A few random announcements before I start off. I have found that I have the honour of Sesame Street making a video all about me! Here it is.
Also following the well received post of mine, Asspartame Assplosion (ie somebody actually read it) I follow it up with some other ways I could have titled it:
Catastrophic catharsis
Public Enema
Scatological spectacular
Any other suggestions?
Thursday, 18 September 2008
Double life
One day, I suddenly thought about a play I wrote 9 years ago. In my play, a person bumps into a younger version of himself, and recoils in shock. He looks at the younger self and realises that the person is at the crossroads in his life: he could join the mafia, or he could have gone and become an artist. I suppose 30-somethings like us usually have these periods in our lives. I guess he watches in morbid fascination as the younger self fatefully goes on and makes the mistakes that the older self regrets making.
It shouldn't surprise you that the younger self is the person who was writing the play, and now I identify with the older self, and I was thinking about this play the other day, and it was like, "it's been 9 years already!"
The prospect of the younger person joining the mafia was a thinly disguised version of myself having signed away a number of years in my life serving a bond. It was this path that he chose in the end. I suppose we all had misgivings about those decisions then. Even though I portrayed this in the play as something that the person should not have done, I honestly can't really see myself pursuing an artistic career either. In the end, by a twist of fate, the older version takes the rap for the younger person having committed a smuggling operation.
It's kinda sad. But I'm glad I came up with that idea. It was a good one. In a lot of what you do, you know that there are 2 different people looking at you. One is your past self, who probably had some degree of expectation of what you would turn out to be, and one of them is your future self, who probably wish that your present self did something differently. I suppose this is universal, which is why if you were to write a play about something like this, it is not easy to go far wrong.
That was what I came up with when I joined the 24 hour playwriting competition for the first time. That was the last time I wrote a good play. It was funny but that was probably the end of my writing career, even as it was the peak of it. There was a first prize given, and that went to Ng Yi-Sheng, who's still writing and doing pretty well. There was 2 second prizes, and one of them went to Michelle Chong who is still acting. The other one went to me. Seems like all 3 of us obtained undergraduate degrees in the US. There were others who won in the student's category but they're you know kids.
Funny thing is: I was really grouchy when I packed up and it was time to leave. I think a lot of us were, after that ordeal. My disk drive broke down, and I had to go to an internet cafe to email my script to another computer that I could save the thing on. Towards the end you just have to write and write and write and too bad if your ideas are badly expressed, you just have to keep awake. But when I left, this notion popped into my head: I'm going to win this. It was a feeling, when you take a free kick, you know that the ball is going in, although 8 times out of 10 it doesn't happen. But I showed it to a friend after that, the same friend who helped me in another play 6 years earlier, and he told me he didn't see the point of it. I changed my mind, and later on when a letter came telling me to attend the prize giving ceremony I didn't bother showing up and wondered why they asked everybody to attend.
It was the most stupid decision of my life because I could have had my mugshot in the papers next to 2 people who would one day be famous. I had to go down to Theatreworks to collect my prize money.
5 years later, I entered the competition again when I shouldn't have. It was held in conjunction with "Romancing Singapore" and I ended up writing something fairly mediocre, because there were no life experiences to draw from. I suppose a Capricorn like me is always more comfortable writing about tragedy and fate. If I keep up my schedule of 1 competition every 5 years, I should be entering the one next year, but I don't really know if my mojo's gone.
The competition was held at the Singapore river, at one of those places near Robertson Quay which had just been rapidly built in a very short time. I suppose that was a nicer part of Singapore, even if people were essentially out in the open. Normally what they do is they give you 5 stimuli over the course of the 24 hours. You are to incorporate the stimuli into the play. That's not too difficult. The main trick is to put your play in the same physical setting as the place where the competition is held. So if it's being held near a river you write a play which takes place near a river. They will never show you something that doesn't belong near a river, and therefore it will not be hard to fit anything into your play.
The person who was in charge of it made a chance remark, "if we give you a stimulus, integrate it with your story. It's even better if you make it appear more than once." So that's when it hit me: write a play where everything happens twice. I called it "Double Life", because it was a little similar to a movie called "Double Life of Veronique", where 2 versions of the same person, played by the same actress, bump into each other. But then again, it's a little different in my case because there was some time travel involved.
