Days of Being LJ

A young Agassi found out that his father decided to name him after two of his co-workers from a Vegas casino. No reason was given, it just turned out that way, neither Andre nor Kirk were particularly close friends of Mike Agassi, but their first names were good enough to embroider the birth certificate of his youngest child.

Thus for his existence, Andre’s search for his answers in life, herein laid out in “Open” his autobiography, results in similar lack of reasons given. Sometimes life just is…it’s a journey which we find ourselves on but forget to find out why we started in the first place.

I was too young to really remember the petulant wild Agassi, and too disinterested to really take note of his late career resurgence but if it were a choice between Sampras and Agassi; I was more drawn to the big A.

After reading “Open” I now have a greater understanding of why.

Agassi is the classic anti-hero in the construct of the myth archetype. “Open” catalogues his odyssey. He cuts the figure of the dedicated child, misunderstood teen, wayward young man, tragic burnout and then the resurgent saviour and ultimately the hero, but always shunning his heroic gifts and in his case the ability to play tennis.

I’m attracted to anti-heroes, I love my protagonists flawed and conflicted but ultimately they need to be good and honest people. And as much as I know about Agassi himself, I get the vibe that in light of the mistakes he has made, he is ultimately an honest and good man.

“Open”, though littered with tennis, isn’t actually about tennis. It’s about humanity, love and compassion over a bed of explanation and analysis of the choices and relationships we make in late. Although there is probably enough of the analysis to fill most biographies it’s really the deep emotional resonance which makes the book interminably readable.

I finished the solid 400 pages in a day. I can’t remember the last time I managed to read a book in a day; I gather it was probably the first Harry Potter book when I was 15 or something.

Upon finishing the first chapter on the train heading to work on the morning I received the book, tears welling in my eyes, I knew for a book to elicit such an emotional response from me in the first 20 pages, it must be pretty damn special.

The book is very well ghost-written by J.R Moehringer (a Pulitzer prize winner no less) and I gather a good amount of the structure comes from his end but I wouldn’t discount some of the origins of the literary poetics from Agassi himself, together they form some rare quality for a sports (auto)biography.

I hold a great literary weakness for (auto)biographies, but usually they’re filled with latent facts for the casual reader with some revelationary stories for the hardcore fan but there is something about “Open” which makes it utterly engaging just on a humanistic level. Just look at the cover (above), it’s not pretty, some would say ugly even, but it’s raw and intriguingly human. Also the book, purely on a narrative level, is just a good yarn, a pure form of “Myth” storytelling.

I’m usually not one to re-read books but I can’t help but feel that I’d be thumbing through my paperback copy of “Open” constantly for years to come.

Even if you hate tennis (or any type of sport), or biographies, or Agassi for that matter, I’d still urge you to give “Open” a go, or at least read the couple of chapters telling of his courtship of Steffi Graf, I think even the most coldest and stoniest of hearts will fall fluttering and submit to the coy sweetness and endearment of that relationship.

LJK books andre agassi, book review, humanity, opinion, tennis, writing

So it’s been over a month since I’ve last posted. I’ll try and keep this one short.

Reasons why I haven’t been blogging:

• Nothing that interesting has happened
• Work has taken over my life
• I can’t bitch about work because of confidentiality obviously and also the risk that people at work might read this
• because of the last point there really  isn’t anything to blog about now since for me for the past 5 years or so blogging = bitching about something

What will happen to this blog?

I’ve been wondering whether I should renew my hosting for the next year (I think my 1 year plan ends in November). Obviously I love to continue blogging but it’s turning to be more of a hassle less of an enjoyment more and more. I guess with so many years of reading other really well written blogs, more and more I’m drawn to the professional blogs which focus on one main area e.g. Tennis, Technology etc and if most people are like me, personal blogs just aren’t read anymore, unless you’re a friend who I like to keep in touch with but even then I’ve found that microblogging is more immediate and satisfying.

So in essence I’m bored about writing about my day to day life. I think when I named this blog I didn’t anticipate the sheer boredom of “Days of being” me.  Seriously I’m bored of living my own life, why the hell would anyone else want to read about it?

