Blast from the Past

Some of you may remember the short-lived and ill-fated Poetry-Sticker on the Street project I got involved in last winter. I never thought they would re-surface again in any form or shape, except that one of them got immemorialized in a photo that is now on the Spacing website. I vaguely remember pasting this one myself, although I don't take any responsibilities for the inanity of the quote itself.

It made me think of Andrea: professional closet organizer; Queen & Bathurst; blow-torched roses; flower studded bicycles and all that jazz.

Me and Ayn Rand Were Tight Once

It's 12:24, 14 hours before my exam. Studying is going nowhere, and I thought, what the heck, might as well.

A post on Adeel's blog ended up unearthing my earlier flirtation with Ayn Rand and Objectivism. If you click on my profile you can still see Atlas Shrugged listed as one of my favourite books. Truthfully though, it's not; back when I had a lot of zits it was.

I don't know exactly why it's still there, I mean, except for it being a badly written novel that incidentally sheds light on Ayn Rand's intellectual narcissim and her ironically authoritarian approach to political ideologies, I'm also pretty offended, on behalf of Melville, Forster, and even Jane Jacobs et al, that it's consistently ranked number 2 in Library of Congress's survey of America's favourite book. Yet somehow I felt, for some inarticulat-able reason, that it should be there: it was what I lived by, if only for a brief year-and-a-half during which I didn't know better.

I actually met my current roommate during Frosh week, when I was lying face-down on a sofa in a boozy stupor while we talked about Objectivism. Later that week we somehow found and signed up for the Objectivist club of UofT, and two weeks after that we went to a lecture given by the club on Objectivism in art.

The lecturer was a self-proclaimed trailer-park boy who found his higher calling. The ensuing two hours was nothing short of a disaster, as he tried, through theatrical imitations of ancient Egyptian gestures, to demonstrate the evolution of the Objectivist idea in ancient Egyptian and Greek art.

I took it rather well under the circumstances. We walked out before the lecture ended, shrugged to each other a little embarrassedly; I felt a little empty, but in a rather cathartic way. We went for pizza instead.

I've never lived by any philosophy since.
p.s. that being said, I do like the cover design of these Rand books and very much appreciate the Deco motifs. My copy, the whole fucking 1000 pages of it, was (I believe) left in Niagara Falls bus terminal by accident. I hypothesize that it ended in one of the following ways: 1) it went to the garbage dump, 2) it spontaneously self-combusted, or 3) it got picked up by an angsty pimply teenager from Hamilton who skipped class for the day and converted him/her. 1) is by far most likely, but I hope it ended up with a teenager. Ah those bittersweet years. Tears.

I'm a Communist Kindergarten Survivor

Choosing not to work, as evidenced by two blog posts within the hour, at the busiest junction of the year, becomes a much less morally challenging proposition once you square it to yourself that you just.don't.want.to.work. Bullshitty excuses are a moral hazard on par with smoking, abstinence, and driving.

So Aliza and I went to a movie this past Saturday at the ReelAsian Film Festival. It was a properly Asian affair: we are both Asian, which was a start. We started the evening at Traditional Chinese Buns, patronized by an entirely Asian population save two white ass cracker Kensington Market transplants. We then made a quick hop to Chinatown Starbucks where I chatted up with the Asian barista. After that we walked back to the streetcar stop on Spadina Ave., which is basically the heart of emigre China this side of Lake Ontario.

I have a small confession to make: I used to dream about, and still occasionally does, of being a festival circus groupie--whoring myself out all day for free festival film tickets and sneaking peeks of Tilda Swinton's non-existent breasts at after parties so I can share salacious tales of her androgyny with my otherwise apathetic friends. Dreams aside, as it stands now I can only afford maybe four tickets at the International Film Festival each year. I briefly contemplated writing for Innis Herald again, in the slim hope that some magazine critic will pick up this quality paper one day (circulation 500) and contact me on the merit of my sharp and incisive writing.

Thankfully, these ReelAsian tickets for Little Red Flowers are only 7 bucks apiece.

It's, well, ironic, that the Chinese title for this film means "It Looks Beautiful", considering the first shot that greeted me when we walked into the theatre was a 5-year-old's penis. Points of subtle psychosexual interest recurred with unfailing frequency in this 90 minute film: a boy named Qiang Qiang (meaning "guns" or "pushka") was enrolled in a residential kindergarten in post-revolution Beijing; the highly regarded school was a place of toys and seemingly benevolent teachers, but also of regimented exercise routines, group bowel movement rituals, and a ruthless system whereby a child was awarded a little red flower for good behaviour. Soon, the spirited Qiang Qiang began to find himself at odds with people around him.

Kids lined up to take a dump every morning, and were awarded for shitting like clockwork

The film's director Zhang Yuan is supposed to be the first truly underground filmmaker in China, his work routinely censored for political reasons. That Little Red Flowers is a political satire on communism and its group psychology is beyond obvious. Like, the group shitting is totally a stab at the kind of cross-surveillance citizens of communism used to carry out on each other. When you've seen someone's privates up close like that you've seen everything, no?

Child actor Kan exposes his privates for art, and takes on the Chinese equivalent of the name Rammington Steel

It wasn't awfully original to situate a political satire in a communist boarding school; the individual in an authoritarian regime is a theme all too often explored, often with great mastery. Heck, even the spirited-boy-in-a-boarding-school franchise is a bit overdone. But lead actor Kan was a miracle, and for anyone who actually went to a communist kindergarten (me & Aliza), the film surely brought back memories.

It was pretty sad that as late as the 80s, things didn't change that much. The group shitting was abolished, thank god, but the nap rooms were still co-ed, with guys wearing pants that had a slit along the asscrack to facilitate easy transportation of goods. All this indecent exposure probably lead to psychosexual retardation at later ages, which explains why all these asian people have issues with their bodies. We still learned songs that ran something like the following:

Li and I are sharing apples;

there are only two left;

I give the bigger one to Li;

and keep the smaller one for myself.

Ayn Rand would have been livid.

But these are beautiful, sepia-toned memories through the filter lens of temporal distance, and both Aliza and I found ourselves oddly moved--half an hour after the movie we still found ourselves excitedly chatting about food in a communist kindergarten (corn gruel, white flour buns). It was then that I realized Little Red Flowers was bound for the Pantheon of Chinese cinema, not as a superb satire, but as a finely crafted keepsake, a little slice of history.

I tried to search through my memory to decide if I ever wore those pants with ass-slits and found nothing. The memory must have been subconsciously suppressed.