Saturday, 29 March 2008

A full life

Sometimes you will hear it being said at funeral oratories: "he lived a full life".

I never thought very much about the significance of this. It sounds great, but then when you think about all the stuff that was missed out, what does it mean? He didn't say, "he was a good man", or "he lived a good life". Or "he lived a good life". Or "he managed to achieved this but failed in that".

Just a full life. It can't be that hard. All you have to do is to avoid doing stuff that's "empty". So long as you're occupied with something interesting every waking hour, you're on your way to living a "full life". Somebody says that at your funeral, and everybody thinks, "wow, that's great".

Think, guys, it can't be that difficult. The bar is like way down there.

Wednesday, 26 March 2008

Chicken and Egg

I might have said this before but I will say it now in a soundbite.

One of my greatest ambitions is to solve the problem of artificial intelligence - how we can build a machine that has a human like intelligence, who can invent concepts and make use of them - you know, think.

I'm on the wrong side of 30 now so I'm probably running out of time. But one of the key questions that I will face is this: what gives a concept meaning? Is there something that has meaning of its own, which is so great that it and it alone gives meaning to everything else? Or is everything circular, as in you have this fantastic big web of concepts and meanings, and everything is pointing to something else?

It's very useful that I've studied maths before. Because maths is nothing other than a system of concepts and meanings, and it is very clear - more clear than other systems of meanings, like law, or ideas in politics - how all these ideas are related to each other. So what we have in maths is that we have a few anchors, we call them axioms, where the ground rules are being laid out and they don't need any evidence to support them. Then everything else is built on top of those axioms.

But what gives those axioms validity? I think what gives it validity is how many ideas you can build upon those foundations and the whole system does not screw up. There have been times before when the system looked very shaky, and a lot of wild conclusions that seem to have been derived from those precepts. But I think for the most part the structure is safe. So I think what validates the axioms is that they give rise to something sensible, they don't lead to contradictions.

Yet another way to put this is that the axioms themselves derive their validity from the theorems that these axioms give rise to. In a way the axioms and the theorems validate each other, so in a way, logic is still circular.

Or let's have a more concrete example since I think I might be boring my readers with my high minded conceptual shit. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Or let's have a simpler example, how are the meanings of a chicken and an egg derived? In other words, which came first? The idea of the chicken or the idea of the egg?

We could say a lot of things about the chicken but ultimately one of the crucial things we will say is that it is the thing that hatches out of the egg. The egg is the thing that hatches out of the chicken. They give meaning to each other. You can't define a chicken without the egg, or vice verca. But that's OK, because that's the way that they evolved. On its way from evolving from a bacteria to a chicken, it stopped being a unicellular object, and you needed a mechanism to protect the embryo during that very vulnerable period in the chicken's life cycle. There just happened to be a layer of calcium, and it just so happened that the packaging and unique enough to fool the human mind into thinking that these are 2 separate entities, which of course they're not.

Neither the chicken nor the egg came first - you see the reason why this question is so tricky is because the way that it was worded is already philosophically loaded - you're assuming that the chicken and the egg are separate entities and that's not really the right way to look at it. If you remember that they are part of the whole system which is the life cycle of the chicken species then it doesn't make sense to consider them separately. Neither came first, of course.

Monday, 24 March 2008

Tip of the day

Some of you may be reaching that magical age of 30 where from then on life goes downhill all the way.

You would have changed your NRIC, and the clerk (probably Malay and wearing a tudung) over there would have given you back your old IC with a hole punched through it.

Don't throw that NRIC away. It will still work as a library card. So I can go to the library these days and use my supposedly invalidated NRIC to borrow books. I will keep my real NRIC at home where it is safe and nobody other than my maid can steal it.

Sunday, 23 March 2008

The thing

One night, I went back home late at night and saw the remote control on the floor, in smithereens. Wondering what happened, I shot an email to my parents, asking
Can we assume that the remote control is no longer working?
So this was the reply from my father.
Lately, I noticed that it was not working well and mentioned it to mummy a couple of nights before. Last night, upon my return from qigong, I believe that I reminded nicely to mummy about it and that it possibly could be caused by the battery. She reacted unpleasantly that she didn’t know what I was talking about. I possibly said something like `this thing’ ( for whatever reason, I just couldn’t describe the `remote control’) and she just wasn’t interested to look at what I was holding and I got very mad and threw it in front of the computer that she was concentrating on.

