The Girlfriend
Every band has a disruptive influence on their music which is blamed for breaking the band up. But seldom has this influence been encapsulated in 1 person: Yoko Ono. She was Japanese. She was an Avant-Garde artist in her own right, and even if she was not as great an artist as John Lennon was, she had a tremendous force of personality, and was a great influence on him. The Beatles always had girlfriends whom they got along with with various degrees of success, but they were second class citizens, and a lot of the time they played a marginal role in the band. This was until Yoko Ono came along.
Yoko Ono was a polarizing figure. Some admired her for being a feminist pioneer. Opinion is divided about how talented she really was. Some were happy that John had finally found the true love of his life. Others despised her for being a talentless groupie, and – well – Japanese. But after she came along, John Lennon broke the golden rule that girlfriends don’t come to the studio. She started putting in her contribution, most notably to the song “Revolution No 9”. She was an unwanted 5th member of the band, and more significantly, it was clear that after she came along that John Lennon’s heart was no longer in the Beatles. There is no doubt that would have happened anyway with or without Yoko Ono, but she now bears the unwanted tag of being the woman who broke up the Beatles.
There would be other bands that had their Yoko Ono. The most famous one was Nirvana, and Kurt Cobain’s widow, Courtney Love was always called his “Yoko Ono”
Artistic growth
Most bands do not go through the 3 phases of being a lowly pub band, then being teen idols, and lastly being highly respected artists, but since at least 1 of these labels apply to the majority of bands. The Beatles came of age at a time when the rest of pop music was highly experimental and constantly breaking new ground at a rate that has not been matched since. They were innovative in many ways.
Right from the start, they were good musicians and songwriters. But as time went on, they progressed from the teenybopper head shaking “woooo!” songs to write songs of greater depth and sophistry. They wrote about sex, drugs, politics. They blended surrealism into their art. They achieved sound effects in the studio that had never been done before (but then they were one of the very few artists with the clout to work in the studio practically full time, and with an unlimited budget.) And what they didn’t innovate, they co-opted and assimilated. They easily met the challenges of the Beach Boys, the Byrds and Bob Dylan because they were able to work the influences of these people into their own art. Considering that they were only around for 8 years after they released their first recordings, their rate of growth was incredible.
However, many in Singapore would mainly remember the early days. When they started growing long hair and smoking pot, I think it was too outrageous for the conservative society they had here.
It is probably true that all artists need to evolve and cover new ground in order to remain creatively vital. But soon the band members would hanker for greater artistic freedom, which led into…
The Artistic Differences
In the beginning of their heyday, the Beatles were a tight unit. Much tighter than in the Sutcliffe / Best days. Under Brian Epstein, they presented a united front to the public. The songs were all listed down as Lennon-McCartney songs, and to a great extent, that was true. Even though most of the songs were mainly written by 1 of the two, there were very few that didn’t have a contribution by the other one. However they were always photographed together, and they always played music together.
However, from “Revolver” onwards, they started having more separate identities. It was around the time when George Harrison started writing music. The later songs were more obviously either “Lennon songs” (songs about the ego, surrealist and crazy stuff, punkish rebellious ones) or “McCartney songs” (more melodious, more harmonically sophisticated, character portraits, nursery rhymes). By the time of the White Album, it was a pastiche of solo recordings from each of the 4 Beatles. The famous inner sleeve was the first time they were photographed separately. By the time of “Let It Be”, they were hardly talking to each other. They only patched things up for “Abbey Road”, but that was a Paul McCartney dominated album.
How many other bands were like this? One of the most cited reasons for bands breaking up are “artistic differences”, because this is the one where nobody is really to be blamed, whether the excuse is true or not is another matter.
India
It is true that at some point, the band would want to pursue more exotic avenues. The Beatles went to India to study meditation under an Indian guru, but soon got disenchanted with him. John Lennon wrote the sarcastic “Sexy Sadie” to diss him, and at the last moment, was persuaded to change the original title, which was “Maharishi”.
George Harrison was the one who pushed the band to experiment with meditation and Indian culture. His Indian inspired recordings are not the most well regarded parts of the Beatles canon, but it was not a bad thing that the Beatles wrote a lot of good songs about spirituality (and drugs).
