Mary Stephen blog of casual writings : 1 place 1 story: TIMBUKTU, MALI

25 RANDOM THINGS ABOUT ME

(Facebook Notes Game as published Feb 6, 2009)

1. After a long intense period of work, like a film shoot, a film edit, and like now, a no-day-no-night-no-sleep-no-wake non-stop preparation and rewriting and readjusting and rethinking of a proposal for funding applications, i would relax either by a) cooking up a storm for the crew and cast, b) isolating myself with a long hot bath and a good book, preferably by virginia woolf, or c) now that i've been tagged by new virtual friends in FB to mumble things about myself... hey, why not, it's very relaxing to write this facing a screen isolated with just Bonnie Raitt belting out "Feeling of Falling"...

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2. First year of True Light Middle School, Tai Hang Road, Hong Kong, i was called into the headmistress' office, facing very powerful honchos (in our opinion anyway, in those days) in the system, who smiled forced artificial smiles and tried to tell me the reasons why they were dissuading me from my idea of getting enough monthly contributors from our schoolmates, to adopt a Vietnamese war orphan by sending money every month, after having been moved and fired-up by an article I read in Newsweek or Reader's Digest or some such thing, of an appeal by Pearl S. Buck.

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3. Other honchos... the Big Sisters of the church I adhered to, shortly after being moved and fired-up as above-mentioned, and taken in hand by super wonderful sincere Big Sisters of faith, going to a small (modern) worship place every weekend, singing and praying in great harmony and warmth. Until one day, they also summoned me outside of my classroom, and smiled sincere regretful smiles, and told me the reasons why I was leading astray my sisters by singing and laughing and joking and generally sharing too much harmony and warmth with a musical boy in the worship place. Big moment of déclic/understanding why human beings are not worthy of the faith betrusted to them by the One above.

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4. More religious stories? On the plane, at 15, from Hong Kong to Vancouver, emigration, turning a page forever (but not knowing that yet !) , sis (the real one) and I sit next to 2 handsome yummy guys laughing and joking generally being warm and harmonious to these 2 skinny kids from HK, until they show us their photo albums "of our work and our colleagues"... they looked different in the photos with priests' collars !

5. à la Germaine: first memory of first winter in Montreal. Walking, or rather, sliding, on McGregor Avenue (now called... ). Mont Royal a winter wonderland of white, trees are hung with magic crystals, clink clink in the wind, absolute moment of harmony and vertige so beautiful and powerful the images and sounds were. Especially walking with someone special.

6. Refusal to go back to class after being parachuted in the last grade of high school in this exclusive girls' private school on a certain snow-covered avenue near Mont Royal.... when some girl in the tightly-knit clique of a class let slip her bible to fall on my head: "whoops" said she. Culture shock. Déclic that there are no "whoops" in life - you let slip something in your hand or from your mouth because you WANT to. Plain stopped going back to class, until...?? On returning, the class had had a briefing session with headmistress, i think, because they then patronizingly ordained me "gym captain" , nice thing to do for this new girl : the skinny awkward thing from HK who couldn't put 2 feet together to run, let alone do gym.

7. Wimbledon match between Vitas Gerulaitus and Bjorn Börg... pure visual ecstasy- blond locks flying for one, cool block of ice for the other. (those were days when it was still politically ok to like blond guys)... by the way, didn't even know that Gerulaitus died in a mono-biocide accident at age 40, until now (looking his name up for spelling).

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8. A road in the French countryside. Complete darkness. My companion, a long-locked (chestnut color) young man, almost a child, but also sometimes almost a demi-god, tore through the night in a citroen 2-chevaux : us in full garb for a very chic very bohemian snob Parisian country wedding with the fashion crowd... how he managed to make the thing feel like a Porsche is still beyond me... but as hair was flying out the half-paned window, and as "scared" was no longer the appropriate word, and as it was a touching moment of the boy asserting perfect control of being a man, it was a pure moment of joy.

9. Knocking on the door of, or hearing the knock on my door, at 5 a.m., in our isolated wing of the only clean "hotel" in Timbuktu, Mali, another long-locked (blond this one) guy and I have this weird obsession of going out to the dunes to watch the sunrise. Every morning. Complete silence. A little bit of wind. Us not really talking. Him with multi cameras taking photos. Me with my first DV camera filming him taking photos. Pure moment of uncomplicated “sharedness”.