It shouldn't surprise you that the younger self is the person who was writing the play, and now I identify with the older self, and I was thinking about this play the other day, and it was like, "it's been 9 years already!"
The prospect of the younger person joining the mafia was a thinly disguised version of myself having signed away a number of years in my life serving a bond. It was this path that he chose in the end. I suppose we all had misgivings about those decisions then. Even though I portrayed this in the play as something that the person should not have done, I honestly can't really see myself pursuing an artistic career either. In the end, by a twist of fate, the older version takes the rap for the younger person having committed a smuggling operation.
It's kinda sad. But I'm glad I came up with that idea. It was a good one. In a lot of what you do, you know that there are 2 different people looking at you. One is your past self, who probably had some degree of expectation of what you would turn out to be, and one of them is your future self, who probably wish that your present self did something differently. I suppose this is universal, which is why if you were to write a play about something like this, it is not easy to go far wrong.
That was what I came up with when I joined the 24 hour playwriting competition for the first time. That was the last time I wrote a good play. It was funny but that was probably the end of my writing career, even as it was the peak of it. There was a first prize given, and that went to Ng Yi-Sheng, who's still writing and doing pretty well. There was 2 second prizes, and one of them went to Michelle Chong who is still acting. The other one went to me. Seems like all 3 of us obtained undergraduate degrees in the US. There were others who won in the student's category but they're you know kids.
Funny thing is: I was really grouchy when I packed up and it was time to leave. I think a lot of us were, after that ordeal. My disk drive broke down, and I had to go to an internet cafe to email my script to another computer that I could save the thing on. Towards the end you just have to write and write and write and too bad if your ideas are badly expressed, you just have to keep awake. But when I left, this notion popped into my head: I'm going to win this. It was a feeling, when you take a free kick, you know that the ball is going in, although 8 times out of 10 it doesn't happen. But I showed it to a friend after that, the same friend who helped me in another play 6 years earlier, and he told me he didn't see the point of it. I changed my mind, and later on when a letter came telling me to attend the prize giving ceremony I didn't bother showing up and wondered why they asked everybody to attend.
It was the most stupid decision of my life because I could have had my mugshot in the papers next to 2 people who would one day be famous. I had to go down to Theatreworks to collect my prize money.
5 years later, I entered the competition again when I shouldn't have. It was held in conjunction with "Romancing Singapore" and I ended up writing something fairly mediocre, because there were no life experiences to draw from. I suppose a Capricorn like me is always more comfortable writing about tragedy and fate. If I keep up my schedule of 1 competition every 5 years, I should be entering the one next year, but I don't really know if my mojo's gone.
The competition was held at the Singapore river, at one of those places near Robertson Quay which had just been rapidly built in a very short time. I suppose that was a nicer part of Singapore, even if people were essentially out in the open. Normally what they do is they give you 5 stimuli over the course of the 24 hours. You are to incorporate the stimuli into the play. That's not too difficult. The main trick is to put your play in the same physical setting as the place where the competition is held. So if it's being held near a river you write a play which takes place near a river. They will never show you something that doesn't belong near a river, and therefore it will not be hard to fit anything into your play.
The person who was in charge of it made a chance remark, "if we give you a stimulus, integrate it with your story. It's even better if you make it appear more than once." So that's when it hit me: write a play where everything happens twice. I called it "Double Life", because it was a little similar to a movie called "Double Life of Veronique", where 2 versions of the same person, played by the same actress, bump into each other. But then again, it's a little different in my case because there was some time travel involved.
Sunday, 14 September 2008
When You're Gone
I think I will write 1 piece about songwriting, especially since Avril Lavigne is coming has been to Singapore.
What a song like “When you’re Gone” tells me is that Avril Lavigne is one of the most inconsistent songwriters out there today. Let’s start on the plus side. This song has a killer chorus. It is a CHORUS. It’s one of those soaring sing-along choruses that will easily stand alongside others like “My Finest Hour” (Sundays), “Voices Carry” (Til Tuesday), “I’ll Stand By You” (Pretenders).
This is one of those songs where the rest of the song somewhat pales beside the chorus. I can picture what happened: a great chorus pops into you head 1 day, and you got to write it down. But a great chorus doesn’t stand on it’s own, a great chorus is a magnificent roof, but you still need the walls to hold the thing up. So you write verses, verses which in this case are not really bad but are fairly undistinguished when put aside that CHORUS. It’s a fairly common problem that when you get a great chorus, the build up to it is not so great. There’s a bit of imbalance, and it’s like seeing a woman with fantastic butt and legs, but flat chest and mediocre face. It happens all the time. (I mean this for both songs and women.)
