It's not you, it's me

It's quite a relief to 1-2 years on actually meet the girl who said this to you, see her still single, and realise that it's really true after all.

Housequake

Shut up, already. Damn!

I don't know whether I've blogged about earthquakes before.

Most parts of the world don't have earthquakes. Unfortunately earthquakes happen near fault lines, fault lines are usually but not always found where the land meets the sea and that's also where most of the world's population live. We get tremors but no real earthquakes.

First one I've ever been in was in Osaka, when I was in Japan for a vacation. It was a Richter 5.5 (meaning it's really mild). But me and my friend were in a hotel room at that point, we were yelling! "We're going to die! We're going to die!" We ran 10 storeys down the stairs to the hotel lobby only to find those people (remember - these are Japanese, not laid back people by any measure) going about their daily business.

It was vaguely humiliating.

Second time was in the wee hours of the morning, when I was sneaking my father's car out for a drive. I thought that I was driving on bumpy ground for a little while. Then it occurred to me, reading the reports, that that's probably what driving in an earthquake is like.

Third time was in the evening, earlier this year. But I was in Geylang fucking a prostitute so I didn't notice anything. I thought it was a wilder than usual experience.

Soup Nazi

I’ve always had fantasies about being a fishmonger or a vegetable seller. I always thought that it’d be great, being like a soup Nazi, drunk on power, ordering his grovelling customers around.

Naturally when somebody asked me to volunteer to distribute goodie bags for some charity run it’s a great chance for me to fulfil my most deeply cherished soup Nazi fantasies.

Best still was that they issued light blue T-shirts for us to wear. For those of us who watch edutainment TV we know that that’s the colour of UN food distributors. Lagi best that we get to play UN aid workers. Such great fun.

We were joking about whether there were small arms or cattle prods we could use to keep demanding customers in line. I kinda liked that “gimme the form, here’s yr bag, that’s what you want?” routine.

Then there’d be some irritating customers who would ask all manner of questions over a simple shirt. Why are you so eager to get your money's worth from a charity organisation? Of course I can sympatise if you want a shirt that fits. (I was instructed: give them exactly the size of shirt they declared, no more.) But I saw people change their mind and it's not their fault if they made a mistake without knowing the size of the shirt. Of course the latecomers had to get the wrong size of shirt, that couldn't be helped. Ah well. It was plenty of fun going to the backroom and saying, "we need 3 more pallets of goodie bags. Fill them up, SLAVE!". And watching the regular staff blanch.

Anyway I've also decided to go do that stanchart half marathon at the end of this year. Now there are people who will go for every running event regardless, but I will probably only go for it once. I might decide to go for a full marathon next year, but either I will do that, or I will quit. Or I might fail to run the half marathon and decide to go again next year. I want to be like Andre Agassi. He didn't win stuff every year, but he won all the grand slams once. He won stuff when he was young, and then won stuff when he was old.

The first (and only time) I saw a marathon live, incidently was when I went to Boston and stayed at a friend's place. I woke up on Sunday morning and there were many people on the streets. It was an exciting time. Sorda.

881

I finally watched 881, around 1 week after the end of the 7th month. There was no question about where I was to watch it. It had to be in the local Eng Wah cinema in the town centre. You have to watch it in a theatre in a HDB heartland. It wouldn't make sense in a Golden Village / Cineleisure outlet, that's American suburban culture.

Amidst all the hype about Royston Tan's first big budget picture, the glitzy costumes the flamboyant song and dance numbers and unexpected box office success locally there was only 1 thought on my mind. Is 881 a prime number? Apparently it is, if you are searching for primes, you only have to search as far as the square root of the number, which means you can stop at 30. So 881 is indeed a prime number.

So the director of "15" and "4:30" have given us another film, imaginatively titled "881". what's all this shit with numbers man? Whoops maybe I shouldn't complain since all my blog names have been numbers too.

A fine movie. It's been said before that Royston Tan's biggest strength is his eye for colour and flamboyance. How he was entirely in his element while filming gangsters. It was entirely natural that he should move to getai. I knew I had to watch this film when it came out, once I saw the advance posters that cast May and Choy as getai singers. It couldn't have been for any purpose other than comic effect. Yes, May and Choy suck at Chinese, apparently so does Royston, but he still manages to get everything translated, still manages to capture the spirit of getai. Shouldn't be a problem there.