She grabbed it and threw it hard on the floor and obviously it is now not working.

Friday, 21 March 2008

Galactic Space Terror

I’ve heard about what high school in the USA is like. People don’t like going to high school over there. It’s a bitchy, competitive place. If you’re in a lousy ghetto neighbourhood school then there is plenty of violence, bullying and the occasional gun massacre. If you’re in a exclusive prep school, there is plenty of bitchy competitiveness, one-upmanship, nerds vs jocks. I think there are places with good spirit where the atmosphere is nurturing, people have a good sense of belonging. But I think either they are fairly rare or you don’t see them so much in media representations.

I think RJC would have fallen in between these 2 extremes, but I think it was a little bitchy. It is strange that I could have gone to 2 schools that are so closely associated with each other – RI and RJ, and feel so different towards them. I always felt that there was a sense of camaraderie in RI that was completely missing in RJ. Perhaps the stakes were less high – I could screw up my “O” levels, (to a limited extent I did) and still get to the next level, and as for RJC – I didn’t appreciate it at that time how relatively easy it was for me to get into the uni I got into, and how somebody from maybe another JC but managing to accomplish what I did accomplish might not get in. Furthermore it was a junior college where all the feeder schools going into it were unisex schools, the first time that you had a lot of hormone fuelled guys trying to impress girls, and it made the environment that much more competitive.

Yes, this is RJC, the one which would 10 years later produce the likes of Li Hongyi and Wee Shu Min.

For me it was not that easy because I think while the balance of power between the nerds and jocks was even in RI, in RJC it was firmly on the side of the jocks, since we had such a pro- sports principal.

I can look back on my days at RJC as being fairly carefree, in spite of the academic pressure. That would have to wait when I got to the U. Because if you haven’t figure out by now, I’m one of those lucky guys who have the magical ability to understand in 5 minutes what it takes mere mortals 1 hour to understand, that’s one, and secondly I never had to take any classes outside the ones that I’m traditionally strong in, ie Maths and Science.

They weren’t completely happy days, and I wished that I had done a lot of things that I didn’t do during those years. I wish I had been more sympathetic to those around me who had to struggle more than I did, and I wish that I was more curious about the outside world back in those days, it would have served me well in the army, in the uni and at work. I also wish that I had more confidence about myself, and realised that I was not as unattractive as I thought I was. (But this is not saying much because I thought I was the ugliest guy around.) The only tofu I was eating was from the canteen stall that I frequented a lot around that time. God, I must have had some seriously beautiful skin and bad flatulence.

I was glad that I was among the engineers. The arts guys are typically more astute, and always slightly more bitchy (but smarter – I took up political science in uni because I wanted to find out just what it was that made them so smart). And there were not a few hot chicks there. Those were the more street smart guys (at least they were more street smart at that time) and foxy chicks, a lot of the same girls who would later on earn the NUS faculty the reputation of having the most chio zhabors. And even one of the hotter chicks in my class, the one who turned up on the first day of class wrapped in an SCGS uniform that she was about to outgrow – so tight that catwoman would look at her and start hyperventilating – she who would brave the risk of heroically ripping up her uniform by actually bending over to put her schoolbag on the ground in front of her – she who would give a second meaning to “flag raising ceremony” and “standing at attention” – she would get into the Law faculty.

Sorry about my digression into happy memories from the past. Anyway, the Arts chicks were usually hotter and held to a higher standard of hotness – except for 1, who was, honestly speaking, ugly as fuck. I don’t know if it was merely her looks, or that she was as obnoxious as she looked. (But we all know that being obnoxious and being obnoxious looking are loosely correlated.) Whatever it was, she was definitely in a vicious cycle (and probably in a vicious circle of friends). You could have the odd cutting remark flying out unexpectedly, or you could have the insouciant slight, or even the unintentioned but careless blow to your dignity. There were rumours that she once wrote a love note to a fairly attractive female teacher, and attempted, in full view of the rest of the class, to slip it under her skirt.

