Lives around…

Album of the day: Brett Dennen: So much more

Posted on April 8th, 2008 by zhipan.
Categories: Music.

Great album from Brett Dennen:

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Song of the day(4/4/08): You know I am no good by Amy Winehouse

Posted on April 4th, 2008 by zhipan.
Categories: Music.

Here is the song:

It is surprising to hear such full-body voice and think about her alcoholic and drug addition. The sound comes with a full texture, and the lyrics are beautifully and emotionally woven together. My favorite song of the entire album “Back to Black.”

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Music player finally is working

Posted on March 26th, 2008 by zhipan.
Categories: Music.

Heheh… here it is… some old song from childhood.

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Friday I am in Love

Posted on March 25th, 2008 by zhipan.
Categories: Music.

Listening to the random collection of songs, and then all of a sudden this classic popped out, and right away I am in a happy and cheerful mood. Here it is, to share with y’all.

I don’t care if monday’s blue
tuesday’s grey and wednesday too
thursday i don’t care about you
it’s friday i’m in love

monday you can fall apart
tuesday wednesday break my heart
thursday doesn’t even start
it’s friday i’m in love

saturday wait
and sunday always comes too late
but friday never hesitate…

i don’t care if mondays black
tuesday wednesday heart attack
thursday never looking back
it’s friday i’m in love

monday you can hold your head
tuesday wednesday stay in bed
or thursday watch the walls instead
it’s friday i’m in love

saturday wait
and sunday always comes too late
but friday never hesitate…

dressed up to the eyes
it’s a wonderful surprise
to see your shoes and your spirits rise
throwing out your frown
and just smiling at the sound
and as sleek as a shriek
spinning round and round
always take a big bite
it’s such a gorgeous sight
to see you eat in the middle of the night
you can never get enough
enough of this stuff
it’s friday
i’m in love

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Revisiting “The Graduate”

Posted on March 10th, 2008 by zhipan.
Categories: Movies.

I have watched this iconic movie only once before, and I guess I really missed many of the excellent lines in the movie, and it takes a revisit to discover them or to find new meanings out of them again.

One question that keeps coming up in the moving is “What are you going to do after this” or “with your life? And there is never an answer from aimless Benjamin, who has no idea where he would be or want to do after graduation. Same as Ben, his girlfriend Elaine is just as confounded with herself and her surroundings. For Ben, it was only after he meets and then confesses to Elaine in an effort to salvage their relationship before the mother destroys it, when he finds he is in irreversibly love with Elaine. Amid the aimlessness of Ben, he finds his goal and his life in pursuing the daughter, or the archetypical girl next door. Yet, that was only part of the story as the movie tries to tell. The other part is about the life that Ben and his girlfriend Elaine lived in, their old-fashioned and even devouringly monstrous parents, between which lies a deep generation gap.

At the very beginning of the movie, a friend of Ben’s father asked him what he is going afterwards, and said I just want to say one word to you — just one word — ‘plastics’.” I guess when I was watching the movie in China with Chinese subtitles, I really did not catch the meaning of the word from the crappy translation at the time. Now that I heard it said again, I paused to think how he meant by that, just as Ben did. Plastic signifies everything phony and superficial in American life, and clearly became a American pop culture phenomenon as I heard it over and over again on the radio, TV, etc. To sneer at all things plastic was to offer an instant definition of oneself as among the young, hip, truth-seeking cognoscenti locked in a moral power struggle with an older generation of square, corrupt, greedy, warmongering materialists. More than any other touch, its ridicule of plastic defined “The Graduate” as a film about the 60’s generation gap.

As for the generation gap, it is clearly just one-sided since Benjamin is the cipher of the gap. But it is clearly to see the inclination of the movie across the gap. In the famous scene of the mother seducing Benjamin, what we see is the manipulative middle-aged woman with sensuality and sexuality exuding from her dress, voice, behavior and posture, in contrast with the nervous, uptight newly graduate, who is still fresh into the society he is either confused with or he had hard time to fit in.

The soundtrack of the movie is such a big plus, which makes the movie such a great success. Nearly right after the movie, as I am writing this blog, I downloaded the soundtrack. It is such a classic.

Come to think of ourself, we all now have been just pushed into where we are and where we do. The fast-paced life barely gives us, especially immigrants any chance of a break. I guess we can choose to have one, but for me, I just don’t have the guts to take the consequences. I also have some ideas of what I really want to do with my limited time in life while enjoying life at the same time, but the never-stopping rhythm just never gave me a pause like Ben had in the Graduate, with enough time to figure out he is really into. The end of the movie, as I heard on NPR’s Fresh Air, used to have a different ending with a more definite result between Benjamin and Elaine, but later stuck with the version that we see on the screen, in which they are on the bus heading to unknown.

