In The Mood For Love

Chinese noodle place in a narrow alley walkway. Rainy days. It's Hong Kong in the 60's filled with retro feeling represented by big Siemens wall clock, Japanese rice cooker, vaselined slick hair and a sensual body - hugging Cheongsam/Qipao dress. To borrow a phrase from one of the film reviews this movie is a "Literary Vision" which to my interpretation is like a composition of beautiful sentences and old photographs combined together forming a moving visions that is distinctively a Won Kar-Wai's cool, hip and artistic style of movie making. His composition of the retro icons mixed with a list of soundtracks consisting a numbers of Nat King Cole's Spanish songs and an Indonesian classic masterpiece "Bengawan Solo" as the backdrop has succesfully transfered us back to the dream and nostalgic time.

The story is about a married man Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung) and a married woman Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung) who moved to an apartments next to each other on the same day. This mellow - drama between the two developed when they both discovered that their respective spouses were involved in a torrid affair with each other (this was hinted mostly off-screen as these characters were never really shown in the film). Leung and Cheung then fell in love with each other and formed a relationship of restrained love bounded by ethics and moral principles. This uncertain affair which seems to exist the fleeting moment in time has an air of sadness and consolation over the betrayal they felt from their spouses mixed with a lot of ambiguities about the extend of their plutonic relationship whether it was about the sharing of feelings, love, and sexual desires. Did they eventually slept together?. These are the abstractions of the plot which Wong Kar-Wai has build around a romantic athmosphere and characterization illustrated through a kind of mind - game narrative, settings, wardrobe and color.

It is a movie of "dream time" and melodrama mood. The acting of Tony Leung and the sensual Maggie Cheung in her Cheongsam provide a portrayal of restraint love from the fight between emotional desires and moral principles and society's norms. These mood of loves between them were shown like a painted canvas of wet alley street, steak dinner, a seedy hotel room, duck noodles vendor in Singapore, and an anti-climax ending in Angkor Wat temple in Cambodia.

Filmography:In The Mood For Love (Hua Yang Nian Hua). Written and directed by Wong Kar-Wai. Starring Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung. Block 2 Pictures, Inc (2000). Cannes 2000 Award.

Glosarry of Vintage Sounds

The title of this review came to me after reading in Tempo Magazine on what Denny Sakrie has to say about Sore's debut album, Centralismo. I completely agree with him on their music that takes us back to the retro 60's. The assemble of strings, guitar and piano produced a mellow romantic songs that are rich in melody that has influence of pyschedelic to classic sounds.

Some might question whether the vintage sounds merely a decoration or were philosopically based. I say, whatever....let it be. The lack of fix identity of the music and the sounds that are mixed in genre has given the taste of the past and taken us back to the time that were simpler. These sounds that were inspired by a sense of the city in the 50's and 60's as portrayed by the cover design illustrated by Mayumi Haryoto has enough power to offer us flavors that are not only local but also one that can be appreciated universally.

The album is produced by Aksara Record and available locally at ak.'sa.ra prodak and demajors independent music industry. If you ask me is it worth buying, I would say yes it is.

Les Triplettes de Belleville.

triplettes-belleville
Originally uploaded by silly sushi.

Directed by Sylvain Chomet. This movie also known as "Belleville Rendez-vous" tells a story about a grandmother named Souza, who tries to save her grandson who's kidnapped during the Tour de France by a French Mafia. Meanwhile, with her overweight dog Bruno in tow, Madame Souza follows her grandson’s captors to Belleville and enlists the aid of three old hags vaudeville chanteuses who were formerly immensely populer known as 'Les triplettes de Belleville'.

Les Triplettes de Belleville is, overall, a very interesting and unique piece of work. A 2D-animated feature film, with a really stylish artwork that somehow all at once naive and sophisticated, which is worlds away from either Disney's or Japanese manga-style animé. I really like the character design by Sylvain Chomet himself is abstract and garish.

Besides the great artworks, the movie is also musical as we can see at the beginning Josephine Baker dancing to the accompaniment of Django Reinhardt -- yes... it's Django playing his guitar with his 2 fingers (until a gang of mischievous monkeys steals her banana skirt); then we will see the Trio perform a cabaret piece using a fridge, newspaper, vacuum cleaner and bicycle wheel as instruments. Definitely one thing you should check out. :)

Squirrel Nut Zippers

squirrel nut zippers
Originally uploaded by silly sushi.

