Sykes Hot Spring

Rob told me long time ago there was a hot spring in Big Sur and you got to hike 10 miles up and down to get to it. At Lost Coast, both Dawn and he started to rave on it again on the trail and Diego took his note and decided to plan a birthday trip for me. He knows how much I love backpacking, and surely enough, he got more excited than I was before we took off on a weekend in late August.

Our series of accidents started on the very first night. At the campground Pfeiffer, we realized the tent was not ours and the poles did not seem to match. We thought our friend Mani could have mixed things up since he borrowed it a few weeks ago. But luckily Diego figured out how to set them up before we turned back to Carmel. Anyway, the campground seemed so civilized and well-equipped that we could not wait to get out. Once we hit the road the next morning, as the trail took the first steep climb and started to extend further into the woods, we quickly felt that we were finally in the wildness.

But the trail turned out to be a long and disappointing one. It went up and down with mostly gentle slopes for seven miles before a small branch led to our camp site. The view was not as spectacular as what I expected, and bugs tended to follow whenever we made a stop. But Terrace campsite was quite a good choice. It was nicely shaded next to a beautiful stream and the water was just warm enough for us to take a few skinny dips.

We set up our tent and went on to the Sykes. Thanks to lack of information, we could not figure out the exact location of the hot springs even after we got to the campsite. Diego suggested we climb further up but after half an hour so we seemed to get further and further away from the waters. We turned back and started to explore the downstream. As soon as we started to see the trail marks (piles of stones), we decided we must be heading to the right direction. After a few more turns and climbs up the cliffs above the stream, we finally saw a pool under a rock beside which some rubber pipes were gushing out hot water. It was a tiny pool, and it could barely fit two of us. That was it?

But it all seemed to worth the efforts after we relaxed in the pools and took turns to cool down in the creek. There was a second and slightly larger pool above the rock but we were so thankful that we got this one instead. For an hour it was just two of us, and the sound of woods and water was soothing and mesmerizing. We did not leave until it was getting late and more people started to show up and want to use the pool.

We slept soundly and went down the next day. This time Diego got his ankle all damaged and had a really hard time walking downhill. But it still took only 4 hours to get out. After all, this was not such a hard backpacking trip, and I am eagerly waiting for the season to start again next year!

Three Road Films

I have a preference for road films. My wanderlust can’t be satisfied by this busy work schedule, and films are the best places for me to escape to, if and only if just for those short two hours. I came across three wonderful but obscure road films this summer. It is a shame that they got so little media coverage, even if all of them were directed by renowned directors.

In July is Fatih Akin’s second feature after the success of his debut Kurz und Schemerzlos. He took a break and made this light-hearted romantic comedy before he went on to direct Head On, which won the Berlin Golden bear and was much darker and intense. The story follows a Hamburg teacher (handsome Moritz Bleibtreu) who falls in love with a Turkish beauty and decides to travel to Turkey by all kinds of transportation means, all in company of another girl Juli who tries to win his heart back. It is a well-worn genre with plenty of witty and humorous moments. It shows If you follow your heart, there will be great adventures waiting for you (beware of sexy East European temptress, corrupted customer officer, car theft etc etc).

Michael Winterbottom always has a political edge. After 24 hour Party people he took the project on smuggling of illegal immigrants. He and his production team chose two refugees from an Afghanistan camp in Pakistan and followed them through Iran, Turkey, Italy, France and finally to UK, often improvising the stories on the road. The end film is called "In This World". The central character, a charming and street-smart teenage kid named Jarmal, was a natural actor who brought the film to life. It was mostly shot by handheld camera, with plenty of jerky movements and occasional grainy shot, and it let us witness the entire smuggling itinerary, from bleak deserts to snow-capped mountains to containers and tunnels, from one language to another, from middle-east to west. The movies call on our sympathy of the illegal immigrants, of the great dangers they endured to look for a better life, and on thinking of the root causes of these human tragedies.

I cried a bucket load when I saw Humberto Solas’ Miel Para Oshun (Honey for Oshun). It was an equally sentimental journey for me since many of the scenes and plots reminded me of my own trip in Cuba. Solas created a melodrama in a documentary style, following an embittered Cuban exile returning to his island and looking for his own mother. Wounded and scarred in life, all these characters slowly discovered their common bond and shared identity in this incredible journey. I never heard about Solas before, but he has been a pivotal figure in the Latin cinema who experimented relentlessly over 50 years. In line with all other Latin American intellectuals, his works explored the Latin American identity and social justices with potent political messages. Honey for Oshun delivered such an emotional but optimistic redemption to the victims of history. It is a tear jerker, but it also makes us think.

