Huh. Just found out today that David took me off his MSN list. I have no idea when he did this. I did block him a few days ago (when we broke up), maybe he did it then. In any case, I don't care. I used to get borderline obsessive over things like, checking up on my boyfriends/ex-boyfriends but I grew out of the habit. Not that I feel scorn for them, but I don't harbour any linger feelings for them. The very idea is absurd. They ARE nice guys (I think), just not for me.

Chungking Express:

TIME review: http://www.time.com/time/2005/100movies/0,23220,chungking_express,00.html
French New Wave: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_New_Wave
John Cassavetes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cassavetes

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The eternal city of youth beckons anew: romantic urban ciphers (cops, gun moll, stewardess, fast-food gamine) bathed in neon reflections of themselves, style as metaphysics (sunglasses at midnight), gaiety and sorrow entwined in a hungover reverie. That's the mood of Wong Kar-Wai's Chungking Express, the 1994 Hong Kong movie-cum-international-sensation that finally opens this month in America under the banner of-who else? - Quentin Tarantino. Wong, though, goes in for cerebral Pop abstractions instead of brain-splatter pulp. A dazzlingly adroit synthesis of art cinema and MTV, Chungking Express has a deadpan cosmopolitan energy that conflates successive New Waves - Godard's and Debbie Harry's. (In Wong's most recent film, Fallen Angels, 1995, a feverish extension of this masculin/feminin mystique, currently making the festival rounds in the West, there's even a tough cookie called Blondie.) The cheerfully lost (well, maybe just misplaced) souls adrift through Chungking Express listen to their interior monologues as if they were soundtracks. Which they are: the movie repeats the 1966 Mamas and Papas hit "California Dreamin'" so often it becomes a sleepwalker's mantra.

Chungking Express presents life as a radiant blur. Wong's visual trademark (in collaboration with cinematographer Chris Doyle) is a look of hyperreal clarity broken with interludes of sensuous, pixilated slow motion. Unfolding in Hong Kong's overdeveloped underbelly, the cramped social space bordered by the fleabag Chungking House hotel and the bustling Midnight Express food stand, the film sketches two virtual love stories that almost but don't quite overlap. In one, a forlorn plain-clothes cop (Takeshi Kaneshiro) tries to romance a mystery woman in a bar (Brigitte Lin Chin-Hsia), unaware she's a drug dealer whose confederates have double-crossed her. The second has a take-out counter girl (the endearingly gawky Faye Wong, an updated Jean Seberg by way of Amanda Plummer) stalking an impassive uniformed cop (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai), sneaking into his apartment to rearrange it like some housekeeping poltergeist. (Since he credits inanimate objects with a mind of their own, he never suspects a thing.) But plot here is merely a cursory formality, a means of ruminating on the arbitrariness of signs and relationships, the tricks desire plays on itself, the present as deja vu.

The first policeman measures the transience of time and love by the expiration dates on pineapple cans - feeling like a discarded one himself, he calmly devours 30 cans of pineapple and then goes out drinking, reasoning that "alcohol's good for digestion." The second gives pep talks to his soap, pining for a stewardess he's lost touch with. These yearning cops are pet-shop boys peering at a shimmering aquarium Hong Kong - the local equivalents of West End girls float past, out of reach but never out of mind. Wong calls Chungking Express "a road movie of the heart," but it's a road that keeps turning back on itself: even as life is happening, it's experienced as memory. A convenience mart will look as lush and enchanted as an oasis, but it dissolves any sense of place in the process. The movie's appeal is partly that, like a Circle K store, it could be set anywhere: this city of sensibility might as well be Paris, Tokyo, Los Angeles, New York. In the same way, the swirl of images and sensations is so thick it tends to obscure how pleasantly familiar all Wong's pop and cinematic free-associations are. Have Jean-Jacques Beineix's playful Diva, or even Robert Longo's ominously blissed-out video for New Order's "Bizarre Love Triangle," been forgotten so soon? Combine the two and you have the essence of what Wong is doing in Chungking Express: boiling down a couple of decades worth of hip archetypes to a smooth, wonderland veneer.

