Ferris Wheel

Perhaps I have been a little too reclusive lately, there's hardly anything new on my blog. So I think maybe I need to write something.

The other day, I downloaded the video of the annual academy awards ceremony, which was in high resolution and it totally made my evening. I sat quietly in my room, watching it without a blinking of the eye for three hours. The emcee was funny, but too many commercials from him, he showed us the iPod touch (iPhone?), putting it sideways, saying “it’s widescreen”, and then, childish as he appeared, on the big screen the announcer showed us how to play the popular game console Nintendo Wii. (By the way, there seems to be a lot of sports games on Wii, which is a good thing I think, since a lot of computer/console games are getting too diffcult for people to really enjoy them.)

As the show continued, we saw in a roll the cast and staff of the nominated films of the last year. Conferring the golden trophies were a string of Hollywood stars.Tom Hanks didn’t seem to be a little older, maybe he loves Oscar too much to grow old. John Travolta is still so charismatic, I have seen his Pulp Fiction, Sword Fish, Broken Arrow and my favorite, Face Off. Cameron Diaz is still glamorous, still in a great shape, yet the freckles on her face dimmed her a little.

Let’s shift our sight to the rising stars. The best I know is Marion Cotillard, who reinterpreted the life of Edith Piaf, in La Vie en Rose. Piaf is really famous, I came across her in my French As A Second Language textbook and in Saving Private Ryan, where the privates were listening to her songs before the final battle. George Clooney didn’t seem to have much luck, outshined but another star, he stills seems quite gentleman like, and even hugged the Oscar winner. I haven’t seen Michael Clayton yet, just watched Ocean’s 11, 12 and 13. I believe this guy has a lot of potentials. The girl who took a leading role in Juno seems to be a little weird, I don’t quite like her. Plus, I am not sure why the members of the academy always pick up such films concerning ethics, something like teenage pregnancy, seven year’s itch, mid-age crisis, drugs, etc. These elements are so chilling and not spirit lifting at all.

In great contrast, I have seen a very bright, very warm film also on the competition, the winner of the best animated film, Ratatouille. As one of roomates commented, cartoon movies never contain any violent or sexually explicit contents, something proven millennia  ago by Confucian philosophers to be disgusting, not esthetically preferrable, yet prevalent in the world movie industry today. It is widely accepted that if an actress wants to be famous, she must first learn how to strip her clothes off. Sophie Marceau is good at it, Tang Wei not bad, and the next generation of young Chinese actesses even made their western counterparts EYES WIDE SHUT (Tom Cruise 1999).

Getting back to the rail, Ratatouille leads us into a world of French cuisine. A rat, who has grown up with extraordinary cooking talent, accidentally fell into a river and flew along the sewage pipes of Paris into one of the finnest restaurants in the metropolis, where with a recipe book written by the former owner of the restaurant, the little furry helped his son conquer the stomach of the most picky critic of Paris, thus making him a big fortune. The picture is impeccable, if not restricted to its genre, I think it should be Ratatouille that brings home the award for best picture. Another film I saw also centered around cuisine, No Reservations, starring Catherine Zeta Jones.

There Will Be Blood, gloomy, No Country for Old Man, not to my taste. Atonement, haven’t seen it yet, one friend says it’s a great film happening around WII.

What I really appreciate is Bourne Ultimatum, I like the trilogy, just I like Taxi, Terminator. The music of Bourne series is unique. It’s the kind of music played right to my heart beat. Its music style reminds me of the Japanimation adapted Hong Kong film, Initial D, starring Jay Chow, whose background music also played closely along the storyline. To me, a film without music is like a meal without meat, which means, unthinkable. And a wonderful composition like that in Bourne absolutely lifts the film up another level.

Before giving award for the best picture, a slideshow was projected on the silverscreen to help us recall all the past best pictures, from Day 1 of Oscar. I saw Casablanca, I saw Godfather, I saw All Quiet on the Western Front, Forrest Gump and Rain Man, many of which happen to be the “Permanent Residents” on my Drive F.

Almost forgot, that why I have thought of the title. I bought another hard drive of 160GB, so now I have approximately 240GB of space, too much space, but just not enough time to watch them.

I put a lot of films and shows on the drives. It’s pratically a server now. I would pick up an old film and savor it an Nth time randomly, it’s like talking to an old friend. And each time I watch them, I could dig out something I didn’t notice before, especially after I got rid of subtitles of English films. Actually, when you use the subtitles, you may never see some interesting details.

Life on the Wheel

I was first put on roller skates when I was merely three years old, by my father in the first roller rink in my home town, in a park which has a statue of President Mao standing at entrance way. It was an outdoor rink with a marble floor, which was used as a rink in the day and a dancing place in the evening. I didn’t remember I started ‘rolling’ this early myself until I was recently told by my father. Maybe, it’s just the fact I started my ‘romance’ with such sports even before I was conscious of the world that sowed the seed of my future passion for those balance-related sports, bicycle, ski, snowboard, skateboard, roller skate, ice skate, surf board, water ski, metal-ring rolling, ‘empty-bamboo’ playing, car racing… you name it. Although I still haven’t yet got access to many of those even till now, but I do know I was born for those sports, and they are invented just for guys like me. Maybe it’s just genetics, like you like some one and hate some one else, for no reason. In my blood are some stimuli that drive me to play this, like Michael Jordan love basketball, John Denver takes music into his soul, I just always enjoy my moments with those sports, games on the wheel are always my greatest resort.

