Last weekend, we had some weiqi friends from Beijing over in Kuala Lumpur. They were actually here for holiday, a trip organised by their weiqi school, the HaiDian Go Institute. Their Vice President, Mr. Zhang Yi Zhou who is a 5 dan, led the group. Among them were three children, a girl of 14 and two boys, one 12 years old and the other younger. The girl is a 5 dan amateur and the boys are both 4dan and 3 dan respectively. I played the 4 dan kiddo and lost.
His judgement and reading was really great. He is very sharp and has superb attacking skills. It was a very interesting game. At the end, nothing really died on the board but I was behind by about 10 points, holding black. So with the komi, I figured I was quite behind and resigned, without finishing the game.
Recent movies watched:
“Saving Face” – Superb, superb movie. Interestingly directed by first time feature director Alice Wu, it was a story very well told. How I wish our local first time directors (and some not very first time directors) can have storytelling skills like this. With a great script and screenplay, first class acting, superb cinematography and a brilliant score, I was completely bowled over. The story is a very simple one and the theme is one that has been told over and over before but the way it was done, it just melted my heart.
“Crash” – Another great movie. It dealt with inter-racial tensions in the US post 9/11 and how these different ethnic groups reconciled with each other. The depiction of the line between who is good and who is bad, what is right and what is wrong, and how each individual deal with their own circumstances and find a place for themselves in this society is very refreshing and thought-provoking.
“Funny Ha Ha” – You will never find an entry for this film in Leonard Maltin’s Film Guide nor would you find it in the annual Time Out Film guide. I have checked the latest copy of these two guides and it is true. One probable reason is that this film never found a distributor and played only in festivals and independent screenings. This film tracks a girl’s life post graduation, sort of like a journey of discovery for herself. Read a wonderful article on this film here.
Aus so krummem Holze…..
The world is getting more and more existential day by day. More Darwinian. Or at least that is how I feel and perceive it now. It may have something to do with my age, something that anyone approaching sort of like a mid-life crisis will feel. While I am not sure at all if I am in a mid-life crisis (I certainly hope not), the world do seem like that to me now. I used to be an idealist, to a point that can annoy anyone who thinks that there is no such thing as an ideal world. Come to think of it now, it may be true. This reminded me of an essay Isaiah Berlin wrote entitled “The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West”. Quote:
“The idea of a perfect society is a very old dream, whether because of the ills of the present, which lead men to conceive of what their world would be like without them – to imagine some ideal state in which there was no misery and no greed, no danger or poverty or fear or brutalising labour or insecurity – or because these Utopias are fictions deliberately constructed as satires, intended to criticise the actual world and to shame those who control existing regimes, or those who suffer them too tamely; or perhaps they are social fantasies – simple exercises of the poetical imagination.”
I remembered how joyful I was when I first read Plato’s allegory of the cave in his “The Republic”. I was pretty young then, still sort of a punk that fits Shimamoto’s description in Murakami’s “South of the Border, West of the Sun” – “…uncouth and selfish. And all they can think about is getting their hand up a girl’s skirt”. With my brand new set of “Great Books of the Western World”, “The Republic” was the first book I read from the set.
It just blew my mind away back then. Yes, Truth exists. Perfection exists. Ideals exist. Exactly how I come to adopt a rather different world-view now, I could not understand. Perhaps it is due to many years of roughing up after stepping into society for real, for a living, where resources are scarce, and everyone is going all out to put themselves on the map. It is also through a perception and observation of the many things that happen in the world and around me and I think to myself, how could all these happen if there is really such a thing as “Ideal, Perfect, Truth”?
Anyways, I am not bitter at all with life. Far from it. It just striked me at this very moment how my world-view have changed. Now, for me, existence really precedes essence. Well, at least most of the time. Some essence do precede existence. I still need to go find out exactly what these are. I am still a bit stubborn and would still prefer to be a true idealist. I guess maybe that’s because my “essense” is still rather much the same as the me in the age Shimamoto-chan described. Or maybe even earlier.
As the closing sentences in Berlin’s above-mentioned essay noted, after an extensive analysis of the topic, “Immanuel Kant, a man very remote from irrationalism, once observed that ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.’ And for that reason no perfect solution is, not merely in practice, but in principle, possible in human affairs, and any determined attempt to produce it is likely to lead to suffering, disillusionment and failure.”
hmmmmmm…..
The same picture as the last one posted. Exactly what is reality, no one can really be sure nowadays… Thanks to my wife for altering this reality ;-)
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