Two Unforgettable Arias from Movies

Above: Aria scene from The Fifth Element

Above: Aria scene from Shawshank Redemption

Red Like the Sky

It is a movie that will make you experience "seeing" in a whole new way...

Sensazione, baby~

Rojo Como El Cielo (Red Like the Sky) (Rosso Come Il Cielo) [*Ntsc/region 1 & 4 Dvd. Import-latin America] Spanish Cover

I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron

 

This was a charming read; a perfect book for a summer holiday! I enjoyed it wildly! And came away with some awesome sage advice from an elder woman, an accomplished writer, an eccentric.

I didn't know that she was the author of When Harry Met Sally until I read this book. I particularly enjoyed her talking about cooking and cabbages; I returned home last summer, and did some really out-of-character thing of cooking, and I did what I imagined would be a healthy soup, one that wouldn't make me too fat. I ended up with some raw tasting soup, a festive thing of cabbages, onions, garlic, tomatoes, celery bits, and spices.

The other advice that was quite eye-opening and timely for me was her advice targeted at younger women like me (younger in comparison to her I mean), to go now, put on a bikini and never take it off until you reach 36! Unfortunately, I wasn't quite able to take her advice so immediately. But now I am working on my abs, so maybe next summer I will be able to do something about it!

Anyhow. It was a really satisfying read for me. I think I saw an Oprah show about this book, some time after I read the book. It's so lovely to feel connected to the world!

Defining the Wind by Scott Huler

This is a book I bought at the Brown Bookstore on Thayer Street
last summer, while on my visit to RISD with my father.

I have always loved the Brown Bookstore. I think it is one of my favorite
bookstores after the English Bookstore in Paris, and the Dillons in
New Malden Mall in London. Of course, now in Seoul, we have the
Kyobo Bookstores which have evolved so much since the 1980s!

Well. This book was on sale and since I was working on a public design
for Jeju Island in my class for Professor Ahn, Sang-Soo, I was really
drawn to it. My team was working on the aspect of "wind" that
typified and characterized the essence and nature of Jeju-do.

And the more we researched into this "wind" thing, the more
fascinating it was! It was more fascinating than the spider project
I was working on the year before for an Illustration class.

There was something so inherently seductive about the "wind" -
it's just so out of your grasp! It's got that quality of sand falling
through your fingers; it entices you, it calls to you, and yet you
can never catch the wind. Unless you can fly or something,
you will never be able to beat it. You can just enjoy it for what it is.
But you can't possess it. Hmm... hence, the attraction.

I read up a little bit about Mr. Beaufort on Wikipedia. What a
fascinating man he was! So full of action and curiosity!

(And what Josh Lyman(sp?) called "a mind at work; gravitas"
in one of the episodes of West Wing...)


* * *

There was another book that I wanted to read in the library of the
cruise we went on last summer, which I didn't quite get around to.

It was called Stickeen, John Muir's Adventure with a Dog and a Glacier.
I don't know why, but my memory has somehow clustered these two
books in the same mental category for that summer.

Maybe some day, I will get to read that book.
It recalls to me two books I taught in class called,
"Journey to the Center of the Earth" and "The Call of the Wild."

Rediscovered I

I saw a movie on Korean TV some years ago
that totally bewitched me, but I forgot the
title. I had to a lot of digging to find out what
the English title was! And I found it.

Gabrielle Anwar, in "Innocent Lies"
which had a Korean title "Days of Helcyon."

It was a great portrayal of
Narcissistic Personality Disorder,
in my opinion. I think her mother was.