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The Wire’s War on the Drug War

Posted on March 6th, 2008 by zhipan.
Categories: Movies.

I never fully understand why we should not pursue the drug war, and why there are loud voices against the drug war at all, because I cannot think of any other ways beyond law enforcement and harsh punishment that can actually deter its detrimental effect to the society and everyone inside. Yet, the latest article by the writing group of the absolutely fantastic HBO TV drama The Wire at least gave the other side of the story on the drug war.

Some excerpts:

We write a television show. Measured against more thoughtful and meaningful occupations, this is not the best seat from which to argue public policy or social justice. Still, those viewers who followed The Wire — our HBO drama that tried to portray all sides of inner-city collapse, including the drug war, with as much detail and as little judgment as we could muster — tell us they’ve invested in the fates of our characters. They worry or grieve for Bubbles, Bodie or Wallace, certain that these characters are fictional yet knowing they are rooted in the reality of the other America, the one rarely acknowledged by anything so overt as a TV drama.

Yet this war grinds on, flooding our prisons, devouring resources, turning city neighborhoods into free-fire zones. To what end? State and federal prisons are packed with victims of the drug conflict. A new report by the Pew Center shows that 1 of every 100 adults in the U.S. — and 1 in 15 black men over 18 — is currently incarcerated. That’s the world’s highest rate of imprisonment.

The drug war has ravaged law enforcement too. In cities where police agencies commit the most resources to arresting their way out of their drug problems, the arrest rates for violent crime — murder, rape, aggravated assault — have declined. In Baltimore, where we set The Wire, drug arrests have skyrocketed over the past three decades, yet in that same span, arrest rates for murder have gone from 80% and 90% to half that. Lost in an unwinnable drug war, a new generation of law officers is no longer capable of investigating crime properly, having learned only to make court pay by grabbing cheap, meaningless drug arrests off the nearest corner.

What the drugs themselves have not destroyed, the warfare against them has. And what once began, perhaps, as a battle against dangerous substances long ago transformed itself into a venal war on our underclass. Since declaring war on drugs nearly 40 years ago, we’ve been demonizing our most desperate citizens, isolating and incarcerating them and otherwise denying them a role in the American collective. All to no purpose. The prison population doubles and doubles again; the drugs remain.

“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right,” wrote Thomas Paine when he called for civil disobedience against monarchy — the flawed national policy of his day. In a similar spirit, we offer a small idea that is, perhaps, no small idea. It will not solve the drug problem, nor will it heal all civic wounds. It does not yet address questions of how the resources spent warring with our poor over drug use might be better spent on treatment or education or job training, or anything else that might begin to restore those places in America where the only economic engine remaining is the illegal drug economy. It doesn’t resolve the myriad complexities that a retreat from war to sanity will require. All it does is open a range of intricate, paradoxical issues. But this is what we can do — and what we will do.

Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest. If some few episodes of a television entertainment have caused others to reflect on the war zones we have created in our cities and the human beings stranded there, we ask that those people might also consider their conscience. And when the lawyers or the judge or your fellow jurors seek explanation, think for a moment on Bubbles or Bodie or Wallace. And remember that the lives being held in the balance aren’t fictional.

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Michael Clayton… George Clooney at his best

Posted on March 6th, 2008 by zhipan.
Categories: Movies.

I just finished watching the movie, and it is already over 1am, but I have to write something about this movie. This is probably one of the best movies that I have seen this year so far. Michael Clayton has everything you like in a great movie. It is modern, relevant, and fast-paced; it is revolves around conflicts on all levels and facets among people of all kind, people that I can relate to, people that I can feel strongly about. The movie has limited depiction of most people, but it effortlessly and sharply expose those people to you inside out. This is not a movie about the centerpiece class-act lawsuit, but about people, and how respond the situation with the information, resources and means at hand. Some chooses to go to the other side of the lawsuit, some decides to take things into their own control, some even goes to extreme measures, some takes all as part of the life and business, some running for life but still strives to do the right thing while trying to figure out what is the right thing to do, some trusts, and some doubts. The movie gets your nerves and heart racing, and it gets you think. But it is not one that boldly prompts you to think on the surface immediately after the movie, but to ask you to regurgitate all this and go to a deeper level: why do people respond to things so differently, and how do we understand this, and what kind of people are we?

George Clooney’s performance is… how to say, um, clean. Everything flows naturally from him, like from the really Michael Clayton, calm, charming, charismatic. Never anything beyond necessary, all just to the point. There will be Blood? Not even close. Daniel Day-Lewis won the oscar, but to me, there is no soul in his performance, all very artificial to me. Something similar to what you see in Dicaprio in all those movies he made lately, striving to be someone tough or mature. To be fair, Day-Lewis is much bette than Dicaprio, but still, he struck as being acting, rather than being there in the movie.

