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potteresque-ire · 6 months

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Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, in a 1993 Hong Kong charity variety show in which he had to sing while drinking a lot of beer. He kept saying, I'm full, I feel quite full in the end. Best actors all started from somewhere, and that somewhere is often idolhood — "traffic stardom", as they call it these days — and situations associated with the role that are at times awkward, uncomfortable, disrespectful. Tony was among the first stars I got to know as a child, and matinee idol Tony remains as much my impression of Tony as the Tony who sweeps up international acting awards.

And why shouldn't it be like that? He's the same person.

The Tony in the clip, at age 31, was between the two Tony's, having left the television station that had given him his idol status and already starred in several critically acclaimed roles, but had yet to win his first best actor award (which would happen the following year, with Wong Kar-Wai's ChungKing Express), or fully left his traffic star image behind.

He was in his so-called "transition period", much like Gg and Dd are.

The difference between traffic star Tony and acting god Tony is time and experience; people in the industry who recognise his talents and offer him opportunities, audience members who give him room to grow.

Idols, traffic stars have always had the potential to become great actors. Those who refuse to see the possibility ... they hardly matter, do they? Because Tony is already a living proof of that.

#Youtube

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potteresque-ire · 6 months

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Happy birthday to the most perfect character in the world Wei Wuxian ♥️👏🎊

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potteresque-ire · 7 months

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The most beautiful thing for me in this pair of photos ~ and its sweetest thing ~ is that the two photos actually complement each other in more ways than one. If one zooms into Gg's photo, one can see the moon wasn't full ... when a full moon is a must on the Mid-Autumn Festival, which falls on the 15th of the Lunar Calendar.

The simplest interpretation of this is that Gg didn't use a fresh photo. For those who enjoy a more lyrical take on things though, I think much more can be read in between the lines. You see, not posting a full moon on Mid-Autumn is a bit of an ... anomaly. Not only because there must be a full moon on this day, but also because of what the roundness of Mid-Autumn's full moon has traditionally meant.

Using roundness to symbolise infinity, to describe being whole and by extension, of being together is an old Chinese custom; a common well-wish of Mid-Autumn Festival is, therefore, 人月倆團圓 ~ the people 人 and the moon 月 both 倆 reunited / complete 團圓. The 圓 in 團圓 is the character meaning roundness, a circle, while 團 carries meanings including a ball, a group ... something held together in a tight circle.

Mid-Autumn festival is therefore a day to celebrate not only the harvest, but also, togetherness. It is, by extension, also a day to miss the loved ones, the significant others not by one's side, the day when wandering scholars and poets of the ancient times looked to the full moon and wrote about their home town, their family and people they had left behind (I talked about how important the concept of home in traditional Chinese beliefs in my analysis for Dd's song, Like the Sunlight.) The imagery of the full moon is therefore very significant for Mid-Autumn Festival, and to suggest that the moon isn't full on this day carries the symbolic meaning that the completeness, the togetherness isn't there for the person paying attention to, mentioning the not-full moon.

Together with the sunset as the background, Gg's photo brought a feeling of sadness to me for this reason. And this is what makes the photo an anomaly, because as a Chinese celebrity, Gg is expected to offer messages of positivity on this day. This sadness isn't the brawling, tears running down the face kind; rather, it's a touch of sorrow, faint, perhaps, but heart-felt. A light sigh that things are not as perfect as they could have been. Looking closely at the photo, one can also tell that the photo was taken behind a piece of glass; a car window, perhaps. Gg might have been on his way to work, watching the sunset and the rising moon and thinking of, missing a someone who completes him, who should be together with him.

Hence, the use of this photo for Mid-Autumn Festival. 明月相思千里隔。Missing each other through a thousand miles under the bright moon. — 賀鑄 Zhu He (1052-1125)

In comes Dd with his photo then, posted 20 minutes later ~ his photo, with the moon bright and direct, almost like a sun at night. Despite the black background that had neither the hues nor the beauty of Gg's sunset, there is a cheeriness to this moon, a "look at me, look at my light!" quality to it.

But the most interesting thing about the photo is, of course, this: not only is there a full, round, perfect moon ... there is also an extra moon, the result of the photo being also taken behind a piece of glass and the reflection the moon generated. This extra moon is not quite as round though, not quite as full, because of the angle of the shot.

It seems to, too, need a little something to be round, to be complete.

Viewed alone, Dd's photo is also an anomaly, a curious choice for Mid-Autumn Festival ~ the moon is the main character of the day, but this photo isn't a particularly artistic, or good-looking take of this main character (Sorry Dd). And why use a photo with such a glaring artefact (the reflection)? Why not use a photo without the extra moon?

