Scene 9

The night was supposed to be great. I gave my pleasures to the hands of reality. After the big movie weekend I was not worn out and I decided to see this preview. Obscure crew and name, without a single description that makes sense, and in a theater I’d never been to. Give it a chance I thought, on this busy swirling Monday night.

’t was a deserted garden, big parking lot, crowded restaurant, ejaculating springs. It has the obvious straining effort for preserving non-existing historic scenery. Indian incenses, Japanese make-ups, artificial pearls, and craftsmen all cramming this little palace city with golden roofs and mercury lights, oh and that circling train reminded me nothing but Disney fantasies. Have the people any goal other than burning out their time…has this place any past that it could possibly take such glorious pride in…There’s a Barnes & Noble right across the street, where lying on the shelves fictions with the same covers, collector items with shining frames, hard-covers that blatantly promise you big fortune, and legends about the celeb’s or celeb-to-be’s. Is this the world we created…is this the world we invaded…?

I was early for the movie, yet late for the line. The invitation was a piece of trash, and the well-dressed gentlemen didn’t even attempt to fake a regretful face. Guardian after guardian for this obscure work, and no one was complaining. Why should they. I started to remember and fantasize how the Pacific at Sherman Oaks was such a wonderland, where I brought my invitation and stayed for two optional features just two days before. Or the James Bridge on campus. How nostalgia I am in this spring break, yearning for those days I walked in with my CD player and just sat down waiting for the start with no previews/ commercials, as if everything was well-established and peacefully- insinuated. But here at the Grove, my first time in this palace garden, the lobby was ice-cold and the guards were even worse. I’m here for the pleasure and the makers for the promotion. What are they working for, do they realize…?

And so I stepped out, watching the spring shooting up high with some version of “I got you under my skin”. It looked Viagrized (if there is such a thing), lively without affection, not even for itself. Why not, thought I, since this was the splendid place and people are here to improve their lives. Yeah with all the alluring pictures hanging in the boutique windows, the defined-as-sensual incenses, and people’s coldness, it can’t be more professional for a high-class prostitute. A prostitute for the rich…

On the way back I degraded myself towards it. I suddenly realized how the society works outside academia. Not that I didn’t know it before, it was just…enhanced, like the sound on an xrcd, all the details accurately positioned and amplified. I traded an invitation for a determination, one with further resilience. Money has to come, and as the cliché goes, “all this has to be answered for”.

I’ll be back, for the Grove-Pro.

Scene 8

I'm in the dark. I'm all by myself. I'm performing ultimate science and it's the best part of it. In this room, temperature is constant, density is constant, loneliness is constant. The changing powers of lasers are dreamy yet succinct; the programs run without an error. I did everything before I entered, and I'm at ease. Mary Black is singing from the speakers. And nobody's online.

What is eternity, I wondered, as I stare at the only bright thing in this dark room--the computer screen. I remembered how Noi stared at his lighter, his only companion when the world shrank to only silence, and how he stayed till the last minute to watch the lighter die. And that instant seemed eternally devastating. What is life after all, to experience the extreme or breathe the conventional? "Noi Albinoi" was a fascinating movie, reminded me of "Rouge" and yet, was a more elaborate effort to expose the nature of life. Living is fatal as someone put smartly, death is approaching every day. And we are totally risky animals to fight and secure ourselves throughout the whole time history. What an elegy.

Right before I went to bed I was trying to scare myself with the darkness in my bedroom. Well, failure for sure, with all the lamps outside in the yard. With the moon maybe, I didn't get up to check. Or with rays from other apartment windows. It's not easy to experience what Noi went through. Maybe the closest was in the cinema. When the black screen lasted around one minute. I wish it could have lasted longer. It could have suffocated me, drowned me, the darkness. And the notion that it might go nowhere, Noi might die, even he survived everybody he knew, by a certain amount of time. Seconds, microseconds, nanoseconds. Words I utter every day. Do I know their meaning beyond their mathematical values?

And the beat goes on. The beat goes on.

"Dark city" wasn't dark enough. Hollywood has too many blue lights. I keep my intuitions and search further for the darkness. The one thing I'll be so fragile when facing.

