Archive for November, 2012
Wong Kar Wai does Kung Fu
There’s always some mention of Manila in the films of Wong Kar Wai. For instance, in In The Mood For Love, Maggie Cheung’s boss asks her if the package has been sent to Manila. Wong Kar Wai has mentioned that in the 1960s all the nightclubs in Hong Kong had Filipino musicians playing Latin band music—the kind we hear in ITMFL.
In the late 80s, early 90s Wong Kar Wai came to the Philippines to film Days of Being Wild. It starred Leslie Cheung, Maggie Cheung, Andy Lau, Carina Lau, and Tony Leung in a cameo that introduces his character in In The Mood For Love and 2046 (Not that one needs a reason to show Tony Leung combing his hair). Tita Muñoz played Leslie Cheung’s mother, and Alicia Alonzo and Maritoni Fernandez had small roles. Parts of the film were shot at Tutuban Station, on the PNR train to Quezon, and at Villa Escudero.
Jude Mancuyas, proprietor of The Frazzled Cook, worked in the wardrobe department of Days of Being Wild. We once asked Jude what it was like to work with the great WKW. He said there was a lot of waiting involved. The director doesn’t have detailed scripts for his movies. He sits silently, smoking cigarettes, composing the scenes in his head. Hours pass.
The production company reportedly ran out of money so they had to sell off equipment and Mark Meily bought cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s light meter.
Days of Being Wild is the first in the sort-of trilogy that continues with ITMFL and 2046. It was the beginning of what we now think of as the Wong Kar Wai style.
We love Chungking Express. Takeshi Kaneshiro and the expired cans of pineapple. Tony Leung and his housecleaning admirer.
Excuses for Plagiarists
8. Diss the author.
“But the author wasn’t stating an original idea anyway. I just happened to restate her unoriginal idea using the exact same words and punctuation marks. There being a finite number of words, phrases and punctuation marks that may be used to express the same thought. What an amazing coincidence!
“The author is a nobody so I’m doing her a favor by bringing her work to a wider public than she could ever reach. Seriously, did you know she even existed before I said something she wrote, using the exact same words she used, and conveniently forgot to mention her?”
11. I am the Kwisatz Haderach!
Only makes sense if you’ve read Dune.
12. The English Major Defense
“Who is Sarah Pope? Oh I thought that stuff was written by Alexander Pope! You know, like, The Rape of the Lock? The Dunciad? Cause Alexander Pope is in the Western canon and his words should be instantly familiar to all literate, erudite persons. “And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it made enlargements too…” You’ve never heard that? God, you illiterates.
“Anyway, when words are universally familiar, it’s silly to even attribute them. You don’t have to say, “Fourscore and seven years ago, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter,” that’s just showing off.
In case you’re not sick of the topic, read our column at InterAksyon.com.
Meta-procrastination
Our weekly workload is usually three columns, a daily blog (which is technically not work), plus assignments, our journal and whatever fiction we’re working on. Making it easy to meet the 1,000-word daily quota prescribed by Graham Greene, who knows all about writing in volume.
Last week we had to write two columns, two articles, and five profiles for a book we’re writing, plus journal and blog (No fiction was written last week, unless we count our columns). We know from experience that it takes three to four hours of “doing nothing” i.e. hanging out with friends, watching movies and videos, reading books in coffee shops, walking, playing with the cats, general vegetation to generate the energy and focus to produce one hour of work. This sounds like an excuse but it is based on decades of empirical evidence.
So we watched three seasons of Community.
Created by Dan Harmon (who was kicked off his own show), Community takes a group of characters who look like stereotypes, puts them in seemingly stereotypical situations, then gets meta on everything. It is bizarre, self-referential, crammed with pop culture parodies, geeky and often hysterically funny. It has reenactments, alternate timelines, Dungeons and Dragons/Doctor Who universes and Ken Jeong who is his own species of crazy. An episode which seems to spoof Pulp Fiction spoof is really a parody of My Dinner With Andre. The destruction of a science experiment leads to a brilliant Law and Order satire: Basic Lupine Urology.
And we had to watch all these in order to get our work done. (We met all our deadlines so eat your lectures, anti-procrastination types.) Meta-procrastination!
9 theories of the multiverse
String Theory suggests that our universe may be like a page in a book, stacked alongside tens of trillions of others. Those other realities would be right next to us now. Photo by the Esch Collection/Getty
There is another you, sitting on an identical Earth, about 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 120 light years away
Gadget shopping for Xmas, without the aggravation
The first true portable computer was the Osborne 1 “luggable”, which weighed about 20 pounds and could fit under the passenger seat of a commercial plane.
Our laptop weighs 3 pounds and is cat-approved.
COMDDAP 2012: From radical technology to gadgets we can’t live without
Philippine Star, 11 Nov 2012
In 1984, a group of computer distributors and resellers joined a privately-organized exhibition of computer equipment in Manila. It was a disappointing experience: not a lot of people came to the show, probably because the organizer was charging an exorbitant fee of 50 pesos “to discourage usyosero”. The participating companies decided that they could put on a much better exhibition themselves. In fact they could form a trade association that would not only do expositions, but also work with IT providers and users, the government, and the private sector to make computers affordable and available to the masses.
Affordability was a big issue at the time. IBM had launched the first personal computer in 1981, setting the industry standard, but equipment prices were prohibitive. A Radio Shack 8-inch hard disk that had all of 5 megabytes of memory cost USD1,500. (5MB was huge because the memory of a regular PC was 16kb.)
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