So my plan is from now until November (or beyond should I fancy) is to use this blog as a point of expression for being creative with language. I’m going to focus on longer essay type posts (about whatever piques my interest and allows me to keep up my academic writing skills), op-ed pieces, random poetry and other word burdened creative pursuits.

Life updates, what I find cool, short form fan wank and other updates of the personal nature will be kept on Facebook as of now.

In reality little will change since I’ve been focusing more on longer opinion pieces since this new blog started but now I’ll actually have a plan of attack and a focus.

Posts in the Works

• Beautiful People – Catching the Gen Y Nostalgia
• Torchwood, where compelling drama comes at the expense of character attachments
• Roger Federer, Goatmaster
• Love and loathing of Shanghainese part 2 (Stand Up Comedy Shang Style)
• The death of blogging

The above is a list of posts I’ve been thinking about developing longer opinion pieces on. If anyone is still reading this blog and has a preference for any of the above, let me know and I’ll bump up the priority but otherwise I’ll just work through these in the next few weeks between my new found obsession for Tennis (have I mentioned I finally started lessons?)

LJK blogging blogging, plans, work, writing

Last week on went on a glorious road trip with my favourite allies and I think I’m finally coming down with the physical results of drinking, talking, eating too much, and sleeping little.

It didn’t also help that this week has been fairly tough at work with a few deadlines, meetings and various issues. Yesterday I got up at the crack of dawn to attend the opening of a new concept store in Bondi Junction. It was fun but it didn’t do much for my plans of avoiding sickness these few weeks.

Every day my urge to travel and go frolicking in awesome places of the world continues. I hope to embark on a longer snow trip this year and work on my abysmal snowboarding skills but I can’t help but feel envious every time I’m bombarded with pictures of far off picturesque locations such as Chile on facebook.

Most depressing is the sudden realisation now that I will only have 4 weeks of travel time a year, 1 week in the snow and another planned for the Australian Open early next year may mean that I only have 2 weeks to frolic around overseas. That doesn’t do much for my plans of driving around Lake Garda ala James Bond, languishing amongst the olive groves of Sorrento and perhaps a side trip to Spain?

Yet I can’t help thinking all these wants and plans are just a method of compensating for my own loneliness. The more I see all my friends paired off and walking into the sunset the more I feel like the need to go out and collect new hobbies and experiences to fill that void in my own life. It’s sad but the brutal end will come as I pass out, face pressed to some cold pizza , vodka by my side and Alsatians nibbling at my toes.

Anyhoo for the positives in the future, the ABC will receive $167 million of extra funding over the next 3 years. A bulk of it will go to producing new local content (up from 20 hours to 70 hours) as well as content for its new Kid’s Channel in the pipeline. Methinks I should really start writing my opus, a dramedy based on my experiences at Uni. It’ll be totally compelling…to me and my friends that is.

But now is a good time to be creative, to start off that slam poetry, create that TV show and make money and fame off my perculiar blend of geeky ethnic youth intellectuality.

If none of that works…perhaps I’ll go become a roving travel guide.

LJK life conversation, creativity travel, drinking, friends, photography, plans, road trip, writing

Okay so the title of this post suggests that Shinjuku Incident (Jackie Chan’s latest Non-Kungfu offering) was a bad film. It’s not, it was actually quite enjoyable. A few unintentional laughs yes, (but when do people like Alan and I ever not laugh at unintentional moments?) but some good tension and action set pieces too.  Chan takes a few acting risks which is nice but overall he is slightly miscast as Steel Head. Derek Yee like most HK directors needs to restrain his actors badly, and what often starts as a nice scene descends into scenery chewing with bad moustaches.

