the ambiguity by combining Japan's "land of the rising sun" with the idea that "the sun never sets on the British Empire".

Filed under // books & art San Francisco

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November 5, 2009 11:05 AM

ornate and ornamental

I have mixed feelings about the book I picked up in July (I think) and only finished yesterday. Yes, it took me the better part of four months to read Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez. I'm not a slow reader, but this was a slow book.

The story is not very complicated, but it is told in a meandering and elaborate fashion. The ornate qualities of the book made it difficult for me to be drawn in. Whenever the plot thickened, the author would digress into a prolonged and detailed description of previous, seemingly unrelated, events that introduced new, seemingly superfluous, characters. At these junctures, I felt the urge to skim until the main plot resumed. I wouldn't describe the book as a page turner, unless you were turning the pages to skip to where the plot resumes.

But I didn't skim or skip any parts of the book due to the aesthetic quality of the prose, which was really the most enjoyable part of the book. The ornamental and rich nature of the writing made the novel deliciously poetic. I didn't want to miss out on any particularly satisfying passages embedded in the author's digressions from the main plot so I was reluctant to bypass any parts of the book.

In particular, I loved García Márquez's examination of the concepts of memory and nostalgia throughout the novel. Here are some of the passages that stood out:

❝

Everything seemed smaller to him than when he left, poorer and sadder, and there were so many hungry rats in the rubbish heaps of the street that the carriage horses stumbled in fright. On the long trip from the port to his house [...] he found nothing that seemed worthy of his nostalgia. Defeated, he turned his head away so that his mother would not see, and he began to cry in silence.

❞

❝

However, when she thought he was completely erased from her memory, he reappeared where she least expected him, a phantom of her nostalgia. [...] While more recent events blurred in just a few days, the memories of her legendary journey [...] were as sharp as if they had happened yesterday, and they had the perverse clarity of nostalgia.

❞

❝

[...] he realized that the Magdelena, father of waters, one of the great rivers of the world, was only an illusion of memory [...] [F]ifty years of uncontrolled deforestation had destroyed the river [...] the hunters fir skins from tanneries in New Orleans had exterminated the alligators that, with yawning mouths, had played dead for hours on end in the gullies along the shore as the lay in wait for butterflies, the parrots with their shrieking and the monkeys with their lunatic screams has died out as the foliage was destroyed, the manatees with their great breasts that has nursed their young and wept on the banks in a forlorn woman's voice were an extinct species, annihilated by the armored bullets of hunters for sport.

❞

Seeing as the novel was translated from Spanish, I wonder how true the translation is to the original words of García Márquez. Regardless of the authenticity of the words, there were certain phrases or passages, such as those above, that I found myself stopping to re-read. Probably another reason why it took me so long to finish the book.

Filed under // books & art sustainability

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August 23, 2009 1:38 PM

california

I knew that there were a lot of songs about California, but I had no clue that there were this many. I came across this video yesterday and was reminded how much Joni Mitchell's music resonates with me. Her voice brings me back to wonderful weekends at home on the farm (my parents are fans) and her lyrics are rich, evocative, simple, and strong.

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August 5, 2009 8:23 PM

fantasy fiction

Recently, I finished reading the His Dark Materials trilogy, which includes The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman. John gave me the book for my birthday last year and I finally got around to reading it. Quite honestly, I wasn't too keen on committing to reading a 933 page, three part volume. But, being a book written for children, I decided that it was reasonable to include on my list of summer reading. I was looking forward to finding out what all the fuss was about.

Prior to the release of the film version of The Golden Compass, which I haven't seen, I didn't know much about the novel. I only became aware of the controversy associated with the book when the film came out. During the media coverage of the debates surrounding the film, I was shocked to learn that the Chronicles of Narnia had strong religious undertones — I was quite young when I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and all of the religious references obviously didn't register. Quite honestly, I'm not sure I'd catch them all now given my very rather superficial understanding of Christianity [1]. Of the Narnia series, Pullman has said: "It is monumentally disparaging of girls and women. It is blatantly racist." (via The Guardian)

Needless to say, as an atheist, I was intrigued by Pullman's literary rebuttal to C.S.Lewis (and was thinking that I should re-read some C.S. Lewis to get a better appreciation of its racist and sexist undertones).

And the verdict? I enjoyed His Dark Materials quite a bit and would recommend it. I found the plot a bit slow in places, but generally captivating. I appreciated that the anti-Church sentiments were unmistakeable yet embedded in the story and presented in such a way as to create suspense and keep the reader guessing. Pullman's re-branding of the notion of Original Sin was brilliant as was his rendering of the afterlife. And the female characters were strong and smart, which I loved. I also enjoyed the author's presentation of scientific theories alongside fantastical concepts throughout the trilogy.

Many of the themes explored His Dark Materials are not those that a child would necessarily understand. Although Pullman's books are so very much different than the Chronicles of Narnia series, they share one thing in common: any person who reads them in their childhood should re-read them as an adult.

