University of Southern California

Got up at 11:30am, we literally had no other choice but to go to USC to kill the rest of the day. However, it turned out to be such a fun day in USC. I've been dreaming to visit this school for a long time, part of the reason is this is the school he wants to go to, of course, other than that, this is a school I personally like a lot, too. (Cross the finger, hopefully they will accept me...) 

The international students portion of USC is amazingly big, almost half of the students are from outside of the U.S. I saw that by myself--it was the commencement day of the 2010 class students. Coincidentally, we ran into all the graduates today. They had some light dinner, without any doubt, Fiona and I mooched some...It was so awkward since half of the students had Asian faces. Many from Taiwan, others from China or Korea. I thought there must be much pressure for students, like me, to study there, now that there were so many ABCs, no one would treat you with the tolerance for foreigners. 

I like the buildings in USC. They all have the same style and relevant colors. Even though LA has no style at all, USC as an old school has its own "schoolnality"--well, it's hard to conclude now, but it definitely does, at least from in terms of architectures. I love the quiet small gardens spattered here and there in the school. Good place for lovers. I can almost imagine the way they talk to each other. Who would get angry in such a place?

The building for communication school is the worst building in the whole school. But what can I say? This is me, always the unluckiest one. I may never had the chance to study in an old and beautiful hall. But the thing is if Gorge Lucas was graduated there, what does it matter the building is not good-looking?

The only thing is, several blocks away from USC, it's another world, which is packed with Mexicans and dirty gum on the ground. The world never loses its hierarchy.

Another LA

After six hours unconscious sleep on the plane, we finally arrived at LA, Mike's dream place, where all the beautiful romances happen. The weather was out of our expectation, for like one out of millions chance, it was cooler than Boston during the day. Fiona's friend picked us up and drove all the way to our hotel on Hollywood Boulevard. Frank Sinatra sings:" LA is my lady..." Now I"m wondering where he got that idea? LA is absolutely not a "lady", not even close. As a relatively new city, LA should be clean and modern in my mind, but on the contrary, LA is kinda dirty compared with Boston. The whole city is covered with thick gray mist. There are no green trees: almost all the trees are light colored. The buildings have no certain style, with the light colors that are similar to Miami, but the gray mist and the gray trees make LA dimmer than Miami. 

It is amazing that everyone says the same thing about LA: you can go nowhere without a car, downtown is the most dangerous place in LA, and there are a lot of Chinese people. We proved all of them in only one afternoon. It took us nearly one and a half hours to get to the hotel from LAX, and then another one and half hours to get to the restaurant from the hotel. I tried to find a Chinese restaurant on Hollywood Bl, failed. How can people order Chinese? Then I realized most people on the this avenue were visitors. But still, it's really inconvenient without even one Chinese restaurant nearby. The good part of this story is that, even though we had to drive more than a hour to get to the place, the restaurant was really good. It is ran by a Tianjin woman, and the food there was fantastic. For the first time in almost a year, I had roasted lamp and Baozi. There was even "Ge Da Soup". Oh I love this place for the good food. Checking out the menu, we thought it was nice that they didn't directly translate the meaning of the soup, or no one would want a bowl of "goose bump soup."

There are all kinds of people in downtown, making it dangerous. But we stayed in Hollywood district after dinner. It was really weird that there were so many sex toys stores on Hollywood Bl. With all the stars on the ground, this avenue should be the most fabulous place, but how come there are so many little sex toys shops, tattoo stores and palm reading rooms? I have no clue at all. The night came quickly, before I realized, we had to head back to the hotel.

Anyways, LA disappointed me a little bit today. It's like another LA from my mind. I hope it can get better tomorrow.

Kane’s plays always feature professionals (soldiers, journalists, doctors). How does work affect the people she writes about?

        Sarah Kane has always been regarded as an elusive writer, so have her works. Even though her plays are often unrealistically violent and brutal, the characters in the plays usually have rather normal identities, like soldiers, journalists, and doctors.  However, what astonishes readers the most is, it is just these ordinary professionals who commit the extremely unexpected behaviors in Kane’s plays. Journalist stays indoors, soldier leaves the war, and doctor complains about his life to a patient. Almost everyone reverses the stereotype of his career. Is it simply because these people are strange and crazy? Sarah Kane depicts a big picture in her plays, through which she explains that it’s not only these people, but all human beings tend to have counteractions when they reach an extreme point in life.

