the four right chords can make me cry

Last night went out for supper with Hwee zi and Kenny. It was pretty good, stingray, satay and sugarcane at chompchomp. And the company was amiable, I felt comfortable, conversation flowed easily. How can I explain the contented satisfaction I felt that night? It wasnt something that made me jump up and down with excitement, but I knew instinctively that it was good. In a sedate, full-bellied way. As i go on in years, I think I will feel this way more and the hyper, exuberant-type happy much less.

Went to apply for PDL and final theory already, but still shifting my feet about finding an actual instructor. At SSDC, some guy asked if i could pay NETS for him and he pay me back in cash. Again. Exact same thing happened the last time I went to apply for basic. And both times the guy was taking the same test as me.

On a second note, will someone go to an art gallery with me? I want to see the work again, but wish I had company. Here's a short write-up about my favourite contemporay Japanese artist of the moment; Hiroshi Okada.

Seeing, is not so much how one can observe reality, but how one chooses to perceive it. Hiroshi Okada views that our perception through sight is defined by the way our minds interact with an object being there. Simply looking, is not necessarily seeing. Okada's paintings attempt to illustrate the reality that is not only projected by what we see of the object. The presence of an object can also be conveyed by the emptiness surrounding it as the negative space defines its form. The artist's latest collection of paintings are composed of nothing but light and shadows, yet it is the artist's sensitive treatment of this 'phenomenon' that renders them haunting and mysterious. While these paintings are often quiet and contemplative, they hint of something else beyond, a larger presence lurking beyond the periphery.

Even if you think that's a bunch of crap, just see the paintings for yourself. I found them seductively evocative, mysterious, insouciant. Heh, if I ever fall on hard times, I think I can still make a living by bedek-ing my way through as an art critic, no?

Here's a beautiful passage from my favourite writer of all time, W. Somerset Maugham; the book being Of Human Bondage.

He did not know how wide a country, arid and precipitous, must be crossed before the traveller through life comes to an acceptance of reality. It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know that they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life. The strange thing is that each one who has gone through that bitter disillusionment adds to it in his turn, unconsciously, by the power within him which is stronger than himself.

I love the writers I love because they put into words so beautifully, so convincingly, what we struggle to express and explain in our own lives. And you can quote me on that one! =)

posted by beckyboo @ 11:27 PM