Viewed side by side with Gg's photo though, the purpose of the extra moon suddenly becomes much easier to imagine, doesn't it? Gg's photo has a missing chunk of moon and Dd's photo is like... here, I have an extra moon for you. It'll fill out that missing chunk of your moon and by doing so, your moon is full and complete (and so is mine).

There is something very Dd about this photo to me. It's very direct and unpretentious, despite taken with a very high resolution (expensive) camera (not cell phone; according to c-turtles). While the style of Gg's photo is professional and artistic, the style of Dd's photo has an almost childlike quality to it ... a parallel I immediately thought of is, you know when an adult gets hurt, a child runs to them with a bandaid and sticks it on the adult, convinced that the bandaid will heal whatever wound there is? That's how Dd's photo felt to me; not that Dd is a child, but there's a similar, pure conviction behind his photo. And to those who've received such bandaids, these bandaids do often have healing powers, don't you think? Not because the plastic or dressing are magical in any way, but because of the belief in the children who offer them, their hearts that simply and forcefully, almost, want good things to happen.

I stared at the pair of photos for a long while after they were posted and I was, honestly, a little dumbstruck, a little touched. The posts were plain, but they continued the ancient lyrical tradition, the rich symbolism of the festival using a not-exactly-sophisticated social media platform and simple technology. The posts were also very contemporary, very individual; I can't imagine Gg posting Dd's photo or Dd posting Gg's photo. Two photos with a style like Gg's, even with an identical composition as the pair posted, wouldn't have had the same effect on me; likewise, two photos with a style like Dd's wouldn't have had the same power.

The photos, the posters, complement each other in more ways than one. Poem after poem exist about the moon and its meanings on this night and I thought, here's a new one, a visual one. But the wish in it is the same, and so, so old: 人月倆團圓. Those who wish it deserved, and deserve to have their wish fulfilled. They deserve it so much.

明月依舊何來悵惘? The moon is still shining brightly as always, wherefore so forlorn?

Happy (Belated) Mid-Autumn Festival, everyone! (August 16th is known as 追月, or Chasing the Moon, and so, this isn't too late!! ❤️💛💚)

I’M SCREAMING!!!! HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! My boys are matching lol. I was surprised when weibo alerted that WYB posted. Happy Mid Autumn Festival to you two ✌🏼

I wanna take a picture of the moon for you 🌙

#pie metas

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potteresque-ire · 10 months

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Ooooooooh ..... (Under the cut: Video analysis by one Hong Konger who lived in the city during the era referenced by the video)

The first 30 sec with the rock song is very (very) likely a reference of, and tribute to, Hong Kong Jiang Hu films, the street gangsters 古惑仔 with a heart of gold that they feature, which I talked about yesterday (Link). The music aside, the typography choice, exemplified by the characters 香港 Hong Kong at 1:05, is also very "street", commonly seen during the 1980s-90s in the older districts like Mong Kok 旺角 where street gangsters gathered and many of the Jiang Hu films took place. Similar fonts was often featured on the city's famous neon lights:

Neon lights in Mong Kok, Hong Kong, pre-2000. Similar fonts can be seen on, for example, the sign with yellow background on the right and the sign with the red words and green edge on the left. Places that called themselves nightclubs, karaokes, and saunas often offered sexual services, and were frequented by the street gangsters. Mahjong houses were for gambling.

Gg, of course, didn't forget to switch to traditional Chinese used in Hong Kong from simplified Chinese used in mainland, starting with his own name (肖戰 — Traditional; 肖战 — Simplified). (There had been confusion before of how exactly Gg would write his surname, which was one of the few "double simplified" characters found in Chinese surnames, in traditional Chinese. The possibilities were 肖 or 蕭. Confusion solved! :) )

One thing that was, perhaps, already really obvious in the photo above is that Hong Kong had / has severe light pollution (and this Hong Konger here loves it this way :) ). Street lamps in Hong Kong during the 1980s-90s was quite yellow; the multiple light sources (from street lamps, the crowded shop fronts and neon lights) meant that people there basically lived in a glowing kaleidoscope. Everyone and everything were lit by a complex juxtaposition of different colors of different intensities and warmth, and sculpted by the many shadows they made. This creates an aesthetics that many has come to associate with the city, which Chinese netizens calls 港風, short for Hong Kong style.