After the Beatles, it was a wide practice for a successful pop band to embrace a foreign culture and work it into their music. The Rolling Stones’ “Paint it Black” had Brian Jones on sitar. Jimi Hendrix had Hindu images on his second album. Paul Simon had his African adventures. The Police had their cod reggae. Madonna had her Kabbalah. Although none went so far as Peter Gabriel, who set up a world music consortium. Each of them would be criticized for not being sufficiently authentic and representative of that foreign element, but then again, each of them would be instrumental in bringing that world music to the attention of a wider audience.
Breakup and Death
It was not that clear at that time, but the breaking up of the Beatles was a fantastic career move. The Beatles never stayed together long enough to see their standards go down hill, although this did happen to each of the individual members. Towards the end, John Lennon was the most unhappy of the Beatles, partly because he felt that his position as the lead Beatle as being usurped by Paul McCartney. (But it was his fault that McCartney was always better at dealing with fame, and was the more hardworking one.) He was depressed and suicidal over getting battered for having found the true love of his life. Their business affairs were in a mess, and both John and Paul had different people representing them. Artistically, they grew apart. Their friendship was breaking down. It was the perfect storm in the making.
So the only surprise here was that at first, only one of them wanted to break up. This was understandable because they were still the number 1 band around, and because they were still functioning pretty well as a unit.
Probably no other band managed to mythologise their breakup as well as the Beatles did. Since the Beatles were always in the news, the various reasons for the breakup were well known to the fans. But this is probably the only time a band of their stature broke up at the height of their success. (Only other examples I can think of offhand were the Police and the Smiths, but although they were great bands, they weren’t in the same league as the Beatles.) They never stayed around long enough to be Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a shadow of their former self, flogging their dead horses over and over again. *cough* Rolling Stones *cough*.
Both John and Paul wrote about their break ups. John Lennon wrote about it on his song, “God”. (“the dream is over / …. And so my friends, we’ll just have to carry on / the dream is over”). Paul McCartney wrote about it on his “Let it Be”.
The lesson to other bands is that you will probably be more fondly remembered if you break up at the height of your powers, and you don’t tarnish your legacy by releasing inferior stuff afterwards. The Beatles did re-record an old, unreleased song, “Free as a Bird”, and it got a pummeling in the press for not living up to the old stuff.
It was the ideal breakup, a wholesale breakup. Not 1 important band member leaving, and the rest heading in a new direction, as was the case with many other bands.
For the 10 years after the end of the Beatles, John and Paul were hardly speaking to each other. Their finances, and the lawsuits ensured that the relations during the 70s were, while not entirely acrimonious, highly fraught with tension. Lennon and McCartney never got a chance to work together again when John Lennon was murdered. It is quite conceivable that if he had lived, they would have collaborated on something. The Beatles often guested on each other’s solo records here and there.
The fact that there was never a Beatles reunion only helped to cement the legacy of the Beatles. It also “helped” that in their solo work, they never accomplished anything as great as when they were the Beatles.
Reason number 4: They wrote the template.
The Beatles were lucky in a way, because their reign of the pop music world took place when pop music was undergoing great changes, in fact, when society itself was undergoing great changes. Pop music at the beginning of the 60s were a bunch of rock and rollers who sang really nerdy, outdated music. By the end of the 60s, it had reached a level of artistic sophistication that hasn’t really made very much progress, even today, 40 years later. Sorry guys, we’re still living in the shadow of the 60s.
The Beatles matched the progression of 60s pop, step by step, and in many instances, were the innovators.
The British Invasion
OK, since this took place a mere 20 years after D Day, this phrase had a resonance it doesn’t have today. But they were the first British pop group to make it big in America, and are probably the main reason why the UK is a main centre of (English) pop music today. They typified many UK bands: emphasis on strong songwriting, catchy music. Urban, working class. Substance is a must, style is optional. Emphasis on simplicity.
They wrote their own songs.
Or more accurately, John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote most of the Beatles’ Songs. George Harrison was an above average writer (and he wrote a few classics) but he just wasn’t in their league. The Beatles created the expectation that great pop bands should write their own songs. To understand why this is significant, just compare this to Chinese pop music: you have the singer, who concentrates of singing and looking good, and they sing songs written for them by professional writers.
The legacy of this is mixed, because bands that run out of good new material would inevitably go downhill. There were a lot of bands out there who were generally good with their instruments, that would generally benefit from having other people write material for them.