And she seems almost determined to follow up a great line like “when you walk away I count the steps that you take” with a clichéd clunker like “do you see how much I need you right now?”. I mean, common sense would have you follow that up with another line that begins with “when you…”, right? Unless she thought about it for 1 hour and couldn’t come up with something.
Similarly the main hook, “when you’re gone the pieces of my heart are missing you” is a good line, but the chorus ends with a limp “I miss you” (as if we didn’t know that already.)
But then I’m reluctant to criticize teenagers. There was this review which put it nicely (“everything is either a blowjob or a castration”). Every thing about her is black and white. Even her face looks like a panda. I remember what it was like to be a teenager, and I know that I will never look at life with such certainty again as I did when I was younger. Well let’s hope she stays in the business long enough for us to know what a middle-aged Lavigne sounds like.
I rate her as a songwriter. A good songwriter is somebody who has a knack for that catchy chorus. She reminds me a bit of Debbie Gibson (although their images are quite different.) The teenage precocious songwriters with high voices and the knack for hooky choruses.
What a song like “When you’re Gone” tells me is that Avril Lavigne is one of the most inconsistent songwriters out there today. Let’s start on the plus side. This song has a killer chorus. It is a CHORUS. It’s one of those soaring sing-along choruses that will easily stand alongside others like “My Finest Hour” (Sundays), “Voices Carry” (Til Tuesday), “I’ll Stand By You” (Pretenders).
This is one of those songs where the rest of the song somewhat pales beside the chorus. I can picture what happened: a great chorus pops into you head 1 day, and you got to write it down. But a great chorus doesn’t stand on it’s own, a great chorus is a magnificent roof, but you still need the walls to hold the thing up. So you write verses, verses which in this case are not really bad but are fairly undistinguished when put aside that CHORUS. It’s a fairly common problem that when you get a great chorus, the build up to it is not so great. There’s a bit of imbalance, and it’s like seeing a woman with fantastic butt and legs, but flat chest and mediocre face. It happens all the time. (I mean this for both songs and women.)
And she seems almost determined to follow up a great line like “when you walk away I count the steps that you take” with a clichéd clunker like “do you see how much I need you right now?”. I mean, common sense would have you follow that up with another line that begins with “when you…”, right? Unless she thought about it for 1 hour and couldn’t come up with something.
Similarly the main hook, “when you’re gone the pieces of my heart are missing you” is a good line, but the chorus ends with a limp “I miss you” (as if we didn’t know that already.)
But then I’m reluctant to criticize teenagers. There was this review which put it nicely (“everything is either a blowjob or a castration”). Every thing about her is black and white. Even her face looks like a panda. I remember what it was like to be a teenager, and I know that I will never look at life with such certainty again as I did when I was younger. Well let’s hope she stays in the business long enough for us to know what a middle-aged Lavigne sounds like.
I rate her as a songwriter. A good songwriter is somebody who has a knack for that catchy chorus. She reminds me a bit of Debbie Gibson (although their images are quite different.) The teenage precocious songwriters with high voices and the knack for hooky choruses.
Sunday, 7 September 2008
Live and Let Die
When you were young and your heart was an open book
You used to say live and let live
But in this ever changing world in which we live in
Makes you give in and cry
Say live and let die
- Paul McCartney, "Live and Let Die"
Somebody put a few pictures of an obscure production by the NUS law faculty online. Through the Proust effect I suddenly remembered about what it was like to attend that production.
It was a musical about the Tiananmen square revolt, and it was written by a Law student who by coincidence was a senior of mine in my school. When I was in sec 3 I saw a school play of his, and I thought, this is great. I didn’t know that sec 4 students could write so well. Next year I wrote a play and staged it for the same event, and although it was a less happy experience than I expected, it was a dream come true for me and it feels great when you can cross out 1 item from your “things to do with your life” list.
But that was not the reason I attended the production. It was because of a violinist who was playing a bit part in that production. I had a crush on that violinist, who was codfish, whom you know from a few articles back.
I can still tell you what it was like to go there. I didn’t have a “reason” to be there. It was weird. There were ppl I sorda knew, and they were like, “who’s he with?”
