Director/producer/independent reporter Kempton Lam has made three full-length documentaries from 2004 – 2015. Kempton’s debut documentary Long Hair Revolution 「長毛革命」 has been collected by the Canadian National Archive since 2009. The three documentaries are collectively known as “Revolution Trilogy” 「革命三部曲」 and are in Cantonese with English subtitles (廣東話、英文字幕). You can watch the three films at this YouTube Playlist (beautifully projected on your big screen HDTV or on your computer). Enjoy!
20190711 Kawhi-apalooza is over and it ended strangely By Doug Smith – Sports Reporter
I love Doug Smith’s analysis and he is always a good read. In this case (see below for an excerpt), I disagree with Doug and want to make a few observations.
No one got “played”. Everyone knows exactly what they get themselves into.
I won’t call billionaires “riverboat gamblers” because the millions to them is “nothing” like you and I pay $5 for a cheap movie. For billionaires, it is not gambling if you enjoy the time spent watching the movie (or your NBA team do stuff) as they can never finish spending their money in their lifetime and last I check, even if you bring money to your grave, your hands are kinda stiff and you can’t spend the money.
And wow Kawhi! I admire Kawhi so much as he has left “that much money on the table” (in the words of Doug)to buy (“buy” is my word, and yes, he “paid” millions to “buy”) the maximum chance to win NBA Championships and to win them fast asap, preferably in the next two seasons in 2019-2020 and 2020-2021!
Kawhi (and his team of advisors including Uncle Dennis) thought carefully about how best to increase Kawhi’s chances to win. He is gambling with a pair of legal mercury loaded dices named Leonard & Georgethat he personally designed. He has put the Clippers on the clock (and they know it) to win like NOW.Remember, at some point, any extra millions Kawhi can make also becomes meaningless to him because, lets not forget, his aim in life is NOT to collect the biggest number of houses around the world or the most number of fancy cars! Kawhi’s aim in life is to win the most number of NBA championships in the time that he is healthy to play basketball. In case anyone is counting, Kawhi is currently at 2× NBA champion (2014, 2019).
For the record, Tim has 5× NBA champion (1999, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2014). That my friend is what the #FunGuy has been thinking since high school and aiming to achieve in his basketball career all along, 6(?)× NBA champion (2014, 2019, 2020(??), 2021(??), ????, ????) How can you not admire Kawhi and think he is kinda “fun” in his own champion kinda way!
Only doing a two-plus-one deal with the Clippers sure caught everyone I talked to by surprise and once again proved Leonard is impossible to read and to think you can is folly.
But a lot of people were combination of mystified and perturbed by the move and some were kind of thankful it ended as it did.
I talked to agents who simply couldn’t comprehend a client leaving that much money on the table and I presume some eyebrows were raised at the players association office, as well.
It’s kind of telling that no player – not Leonard, not Durant, not Kyrie Irving, not Jimmy Butler to name just four – got every last dollar they could have out of the market. Not sure if that means the market is flawed or just too full of money but I do think it means something.
What it also means, to me in the immediate moment at least, is that the Clippers got used and a bit played and now the pressure on them to win big and win fast is astronomical. [K note: “win big and win fast is astronomical” is exactly the position Kawhi want Clippers to be in] It was one thing to pay the highest price ever paid by an NBA team on the trade market – basically two good players and a decade of draft picks to get the one guy the guy you wanted demanded you get – when the expectation was you’ve have Leonard for four year, a much longer time to win championships than just two.
I don’t know for 100 per cent that they knew they were only going two years guaranteed and if they did, wow, are they riverboat gamblers. If they didn’t, they got played.”
I’ve spent quite a few hours over the last few weeks to video capture the Headliner 頭條新聞 segment【聰吧！新中年！】抗爭者言, translate the spoken Cantonese into English and lined up the English subtitle/Closed Caption text to exactly match the timing of the Chinese subtitle text on the clip. Feel free to let me know if you spot any clear mistakes and have suggestions to better translate things.
*** A Documentarian’s Observation – Long Hair Revolution from 2004 to 2019 ***
I originally planned to write a post call “A Documentarian’s Apology” (in the line of British mathematician G. H. Hardy‘s “A Mathematician’s Apology” (PDF). I’ve now tweaked the words a little and now writing “A Documentarian’s Observation” instead and here are a few of my observations:
Interviewer 羅永聰 was able to ask Long Hair (LH) questions about his ex-wife because they have known and interacted with each other for years. Looking back, it would be very gossipy and uncomfortable for me to ask LH about his ex-wife then and even now 15 years later. I’m glad that Law asked and we got to learn a bit more about that side of LH.