The Studio
One of the innovations during the 60s was the use of the studio as a special instrument for recording effects. This innovation was not unique to the Beatles, and was also associated with others like Jimi Hendrix, the Beach Boys and Phil Spector. But studio tricks made great strides forward under the Beatles, and after them, a lot of other people would be very inventive about creating interesting sound effects for their music.
They created albums
It used to be that albums were just a collection of singles, or they were just there to put 3 or 4 of the current singles in the same place, and padded up with filler. But Sergeant Pepper was the first of what was to be the concept album, where the whole album was a song cycle, or at least all the songs put together would tell a story, the entire album, instead of the song would be the basic unit.
This concept concept would be responsible for both a lot of artistic triumphs, and a lot of pretentious hogwash.
Sex and Drugs
As said before, the 60s were a time of the collective loss of innocence for people living in the West. It was a time of the sexual revolution, which more or less lasted until the emergence of AIDS. People started experimenting with a lot of drugs. Those were the times. The Beatles of course were not responsible for this, but having 4 young and attractive gentlemen in front of a screaming horde of teenage female fans did not
So – the legacy of the Beatles. Now who wants to say that they’re not the greatest band ever?
Sunday, 27 September 2009
Saturday, 26 September 2009
Beatles - 1
Since this blog is named after a Beatles song, I think that I should be writing about the Beatles.
I didn’t know that they re-issued all the Beatles’ albums until I was looking through my favourite music online magazine (OK not my favourite, but it’s one of the most complete ones) and found it chock full of Beatles reviews. I’m not surprised at the release date of the re-issues: 9/9/09. Nine was John Lennon’s favourite number. He wrote “Revolution No 9”, which is actually the most atypical Beatles song of them all.
It’s possible that nobody ever dominated an art form the way that the Beatles dominated pop music.
However, not everybody is that crazy about the Beatles. Once, my sister (one snippet of history: we used to quarrel all the time but she became good friends with me when she found out how fantastic my music collection was) asked me, “you know, I like the Beach Boys and the Kinks more than the Beatles. I always had a few songs I really liked. This isn’t true of the Beatles.” OK, fair enough. Then I remember something my school buddy said years ago when we were discussing music: “Why do people worship the Beatles and why do they worship Shakespeare? I don’t see anything really great about those two. People only regard these guys highly because everybody are sheep.” (My friend despised people who followed the crowd and a lot of that rubbed off on me.)
I don’t know about Shakespeare, but I can say this about the Beatles. Both their statements are not wrong. None of my favourite albums are by the Beatles. But I can still understand why they are the greatest pop group of them all.
Reason number 1: they meant something to everybody.
The Beatles may not have written your favourite songs, but they have produced something for every segment of the market you could possibly think of. Teen bopper? (“Please Mr Postman”) Straight forward pop? (“Help!”) Broadway show tunes? (“Til There was You”) Rock and Roll? (“Rock and Roll Music”) Brill Building? (“Baby It’s You”) Folk? (“You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away”) High school reunion music? (“In My Life”) Romantic ballads? (“And I Love Her”) Drug music? (“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”) Hard rock? (“Come Together”) Punk? (“Helter Skelter”) Blues? (“Yer Blues”) Surrealism? (“Strawberry Fields Forever”) String Quartet chamber music? (“Eleanor Rigby”) Nursery Rhymes? (“Ob la di, Ob la da”) Funeral music? (“Let it Be”) Acoustic Ballad? (“Blackbird”) Romantic ballads? (“Something”) Heartbreak song? (“Yesterday”)
And not only did they cover a large ground, they often wrote some of the best songs of each genre they were involved with. The Beatles were also the most covered band ever. Apparently there are 1800 versions of “Yesterday” recorded. This is probably a record. In a way, the Beatles were everywhere. In another sense, they are invisible. Most songs are distinctive enough that the identity of an artist is forever associated with the song. For many Beatles songs, there are many instances where anybody could have taken that song and made it their own. Perhaps this is one of their weakness: many of their songs lack the distinctive force of personality of the artist. But it is also a strength, that each song exists in its own right, rather than sounding like a “typical Beatles song”. There are no typical Beatles songs.