I didn’t know her personally although I knew people who knew her (and they gave me the rumours). You had to conceal the first flinch of revulsion when you bumped into her, but otherwise you could just pretend that she wasn’t that ugly. But she was massively unpopular. The ugliness gives way to insecurity, the insecurity causes more clingy behaviour, the clingy behaviour makes you even more unattractive as a person than the ugliness alone, and eventually you have a reputation and nobody is your friend. There was this “school event” where the whole school had to go to a big auditorium. I would not forget the sight – she was on one of the seats near the back, the tiered seats. Most of the seats in the gallery were taken, except for those in a perimeter around her – the empty seats forming a ring around her.

And things were about to blow back in the ugliest way possible. At the entrance of the old RJC library at Mount Sinai Road, there was a room where you would put your bag there. Most students in those days had a file containing all the lecture notes, and all the other stuff went into a bag. So you usually brought the file there to study. Thing is, near the prelims, she would squirrel away the files, and chuck them in a garbage bin. This went on for quite a long time, a few weeks, and it would cause widespread panic among her victims, although most of her victims would be lucky enough to get their stuff back. Eventually she was caught and had to be sent for counselling. I don’t know if she picked the victims, I don’t think she did. Many of them never did her any wrong.

People knew the score, and didn’t entirely blame her. What we witnessed, before this terrorism thing became a big issue, was basically terrorism. The logic is the same – somebody who feels oppressed, unable to seek redress for her problems, and she takes it out on the random person on the street, maybe to make herself heard, or maybe because this is the one and only way she can exert power over her fellow human beings. She did people wrong, and also people did her wrong.

Wednesday, 19 March 2008

Tibet

Heard that Bjork has gotten into trouble in Shanghai for rallying for independence in Tibet during a concert. She probably didn't understand that it would be very badly received. Well it's understandable that China (and also the man in the street in China) do not want Tibet independence.

So what about the Tibet question? It is a big country. It is a damn big country. It is the size of Iran. It's not easy to grant independence to Tibet. I heard that the Dalai Lama is resigned to not having independence, which is just as well: for all practical purposes, you have to depend on China for just about everything.

The other thing is that it's just your bloody arse luck if you are a smaller country stuck between 2 big countries. Just ask Korea and Poland. And Finland. So when China thinks about an independent Tibet, they're going to wonder if the Indians are going to gain influence in that country, have to think about the Russians. Better off declaring that you're part of China and heck with it.

But if they're going to dump all the Hans into the country, if they're going to repress you and stop you from being Tibetian, if they're going to colonise (this word rhymes with "sodomise") you then there's plenty to be upset about. And that's why a lot of people are protesting. I've said before that the Olympics are a big platform for a lot of unhappy people to make their political views better known to the world. And so it goes.

So it appears that the issue is not about the status of Tibet: we'll probably have an autonomous state. The immediate issue is how the thing is going to be governed. Divorces are always painful, and successions between countries are further complicated by the fact that the countries are still going to be neighbours after the succession. Sometimes (Singapore-Malaysia, Czech-Slovak) things are easier when both parties are consenting and other times when only 1 party wants the divorce things get a little messy.

Thing about China is this: yes you always have the Opium war getting mentioned. You also have those tremendous sufferings during the Japanese wars. The unequal treaties. Of course China is also perfectly capable of fucking itself (Great Leap Forward famines, civil wars, warlord period, cultural revolution etc). But China is also a colonial power. We don't really talk about colonies these days but it's still alive in a certain form: Russia with its problems with Chechnya, Israel and West Bank, China with Xinjiang, Tibet, Taiwan. The US and Cuba / Central America. Indonesia / East Timor. Serbia / Kosovo. As is usually the case you will go on and on about historical injustices, but it's a totally different story when you're the one trying to get those darn Tibetians to toe the line.

