Recent pictures from Anchang, Sichuan

I spent the week or so prior to the chinese new year in Anchang and the Beichuan area, which was one of the hardest hit and in which there are many quake victims living in temporary housing. I talked a bunch of them and in general just observed their lives there. I will write something more in depth later. I hope to follow their story in the coming months and years.

Technorati Tags: quake, earthquake, victims, pictures, photos, tragedy, life, china, chinese

Pirouettes on the edge of madness: Bertrand Russell, me, and other fucked up peeps

With my own sanity and mental health at greater peril than ever before, i start reading, for some inexplicable reason, about Bertrand Russell’s personal life. I have read some of his books before, on happiness, marriage, etc. and of course the classic “On the History of Western Philosophy”–but I find that while i am obviously not of the same level, there are various personal similarities which i can’t help but noticing. If you go to the Amazon page for Ray Monk’s biography of Russell’s early middle-age years you find the following blurb from Publishers Weekly:

At age 30, philosopher and philanderer Russell (1872-1970) wrote, “Abstract work must be allowed to destroy one’s humanity.” His life into his 50th year is the subject of Monk’s first volume of a two-part biography. As previous biographers have found, his competition is Russell’s own mesmerizing yet unreliable memoirs. Monk (Wittgenstein) quotes extensively from Russell’s correspondence and autobiographical writings, but always with a gloss on the facts. Russell’s compulsive womanizing kept at bay loneliness, and worse. His mother and father died when he was a boy, and he saw insanity in his aristocratic lineage. Mathematics, his first love, lay on the edge of philosophy, and he feared that inquiring too deeply into the wellsprings of the self would lead to madness. The loss, also, of Victorian certainties intensified his sense of solitude, and his compensatory quests into logic, politics and sex left him questioning (as Monk puts it) “whether it was better to be sane with lies or mad with truth.” When the biography breaks off, he has married for a second time, been to jail, been expelled from his Cambridge professorship and written landmark books on mathematics, politics and philosophy. By then D.H. Lawrence has wounded Russell by accusing him of a paradox: that while Russell loves women sexually and loves logic professionally, “It is not the hatred of falsity which inspires you. It is the hatred of people, of flesh and blood.

This revisits a theme that i;’ve thought about continuously for much of my adult life: which is what you want out of people in your personal life and what you hope for for humanity at large–and if there is any sort of psychological connection between the two. People–biographers, or just people who have had substantial contact with the man, have said that his love of humanity was abstract–that he was afraid of flesh and blood, that he had problems dealing with real people. And then there is talk of the compensatory nature of logic, and i find that *compensatory* to be quite illuminating. Why? Because logic and the disinterested pursuit of truth in science and mathematics allows one to dwell in rarefied world, away from the messiness and inconstancy of human life. There is a real sense in which someone with an IQ as high as Russell’s is also just not going to be able to “get” other people. sure he will need other people–I was reading about Conrad’s wife and Joyce Carol Oates described her as offering “maternal solicitude”–and I’ll be damned if there aren’t a bunch of male intellectuals who go for women like that…in any case, these uber-intellectuals and writers need regular people sometimes–they project their own fantasies and needs on them. I bet that the reason that Russell was a pacifist was because he believed that the nuclear arms race was a form of irrational madness based on lies that the government tells the people to get them into acquiesce–and this offended his deepest intellectual instincts. Human beings are mad, they are stupid. And yet you must love them so you try to steer them in what you consider the right way.

And what about Russell’s personal life, his compulsive womanizing? Again, echoes of my own life, except that I am not that compulsive and not that much of a womanizer–but again, the vector points in the same direction, just with lesser magnitude. The need to stave off madness and loneliness–i know that all too well.
I would go as far as to say that a man’s deepest redemption from loneliness–the loneliness brought about, in part, by his intellectual and existential instincts. Therefore, there is always this balancing act going, because the intellectual and artistic pursuits drive you in one direction, drive you in a direction that could conceivably lead to madness, or at least, shall we say suboptimal mental health. And that is why you need a woman, to assuage and ameliorate the pain that is brought on by that very pursuit.

somewhere else i read about Russell’s “unyielding” type of personality–another word which sent the flashbulbs off in my mind, because I believe that is why I have such problems following careers such as journalism and filmmaking, things that I ostensibly am in love with and respect–because I have something in me that predisposes me towards logic and mathematics, same as Russell (though obviously not on the same level). But the same proclivities are there, and the same political leanings–which means that whatever “advice” I could glean from his writings or writings about him could really be quite useful and therapeutic for me. And that’s perhaps, why, in times of extreme, duress, articles such as this and the thoughts they contain “find” me.