Many of those games belong to a group of games called the X-Game, and gladly, some even got their names listed in the Winter Olympic Games. One of the X-Games is roller skate, the one I first got in touch with and love the most. And since it’s an X-Game, it’s a little dangerous, especially for beginners without much talent. Every time you don’t pay attention, you might get your feet above your nose. But since people usually skate during winter days, it generally doesn’t hurt you, but for some ones really unlucky, chances are they might get their ankles sprained or even get an arm fracture. However, I believe it’s just because it’s a little dangerous that the game is so exciting to me. Actually, to me, the moment you lose your balance and fall is the biggest thrill. When I was little, mother always dressed me like a ball in winter in order that I don’t get myself seriously hurt. So it doesn’t matter if I fall, I just stood up, then I fell again, and I stood up again, and then one day I got my wrist hurt and swore that I wouldn’t never play the god dam game again, but before my wrist fully recovered, I was back in the rink again, circling in the middle like dancing, as I toddled forward, the world swung with me, I puffed and could see the white fog from my mouth, my hands were like frozen even inside my gloves, but the world was so beautiful at that moment. And when later I developed the stunt of reverse skating, that game was greater fun for me. When you do a reverse skating, the world is completely different, everything was backing off as fast as they can, it’s like a kid looking from underneath his crotch, everything is upside down, or observing your mother cooking from a mirror. That fresh feeling is no match by anything else. I got the same wonderful feeling only years later when one day I suddenly found that I could express my inner feelings in English as well as in Chinese. I skated forwardly and backwardly, and I write in English and Chinese. They both, to me, feels like dancing.

As I grew taller, the wheels I was on seem to have grown bigger with me. This time, bicycle. However, the time I started to ride the bicycle I was still not tall enough to straddle on it directly as I do now. So I suffered a lot more than I did learning roller-skating to master the skills of bike riding. Since I was short, I had to first put my left foot on the left pedal, lean left, and lean the bike right to make a ‘V’ shape, slide forward to give the bike some inertia before I struggled to rise to the saddle. Predictably, I failed many times before I finally made it. But when I did, it’s like I topped the Himalaya and I was the king of the world. But the story didn’t end here, like I acquired the reverse-skating skill, for bike, I also equipped myself with some acrobatics, this time, hand free riding. It is actually not as impossible or dangerous as it seems, what can be done by the acrobats in a circus can be done by anyone with some guts. I got ‘infected’ by one of my best friends in primary school who always inspired me later in my life with new ideas. Doing a hand free riding was highly forbidden by my mother who always tried to protect me from all harms, but to young boys, it was those forbidden things that were the most exhilarating. So when I was in my sixth grade, I first freed my hands and let it go and ‘BANG’, I saw stars flying around me J Luckily, I never got seriously hurt before I fully conquered the skill finally. Every now and then, when I was riding alone with no motor vehicles around, I would free my hands and start ‘flying’, it makes me feel I was back to my childhood and forget all my worries and troubles.

Then there comes my new love, Need for Speed (NFS), the car racing game devised by the renowned game company Electronic Arts (EA) .The Company also produced many other sports games like Medal of Honor, NBA, which are also on my radar, but NFS was always my favorite. Like what is said in God Father, ‘everyman has but one destiny’, I think such games and I are meant to be, it means, no matter what kind of route you have followed to come to a place, once you have come, you know this is the one, the one you will not live without and will pleasantly spend the rest of your life with. To me, this game is NFS. Compared with it, other games are simply not games, they are either too simple or too complicated, not quite as entertaining as they are supposed to be in nature. But here with NFS, you got career to make. Like Michael Schumacher, you are a professional now, and have to drive like crazy to help put food on your family’s table. The rules are simple, you start with a low-rated car, and as you take races and cash in, you upgrade your vehicle, and then race with tougher guys and so on so forth. And of course all these go underground, sometimes even with cops on the tail. In reality, this could be both life-risking and highly illegal whereas in the gaming world, this could be as safe as walking in your bedroom. So I always harness my ride with the fiercest engine, throttle up to 150 MPH and drift on as the wind whizzing around my ears. And here again, I got the same familiar feeling I got previously with roller-skating and cycling. Like dancing, like flying, I galloped across the virtual city like a ghost, winning greenbacks and unlock the forbidden areas. Right here, I am the king of racing, since everybody else in the game was programmed to be a lesser player by the EA engineers, I know that, yet I turn a blind eye to it.

Once I heard a proverb ‘The important thing in life is sports’. I deeply believe it’s true and took it to heart from then on. Like claimed by some philosophers, the nature of all objects is motion instead of stillness. People always got inspirations from sports or moving objects (Newton, apple, gravity ???) And in this pro-industrial era when everyone is supposed to squeeze himself so much in work, maybe you would also like to start your life on the wheel, like a kid, try losing your balance, and let it go, and then, you will find something you’ve never experienced before.