10. Hong Kong. Conference in Cantonese about the French New Wave. I divulged the story given to me the night before leaving, having collected these info in-extremis for the talk, of how Godard jump-cut in "Breathless" because he filmed the characters passing in front of windows and part of the shot became unusable visually. "just cut those parts out", said he to the editor. At 11 pm at night, in my hotel room in HK, a student who was in the audience called and told me I had crushed her illusions. She had thought that the Maître had had long painstaking thinking sessions about his masterpiece and that every single shot including the jumping ones would have been the results of careful artistic masterly vision.

well, random... we're playing random here. Random is the word. Was then too.

11. In our backyard in the house on Tai Hang Road, way before all the high-rises, there was a part that was wild and overgrown. There were wild papaya trees. Wild Papaya Trees !!!!!!

I'd give anything to look and touch that wild garden again at 10, Tai Hang Road, Hong Kong Island.

12. On those post-typhoon rainy afternoons, we made boats out of quarters of orange peels, stuck some toothpicks on them for imaginary sails, and set them free in the overflowing gutters on the wide wide terrace.

13. On this same wide wide terrace, we sat out after dinner and watched the clouds, telling imaginary stories of the imaginary characters and animals from the shape of these clouds.

14. Eric R. told me that the clouds overhead in Paris are called "Ile de France" clouds because nowhere else are clouds of this colour, shape or lightness. Those over-the-Tai-Hang-Road-terrace clouds would be called "Causeway Bay clouds"? Nowhere on this earth or the next are there clouds of that colour, lightness, beauty, and purity.

15. "I have seen that the full moon has the same sheen in Paris and Istanbul: the rabbit and the lonely Chinese lady of legend don’t care if the moon is French or Turkish or even Kurdish." (from the Reel Asian anthology 2007)

16. Julien age 7? 8? at the breakfast table, after having fallen asleep on the program "Nouvelle Vague" on TV the night before.... "mom, who do you think is the better film director : Visconti, or Godard?"

17. Julie clenches her hands into little fists and positions them on each side of her head when she slept as a baby. I used to bathe her in the same tub as me when I indulge in my fetiche of a daily hot bath. I looked at her little backside one day as she splashed around in the water and thought to myself, "this is what some boy will swoon for, someday."

18. Jo slept in my arms one afternoon, about a few months old, the mediterranean light fell on his face, I held him and walked from the kitchen to the terrace, and on the way, thought to myself, "we're now locked in our mutual need for each other."

19. The ferry ride between Hong Kong and Kowloon... never tire of it, day, night, rain, sun...

20. most spectacularly beautiful landing by plane: over Table Mountain into Cape Town.

21. Sunset reflected in the side mirrors of the car, behind us, as the car glides between Cape Town and Stellenbosch, between someone's memory and another's imagination, pure moment of emotion. As the radio hums peggy lee's fever.

22. Another car. Another glide. A gleaming Rolls gliding down the corniche over the bay of Cannes... "why do these ladies all want to get married to me? that's what i wanted to ask her, we're not good like this?" later, same car, another glide, through the night in London, between the casino and the club. Pure enjoyment of the quiet moment, with the gentleman of 85, who knows what it means to purely enjoy a quiet happy golden moment.

23. Another car. Another glide. Air-conditioned Mercedes glided between Jardines Lookout with the city of Hong Kong below all spread out, towards Tai Hang Road.... a silent bird-like glide, this time definitely over clouds made of cotton and memories... a magical sadness.

24. Another car. Another glide.

FB entry:

"Edit

Mary is whishing down a misty deserted expressway in China at 2 am touched by youthful ideals and pleas and vows of indie artists after 3 consecutive 3-hour nights. 8:12am - Comment

Kwoi Kwoi at 8:23am December 28

is dat possible...a deserted xpressway in China? r u in Mongolia?"

25. A caravan story to end all car stories. Lost and stranded for the night in a place you can't even call a village, somewhere between Mopti and TImbuktu. Exchange of stories between the sand-dunes' inhabitants (the women) and me... she shows me a picture of her "man" with a gesture of her hand, I understand she's telling me her man's gone off to work in the city, her mates- the other "girls" gather round and point to the golden-locked guy in our caravan now being pampered and fanned as a precious guest on the other side of the hameau, then they point to me and round up the thumb and the index finger to make a hole, with the index of the other hand they make it go in and out of the "hole", asking thus their question about whether this is what Monsieur goldilocks and Madame weird-black-hair-they've-never-seen do every night in the caravan truck. (maybe they didn't see the other 6 team members in the same truck. or maybe they think we have special silent ways.)