Tibetians seem like nice people and I'd like to see China treat them with a little more respect. Of course the Dalai Lamas have had a history of being tyrants and it's like their PR is really good. (This is not a comment about the current Dalai Lama since we don't really know how he would have run his own country.)

A friend visited Tibet recently, I wonder what she's thinking about the funky stuff going on in the country. Usually it's fight fight fight, then take a break to allow some tourists to pass through, snap a few pictures with your Kalashnikovs, then fight fight fight again.

Sorry, I know nuts about Tibet actually, I'm just rambling.

You know the Greeks understood the nature of things very well. Their gods were assholes who played around with common mortals for sport. It is the way that powerful countries mess around with smaller and weaker countries: not so much immoral as amoral, which means that sometimes they will be the good guy when it suits them.

When your backside is itchy then you will go stir up shit in Afghanistan and Iraq. And Uncle Sam will go dick around in Latin America in the manner of an unhygienic guy absent-mindedly scratching his balls every now and then. When the USSR was still around they sponsored wars in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Cuba, Ethiopia, Syria - basically anything to piss off the Americans, until they made the fatal mistake of messing around with Afghanistan. So when China rises to the fore, you just wonder how it's going to behave, given that it's now influencing Burma, Taiwan, North Korea, Tibet, India, Pakistan, Central Asia. It's always interesting to watch.

Monday, 17 March 2008

Woof woof

Had a dream last night. There was a dog who came under my care, very unexpectedly. Now you guys know me, I never keep pets. I wouldn't know what the hell to do with them. It gave me a lot of problems. Threw tantrums at me. I argued a lot with it, it wouldn't sleep in the kennel like it was supposed to. Kept on demanding more care and attention.

The one day the pound came and took it away.

Have you had this sort of a dream before? Any of you who has watched "Solaris" (I watched the Tarkovsky version) would find this dream familiar.

The context of this dream was that it happened 1 or 2 days after I asked a girl out on a date. I wonder if having a girlfriend would be something like dealing with that dog.

Thursday, 13 March 2008

The iPod Workforce

THEY want to be paid at least $2,500 a month and be praised at work, but won’t skip their evening gym sessions to work overtime.

They roll into the office with their iPods and mini-skirts around noon – and yet expect to be CEO by the end of the week.

But the shocker is: Many professionals – the young blood entering the workforce – whom my paper spoke to actually agreed with this depiction of themselves. Four local recruitment firms also affirmed these trends among new hires.

A recent episode of American news programme 60 Minutes zeroed in on those born after 1980, who are known as the Millennial Generation – or the iPod
Generation.

Its findings were culled from interviews with employers, young employees and recruitment experts in the US.

The show found that Millennial Generation employees have no company loyalty and think that anyone over 30 is old, redundant and should be retired.

Mr Josh Goh of recruitment firm GMP Group felt that the same attitude prevails among the under-30s here who have not gone through a recession.

Said the corporate services manager: “Due to the current talent shortage, employers are telling recruits what the company can do for them, rather than ask what they can do for it.”

Assistant project manager Mr Heng Tee Jin, 24, is one such Millennial Generation employee. While he agreed that “young employees are often seen as lazy or lacking in ambition”, he said he has also witnessed peers who are “equally hungry for success”.

“It boils down to the individual”, he added.

This was a MyPaper article that I copied out. I think it was published last month.

This is the issue that has been talked about ever since I was young. This is what you get when you have a parent who worked his way out of poverty, and never tires of reminding you of what it’s all about.

It is infectious enough to be scary. I have seen people, who after marrying one of my family members, start having more of a work ethic than they did before. And it’s all that nagging, that consistent competition and one-upmanship that goes around.

Some of my aunts have asked me, well the 3 eldest cousins have degrees from nice universities in the US. (She means myself, my sister and my cousin). And you have the younger one who gets pressured because she can’t do the same. They ask me, do you feel bad about giving pressure to your youngsters?

I said that I didn’t know. Yes, I received a lot of help when I was young in my studies. Not from tuition, not from asking help from my teachers. My parents did give me a good hard push when I was very young and that definitely helped. Also I never had to worry about anything else other than studying, and that helped. The rest was all down to my talent and hard work. So I said I just did what I did without thinking too hard about how people who are going to follow after me are going to take it.