Long Hair’s home was another place that I felt a bit too nosy for me to ask to follow him to film in 2004. In hindsight I wish I had but then I can’t turn back time. Making a documentary is about doing what I can and cannot do. What I couldn’t or felt uncomfortable to do things that could jeopardize the sense of trust between me and LH. His home was one of those places that I instinctively set as “out of bound” for me to film.
Paradoxically, LH has become even more of a statesman (at least in my eyes) in 2019 compare to previous times I’ve seen him on TV or video after he got DQ (disqualified) unjustly by the government.
Hearing LH said in the Legislative Council chamber: “夕陽無限好, 只是近黃昏” “不如欣賞一下…” (“The setting Sun’s endlessly endearing… But the light of Day is disappearing!” “why not admire it a little …”) made me feel sad.
While it is good to see LH in reasonably good health, at different places in the short clip, LH seems also visibly aged and much more tired (definitely compare to 15 years ago but even compare to 2-3 years ago). It makes me feel sad to see his physical health wanes a bit.
(20190704 new update) When I filmed Long Hair Revolution (2005), I felt almost completely safe at all times except, as mentioned in the past, when I was detained briefly at the immigration queue coming back to Hong Kong from Long Hair’s Macau protest trip. If I were making a documentary today in 2019 (which I am NOT), I would likely have gone into the LegCo to record and witness as HKFP report “The writing on the wall: Understanding the messages left by protesters during the storming of the Hong Kong legislature“. If I had gone in LegCo (which I have not), I would have felt totally safe with the protestors (as fellow documentarian Lynn Lee said so well in her Facebook post), unfortunately, I would NOT feel safe at all with the HK police knowing their brutalities. Nor would I feel safe in rally organized by pro-police/pro-government protestors who are often violent even as they claim to be protesting against “violence”.
My 1986 copy of “Iacocca: An Autobiography” which I used for a high school English class assignment/book review. This is one of the autobiographies that got me onto the path of lifelong learning form insightful people’s biographies.
Thanks to my high school English teacher for letting me use Iacocca‘s best selling autobiography for one of the book review/class assignment which got me on a lifelong path of reading and enjoying autobiographies and biographies of many people which got me to learn valuable life lessons and teachable moments from them.
20190619 Anna Maria Tremonti’s final edition of The Current
I’ll miss Anna Maria Tremonti very much as I listen to the final edition (full text transcript) of The Current. AMT is one of the best broadcasters in Canada (if not the world). I totally admire her and see her is a National Treasure! Looking forward to her new podcast.
AMT, best of luck to you from a confessed listener since The Current started in 2002!
Here is an excerpt from the last interview of AMT by Carol Off, the departing host being interviewed on her show! (emphasis added, transcript mistakes fixed and link added)
AMT: […] To be able to do that story, to be able to say to The Current I want to take half an hour of prime time morning radio and I want to talk about the rape of women in war. And the bosses say: Okay. What do you need? We’ll let you do that. That’s the gift of The Current as well we have been able to tackle those kinds of stories at a time of day when people would go ‘Oh we’re not so sure about that’. And you know what the listeners have said thank you for that. And that’s really been important to me.
CAROL OFF: Because that’s the gift of Anna Maria Tremonti because what you do with that story is that you don’t make it so horrific that no one can bear it. You tackled it as into the humanity of those stories and that has been your hallmark no matter who you talk to, no matter where you’ve gone, you have made it a hallmark of your empathy of being able to draw those people and I think what people remember most about what you have done for these 17 years is that you have made Canada your hometown. You have been from coast to coast, talking to people on the line but also going to town halls everywhere. You have connected with this country. What does that meant for you?
AMT: A lot. You know when I became a foreign correspondent it was Joe Schlesinger who said now that you’re foreign correspondent you better think about what you’re going to be when you’re not. And I thought about coming home because when you’re foreign correspondent you never want to come home. It’s a great life. And the people you answer to are far away and asleep. So it’s perfect.“
And here I’m adding a new quote to my long list of Quotes I LOVE,
“For 17 seasons you have been my partners in listening. In fact the most important thing I have learned in hosting The Current is how to listen, not how to talk, not how to ask questions, but how to listen. How to say nothing even and hear what someone else is really saying because I learn not in the asking but in the hearing. I learn about someone or something in the words that are spoken and then how they’re spoken and the words that are used in the exuberance, in the hesitation, in the emotion. Even the silences tell me something and they tell me something loudly.
At a world where so many people are shouting at each other, where so many refuse to hear anything but their own voice, the ability to hear another side to think differently, to question yourself, to learn something new, that is a gift.” – Anna Maria Tremonti (1957- ) (AMT’s final edition, timecode (~1hr 08min 38sec))
“In my experience at SNL, there really could be no creativity without structure and boundaries. Every week we go from a blank page to on the air in six days, never knowing for sure what the final show will look like. I say every week, we don’t go on because it’s ready. We go on because it’s 11:30.” – Lorne Michaels (1944- ) (Quote starts at the 12s mark)
For the record, the following are excerpts from five insightful articles I found to read re “Load Management” as used by NBA Champion team Raptors on its players including MVP superstar Kawhi Leonard. Pay attention to mentions of Alex McKechnie, Raptors’ director of sports science (hired by Raptors in 2011) who now has six, yes SIX, NBA championship rings!