Shanghai Business School Fire: now comes the blame game

Should they have jumped, why did the jump? Were they hanging off the rails of the balconies until they had no strength and just let go? Why didn’t any brave men climb up the stairs to rescue them?

Four women died after jumping off their dorm balcony, but now the debate rages on about what the problems are. Understandably, people are angry and the students are being quite vocal about the issue.

Talk of the electric heater, dubbed ‘热得快‘ has been the focus of many conversations online, as many students have said that the reason why they have to use such shoddy electronic appliances is because there is no heated water and electricity is turned off at night, so those students wanting a cup of tea, a bowl of instant noodles, or a hot shower at night have to use these appliances. There was also discussion of whether or not safety facilities, ie fire extinguishes and emergency exits, were up to par in Chinese university dorms, with many people arguing that they are not.

One post, from Aibang.com, explains these points:

最根本的问题是，学生从家里来上学，现在生活的一些设备离不开电，而学校仅仅是单纯的禁止个处罚有用么？为什么不改善宿舍的居住环境呢？如果学校有饮水机，或者将开水设备安排在每层宿舍楼，那么至少那种劣质的“热得快”那个学生还会买呢？你宿舍24小时供电，首先就会避免了因为停电而忘记关闭电源的事故发生，难道学校领导意识不到？

It’s true. Students born in the late 1980s and early 1990s–as all of the shanghai fire victims were–are used to having running, and yes, even hot water available to them at all hours of the day and night. They are used to having a bunch of appliances, be it computers or otherwise, always an arm’s width away. The poster of the above comment argues that simply banning and fining people for having such appliances doesn’t get at the root of the issue. What is being argued for, then, is an investment in safety education, facilities–that is, bringing student dorms into the modern era, equipping them so that these types of incidents won’t happen again.

My theory of cats

I am beginning to wonder if I like cats because they are needy the same way that i am or if I have begun to assimilate or emulate their psychology instead. The constant need for contact and affection: I wonder if, behind it all, that’s really what my ego is. If you pare everything down, if you strip out the unessentials, what is left, at the core? I remember the attention I would get from my parents after spending an afternoon drawing pictures. There are times when I feel like I have transferred that whole project onto society and photography:i take pictures or create art, and expect society to shower me with accolades. And then I will feel wanted. I will feel there is some place for me in this world. My role becomes clear.

I think, in some way, I was harmed by having too good of a childhood: I was–or rather, am–a spoiled only child. There was constant attention and affection from my mother. She was doting in a way, but not just by pampering me with food, though there was that. I think it was the feeling of absolute security–the absolute security of knowing that you were wanted, and that you belonged–that has now, ironically, created an absence that cannot be filled.

When I see my needy and clingy cats calling for attention, I never hesitate to give them what they want–I “parent” them much the way that my parents cared for me. I spoil them with food, let them sleep under woolen blankets, and will scratch and pet them whenever they want me to. I suppose that this is, in some fashion, a surrogate family for me: a way of continuing or resuscitating the emotional economy that I am used to, a way of reviving the emotional autarky of the nuclear family.

Of course, we all have that need, but to different extents: and in that regard, we are all cats. There is no point in pining for the prelapsarian: on a regular day, that is, a day in the course of which I will feel completely lost and abandoned, I will at least have the company of my two cats, who will, without asking, jump on my lap or cuddle next to me in bed. They say that cats are only loyal to their food bowls, but I think they’ve gotten a bad rap. Anyone who lives with cats can at least fool themselves into thinking that some of this love is unconditional. It is not like how it is with us humans: tremulous requests that form in our minds but that never make it past our lips. The cats are quite comfortable in asking and demanding for this kind of attention. They give less than they receive, true, but they speak to that part of the psyche that, when in pain,
calls out in the very same way.

In the course of these one-way transactions you find that giving isn’t so bad, and that giving is a way of ameliorating your own need to receive or get something in return. Nothing ever is,
in the end, one-way.

Will I ever get what I want from this world? Will I ever be recognized for whatever talents God, my parents, and my UC Berkeley (go Bears!)/Stanford education has bestowed on upon me? Or will I, like most other people, get swallowed by the huge anonymity machine that eats through most of humanity and human history? At this moment, I don’t know the answer to that. But I feel that rather than waiting for the answer, I am actually, even through this non-action, making an answer. This veers dangerously close cliches like John Lennon’s about life being what happens while you’re making other plans.