To recap, I had met codfish while temping, and probably started having a crush on her without fully realising it at that time. But I KIV’ed her, probably for 4 years and then after a chance meeting we started corresponding by mail. (Yes when I say that I’m KIV’ing somebody it’s not the same as saying that I’m giving her up).
I was a little bruised and battered after my first year studying overseas. But towards the end of that first year I started writing to her. After I came home for a visit, we started talking on the phone. She happened to mention that she was involved in this production.
It took place at a location that almost certainly doesn’t exist anymore: the old harbourfront auditorium that got converted into offices probably.
I can certainly tell you that if I hadn’t lived through those emotions before and somebody tried to describe them to me, I wouldn’t have the faintest clue what he was talking about. But when you’re teetering on the brink, it’s this mixture of awe and fear and at the same time the expectancy of a wondrous and delightful experience. Even back then I was a little old to never have asked out a girl before.
I thought it was weird for me to pop into the dressing room and say hi when I hadn’t yet gotten to know her better. So I left. I didn’t want to admit that I had gone to a show all alone (I had faith in the playwright, though but still…) just because I had a schoolboy crush on some obscure fiddler in one corner of the orchestral pit.
Well even though I was pretty pleased that it turned out to be more than just a schoolboy crush, even though we did end up as friends after that, I ended up severing ties with her a few years ago. Probably I was fed up with her condescending attitude, probably we found that I was getting less interested in film (she’s a film graduate student, and I wonder how her PhD’s coming along – it’s been quite some time already), and she was emphatically no engineer. She used to say that the best thing I said to her was that I would never leave her. I think I just wanted to piss her off.
I’ve been tempted to get back in touch with her, particularly after one time when she gave me a shout out on her blog. I decided not to, and for some funny reason not long after that her blog was locked.
I was a much more open person in those days. I genuinely thought I was going to become a new person – kinder, gentler, more open. Some parts of my teenage years were really nasty and it seemed to be all over at that point. But things didn’t work out. Or maybe I just didn’t have enough faith. There was a haze of confusion after the relationship ended, but after that for some strange reason I turned away from that kinder gentler thing. I became more hard, more dead. Maybe it was too much maths.
And that’s why that picture startled me a little bit – because you go back to all those times when there were forks in the road in your life, and you’re always wondering, “what would have happened if I had turned out differently? What if I went to this school instead of that, worked for this company instead of that?” What if I became the kinder gentler version of numbernine instead of being lazy and becoming a spoilt brat?
She looked great. She always looks great. But there’s something hidden, something vaguely inscrutable about her, as though she wears a mask. She looks a little like a sphinx. I’d wager she’s got a great sphincter although to my eternal regret I never got to find out.
She told me details of her unhappy childhood. At first, I thought, OK – not bad we got that much in common. (There is a significant correlation between those people who have unhappy childhoods and those people who leave their countries after they grow up.) But I don’t know how to put this nicely – she’s damaged goods. I wish she had her head screwed on properly – but if she did, she would be out of my league. That’s the tragic part – at that time I genuinely believed that I would not have had a shot at a chiobu unless she was a little sick in the head. I could have saved myself some problems if I had had walked out on her, but I stuck this one out because I believed that if I found somebody better she would want to walk out on me. I guess that’s why you find some people getting onto heroin even though they know what it entails – because they don’t really think they’re going to find other better forms of happiness.
For somebody as good looking as her to not be able to hold on to a permanent relationship, that is sad. For somebody as smart as her not to be able to achieve more in life, that is also sad.
So as much through laziness I will not contact her again. But during those first few days while I was corresponding with her, I was happy. It was a wild crazy sort of happiness in the beginning, and maybe a calm peaceful sort of happiness before all the problems started. And when I look back, I think that it’s that happiness that I miss and not her. That as much as she inspired it, I also created much of it in my own mind’s eye. Except that it’s probably long ago enough for me to not really understand it anymore.
Tuesday, 2 September 2008
Gustav
It’s been 3 years since Katrina. 1 year after that, Douglas Brinkley published his mammoth book on Katrina, “Great Deluge”. 1 year after that, it appeared in a bargain basin and I got it. 1 year later, I’m almost through with that book.
I suppose you’re wondering, why was I so interested in Katrina? When there are floods in India which are far more destructive, in terms of lives and property?
