杨德昌的声音

近日托本科生小朋友们的福，听到杨德昌的声音。Criterion Collection的《一一》里，附杨先生和影评人Tony Rayns的同声评论。冷峻愤怒的杨德昌，竟然是如此温暖乐天的音质。非常美国的口音，轻微口急，认真组织自己的句子，也会为自己的笑话得意大笑。那场和廖女士一起出境的音乐会，漫溢夫妇的默契和幸福。杨导演要求太太入镜，太太也要求杨导演上场。杨先生欣然应允，录下太太弹琴姿态，躲在琴后努力模仿。是谓夫唱妇随之锦瑟齐鸣。
附上杨德昌解释《一一》主旨。
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Notes from Edward Yang:

On the Title:
Few things in life are as simple as ones and twos. I remember that back in the 1980s, the French newspaper Liberation posed a simple question to filmmakers all around the world for a special Cannes supplement. The question was: “Pourquoi filmez-vous?” My one-line answer was just about as simple as the question: “So I don’t have to speak so much.”

The best thing a director can say should probably be found inside the film he has made, not on the page. This film is very much as simple as the ones and twos in life. I’d like viewers to come away from the film with an impression of having been with a simple friend. If they came away with the impression of having encountered “a filmmaker,” then I’d have to consider the film a failure.

The film is simply about life, portrayed across a spectrum of its span. In my view as the writer, simplicity is what’s at the bottom of the whole lot of complications at the top. Therefore the Chinese title of the film is Yi Yi, which literally translates to “one-one,” and “one-one” means “individually” in Chinese. This signifies the film’s portrayal of life through each individual member at each representing age, from birth to death. “A one and a two and a… ” is what’s always muttered by jazz musicians before a jam session. This is where the English title of the film came from, to signify that what’s following the title is not something tense or heavy or stressful. Life should be like a jazzy tune.

labyrinthitis

很酷的字吧。
迷宫一样的症候。是谓迷路症。

Labyrinthitis hovering over a 9pm deadline
The anxiety of almond icecream
Halal food, in the wind of late October breeze
The tagline being: the logical gaps
In commemoration of the struggle of 11/2.

好镜头

好镜头一：
昨日马友友和斯特拉文斯基结束后，地铁里有一个西班牙裔洋娃娃，跟她爹玩吃手假寐游戏。镜头角度45度向下俯瞰，娃娃只露鼻子以下半张脸，牙齿雪白，笑声银铃，身体随大笑节奏抽动，越笑越开，越开越笑，三分钟后全车大人跟着傻笑。

好镜头二：
回家的红色石砖路，红黄绿叶落英缤纷，带蓝色连衣帽的小男生拉爸爸/哥哥出来遛弯，不及爸爸/哥哥膝盖高。小男生和我四目相遇、交错，我手捧嫩黄色日文文件夹，带橙色围巾，小朋友站定，转身，定格。我倒退式继续往家的方向挪动，小朋友定睛不动。我站定，隔20米外跟他招手再见，他不动，定睛，蓝色的小胳膊小腿呈90度转身状打开。他爸爸/哥哥弯腰大笑。我继续挥手。他继续不动。暮色里，相看不倦。

ZZ: Un Petit Verre de Rhum (H Saussy)

I raised a tiny glass of rum before lunch to the name and honor of Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose death on November 1 at the age of 100 was announced today. His extreme old age was painful, I heard. Not that he was in physical pain, but he felt anger and disappointment at the way human beings treat each other and the finite environment we share. Nobody would deny that we are infinitely better at killing each other and at fouling our collective nest than we were in 1909.

I owe a lot to Monsieur Lévi-Strauss. Never officially my teacher, he taught me steadily for years and years-- through books I pored over and reread, through his big public lectures at the Collège de France, through the lateral connections to which his work led (the allies, Lacan and Jakobson; the antagonists, Derrida, Godelier, etc.). Some of my strongest lifelong friendships were solidified in the shadow of his lectures. Some of his paragraphs I can recite from memory, with ever-renewed admiration for their deft interlocking of syntax and semantics, their apt figures, their subtly scandalous implications.

Of course he was not always able to keep from saying silly things-- about Marxism, about Buddhism, about Islam, about India, about the resolution of the sciences of behavior to their ultimate constituents in physics and chemistry, about Rousseau, about nature. Still, if you want to make no mistakes, you avoid saying anything, and I'm glad he chose not to be that kind of mute sage. By taking intellectual risks, he left anthropology a very different discipline from what it was when he wandered into it.

I stumbled across La Pensée sauvage in my first semester at college, and it was a transformative reading for me. I was feeling homesick (so to speak) for France, where I'd spent my last year of high school, and would have grabbed any French book off the shelf just to see the grave and acute accents again. What brought me to the stacks was a paper I wanted to write about something I'd noticed (I was ignorant enough to think it was original) about words denoting the passage of time, that they were all metaphors drawn from space. There must have been a bibliographic category for books about cognitive metaphorics, because I was almost certainly not looking for this book. But the title, with its clever pun (savage thought / wild pansy), caught my eye, I opened to the page about scale, information and miniaturization in painting, and I was hooked.