SOme of these conclusions came about in a weird way, having to do with the differences in the various women that I have dated and loved over the years: some, like my parents, are quite doting, quite “ti tie” as we say in Chinese, whereas others are more independent, and cater less to the man’s whims and needs. I hope that none of this strikes you too much as sexist. I don’t feel entitled to anything because I am a man. I feel entitled to things–love, attention–because that is what I am used to, from growing up, not to mention a huge innate need which might involve scouring my genome for clues more than psychoanalyzing my youth. In any case, I have dated quite a heterogenous group of ladies and each has delivered their love and affection in various different forms of packaging. Sometimes you like the one more than the other…years later you change your mind. There is something maddeningly mercurial about this, and stripped down to its essentials, you feel like you are watching the seemingly chaotic evolution of you yourself…and at the risk of sounding hopelessly narcissistic the evolution of the personality, the dynamics of the ego–IS something interesting. That is whole point of introspection, is it not?

Cats allow themselves to be petted. They hardly ever reject you, if you are persistent enough. And they are always pleased by the attention. So it’s true that what I am describing here is a refraction of human nature: but its also a distortion. If we were all like this, all the time–nothing would ever get accomplished. But for what it’s worth, these cats allow me to regress to this more primitive state–one that we cannot stay in, but without which we would most likely go mad.

Music I’m listening to: Dido’s “Safe Trip Home”

I’ve never been a Dido fan, i don’t even know the name of any her songs save that “White Flag” one, but I did download her recent one. And although there are many nice tunes on it, there is one in particular that sticks out. The song is called “Look No Further” and i suppose that its poignancy, for me, is related to this whole idea of looking further–especially when it comes to relationships. There have been many times when it would have been possible or even wise to settle, and yet I was restless. Hormones, desires, neurotic maximizer tendencies, fear of making mistakes and wasting time–which is nothing but a permutation of the fear of death–what is behind that constant tendency to look for something more, something better, something ideal. Something that will bring us close to some kind of very probably illusory, half-baked notion of what happiness is. This song is the song of someone who has found something and will look no further–and I find solace in knowing that yes, people probably do, on the whole, experience a longer and more fulfilling happiness in this state–but the whole song, and not just the lyrics, is shot through with the consciousness of what one loses in that process. “Everyone I’ll never meet/and friends i won’t know make…”–lyrics like this understand the difficulty in acknowledging the sacrifices that every human being, simply by living in time with his animal condition, must confront everyday. If you think hard enough about it, do you get overwhelmed by sadness? Is it something more than you can bear?　Do you think about things that have past, people who have passed from your life and perhaps from this earth, or do you manage to always maintain that healthy, optimistic attitude of looking towards the future. Have you learned, somewhere, a philosophic tolerance for that transience？Was it something inherent in your genes, in your personality and the way it processes such things, or was it engineered by the formative experienced of childhood or early adulthood?

There is still the tendency of life to not make that choice. However, every moment that you are breathing you are making that choice. The contradictions are enough to tear one apart–therefore, in order not to go mad, all human beings have to firewall their attention so that you act, without thinking too much about the action. I only remark on this because the balance of power, in my life, has always sided with thinking–to the detriment of my overall happiness, i think. Vita contempliva and vita activa–that’s the wrong distinction. Both can be healthy and non-neurotic, depending on how you live them. The neurotic impasse, the block, the rut–those are the things that have to be avoided if you want to live life the right way.

Here are the lyrics to the song:

I might have been a singer
Who sailed around the world
A gambler who wins millions
And spent it all on girls

I might have been a poet
Who walked upon the moon
A scientist who wouldtell the world
I discovered something new

I might have loved a king
Been the one to end a war
A criminal who drink champaign
And never could be caught

But among your books
Among your clothes
Among the noise and fuss

I’ve let it go

I can’t stop and catch my breathe
And Look No further for happiness
And I will not turn again
‘Cause my heart has found its home

Everyone i’ll never meet
And friends I wont now make
The adventures that they could have been
And the risks I’ll never take

but Among Your Books
Among your clothes
Among the noise and fuss

I’ve let it go

I can’t stop and catch my breathe
And Look No further for happiness
And I will not turn again
‘Cause my heart has found its home

Drunken phrasings

there is an insidious loneliness
that razes
things
it goes about its business
with a grin
like someone that knows
that everything can be swept–perfectly–under the carpet.

i cannot stay at gigs too long.
because their creativity unnerves me
makes me wonder where mine goes .
Surely no need for insecurity–we all have our own voices.
we all speak to different needs.
we all cater to different markets.
I long to be able to sweat under the irrationality of the spotlight.

