AUDITOIRE: Tag me, what is this?

a tag-me post

[photo credits to dvdbeaver]

A lamenting image from Satantango (1994)

Jan tagged me. But thanks anyway.

The topic of the tagging game is to make a list of your top 10 birthday wishes.

My birthday, around July, is months away. However, I am indignant on making wish lists for my birthday. I feel it's not necessary so let me count the ways:

1) The future is an uncertainty. I live a life here-and-now. According to a song from RENT (an award-winning musical by Jonathan Larson) There's only us, there's only this. Forget. Regret. Or life is yours to miss. No other road, no other way. No day, but today.

2) My birthday is usually a celebration with friends to recollect fruitful memories of my past year of existence. Not a day to collect gifts from other people, or to plan for the next year. It is a day to thank important people, a day to renew my bonds to them.

3) Life is in constant flux, material things deplete in a split second. One must harbor oneself on immaterial things, such things go on forever, unbounded, and will fly you away.

A scene from Satantango.

For the sake of the tagging game, here is my wish list. It does not matter what time, what place, what situation, i am open.

1.) A seat at Cannes Festival on May 13 - 24, 2009.It would be a mind-blowing experience sitting next to Jonathan Rosenbaum or Roger Ebert, but please not with Ben Lyons.

2.) An Artificial Eye DVD about the 7-hour film Satantango (1994) by Bela Tarr, possibly the most unforgettable cinematic experience to date. Bela Tarr is actually against the idea of making his masterpiece on digital format. He suggest to watch it the straight seven hours without pausing or stopping. I might errrr... reconsider the idea of buying the DVD.

3.) A seat on the premiere of A Turin Horse (pre-production, 2009) also by Bela Tarr, his last film.

4.) A theatrical invitation for Yi Yi: A One and A Two (2000) at Taiwan or anywhere in the world. I agree with Rosenbaum's opinion on Yang's films: each one needs the space of a movie theater. Though i am quite satisfied with the DVD format, i wanted to experience the brilliance of the frames of YI YI on a theater.

5.) A coffee talk with Abbas Kiarostami on an Iranian countryside. I always wanted to talk with Kiarostami about how his modes of representations in his work, how his functional use of non-narrative modes of expression differs from his predecessors.

6.) A literary trip to Russia to visit the grave sites and old houses of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

7.) Another literary trip to the English islands to visit the places where Virginia Woolf and James Joyce thrive.

8.) A better health, a more critical eye and a more focused mind --- as simple as that.

9.) More friends.

10.) A better year.