Three Things To Do in 2009 - Part A

Here is my list of three things to do before June 30, 2009:
1. Read the Bible
2. Learn French
3. Do a couple of ARE exams

This is probably my last blog for the year. It has been an interesting one. See you next year.. I have lots of wishes and hopes to do, I hope you do to. Like St. Paul said, keep running!

barely good people

I just saw 21 Grams, a 2003 movie by Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu and Guillermo Arriaga. I was really 5 years late in watching this good movie. Yep, i think between 2000-2005 I almost lost contact with most of the world out there as I was making love with architecture. Sorry for making that kind of analogy. But I came to realize sometimes when you fall in love intensely, you live in the world but your mind is not in it. 21 Grams was about the grotesque reality that we live in. It attempted to convince us that that the grotesque and the beauty of this life were more intertwined than we thought they were. It dig deep under our skin - inspecting the weight of our soul. At the end of this journey, the medium barrier dissolved and we saw ourselves in the mirror. That we are all barely good people under our skin capable of uncontrolled good (donating heart) and evil (killing innocents) in a switch of an instant. That's the overall impression I have. I am sure if you are familiar with that movie, you have must known about the non-linear montage style editing. It, however, looks very Bressonian for me at the core, with a simple proposition to show effect before cause. Crash (2004) became a little tame after watching this.

Talking about tame movie, I also watched Priceless with the cute Audrey Tautou from Amelie in it. She is probably one of the super skinny actors that I found attractive. I could say Priceless is a totally different genre from 21 Grams but arguably exploring the same issue of: what is the content of human soul?. Didn't feel like that at first because Priceless looks just like another re-take of Hollywood chic-flick made in France. But beyond all the beauty, charm, and glamour of Tautou character's, it revealed the grotesque side of a soul; in this case, of a high class hooker/seducer of middle age men. Maybe kind of like Miss Dupre in Spitzer's scandal back in March. Yes, we are all barely good people.

Reboot - clip

TF is always good in expressing for us, our collective thoughts and also like he said in one of his books "connecting the dots". But reading his articles and insights I often times found these projective possibilites and original ideas from him that are so interesting. One of these nuggets of thoughts is the part that I highlighted above from his Dec 24th, 2008 op-ed: Time to Reboot America.