Courtyard at the National Art Gallery

National Art Gallery is right in the middle of the Smithsonian jungle in DC - is nice and it's free. Even nicer are the two courtyards on both its ends (east and west). Of course while I loved seeing the Monet's and the Gauguin's (my favorite), the courtyards are what remain etched on my mind. First of all, it's quite unexpected. You keep walking from gallery room to gallery room and you spot what seems like an open space. You walk a little further into the open space - the courtyard expands, quietens you and soaks you in. The noise levels automatically subdue - it dins - and surprisingly the light seems equally responsible to suck up the noise as does the architecture. It's almost like something floating in the air catches every released word and immediately silences it.

On the distant left, I saw a beautiful lady in a yellow summer dress. She lay lazily with her legs crossed on the table - her eyes closed in contemplatation (she might have just been napping). I walked over to the other side for whatever reason and settled into one of the garden chairs. The center of the courtyard boasted a fountain magnificent in its simplicity. The fountain - a sculpture of two little boys playing with each other - let out water in a leisurely pace and not uniformly. Around the fountain were flowers in rich, bright colors - yellows, reds, pinks and deep violets with intermittent green from the leaves. Smells of the flowers tingled not just my nose but my mouth - I can somehow taste it in my mouth right now - I wonder why. A Chinese family - a senior couple and their girl - took photographs of each other in all possible combinations - dad-mom, dad-daughter, mom-daughter, dad-mom-daughter, dad, mom, and daughter. That was amusing. My eyes moved away from the trigger-jolly family to the ceiling; up above the circular breadth of the courtyard was white light. Sunlight seemed to force itself through the glass dome and engulf the whole courtyard with its radiance. The courtyard demanded the mind to stop thinking and empty itself completely. I liked it.

Adventures with the Mac

My first experiences with a computer were some 19 years ago -- it was a machine called Commodore 65 - back then I thought it was a good toy to play some frog-computer game. Later, I saw my cousin struggle with another one which came with a real magnetic tape that played on something that resembled a tape-recorder. Post all this, it was the PC and its umbical Windows. My affairs with the right-click ended this past weekend and I switched - with the same trepidations and stomach-flutter as with a blind-date - to the MacBook. Here are my 1-day impressions.

It's simply sexy - there's no other reasonable word for it. For example, I just clicked (apple-button and +) to increase the font of my whole screen - there's no right-click, display, change, flicker and all that. Coming back from the Apple retail store (which is an amazing experience by itself), I excitedly opened the classic looking box - clean and white. It had the MacBook in a cloth-bag, 2 boxes (one said, "Everything Mac" and the other "Everything Else"), a remote control (yes). I turned it on and it loaded itself, asked me to register...10 minutes I was set without having to load even one CD. One of most exciting nice-to-haves is when you try to plug in the power cord to the comp - it sucks it into it - you'll just have to try this one -- of course, it's nice to have! Every 20 min during the next few hours, I kept dragging my cousin to see one aha feature after another...how the windows rotate, the crisp color quality of the monitor, the inbuilt camera called iSight(!), playing photos with my remote, 4-way video chatting, intelligent email search, the way a window flies out of sight - some of the Vista features seem standard on this side...I could go on after I figure everything out. On the flip side, my 4th and 5th fingers are kinda aching because they can't find the right click (reminds me of VS Ramachandran's articles on the Phantom brain), my external hard-disk is not compatible with this, I can't find the home/ page-up on the email (most painful!), do an elaborate shift-apple-D instead of Alt-S on email and I still can't seamlessly slide to the left to shut things down than to the right or do an apple-Q or W instead simply Esc, I frantically search for a missing back-space...but I'll get through this - who said new relationships are easy? My IBM thinkpad - with the missing 4-button shamelessly showing me the metal underneath - looks on at me making a little refrigerator-like noise -- I love you too and thanks for the good times but I already tasted the forbidden apple.

Movie Review: Gwoemul (The Host)

I'm just back from Michigan Theater - my host to movies of many flavors and languages. The Host (Directed by Bong Joon-ho) is the second Korean movie I've ever watched. The first (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...And Spring) was brilliant and deep. The Host is a monster movie - and I don't know what to make of it. It's a little absurd - like when you eat something but aren't sure whether you liked it or not but are sure you'll remember it. For a long time I've romanticized with the cranky idea of making a movie that completely stumps everyone's logic by defying regular commonsense - just to annoy people - Gwoemul does that sometimes. For example, after the monumental effort to save the little kid from the monster - the kid dies. uh? I already broke the climax - you can read on if you want.

The movie starts in the right spirit - entertaining and mildly frightening - complete with slapstick laughs and edge-of-the-seat sounds and scenes. The story starts with an American military guy instructing a Korean assistant to dump formaldehyde into the Han river because the bottles storing the danger-liquid are dusty (by the way, the dumping is a real incident). Over the years, the formaldehyde causes an environmental hazard and somehow produces a deadly monster - that looks somewhat like a 20-foot slimy, dark gigantic fish with a mouth that loosely resembles a...um...female body part and it loves to swing like a professional gymnast on Seoul's various bridges. Absurd. Don't worry - read on - this movie is the highest grossing South Korean movie ever and has a A- rating from critics on Yahoo! Movies. In its grand entry, the monster kills aplenty and captures Hyun-seo - a 13-year old girl. This incident brings her family closer - a sleepy father with blond hair (Park Gang-du), an unkempt grandfather (Hee-bong), an aunt (Nam-joo) who's a national-level archer and an uncle (Nam-il) who's college-educated but mostly drunk. Of particular note is a melodramatic family grieving scene after they assume that the kid is dead - it's part funny (was it supposed to be?) and somehow very embarrassing (I don't know why). The rest of the movie is about how the monster supposedly infuses a deadly virus onto whomever it touched or spat on, how America's Agent Yellow (a virus combating chemical) is protested by Korean NGO groups, how we discover that the virus finally was all about propaganda, how the monster kills the grandfather, how the monster chews all flesh but spits out bones by dozens, how the monster gets burnt, how the kid gets killed, how Agent Yellow causes noses and ears to bleed and how the kid's friend gets rescued from the monster's esophagus and finally survives.

There are some cool scenes where the kid tries to escape while the monster snores - she sprints on top of the sleeping monster to jump up to a hanging escape but the monster quietly catches her with its tail and drops her to the ground. There are some really funny scenes. On a rainy night, a crowd (all with protective masks) at a bus stop listens to a radio/TV warning on the deadly virus and its symptoms of sneezing and wheezing. Suddenly one of them sneezes, takes his mask out and spits into puddle of water on the road scaring other bystanders - in the next instant, a bus speeds by - splashing virus-infected water on everybody. Some scenes are just expected - much like Bollywood movies. The revenge has to be taken by the father - and everyone has to contribute. So while the grandfather dies fighting the monster, while the drunk-uncle hires a guy to pour gasoline and while the archer-aunt fires off a burning arrow into its eye (bull's eye?) - it's the dad who opens the jaws of the monster to pull out the kids (literally) from its gooey insides and pierces a pole into it- twists and turns it until it dies - releases it a little slowly allowing the vibrating pole to finally stop. The camera then focuses on the round impression of the pole on Gang-du's hand. The movie ends with the Gang-du guarding a snowy Han river from possibly future monsters and eating dinner with his adopted son - the little friend of his daughter. This happens in the backdrop of an American news channel that shows a White House-type environment where someone mentions "misunderstanding" or some other word like it. Ahem.