Scene 7

Morning, Debussy.
Morning, Mavis.

You made my day, made tides rush to the shore, made clouds hold back tears, made wounds rest in peace.

You carved tricky springs in my rocky memories. You drowned souls in the water of flesh. You named death after life.

And that's how the past gets resurrected. Strange feelings are developed, old affections are mesmerized, and living is suffocated.

No awakening is more dubious than from Debussy's images, and no sleeping is more painfully joyous than in Mavis' voice. And the night and day connect at a distance, where dream is enforced and living is dissipated.

And I nonsensed.

Happiness is sinless.

The night becomes the day.

Scene 6

Tear it up, and eat it!

I came back from the screening of “Dogville”, feeling the director didn’t have much success depressing me. But he did strike me with the continuation of thoughts and ponders upon one eternal thing (if any)—human nature and its unspeakable vulnerabilities. I wouldn’t think it’s inappropriate to compare this piece of art work (which, by the way, was a little too simple and thrifty to avoid its hypnosis side-effects) to its similar ancestors. Boule de suif by Guy de Maupassant, for example, was told on a similar basis but glorified from a shorter time span and consequentially higher intensities. But that short story ended with a question mark, leaving people with spacious possibilities of sequels. Xiu Xiu, or known for its Chinese name 天浴 (Heaven Bathing), was more entangled with its political settings and thus more pointedly designated as an impugn for dictation. But after all the introduction part of that movie, what is left contains one spot and two main characters, and a bunch of come-and-go people who should be credited for arousing the isolation, the fears and hatred. That, is perfectly incorporated in “Dogville”. And yet I still would like to say that Xiu Xiu, despite all its graphical and psychological disturbing, makes a more optimistic movie than the latter, simply because the script told the heroine to die on top of the mountain. She terminated her life in great despair and left the vicious world without a physical trace. At least she refused to be part of it, helplessness turned zero. While Grace in “Dogville” after the painful ambivalence (which was kind of single-sided, again because the one-set footage saved all the space for a could-have-been-better prologue), chose to commit a crime not necessarily unjustified but certainly as immoral as that of the others. This spreading and continuation of crime becomes an even more dreadful and haunting cleavage of human nature. And with the laughter from the theater the director himself must have grinned. Yes you people watching and laughing, and the ghost is right in the mirror in front of you.

The movie sure has artistic-bore moments, but the drama is clear and hot. And it paves way for some serious thinking, which could be useless, but could also make a difference.

Scene 5

Why should you cry I said, why in the bloody H should you cry. And I didn’t type in these words. I wouldn’t think he’d like more scolding, besides all the pain he has gone through. The pain, of something yearning against all the belief he ever had. Of all mental treatments he accepted unconsciously in that tower house, under the lanterns, in front of the priests. He never even realized that what had become of him was an even more clashed nature, because of the treatments. Yeah the treatments. The rituals the words the hums, the appeasing existing that drives the human out of bodies and injects into them utmost emptiness that somehow doesn’t feel bad, at least for those who are pure existing-emptiness themselves.

Not him. He wasn’t that empty from the very beginning and he suffers now from the conflict, the morose, the desires, and the blasphemy.

Does he understand o yes he does, I talked with him for numerous times to find him up where I am, but he carries on his back more than I do, which starts to swallow his natural intentions, and make him miserable on his knees, for the wrong reason. He gets laid by the B-book, whipped by the holy, humped by the commandments. And yet he plods on, cries into his sleep, his fantasies, his prayers and his sleazy dreams. He lives for no one. Not even for himself. He lives for the aftermath of dictators’ crimes centuries ago. They all do. And what makes the climax of the tragedy is, they laugh and sing and say, this is haven.

And I stopped talking to him. I wouldn’t spend time dealing with the sacred widower. He is lonely because he is abandoned, or chose to be from even before the prelude. Or somebody chose it for him. Out of what intention aha read the climax again. Why was peer pressures overweighed than family ones? Why was it never named a crime to bring children into the planet and fill them up with rancid souls or sculpt them with distorted knives? Why was it considered guilty to kill, but never to force someone into suicide? Why the BH should the imperfect world saved by an even more marred creature, whose existence is unanimously questioned upon? You can romanticize the pleasure, but never ban the ill-fated happiness just to stabilize your reign. (This starts to become a GRE verbal test, find the closest word to “reign”. Here you go.)