    
        The first professional we encounter is Ian in Blasted, a forty-five years old journalist living in Leeds much of his life. Ian first leaves us the impression that he is a homophobic, xenophobic, misogynistic person and has a very passive life attitude. As he comments on families at one point in the play: “Who would have children. You have kids, they grow up, they hate you and you die” (Kane, 21). To him, life is full of disgusts. Even in the innocent kids he can only see the somewhat doomed future aspect.  He is such a solitary person that he hates most people in the world. The only people who he does not discriminate against are people like him, pure native white men. This is not a very suitable kind of character to be a journalist. Journalists are destined to go outside and get in touch with as many people as possible to get the latest information and the newest stories. The only news story we hear from him in the play is about “a serial killer slaughtered British tourist Samantha Scrace in a sick murder ritual” (Kane, 12). The horrible story seems to prove some of Ian’s discriminations are actually reasonable. Women are stupid because they go to the isolated foreign forest regardless of common sense and get killed. Foreigners are cruel and uncivilized so they kill people for a certain ceremony. Apparently, this is not true, because incidents like that are too rare to be counted as solid evidence to define a group of people. However, it is fair to assume that as a journalist, Ian probably hears or reports this kind of story a lot. Ian talks about his job in the play: “I do other stuff. Shootings and rapes and kids getting fiddled by queer priests and schoolteachers.” (Kane, 48). It’s like his opinions are being proved over and over again. Just as the psychiatric indication will make people believe fake truth, Ian is convinced that the world is the way he imagines.

        The more convinced he is, the less he wants to be anywhere near the people he hates, in other words, most people in the world, which goes against the feature of his profession as a journalist. He even refuses the story that comes to him, as he refuses the soldier’s request to tell his story, “This isn’t a story anyone wants to hear…It’s not my job…No joy in a story about blacks who gives a shit? Why bring you to light?” (Kane, 48). Instead of running for stories, Ian seems to be more interested in those who are innocent and ignorant. Ian is seducing Cate during the night: “You don’t know anything about it…Don’t know nothing. That’s why I love you, want to make love to you.” (Kane, 23). When Cate refuses to have sex with him, Ian rapes her.

At this point, Ian has already become this person who creates the story that a journalist like himself will do a piece of news about. He rapes the young girl like a “foreigner” in his own opinion, he keeps smoking even if he knows that is so dangerous that can take away his life, just like the woman without common sense, he becomes everything he hates.
 

       Similarly to Ian, the doctor in 4.48 Psychosis also goes to an opposite way when his job reaches a certain point where he finds it too much to bear. The doctor asks the patient in a therapy: “What do you offer your friends to make them so supportive? What do you offer your friends to make them so supportive?” (Kane, 236). Facing a patient who suffers from serious depression, the doctor asks this question without any context. It is confusing. If the first time he asks is gentle and guiding, the second time he asks the same question is more like a request. Why does a doctor want answers from a patient who he knows well that will not give him an answer? The only possible explanation is that the doctor does not expect for an answer: he just needs to speak it out. As the play goes on, the doctor becomes the one who pours out all the hidden angst, “Most of my clients want to kill me. When I walk out of here at the end of the day I need to go home to my lover and relax. I need to be with my friends and relax. I need my friends to be really together…I fucking hate this job and I need my friends to be sane…I’m sorry.” (Kane, 237). The job is somewhat driving the doctor crazy, and the only way out for him is to stay together with his sane friends. However, friends are not shadows. There are definitely some time when they cannot be there for the doctor. Under this circumstance, he has no one to turn to help, and he has to be the one who helps during the day. His life is in an extremely unbalanced state. Finally, when the misery of the doctor’s life accumulates to a certain point, it explodes like a volcano. The doctor behaves like a patient in front of the real depressed patient, complaining his life and talking to himself as if he is out of his mind.

       Going the opposite way seems to be a way out for people whose lives are extremely unbalanced and polarized. This is also the same situation that the soldier in Blasted is going through. In the early scenes where the soldier comes into the room just for food, he is still the soldier who’s taking absolute charge by the arms, as he tells Ian the reason why Ian should listen to him: “’Cause I’ve got a gun and you haven’t.” (Kane, 40). Soldiers are long-time considered to be as cruel and cold as the arms during the war, no exception for this one. However, as the conversation between the soldier and Ian goes on, the soldier makes some very weird remarks, like at one point they are talking about Cate, the soldier says: “Don’t [kill her], I’ll have to shoot you. Then I’d be lonely.” (Kane, 44). The soldier seems to have an unknown dependence on Ian, and this becomes even clearer when he fails to persuade Ian to write out his story, he almost pleads Ian, “…At home I’m clean. Like it never happened.” (Kane, 48). The soldier is literally trying to prove him to be an innocent person, or even a victim after telling Ian the horrible things he did to the girls. The feminine side of the soldier takes control of him at the moment. The loneliness and the desire for sexual action drive him to rape Ian, and after that he “smells Ian’s hair” and “is crying his heart out” just as what Cate does earlier in the play. The stereotypically cruel and cold-blooded soldier unexpectedly shows his feminine aspect.