But I can be quite offensive about doing well. I think that when I did well in school I pissed my sister off so much that she became really competitive and did even better than me in school.

When I think about it, their complaints that I was putting pressure on my younger cousin did not make sense. One of them was a successful fund manager, really raking it in. The other did not really fit the conventional Singaporean notion of success but she is a good enough cook that we know that she will succeed if she wants to go into business. Then there’s my father, former head boy, top student, climbed up the corporate ladder. Their youngest sister married a successful businessman. I think it is completely not fair for them to complain about me giving the youngsters pressure.

We’ll keep on giving youngsters pressure and taking pressure, I guess. That is the system. We’ve usually had corporal punishment in my family. I didn’t like getting beaten the shit out of when I screwed up but I will do it to my kids because this is family tradition. My grandmother beat the shit out of my father, my father beat the shit out of me, and I will beat the shit out of my kids when they screw up.

So when I see that article about what youngsters are like in their work, I don’t feel particularly proud to be associated with that generation of assholes. You do not need to be from a poor background to have that extra drive and passion. Bill Gates was born upper middle class. In a perverse way, even though Paris Hilton was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, you need a certain amount of drive to keep your name constantly in the tabloids without having any artistic talent that people normally need to end up there in the first place.

I wish my generation of people were not like that. I wish they were humble down to earth folk who didn’t place such emphasis on hedonism and shit like that.

I don’t want to give the impression that I’m the model employee because I’m not. But I still think there has to be some minimum standard for everybody, and people should get their priorities in life right.

In the business world, people usually consider it a success if all your customers are spoilt and pampered assholes who say me me me I I I, vacuous enough to part with their cash at every given opportunity, seeking fleeting pleasures, not giving a fucking thought about how they are contributing to the betterment of society and that is completely fucked up.

Tuesday, 11 March 2008

A Spade is a spade is a spade

It’s a little funny what you could do with political correctness. People are questioning how the male gender has become the “default” sex for most things. The word “woman” itself implies that it’s a modification of the word “man”. Then we speak of “mankind” rather than “womankind” Or we shorten it to “man”. Why do we have “history” rather than “herstory”? Why do the kids take the surname of the father rather than the mother since paternity is always disputed more than maternity?

I think that these things are just conventions, we shouldn’t set too much store by them. Of course you might say "you're a guy, these conventions favour you!" Not always true. If you are Chinese, Korean or Japanese, you always write your name surname first. And when you're with westerners, they can't figure things out so quickly so sometimes you got to write your name backwards for them. I'm perfectly happy with it, even though sometimes it's also a case of preventing your good name from being mangled in their incompetent hands.

And black people, I think it's OK to call them black. It used to be a term or pride, and much better than the derogatory n word, or d!@kie. (Even though negro is just French for black.) Now they call them African-Americans. Which might still be OK except that most of them have never been to Africa before. Why not just admit that the main reason why race has any meaning is that somebody's skin is darker than the other?

When I was doing religious studies, somebody put the dates of Buddha’s life to be around 500 BCE. What’s that? Well it has become politically incorrect to say BC which is “before christ”. And AD “anno domini” is even worse, “in the year of our lord”. So in order for things to become less western centric, you should call it “before common era” / “common era”. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Our year 0 is centred around the life of Jesus Christ, that’s what we think the year of his birth is. That’s the original meaning of “2007” which means JC was born 2007 years ago, so it is what it is. Call a spade a spade. If you change it to “common era” or whatever that crap is, you’re still taking his birth as a point of reference anyway but you’re just obscuring that. Of course it is not very meaningful to say “Qin dynasty was 200 years before the birth of Christ”, because these 2 events have very little impact on each other. But it is a point of reference, and you are using the Gregorian calendar after all, so you might as well use the traditional names.

That’s why I’m also suspicious of how some bosses ask their subordinates to call them by their first names. To be sure there are some of them who truly want things to be more egalitarian but I’m sure that a few of them just want the semblance rather than the actual substance of things being more egalitarian. Like I want to lord over you but I don’t want it to be too obvious that I’m lording over you.

