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Training hard at home for the upcoming sport day in school :)

Certain Moments in Time

Whitney Houston (1963 - 2012)

Since everyone is doing a tribute to the passing of Whitney Houston, I might as well share out some random babbling of my own. This is by no mean an exhaustive retropective of Ms. Houston's career.

1. Whitney Houston has always been a Grammy darling. She had the look, the image, the voice and the pedigree (daughter of legendary gospel singer Cissy Houston and cousin to fellow Grammy winner Dionne Warwick). Her debut album was certified eight time platinmum already within one year of its release. The entire package just spells G-R-A-M-M-Y. So it was puzzling to say the least that she was not even nominated for Best New Artist in the 1986 Grammy Award, when she won the Best Pop Female Vocal Performance in the very same year. The official reason is, among other, this song
   
   
   
   From Jermaine Jackson's album Dynamite, Take Good Care Of My Heart featured Whitney Houston as one half the lead vocal. Because the album was released in 1984, it disqualified her from the 1986 Best New Artist category. This reason is of course unconvincing because Cyndi Lauper, who won the Best New Artist award the previous year, had released an entire album as the lead singer of the band Blue Angel herself as early as 1980.
   
   But it might just as well because the Grammy Best New Artist award has a reputation as being a "curse", particularly from the late 70s to mid 80s, since the winners during this period generally failed to duplicate their initial success and just simply faded away. Could it be that Clive Davis actively campaigned against his protégé being nominated for the award in order to protect his investment?



2. One of the most infamous incidences in French TV history
   
   In April of 1986, Whitney Houston, still relatively unknown in France, was invited to a live French variety show called Champs-Elysées through a connection her famous cousin Dionne Warwick has. Also invited that night was enfant terrible Serge Gainsbourg. The first meeting between the French legend and the American legend-to-be proved to be memorable in more ways than one. After host Michel Drucker introduced Whitney to the audience, he walked her over to sit next to Gainsbourg. The obviously under-the-influence Gainsbourg showered Houston with compliment before blurting out in English (with a thick French accent): I want to f**k her – on live TV. Add to the hilarity of the moment is Whitney’s shock reaction (Youtube doesn’t allow the video to be embedded but you can watch Serge Gainsbourg vs. Whitney Houston here)
   
   
   
   Michel Drucker tried desperately to abate the situation by explaining to Houston that Gainsbourg sometimes is a little bit drunk. At this stage of her career Whitney was still considered a class act and she managed to keep her composure and laughed off Gainsbourg’s unwanted advance but the debacle unexpectedly gave her an extra exposure in France. A French acquaintance once told me that most French people first came to know Whitney Houston only through this particular episode



3. MTV has become all the rage in music industry by the time Whitney released her debut album in 1985. Unfortunately cable TV has yet to arrive at Hong Kong and those music video starved had to settle with the cheesily made TVB got to offer, featuring the usual triple tricks of beach strolling, glass-crashing and dry ice overload. However, Whitney Houston was one of the very first artists who had music videos commercially released for sale. I remember spending over half an hour staring at the big screen TV of a relatively high-end audio visual shop in Sheung Wan just because it was playing Whitney Houston’s #1 Video Hits (repeatedly). Of the four music videos, How Will I Know easily the most vibrant and elaborate one, with a colourful set of maze built specifically for it.
   
   
   
   I particularly like how it choreographed the Decision of Flower verse (the If he loves me/if he loves me not… motif) with Whitney pushing through a set of doors to search for the boy she has a crush on. The best kind of music video should be those that present the music visually, rather than just a montage of images that come with a score





4. Like most people, growing up I only listen to those got played on the radio, those got pushed and promoted by record companies. None got more radio-friendly and pushed and promoted than Whitney Houston’s ballads, it is what made her a megastar. However, as you grow older and start to explore musically on your own, you can’t help but notice slickly produced and easy listening they undoubtedly are, they are also generic and characterless, meticulously calculated to mass appeal. They are good diversions as long as you don’t listen to them more than twice in a row.
   