This video of Gg is a demonstration of the 港風 aesthetics. It carries a noticeable yellow tint, reminiscent of the street lights when such aesthetics was developed (1980s-90s), and while lights were heavily featured, so was darkness — it was dimmer and more shadowy than most of his other videos. One of my favourite frames is the street view from the taxi (1:15), which showcased the city's perennial light show feel. That the quality of this video was less crisp than other GG videos also appropriately added years to the video's appearance, and the round lights at the Cultural Center (the pink bricked building where Gg was walking around), one of the city's landmark that opened in 1989, further hinted at the age of the aesthetics.

Hong Kong Cultural Center in daylight. Prince Charles, now King Charles III, cut its ribbon. The next 30 sec of the video is a clear reference to the director Wong Kar-Wai 王家衛. The BGM, Always in My Heart by the cuban guitar duo Los Indios Tabajaras, was famously used in one of the later scenes of Wong’s Days of Being Wild 阿飛正傳. 阿飛, by the way, literally Ah Fly, is an older Cantonese slang that meant bad boys — a term that, to me, connects the two halves of Gg’s video to each other.

The Ah Flies, the older generation of bad boys, might or might not have been gangsters; they were generally young men who were very fashion-forward, who mostly loitered on the streets doing little or no proper work, and spent their time wooing the pretty girls passing by.

You can hear the same BGM in the following clip from Days of Being Wild (start 4:32). How iconic has this music become? When I heard it just now while watching Gg's video, I immediately saw palm trees in my mind:

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A trivia, perhaps, for those who are interested: while especially Westerners associate Wong Kar-Wai with Hong Kong, the arthouse films that have made Wong famous worldwide were actually far from popular in the city before the millennium. Days of Being Wild (1991), despite starring the most talked about young actors and actresses of the time, was a well-known box office flop, making < 25% of its HKD 40 million investment. For more than 2 decades, Wong's work with the highest box office remained to be As Tears Go By 旺角卡門, his directorial debut and more importantly, a Jiang Hu film with some rather famous friend-hacking scenes.

In the eyes of many locals of the time, Wong was the city's ... foreign movie awards bait, plus the butt of many jokes surrounding the pair of sunglasses he never took off.

Quality "friend-hacking" in As Tears Go By. This movie has supplied memes that continues to be in use today, the most famous being a shot of Jacky (in the background) spitting out "Eat shit, you!", which isn't very art-house Wong Kar-Wai at all.

Anyway, where was I? Right ... let's wrap this little essay up. There were two Cantonese sayings in Gg's video:

唔係生活有無意思，係你熱愛生活，才有意思。（0:49） It's not if life has meaning or not. It's you loving life, and that has meaning.

I've got to say, this line ... doesn't feel to me as Hong Kong of the 80s and 90s as the rest of the video; and I can't remember it as a reference to any famous quotes of the time (I may be wrong). On its own, it's to me a little too properly inspirational, perhaps a little more China now than Hong Kong then :) . The sentence structure also deviated from the spoken Cantonese used in the city. Hong Kong Cantonese is very slang-ish and has its own phrasings, and 才有意思 is more written than spoken Chinese. (先有意思 would've sounded smoother to my ears). I wonder if it was dubbed by someone from Guangzhou.

And finally:

月亮，係獨一無二。你都係。（0:10） The moon, is one and only. You are too.

Probably some of you have read about this in turtle talk already, with its reference to the moon that is such a common theme in turtlelore. For those who'd like an extra piece of candy for dessert, I hereby point to the mention of "one and only" :) . While full accuracy of translations between Chinese and English is often not achievable, I stand behind my choice behind this particular translation, with 獨一無二 literally meaning Alone One No Two.

If that doesn't translate to One and Only, then what does? ❤️💚

GG HK Vlog

#pie metas

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potteresque-ire · 10 months

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I should include a translation for the sake of completion. I was watching the concert and felt like throwing a line of Cantonese on here :). (Under the cut: with sincere apologies to Alexander McQueen 😛)

What I wrote was: One is dapper. The other is like a 1990s street gangster who came over after a knife fight. The dapper part doesn't require much explanation:

As for the second part, here’s the thing ... it may be my overactive imagination at work, but I also think there's a chance that Gg's choice of attire was a subtle tribute to the golden age of Hong Kong entertainment (1980s-90s), many of the songs of which were celebrated in the concert. Since the golden age was during the city’s colonial era, there was almost no censorship in the industry. Among the popular genres was the “Jiang Hu Films” -- films that told stories of gangsters with a heart of gold. This has a lot to do with the heavy involvement of mafia in film production at the time and their desire to glorify themselves, to compare themselves to the heroes of Wuxia novels. Street gangsters were also known to be faithful audiences of these films that depicted their lifestyles, making time between their late night activities to attend midnight showings and promptly cutting the theatre chairs with penknives if they didn’t like what they see.