Qi Yuwu is basically the surrogate eye of the director. Does nothing but watch and take it all in, which is how I'd imagine Royston interacting with this heartlander world. He's more or less the gigolo of the film: friendly obliging chaffeur. Nice cock too.

Nice comic touches. The actresses playing the papaya sisters are good, and the one playing the auntie as well as he twin sister the Goddess of Getai is also good. The durian sisters are Paris Hilton plays Paris Hilton sorts. Possibly they didn't speak Mandarin prior to shooting this movie. Qi Yuwu does nothing but stroke his cock all day long.

It'll be nice if we were to see what the Papaya sisters did in real life. Like what do getai singers do for the other 11 or 12 months of the year, other than smoking with facial masks on, or snogging gigolos in car washes? I thought it would be nice to have some dead spirits pay these getai people a visit. Why not show these people burning hell money? Chinese religion offers up a lot of great visuals, from the colourful altars to the lion dances to the temple mediums.

The stuff that lets the show down are the slow bits. First lesson of drama: everything is action. And I mean everything. Sometimes the action is not evident, but it is happening under the surface, which is why "Hamlet", which is about some wishy washy guy wondering what the hell to do is also action, the action is in the tension.

Then the focus of the narration? If you want to see everything through the eyes of a character, then the characters which are being seen should not have to speak for themselves. In other words, let Qi Yuwu do the speaking for the papaya sisters. If Qi Yuwu is not needed as a medium between the stage and the audience, then he is simply not needed as a character.

As with the last time I posted on Singapore Dreaming, I have to kaopeh about how all Singapore films centre themselves around themes instead of stories. "I Not Stupid" is the Education System film. "Best Bet" is the Lottery Film. "Singapore Dreaming" is the Rat Race Film. "12 Storeys" is the HDB Ennui Film. "Just Follow Law" is the Gahment Sector Film. It'll be some time til we make a film that isn't some travel brochure or docu drama, something that will tell a story that is less about something specific to Singaporeans (ie something that screams out "LOCAL FILM") and something that's more about what's universal to the human condition ("FOREIGN FILM"?).

But these are small complaints, and the overall impression of the film is a positive one. Yes, maybe it's just the charm of seeing Hokkien spoken on the big screen. Or seeing the last hurrah of a dying culture.

Also, another interesting observation: it may well be true that more than 70% of Singaporeans live in HDB flats, but it also doesn't seem as though it's possible that we'll be seeing a Singaporean film set in condos / district 9/10 posh places any time soon. Which is true, there's no life in those places, and it looks just like a cemetary. No sounds save those of dogs barking.

Was talking about this with a cousin of mine one day, she worked on a Singapore film before. Said it was overhyped. Yes, let's be realistic, "881" is a good but flawed film, and hardly a masterpiece. But you got to be proud about the stuff that's coming out of your own country. Like, I wouldn't consider "My Sassy Girl" to be a masterpiece either, even if I readily concede that Jeon Ji Hyun is was more chio than the zha bohs in 881. But she also shared some juicy titbits. Like how Daniel Yun and Qi Yuwu are gay lovers. (Disclaimer: This is an unverified rumour.) Damn, that should explain how Qi Yuwu was explaining not long ago that his latest *thrust* was *into* movies. (And movie executives, I'll bet.) Seems like Royston Tan is also gay.

Was sorting out a huge bunch of ebooks I downloaded off Bit Torrent as a bundle, and came across William Gibson's "Disneyland with the Death Penalty". Motherfucker seems to think of Singapore as some sort of cultural wasteland. I'm wondering if he isn't just some thick angmoh who doesn't get it.

Ball

Interesting game of basketball yesterday. I was actually playing.

Now I don't usually play basketball. I'm on the same pitch as the rest, but what I do is not really playing. I used to call myself the velvet rope, or the pillar. I just do what people who don't play - just get into the way of the path of the ball, block the obvious next pass. I completely understand why ppl don't pass to me, because I'm bad at receiving, which is why I end up having to get it from the opponents.