   
   
   While Where Do Broken Hearts Go is no exception this song does mean a little extra special to me – I came to Boston in the late spring of 1988 and my life can be schizophrenically divided into pre-88 and post-88. Where Do Broken Hearts Go spent two weeks topping the Billboard 100 chart back in mid-May, 1988, the first when I was in Hong Kong and the second in Boston. So in a hyperbolical way the song has bridged the two sides of me.



5. With her faultless voice, Whitney Houston was considered somewhat beyond reproach in Hong Kong, at least in the 80s. However, critics in US were not as kind. The black audience in particular considered her music whitewashed and sellout for the sake of mass commercial success. It had reached the nadir when she was booed as Where Do Broken Hearts Go inexplicably received a Soul Train Music Award nomination. To answer her critics, Whitney Houston tried to introduce (not entirely successfully) a heavier R&B flavor in her next solo album I’m Your Baby Tonight. The title track presented her as a harder-edged queen of the nightclub:
   
   
   
   Dabbled in cross-dressing, Whitney paid homage to the decadent cabaret act of Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus:
   
   
   
   Donning beatnik black, Whitney channeled Audrey Hepburn's Parisian café dance in Funny Face (also the inspiration for a GAP commercial a few years ago):
   
   
   
   But best of all is the final mirror hall sequence:
   
   
   
   Whitney Houston was never known to be much of a dancer. I don't know how many takes she had to film the video. However, when she perform I'm Your Baby Tonight on Saturday Night Live upon the album release, she just simply stomped her feet during the same verse.
   



6. Whitney acquitted herself on the dance floor somewhat when I'm Your Baby Tonight became her eighth number one song in Billboard 100. She went one step further with her next uptempo single My Name Is Not Susan:
   
   
   
   Gone were those sequin dresses and classy silk stocking, Whitney slipped into a white overall and wore her cap backward. The song even included a rap segment (by someone else) to give her some extra street credential. What makes My Name Is Not Susan memorable to me is the ingenious idea to incorporate Hitchcock’s cult classic Vertigo into its video
   
   
   
   Unlike I'm Your Baby Tonight where it borrowed footage from old movies mostly for the "cool" factor, My Name Is Not Susan actually had a relevant story line. For those who are unfamiliar with vintage movies, Vertigo is about a man who tried to transform his new girlfriend into the exact same image of a deceased woman he has an unhealthy obsession with. This included having her wearing the exact same bouquet:
   
   
   
   Buying her the exact same dress:
   
   
   
   And ultimately dying her hair to the exact same shade of colour, the famous Hitchcockian blonde:
   
   
   
   It is a clever idea for a song about a man who dates a girl because she reminds him of his ex-girlfriend, Susan (It will be an even bigger statement had the photographer in the video been played by a white man, considered Whitney's career was carefully groomed by Clive Davis to maximize her cross-over appeal). The end result, nevertheless, is Whitney Houston's first ever solo single that didn't reach the top 10 in Billboard 100, not counting The Star Spangled Banner
   



7. The somewhat underperforming of her third album was quickly erased when she reverted back to her bread-and-butter with the power ballad I Will Always Love You. The success of The Bodyguard would keep Whitney Houston in the movie business for a while. However, it was not until her third movie did she break new ground musically. The remake of a 1947 Cary Grant vehicle, The Preacher’s Wife is about an angel who came to help a financially strapped bishop in building a new church, along the way provided guidance to his spiritual crisis…
   
   
   
   The story of The Preacher’s Wife is only a little old fashioned Christmas fairy-tale. Nevertheless, despite her background in church choir, Whitney Houston’s music has long been complained as soulless and the movie provided her the perfect opportunity to get back to her Gospel root. It features perhaps my favorite Whitney Houston song ever – Step by Step:
   
   
   
   To be precise, I should say Step by Step is my favorite song Whitney has recorded. Like her megahit I Will Always Love You, Step by Step is also a cover of a song that was written and recorded earlier by another female singer-songwriter. Released in 1992, the original is available only in the Japanese edition of Annie Lennox's debut solo album Diva:
   