Let me start by sharing this cool bonus video that I found online:
The Raptors were 17-5 when Leonard sat in the regular season but his value — and the value of Toronto’s patience — has been proven in the post-season.
The Raptors are 22 points better per 100 possessions with Leonard on the floor than when he sits, which is why Nurse has leaned on him so heavily when the games have mattered most.
That Nurse has been able to do so reflects the outsized impact of the club’s director of sports science, Alex McKechnie, a white-haired senior citizen with a Scottish accent who has as much influence in the organization as anyone other than Nick Nurse and president Masai Ujiri.
When the Raptors traded for Leonard, who had missed 73 games in San Antonio in 2017-18 due to an unspecified right quadriceps injury, a Raptors insider texted McKechnie with a simple message:
“You’re the most important person in the organization now.”
Managing the load When Leonard arrived in Toronto, he made his priorities clear — after establishing that he was, indeed, “a fun guy” — a few minutes into his opening press conference on the eve of training camp.
He was asked: What does he want for his career?
“Just be able to be healthy, that’s my No. 1 goal,” he said. “Play a long, healthy career [and] be able to be dominant, wherever I land.”
He’s dominant. He showed it all season long as he posted career highs in points (26.6) and rebounds (7.3) and was second-team All-NBA and second-team all-defence despite playing just 60 games — missing most of the other 22 due to “load management.”
The term is a medical one, recognized by the NBA and deemed an acceptable reason for teams to sit out players who aren’t otherwise acutely injured or ill. It was McKechnie — who’s in his 19th NBA season and seventh with the Raptors — who made the term part of the lexicon and was responsible for managing the load by keeping track of Leonard’s fitness through a combination of biometric measures, outside medical opinions and feel.
Shortly after he joined the Raptors, McKechnie — who was not made available to be interviewed for this story — described his approach, honed after more than 40 years working in the field, as a blend of science and instinct born of thousands of hours of in-field experience.
“When we look at rehabilitation and training and conditioning, there’s a science to it, [but] once you establish the science the trainer becomes an artist, and so it’s really painting that individual’s picture,” McKechnie told Raptors.com in 2012.
“For example, you’re not going to do the same things you may for a post-up player as you would for a guard. Totally different approach to the training protocols. In much the same way that we look at a player shooting on his right side as a guy shooting from his left. There’s a completely different set of default postures that we look at.”
Green Balls from Play | Alexander Ekman & Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris | Palais Garnier 2017
Respect and help others, even total strangers. This is one of the many lessons my dad taught me by example.
You see. one year our family traveled to Thailand and there were performances (dancing and singing) at lunch. As our tour group finished our meals, people were getting ready to leave. All except our table.
Dad convinced our fellow travellers to stay seated for a few more minutes to allow the singer to finish her song before we left. The singer noticed and appreciated it. She was someone we would never meet again. I guess in some sense even she didn’t mind people leaving en masse mid-song as she must have come to expect and have seen happened many times. But our small gestures made a small difference to her that day.
Dad didn’t intend to teach me any lessons. He was just being himself. Respectful and polite (and be firm with reasons when needed) to everyone including strangers. I in turn got a lesson for life. By example.
So back to my green balls which signify playfulness and happiness to me thanks to the epic ballet Play in Paris (see trailer video below). It just so happened that while watching Play in Paris during an intermission, I was posting stuff on Facebook and saw a friend’s post which I saw as a “cry for help”. Long story short, after getting my hands on a few of the magical green balls at the end of the performance, I snapped a photo and sent it to my friend and promised to arrange a coffee meetup to give the friend one of my treasured green balls. We had a good talk. And the friend felt better.
Today, another Facebook friend from overseas seemed to be having a bad day so I took the above green balls photo and sent it to the friend with a few words of encouragement and care. Giving the friend my balls (photo of them) and keeping them. My version of “having my cake and eat it too“. ;)
At the end of the day, I believe love and care are like that, the more you give, the more you have. We are all on this earth for the blink of an eye and may be gone tomorrow. Might as well be good and caring to our loved ones, friends, acquaintances, and even strangers. We may not be able to be good all the time, but try we can. A new thought just came into my mind as I typed this paragraph. You see, if you think about it carefully, we are that “strangers” to others we don’t know. And the world and we ourselves would be better if we are all a bit nicer and kinder to that strangers as our world seem to fall into a darker period in our recent years.
Posted by kempton 
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