I don’t know, I’ve always been a believer that you shouldn’t invent new names for things that have perfectly good old names.

Julius Caesar

This is Julius Caesar on masturbating at bed time:

I saw, I came, I conked out

Friday, 7 March 2008

Mas Selamat Kastari

Let's dispel a few myths about Mas Selamat Kastari. People think he will be caught. I don't think it will be easy, or possible, I don't think he will be caught before he links up with JI again. It is possible to escape from Singapore. There is jungle. Why they put the Whitley detention centre so close to the jungle escapes me, but in Singapore, if you're not close to a jungle, then you are close to the coast, and you can still escape to another island.

I don't know why they say he is still in Singapore. They only made this public 4 hours after he escaped. This is really stupid. If you were to make this public immediately, it would have been much easier to catch him, everybody would have been able to look out for him. I'm sure it takes less than 2 hours to escape from this small island.

Saying that he is still in Singapore does serve one purpose. When you are in the government long enough you will realise that times of adversity will unite the people, as it did in the SARS case. Never mind that you yourself were the cause of that adversity.

Mas Selamat may or may not join back to JI and return to terrorism. It is possible either way.

His escape will not make a big difference to terrorism. JI's the way that it has always been. If it needs more talented people it can always find them. One more or one less doesn't make a difference.

What is not a myth is if I do find myself face to face with him I will try to beat the shit out of him before the police stop me.

I am very annoyed. But not as annoyed as the air defence units in the country who will have to work harder because he is on the loose.

Cherian George raised the interesting question of why the media has failed to report on the inquiries into the security lapse. That's the last thing the Straits Times would want to write about. Who in the press would want to criticise Internal Security since most of them work for them anyway? And some have also criticised the nomination of an insider to be a member of the so-called independent inquiry into the case.

This just in: LKY has criticised the handling of the case and blamed "complacency". Well and good. But it is interesting that the first time that the media reports about the culpability it is still LKY who opens his mouth. Doesn't the prime minister of the country have anything to say? Do LHL and GCT wait for him to take the lead? nobody wants to say anything risky unless it's LKY saying it?

Wednesday, 5 March 2008

George Clinton

If you need any convincing to go to next Monday's George Clinton concert, I present here some of his pearls of wisdom. Another article on P funk to follow.

The world is a toll-free toilet
Our mouth's neurological assholes
And psychologically speaking
We're in a state of mental diarrhea
Talking shit a mile a minute
Or in a state of constipated notions
Can't think of nothin' but shit
And in this world of
Stinky futures, shitty memories and
Constipated 19 now-nows
Emerges from the hiney of your head
The doo doo chasers,
The Promentalshitbackwashpsychosisenemasquad
The prune juice of the mind
The doo doo chasers
Friends of roto-rooter
Bringing you music to get your shit together by
The band in the tidy bowl of your brain
(What was that long word again-Promental...?)

A musical bowel movement
Designed to rid you of moral diarrhea
Social bullshit
Crazy do-loops
Mental poots

They call us the unflushables
One swipe a clean wipe
(Go flush it, fellas)

And what causes all of this shit?
What is the source of food for thought?
Ego-munchies
Images doggie bags
Me burger with I sauce on it
Me burger with I sauce on it
A myself sandwich
A personal burger
Hamburger
And a glass of constricted cola
Out to lunch with lunch meat
The fear of being eaten by the sandwich
The Promentalshitbackwashpsychosis-----
The doo doo chasers
Friends of roto-rooter
Music to clean your shit by

Low calorie logic
Muscle brain
Skinny brain

Count the calories of your thoughts
Funk, Confucius says
Like Chinese laxatives
Sweet and sour bowel movements
And in this world of stinky memories
Shitty futures
19 now nows-constipated-like
The prune juice of the mind
The band in the tidy bowl of your brain
Bringing you music to clean your shit by

Funk, the P-Preparation
The mental musical bowel movement
Groovalax
One swipe a clean wipe
And with no extra charge
A psychological trend
A neurological enema
Holy Shit
(let me try one-crap)
Corpolite
Prehistoric doo doo
Helping you get your shit together

Backstage at a Funkadelic rehearsal
We bring you the doo doo chasers
(Which one is George Clinton?)
Out to lunch with lunch meat, once again
The fear of being eaten by a sandwich
Lunchville
Where lunch is a nice time of day
At least twice a week

Fried Ice Cream is a reality

(Which one is George Clinton?)

