Sunday, May 30, 2010

Indulgent Nights

tired tired tired.
then again it's 12.40 am so not much of a surprise there.
and I shall start giving my posts titles again.

back from a celebration of Timo's birthday with Ivan, Nat, Timo and Jurian. Really wish that Darius/ShiXian/Bok could have joined us but.... oh well, there's always next Saturday!

and this blog post is really dead. and probably going to be narrative. and here's to hoping that I'm not going to slip into one of those emo moods because I've really had a good week so far =)

rights, yesterday was the long-awaited Taming of the Shrew play. Epic dinner with Tammie/Thomas/Steph/Shu is epic. Lost my Waraku virginity at Central! which I think really does have an exclamation mark in the name. Shoyu Ramen was good, not great as I would have expected but certainly decent fare. Not quite worth the $12.80 that I spent though. Choice quotes from the expedition:

Thomas: Eh what are you doing?
Lino: Checking my hair in the reflection [of the Waraku sign]
Thomas: ...
[5 seconds later; Tammie and Steph check their hair in the reflection]
Lino: Wow, who checks their reflection
Shuyin: Girls I guess. But I'm too much of a man to check my reflection.
[Time passes]
Lino: Oh, were we suppose to say something about that?
Shuyin: OMG you guys suck! why do you not say anything huh? HUH?
Thomas: Whoops.

Lino: Crikey this here is a big'un! Imma get closer and tryna get a pictcha!
Ayesha: Go away idiot.
Lino: Ooo it's ahngry!

Shuyin: Hey the girls are going to go toilet so take care of my camera kay. Don't do anything stupid.
[Girls leave]
Thomas: Take a photo of me.
Lino: I thought Shuyin said not to do anything stupid...

Met up with R.A.Y (which is terribly ironic in my opinion) and Hafiqa and journeyed to the east aka Robertson Quay. Which I pronounced as kway instead of key for 5 minutes before realizing that I was mis-pronouncing a word I knew how to pronounce. yay random facts. walking there was epic; there's something magical about having the girls trying to orientate. thankfully the GPS system of the iPhones gave us an iDea of where to go so we didn't get horribly lost.

the play itself was... enjoyable yay! sitting in the 1st row gives you all the action you need. It also provides an uncomfortably close view of some of the more disturbing moments of the play. Biondella (who presumably is Biondello after a trip to Thailand) had a... momentously low-cut chinese-style garment. She ran a lot, heavily. There was a lot of jiggling. Blood vessels in my cheek burst from blushing. the Vincentio-impersonator was also dressed in nothing but tight tights. he later put on a nice red shirt. This remedied nothing of the problem of the lower half. There was a lot of uncomfortable shifting, much of it due to me forcing myself to stare at the program booklet.

Warning: literature bit coming up. those not litterateurs will probably want to skip. Those who are may still want to skip anyway. Here there be tygers.

that was also when i realized that the much-praised iambic pentameter of the nobles' verse wasn't really emphasized. it seemed so theatrical, so full of emotion and strongly, confidently delivered that it lost what I felt was a key aspect to the play: that it was a representation of something supposedly completely natural. a depiction of women's struggles in those times and to lose the natural iambic pentameter in favour of an artificially-theatrical delivery sort of took away from the play. it was perhaps a minor detail, certainly one that I've not given much thought to till I started typing this paragraph but still significant, somewhat I guess.

what I really liked though was the physicality of the play. Now of course this sounds somewhat redundant because the text is obviously not a physical thing itself and Shakespeare's rare imposition of specific stage directions allows for creative thinking. but what I found absolutely interesting was the tempestuous relationship between Petruchio and Katharina. Even through Petruchio's transitions from the suave, smooth glib talker to the fierce, wild almost Heathcliff-like ruffian, there was just this undercurrent of a true affection for Kate that was still very ambiguous in the book. I guess it was Woolhead's directing decision to allow Petruchio to show certain signs of affection (that were absent from the book) to Kate that kinda wowed me.

one part in particular that moved me was the ending scene after Katherine's monologue to the widow and Bianca. without giving away the ending here (though you can ask me :3), i felt that it was of the gentlest, most subtle ways of showing Petruchio's love for Kate. It also symbolized that Petruchio, by physically lowering himself to Katherine's level without having any monetary gain (as seems to motivate him), showed himself as being on the same level as Kate, physically or mentally or otherwise. But for a man to see a women as equal to himself was definitely rare in those times, and for Petruchio to do so after the rough taming of his falcon was even more startling for me. perhaps it was just a directing decision so as to somewhat lessen the brutality of the play's meaning since the epilogue scene is really not the most convincing nor thought-provoking of scenes but I felt that it really made sense.

it's a play good to watch if you've got the time and money. It's not the best play around in my opinion but it has its moments if I may quote dear Dr Saradetch and those moments justify the $20 spent if just for the rhetorical questions that are posed.

[end of literature bit]

OKAY!

Went to Subway with Dionysius, Thomas and YongZhi for midnight snack. Dionysius if you're reading this thank you for the lovely subway cookies x2 plus the drink! the talk in the train with you was awesome haha and i think it's a pity that we've only started talking recently. hope to have more conversations with you haha! =3

came back home, msned with some people for a while then crashed, happily.

woke up feeling like p diddy quite lethargic, feeling like there was a flu/fever coming on. plus the early morning smses in preparation for Edwin/Timo's birthdays didn't really help since I was being woken up every 15 minutes on average. crashed repeatedly till about 9 when I gave up. piano'ed and tv'ed my day away like the bum I am instead of studying. I am doomed.

i need to get my discipline for being punctual back again! for some reason, it's really done and gone these few months and I've been so uncharacteristically late for events that I'm actually getting worried. maybe it's a slippery slope, but if my paranoia about being punctual can be so 'subjugated' then what about the other not-so-paranoid paranoias...

As Angie would put it: Frightening.

good celebration is good. though the 2hour delay was kinda ridiculous but it all worked out well in the end so hurrah! BBQ chicken for dinner, cake at Gelare (Reminder:Nat owes me money) and then even lepak'ing at the grassy patch area with a guitar and songs.

ah, indulgent nights. indulgent days. indulgent weeks.
how many more do I have?
hopefully none
i need to start studying!

C'mon Lino, 加油！