Nirvana wrote “I Hate Myself And I Want to Die”. Oasis wrote “Live Forever”. These are 2 of the 90s bands which most consciously take the mantle of the Beatles, although other than having a lot of loud guitars, they have nothing else in common. Frank Sinatra was famously contemptuous of rock music: he covered “Something”. Classical music fans usually turn their noses up at most of pop music, except at the Beatles.
Reason number 2: They were extremely popular
There are only a few names which have completely dominated pop music for a short period of time. Frank Sinatra. Elvis. The Beatles. Michael Jackson. That’s about it. There was 1 week in 1964 when the #5 song, the #4 song, the #3 song, the #2 song and the #1 song were from the Beatles. That is the one and only time it happened in the UK since people kept records.
Reason number 3: They were the typical pop group.
If there is a bible for pop music, it was written by the Beatles. Just as Adam was the archetypal man, the Beatles were the archetypal pop group. Just as many God fearing Christians ask themselves, “what would Jesus do?”, most pop groups ask themselves, “what did the Beatles do?”
Most famous pop groups have their mythology, or famous stories about them. Jimi Hendrix had his setting his guitar on fire, and dying young by choking on his vomit. (The second story has been revised lately: apparently he was murdered.) Cat Stevens had his conversion to Islam. Elvis had his stint in the Army. Sly Stone had his “happy optimistic phase” and his “dark druggy phase” and right in the middle was “Thank You (Fallatinme Be Mice Elf Agin)”. Pink Floyd had their crazy diamond Syd Barrett.
But the Beatles had the greatest and richest mythology of them all. It just seemed that they shared DNA with just so many other bands.
4 personalities
To be sure, there are 2 ways of looking at the Beatles. There were 4 people who were close like brothers (and this is a compelling version, because the individual members of the Beatles never achieved as much artistic success as they did while in the Beatles.) The other way is that it was John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and 2 others. Both versions are equally valid.
What made the Beatles so compelling collectively is that they were all very different people, but they represented molds that many band members who followed in their wake belonged to. There was John, the fiery, sarcastic and arrogant one. There was Paul, the cute one (but underneath that cuteness was a hugely ambitious social climber). There was George, the shy one but the best guitar player of the lot. There was Ringo, who was exceptional because, even though he is quite the solid, dependable drummer, is the least talented of the bunch.
Think about the Smiths: Morrissey is the John Lennon, and Marr is the George. Take That: Robbie Williams is the John, and Gary Barlow is the Paul. U2: Larry Mullen is the Paul, the good looking one. Bono is the John, The Edge is the George, and Adam Clayton Jr is the Ringo. The Police: Stewart Copeland is the John, Sting is the Paul, Andy Summers is the George.
We know that sweet and sour is a great combination. Paul was sweet and John was sour. They needed each other: John was the cutting edge, and Paul was the one who appealed to the masses. Although Paul has a quite an unfair reputation for being a conservative, and the less artistic one, in fact his best songs had an artistic sophistication beyond what John was capable of. But you always could rely on John to come up with a crazy artistic concept. It was quite apparent to both of them right from the beginning that they needed each other.
John Lennon was the id, Paul McCartney was the ego, and George Martin, who was their producer, and who had the best musical background, was the superego. The Beatles were also very interesting because they had a two headed leadership. No one personality dominated the band, so you could see more than one facet of the many-headed monster.
The other two? George was no slouch. He was not a Clapton or a Hendrix, but he could play a mean guitar all the same. He was ambivalent about fame. Ringo Starr bore the fame with equanimity, although they had to deal with less than John and Paul. But they were famous together, they were the Fab Four, so they had to deal with it. And they were all level headed enough to be good at dealing with the pressures of fame. I think they were important because their presence turned the Beatles into a family. The other two more famous ones could always rely on them, until the end. Come to think of it, the big irony of the Beatles is that John Lennon, the first Beatle, and the leader in the beginning, was the one least able to deal with the fame.
They all had their turns at the mike. They also wrote a song about friends that never leave you in spite of your inadequacies, and not surprisingly they let Ringo sing it. The Beatles were a very effective unit because of their contrasting and complementary personalities.
Art School
It has become a truism that bands come from Art School. John Lennon couldn’t fit in anywhere, so he went to Art School. Paul McCartney was good at school, but it all went downhill after he joined the Beatles. It was just as well that they all had a sense of aesthetics: appreciation of beauty is something that is rarely confined to any one art form. This brings us to another great cliché of bands: the ones who were with them at the beginning, but left before they became famous.
