Tales From the Down Under: #3 Every Breath I've Fought For May Be Fragmented At Any Moment

I've been bewildering at the idea of things going from bad to worse, or things reaching to such a pinnacle that they are destined to fail. It is not karma I'm trying to elucidate but rather some wicked old witch's clairvoyance which I can never decipher.

Studying is made overwhelming if other trivial yet muddling fuss slides across. It is almost impossible to root out all the hindrances since university life entails one's preparation to a more independent adult world. Therefore, being independent of the words I ramble about and dependent on the actions I shall take is what appears to be the most challenging. Thankfully, like every start of a new year, I scrawled all over my schedule book of how I'm going to squander my weekends. The diligence can only be paid off if every single letter is spelt out correctly and accurately in its place.

It is like staring at the sun with persistent eyes only to prove that you can never win over it. When you are bulged with inexplicit anger and you can find no way to vent it, injustice is how you define the word. To struggle to be a typical student, I did dream of the ordinaries. Or I do still dream sometimes, having a life without muddle; being level-headed, pracitcal-minded.

Gratefully I was able to veer back to the track and be a realistic person, and deem all my stupid follies of 2010 as those who can only live in my diary but not in my nightmarish memory. As I stared persistently to the setting sun in the vain hope of prevailing it, optimistic thoughts suddenly came like thunderstorm, that I'm studying music, art history and English literature therefore I should be contented and happy.

Therefore the sun stared back but never managed to blind me.

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Honore Daumier

“If you shut up truth and bury it under ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.”- Émile Zola
Exited Honoré Victorin Daumier, 10 February 1879, in an impoverishment that many of his contemporaries, especially his foes, would have thought was his long overdue retribution- the painter was blind, heavily in debt, and later relegated to a pauper’s grave. His friends, upon visiting his resting place, would, I imagine, see it a chance to admonish their children: “Now that’s a lesson for you cheeky devils whose tongues rattle off things that should better stay unspoken.” But Daumier devoted his life in revealing those “unspoken things.” His lithography ink proved sharper than most writers’ pens. He vented his rage and stigmatised others’ infamy in his satirical and, oftentimes, side-splitting cartoons. The tone was relentlessly acerbic but only because Daumier was exposing truths that, in the time…

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As a storyteller, Yasujiro Ozu insists on an implausibly objective stance that refrains from direct commentary or criticism; his camera customarily assumes the role of a detached observer, to whom the characters in the film, staring or talking straight to the camera, occasionally address, with an intimacy akin to that between a host and his guest, a closeness that is underpinned by a mutual recognition of the psychological distance that separates the two. The audience, whose perspective, in this case, conflates the camera’s (the director’s), an invisible character’s in the film (to whom the other characters address) and their own, is thus situated amidst this spatial complexity which, as a rule, every work of art necessarily creates.
In Late Spring (1948), the camera serves in part as an underlying comment to the story, which is noted by its economy of details. A prolonged shot of a departing train, on which the father and daughter travel to the city for a one-day excursion, prefigures…

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Jean Luc Godard’s first feature feels oddly like a swansong: in many respects the film seems a self-mockery of what it ostensibly celebrates – the new, the bold, the reckless; the 60s zeitgeist that resurrects the anguished ghosts of the 1920s, who, according to F. Scott Fitzgerald, grow up to “find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faith in man shaken.” For the children of the ‘60s, their wars are of a kind in which the opponents constantly change roles: sometimes they are the unmerciful authorities bent on making miserable lives out of their inferiors; in other times they are the society at large, weeding out in its insidious and devious way the errant law-breakers. They all seem to be donning the same masks, through which the warriors recognise themselves.
This fight with one’s inner demon necessarily evokes concerns of mortality and death - timeless concerns that acquire an added pungency in the 1960s: would a dangerous, unheeding spell of hedonism finally defy life’s incontrove…

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