All about the divine comedy...(19/10)

When I was in Olympia this evening, I recognised that the divine comedy was such a familiar group to me that I would use to buy their every CD since over a decade ago...still recall years ago when I first listened to their music, I thought that if I had a chance to watch them playing live, I would have to go. They were not the kind of radio-favourite bands which play always under spots from everywhere, they have no million-copy sales. Their debut album was sold with a few thousands copies only in UK, and similar number for their second one. They are always the example of how an indie band does its music at the other side of the music scene. And now, they are a 17-year-old band. Still recall the time when I looked for their CDs and special editions in UK and France, a treasure of finding the specialties, and that was fun. A moment appears when I was listening to national express on a TGV in 1998. Images blurred outside the window, and the reflection of me was staring to me. It was 'fin de siecle' but it was also those good old days. The band had their mini album released actually before they had fin de siecle in 1998. Romantic enough, this mini album was called 'a short album about love', which reminds me a lot 'a short film about killing' of Kieslowski. Both are mini work for big idea...
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My first encountering about the divine comedy was in a history class. I bought my copy of Purgatorio ironically in Beijing in 1997. It was part of the episode, and the paperback is in Italian, I just keep it well on my shelf for long time. I bought another book about the illustrations of the divine comedy in the same bookstore, but again I leave it so comfortable on the shelf for ages...though it was not the cocytus where things remain frozen and imprisoned.
Some childhood dreams appeared like the scenery of purgatorio...a confluence to the Buddhist’s regeneration cycle?!
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The band has picked a name with infinite imagination. Their music is not the dark one, but their songs are filled with a sense of French romanticism. They are the one to have orchestra music playing in their band song too before the brit-pop era. Neil Hannon, the frontman of the band, has always a college-gentleman like icon with much charisma. Surprisingly the band is quite popular in France. It's maybe their music style, their pro-renaissance lyrics rich of beautiful vocabularies and stories. Their live tonight was nice. They played songs mainly from the latest 3 albums, and when they played generation sex, it was the tout le monde chorus moment. When they had national express in the encore section, I felt like well stepping back to the summer of 1998...
The concert ended by the song sunrise, a metaphor of Dante's journey probably?

Natural Beauty...(15/8)

Life is repetitive, if you think so. After a puppy journey long time ago, I went to Switzerland again recently and then I recognise that I have been so young...the country is famous for its tranquility and picturesque scenery, and lying at the heart of the Europa, the places are really a bit too dreamy. I took nearly the same route as my previous visit from France to enter Switzerland, but I made a switch of the first stop to Geneva instead of Bern. My memory about Geneva before I re-visited the city had been only the three-leg chair outside the headquarter of the United Nations. I did not understand why my previous memory of the country had been so pale and blurred, but I did enjoy this unconsciousness for fresh idea and understanding about the place. Geneva is a business centre in the western part, and it provides a very pleasant habitat for people. My general impression about the Swiss is a very peaceful and relaxed country, and it actually is. The landscape offers the Swiss an unbelievable beautiful playground of nature. The lake areas beside major cities serve as a placebo to purify the contaminated roughness of human ego and arrogance in the world. I passed by Lake Geneva, Lake Thun, Lake Brienz and Lake Luzerne, and in front of the calmness of waterground, words become useless and stupid.
I re-did the trip from Interlaken to Jungfrau, but rather than climbing up via Lauterbrunnen, I tried the path of Grindelwald this time. Claiming Top of Europe, the tourist centre on Jungfrau is actually located at 3454m above sea level, 700m below the tip of the mountain range. The mountain is indeed much below the height of Mount Kenya (5199m) I went before. A 100% journey for tourists, there is not much special at the centre of Jungfraujoch, but the stunning scenery along the hilly way was a fascinating journey. I still recalled the climax feeling when I first took the train to the top in the summer of 1998, but facing the scenery again this time, I replaced my curiosity about the world with a much deepening respect to the nature and the possibility of our world. The weather was fine throughout the trip and I took a hiking route from Kleine Scheidegg to Brandegg.


