Oh to be a flâneur. A person who walks the city in order to experience it.
And somehow things in black and white just seems so much richer.
“..A while ago somewhere
I don’t know when
I was watching a movie with a friend.
I fell in love with the actress.
She was playing a part that
I could understand..”N.Young
You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened. – Jorges Luis Borges
Many people said that Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film, Inception, was brilliant and perhaps the best mind-blowing film they’ve ever seen.
Caught by the public hysteria about the film – there were tweets that wowed over the film every so often when it opened – I decided to catch it at the cinema. And was disappointed.
It was a wonderful exercise in film techniques but otherwise, in terms of plot material and originality. Just like Shutter Island, I’ve seen the plot before. As opposed to popular opinion it was pretty easy to follow as well. How can cross-cutting of scenes be confusing? I’m referring to the second and third layers of the dream.
Granted there are a few details I’ve missed out but a second viewing of the film will surely reveal more. Nothing about it.
You’ll only have to peruse the books that belong to the metafiction genre in order to be able to experience the same “labyrinthesque” experience. And none more so than in the works of Jorges Luis Borges.
Conclusion? I’m getting old. Nothing is difficult anymore if I can get through Foucault’s Pendulum.
Tomorrow, Le Nozze di Figaro will be staged in the Esplanade. Now regarded as an essential of the standard operatic repertoire, the opera buffa is relatively famous with its overture often performed as a concert piece. It’s not listed in the 6th place of Opera America’s Top 20 most performed operas for nothing, you know.[1]
Your run-of-the-mill youth probably couldn’t care less about such a performance and would rather jump into the mosh pit in a random Christina Aguilera concert. But still, I do have some friends who are terribly interested in all things classical.
Therefore, I can’t help but feel a tinge of guilt that I am holding a free pass—a gallery pass no less—to Le Nozze. Me, a plebeian, uncultured couth who is a pseudo-intellectual with a bad, stinky pseudonym “Aristocrat”.
Forsooth it’s best the status quo rests
for you a glimmer of the beau
Of fan’asy, to be or not to be
as the flicker of hope thus burns
Whereas if the biston betularia comes
too close to the light
all it finds is a might beyond imagining
An evaporation of a mirage
hissing in the calefaction of its beat
The heavens did a splendid mess of the sky last night
and all we could do was to watch blindly
reading not watching.
(c) Picture by Imran, Singapore National Day Parade 2006
Click the photo for an enlarged view
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