chasing the sun

I like photos which could pass off as movie stills. 

O, the contingency of that stolen moment:

The man with the stroller would walk out of the frame.

The light would fade.

The newspaper lying on the ground would be gnawed by indifferent feet.

The woman would finish that cigarette.

And us, we would stop loving each other.

Or it could be the beginning of something even greater.

My new memory card should arrive within next week and I shall start shooting in larger file sizes!

Sept 29, dusk @ Lachine, my neighbourhood

time out with e520

 

Sept. 23rd

召集令

在外滩我遇到了一个以后反复和我狭路相逢的家伙，就叫他超级赛车手吧。此人身高不过一尺，身穿紧身蓝衣加绿色马甲，背个小红包，骑辆小红车，一天到晚墨镜头盔不取。他骑车路线只有一条，原地打转。永远陪同他的背景音乐虽然跑调严重，但是依然十分耳熟，应该是 音乐之声 或其他所谓 kisch 代表作的插曲。你可别小看了超级赛车手，他简直上天下地，无所不在。从外滩开始，他一路追踪我到杭州岳庙，到苏州观前街（还是十全街？），到北京广安门某天桥下，到西安东南西北某一条大街，最后直追到兵马俑门口那条商业街上！ 我每次见到他都忘了留照为证，甚为遗憾。

我现在号召广大的群众们行动起来！请扑向你所在的城市游客多且小贩集中的地方，如南京夫子庙，昆明金马坊，宜宾合江门，成都春熙路等等等等。一般只要是卖风筝的，激光手电筒的，星星棒魔鬼角荧光轮滑的地方，你就离他不远了。先闻其声，再见其人。跟着感觉走，绝对没错的！等你们辨认出超级赛车手之后，请让他与当地的著名地标合影，传到我发起的线上活动相册里。 这只会比爱美丽的小矮人更那个那个什么！

对吧！？因为呢，这么个简单电子塑料玩具的背后。。。。这个。。。隐藏着阿。。。你看啊。。。这个工业社会。。。消费主义。。。阿还有。。。什么mass production，阿速食文化。。。反正啊，这个意义简直太深刻了，是对当今时局的尖锐批判，是不是这个理？

请把这件事儿记下来，最好写了，拿磁卡贴到你家冰箱上，每天吃饭前琢磨琢磨，没空的千万记得天天带相机，谁知道呢？说不定哪一天在大街上就撞个照面，可千万不要措手不及啊！我可是在等待着你们的照片的呢！

后记：

因我要求，我在昆明得到了两个礼物，超级赛车手和超级赛车手奥特曼版。我只带了超级赛车手。G指出她，对，赛车手是个女同志，很像他的一个朋友。我回到mtl发现她有条腿断了，所以绕圈不是很利索了。

夏天历历在目。

Michael Pollan: Why Bother (excerpt)

Pollan touches on the vices of labour division and the benefits of growing your own food, among many other things.


“For Berry, the deep problem standing behind all the
other problems of industrial civilization is “specialization,” which he
regards as the “disease of the modern character.” Our society assigns
us a tiny number of roles: we’re producers (of one thing) at work,
consumers of a great many other things the rest of the time, and then
once a year or so we vote as citizens. Virtually all of our needs and
desires we delegate to specialists of one kind or another — our meals
to agribusiness, health to the doctor, education to the teacher,
entertainment to the media, care for the environment to the
environmentalist, political action to the politician.

As Adam
Smith and many others have pointed out, this division of labor has
given us many of the blessings of civilization. Specialization is what
allows me to sit at a computer thinking about climate change. Yet this
same division of labor obscures the lines of connection — and
responsibility — linking our everyday acts to their real-world
consequences, making it easy for me to overlook the coal-fired power
plant that is lighting my screen, or the mountaintop in Kentucky that
had to be destroyed to provide the coal to that plant, or the streams
running crimson with heavy metals as a result.

Of course, what
made this sort of specialization possible in the first place was cheap
energy. Cheap fossil fuel allows us to pay distant others to process
our food for us, to entertain us and to (try to) solve our problems,
with the result that there is very little we know how to accomplish for
ourselves. Think for a moment of all the things you suddenly need to do
for yourself when the power goes out — up to and including entertaining
yourself. Think, too, about how a power failure causes your neighbors —
your community — to suddenly loom so much larger in your life. Cheap
energy allowed us to leapfrog community by making it possible to sell
our specialty over great distances as well as summon into our lives the
specialties of countless distant others.