But 2 weeks ago I found myself receiving, making passes, nutmegging ppl with the ball, making feints. Like playing.

I guess it was easier because it was 3 on 3. Everybody has more space, more time to think, and I appreciate that. Plus you know there are only 3 people, that means I get the ball sometimes.

I have a slow brain. Good, but slow. In fact I often feel like I'm a cold blooded animal. In the morning, I don't wake up immediately. It's like when you turn on a photocopying machine or a laser printer or anything that uses powder toner, and you got to wait for the thing to heat up before it's capable of doing anything. I'm like that in the morning. I think that when I play with 7 on 7 I usually gabra and don't always know where to place the next pass. But with 3 on 3 that extra half a second I get does wonders, and all of a sudden I'm almost competent.

Like when you hear about how people like Veron and Shevchenko do so well in Italy but not in England, it's probably because of the pace of the game. Maybe they're just used to slower rhythms and when the pace changes they suddenly can't cope.

You listen to a lot of old farts talk about football and they keep on telling us that all the greats were of a bygone era. Therefore Pele and Maradona can never be touched. Then on the next tier you have Platini, Cryuff, Beckenbauer, Gerd Muller. And by the time you get to our era... but I don't see how and why Ronaldo, Rivaldo, Ronaldinho, Zidane, Henry are necessarily inferior.

I looked at old footage of football and it just seems that they play football at a slower pace. Yes, Cryuff is very spectacular, and does a lot of neat tricks, but I also noticed that during those times they gave him time to do it. Now defences are becoming so tight that all you have to do is hesitate, and then a lunge will come in, or you will find your pass blocked.

Most of the things that you've experienced when you are young are better, which is another way of saying that young people are more impressionable. I think the game is very different and I think maybe the pace of the modern game would have made all those past masters, like Pele and Cryuff look a little more ordinary.

Anyway somebody also once told me that in order to mark somebody in football you need to stand within an arm's length of that person. I wonder if that's really true, but it's not my style. First, the court is small enough, so that I can keep watch on 2 different people at the same time, so I'll just challenge whoever the pass is played to, not that difficult. Second, I was reading about how people track down and capture terrorists. Ideally, suspected terrorists should not be captured and interrogated immediately, but rather they should be watched to see whether they will lead the investigators to other terrorists. I think that's good. Similarly I don't like to hound people so closely, I will give them the space. Because if I'm too close, the ball will never be played to the guy I'm guarding, and I will never get to steal it.

Of course, there are times when my cavalier approach breaks down... well too bad when it does.

The finger

I think that sometimes you just got to assert yourself.

Like there was this time I was crossing Adam Road, and you know it's in the vicinity of a lot of spoilt rich brats who live in Bukit Timah. I was jaywalking across it (dun worry, only 1 car was there) when the car, that was on the far lane, flashed its lights at me and accelerated so that he could get me to move away a bit faster. I stopped for a split second, and showed him the finger. I think I could hear him pop a vessel while he was horning me furiously and I stepped aside with a few seconds to spare (that's how far away he was). Really pissed off with this guy. He was furiously horning as he passed by.

That was one thing. Something even more alarming happened today.

I was crossing the road, maybe taking my own sweet time, but I had just run 12km and my legs were just about ready to give way, so I may have been slow to get out of the way of a lorry carrying LPG tanks, getting out of his junction. That motherfucker drove up near to me to hurry me along, and I wasn't having any of it. (I had seen my mother drive up to a pedestrian to shoo him off and I got really disgusted with her behaviour. )

As he drove away, I turned and showed him the finger. Then suddenly I got alarmed when he stopped the lorry on the opposite side of the road and got out. He wanted to pick a fight with me! Motherfucker was as combustible as the goods he was delivering. I had my 2 jogging buddies with me and we could definitely take him on, but we weren't ever going to have anything on our criminal records. So I had no choice but to put my hand up, and he, that despicable motherfucker won a small victory.

Goddamn. I would have liked to hack him to pieces!

