Thursday, September 28, 2006

Mrowp

You Are Romanticism

You are likely to see the world as it should be, not as it is.
You prefer to celebrate the great things people do... not the horrors they're capable of.
For you, there is nothing more inspiring than a great hero.
You believe that great art reflects the artist's imagination and true ideals.


Supposed to be doing an interview with Jimbo and Aladdin with the New Jersey - I think it's Monitor, it's some Jersey paper - tonight. Actually, speaking of Aladdin and interviews there's one with him up over here, though he/they refer to me as "John Cho". Oh snap, the dude from Harold and Kumar is on Uncle Morty's? It MUST be good!

Riiight.

Saturday, September 23, 2006

Yaaaaay Fall!

You Belong in Fall

Intelligent, introspective, and quite expressive at times...
You appreciate the changes in color, climate, and mood that fall brings
Whether you're carving wacky pumpkins or taking long drives, autumn is a favorite time of year for you

My Mom is Crazy

So, for some odd reason, I wake up at 8:20 this morning. It must have been my Spidey sense, because 10 minutes later, lo and behold, my phone rings.

"Hello?"
"Hi, it's mom."
"Hi mom."
"I was just wondering - do you have enough money?"
"Uh - yeah."
"Ok, because if you need money, you know all you have to do is ask."
"Yeah mom."
"So when are you coming back?"
"Um...I'm not?"
"So what are you going to do?"
"I'm extending my visa."
"Well, when will you know if that will work?"
"...in a few months? But there's no reason why it shouldn't be extended."
"Well...ok. But if it doesn't work out, then you should just come home. And no need to get a condo or anything, I don't know what dad is talking about, you can just come home."
(let me interject here for a moment - I don't know what dad is talking about either, he hasn't mentioned a word of moving back to Canada and into a condo, other than a discussion relatively similar to the one above, about my visa status and whether or not I would be deported anytime in the near future. It's been discussed that if I came home, he would basically set me up with one, but as the former has not happened and hopefully will not happen, the latter is somewhat of a moot point to my mind)
"Uh - ok."
"Well, I just wanted to say that."
"........ok."
Bye, etc.

Sigh.

I have, however, realized what's the cause of my mom's sudden uptick in crazality: she's got empty nest syndrome, as my younger brother just moved to Scotland for college (yes, I know - Scotland? How's that for a head scratcher. The way I look at it, each the sons has moved further and further out for college, for whatever reason. My older brother went to a college about 45 minutes away. I first went to one 3 hours away. My younger brother chose to cross the Atlantic. It's like each of us was trying to get away, but each subsequent brother saw that the distance travelled hadn't quite been far enough, so they had to go a bit further. If there was a 4th brother, he'd probably go to school in Japan or China or something. Terrible, isn't it?) Anyways, now my mom is all alone in that rather large house, which is somewhat sad but also simply part of the inevitability of life. Or - come to think of it, maybe it isn't in her mind, with the whole three-generations-of-Asians-under-one-roof thing. Still, it's not my responsibility to make her happy - or is it? Asians (again, those tricksey Asians) would probably vehemently disagree with me. Oh well, guess I'm a bad son. She probably should have figured that out when I first failed out of college and refused to become a lawyer.

Thursday, September 21, 2006

Color Me Im-Proust

Yes, in case you're wondering, it took me quite a while to come up with the title of this post. But today, if you didn't know, is Punny Thursday, aka Pun-rsday in Newfoundland, where the clocks are a half hour ahead and the puns are staggering. So there.

Anyways, I'm enjoying In the Shadow so far. As with all works dealing with the subject of love, there's a niggling question that tends to detract from the enjoyment of the piece: is what the author depicts really love?

I find it helpful to recall an early philosophy class I took, in which a professor mentioned that most social philosophical works fall into one of two general categories: "is" works and "should be" works; that is to say, either the work will attempt to explain the way things are, or the way things should be. Many authors will dabble a bit in both, but when evaluating any work or even a single statement, you must first establish which of the two you're dealing with, as it must affect your interpretation.

Returning to love. Many times in art, I encounter romances that do not necessarily conform to my interpretation of love; what it means, how it feels, what it tastes like and such. I try not to reject them out of hand, though that's frequently my initial impression, and I go back to the bromide from that professor to recall that while I may not see love that way, may not want my love to look or be like that, that is the way love is seen some times, in some places, by some people. In that sense, the work is truthful, even if that truth is anathema to us. The Last Five Years, probably my favorite musical, depicts a relationship/marriage that begins and ends over the course of five years - it's actually loosely (or perhaps not so loosely, as his ex-wife tried to sue to block its performance) based on the failed marriage of its writer, Jason Robert Brown. And while I would not necessarily want to be either of the two characters in the musical, it is undeniable that there are countless millions of people who do act, talk and think like them. The musical does not try to change this truth, which some might see as a failing (but that's a topic for a different post), it contents itself with identifying it. In the Shadow has been much the same.

There's also something else at work in it, something aside from its observations on and characterizations of love. I hesitate to type this, as I'm not sure if it's really accurate, but it seems to me to be an expression of modernism or even (gasp!) post-modernism. Yes, I hate those words. No, I don't quite know any other succinct way of expressing what I mean. I'm going to go ahead and try to explain in more detail now anyways.