Here’s the point:
Cheap energy, which gives us climate change, fosters precisely the
mentality that makes dealing with climate change in our own lives seem
impossibly difficult. Specialists ourselves, we can no longer imagine
anyone but an expert, or anything but a new technology or law, solving
our problems. Al Gore asks us to change the light bulbs because he
probably can’t imagine us doing anything much more challenging, like,
say, growing some portion of our own food. We can’t imagine it, either,
which is probably why we prefer to cross our fingers and talk about the
promise of ethanol and nuclear power — new liquids and electrons to
power the same old cars and houses and lives. ”

++++++++++++++++++++

“But there are sweeter reasons to plant that garden, to bother. At least in this one corner of your yard and life, you will have begun to heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen. Chances are, your garden will re-engage you with your neighbors, for you will have produce to give away and the need to borrow their tools. You will have reduced the power of the cheap-energy mind by personally overcoming its most debilitating weakness: its helplessness and the fact that it can’t do much of anything that doesn’t involve division or subtraction. The garden’s season-long transit from seed to ripe fruit — will you get a load of that zucchini?! — suggests that the operations of addition and multiplication still obtain, that the abundance of nature is not exhausted. The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world. ”

I think I'll go visit my vegetables first thing tomorrow morning and I will finish the Omnivore's Dilemma witin this month.

Dream Corps September Newsletter

Email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. 2009, September edition In this issue: 1. 2009 Summer Volunteer Program 2. Toronto Professional Chapter Concert 3. U of T Chapter Auction 4. McGill Chapter Benefit Concert 5. UVA Chapter Charity Dinner 1. 2009 Summer Volunteer Program Class of 2009, Dream Corps Summer Volunteer Program  “We made a pact to return to Huju in 10 years, together," Dream Corps Huju team volunteer Rui Huang beamed at the audience of her peers, mentors, and visitors, during the 2009 Summer Volunteer Program conclusion forum, held at Communication University of China in Beijing, on June 27th. For four weeks, 34 volunteers shared their lives with six communities scattered over China's vast land. On the next day, they would be returning to their work and study all over North America and Asia, taking with them a new perspective on life in rural and migrant workers' China. At Beijing and Henan, two of our oldest sites, our teams returned to build upon Dream Corps libraries already in operation,concentrating on reading programs that accompanied the infrastructure in place. Working steadily in the steps of their predecessors, our volunteers continue to bring new ideas and laughter into schools and households. Newly established except for one, the four sites in Hunan province are located in vicinity of the very first Dream Corps site. Working on new projects allowed our volunteers to demonstrate their ingenuity on all aspects of library-building. Their resourcefulness gave birth to stenciled logo painting, hand-printed walls and book place holders! More importantly, they have made ties with their host communities, thus setting the cornerstone for future collaboration. Here, we would like to express our most sincere gratitude for our volunteers' commitment and dedication. You not only represented Dream Corps when you worked in the field, you are the ones who make our operations possible. Let's keep in touch, we would like to hear from you about your summer experiences, your accomplishments and your endeavors for many summers more! You've got some recollections and reflections concerning SVP09? Funny? Sad? Touching? Critical? We want them all, please send yours to: communication@dreamcorps.org 2. Toronto Professional Chapter Concert Volunteers from the Toronto Professional Chapter, assisted by the two Canadian university chapters (U of T & McGill), inaugurated Dream Corps' first community based event, a charity concert, on July 19th, 2009. Here's the field report from chapter chair Hangtian She:  It is never easy to put together a 90 minutes long concert, not to mention one that targeted a new audience, but our enthusiastic organizers handled the challenges with aplomb. For promotion,they brought on board the Toronto Public Library, who posted event posters in their some ninety branches across the city, and York BBS, one of the largest Chinese online communities in Toronto. All our families and friends contributed equally in spreading out the words. The chapter co-chair Jiafei Niu convinced her father Peiyi Niu, a talented Er-Hu player, to perform alongside Helen Hu, a young yet very proficient Pi-Pa player and pianist. We also owe our thanks to pianists Ricker Choi, Matthew Craig, Emily Lam, Benjamin Yang, Amely Zhou, whose performances will linger long in our minds.  As the Co-Chair of the Toronto Professional Chapter, I would like to give our special thanks to the McGill University Chapter, whose key members travelled for 6 hours to Toronto to support our event, and to the University of Toronto Chapter, whose members contributed greatly to this concert and provided us with precious event-planning experience. 3. University of Toronto Chapter Charity Auction On April 9th, 2009, University Of Toronto held a charity auction in junction with UTCSSA, raising a total of  total of $1,232. This event was reported in detail by a local newspaper. You can find the full article at http://www.torcn.com/cache/62319.html?PHPSESSID=bb7dd47d528e3ff0bae141d1303fd1fa    4. McGill University Chapter Benefit Concert McGill Chapter executives with volunteers after concert On February 7th, 2009, sounds of music and laughter filled Presbyterian College as McGill University Chapter concluded "Journeys to a Dream", a benefit concert that attracted more than 100 pairs of curious ears. The concert kicked off with a video stating Dream Corps' mission and ended with a slide show highlighting the young chapter's activities in its first year. Tap dancing, piano solo, chamber music trio, poem recital, singing, and gu zheng solo, the program was keen on variety. Volunteer performers from Fantasia McGill and chapter members enlivened the night with their performances and good humour. The climax of the concert was palpable when all executives reunited on stage to sing "Tomorrow will be better", the Dream Corps theme song. The audience clapped to the beat, singing from memory or humming it for the first time. A truly magical moment. $100 was raised and members of the audience encouraged McGill University Chapter to make concerts an annual event.    5. University of Virginia Chapter Charity Dinner  What was brewing in Charlottesville? Yum, a hot pot fundraiser! On January 30th, 2009, the University of Virginia chapter annual charity dinner took place at a local restaurant. Over 50 students attended the event to enjoy authentic boiling hot pot prepared by the chapter officers and to display their karaoke prowess, preferably not at the same time. The charity dinner was a success, a night showcasing Dream Corps, raising more than $800. Many attendees have shown interest in the summer volunteer program.  Want to see more snapshots of hot pots and a lot of jolly people?  Click on http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2251650&id=1527763&l=9e0ccf3454 for photos of the event.   Generous contributions from our supporters is vital to the success in bringing quality education to underprivileged children in China.  We appreciate the time and effort you have contributed to Dream Corps and hope that you can extend your support one more step by providing a gift of donation. Donations create direct impact to the development of libraries and reading programs, and can be dedicated to specific project sites under your request.    All US-donations are 100% tax-deductible. Please visit our donation page athttp://www.dreamcorps.org/donation.htm or contact us atdonation@dreamcorps.org.         You are receiving this email because you opted in at our website Our mailing address is: Dream Corps International 2905 Fallstaff Rd, Apt 14 Baltimore, MD 21209 Add us to your address book Copyright (C) 2008 Dream Corps International All rights reserved.

