This blog revisits an old post on my defunct myspace blog. So much in my life has changed since writing that entry two years ago. SOMArts has gone through so many transformations since the death of Jack Davis and is only now finally returning to stability under the guidance of my homegirl Lex Leifheit.
One thing that hasn’t changed since that night in November 2007 has been my fascination and awe at the first two and a half minutes of Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Millenium Mambo. Tonight, hitting shuffle on my itunes brought me to Lim Giong’s A Pure Person and all of my love for the song and Millenium Mambo came flooding back to me. I immediately looked up my old writing on the movie and was shocked to discover that it had been written all the way back in 2007. I summed up my feelings on the song and film that night in the excerpt below:
A Pure Person has been stuck in my mind since I first saw Millennium Mambo as a starving student at Calarts. The visuals of actress Shu Qi propelling herself through that urban passageway combined with the song’s sentimental beat made me obsessed with every detail of it. Without being too pretentious, this opening sums up so much of my life as a 19 and 20 year old. It represents everything that was beautiful and energetic about being young and living in the Mission District. The corridor that Shu Qi walks through in Keelung, Taiwan could have easily been the 24th street BART station to me.
Here are the fleeting two and a half minutes that have moved and inspired me so. I was 21 years old when the film was released and for me, even though it moves in slow motion, no other sequence in film has best captured the energy and spirit of youth than this excerpt of Millenium Mambo.
In my explorations of flickr I have been amazed to see that photographers have voyaged to this passageway and shot pictures of it. My two favorite are below:
If I have ever had one unfulfilled desire as an artist it would be to reimagine this sequence with a Latina in the Mission District. I’ve set it as a goal to complete before I die. If anyone reading this is interested in performing or collaborating with me to make this a reality please let me know.
Peace,
Rio
Graphic Art, Tortillas, Comics, and Troublemaking 