First of all, the terms modernism and post-modernism exist in any art-y medium, from architecture to music. They don't, however, necessarily mean the same thing in each one. In fact, even within a medium there are any number of wildly different works that could be referred to as either modern or post-modern.

One aspect of modern and post-modern works that does happen to exist across a couple different mediums is self-awareness; that is, the characters themselves are, to a certain extent, aware of their existence in a piece of fiction, whether it be movie, book or play. Artists will play with this notion, and with their audiences. Enter Proust, publishing this book in 1919, around the same time that Virgina Woolf and James Joyce were writing. So he has this character, a young boy (14-15ish? I forget if it's ever explicitly stated) who's been struggling against the wishes of his parents to find a post in the country's ambassadorial corps - he wants to be a writer. Finally, his father says, "The main thing is to enjoy what one does in life. He's not a child anymore, he knows what he likes, he's probably not going to change, he's old enough to know what'll make him happy in life." This, however, makes the boy upset, as he realizes that, "...I did not live outside Time but was subject to its laws, as completely as the fictional characters whose lives, for that very reason, had made me so sad when I read of them at Combray...Theoretically, we are aware that the earth is spinning, but in reality we do not notice it...The same happens with Time. To make its passing perceptible, novelists have to turn the hands of the clock at dizzying speed, to make the reader live through ten, twenty, thirty years in two minutes."

So what's going on here? This character is realizing his life is just like the life of a character in a book - which is exactly what he is. I actually didn't even catch on until I had read a page or two past it, and then stopped to flip back and have a chuckle at those words laid down so long ago. Well played, Marcel. Well played.

Monday, September 11, 2006

The Land of Make Believe

This might end up longer in the future if I choose to work on it. For some odd reason I've felt exceedingly silly these last few days. Below is the result. It's silly. I like it.

Come with me
to the land of make believe
where we will lift each other's blindfolds
and tiptoe through the tulips
(those naughty, naughty tulips).

"We have no bananas," you will say.
"But we have mangoes!" I will reply.
"Mangoes with an e?"
"Of course - they're the sweetest kind."

We will laugh and we will shrug, and be inscrutable together
while the clouds crash so crustily and the grass grows so grustily.
"Grustily isn't a word," you will object.
"Have a mango," I will reply, and the tulips will laugh.

Someday perhaps
I will be telling this to a child
(their face smeared with syrupy sugar
and love)
of how, once upon a time,
a friend and I walked down that yellow brick road
where the tulips sway in the breeze,
and we had no bananas.
No, we had no bananas that day.

But we had mangoes.

Saturday, September 09, 2006

(insert title here)

1. The Complete Poems, Anne Sexton
2. On the Road, Jack Kerouac
3. High Fidelity, Nick Hornby
4. Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
5. Sideways, Rex Pickett
6. The Shipping News, Annie Proulx
7. Le Morte D'Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory
8. Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh
9. The Sonnets, William Shakespeare
10. To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
11. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
12. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Yiyun Li
13. interpreter of maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri
14. The Neverending Story, Michael Ende
15. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
16. Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami
17. Blink, Malcolm Gladwell
18. The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas Friedman
19. The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell
20. the namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
21. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
22. seven types of ambiguity, Eliot Perlman
23. Unhooked Generation, Jillian Straus
24. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins
25. The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
26. This Book Will Save Your Life, A. M. Homes
27. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
28. Youth in Revolt, C.D. Payne
29. jPod, Douglas Coupland
30. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke
31. History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides
32. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
33. Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, John Lee Anderson
34. No Acting Please, Eric Morris
35. In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, Marcel Proust

A couple weeks ago I watched Little Miss Sunshine, which was ok. One of the more amusing little character quirks belonged to Steve Carell's character, who continually shouted, "I am/was the foremost Proust scholar in America!" when confronted with demeaning tasks. Said quirk also served to remind me that I have yet to read any Proust, something which I now choose to rectify.

Saturday, September 02, 2006

Do Revolutionaries Have Mothers?

1. The Complete Poems, Anne Sexton
2. On the Road, Jack Kerouac
3. High Fidelity, Nick Hornby
4. Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
5. Sideways, Rex Pickett
6. The Shipping News, Annie Proulx
7. Le Morte D'Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory
8. Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh
9. The Sonnets, William Shakespeare
10. To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
11. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
12. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Yiyun Li
13. interpreter of maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri
14. The Neverending Story, Michael Ende
15. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
16. Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami
17. Blink, Malcolm Gladwell
18. The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas Friedman
19. The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell
20. the namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
21. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
22. seven types of ambiguity, Eliot Perlman
23. Unhooked Generation, Jillian Straus
24. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins
25. The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
26. This Book Will Save Your Life, A. M. Homes
27. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
28. Youth in Revolt, C.D. Payne
29. jPod, Douglas Coupland
30. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke
31. History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides
32. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
33. Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, John Lee Anderson
34. No Acting Please, Eric Morris

So, earlier today my mom calls me, and our conversation goes something like this:

"So...are you going to come home?"
"No."
"Well, what are you going to do?"
"Get back to auditioning."
"Well, how long will that take?"
"As long as it takes."
"Well, how long are you going to be there?"
"As long as I can be."
"Well, maybe you should pick up some LSAT books."
"..."

Hm, I kind of like the title of this post. Sounds like a funny book/story.