Shinjuku Incident also embodies elements what has often become the scourge of HK cinema in the past 5 years or so:

1. Way too many actors from across the regions, HK actors, Mainland actors, Taiwanese actors and of course Japanese, cause the film is set in Japan.
2. Because of 1, you get HK actors trying to speak mandarin whilst lapsing into Cantonese or trying to sound Dong Bei but with an unconvincing Dong Bei mandarin accent, Taiwanese speaking hakka and mandarin, Japanese speaking Japanese AND Chinese and Mainlanders speaking standard mandarin (no that they’re actually capable of doing anything other). Like WTF people, have some consistency. The thing is that if it was a Hollywood film and Brad Pitt was meant to be a British character but instead spoke in an American accent they’d be uproar, but in Chinese films it happens all the fucking time. Like someone introduce the notion of a “Dialect Coach” into Chinese Cinema…PLEASE

• • But wait, you say…What about something like Hero or Lust Caution where you have HK actors speaking mandarin with an accent? That’s okay I say because those characters where never explicitly said to be from a certain place in China. For Ancient China we don’t even know what the accents were so it shouldn’t even be a problem to the viewer. In Lust Caution, Tony Leung’s Character was from the South, so he had a southern mandarin accent which worked. But in Shinjuku Incident, Jackie Chan and Daniel Wu were both meant to be from Dong Bei…but had southern mandarin accents.
  • But hey if you don’t even understand Chinese you wouldn’t care, so maybe I’m just being picky.

1. Total inconsistency with tone, Shinjuku Incident is part country bumpkin migrant rags to riches, part black society, part TV Soap, part weird surrealist punk rock anti-drug story.

Derek Yee is a director with some good solid and interesting films under his belt, but overall I can’t help but feel that The Shinjuku Incident was another failed attempt at pleasing the Pan-Asian market. Yet because of it’s subject matter, it didn’t get a release in the lucrative Mainland market and thus had to settle for whatever profits it can take from HK (It headlined the HKIFF) and peripheral markets like this weird deal made in Australia where it was exclusively shown at Hoyts cinemas.

What I think has been the fundamental downfall of the HK film industry is not only due to the rise of the Mainland China but more the lack of development of it’s own talent. In the golden age of HK Cinema the directors, actors and other crew came up through the studio system from the 1960s-70s with the likes of the Shaw Brothers Studio. They were essentially trained as collaborative filmmakers not as money men. Time and time again we see the same directors making the better films now, John Woo, Derek Yee etc.

Later on actors came though the TVB training system which has now become weaker and weaker because whilst previously young men and women who tried out for the TVB school did so not for the fame or money but because they didn’t have any other avenues (Chow Yun Fat, Andy Lau, Tony Leung etc etc). But now acting is seen as lucrative, HK people go into it for the wrong reasons and hence you keep getting more and more mediocre graduates.

So now you’ve got a lack of young developed talent both in front and behind the cameras in HK who have to compete with the greater numbers of more talented people over the border on the mainland. So we have actors and directors in their late 40s-50s who are still taking the top billing and getting the best projects…why? because no one younger can come close.

It’s a serious dilemma, and HK Cinema is not going to improve until it decides to start nurturing the younger talent like it did in the past. So in 10 years time I hope I’m still not stuck watching Jackie Chan, Tony Leung and Andy Lau in roles which should be played by guys in their 30s.

So has HK Cinema lost it’s mojo? Yes, and tt has since probably 2005 and probably even much earlier (although I think 2004-2005 was the last year for solid films like Breaking News, 2046, Jiang Hu, Love Battlefield etc) And it probably won’t regain its mojo in the near future. I’m thinking there’s at least another 10-15 year wait until there’s a possibility of a resurgence. It’s sad, but the damage has been done.

—

We have a similar issues in Australia with both Film and TV. I was looking at the BBC blogs over the past few days and stumbled over these:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/opportunity/college_of_comedy.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/opportunity/writers_academy1.shtml

The BBC has a Writer’s Academy and a College of Comedy…to do what? To nurture new talent. And this is why they’re able to continue to output new and interesting programs because they always have a fresh crop of youngsters waiting in the wings. But not only do these programs benefit BBC itself but it also benefits the entire UK TV and film industry.

*sigh*

LJK film accents, bbc, dialects, filmmaking, hong kong cinema, jackie chan, writing