Raise the Red Lantern (Ballet), Zhang Yimou

Zhang Yimou is omnipresent these days. Other than making movies, TV commercials, he moves from opera (Turando in Forbidden city) to Olympic opening ceremony, and to ballet (Raise the red Lantern). Lately he has been busy staging a series of spectaculars using real locales in GuiLing, Lijiang, and West Lake, combining stage design, music and dancing in the backdrop of famous landscapes. His next project is opera again, in collaboration with Domingo and Tan Dun and under a comission from New York's Metropolitan Opera. Zhang’s talent certainly hit a jackpot with the audiences. His usage of colors and patterns is overwhelming, beautiful and crowd-pleasing. He borrows freely from many classic elements of Chinese aesthetics and fused a unique style that is easy to bank on. The critics of Zhang have been attacking him for lacking of substances, accusing him of running out of ideas. But Zhang soldiers on, and no one could predict what he would do next, although it is surely not anything too surprising.

The Chinese National Ballet is touring US with “Raise the Red Lantern” at this very moment and I got a chance to watch its Berkeley show with my friend Andrew. The only other ballet I ever watched from the same company was “Don Quixote”, back in 1997 when I was in Guangzhou. Chinese ballet inherited the entire Russian training system and produced a number of award-winning principal dancers. But while it could succeed in techniques, it often failed to deliver . After all, ballet is a very Western art form, and all these ballet classics are stories set in old Europe and how could you expect these Chinese dancers to truly interpret these foreign characters using body movements? There have been many attempts to choreograph ballet with contemporary Chinese themes. The most famous example is probably “The Red Women Bridget”, produced in the heyday of Culture Revolution by Mrs. Mao. Since ballet is a rather confined and rigorous form, I was curious how this one would work out, and how on earth Zhang Yimou could direct a ballet.

The film version of “Red the Red Lantern” is probably Zhang’s best film in his career. Based on SuTong’s original novel, it unfolded a complex social-political drama with clarity and elegance. The ballet, however, departed from the original plot significantly. It eliminated all the side characters, tightened up the story line and made the whole thing a classic melodrama that is emotionally charged but psychologically simplified. Rape, rebel, adultery, punishment, redemption and execution, each plot twist has a clear climax that can be danced. Here Zhang is at his best in creating visuals and tension-filled atmosphere using his usual tricks. Two most famous scenes, the raping scene and the death scene, stand out not because of the choreography but because of the stage effects such as shadow play and fluttering of fabrics and fake snows, which are clearly Zhang’s creation. The opera scenes and the colorful sleeve dance resemble what he did for Athen’s closing ceremony. 

But the choreographers (Wang Xinpeng and Wang Yuanyuan) apparently wanted to innovate on their own. They fused Chinese wushu and other traditional elements into the ballet’s form. The mahjong piece, danced by a group around mahjong tables, broke further away from the classic ballet and ventured into modern dance. The purists may get offended by all these fluffy stuff and wanted something more traditional, but for audiences who do not necessarily need to hold on to the old concept of ballet or appreciate it from old point of view, the performance is surely a powerful and dazzling experience, and for the national ballet company who is so eager to showcase a new Chinese art that is both contemporary and ancient, “Raise the Red Lantern” could not be a better choice to tour US. Whether it can stand the test of time and become a classic, only time can answer.

ShangHai Dreams: Wang Xiao Shuai

Wang XiaoShui has always been hailed as one of the leading directors from so-called Sixth Generation of Mainland Chinese directors. You can at least find three of his films from Netflix (Frozen, So Close to Paradise, Beijing Bicyles), which is a hard evidence of his ascendance in the art-house arena. Characters in all his films don’t end up well. They either go insane, or commit suicide, or get violently beat up, all due to high external pressures and their inability to control their fates. It is easy to see why all his earlier films get banned in China. These external forces eventually all point to the system’s flaws, and to the social injustices and inequalities. His protagonists struggled hard but in the end still could not escape their tragic ends. These stories inevitably made him infamously underground as well as a favorite of all the film festivals.

Shanghai Dreams, Wang’s first film that ever passed the strict censorship in China, was released in Mainland this summer and got abundant media attention after it won an award in Cannes. This year saw a few major art films being heavily promoted by China’s media: Peacock (form Gu ChangWei), The World (from Jia Changke), and Something Like Happiness (from ZhangYang). Shanghai Dreams joined this rank although box-office-wise it fell short of expectation but still did way better than other art films. Film critics indulged in collectively nostalgia, focusing on the autobiographical side of the story and choosing to ignore the political message due to their own self-censorships. Shanghai Dreams is nevertheless a very depressing film that raised poignant questions on the leadership of not-so-distant past. The very fact that this film actually passed the censorship indicated a loosen grip by Chinese government. One of the few daring details in the film included the father sneakily listening to the Voice of America (the film never mentioned the name of the radio station but anyone from those years can easily recognize that), This plot would be unthinkable just a year ago. Wang obviously did not budge.