It seems to me that Oscar has a strong preference for performance about mentally, physically, or socioeconomically deprived personalities. There are just too many examples of this, and I am not saying this acting is easy, but acting someone who is not in the extreme is even harder, because it is much harder to find the right pitch, which is all very subjective and hard to grasp, in my opinion. and trying to act out a multi-faceted personality that can be seen by different people to arrive different perception is the hardest. And I think George Clooney is definitely one, who’s got there.

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Lindsay Lohan’s naked shocker

Posted on February 19th, 2008 by zhipan.
Categories: Uncategorized.

http://www.popcrunch.com/lindsay-lohan-naked-new-york-magazine-february-2008-naked-lindsay-lohan-marilyn-monroe-photos/

A naked Lindsay Lohan teamed up with the Spring 2008 Fashion Issue of New York Magazine to recreate screen siren Marilyn Monroe’s last photoshoot. Photos NSFW After The Jump.

In 1962, photographer Bert Stern shot a series of photos of Marilyn Monroe that have collectively come to be known as “The Last Sitting.” Taken during several boozy sessions at the Hotel Bel-Air, the photographs are arguably the most famous images ever captured of America’s most famous actress: Monroe, sleepy-eyed and naked, sips from a Champagne glass, enacts a fan dance of sorts with various diaphanous scarves, romps with erotic playfulness on a bed of white linens. Six weeks after she had posed, Monroe was found dead of an apparent barbiturate overdose.

The photos endure partly as artifacts—as the last visible evidence of the living woman (a legacy reinforced by Stern’s decision to publish the contact sheets Monroe herself had crossed out in red marker). But the pictures are also remarkable for the raw truths they seem to reveal. In them, we see an actress whose comedic talents were overshadowed by her sex appeal, a woman who is cannily aware of her pinup status, yet is also beginning to show her 36 years. In many shots, she is obviously drunk.

This was an unhappy time for Monroe. Notorious for her on-set antics, she had been publicly lambasted by Billy Wilder after Some Like It Hot, then fired from the production of Something’s Got to Give; she’d endured two recent divorces and, in 1961, a brief stint in a psychiatric ward.

Stern excavated and preserved the poignant humanity of the real woman—beautiful, but also fragile, needy, flawed—from the monumental sex symbol. In our armored, airbrushed age, his achievement feels almost revolutionary.

Forty-six years later, Stern has revisited his classic shots with Lindsay Lohan, another actress whose prodigious fame is not quite commensurate with her professional achievements. Stern, who shot the photos on film rather than digitally, told me he was interested in Lohan because he suspected “she had a lot more depth to her” than one might assume from “those teenage movies.” Indeed, many in the film industry believe that Lohan has yet to pursue projects equal to her gifts. Without putting too fine a point on it, you might say Lohan has, like Monroe, a knack for courting the tabloids and tripping up her career. (Readers will remember that Lohan had her own Billy Wilder moment two summers ago on the set of Georgia Rule.) Stern said the project also grew out of his interest in “controversial women,” or “bad girls,” like “Britney, Paris, and Lindsay.” Monroe was, in a sense, the original tabloid queen.

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Democrats should read Kipling by William Kristol

Posted on February 18th, 2008 by zhipan.
Categories: Books.

An article from today’s Times.

Democrats Should Read Kipling By WILLIAM KRISTOL

Browsing through a used-book store Friday — in the Milwaukee airport, of all places — I came across a 1981 paperback collection of George Orwell’s essays. That’s how I happened to reread his 1942 essay on Rudyard Kipling. Given Orwell’s perpetual ability to elucidate, one shouldn’t be surprised that its argument would shed light— or so it seems to me — on contemporary American politics.

Orwell offers a highly qualified appreciation of the then (and still) politically incorrect Kipling. He insists that one must admit that Kipling is “morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting.” Still, he says, Kipling “survives while the refined people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly.” One reason for this is that Kipling “identified himself with the ruling power and not with the opposition.”

“In a gifted writer,” Orwell remarks, “this seems to us strange and even disgusting, but it did have the advantage of giving Kipling a certain grip on reality.” Kipling “at least tried to imagine what action and responsibility are like.” For, Orwell explains, “The ruling power is always faced with the question, ‘In such and such circumstances, what would you do?’, whereas the opposition is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions.” Furthermore, “where it is a permanent and pensioned opposition, as in England, the quality of its thought deteriorates accordingly.”