an analogy

I have been thinking about Tomas for many years. But only in the light of these reflections did I see him clearly. I saw him standing at the window of his flat and looking across the courtyard at the opposite walls, not knowing what to do. 

He had first met Tereza about three weeks earlier in a small Czech town. They had spent scarcely an hour together. She had accompanied him to the station and waited with him until he boarded the train. Ten days later she paid him a visit. They made love the day she arrived. That night she came down with a fever and stayed a whole week in his flat with the flu. 

He had come to feel an inexplicable love for this all but complete stranger; she seemed a child to him, a child someone had put in a bulrush basket daubed with pitch and sent downstream for Tomas to fetch at the riverbank of his bed. She stayed with him a week, until she was well again, then went back to her town, some hundred and twenty-five miles from Prague. And then came the time I have just spoken of and see as the key to his life: Standing by the window, he looked out over the courtyard at the walls opposite him and deliberated. 

Should he call her back to Prague for good? He feared the responsibility. If he invited her to come, then come she would, and offer him up her life. 

Or should he refrain from approaching her? Then she would remain a waitress in a hotel restaurant of a provincial town and he would never see her again. 

Did he want her to come or did he not? 

He looked out over the courtyard at the opposite walls, seeking an answer. 

He kept recalling her lying on his bed; she reminded him of no one in his former life. She was neither mistress nor wife. She was a child whom he had taken from a bulrush basket that had been daubed with pitch and sent to the riverbank of his bed. She fell asleep. He knelt down next to her. Her feverous breath quickened and she gave out a weak moan. He pressed his face to hers and whispered calming words into her sleep. After a while he felt her breath return to normal and her face rise unconsciously to meet his. He smelled the delicate aroma of her fever and breathed it in, as if trying to glut himself with the intimacy of her body. And all at once he fancied she had been with him for many years and was dying. He had a sudden clear feeling that he would not survive her death. He would lie down beside her and want to die with her. He pressed his face into the pillow beside her head and kept it there for a long time. 

Now he was standing at the window trying to call that moment to account. What could it have been if not love declaring itself to him? But was it love? The feeling of wanting to die beside her was clearly exaggerated: he had seen her only once before in his life! Was it simply the hysteria of a man who, aware deep down of his inaptitude for love, felt the self-deluding need to simulate it? His unconscious was so cowardly that the best partner it could choose for its little comedy was this miserable provincial waitress with practically no chance at all to enter his life! 

Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love. 

And he was distressed that in a situation where a real man would instantly have known how to act, he was vacillating and therefore depriving the most beautiful moments he had ever experienced (kneeling at her bed and thinking he would not survive her death) of their meaning. 

He remained annoyed with himself until he realized that not knowing what he wanted was actually quite natural. 

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come. 

Was it better to be with Tereza or to remain alone? 

There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, sketch is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture. 

Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live,we might as well not have lived at all.