   
   
   Both versions are very uplifting and soulful but Whitney did add an extra touch of Gospel to the song. In fact you can even distinctly catch Annie Lennox’s background vocal in her cover. I don't give much thought on religion but even I have to admit there is a certain spiritual cleansing listening to both of these songs. It is too bad Whitney in real life wasn't able to live out the lyrics of this song. Had she hold on to what she got what turned out today could be very different
   



8. After a decade spent mostly in movies and soundtracks, in 1998 Whitney Houston released My Love is Your Love, her first studio album in more than eight years.
   
   
   
   Although her addiction had yet to surface at this point her stormy marriage and Bobby Brown’s frequent brushes with the law had been the constant fodder for the tabloid. With songs like Heartbreak Hotel, It's Not Right But It's Okay and I Learned from the Best, My Love Is Your Love certainly played up to her wronged woman persona. Of the three my favourite is I Learned from the Best because it reminds me one of my all-time favourite movies – The Heiress
   
   
   
   The Heiress is about a plain and shy woman in 1800s New York rebelled against her emotionally abusive father to elope with the first young man who ever paid her any attention, only to be deserted when the young man found out her father had disinherited her. In one of the sweetest revenge scenes in movie, the harder and bitterer woman had alluded to giving the heartless mercenary a second chance now that her father has passed away. Upon finding out her true intention, her silly aunt implored to her conscience by asking if she could be so cruel. The woman cynically replied:
   
   Yes, I can be very cruel. I have been taught by masters
   
   
   
   The Heiress had won actress Olivia de Havilland her second Oscar and it is considered one of the most well deserved wins in Oscar history. The movie itself was based on a 1947 play that adapted from Henry James' Washington Square, which has enjoyed a Broadway revival in 1995. If they somehow decided to modernize the play to a musical and feature an all-black cast, I Learned from the Best can fit right in the revenge scene. Considered the time of the release and the similarity between the lyrics and the play, I can't help but wonder if The Heiress is the source of inspiration when Diane Warren penned I Learned from the Best
   
   My Love is Your Love has given Whitney the strongest critical review in her career by far. Although it took some times before the public was warm to the album (it was her only original album failed to crack the top ten in Billboard 200), its longevity eventually certified the album quadruple platinum and even outsold I’m Your Baby Tonight worldwide.
   
   Unfortunately that proved to be her last hurrah. Despite that she would go on to live for another thirteen years and release two more studio albums, her hard living had all but obliterated that angelic voice twenty years before. Her untimely death is a sad conclusion to a singer that had only been a shadow of her former self for more than a decade
   

三年

好容易才望到了再回來　算算已三年



左三年　右三年　這一生見面有幾天?



回程的行李尚在收拾中


先把思念寄回來

"C" You

Here is my shamelessly plagiaristic attempt to pay tribute to a computing technological visionary who recently passed away after a long battle with cancer. And I am NOT talking Steve Jobs.



Dennis Ritchie (1941 - 2011)

Dennis Ritchie, a true pioneer in modern computing, was found dead on Oct 12th in his New Jersey home at the age of 70. The exact date of death cannot be identified since Mr. Ritchie chose to live alone despite being in declining health in recent years due to prostate cancer. For most of the general public, his name is as alien as Martian. However, anyone self-respecting software developer will tell you that Mr. Ritchie’s contribution to the industry is as monolithic as Steve Jobs’, if not more.



As the chief designer of the C programming language in the late 60s, Dennis Ritchie brought to the world a more sophisticated tool to program a computer for hitherto computer software had been written primarily in assembly language or even machine code, a very low level and cryptic instruction set that are both labour-intensive to write and difficult to decipher. The C programming language, on the other hand, provides a (relatively) closer to human-language syntax and allows programmer to shift the focus from execution level to a more paradigm aspect of a design. The quantum leap of computing advancement the C language brought is comparable to the evolvement of written language from spoken dialog in the linguistic term, and it also paved the way for the more complicated programming languages that we use today.