And, finally, when it comes to fantasy fiction, J.R.R. Tolkien still takes the cake in my books.

[1] Religion has not played a central role in my life — I learned most of what I know about Christianity in MRE (Moral and Religious Education) in elementary school. MRE involved separating the Catholics from the Protestants. For this purpose, I was classified as Protestant (the lone Jew in my class had to spend MRE sitting in the Principle's Office, which I didn't perceive as being wrong on so many levels until much later in life). We learned the main stories from the Old and New Testaments and we watched religious movies, like the Ten Commandments, and we made decorations for the teacher's church at Easter. Very instructive.

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July 22, 2009 11:03 PM

chemistry + physics = beauty

I presume that the environmental impacts of fireworks is probably high. The impacts of the noise and the smoke and the chemicals on the surrounding environment is the one thing about fireworks that I don't appreciate.

I do enjoy the bright colours and the grandeur and the magic of fireworks though. Kevin can attest that I get pretty excited about fireworks. I am drawn to the combination of an explosive substance with chemicals to create huge, awe-inspiring, fleeting art installations. Being rooted in scientific principles (and reminiscent of a high school chemistry experiment), fireworks are an art form that appeals to me. Chemistry + physics = beauty.

Every summer, Vancouver hosts a fireworks competition between four countries. The venue is English Bay and the best seats are on the beach five minutes from our place. As a result, our neighborhood is flooded with fireworks spectators each of the four nights. The main streets are closed to traffic and vehicles are replaced by crowds flowing towards the bay, not unlike water flowing in rivers towards the ocean.

The restaurants are packed, the line ups at the grocery store are huge, and every patch of sand and grass with a view of the barge (from which the pyrotechnics are launched) become completely covered by blankets and chairs (to the extent that the city has to erect giant blue fences around gardens in the vicinity of the beach to prevent people from trampling the flowers). To stifle any spontaneous post-fireworks festivities (or stabbings, as have been know to occur), the police presence in the West End during the event is huge. Cops on horses, cops in helicopters, cops on foot. It's surreal.

Every spring, the fireworks competition is cancelled for the lack of sponsors and I am simultaneously relieved (our neighborhood won't be invaded) and disappointed (there won't be any fireworks). Every year, a new sponsor steps up and I re-live the emotions. It's a love-hate relationship, really.

Tonight was the first of the four nights of the aptly-named Celebration of Light. I found a patch of grass with a good view despite only going out a half hour in advance of the show (living in the area provides good insider knowledge of less obvious vantage points). I waited in eager anticipation with thousands of other spectators for the show to start. An I marveled at the spectacularly exhilarating combination of light and sound. The theme of tonight's show was The Wizard of Oz (which made me think of one of Tommy's recent posts).

And now I'm home, listening to the sound of noisy crowds making their way home as the police helicopter (complete with spotlight) circles overhead. The drown will persist for another few hours, long after the joy I've derived has faded somewhere over the rainbow.

Click here to download:

chemistry_physics_beauty.zip (4164 KB)

Filed under // books & art science & technology sustainability Vancouver

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July 21, 2009 9:59 PM

summer viewing

It seems that every summer I get hooked on a TV series that I haven't previously watched. Last summer it was Sex and the City - after I was dragged to the see the movie by some girlfriends, I was inspired me to watch all the seasons. This summer, it is Mad Men. I just finished watching the last episode of season 2 and am left craving more. Unfortunately, the third season doesn't debut until the end of the summer and the likelihood that the show will air on any of the channels we catch with the rabbit ears (yes, it is 2009 and we have rabbit ear antennae affixed to our HD TV) is dubious at best.

At first, I wasn't sure what it was about the show that I enjoyed so much. The premise is not overly enticing: the lives of people (mainly men) working for an ad agency in NYC in the 1960s. But the way the show is delivered is compelling and satisfying. Like a good novel, the show achieves a perfect balance between setting, character, and plot.

The setting is superbly aesthetically appealing. 1960s Manhattan. The fashion, the decor, the food, the drinks. The setting is artful and humorous and camp and kitsch and beautiful and sexy - combined in a way that is thought-provoking and natural. The characters are deep, rich, complicated, and believable. The plot is slow, but subtle and challenging and rewarding. The opening credits do a good job of capturing the feel of the show:

What I enjoy most about Mad Men is that it doesn't use a rosy lens to depict the 60s. The show feels real - like a glimpse into the not-so-distant past, into an era that my grandparents and parents experienced that is simultaneously so different from today yet very much the same. From the show, I get the sense that so much of what is commonplace today was just below the surface in the 1960s - and, to some extent, vice versa.

For instance, women's rights and racial equality and open homosexuality and counterculture were all just emerging in the sixties and are typically considered to be rather mainstream today (kind of ironic that counterculture has become mainstream). Conversely, smoking and littering and fedoras were the norm in the 1960s but are far less common now.