Fried Ice Cream is a reality
Guess who's coming to lunch
I'm not gonna pay for this lunch, man!

Fried Ice Cream is a reality!
Fried Ice Cream is a reality!
Fried Ice Cream is a reality!

Monday, 3 March 2008

Today in Parliament

Now George Clinton is bringing his funky bunch to town next week. They are still promoting the tickets. I think they are having problems selling them. You want to pay $60 to watch a 60 year old man prance around in his diapers? (nb: this is not a mere rhetorical question. This being a P Funk George Clinton concert, there will be a guy prancing around in his diapers.) Am I going to fork out $60 for that lunacy?

But then again I reflected: there are only a handful of people whose live concerts I would attend. Sonny Rollins. Sonic Youth (They were in Singapore, performing in the Harbour Pavillion, 1 week before I was drafted. Since then the Harbour Pavillion has been torn down, and Vivocity erected in its place.) Bob Dylan. (He turned up at my super ulu out of the place uni 1 day, so why could I do?). Sonic Youth was great, the others were OK, but over the hill. Bob Dylan was good for his age.

Now anybody who knows rap music knows that the 3 most sampled artists are James Brown, Sly Stone and P Funk. So when P Funk (OK, it's just George Clinton and a few newbies - no Bernie Worrell, no Bootsy Collins) traipse into town, what should we expect?

I don't expect many Singaporeans to know P Funk, which is why I'm surprised he decided to come to Singapore. Aren't a lot of R+B fans, and definitely very few people from that disco era. But it's going to be like that David Bowie concert 25 years ago when a legend comes to perform, and nobody turns up, but people have fun anyway.

This is P Funk, they are legendary. Anybody who compiles a list of the top 100 greatest artists of pop music will include them.

There are a few musicians I want to be. One is Thelonious Monk. Another is Andrew Hill. (Both are dead unfortunately). I wouldn't mind being Captain Beefheart or Zappa, making crazy music that would piss off a lot of people. I would definitely love to be George Clinton, strung out and freaky with all that crazy music and crazy costumes, being a good role model for Prince to follow in your footsteps.

There are the crazy characters, like Sir Nose D'voidOfFunk (the straight nerd who doesn't understand black music, doesn't swim and doesn't do cocaine hence the nose reference), Uncle Jam, Dr Funkenstein, the Mothership.

I heard them first on Prince's "Graffiti Bridge". "We can Funk" was cool but probably a step down from their great heights. I fished out their masterpiece (wait for it) "Funkentelechy vs the Placebo Syndrome" from the discount bin. (Told you Singaporeans can't appreciate good stuff.) 1 minute into "Endangered Species" I was hooked, I hadn't heard anything that funky in my life. (By then I had already been acquainted with Sly Stone and Stevie so that is saying something.) Just before I left for the States I renamed the ICQ account on the Singapore computer "Mothership Connection" as a tribute to them (and my family too of course.)

Remember: you can tune a piano but you can't tuna fish.

Sunday, 2 March 2008

Disneywar

I’m reading “Disneywar” by James Stewart. Of course in accordance with trying to buy myself new bookshelf space, it is one of the thickest books I have, on really thick paper, it’s a 600 page book thicker than some 900 page books I have. (There will be people who will naturally ask: why not buy a new bookshelf. That is the last thing I want. I have enough books at home as it is.) And it reads very easily. I don’t know why I bought it even though I had read a biography of Michael Eisner before but I’m really keen to finish it and sell it off so as to free up space.