The could-have-beens
There were 2 more Beatles: Stu Sutcliffe, and Pete Best. Sutcliffe was John’s art school classmate, and a talented artist in his own right. He imparted a sense of aesthetics to the band, and helped shape their early image, in the style of the Rockers. But he died young. In any case, he wasn’t terribly talented in music, and he plonked along on his bass guitar. He didn’t get along with Paul McCartney, since both of them were vying to be John’s number two. Eventually he knew that he didn’t belong there, and he left the band.
Pete Best was another story. He was a drummer, and the most handsome of the four. He played with them throughout the Hamburg days, but he was sacked, almost on the eve of the Beatles getting popular. No reasons were given, but a few have been suggested: he didn’t fit in, he was too handsome and popular with the girls, and Ringo was simply a better drummer.
Needless to say, the early band members who didn’t make it are part of the rock band tradition.
The pub band
The Beatles paid their dues before getting famous. John Lennon formed his own band in his teenage years, and for a long time, was the only competent member of the band, until he met Paul, and shortly after that, George. It’s another tradition that even the greatest bands have humble beginnings. But that is not always true: there are bands formed by members who were already famous: these bands are called superbands. Examples are Led Zep, Emerson Lake Palmer, and Traffic.
Hamburg
The rite of passage for a band is that they play on the road, overworked and underpaid, while they earn their experience points. Nobody could accuse the Beatles of not paying their dues. They also first became stars of the pub circuit in Hamburg, before making it big back at home in Liverpool, and like so many other bands after them, first made it big overseas before a triumphant homecoming.
Record Company Rejections
Before the internet, and before punk, you had to sign with a major label if you had any hope of making it big. The Decca audition was infamous because they went down to the label, made a few cuts over a few days (some of which were below their best) and the record company listened to them and decided they weren’t good enough, and anyway boy bands were on the way out. This has gone down in history as the biggest mistake ever made by any record company executive.
The Manager
The Beatles had one of the more colourful managers. Brian Epstein was different from the Beatles in so many ways: he was a son of a rich man, Jewish, and gay. He was gay at a time when it was not acceptable to be gay – the gay movement would only come up in the 1970s. He saw them while they were performing in Liverpool and got so turned on that he decided he was going to manage them. He was instrumental to their early success, promoting them as a cute boy band, and shaping their image. However his role became more and more marginal as the Beatles started to grow in other directions.
John Lennon was famously contemptuous of him, and treated him cruelly, although Epstein seemed to enjoy the sadomasochism of it all. When singing his song from “Magical Mystery Tour”, John allegedly sang “Baby you’re a rich fag Jew” instead of “Baby you’re a rich man, you”.
In the end, his behaviour became more and more volatile, and his drug taking spiraled out of control, aided by his anxiety that he was being cut out of the decision making process. He overdosed on drugs and died. His death was a big shock to the band, but in the long run, it resulted in their taking over their own management. They were quite incompetent at managing their affairs, and this was the beginning of the end for the Beatles.
In the wake of their breakup, their affairs were in such a mess that it took years of lawsuits to sort everything up. This state of affairs was the main reason why it took so long to remaster all of the Beatles’ stuff.
Beatlemania
It was crazy, as was said earlier. The enduring image of the Beatles is of 4 guys being mobbed by fans wherever they went, of teenage females going crazy and fainting, of their having to sneak out of back doors to avoid being mobbed by crazy fans. In the middle of their career, they quit playing live for good.
Their relationship with the media evolved, as was the case of many of their peers. The press, in their early days were greatly supportive of the Beatles. But as time went by, they started getting hounded by the media. John Lennon took the brunt of it, for his statement about being “more popular than Jesus”, and for his relationship with Yoko Ono.
Many bands that followed would follow this script: the initial euphoria of fame, giving way to the cracking up under the pressure. The claustrophobic life leading to disenchantment with the high life. The drugs for escape. An initially receptive press that ultimately turns against them.
I didn’t know that they re-issued all the Beatles’ albums until I was looking through my favourite music online magazine (OK not my favourite, but it’s one of the most complete ones) and found it chock full of Beatles reviews. I’m not surprised at the release date of the re-issues: 9/9/09. Nine was John Lennon’s favourite number. He wrote “Revolution No 9”, which is actually the most atypical Beatles song of them all.