If I may vulgarize the implications of Orwell’s argument a bit: substitute Republicans for Kipling and Democrats for the opposition, and you have a good synopsis of the current state of American politics.

Having controlled the executive branch for 28 of the last 40 years, Republicans tend to think of themselves as the governing party — with some of the arrogance and narrowness that implies, but also with a sense of real-world responsibility. Many Democrats, on the other hand, no longer even try to imagine what action and responsibility are like. They do, however, enjoy the support of many refined people who snigger at the sometimes inept and ungraceful ways of the Republicans. (And, if I may say so, the quality of thought of the Democrats’ academic and media supporters — a permanent and, as it were, pensioned opposition — seems to me to have deteriorated as Orwell would have predicted.)

The Democrats won control of Congress in November 2006, thanks in large part to President Bush’s failures in Iraq. Then they spent the next year seeking to ensure that he couldn’t turn those failures around. Democrats were “against” the war and the surge. That was the sum and substance of their policy. They refused to acknowledge changing facts on the ground, or to debate the real consequences of withdrawal and defeat. It was, they apparently thought, the Bush administration, not America, that would lose. The 2007 Congressional Democrats showed what it means to be an opposition party that takes no responsibility for the consequences of the choices involved in governing.

So it continues in 2008. The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gen. Michael Hayden, the director of national intelligence, the retired Vice Admiral Mike McConnell, and the attorney general, the former federal judge Michael Mukasey, are highly respected and nonpolitical officials with little in the way of partisanship or ideology in their backgrounds. They have all testified, under oath, that in their judgments, certain legal arrangements regarding surveillance abilities are important to our national security.

Not all Democrats have refused to listen. In the Senate, Jay Rockefeller, chairman of the Intelligence Committee, took seriously the job of updating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in light of technological changes and court decisions. His committee produced an impressive report, and, by a vote of 13 to 2, sent legislation to the floor that would have preserved the government’s ability to listen to foreign phone calls and read foreign e-mail that passed through switching points in the United States. The full Senate passed the legislation easily — with a majority of Democrats voting against, and Senators Obama and Clinton indicating their opposition from the campaign trail.

But the Democratic House leadership balked — particularly at the notion of protecting from lawsuits companies that had cooperated with the government in surveillance efforts after Sept. 11. Director McConnell repeatedly explained that such private-sector cooperation is critical to antiterror efforts, in surveillance and other areas, and that it requires the assurance of immunity. “Your country is at risk if we can’t get the private sector to help us, and that is atrophying all the time,” he said. But for the House Democrats, sticking it to the phone companies — and to the Bush administration — seemed to outweigh erring on the side of safety in defending the country.

To govern is to choose, a Democrat of an earlier generation, John F. Kennedy, famously remarked. Is this generation of Democrats capable of governing?

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Good night and good luck

Posted on February 18th, 2008 by zhipan.
Categories: 1.

I finally watched Good night and good luck, a great movie about Edward Murrow and Fred Friendly’s fight with Senator McCarthy. There is not much to say about what a great movie it is and how it reminds us of the spirit of the journalism as citizen reporter, but here are some quote from Murrow’s RTNDA convention speech in 1958, quoted from: http://www.turnoffyourtv.com/commentary/hiddenagenda/murrow.html

I have no technical advice or counsel to offer those of you who labor in this vineyard that produces words and pictures. You will forgive me for not telling you that instruments with which you work are miraculous, that your responsibility is unprecedented or that your aspirations are frequently frustrated. It is not necessary to remind you that the fact that your voice is amplified to the degree where it reaches from one end of the country to the other does not confer upon you greater wisdom or understanding than you possessed when your voice reached only from one end of the bar to the other.

Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live. I invite your attention to the television schedules of all networks between the hours of 8 and 11 p.m., Eastern Time. Here you will find only fleeting and spasmodic reference to the fact that this nation is in mortal danger. There are, it is true, occasional informative programs presented in that intellectual ghetto on Sunday afternoons. But during the daily peak viewing periods, television in the main insulates us from the realities of the world in which we live. If this state of affairs continues, we may alter an advertising slogan to read: LOOK NOW, PAY LATER.

We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent. We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.

To those who say people wouldn’t look; they wouldn’t be interested; they’re too complacent, indifferent and insulated, I can only reply: There is, in one reporter’s opinion, considerable evidence against that contention. But even if they are right, what have they got to lose? Because if they are right, and this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse and insulate, then the tube is flickering now and we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost.

This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful.

Stonewall Jackson, who knew something about the use of weapons, is reported to have said, “When war comes, you must draw the sword and throw away the scabbard.” The trouble with television is that it is rusting in the scabbard during a battle for survival.

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