Many of the themes of the show are similar to those explored in the movie Revolutionary Road, which I also enjoyed. These themes remind me of the song Mad World, originally by Tears for Fears and covered more recently by Adam Lambert (yes, I'm a fan). For those who didn't get caught up in the American Idol hype, this is what all the fuss was about:

To play mp3s in your browser, you will need to have Javascript turned on and have Flash Player 9 or better installed.

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July 15, 2009 6:19 PM

malcomtents*

This month, I was the host of book club. To mix it up a little, I decided to try a non-fiction read and, in the end, Outliers by Malcom Gladwell was selected. To provide a bit of context, I have heard a lot about this book. Kevin read it and told me about it, I heard Gladwell interviewed on a few occasions, and had discussed the book in some detail (based on what I had heard in the interviews) while making conversation at a business lunch. Needless to say, nothing in the book was entirely new because I had heard so much about it already.

But, as was discussed at book club last night, nothing in the book is entirely new. General consensus was that, while interesting, the anecdotes put forth by Gladwell support a thesis that is commonly accepted and far from contentious. The premise of the book, namely that "only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't" (Gladwell's own emphasis), is far from a revelation.

Sure, as the author points out, the media seizes on the "rags to riches" components of success stories and, as a society, we generally like to focus on the "against all odds" plot. But I think it's an unfair assumption to attribute our tendency to oversimplify and romanticize with a general failure to recognize the power of opportunity and motivation and nurture. There aren't many people that, if asked how they got to where they are today, would respond by pointing solely to their own innate abilities and traits. Most people recognize that "parentage and patronage" matter.

Early in the book, Gladwell states that:

The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantage and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we grew up. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement...

Do you have an issue with that statement? Probably not. So why would someone write a 300 page book to prove it?

I probably would've appreciated the book more if it was framed as a collection of interesting success stories serving to simply highlight the truth to the statement rather than as "The Story of Success". By trying to prove something that is already generally accepted to be true, the author promises enlightenment but delivers affirmation. Gladwell is a good writer and so he succeeds in making the reader think that they're being convinced of a new theory but, when the content of the book is scrutinized more closely, it become clear that there was no new theory, just new branding.

The other thing that stood out to me was that the individual examples provided by Gladwell in support of his "theory" were dominated by men. More specifically, men from North America and Europe. I'm not sure if Gladwell clued into this pattern himself or recognized that it, in itself, reinforced his "theory" - perhaps he wanted to keep the book upbeat by focusing on happy success stories rather than by providing examples of the lack thereof that are clearly rooted in less cheery circumstances that are still rampant today, such as poverty and gender inequality.

For instance, the story of an intellectually brilliant woman belonging to the caste of untouchables in India fated to a life of poverty and the antithesis of success would fit Gladwell's thesis perfectly. But that story, along with the stories of the millions of people in the developing world that will never be provided the opportunity to be successful due to circumstance, patronage, parentage, etc., is left out. Which is a shame, because I think that's a much more important, if perhaps less enticing, story than how Bill Gates became a billionaire.

*people who read the tipping point or outliers or freakonomics and are realllllly excited to share this intelligent "find" with you at a party
via wordsmyte.com (via @pm)

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July 2, 2009 6:56 PM

beyond celine

Since being introduced to iTunes Genius by Kevin, I've been hooked. It's a great way to listen to all the music in our collection without the playlist being completely random. I'll pick a song I'm in the mood to listen to and start the Genius. I'm rarely disappointed with the results. Oftentimes, Genius will remind me of artists that I've neglected and the re-discovery is much appreciated.

After work today, I chose a song by Martha Wainwright from her latest album. I only started listening Ms. Wainwright after I went to one of her concerts on a friend's recommendation. I've been a fan of Rufus Wainwright (her brother) for years, and Martha did not disappoint.

While cleaning the apartment and grooving to the music, I kept recognizing Canadian artists on the playlist. Turns out that 14 of the 25 songs were by Canadian musicians and bands (some duplicates):

Martha Wainwright - Montreal, Quebec
Rufus Wainwright - Montreal, Quebec
Stars - Toronto, Ontario (now based in Montreal, Quebec)
Matthew Good - Burnaby, British Columbia
Arcade Fire - Montreal, Quebec
Sarah Harmer - Burlington, Ontario
Sarah Slean - Pickering, Ontario
The Stills - Montreal, Quebec
Metric - Toronto, Ontario
Feist - Calgary, Alberta

Thanks to Genius, my Canada Day celebration continued into today. The playlist exemplifies the musical talent in this country (and indicates that Kevin and I support that talent by purchasing the albums) and that it extends considerably from the realm of the mainstream (i.e., Celine Dion is not on the list). Check out CBC Radio 3 to get better acquainted with the great music being made in this great country.

And for those unfamiliar with Martha Wainwright, let me introduce her to you:

Filed under // books & art Canada science & technology

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