It’s possible that nobody ever dominated an art form the way that the Beatles dominated pop music.
However, not everybody is that crazy about the Beatles. Once, my sister (one snippet of history: we used to quarrel all the time but she became good friends with me when she found out how fantastic my music collection was) asked me, “you know, I like the Beach Boys and the Kinks more than the Beatles. I always had a few songs I really liked. This isn’t true of the Beatles.” OK, fair enough. Then I remember something my school buddy said years ago when we were discussing music: “Why do people worship the Beatles and why do they worship Shakespeare? I don’t see anything really great about those two. People only regard these guys highly because everybody are sheep.” (My friend despised people who followed the crowd and a lot of that rubbed off on me.)
I don’t know about Shakespeare, but I can say this about the Beatles. Both their statements are not wrong. None of my favourite albums are by the Beatles. But I can still understand why they are the greatest pop group of them all.
Reason number 1: they meant something to everybody.
The Beatles may not have written your favourite songs, but they have produced something for every segment of the market you could possibly think of. Teen bopper? (“Please Mr Postman”) Straight forward pop? (“Help!”) Broadway show tunes? (“Til There was You”) Rock and Roll? (“Rock and Roll Music”) Brill Building? (“Baby It’s You”) Folk? (“You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away”) High school reunion music? (“In My Life”) Romantic ballads? (“And I Love Her”) Drug music? (“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”) Hard rock? (“Come Together”) Punk? (“Helter Skelter”) Blues? (“Yer Blues”) Surrealism? (“Strawberry Fields Forever”) String Quartet chamber music? (“Eleanor Rigby”) Nursery Rhymes? (“Ob la di, Ob la da”) Funeral music? (“Let it Be”) Acoustic Ballad? (“Blackbird”) Romantic ballads? (“Something”) Heartbreak song? (“Yesterday”)
And not only did they cover a large ground, they often wrote some of the best songs of each genre they were involved with. The Beatles were also the most covered band ever. Apparently there are 1800 versions of “Yesterday” recorded. This is probably a record. In a way, the Beatles were everywhere. In another sense, they are invisible. Most songs are distinctive enough that the identity of an artist is forever associated with the song. For many Beatles songs, there are many instances where anybody could have taken that song and made it their own. Perhaps this is one of their weakness: many of their songs lack the distinctive force of personality of the artist. But it is also a strength, that each song exists in its own right, rather than sounding like a “typical Beatles song”. There are no typical Beatles songs.
Nirvana wrote “I Hate Myself And I Want to Die”. Oasis wrote “Live Forever”. These are 2 of the 90s bands which most consciously take the mantle of the Beatles, although other than having a lot of loud guitars, they have nothing else in common. Frank Sinatra was famously contemptuous of rock music: he covered “Something”. Classical music fans usually turn their noses up at most of pop music, except at the Beatles.
Reason number 2: They were extremely popular
There are only a few names which have completely dominated pop music for a short period of time. Frank Sinatra. Elvis. The Beatles. Michael Jackson. That’s about it. There was 1 week in 1964 when the #5 song, the #4 song, the #3 song, the #2 song and the #1 song were from the Beatles. That is the one and only time it happened in the UK since people kept records.
Reason number 3: They were the typical pop group.
If there is a bible for pop music, it was written by the Beatles. Just as Adam was the archetypal man, the Beatles were the archetypal pop group. Just as many God fearing Christians ask themselves, “what would Jesus do?”, most pop groups ask themselves, “what did the Beatles do?”
Most famous pop groups have their mythology, or famous stories about them. Jimi Hendrix had his setting his guitar on fire, and dying young by choking on his vomit. (The second story has been revised lately: apparently he was murdered.) Cat Stevens had his conversion to Islam. Elvis had his stint in the Army. Sly Stone had his “happy optimistic phase” and his “dark druggy phase” and right in the middle was “Thank You (Fallatinme Be Mice Elf Agin)”. Pink Floyd had their crazy diamond Syd Barrett.
But the Beatles had the greatest and richest mythology of them all. It just seemed that they shared DNA with just so many other bands.