It's a marvelous formula, but the solemn press build-up ("It must be blindingly obvious to anyone with eyes and ears that here is a supreme stylist of the cinema") will leave a lot of people scratching their heads when they discover that beneath its technique and elliptical form, Chungking Express is a lighthearted comedy. (As they will, unless they mistake charm for subversive chic.) The movie treats its existential baggage nonchalantly, serving up melancholia with a smile. Yet to read Wong's press clips you'd think this was a visionary come to save Hong Kong film from itself. Wong and Chungking Express are being hyped as though they were the antitheses of action director John Woo and of HK's glut of what are disdainfully referred to as genre films. Never mind that quite a few of those pictures are more audacious and suggestive than Wong's work so far; what cineastes mean when they hail Wong as the greatest director to come out of Hong Kong is that he's the most Eurocentric, the most taken with the high masters of auteurism. Even so, a look at Clara Law's 1992 Autumn Moon shows that he's hardly the lone "serious" Hong Kong director. Moreover, Law's beautifully modulated film anticipates many of the central themes (isolation and youthful longing in a commodified world) and devices (contrapuntal voice-overs, the outsider who filters life through a video camera) of both Chungking Express and Fallen Angels. Next to Law, Wong's treatment of this material looks far less personal - he seems a swoony prankster trying out attitudes before a mirror. (This is most apparent in how the two handle sex: Wong is coyly voyeuristic, Law gives us visceral, disruptive physicality.)

Recipes

- Hummus with tahina
- Italian Tuna and Avocado Antipasto
- Avocado Sandwich
- Avocado on Crackers
- Avocado with Alfalfa
- Sweet potatoes with apple butter
- Apple butter recipe
- Mashed sweet potatoes with apples
- Sweet potato patties
- Almond tarts
- Potato pizzas
- Green on green soup
- Tofu quiches
- French toast with fruit
- Eggplant and tofu
- Ranch tofu nuggets
- Awesome oatmeal recipe
- Mini Veggie Frittatas
- Everyday Dipping Sauce
- Shrimp and Brown Rice Wontons
- Seafood salad
- Egg and cucumber sandwiches
- Potato dip
- Grilled veggie sandwich

Sites

- Fat-free vegan
- Kaji's mom
- Quick and easy vegan recipes

- Feelings are personal and biographical
- An emotion is the projection/display of a feeling.

Neuroesthetics directs attention to the bodily structure and response of an organism in an encounter with esthetic phenomenon such as art.

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Affect:

- ex: woman who can't feel and move her leg but would involuntarily, unconsciously, tap it when she hears music
- ex: infant w/ no language skills...bodily organs react to situations/simulations (affect), producing an emotion...but this doesn't mean that the infant can

feel
- outside of consciousness; remains uncontrollable, regardless of skill to repress feelings
- affect amplifies our awareness of an action, a bodily movement...makes us consciously act, and act accordingly...without affect, our feelings will not

have the varying levels of intensity that they do have
- when your body takes in an event/circumstances/context, and another body shows something related to that context, then your body tries to make

sure that it responds appropriately (ex, one can soak up someone else’s depression or anxiety or sense the tension)
- humans absorb emotions that originate from others and that influence their very physiology and experience
- thusly: no such thing as a self-contained individual

keyword: Proprioception (un-conscious physical movement)

- but body language varies from culture to culture

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- cultural studies is crap at a-ffect --> cannot comprehend a-ffect fully if put solely in a cultural studies context
- is studying a-ffect really all that meaningless?






