After dinner at a friend’s, someone posed the question: if you were independently wealthy, say you have $10million, what would you do?
Someone mentioned starting his own business, someone wanted to become an architect, most people would travel, and perhaps charity. My mind was a blank. I remember at another occasion being asked this question a few years ago, my answer was pretty standard then, travelling, and perhaps charity.
But it doesn’t seem to matter so much now. Of course I still like travelling, as I’m getting ready for my next trip. But it just doesn’t seem to have as much thrill. The past year have changed my perspective, I presume.
Almost exactly a year ago I was confined to a hospital bed, scared, in pain, fearing for the worst.
Having seen a few Wes Anderson movies, from the mildly amusing “Darjeeling Limited”, to the somewhat intriguing “Royal Tenenbaums”, to the downright unwatchable “Aquatic Adventures of Steve Zissou”, I did not have very high expectations of “Moonrise Kingdom”. I did expect another highly stylized drama with saturated colors, oddish characters, and improbable plots. What I did not expect was how much I would like it. What seemed overly done or forced in those other movies somehow worked in this one. It was a bit like a fairy tale. A self-contained world of childhood on the cusp of adolescence, with hapless but well-meaning adults on the fringe, set on idyllic islands at a long summer’s end. A world that draws me in. I was spellbound.
My mom introduced me to this obscure artist with a strange life story – she’s half Swedish, half Japanese, and came back from being deaf. An eighty-year-old in eccentric outfits, she plays her classic piano pieces in her own way, with her very own special sound. Somehow she makes Chopin sound not quite Chopin, Liszt not quite Liszt, but the sound has a quality to entrance, to draw you in to this world that is Fuzjko Hemming. When the concert started at Palace of Fine Arts it became immediately apparent that this is not a good site for a concert. The sound was not projecting well from the stage, but I could hear all the other noise in the rest of the theatre, and the well ageed seats were creaking all over the place. For a couple of songs, I was rather distracted – the stifled yawns from a couple of rows behind me, a child’s whisper to the right, but most of all, the moaning seats from all directions. Then somehow I stopped being bothered by it, as I entered the zone of her music, the sound that seemed at times effervescent, that somehow tapped into my memories and evoked something… I know not what. And I was spell-bound.