It’s very entertaining, though. You read about all the crazy things that take place in Disney:

How Eisner and his number 2, Frank Wells, formed a great partnership which brought a lot of success to Disney in the early years.
How Eisner refused to promote his number 3 to the number 2 position after the number 2 died in a helicopter accident, and refused to pay him his bonus. Eventually the number 3 filed a suit and got more than his bonus. Later on, the number 3, Jeffrey Katzenberg left to form Dreamworks SKG with Spielberg and Geffen.
How Eisner roped in his then best friend, Michael Ovitz to be his number 2. Ovitz was then the most successful agent in Hollywood. Later on, he couldn’t manage the inevitable power struggles with the other people who felt themselves more entitled to the number 2 position, and basically was a lame duck for most of his 1.5 years at the company. He had to leave, his career was ruined, even though he received a $140 million severance paycheck.
Eisner had roped in Ovitz on impulse because Ovitz stayed at his side when he was going through heart surgery. Eisner had just lost his number 2 and number 3, and his wife wanted him to install a number 2 so that he didn’t have to manage everything himself. But after Ovitz’s firing, he didn’t appoint a president for a few more years.
How his playing his subordinates against each other ruined the unity of the company.
How, in order to “cut costs”, his subordinates felt compelled to sell away the domestic and foreign rights to the “Sixth Sense”, which was one of the biggest grossing films of all time.
How, because of the politics around the company, they fired the executive who wanted to make “Survivor” and “Who Wants to be a Millionaire”. They managed to hang on to the latter, but they lost “Survivor”.
How they fired the executives who championed “Lost” and “Desperate Housewives”.
How, because Eisner and Steve Jobs couldn’t get along, Eisner actually wanted to sell off Pixar.
How Roy Disney was always called Walt Disney’s “idiot nephew”, when he was the one who brought in Eisner in the first place. Later on, Eisner wanted to get rid of Roy Disney by invoking the mandatory retirement requirement for directors. Roy Disney managed to initiate a shareholder revolt in which 45% of the shareholders withheld their support of the CEO. This was the record highest percentage for a CEO of a major company.

Great entertaining reads.

Saturday, 1 March 2008

Cotillard

It's a great thing that Marion Cotillard won the Oscar for Brest - sorry - Best Actress. I first saw her in "Love Me if you Dare". My second thought was that she was a great actress and was the emotional soul of the film. (My first thought, naturally, was to find a nice place to violently frisk her.) So I liked the movie even though it was a little sappy at parts, and the characters were basically selfish assholes.

I would want to watch "La Vie en Rose" (incidentally "Love Me if you Dare" featured the song). She is a great actress with good emotional range. Very spontaneous, which is to say, she doesn't even have to act a lot. No longer as pretty as she was in "Love Me If You Dare", doesn't speak English well. My opinion is that all ze French people, if zey sbeak English, should sbeak wis ze French eksaunt like Arsene Venger, and not un Amerikan one. But zat ees a small gripe.

A bigger gripe is that they are making a movie called "Nine", I found this out when reading an interview of Cotillard. While ordinarily having a movie named after your blog is something to rejoice at, it appears to be a remake of "8 ½". THE "8 ½", one of the most amazing films ever made. God knows what they're thinking. I don't give a shit if Sophia Loren and Marion Cotillard are going to be in it. This is one of those things that shouldn't ever be touched.

What would Fellini think if he knew his masterpiece was going to be molested? It is not only a great film, it is the index page to all his other works. It is the work of a director, at the height of his powers, who nevertheless knows that it is the end of the first and greatest phase of his film career. Who ever says "Asa Nisi Masa" in this day and age? How are they going to shoot the scene where Claudina tells Fellini "You don't know how to love" three times?

Who's the motherfucker with this amount of hubris? It is none other than Rob Marshall, the guy behind "Chicago" (great visuals, no soul) and "Memoirs of a Geisha" (great visuals, no soul). You can expect "Nine" to be more of the same. I would have wanted a sensible guy to do a remake but then again if you were a sensible guy you would not want to touch this project with a 10 foot pole.

(Edit: I've since learnt that Nine was a broadway show before Rob Marshall touched it. Well and good, but even if Nine was half good, I wouldn't want Rob Marshall to touch it.)