mister bijou: June 2010

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

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Pak Tai Temple

Tomorrow is 1 July, already.

Hereabouts, tomorrow is also Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Establishment Day, which means it's a public holiday.

For some, the holiday has already started.

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Jean-Luc Godard: Éloge de l'amour

For the weekend, a guilty pleasure.

In Praise of Love, a film by JLG with music by David Darling and Ketil Bjornstad (ECM Records) . . .

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

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Dragon Boat Festival

As well as it being Bloomsday, tomorrow is also the fifth day of the fifth month of the lunar calendar aka Dragon Boat Festival.

As part of the celebration, many of the trawlers in the harbour of a little island in the South China Sea are flying pennants.

Racing in the harbour will be from 10am till 4:30pm. Of course, it is really hot and humid then . . .

James Joyce: Ulysses

Tomorrow marks the anniversary of the day James Joyce's Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom, Stephen Dedalus and others go about the business of their ordinary lives on 16 June 1904 in Dublin.

Yes, it's Bloomsday!

The final chapter of Joyce's wonderful novel Ulysses closes with Molly Bloom's interior monologue. Here are the exquisite, extraordinary, only terminally punctuated, final lines:

O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Trieste-Zürich-Paris, 1914--1921

Monday, June 14, 2010

To torrent a film or not to torrent a film -- that is the question

An independent film maker writes:

In a nutshell, I believe the only films that are hurt by torrent sharing are mediocre and bad films. In contrast, the good films of any genre only benefit from file-sharing. Due to this, I feel the current file-sharing trend is a catalyst for a true evolution in filmmaking and attempt to explain my theory in this article.

To read the whole thing, go here: torrentfreak