Turning back to the beginning of the book, I read and thoroughly sympathized with its argument that you could do extraordinarily refined and complex operations of thought even if you were a so-called primitive person speaking a so-called primitive language. I should acknowledge that I owned more than one pair of shoes and had been to some very high-end schools, but I liked the idea that cognitive refinement didn't depend on having a specialized logical vocabulary because this seemed to be good for the vindication of poets, and I wanted, then as now, to speak up on behalf of poets, to get people to take them seriously as intellectuals and not just as the jingle-jangle team you call a week before the holiday party.

The book's closing chapter, a polemic with Sartre over the Eurocentrism of Sartre's Marxist-derived conception of history, I devoured with relish too. In this I think I was probably happy to see a counter to the immense self-assurance of the few Marxists I knew.

My motives, therefore, were anything but pure, but if you sign on with Lévi-Strauss for some sectarian interest you will soon find yourself challenged with an argument that runs exactly counter to your wish. I still remember the Sunday afternoon I spent walking around trying to find a response to the discussion, in Tristes tropiques, of the relative humaneness of cannibalism and imprisonment. The cannibal takes the enemy of society and ingests him, renders him harmless and makes him yield up his calorie supply for the needs of his fellow man; the so-called civilized man throws the enemy beyond the borders of society where he can do no evil, but no good either. Which is preferable? Very much a pacifist and with vegetarian inclinations, I was sure that eating people is wrong, but when you put it that way, M. Lévi-Strauss, I didn't really have a good basis for my feeling so any more. The disorientation I felt-- what Kant called being summoned out of one's dogmatic slumbers-- I would experience again and again in encounters with Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard and the whole lot of them: that crew who came intellectually of age contradicting you and whose obituaries you read, one after another, in the paper.

Just this morning, before I got the news, I was singing the praises of your word “bricolage.” As the young and insolently clever Derrida pointed out at the Structuralist Clambake of 1966, the moment of your own apogee and the day when a new whisper of doubt entered the longhouse, you framed it wrongly, by making a contrast with the “engineer,” who can create a totally purpose-built machine or language out of brand-new pieces; this engineer exists only as a theological fiction, and is probably inconsistent with any attempt to imagine such engineering. But if bricolage is the assemblage of new wholes out of the discarded pieces of ideologies formed at diverse times for incompatible purposes, and held together merely by an occasion (here goes, memory: “le bricolage bâtit ses palais idéologiques avec les gravats d'un discours social ancien”), then deconstruction is really negative bricolage, more properly named, perhaps, débricolage, because it too recognizes the impossibility of breaking through to a new, unused, uncorrupted language of truth. (“Deconstruction” would be the undoing of the work of the engineer; but it's already admitted that engineers in the strong sense are not available.) Your critics, sir, had to pry stones from your edifice in order to have something to throw at you-- stones that you had extracted from Durkheim, Mauss, Morgan, Granet, Marx, Montaigne. And that's progress. I have a vision of a castle moving across a landscape, an inch or two per century, its walls and towers whirring like decks of shuffled cards.

寫

寫。
寫。
寫。
又是一年萬圣節，又是一年跟Basic Chinese糾纏的萬圣節。
寫。
寫。
寫。

See You Sometime

What can I say... I LOVE JONI.

See you Sometime

by Joni Mitchell

Where are you now
Are you in some hotel room
Does it have a view?
Are you caught in a crowd
Or holding some honey
Who came on to you?
Why do you have to be so jive
OK hang up the phone
It hurts
But something survives
Though it's undermined
I'd still like to see you sometime

I'm feeling so good
And my friends all tell me
That I'm looking fine
I run in the woods
I spring from the boulders
Like a mama lion
I'm not ready to
Change my name again
But you know I'm not after
A piece of your fortune
And your fame
'Cause I tasted mine
I'd just like to see you sometime

Pack your suspenders *
I'll come meet your plane
No need to surrender
I just want to see you again

We're in for more rain
I could sure use some sunshine on my apple trees
It seems such a shame
We start out so kind and end so heartlessly
I couldn't take them all on then
With a headful of questions and hypes
So when the hopes got so slim
I just resigned
But I'd still like to see you sometime
I'd sure like to see you

“人民万岁”

我的乖乖，从图书馆紧赶慢赶回来，胡core正好讲话：“社会主义中国巍然屹立在世界东方”！

我伟大首都咋今天天这蓝这透；我伟大祖国人民咋这有素(so4)质,这许多收音麦都收不到杂音；我伟大祖国天安门咋这能换口号和颜色；我主席咋看到女兵尤其女民兵这欣慰（中山装要大红啊）；我军某某某某团师营咋连坦克的影子都一边齐，炮头都一个角度…… 我前主席咋还需要人双手在腋窝下搀扶；我党喉舌女播音员咋还经常破音，镜头经常切空……

high鸟。。。

然则，我伟大祖国都屹立世界东方一甲子了。我留学生为虾米一天假都木有？人家犹太学生大前天过赎罪节，连曾经屹立世界西方抹黑灯南端世贸双子塔边上的超级卖场都关掉了。我们也要求：该超级卖场对东西方屹立的各个伟大祖国，都实行关门礼；我们也要求，所有今天生日的同志们，不分颜色，都切一小块蛋糕向我伟大祖国贺寿。