4 personalities
To be sure, there are 2 ways of looking at the Beatles. There were 4 people who were close like brothers (and this is a compelling version, because the individual members of the Beatles never achieved as much artistic success as they did while in the Beatles.) The other way is that it was John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and 2 others. Both versions are equally valid.
What made the Beatles so compelling collectively is that they were all very different people, but they represented molds that many band members who followed in their wake belonged to. There was John, the fiery, sarcastic and arrogant one. There was Paul, the cute one (but underneath that cuteness was a hugely ambitious social climber). There was George, the shy one but the best guitar player of the lot. There was Ringo, who was exceptional because, even though he is quite the solid, dependable drummer, is the least talented of the bunch.
Think about the Smiths: Morrissey is the John Lennon, and Marr is the George. Take That: Robbie Williams is the John, and Gary Barlow is the Paul. U2: Larry Mullen is the Paul, the good looking one. Bono is the John, The Edge is the George, and Adam Clayton Jr is the Ringo. The Police: Stewart Copeland is the John, Sting is the Paul, Andy Summers is the George.
We know that sweet and sour is a great combination. Paul was sweet and John was sour. They needed each other: John was the cutting edge, and Paul was the one who appealed to the masses. Although Paul has a quite an unfair reputation for being a conservative, and the less artistic one, in fact his best songs had an artistic sophistication beyond what John was capable of. But you always could rely on John to come up with a crazy artistic concept. It was quite apparent to both of them right from the beginning that they needed each other.
John Lennon was the id, Paul McCartney was the ego, and George Martin, who was their producer, and who had the best musical background, was the superego. The Beatles were also very interesting because they had a two headed leadership. No one personality dominated the band, so you could see more than one facet of the many-headed monster.
The other two? George was no slouch. He was not a Clapton or a Hendrix, but he could play a mean guitar all the same. He was ambivalent about fame. Ringo Starr bore the fame with equanimity, although they had to deal with less than John and Paul. But they were famous together, they were the Fab Four, so they had to deal with it. And they were all level headed enough to be good at dealing with the pressures of fame. I think they were important because their presence turned the Beatles into a family. The other two more famous ones could always rely on them, until the end. Come to think of it, the big irony of the Beatles is that John Lennon, the first Beatle, and the leader in the beginning, was the one least able to deal with the fame.
They all had their turns at the mike. They also wrote a song about friends that never leave you in spite of your inadequacies, and not surprisingly they let Ringo sing it. The Beatles were a very effective unit because of their contrasting and complementary personalities.
Art School
It has become a truism that bands come from Art School. John Lennon couldn’t fit in anywhere, so he went to Art School. Paul McCartney was good at school, but it all went downhill after he joined the Beatles. It was just as well that they all had a sense of aesthetics: appreciation of beauty is something that is rarely confined to any one art form. This brings us to another great cliché of bands: the ones who were with them at the beginning, but left before they became famous.
The could-have-beens
There were 2 more Beatles: Stu Sutcliffe, and Pete Best. Sutcliffe was John’s art school classmate, and a talented artist in his own right. He imparted a sense of aesthetics to the band, and helped shape their early image, in the style of the Rockers. But he died young. In any case, he wasn’t terribly talented in music, and he plonked along on his bass guitar. He didn’t get along with Paul McCartney, since both of them were vying to be John’s number two. Eventually he knew that he didn’t belong there, and he left the band.
Pete Best was another story. He was a drummer, and the most handsome of the four. He played with them throughout the Hamburg days, but he was sacked, almost on the eve of the Beatles getting popular. No reasons were given, but a few have been suggested: he didn’t fit in, he was too handsome and popular with the girls, and Ringo was simply a better drummer.
Needless to say, the early band members who didn’t make it are part of the rock band tradition.
The pub band
The Beatles paid their dues before getting famous. John Lennon formed his own band in his teenage years, and for a long time, was the only competent member of the band, until he met Paul, and shortly after that, George. It’s another tradition that even the greatest bands have humble beginnings. But that is not always true: there are bands formed by members who were already famous: these bands are called superbands. Examples are Led Zep, Emerson Lake Palmer, and Traffic.
Hamburg
The rite of passage for a band is that they play on the road, overworked and underpaid, while they earn their experience points. Nobody could accuse the Beatles of not paying their dues. They also first became stars of the pub circuit in Hamburg, before making it big back at home in Liverpool, and like so many other bands after them, first made it big overseas before a triumphant homecoming.
