What the hell.

Much like the magnetic charm of these thousand year old boulders, it yanks at your very being. Obligates you to gawk. Stupifies till grown men become like a little child on his first jet flight. The magic roots you, and despite the menacing north wind that incessantly howls, that bites hard at your face and uncovered fingers, one stands there, furiously pressing the image capture button on the digi cam, wanting to immortalize the moment.

It is the colours the setting sun casts on the countryside. The gold glaze the light casts upon the tip of the otherwise dark brown forest of bald trees. The bright white that fades quickly into a swirl of yellow, orange and dark in an expanse too wide, too beautiful, and foreign for city boys. It is poetry in picture, poetry in slow, surreal motion.

It is powerful. Like the belief of Oliver Cromwell, the sheer insanity. It is the verve of Horatio Nelson, the steadfast devotion. The moments when the will of men changed the course of history.

It is me being emo, and not wanting quite just yet to throw in the towel even though I feel like poor old Ricky Hatton being thrashed to pulp by the Floyd Mayweather, losing his footing, incoherent, babbling but still wanting to put up a fight.

Well, what the hell. :)

Rolling

Well, I decided to take Mrs Neo's advice and "Carpe Diem". Seize the day kind of thing.

I've rolled the dice for stakes I think are really awesome, good enough for me to stake my pride and perhaps a small portion of my soul on the table. I thought i'd lost it for most of today, but somehow my chances were raised abit just recently.

I actually did abit of thinking in Europe, and kept vascillating between going for it and dousing my hopes with the sad reallity of only having about a month.

Of late though, I think there are certain substantial qualities I see that are quite enough the motivation for me to decide to take my chances.

So i'm keeping my fingers crossed and hoping for the best.

Pretensions(thanks for e txt robs)

It's 2 in the morning and my bro and his ex-classmates are still being rowdy downstairs(not that i mind since its a get-together and it's right they have fun) so i cannot sleep. am bored and decided to blog.

After drinks, talking nonsense, and intermittently shimmying with the belly dancer, we spoke of pretensions. I think it was brought about when I told robs I blogged about art(which post was full of nonsense anyway, though I really did enjoy the three pictures) and somehow that topic began.

It started me thinking about a morning I had when I met for the first time my neighbour of 3 years(yea, a shameful relection of my neighbourliness). We made small talk, and we started talking about things we like, and somehow went on to the topic of literature, which is a topic I would think one would require abit of contextual knowledge to appreciate. At this point though, I don't think anything was quite yet near pretentious.

Then, enter the pretentions:

I was guilty of it when she made a comment on a band called Hanson. I just heard a song from it, but I knew nuts about the band. I nodded knowingly(the kind of nod that demonstrates intent listening you give a parent/teacher when really, all they say whizz pass your ears and you are just being patronizing) so as to not appear like a geek.

But I think as we grow older, one cannot help but keep up this little fronts. But I think a trait most admirable is where one is most comfortable in one's own skin, and sees not the need to compromise one's individuality to impress, but yet, is polite and modest enough to temper being true to one's self with discretion, and not being unecessarily offensive. For me, that is a major wow factor. So I have been wow-ed of late.

God help me.

Depth: a Kodak moment

I was trying to do a double-entendre on the word depth when I just remembered a Kodak moment, one that should be enshrined upon the highest pedestal in my world of bloke jokes, to be told and re-told.

When we were in the army, my buddy, Weijie and I changed our OC's desktop background after helping him sort out some administrative work on his computer. It looked something like this:



After he saw it, he came out of his office, fingers-a-snapping, and sang the line "how deep is your love". ahahahahaha!!!!

Adding some needed Depth

for the sake of the last post which could have been taken straight out from a dumb and dumber/dude where's my car movie, I shall talk about art. (by the way, this intensive spate of blogging is spawned from my incredible lack of substantial tasks to perform when I am now at work. I tried reading abit of Leo Tolstoy(are you ooh-ing?? hopefully cause it's Tolstoy and not ooh-ing cause I read) but I thought blogging would be a more interesting alternative. By the way, the most interesting non-modern English novel I think I've read would have to be Fanny Hill. Lol, sorry, bear with one last himbo moment. I watched one episode of a Fanny Hill remake on BBC when I was in London. Va-va voom!

Ok, now for the depth. Art.

