17feb2005:
The international oil trade causes harm to the... environmentalists.
What happens when a bunch of peaceful, non-violent Greenpeace protestors
decide to invade
an oil trading floor straight after the traders returned from a lunchtime
pint?
My favourite quote: 'I took on a Texan SWAT team at Esso last year
and they were angels compared to this lot!'
16feb2005: OK, I'm calling it. Kim Jong-il of North
Korea is dead. (It's not that I'm one of the few Westerners to have set foot
in North Korea; this is just media theorising.) He's just been missing from DPRK
TV a little too long; all the broadcasts seem to be about two years old. And
in Socialist-speak the overdone 63rd birthday celebrations today are there mainly
to... emphasise the fact Kim's not. Same way the forelock-tugging of the Soviet
old guard was always at its most deferential when someone was about to be ousted.
Whatever anti-Kim factions exist in North Korea - and there are plenty
of them - at least some have succeeded; even if I'm wrong and he's not actually
dead, Kim's off the scene now, for good. It's possible that this wasn't planned
- perhaps he's been under effective house arrest for some years, and his cancer-ridden
liver gave out unexpectedly? - but what the hell, he's gone.
15feb2005: Themes. Ever have one of those days that
seems to have a strange sort of structure to it? About two weeks ago, starting
with a morning latte at Starbucks, I had an entire day where EVERY SINGLE WOMAN
seemed completely hot - in the shop, on the streets, in the pool later. I even
became immune to it after an hour or two. Supermodel lookalike over there? Yawn.
Even the 'Sinners and Winners' man seemed somehow floaty.
Well today for some reason was full of women with bad haircuts -
sort of Mary Quant meets the Rocky Horror Show, with LSD thrown in for good measure.
Colours from toxic blonde to oxidised red, but all cuts about as off-kilter as
an 80s brickphone.
Not sure if there really was one end of a bell-shaped curve in action
today and my route across town just happened to intersect with it, or whether
I'm somehow constructing the reality my mind wants to see from the available
material. But from my viewpoint, it happened nonetheless.
13feb2005: My word, what an ice cream! Organic chocolatier Green & Black's ice
cream is truly amazing, even when my belpepper pasta and a bottle of Rothschild
have already given me cause for great joy. Think of the rush you had from your
first spoonful of Haagen-Dazs, then double it. Haagen-Dazs was for eating while
having sex; this Green & Blacks stuff IS the sex. Next to it even Ben & Jerry
can't compete; it's just not adult enough. Alongside Innocent smoothies in the
new litre containers, these half-litre tubs have just made my top 10 prepackaged
foods roster.
10feb2005: Should the grocery bill of a single male living
alone really be £120 a week?
I seem to head for Tesco at least three times a week and spend at
least £30 each visit - and that's without including wine, which I tend
to buy from the smaller retailer on the way home. I admit I'm a sucker for the
latest infused olive oil and go for free-range or organic rather than the headlined
items, but I can't work out why other people seem to fund their fridges with
far less cash. It's not as if I'm putting Chateau Lafite in my basket or anything.
09feb2005: Wong Kar-wai's '2046'. Like most art stuff, I enjoyed
it more after I'd seen it. (I think it was Twain who said literature is something
nobody wants to read and everybody wants to have read.) Yes, the photography's
beautiful and the nonlinear narrative and object fetishization makes him a worthy
Chinese Tarantino. But something deeper happened here: I thought, for the first
time, I'd actually 'got' an artsy film on first viewing. Later, I discovered
I hadn't. (Spoilers ahead.)
OK, so the hero's living his life forwards, but the film's rolling
backwards. Got that. But my major mistake - at least, an interpretation that
nobody else on the web seems to have adduced - is that I thought the women he
meets are the same woman, somehow living backwards in time to match the film's
actual (as opposed to chronological) narrative. (If you're confused here, stop
reading, because it only gets worse.)
One clue is that Black Spider's real name, Su Lizhen, is the same name
as Chow's lover in the prequel (which isn't really a prequel) 'In the Mood for
Love', which I haven't seen. Some background dialogue suggests she's returned
from Cambodia, which we later learn was Chow's earlier posting, and this interpretation
is backed up by the way Chow's lovers get younger as the film progresses.
The japanese guy in 2046 is Chow, a character in one of his pulp novels,
and the part where the japanese guy takes an android lover in the future as a
substitute for the love he lost in his past is a reference to Chow's own substitution
of the hotel owner's older daughter with the girl in the room opposite. At the
end of the film, which is really the start of the film although it happens chronologically
before the first scene, Chow's taking up with the younger daughter of the hotel
owner, which may be the reason he owed so much money he needed to go to the gambling
tables and got stuck in Singapore later on (which we saw in the preceding scenes)
and later (earlier) left for Hongkong, which is explained at the film's end (where
the story starts.)
I wanted to work out how the women/personae portrayed by Maggie Leung,
Faye Wong, Gong Li, and Zhang Ziyi at different points in the narrative could
reasonably be interpreted as the same woman getting younger with each liason
- a woman living backwards through time, clued by the nonlinear narrative and
the journeying-through-time theme of the 2046 novel's subject matter. There is
dialogue to back it up, and I actually started scribbing down some Red Chamber-style
diagrams to see if all the plot threads and character interactions added up to
enough evidence, at which point my brain exploded.