         Kane doesn’t explain what happened to the soldier that makes him suddenly so sensitive, but the background information about his girlfriend helps us understand this character. The soldier shouts at Ian at one point in the play, “You don’t know fuck all about me. I went to school. I made love with Col. Bastards [soldiers] killed her, now I’m here. Now I’m here.” (Kane, 48). The soldier used to be a school person, but what happened to his girlfriend made him choose to be a soldier. He hates the soldiers for killing his girlfriend and eating her eyes, driving him to be soldier and do the exact same things. The horrible accidents changes him to a person who is totally different from he used to be. After sucking out Ian’s eyes, the soldier explains: “He [the soldier who rapes his girlfriend] ate her eyes. Poor bastard. Poor love. Poor fucking bastard.” (Kane, 50). The soldier is lamenting his girlfriend, as well as himself. He’s become the bastard he used to hate. He hates what other soldiers did to his girlfriend, and he also hates what he did to the poor girls. From one extreme to another, the soldier is tired of the brutality of military. He wants to be the clean person he used to be, so he cries and pleads, but there is no way back, he chooses to end his life.

        The endless terrifying stories make the journalist become one of the stories; the timeless listening changes the doctor to a talking patient; the long-time brutality esposes the soldier’s sensitive personality. Just as Lao Zi, the founder of Taoism, reveals, things will develop in the opposite direction when they become extreme. The world needs balance, so as long as these professionals reach a certain extremity in their professions, they turn to the opposite way. Kane’s plays are filled with the idea that the world is balanced. In Blasted, the three characters take absolute control one by one in the hotel room, while in 4.48 Psychosis the doctor and the patient both have problems and both don’t have solutions. It is not just the professionals, but all the people will have counteractions when they get to the point of extremity.

Work Cited:

Kane, Sarah. Sarah Kane Complete Plays. London: Methuen Publishing Ltd, 2001. Print.

Gritzner, Karoline. "(Post)Modern Subjectivity and the New Expressionism: Howard Barker, Sarah Kane, and Forced Entertainment." Contemporary Theatre Review 18(3.328 (2008). MLA International Biliography . Web. 23 Apr. 2010.

Iball, Helen. "Room Service: En Suite on the Blasted Frontline." Contemporary Theatre Review: An International Journal 15.3 (2005): 320-329. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Web. 23 Apr. 2010

Solga, Kim. "Blasted's Hysteria: Rape, Realism, and the Thresholds of the Visible." Modern Drama 50.3 (2007): 346-374. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Web. 23 Apr. 2010.

"Taoism." Religious Tolerance. N.p., 2009. Web. 23 Apr. 2010. .
Urban, Ken. "An Ethics of Catastrophe: The Theatre of Sarah Kane." PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 23.3 [69] (2001): 36-46. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Web. 23 Apr. 2010.

May we always be like this

We've been school pals for like nine years, but not until we both went to college did we really become friends. All the memories about you were the guy that spoke really beautiful english, the guy that got a highest score on an english exam, the guy that was in the class next to ours. And now it's the guy who supports me always, the guy who hangs out with me, the guy who i miss and misses me. Who will you become? It's a terrifying question.

It's weird that whenever I'm blue, so are you. They "dumped" us. We got new BF/GF. We are alone again. Why does the world work this way? Sometimes I'd think that it as the God's sign, telling us to be together. But whenever I think it that way, the horrible scare from the uncertainty of relationship forces me to chicken out. Like now, I can't even text you back. We're friends. How wonderful is that.

And I know we can be friends forever, as long as we don't step forward. Couples separate. Friends stay. You are too precious to lose. It hurts, both you and me. I don't know how I can put it, but please, don't go away, you are my best friend.

Mise En Scene of Edward Scissorhands

        Edward Scissorhands is concidered to be one of the most classic romantic films. As an uncompleted creation, Edward only had several scissors as his hands. After living alone for years, he was invited by a local Avon lady, Peg, to her family and lived with them ever since. The day Peg went up the hill and found Edward was a big turning point in Edward’s life. And I am going to talk about how director Tim Burton creates the turning point image and do a mise en scene analysis of a shot from the movie.

       This scene is when Peg first saw Edward and realized those scissors were actually his “hands,” she couldn’t help going close to him and sympathysing him. At the first sight of this scene, audiences will focus on Peg’s hat, because that is the brightest thing in focus. She is one of the two largest objects in the scene, and she wears a bright color suit, making her even more outstanding in contrast to Edward’s black “armor.” To make her the dominant gives Peg more energy in the movie.

      

        Edward lives alone in the mysterious, which gives the reason why the director uses a low key lighting. Edward stays in the shadow, both before he meets Peg and after. The shadow creates a mysterious and depressed atmosphere, even Peg is in the shadow now. The strong loneliness is embodies in the shadow and Peg walks in it and decides to take Edward out of it. The low key lighting also indicates this film is a formalistic film.