There are some people that can plummet headlong into the days
whereas those like me
are always trying to slam on the brakes.
I imagine a life like that. I imagine a mode of life like that.
And after all these years, after the whole of my adult life so far.
I might be willing, after all, to admit that it was a mistake.
It’s not amazing that illusions exist, when reality is so patently obvious.
What is amazing is how far illusions can take you.

You can give up the love of the best of women
for that illusion.
Even as the antinomies take you to your grave
you believe in that illusion. You maximize.
You console yourself. You cajole yourself.
There is, after all, something better. Someone better.
Just wait and see. There is no greater faith, not even the faith
in God.

Movies I’m Watching: Tarsem’s The Fall, Deception and Righteous Kill

A lot of critics, such as the NY Times Nathan Lee, did not like this film.
Here’s some of what he says:

The details of this saga, a threadbare patchwork of postcard exoticism, turgid characterizations, stilted duels and lackluster spectacle, are projected via the imagination of a little girl cognizant, it would seem, of the full repertory of high-gloss, empty-headed pictorialism deployed by corporate advertising.

Tarsem, as the filmmaker prefers to be called, made his name marketing soft drinks and sneakers, and “The Fall” bids to sell its audience on a visionary quest full of romance, intrigue, fabulous sights and fantastic creatures (Charles Darwin, swimming elephants, white people with dreadlocks). It’s strictly bargain bin.

Ouch.

Roger Ebert is a bit more sympathetic to the movie, saying:

Tarsem’s “The Fall” is a mad folly, an extravagant visual orgy, a free-fall from reality into uncharted realms. Surely it is one of the wildest indulgences a director has ever granted himself. Tarsem, for two decades a leading director of music videos and TV commercials, spent millions of his own money to finance “The Fall,” filmed it for four years in 28 countries and has made a movie that you might want to see for no other reason than because it exists. There will never be another like it.

That’s the initial wow-factor, a feeling that has any visual sensibility or heck, anyone with a still beating heart ought to share. The images are simply stunning, though I suppose Nathan Lee would argue that this art for art’s sake stuff is still essentially vacuous. I would like to know the locations, spread over 28 countries, where the film was made: there is one place which is MC Escher like in its geometry of strange, angular staircases. When the black-clad bad guys are running up and down the stairs like so many evil ants, it’s just about as good as anything computer-generated in Star Wars (I mean the prequels) or the Matrix. Perhaps it is more stunning knowing that there were supposedly no CGI in the movie at all (just old style special effects).

The film’s style is a mashup of fantasy, historical drama and animation. In the end, you see the characters (in 1915 LA) watching silent films…including the early action and stunt work in films. I suppose I’m a sucker for this meta-cinematic stuff, you know, the Cinema Paradiso-esque love letter to the cinema business, because I do love movies, and of course everyone who loves the movie loves to bask in the glow of kindred spirits. The delight of watching the oh so cute wiggling and squirming faces of children in the hospital ward watching the “flickers” is a mirror with which the narcissistic cinephile gazes at himself.

But, critics will have their criticisms. A bit interesting of a read is the Onion A.V. club’s interview with Tarsem. The stunning locations: he piggybacked them off of commercial ad work.

And then after that, I needed the characters’ backstories, so for those, I went around the globe, saying “I need to go to this location, this location,” places I’d scouted for 17 years. I would only take ads that went to those regions. So I’d shoot an ad, and then bring my actors over to shoot on location.

Anyhow, it’s a great interview, full of interesting things about his filmmaking style and methods, as well as some tidbits about his life. Like this bit about how he got into commercials, videos, and films:

So I told my dad, and he said no way. Every year, we’d go to England, because my dad was in the airlines and he got free tickets, and at that point, he just stopped it. He said, “No, you’re gonna jump ship.” He wouldn’t let me come abroad with him unless I graduated in business. I love science, but business was absolutely something I dreaded. So I barely went to college, I lied and cheated like mad, I had other people sit for my exams, everything possible. And then I got a 99 percentile on the GMAT, which got me—I could pretty much go to Harvard. So we applied out there, and my dad said, “Okay, now it’s done. He’s settled down, calmed down.” And he sent me on my way there. He sent me to visit my cousin in Vancouver, and I called from Canada and said “I’m going to go study film.” And he said, “Get to the other coast and go straight away to Harvard! Ninety-ninth percentile, you should be able to get in wherever you want!” I said “no,” and he said, “Okay, then you don’t exist any more.”