I gave a crappy suggestion, and some remarks that surprised myself. Either God makes you happy, said I, or guys do. Or you choose to be unhappy. And he agreed.

He said that was so correct. And I thought this was the perfect epilogue of the tragedy.

Scene 4

Here it goes, the list, after several years of departure, reunited with me. The textures, and stares, and ripples of the fingers on the strings. Everything was so perfect and fragile. Through the darkest moments I used to learn that there existed once in history a way worse form of living. And I was contented. But now the distant tragedy groans within me and doesn’t let go. My compulsive syndrome almost out-burst into a disorder. Time and time again I attempted to terminate this afflicting in vain.

And the next thing I knew was daylight. Another day another word possibly another form of life. Awakening was always the most joyous moment, even though the man in the mirror always looks aghast and worn out. Then there was food to think about, food for thought mmm, and there was the melody. And the light was on and the next thing I knew was the 36364313 notes after notes, crispy and cautious, on this precious spring morning-noon. My notes convolved with Perlman’s recording ten years ago and engraved on shadows of the holocaust in my brain. There’s plenty of thought even without food. Then the notes went wrong, like pebbles in a roaring river being washed and crashed to the bank. And I had to stop this delectable musical moment and get washed and fed for the day.

And yet I could not understand my obsession for the list. Was it the picture itself or the time I first got to see it, that has been clinging on me ever since and synthesized dozens of self-compulsions?

3636, 4313, 12123.

Scene 3

That afternoon was cozy, gorgeous, nostalgia and whatever. The peep through another place in town another form of life pierced into me self-complacency and disgust. And yet, my attitude towards life was, somehow, further torqued for a better change, a change that I still cannot explicitly utter. People were kind, they were devoted, indulged, abused. No borderline between dream and reality, passion and slavery, wonder and confirm. Living, as they did, formed a total split-free unity, ignited tons of derisive tides around my body.

THIS IS GOING NOWHERE. YOU ARE PLANTING MASOCHISM AGAIN.

Alright. What do you want me to write about, the food, the tides, the beats and the moon? There you go, dare-free nuts, he said, that’s somethin’ I wanna hear. See how people get numbed and materialized without a slight complaint?! That’s the most devastating tragedy of our age, same thing as expressed in “About Schmidt”, and yet people likewise laughed and didn’t give a D. Let me tell you how all this was possible, how all the joy was created by a bunch of dare-whatever nuts, how a crappy car can encapsulate a universe of beauty, and how a Sunday can prove your bastard mind wrong!!

CALM DOWN BABY. THERE’S NO NEED TO GET PISSED.

YOU KNOW WHAT, I THINK YOU ARE GETTING CLOSE TO SPLIT.

HEY WHY DON’T YOU CONSIDER SWITCHING YOUR MAJOR?

I WANNA HEAR NO MORE FROM YOU.

Anyways, that was a wonderful time I spent, for the first time indulging myself to express freely and nobody around was arrogant enough to criticize. Wearing the science mask I attempt to probe deeply into their world, their emotions, their joys and sorrows. And wicked as I am, they won’t notice my GD ambition because hey, I’m a scientist, and that washes away all the suspicions. Because I don’t deal with feelings, because I live with theories and phenomena, because I can babble for a whole day with jargons I can simply generically create. Because I can mess up your brain not with colors or shapes or objects but numbers. SHUT THE F*** UP. You are acting out the most hateful thing called stereotype, and you don’t even realize. But can’t you see my sarcasm?

I played for a long time, “Auntie” and “Farmer”, two lovely pieces from 陈升. Warming my eyes with the deep blue lyrics book and soaring through the soft and heavy, strange and homesick, curing and hurting chords. My fingers yelled out in hunger, my voice familiar and weird, and he has the most beautiful eyes and eye lashes. And I’d be happy just to remember that.

First Day. First Time.