I suppose that if you were to look closely at most natural disasters they would all turn up plenty of drama, and it’s also that New Orleans is in America, and is therefore the most well reported of all natural disasters.
Why do you think that Cyclone Nargis shone the light on the Burmese junta more than the Indian Ocean tsunami? Because there was less reporting on Burma for the latter incident, and because aid workers were scrambling to more prominent places in Aceh, Sri Lanka and Thailand than to think too much about Burma. But when cyclone Nargis hit, Burma got condemned as the place where the junta was collecting everything for itself and not distributing it to the people.
I guess it has to do with how it’s New Orleans, birthplace of jazz. How it happened to the world’s richest country but they weren’t able to save their poorest people.
It was also a frightening picture of all hell breaking loose, of what would happen to America’s ghettoes if one day the USA were to stop being so wealthy. A society where everything had broken down but everything was kept under wraps had turned into one which was not only full of dysfunctional people but was also a natural disaster zone.
There were robberies, rapes, looting, rampaging, sniping. There was the hellholes that were the convention centre and the football stadium, where people were pissed off, had nothing to eat or drink, there was no sanitation, and people were crapping all over in public. (Although you must imagine that the situation is probably even more dire in places like Aceh and Bihar India, except that those ppl are OK with no sanitation because they never had it anyway.) There was the callous incompetence of the cronies that Bush 2 had appointed to the key aid agencies in the US.
It was as though somebody up there had overturned a very large rock, and exposed the festering reality underneath the shiny façade. Suddenly a lot of things which were simmering under the surface just exploded. The friendly black people who used to frequent your stores suddenly became part of the rampaging horde of looters. The smiling neighbourhood policeman suddenly became the guy who shut you away from a shelter. The mayor, normally full of oratorical bluster, suddenly became the coward who couldn’t do anything.
What made this special and unique though, was the presence of snipers everywhere who would just shoot aid workers and make it impossible for them to do their job without risking their lives.
But in the end, why did I spend so much time reading that book? I guess I just have this bad habit of picking up a book on a whim and finishing it because I can’t stand to leave books unfinished once I’ve touched them.
I suppose you’re wondering, why was I so interested in Katrina? When there are floods in India which are far more destructive, in terms of lives and property?
I suppose that if you were to look closely at most natural disasters they would all turn up plenty of drama, and it’s also that New Orleans is in America, and is therefore the most well reported of all natural disasters.
Why do you think that Cyclone Nargis shone the light on the Burmese junta more than the Indian Ocean tsunami? Because there was less reporting on Burma for the latter incident, and because aid workers were scrambling to more prominent places in Aceh, Sri Lanka and Thailand than to think too much about Burma. But when cyclone Nargis hit, Burma got condemned as the place where the junta was collecting everything for itself and not distributing it to the people.
I guess it has to do with how it’s New Orleans, birthplace of jazz. How it happened to the world’s richest country but they weren’t able to save their poorest people.
It was also a frightening picture of all hell breaking loose, of what would happen to America’s ghettoes if one day the USA were to stop being so wealthy. A society where everything had broken down but everything was kept under wraps had turned into one which was not only full of dysfunctional people but was also a natural disaster zone.
There were robberies, rapes, looting, rampaging, sniping. There was the hellholes that were the convention centre and the football stadium, where people were pissed off, had nothing to eat or drink, there was no sanitation, and people were crapping all over in public. (Although you must imagine that the situation is probably even more dire in places like Aceh and Bihar India, except that those ppl are OK with no sanitation because they never had it anyway.) There was the callous incompetence of the cronies that Bush 2 had appointed to the key aid agencies in the US.
It was as though somebody up there had overturned a very large rock, and exposed the festering reality underneath the shiny façade. Suddenly a lot of things which were simmering under the surface just exploded. The friendly black people who used to frequent your stores suddenly became part of the rampaging horde of looters. The smiling neighbourhood policeman suddenly became the guy who shut you away from a shelter. The mayor, normally full of oratorical bluster, suddenly became the coward who couldn’t do anything.
What made this special and unique though, was the presence of snipers everywhere who would just shoot aid workers and make it impossible for them to do their job without risking their lives.
But in the end, why did I spend so much time reading that book? I guess I just have this bad habit of picking up a book on a whim and finishing it because I can’t stand to leave books unfinished once I’ve touched them.
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