Together with Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie also co-invented UNIX, the first computer operating system that won widespread acceptance. Today we are so used to having a platform like Windows or MacOS to run our software applications that we might not realize what a monumental concept an operating system was. Flashback forty years ago when dinosaur like mainframe was lauded as the most cutting-edge programmable machine, software programs were installed and run via punch cards since the machine was virtually devoid of an interface between end user and its system resource. Such cumbersome maneuver restricted the device to mainly engineers. The introduction of this intermediate layer between the machine and the user’s program made computer much more user-friendly. And because the UNIX Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson built was essentially free, it was easily obtainable and enhanced, indirectly led to the democratizing of computer from primarily corporate and government use to indispensible household appliance.

In all honesty, I can only be considered as a pseudo(哎呀)-techie at best. I reached the legal age for marriage before I first used a computer and my embarrassing discovery that there exists more than one language you can use to program a computer is material made for stand-up comedy. Naturally my experience with C was and is not smooth sailing (remember those dreadful pointer de-referencing?) and every software developer has horror stories to spare about UNIX’s segmentation fault and core dump. While these tools might seem primitive by today’s standard, you have to realize that they played a crucial role in the evolving of what we have taken for granted in computer technologies today. When you put them in this perspective you can’t help but marvel the ingenuity of their creators and what a vision they have.

While being greatly mourned within the industry, Dennis Ritchie’s passing was barely mentioned in the mainstream media and the public remains oblivious to his contribution to their lives. Given that UNIX is the very operating system Mac OS X inherited from and eventually went into various handheld gadgets Apple Inc. sold, the irony is not lost in the tech community when Steve Jobs' passing has been greeted with outpours of tributes but Dennis Ritchie’s is by and large ignored.



I am not born yesterday to not realize that in our society it is the kind of marketing geniuses like Steve Jobs who are celebrated over the nameless inventors like Dennis Ritchie, and I have no intention to discredit Steve Jobs’ achievement either, the world needs both kinds of people. However, as someone who makes a living (or should I say ‘steals’ a living) on the legacy Dennis Ritchie has left behind, I feel obligated to let the uninformed be aware that the lofty pedestal Steve Jobs has been put on, rests in no small part on the shoulder of Mr. Ritchie’s twin towers of invention

感覺完美九十天

Actually it was only 89 days to be exact but who is counting? For these I have my sister and brother-in-law to thank, a summer of truly perfect memory that would last a lifetime



Momentarily I have toyed with the idea of a quick trip to Hong Kong to see Sandy Lam in concert but, no offense, watching 林憶蓮 MMXI won't even come close to this and I don't want to miss one minute of it.



An angel sent from above


Do you know that when a cranky baby keeps pulling his ear it is likely because he is teething?


You can take me out of Japan but you can’t take the samurai out of me


有得玩水就最開心


I can swim too, I just need a little *push*


感覺多麼完美　都只因有著你

Meet Priscilla Chan

Not THAT Priscilla Chan

For 老餅 like me who grew up in Hong Kong during the 80s, there is no better way to pass your time by Googling the once superstars from yesteryears' Pearl of Orient. With the ongoing of Sandy Lam's concert, it is only logical for me to dig up the latest scoop on her one-time classmate/nemesis 陳慧嫻. I was expecting images of 傻女 or that lamp shade hat from 秋色 to pop up on my laptop but instead what showed up is none other than Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg along with some Asian girl. 陳慧嫻 might have seen better days but you would have thought she would still be the most famous Priscilla Chan out there.




Well but no but no. Turn out I am obviously a little behind in the dating gossips of Internet moguls. Hot in the news earlier this year was that online networking revolutionist Mark Zuckerberg had come clean with his relationship status when he flipped his own Facebook page to "In a Relationship" with a certain Priscilla Chan whom he has been seeing ever since they were students in Harvard. That shouldn't be of any interest to me if not for one minor detail - I happen to know someone named Priscilla Chan who went to Harvard during the early 2000s.