Oh, and as far as Deception and Righteous Kill….well, it’s always a joy watching De Niro and Pacino, but really, this geriatric thriller stuff doesn’t really move me. Plot twists are so common to films of this sort that it makes us jaded, I think, and that’s not good for the cinema in general. Oooh, the good guy was really the bad guy, it was an inside job, he was pulling the strings the whole time, you know how it goes. These are two terrific actors, but really, this and Deception truly belong in the category of Mc Thriller, because that’s what they are, boilerplate thrillers. I know that sounds like a paradox but this, I truly believe, is a new Hollywood genre. They are typically slick productions with your typical repertory of cinematic tricks, the high contrast shots, the moody lighting, the skewed color palettes, etc. Everyone plays their part, which is fine and good, but that’s the problem: you forget these films right after you watch them, because nothing is real and nothing leaves any lasting impression on you.

Tarsem’s film, whatever its faults, is as Roger Ebert said, something that you just have to see because it exists. It’s just an audacious thing and you can’t say that about Deception or Righteous Kill. I know that this might seem like apples and oranges, but its just that these are the last three movies that I happened to watch, so are most recent in my mind.

tarsem, the fall, movies, REM, video, art, photography, life, career

It gets cold here in late September

“It gets cold here in late September”—I dont remember the rest of the song anymore. It was the autumn of 1999, probably around late September or early October. The place: the main cafeteria at the University of Washington, Seattle. I had just moved there to start graduate school in applied mathematics. I was quite happy to be in the coffee capital of the US, where everyday was a battle to see if you could restrain yourself from spending too much on coffee. The cafeteria had musicians come in and play. I remember this woman’s voice, though I have long forgotten her face. “It gets cold here in late September” was the refrain, and for a reason unknown to me it has stuck in my mind for the last nine years. It’s the way that it was sung–the fragility of a girl folkie’s voice–that somehow mesmerizes you. Obviously there was more than just metereological iufnromation being conveyed: it is the sense of passing, the sense of the seasons changing. The poignancy is in the way that it’s stated, so simply, almost obliquely, like a passing remark, said by a woman standing by an open window, pulling a sweater out of her closet and onto her body. That summer, I had taken an extension class in songwriting. From then until now, I’ve written many songs, but none of have been like that song. They are sometimes plaintive, but much more heart on your sleeve. “It gets cold here in late September”, on the other hand, is so much more rich than the lyrics that I have written. Somehow, for me at least, it just captures and explains much more about life than anything that I’ve ever written.

Some pictures from Hong Kong and Tin Shui Wai (天水圍）

I don’t remember where I first heard of Tin Shui Wai, but I believe someone told me that this was the famous “walled city” (圍城） that the movie was named after, so I went there expecting something desperate and ghetto, but didn’t find anything of the sort. The subway ride is nice…the stations are not as flashy and busy as the ones in the major Hong Kong lines; there’s a certain sterility, as if somewhere along the way, somewhere underground you passed a threshold. Of course for me, this is just reflected in how things look and appear, and what effects that has on you–that is, how the urban environment, urban form, urban aesthetics affects your perception of, well, everything: even if you are thinking of something utterly different, the environment is still there, leaving some kind of subtle imprint on your mind, coloring your moods and perceptions. I think that’s why my photos has some strange and obviously distorted color schemes: the attempt to impart the deep truth of the place, or one’s subjective vision of a place, means that you hve to depart from the common notion of verisimilitude, and truth be told once you get used to it, it ain’t no thang.

I wondered what it would be like living here; in one sense it’s no different from the rest of Hong Kong, but in another sense, it is separated by those lush forests and hills, and has a radically different form—we’re talking suburbs here, high-rises cloned and sprouted all over the place, jutting awkwardly into the sky, assured of their functionality but somehow unsure of their existence.

Shopping malls: I played Time Crisis 4 there, blowing a chunk of change that could have been used for better purposes. Others played that horse-racing game where plastic horses race across a track. It’s dated and quaint for that very reason. You would have expected horse-racing to have morphed into some high octane video game with crystal-clear graphics, the whole nine yards. And here was this old contraption, looking like some kind of cheap museum diorama…anyhow I can’t see what the fun of it is. Nearby, old men play video game mahjong.

I wonder how much time I’ve spent wandering through malls. It’s become some kind of ritual, so much so that I can pretty much sleepwalk through it. It’s so utterly familiar and so perfectly banal that you don’t even think twice about it, it’s automatic, a twitch that sometimes lasts an entire afternoon.

tinshuiwan, tianshuiwan, pictures, photos, arcades, games, life, malls, shopping, consumerism, consumers, ricoh, photos, photography

Some pictures from Wenchuan

The rest of that series is here. Some photographs from the Magnum photographer Patrick Zachmann are here.