Zawinul

It's a bad year to be a musician that I'm a fan of. Joe Zawinul, creative genius behind Weather Report, is dead. Earlier this year we had Andrew Hill dead. Also Antonioni, Bergman, Edward Yang. What do all these people have in common? I discovered them while in college*. All these 5 people were in their way my heroes (Bergman less so, but he's touched me too, anyhow.) All 5 of them were great artists.

I'm a little too tired to talk at length about the great music he made so I'll just leave a clip here for you. (In case you don't recognise him he's the leader, and the one playing the keyboards).



* Note: I heard of Antonioni when I was in college, but only watched "l'Avventura" for the first time 2 years after I graduated. However he is thematically consistent with the 4 continuous years of mental masturbation I call my college years.

No cigar

I topped my class once. It was when they put together in a class people they considered to be smart. They had surprisingly egalitarian ideals for that part of the class, and you never had your class ranking written down in your report books. And maybe it wouldn't count.

It came as quite a surprise to me: I didn't aim for it. I knew I was doing well, but it was more or less that I knew what I was doing. So my form teacher told this to us, and added (something that makes me resentful till today) that I didn't quite deserve it. But in a way she was right, because there were people (4, I think) in the other classes who did better than me. Probably also had something to do with me being the class clown. I wonder if people knew that Iggy Pop was first in his class in high school, but I digress.

Funny thing was, since it was official policy that class ranking didn't matter, nobody in my family ever did anything to celebrate my being first in class. I topped my class again the next year, again, not really, because the guy who was ahead of me decided to migrate overseas. Again no celebration.

It never happened again. And thereafter teachers would look at me, go tut tut, and describe me as "the one that got away".

In the meantime, there would be a maths quiz. Now this was at a real junior level, so people aren't trying too hard for it. Plus we had the star player on our team who could well have won the thing on his own. To cut a long story short, we won, but right after that there was an incident that happened to me that was so unpleasant that I can remember it even today, which totally made me wish I hadn't won it.

In sec school, we had an essay writing competition, and I put something together hastily. It won first prize. I wasn't there when they announced it, and never got to collect it in front of the rest. I've had other stuff in other competitions which I put in more effort for and they never won anything, so I think luck has to do with it. But as luck would have it, I wasn't there to receive the prize.

It was funny, we were in basic military training, when we got called back to receive our "A" level results. Still remember it today: the old 4A2D, an unexpected 1 for Chinese (don't know what drugs the examiner was on), and a 3 for GP, something I have since strived to correct by taking up artsy courses in college. Not much celebration, either. I suppose hundreds of others got something equally good. Overwhelmingly it was a sense of relief, rather than joy.

Participated in a Maths competition during my first year in college. Surprisingly won a prize (I think they gave out 6 prizes). I missed the prize giving ceremony when I overslept on a nap, so never got to collect it. Picked up the check a few days later, but no kick.

Later that year, entered a play-writing competition. Wrote something that I thought was one of the best things I had ever written, so I thought I might have a chance at winning something. I showed it to a friend, and he laughed at it, saying it was pretty incoherent. So when I received a letter saying, "congratulations! Pls come to our prize giving ceremony..." I thought, why the hell should I go there and watch somebody else get the prize?

I only found out that I won 2nd prize by reading about it in the papers. Again, hurried down to collect my check but no kick.

So if you guys out there wonder why I don't really give a fuck about doing well, succeeding in life, wonder no more.

Sumiko Tan

There's this preview of her article that will be in the Sunday Times: "A Woman needs a man to be complete". Goddamn, she doesn't have any qualms about embarrassing herself in public. You'd expect that sentence to be her epitaph.

Well I'm actually old enough to know 1 or 2 people who might end up as Sumiko Tan. Too bad for them I guess.

Fuck them all

Had a "Negotiation Strategies" course today. There were some people I knew, and that was OK.

One interesting episode: we had a game where 3 teams of us were supposed to build a structure, Stonehenge.

The trainer had 4 sets of blocks that would assemble to form stonehenge (although 1 set of blocks was incomplete. They were all marked according to which set they belonged to. The "market" would release blocks, and representatives from the 3 teams (of whom I was one) would snatch them. We would deduct the "cost" of these blocks from the accounts. Round by round, we would try to engage in barter or trade to get a complete set of blocks. If we managed to build stonehenge, the financial reward would be huge. The team with the highest amount of money at the end of the game would win.