I was very much touched by the colour of 'green' in the films of Tarkovsky, and while I was walking down the mountain, I witnessed the much translation of green in nature. This is always something which can peace a mind.
Hotel management is reputed in Swiss, but that doesn't mean that all the hotels are good in the country, at least there is some variation between my expectation and my experience this time. Not sure what is going on in Korea apart from its robust recovery of economy, Korean tourists were influx everywhere in Switzerland. This is something unexpected.

My Dramatica...(7/4)

I did not have thought of too much how it would be years later when I worked on some script writing for drama at the very beginning...It was always a step of my personal growth. We call this 'experience'. Actually I know that I did not really have managed to produce a controllable flow of story with dramatic elements on the stage. I thought of a lot how I was creating the script and the many nice moments in my mind failed to appear on the stage during the performance. This is basically the technique of stage work. A tight schedule was usually a major factor of failure too. In those days, funding was a big problem for organising a drama show for our group, but my will had never been inviting just some friends to come and support what I wanted to do. This was a bit meaningless to me. I did not see drama as a sake of profit or socialising with my communities. I had a silly but simple aim like many other young artists to express my thought through the performing arts. I still recall the moment when I was writing hard my script in Beijing or beside the window in the room of Grenoble. It was a passionate moment in my good times. Time may have killed some of the intention...
After years...
Recently I met 2 friends separately in Paris, and coincidently they were surprisingly an audience of our drama before. They were sitting just a few metres away from my stage, and I could not have imagined that after years, we would meet each other in Paris and talk about the drama again...
I really do not know how the great directors or artists would think when they work on a project and if their works would have perhaps influenced others' way of thinking. Of course, I admire a lot of them, and this is just an interesting feeling to me to talk to some audience again in such an unexpected occasion. I wish there would not be too much a critics. ;p

Single Way Ticket...(9/7)

I am also looking for a single way ticket...

"有時候覺得自己好像已經這樣朝九晚五一輩子了。
常常有個念頭,想放下工作,買一張單程機票,沒有目的地也無所謂...
一直生活在這個挾小的城市,每天被瑣碎的事佔住思緒,整個人的視野變小了...
連夢想也都變得好遠好遠...
但是現實的生計問題又活生生把我抓回辦公室裡...
原來大家常說的無奈,也就是這樣
所以也只好不要想太多,安於現狀就好。"

The cost of a single way ticket (SWT) does not matter. We are in a society of less fun and aspirations, and this is pathetic for a developed world. Dreams and fantasies are either lost or hidden perhaps only in a cinema room. 2 hours after watching a movie, a dream fades out again. The invention of cars and planes reduces the size of the world, and so we travel and voyage. We move from destination to destination to find a piece of habitat that we can live peacefully. We have yet found the place. Someone calls it Utopia, others think that it may be the dreamland, but yet this is not known. We suffer from locating an agent to buy us a single way ticket. If you watch the film "Happy Together" by Wong Kar Wai, or if you hear the album "The Holy Bible" from the Manic Street Preachers, you will find that a destination is usually somewhere far away from our world, be it "another" world, or a stop that we may never be able to reach...poor us.

Invisible air pressure covers our city, and this is something our weather forecast fails to mention in everyday's report. A kind of pressure from works, from the human interaction, from the expectation and reality, from the fate or destiny. We become monotonic and fatigue...we are still the one to suffer from disappointment and unexpected moments. Lives are sweet and sour.

If we are offered the SWT, we need to figure out the direction we have to go. I wish I could go now. I have been thinking about the question posted by the Radiohead, "how to disappear from the world?"...I can hide myself and disconnect from the usual extractable means of communication at first, and then should I go to India or South America? Or the Sahara, or no more a physical space but a psychological one? The soul asylum?? The heaven or hell, the Moon or the Mars. Believe or not, there are hundreds of person disappearing from "our" world everyday, and perhaps it is because they finally got their SWT.

The illness of city people needs not be curable, and this is always a symptom after rapid development of urbanisation. A side effect that has seldom be addressed by the planners and architects. Our world has over 6.4 billion of people, and the humaine management of each of us the kind of homo sapiens is nearly impossible. We suffer from all kinds of social problem every moment, and the Darwinism simply explains parts of the world at present. To live in the civilisation is not an easy task.

A setting up of SWT should be a profitable business to my understanding, and another emerging industry should be dream selling. Save your money for the new products to be released soon, but well, perhaps at that point of time, we buy it not by cash notes but something else...