When I heard them for the first time, I thought I was listening to some old records. but it's not. It was Squirrel Nut Zippers and I felt like I was taken by its tremendous diversity and quality of their music. They're bringin the old and new together very well then making it as their own. The brass section, banjo, the unique misc sounds of percussions and Jimbo's guitar will take us back to the swing era, dixieland. And of course Katherine's vocal wud sway us more. They've done quiet many albums, but I only have two of their albums; "HOT" and "Perennial Favourite". So, the swing is not dead and it looks like they've grabbed the gold in the swing revival sweepstakes.


http://www.snzipper.com

Velvet Voodoo

It's always an adventure to go on a search for some new kind of music for the thrill of finding some undiscovered music that you have never come across before. Thank's to this small group of great bars in London and New York and its newest bar in the group called Trailer Happiness in Notting Hill area and the one with a music policy most closely fitting the music (funky rare grooves from the 60s & 70s).

Together with the good people at whatmusic.com in London, they release a compilation of wild jazz belonging to a different era. It's not your usual Jazz Mood thing but a wild and diverse combination of Jazz and Brazillian genre from a pre Coltrane era. This particular album Velvet Voodo gives you a sound compilation filled with Brazillian soul with a rich mix of samba jazz, fusion soul, funk and afro bossa.

Searching for great sounds is an adventure but so time consuming sometimes with our busy hectic everyday life. To come across this kind of compilation can sure make our life so much more easier.

For availability of this release and other rare music in Jakarta contact:

demajors
Jl. Gandaria I No 57 A Jakarta 12130, Indonesia. Phone +62 21 7208860 or email david@demajors.com

Amp Fiddler

Getting caught up in the day to day routine we often got trapped in the negative vibes that sometimes surrounds us from our interaction with family, work and society in general. These vibes could at times lead us to "misplace" ourselves in the midst of a chaotic world around us. As a music lover we sometimes turned to sounds and songs as an escape to our private calm oasis and we live for that moment when we discover a new sounds that gives us that sudden rush that blows our mind wide open and somehow lead the "misplace" part of ourselves back to us.

This is how I felt when I caught the live performance of the Detroit base Amp Fiddler at the Jakarta International Java Jazz Festival 2005 last week. Their electronic jazz funk sound really speak to the soul and takes me to the place where I don't want to leave. Not having known anything about these guys before their performance at the festival defenetely was the nicest suprise I got from attending the 2 days out of a 3 days festival.

Their carefree attitude on stage and the smooth buttery voice of the vocalist Joseph Anthony "Amp" Fiddler really is a portrait about urban grace. Having heard the live performance I now look forward to hear Amp Fiddler’s debut album, "Waltz of a Ghetto Fly".

36 Views: A Play

By Naomi Iizuka
On my current visit to my birth town, Bandung I happened to visit the newly opened QB World Books who just had its soft launched the day before. I can see that Richard Oh (once upon a time I used to work for this literary man as well as novelist) the owner of these chain of book stores is really spreading his wings with a bunch of new outlets.

Browsing around looking at the still half empty shelves around the store I found this book with an interesting cover on the Play and Poetry section. 36 Views is a play where the plots at heart are about combining East and West, represented by an Art Dealer and an Oriental Art Historian. It explores the meaning of beauty in art as well in life itself. The hidden value in the work of art and what it represent economically and whether originality and truth carry the same emotional value in real life relationship between people.

The dialog is full of pillow talk poetry of ancient time mixed with urban punk rhetoric and cynicism on modern realism about work acknowledgment, achievement, eroticism and the game of human heart on greed, love and passive aggressive mental game.

Related Link
The Great Wave from 36 Views of Mount Fuji by Japan's greatest artist Hokusai

Mata Ketiga by Rieka Roslan

Available now on CD. For further info contact demajors at +6221-7208860 or david@demajors.com and at Aksara Prodak stores near you.

South of the Border, West of The Sun

Novel by Haruki Murakami

South of the Border, West of the Sun is a fiction about lost love of the past and a mid life crisis of a Tokyo businessman. Murakami's literate poetic language tells the story surrounded with an old jazz ambiance. The story takes us inside the quirky mind of Hajime who lives in Tokyo. Hajime in his mid-life is a husband with one daughter and an owner of a successfull Jazz Club in Tokyo's trendy area. He is full with longing of an undying childhood romance with Shimamoto who he has not seen since childhood during post war Japan. The story is told in a cool romantic that radiate something of a literate poem where the couple now both live in modern Tokyo and successful found renewed sensualities with certain dark complexities of the past. Available locally at Aksara Prodak book store Kemang, Jakarta.