   

        This is a scene from the process of Peg walking towards Edward. I chose the scene from the middle of the process. The camera in fact is following Peg, so the shots change from full shot to medium and then close-ups. This scene is from the medium shots part. Again these shots show how passionate Peg is, and how sympathetic she is towards Edward. She was afraid of him when she first saw him, but felt immediately sad after realizing how pathetic and lonely Edward was. So she walked to him. From this scene we can see that Edward shows a really innocent and ignorant. He doesn’t want Peg leave, but he is also afraid of coming near her. Peg walks near him, as if she walks into his life. Eye-level angle shot helps audience to feel close to the characters in the movie. It streees that Edward is the same with us all, even he has scissors rather than hands, and has so many scars on his face. He is equal with every one, so he should have what anyone else has. The scars is a symbol of bitterness in Edward’s life. Therefore the director uses long shots and slow stock to emphasize on the high quality of the image, in other words, Edward’s face, giving audiences intense impression.

  

        Color using in this shot is symbolic. On the whole the scene is in a basic tone of black, like Edward himself. Black suggests the loneliness Edward used to have and his monotonous life. Even though Peg is now in the shadow, too, but she is dressed in a light pink suit, a very clear contrast to Edward’s dominant color. This gives us the idea that Peg will bring some “color” to Edward’s life. And pink is such a warm color that it seems that it can melt all the sadness and loneliness of Edward’s.

   

        Edward, as the other character in focus in this scene, is the main and only subsidiary contrast. He stands in the darker shadow and wears black, so he is not so obvious as Peg. Yet he faces the camera, or audience, and his face stands out in the black background. Besides, in this shot he is the object that the dominant figure, Peg, is watching. Now he is the subsidiary contrast, but soon he will be the dominant. We can figure out this through the different positions of the two: Edward shows a full-front, but Peg is back to camera.

       In this shot, there is little objects in the background, so the image is not so dense. This draws audiences’ attention more on Edward because his “armor” is the most complicated obejects in the picture. However when we really focus on his “armor,” we find him weird and out of normal fashion. The less-packed image says more about how Edward is like.

   

        The sense of equality, the sympathy Peg has for Edward and Peg’s determination to help Edward is the basic meaning of this single shot. All elements prove that. For example, binary structures of the scene well shows parallelism and equality. Their standing also shows some vertical sense in this shot. And the sort of deep-focus shot allows both Peg and Edward in the focus at the same time, but also creates two planes simutaneouly. Peg stands near the camera as the first plane, and Edward stands in the second one. On top of that, both Peg and Edward are in the center of the frame. There is space between them, but the margins they to the edge are almost the same, so that the frame of this shot is moderately loose. All these show the equality between the two. They share the same importance in this shot. And the personal distance reveals the sympathy Peg has for Edward. She doesn’t treat him as a “strange creation”, but she regards him as an lonely orphan. The image of Peg’s is a little bigger than Edward’s, meantime she is facing him directly. This somehow implies Peg’s decision to help Edward. Because of Peg, Edward’s life will change to a happier direction, which might be the reason why director uses open form here. Restricts make people nervous, and open form opens people’s minds.

   

        On the whole, this scene foreshadows a lot about the later on story of the movie. Maybe there are thousands of scenes like this in a movie, but if we analyze any one of them in detail, we will realize every detail in a film has been paid much attention.

Here attached the scene I analyzed above:

Sometimes, you just have to be ignorant.

It's never been easy to be in a relationship.

Last night I overheard Fiona talking to her BF and got really upset. It seemed that Achun might not be able to go to HK to meet her there, because of the final paper or something. I'd be disappointed in that condition, too. It's like he offers you a pretty balloon, and then pierces it to explosion himself. Not a good feeling, and I'd had so much before. However, it's actually nobody's fault. As the saying goes, future is always uncertain. Plans, dreams, relationships. Nothing can beat the uncertainty. Still. It's disappointing.

BFF is so much better than BF. I miss you guys.

Chun just told me that she was gonna stay in Japan for 3 years. I'm gonna cry.

A little poem.

你和他讲道理，他和你耍流氓；
你和他耍流氓，他和你讲法制；
你和他讲法制，他和你讲政治；
你和他讲政治，他和你讲国情；
你和他讲国情，他和你讲接轨；
你和他讲接轨，他和你讲文化；
你和他讲文化，他和你讲孔子:
你和他讲孔子，他和你讲老子；
你和他讲老子，他给你装孙子！

 

Just saw this really precise analysis of the government. The interesting part was that all comments were like "we are waiting for this to be 'harmonized'..." Yeah, what can we say? Is this the reason why the economy has developed so fast but nothing happened in the culture development?

If we are not allowed to have the right of free speech, how can we have a wider horizon? How can we share different opinions? How can we develop?

I'm sure it's safe here, since people actually can't  use blogspot in China...hush...