In truth, to say I know Mr. Zuckerberg's girlfriend (and rumoured fiancée) is a little stretching; we were more like acquaintances through the same part-time job we both had in late 2002 only and I don't expect she would even remember me at all. In fact, not until I saw the hometown and high school in her Facebook page was I certain that she is the person I once worked with.




When I was laid off from my software development job one month after Sept 11, 2001, as the story goes, I went into an extended period of unemployment. On the advice from career specialists, I took up a part-time job in a local office supply retailer, not so much for financial reason but just to keep my spirit up. It is the kind of work mostly for high school students looking for some extra spending money. Although it isn’t something I am keen on repeating again, I still believe it was the right move at the time.

So for the first time in over a decade, I had high school kids as my co-workers and the best part of it was most of them assumed I was their age when I was actually at least twelve years their senior. Among them was a high school senior working at the register named Priscilla Chan, whose name was naturally the first thing that caught my attention. I had once asked her and she freely admitted that she was aware there was a famous singer in Hong Kong who shared the same name but she was quick to point out that she was born a tad too early to be named after 陳慧嫻. Later on I found out she went to the same local high school where I spent one year in before heading to college. So she updated me that Mr. Harrington, the History teacher who had lobbied to take me out of ESL (English as Second Language) into his class, has since retired.

Priscilla lists Cantonese as one of the three languages she speaks in her Facebook page but in the six months or so we worked together I had never heard her speak Cantonese. However, in the couple occasions where a few Cantonese-speaking customers were visiting the store, I could tell she can comprehend their conversation since she figured out what they are looking for. So it could be just that she wasn’t comfortable enough to talk to native Cantonese speakers, just like how I feel about speaking English socially sometimes. Besides, Priscilla was genuinely an amiable person - one thing I remember the most is she always gave another girl in the store a ride home after work. For a long time I just assume they are close buddies from school. Turned out they were from different schools and only got to know each other through work. For those who have never live in North America, you may not realize how huge a favor it is for high school kids to be able to count on someone for a ride when most of them don’t own a car.

Asians in America tend to have the reputation to be the model students who all excel academically and aspire to be doctors or scientists. Priscilla certainly did not disappoint these expectations. With her potential it was only natural for her to be ambitious when it came to her college choices. She has confessed to be feeling guilty about applying close to ten universities at the time because it would cost quite a fortune (the application fee for most colleges is about US$ 70 these days). Having been in the same position before I divulged to Priscilla one of the best kept secrets in Boston - you are allowed to have up to four college application waivers per lifetime, made available to you by The Education Resources Institute (TERI) in the Johnson Building of Boston Public Library. Considering where she eventually went (and whom she had met there) maybe I could claim some credits here myself. That of course is all jest, Priscilla is gifted enough to reach the top without anyone's help, much less mine. In fact, if I am not mistaken she enrolled at Harvard through Early Decision, meaning application for most schools was still open when she was accepted. Chances are she might never need to use the waivers at all.

When the news that she got admitted to Harvard broke a mild buzz of excitement was brought to the otherwise uneventful life in the store. In April 2003, after being out of a full time job for almost a year and a half, I finally landed a real job and back in the high tech. industry. Promptly I quitted my part-time job and I think Priscilla did the same a month before me, probably to get ready for a new life after high school. In the following couple years I occasionally wonder if I would bump into her whenever I pass by Harvard campus on my way to the library but it never happened. As the time passed she kind of faded from my memory, until now. Ever since her relationship with Mark Zuckerberg had become public she had been hounded by photographers and the media but information on her is rather sketchy. Some said she is currently in medical school but other said she is a grade school science teacher. Regardless, I am sure Priscilla will shine in whatever career pursuit she is undertaking. Let’s hope a bright and challenging future lie ahead for her, both personally and with Mr. Zuckerberg.

地震

Earthquake shakes Boston

There is a first for everything I supposed but it only felt like a rocking boat, thankfully