I was quite proud of myself when I was at the gallery at Trafalgar Square. Tate I think, or just national gallery. And unlike the last time, which is about a decade ago when I was at the Louvre, the paintings managed to hold my attention for more than a couple of minuites. Yes, the abundance of women in various stages of undress helped in no small part, but I actually quite liked looking even at the clothed. I thought this Italian dude, Guercino was pretty darn good. He painted mainly biblical stuff. I particularly liked this:

Her eyes(which cannot really be seen in detail in this picture) really looked like one of those folks in church after a damn emo service, except she's in a desert rather than church. I thought he got the emotions pretty good.

My favourite pic though, is this chick that Francesco Hayez painted. The title of it is Susannah at the Baths, lol, the description of the painting was that the painter use biblical art as a pretext for painting nude ladies during a rather conservative period. Lol, which is like Lust Caution right? Carnality in the guise of artsy fartsy ness, i.e.: horny men pretending to be cultured. Anyway, this chick in the picture, see below, is such a Monica Belluci look-alike.





Anyway, i think her look is a more inviting, "do-you-like-what-you-see-loverboy" kind of look rather than what the national gallery calls an accusatory glare at the two old men who in this Biblical story, are peeping at her bathing.

Another painting interesting enough to blog about is this one of Narcissus and Echo I saw at Liverpool.

I laughed when I saw it. The painting though is supposed to be dark and gloomy and about just quite the suckiest thing in the entire world: pining after unrequited love, at least according to the plaque describing it. The way I see it, its hilarious cause the bloke is just too gay to check out the partially-undressed chick right infront of him. Good God! What an ass!

I'm half hoping you see, and just maybe enjoy the humour, and hoping hard to the Good Lord that I don't appear too geekish to have visited two galleries quite enthusiastically. And hopefully, despite all the himbo-ness, there's at least abit of depth added.

Teochew Ah Pek

I met 3 ah peks in the course of my holidays. The coolest of which, in my opinion was this teowchew (i'm teochew too!) ah pek who's Danish and has a restaurant in Copenhagen.

The first was a retired American banker travelling with his wife. We were on the same tour, of Windsor Castle, Stonehendge and Bath, and managed to have a chat cause we lunched at the same table. His name's Jim, if memory serves, and is the kind of guy i think all of us blokes want to be when we retired. Travelled the most of the world whilst working, Asia, Africa, most of Europe... Rich(that dude was living in Hilton, and London's standard of living is inbal.), and still lovey dovey with his wife.

The second was a scouse. Blue fan, but the funky fact with this fella was that he played cards with freakin' John Lennon!! And the dead beattle allegedly owns him 7 quid or something. But I felt abit sorry for him, cause he was drinking alone and all. Kind of the Liverpudlian equivalent of the ah peks who "he men jiu" at our kopitiams.

The third guy would be the teochew ah pek who lived in most of the shittiest parts of history. I found him rather inspiring. He's pretty pally with my dad cause my dad frequents that restaraunt(being holed up in Copenhagen cos of work), and in the two dinners I had at his restaurant, was fond of standing by our table and chatting with us.

And as with most old folks who revel in telling their life's story, he did. His story was pretty amazing. He had the usual sad story our ah kongs and ah mas would tell us of the Japanese occupation. But he was in China then, and I think it was abit worse as compared to Singapore. There were tales of how he had to survive on tree bark, walk somewhere near 72km (shame on all in the SAF) from his village while trying to get away from the Japs. Well yes, one might think he's exaggerating, but he got the time taken to do a 72km - somewhere around 1.5-2 days correct(tt's correct right?).

He later moved to Vietnam after the Japs surrendered. Oh yea, thats quite a shite right? What was worse was that he made a small fortune with his business in Vietnam which was of course, left wrecked by the war. That's not all, he's eldest son died at the age of 18 in the war. Later, in 1978, he managed to get away from Nam, and was one of the boat people. Many of those on his boat were lost at sea.

After that, he landed in M'sia for somewhere around 40 days before eventually being shipped off to Denmark. The sad story does not end in Denmark by the way, he's got a daughter in an asylum there, and lives alone.

But at least he now has his own restauraunt, and like the first ah pek, is travelling the world, US, Europe, China, and even goes back to Vietnam.

That's one hell of a life story.

And, having heard the first hand account of one of the many refugee/migrant who despite the most fucked up of circumstances eventually made it good, I felt rather proud to be Asian, lol, rather proud to be Chinese.