On Growing Up

I saw it one day on a bus ride.
Under a flyover,
two miniature-like kids running over the forbidding bank
between two opposing roads.
That's it.
It's the picture.
The picture that froze in my mind.
Skipping thousands of reasons,
jumping hundreds of conclusions,
emitting and connecting trillions of nerve impulses or maybe
just one struck by lightning –
The picture of how we're growing up.

Tracey Thorn – Love and its Opposite

To me, the singing of (my) Everything But The Girl – Tracey Thorn remains to be the voice of 90s'. Her voice seems to emerge from the deepest recesses of her throat and have been just steadied from sobbing minutes ago. Bear with me, I'm an incurable sucker of melancholic vocals and tunes.

From the heart-breaking "I don't want to talk about it" to the refreshing electronic makeover of "Driving" and "Missing", I can almost time-travel into the past. But before an actual time machine was made, we can only grow old forward. And she apparently did. After years of self-imposed hiatus to concetrate on parenting three children she had with her EBTG partner Ben Watt, she released another solo album this May, titled Love and its Opposite. She described it as "a record about the person I am now and the people around me ... about real life after forty." So Thorn wonders in the album's opening track "Oh, the Divorces!":

Who's next?
Who's next?
Always the ones that you least expect
They seem so strong
It turned out she wanted more all along
And each time I hear who's to part
I examine my heart
See how it stands
Wonder if it's still in safe hands

Anyone who is married or have been married could find sympathy with the lyrics. Love (and marriage), can be as strong as death, and can be as brittle as a changing thought.

As the irony is floating in the air, I notice the song is a waltz.

Pringle of Scotland Animation by David Shrigley

Speaking about Scottish, here's a truly hilarious stuff made in Scotland.

Camera Obscura

I posted on my Facebook awhile ago saying "Starved of new, good music."
My colleague "Big Mouth" pointed me to this Scottish band.
I am deeply, utterly in love with them ever since.
I feel what we Chinese say"相逢恨晚" (regretting not having met earlier).
Now, one more thing Scottish that has won my heart over (after Travis, Snow Patrol, Belle & Sebastian, Trainspotting, Kenny Dalglish, and their very own accent.)

From the heart of hummingbird to ours

You can brick up your heart as stout and tight
and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can
and down it comes in an instant,
felled by a woman's second glance,
a child's apple breath,
the shatter of glass in the road,
the words I have something to tell you,
a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die,
the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair,
the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen
where he is making pancakes for his children.

The last lines of "Joyas Voladoras" by Brian Doyle.
A beautiful piece of writing begins with an invitation to consider the heart of a hummingbird, beats and pumps with facts, vigour, and ends inside a little left of our chest.

For full essay here.

Philosophers vs Artists

I'm reading a book on noted philosophers down the years of Western civilization, from Thales of Miletus to W.V.O. Quine, this is my observation:

The philosophers ask: What is there?
The artists ask: What is not there?

Wally Hermès Yacht

This is a blog that champions the beauty of the simple and everyday. But when came along a piece of man-made marvel as extraordinary and beautiful as this, the price tag and all its moral concerns aside, I can't help but be awed by its vision, innovation and architecture.

It's Wally Hermès Yacht, a co-project by the french luxury brand Hermès and Monaco based yacht maker Wally. That's why it's called WHY. And maybe that's also WHY you tell yourself to work the ass off for money!

www.why-yachts.com

Hermès × Tokujin Yoshioka

There's something quintessentially Zen about this.

More of Tokujin Yoshioka's works here: www.tokujin.com

The life of John and Mary

John and Mary fall in love and get married. They both have worthwhile and remunerative jobs which they find stimulating and challenging. They buy a charming house. Real estate values go up. Eventually, when they can afford live-in help, they have two children to whom they are devoted. The children turn out well. John and Mary have a stimulating and challenging sex life and worthwhile friends. They go on fun vacations together. They retire. They both have hobbies which they find stimulating and challenging. Eventually they die. This is the end of the story.

(Atwood, in Lee, ed., 1985:370)

Is it a story? What is a story? These are the questions the author asked in The Routledge Creative Writing Coursebook (a very good book by the way). "This passage, in affluent societies, is what living 'happily ever after' means, or is supposed to mean..." "Imagine reading long, detailed descriptions of John's hobbies, or of their endless vacations together!... it would bored us to death."

The author aims to point out that a proper story, one that's able to engage us, requires two sets of things:

1) A close-up realization of Where, When and Who: the immediacy, the specific and minute-by-minute vividness, the very features that makes the story real.

2) A sense of danger, encounter, incident, disruption. (Why we aren't happy reading happiness is another case, and possibly a mystery.)

Isn't it the same with the story of our life? I wonder.

While we constantly devote our attention to the grand scale of things, like education, qualification, promotion, vacation, pension, shouldn't we at least spend a few minutes to savour the happenings, the intensiveness of everything that's going on around us? The air we're breathing in may smell sweetly different from yesterday because of the change of seasons. The glass of water you're drinking may be reflecting a marvel of light that once inspired Newton's optics and the Impressionists' palette. The beauty of nature, the good will of a stranger, the grin of your loved one that belongs only to you, every bit of our fickle reality could be easily and silently missed.

We all wish that life is mellow, flowery, nice and death-free, like in Disneyland. But of course reality bites. And even fairy tales have the dodgy part before the happy ending. While we're complaining to the Author, it may ease our pain by turning our thought to the possibility that without all the unexpected, the risk, the turbulence, the suffering, life could be equally unbearable on the extreme scale of another end – namely, boredom.

How audiobook can change my mood

I thought audiobook never worked, at least for me.
It demands relentless attention. Only if my mind wanders off for a second, the flow or the plot is lost.
The same can be said for reading, but you can easily pick up from where you left off.
It's not so much a nuisance to move your eye balls than your finger to reverse your iPhone.
And after all, I guess a native English speaker would find it difficult to grasp every single spoken word, let alone a Chinese like me.

I tried anyway, for the first time in my life, an audiobook of Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life, narrated by Samuel West.
No doubt it's as good as a book can be. It has all the usual elegance and wits of de Botton.
Lapses of attention did occur as expected, and when it happened, the narrating retreated to become almost like a background music.
That doesn't matter. And that's probably why I found it rather delightful.
To West's credit, by his lively narration, the continuous stream of tuneful British accent and the mere impression of absorbing knowledge and being so intellectual,
my mood was changed, before my life.