"poetry of the day after"

i've been listening full tilt, nonstop to mayday's "後青春期的詩" or "poetry of the day after" for a while now. my opinions of it has been steadfastly improving, especially after i read this review, which summarized the idea behind the album as follows:

It’s the paradox of life. When we’re young, we can’t wait to become older and gain our grown-up freedom. And when we grow old, we look back wistfully on the carefree days of shining dreams, and we would give anything to be young again. For the lucky few of us, we might get an extended lease on the wild ride of youthful exuberance, and that is the theme explored by Mayday in their seventh album, “Poetry of the Day After.” The original title is 後青春期的詩, which literally translates to Poetry of the Late Adolescent Period. After all these years, Mayday is still five oversized kids having fun with each other. And the music they produce is still as energetic and moving as ever.

so true and so altogether bittersweet. mayday embodies success and friendship and happiness. once achieved do we have a fast hold on these grails or is it just a tenuous grasp, the grip each day lossening. and mayday, as they mature, will they be able to maintain their energy, their wide-eyed zest for life or will producing these types of songs become a farce?

if mayday has any conception of the impact they have on the lives of those who listen to their music, those of us using their music to explicate, to find meaning, to move, to inspire, to create, then they will find a way transcend the generations.

the following are my favorites in order:

1. 夜訪吸血鬼
2. 出頭天
3. 後青春期的詩
4. 你不是真正的快樂
5. 突然好想你
6. 爆肝

rating: 8.5/10

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"tropic thunder" and "the ruins"

i watched 'tropic thunder' monday night. fully fell short of expectations on comedy, humor, wit. all the laughs to be had were already highlighted by the trailers.

rating: 6/10

then last night, i watched 'the ruins'. really, how menancing can a plant be? there was a couple of stomach-churning, retch-inducing scenes of amputation and self multilation, but that only works on a visceral level, not on the prolonged psychological level, which are the territory of truly frightening films.

rating: 6/10

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"shade's children"

i finished reading garth nix's "shade's children" this weekend.

!!!spoiler alert!!! the story takes place in a post-apocalyptic world in the non-too-distant future, surprise, surprise. one fateful day, "the change", all humans over fourteen years of age disapear. those remaining are herded into concentration camps or otherwise killed. why? because beings calling themselves "overlords" have decided to make earth a battle ground for creatures who are built from body parts harvested from fourteen-year-olds. a resistance movement orchestrated by shade, an artifical intelligence program, created by a computer scientist prior to the change, seeks to discover the source of the overlords power and destroy it. the book follows one of shade's cells, comprised of ella, drum, ninde, and gold-eye.

i liked it! the action was fast-paced, but i didn't feel like i was reading a movie script. the character development was good, the world imagined by nix interesting, and the mood ominous. i flipped through the pages so quickly, i didn't have time to note down interesting quotes, save two near the end:

(1) "There comes a tide in the affairs of men, that if taken at the flood...or something like that. There is still a chance, a very slight chance."
(2) "Then they were dead, and the sun moved around, bringing the shade to wrap around their bodies like a shroud."

rating: 7/10

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