Initially, all the 3 teams were mutually suspicious of each other. We would hide the markings on the blocks from each other so that nobody would ever know how many of each our teams had. It was a competitive game. But the majority of our blocks had the label "C" so we more or less figured out that we were going to build the stonehenge based on that set.

I think the people from Marketing were the first to realise that nothing could be accomplished unless we all co-operated to some extent that we tried to make sure that everybody would build 1 complete set each. To that end, we started trading info on what our total inventory was. And then our team realised that "C" was the incomplete set.

So we realised that if there was going to be a barter, we would all end up with complete stonehenges, but we would be the least well off, because we would have to pay the other teams to get more blocks. Furthermore we also had an incompetent grabber (ie me) who probably grabbed the fewest blocks among the teams. (Among 99 blocks, I grabbed, say, 31.) Which means we paid the least, which means, if no trading was done at all, we would win the game. Last of all, since it is extremely unlikely that this isn't the case (you do the maths if you know probability), all of the teams had blocks from each of the 4 sets.

In other words, we could just sit down and refuse to trade, say "fuck them all", and we would sabotage everybody's efforts, and since we had started out by paying the least money for the blocks we would be ahead of everybody. And almost independently of each other, that is what we all decided to do.

The other teams were shocked, of course, and dismayed. I don't know if they wanted to persuade us otherwise, but they didn't try that hard. It's almost they were admitting they would have done the same in our situation. We did try to sell the remaining bricks to 1 other team at an exorbitant price but later we recalculated that we charged too high: they would never have bought it, even when you factor in the windfall that comes from completing a set.

I had to laugh. I didn't believe we were doing this. The best British comedies are of horrid, despicable xiao3 ren2 who do petty things like this to each other. And now we were like the xiao3 ren2. The people who throw orange juice out of our kitchen windows knowing full well that other peoples' laundry are downstairs. The people who urinate in lifts. The Indonesians who pull the sand embargo shit on us.

We should have called this activity "stonewall" instead.

Anyway there was more interesting stuff to follow. Later on we had to construct a scenario where people would have to put their negotiation strategies into practice. I wrote on a piece of paper: you South Korea, we Taliban.

The instructor was sufficiently amused that he asked us to go first. It was a riot. I remember making comments like, "you have to decide whether you're going to pay up or not. While we have to decide whether we're going to hang or shoot the next hostage. Life is full of unpleasant decisions", and when one of the opposite team made the unfortunate statement "what would the world community think of you?", we said, "look, we're terrorists. Do we look like we give a damn? If we're such bleeding hearts we'd end up like those suckers we got locked up in the basement."

Or "look, we're really busy people. We don't have all day. We still have plenty of terrorist activities to plan, insurrection operations, Koran study sessions, drug smuggling operations, physical training sessions, prosthetic limb maintenance. We're not lazy people just because we happen to be Muslim."

Or "OK OK, maybe we won't execute tomorrow. We're just going to circumcise all the men."

And this comment that my brain thought of, but also censored. "Rest assured that we are not going to violate your women. Not when they are alive anyway."

Gravity defying bottom

Now when sometimes we want to praise a woman's figure, we take note of the texture of her bum. We like firm, toned bottoms which don't sag from the fat, and we sometimes term them "gravity defying bottoms".

However, did you know that all of us in a sense have gravity defying bottoms? When human beings evolved through the stage where they had to stand on their 2 hind feet, there was one more evolutionary feature that we needed. Whereas previously our anuses (anii?) faced sideways, now they faced downwards. From then on, the only thing that stopped the shit that accumulated from yesterday's meals from flowing down the sides of our legs was a combination of the strength of our anal sphincter (that's the circular muscle that holds you ass shut) and a resolute and grim determination.

Freud postulates that this constant fear is a big part of our human psyche, and that it manifests itself in an obsession for cleanliness and orderliness. Therefore when we meet a fussy, nitpicking and obsessed with cleanliness person we are bound to call him "anal".

Thus ends our non sequitur for the day.