His fur necklace was so creepy!
Her necklace was full of creepy!

dreamers - sarah brightman










- media effects: exposure to representations of violence in any of various media tends to cause increased aggression or violence in the consumer

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creativity versus the scientific method; rationality versus impulse; information versus aesthetics; feeling versus thought

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psychoanalytical ideas can illuminate such clinical problems as disturbances of personal identity, adolescent loneliness, obsessionality, long-term

mental illness, agoraphobia and suicide. He emphasises the importance of creativity in psychotherapy and the connections between the artistic and

the psychotherapeutic impulse. He stresses that psychotherapy is an important humanising force within psychiatry and contemporary culture, and that

the psychoanalytical vision acts as an important bridge between the arts and the sciences, combining the intuitive and the rational, the narrative with

the experimental approach.

Representations play a critical role in both science and art. Perceived as different in kind, artistic and scientific representations have been studied as

objects of distinct disciplinary and intellectual traditions. However, recent work in both the philosophy of science and studies of the visual arts

suggests that these apparently different representational traditions may be related in challenging and provocative ways.

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“Perception, Selection and the Brain”

- brain constructs coherent vision of world, which is a complete chaos of electromagnetic signals.

Our brains do pattern recognition. things connect in many different ways.

In the conscious perception there is an explosion of simultaneously linked activity between many, many parts of the brain. (ex, red and blue

cellophane spectacles)

you are literally putting together all of the different aspects of the image that are perceived by your retina, and processed by your brain. “Every

perception is an act of creation.”

perception is subjective. language makes things universal.

every perception is an act of creation, every memory is an act of imagination. memory is constructed as you have the experience of it.

many areas being triggered in the brain all at once, which gives you an experience

trying to get to the bottom of what actually makes for this complex system that is a brain, which is ordered, but not fully ordered, but has a certain

degree of heterogeneity to it, but is not completely random.

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Misc

Art is a human activity and, like all human activities, including morality, law and religion, depends upon, and obeys, the laws of the brain.

Art's function is extension of brain's function. Acquisition of knowledge, which the brain is always engaged in...reflects in our art, a method of

distributing knowledge, and making it eternal <-- how does the brain do this?

Abstract thinking: process of reducing the information content of a concept, typically in order to retain only information which is relevant for a particular

purpose. -- creation of concepts and ideals

first step is to understand better the common organization of our visual and emotional brains

how creations can arouse aesthetic experiences can only be fully understood in neural terms.

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Thinking the Unthinkable

On movement and change:

1) sets or closed systems that are defined by discernible objects or distinct parts
2) the movement of translation which is established between these objects and modifies their respective positions
3) duration or the whole, a spiritual reality which constantly changes according to its own relations

- Real time/duration flows and is non-segmental, so why do we conceptualize it as static and through mechanical means?
- The brain cannot grasp what real time is
- Life cannot be explained solely by mechanism
- élan vital - continuous, unpredictable forkings; declares that the state is ever-changing; does not differentiate organic from non-organic.
- Past, present and future all interconnect, they co-exist. Don't see them as segments (that's too limiting) --> past makes the present. it pushes the

present forward. it makes a new future. and so the "old" present becomes past. The present reflects the past. The present is the actual image, the

past, the virtual.
- And the virtual: conditions of real experience, the internal difference in itself
- Thus the past is not external of the present, nor is it static. Is it indeterminate.
- Ex. --> deja vu, the recalling of the present, while the present is still happening <-- the act of returning
- Duration is thus indivisible. partial views of the cyclical whole

Keywords: difference, virtual, élan vital, duration
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Mark Cohen

3 things he talked about:

1) How can we actually look at the cognitive organization of the human brain?
2) Information we currently have on how our brain organizes the process of seeing
3) What we see really IS what we know

- pineal gland. the eyes are connected very closely to this gland.
- if any given part of your brain becomes more active, it demands more blood
- so how does the brain organize seeing?
- when you look at art, your brain starts becoming active in the visual parts of the brain when you are thinking about visual things. as in, our minds must use our brain’s organs of perception

Go! Shoo! There is nothing to see here.