How people called the hooligans on screen depended on the years. In mid-1990s though, the common nomenclature became 古惑仔, literally, cunning kid, from a wildly successful film series of the same name, that was in turn based on the popular local manga series. That was how I described Gg this morning. Like a cunning kid 古惑仔 from the 1990s. You see, ... I don't know fashion at all, and my first reaction of Gg's photos taken at the Cultural Center was not Alexander McQueen!! But ... Oh dear GG is covered with blood!! (Sorry Mr McQueen)

Guns are banned in the city, and so wounds on street gangsters are usually the result from weapons such as cleavers and machetes -- no bullet wounds. Blood seeps from the shallower skin openings from the blades, and the dye pattern on Gg's clothes very much reminds me of the many fighting (and injury-nursing) scenes in HK Jiang Hu films, especially under the yellow streetlight and with the red taxi flying by in the background. Locals call the act of street gangsters going out to fight, to attempt to kill each other using sharp, non-ammunition-based weaponry 劈友 To hack friends -- hence, that's what I said I thought Gg had gone off and done before the concert. :D (I don't know why the object of the hacking was friend. Hong Kong gangsters may be an exceptionally friendly bunch.)

But but but ... many of you may say now, gangsters are so much against core socialist values! Does Gg even know about the Cunning Kid, 古惑仔? (The official name of the film and its sequels is Young and Dangerous)

Oh, of course he does! And this time, I have proof. Here's Gg in a performance of the theme song of the second 古惑仔 movie, 亂世巨星, while he was still active in XNINE:

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I've got to say, the group dressed more like property agents than Cunning Kids here, but you get the idea 😊.

The manga series of Cunning Kids was popular enough in China that when it finally ended its run in 2020 (it started in 1992), some Chinese media reported on it. They neglected to mention the fact that the manga had touched on Hong Kong's democracy movement, of course, but the popularity of the manga among Chinese youths at the turn of the millennia was recognised. If Gg's suit today is an intentional tribute, then I hope to take this opportunity to thank him and his team for the thought. Like them or not, Jiang Hu films are part of HK's entertainment tradition, and in an event like today's (a state-sponsored, funded handover celebration in disguise), often, what is truly Hong Kong is swept under the carpet, distorted and / or forgotten. Far more Hong Kong than all the propaganda talks about the Bay Area (starting with ... the city isn't in an actual bay area) is a legend, perhaps, of a cunning kid loitering on the streets of Tsim Sha Tsui in the depth of the night, wearing his wounds and his blood, the latter mingled with the blood of his fallen colleagues, like a badge of honor. (The long hair really completes the look too. The main character of Young and Dangerous famously wore long-ish hair, and made the style his signature look).

一個官仔骨骨，一個好似九十年代古惑仔劈完友過嚟咁。❤️💚

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potteresque-ire · 10 months

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Below is a more literal translation of the lyrics that can hopefully capture a little of the song’s atmosphere. Just to add to the wtf, in this translation, the song’s title becomes To Walk Once with Abandoned Grace 😊. 天地悠悠　過客匆匆　潮起又潮落 Wide is the heaven and earth; hurried are the passing travellers. Tides rise and fall once more.

恩恩怨怨　生死白頭　幾人能看透 Gratitudes and grudges; life, death and old age, How many people can look past them?

紅塵啊滾滾　痴痴啊情深　聚散終有時 Rolling is the red dust **, Infatuated is the deep love, Meeting and parting inevitably have their hours. 留一半清醒　留一半醉　至少夢裡有你追隨 Stay half sober and half inebriated. At least, in dreams, there’s you as my follower. 我拿青春賭明天　你用真情換此生 I’m taking my youth to gamble for a tomorrow. You’re trading your sincere love ** for a life lived. 歲月不知人間　多少的憂傷　何不瀟灑走一回 The years know not much of mankind’s sorrows. Why not walk them once with abandoned grace? ** 紅塵 Red dust is a traditional, poetic term to describe the non-spiritual, materialistic aspects of the human world. Lan Wanji’s sword Bichen 避塵 -- “To avoid the Red Dust”, is named after it. ** 真情, literally translated as real love, consists of the heart-felt feelings and sentiments without concealment and, above all, without deception. Many turtles probably know this phrase already, from 真情實感 (zqsg) ~ "Real Love and Solid Emotions”.

OK wtf is this song called? 😅 Everyone seems to be calling it something different:

Walking in Style

Run Without Care

Walk Without Care

Walk Gracefully Once

Live As You Wish

Walk With Grace

Let's Go Back

Let's Go For a While

Chic Walk

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potteresque-ire · 10 months