Record Company Rejections
Before the internet, and before punk, you had to sign with a major label if you had any hope of making it big. The Decca audition was infamous because they went down to the label, made a few cuts over a few days (some of which were below their best) and the record company listened to them and decided they weren’t good enough, and anyway boy bands were on the way out. This has gone down in history as the biggest mistake ever made by any record company executive.
The Manager
The Beatles had one of the more colourful managers. Brian Epstein was different from the Beatles in so many ways: he was a son of a rich man, Jewish, and gay. He was gay at a time when it was not acceptable to be gay – the gay movement would only come up in the 1970s. He saw them while they were performing in Liverpool and got so turned on that he decided he was going to manage them. He was instrumental to their early success, promoting them as a cute boy band, and shaping their image. However his role became more and more marginal as the Beatles started to grow in other directions.
John Lennon was famously contemptuous of him, and treated him cruelly, although Epstein seemed to enjoy the sadomasochism of it all. When singing his song from “Magical Mystery Tour”, John allegedly sang “Baby you’re a rich fag Jew” instead of “Baby you’re a rich man, you”.
In the end, his behaviour became more and more volatile, and his drug taking spiraled out of control, aided by his anxiety that he was being cut out of the decision making process. He overdosed on drugs and died. His death was a big shock to the band, but in the long run, it resulted in their taking over their own management. They were quite incompetent at managing their affairs, and this was the beginning of the end for the Beatles.
In the wake of their breakup, their affairs were in such a mess that it took years of lawsuits to sort everything up. This state of affairs was the main reason why it took so long to remaster all of the Beatles’ stuff.
Beatlemania
It was crazy, as was said earlier. The enduring image of the Beatles is of 4 guys being mobbed by fans wherever they went, of teenage females going crazy and fainting, of their having to sneak out of back doors to avoid being mobbed by crazy fans. In the middle of their career, they quit playing live for good.
Their relationship with the media evolved, as was the case of many of their peers. The press, in their early days were greatly supportive of the Beatles. But as time went by, they started getting hounded by the media. John Lennon took the brunt of it, for his statement about being “more popular than Jesus”, and for his relationship with Yoko Ono.
Many bands that followed would follow this script: the initial euphoria of fame, giving way to the cracking up under the pressure. The claustrophobic life leading to disenchantment with the high life. The drugs for escape. An initially receptive press that ultimately turns against them.
Saturday, 19 September 2009
Asian male
On Facebook:
#9's sister: An unpaired sock seems more distressing but less futile than an unpaired chopstick. I have both in any case.
Some random angmoh chatting up #9's sister: What about unpaired humans?
#9: What about I unpair your nuts?
When Obama was inaugurated, there was plenty of talk about how America had become "post racial", and suddenly the colour of your skin didn't matter. That was until last week, when a Harvard professor was arrested for breaking into his own house. In spite of his vehement protests that he was the occupant of that house, the police held him in a cell for 4 hours, before he got released.
Skip Gates was one of the most famous black professors in the USA, and the irony was that he wrote a lot about racial profiling: examples of police officers picking on black people and checking them out because they were black and more likely to be criminals. On one hand the more likely to be criminals part is true, and on the other hand, you could also call this blatant racism.
There's a lot of hoo-hah in the media about that incident. OK, Obama is PUSA, but it doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of people in prison in the US are black. This is not reparation for slavery because he did not descend from slaves (although Michelle did).
Of course there is hope that the majority of Americans have indicated that they would not mind a black man in the White house. But this does not mean that all the racists have gone away. With every action there is a reaction, and the reaction here is that some extremist minority will feel so threatened that he will start being a terrorist (like that guy who bombed the holocaust museum earlier this year.)
A digression here - the way that Obama handled this incident showed that he is a very good politician. He did not hold back from criticising the way that this case has been handled. He called the officers "stupid", knowing that the majority of Americans would have either agreed with him, or otherwise not blamed him for saying that. After the police union criticised Obama for that comment, Obama said that he would invite the officer over for a beer, and also Skip Gates.
He knows that he's the first black president, and the black community would be looking to him to at least make 1 comment about this incident, and he duly obliged, without killing himself politically. He didn't shy from making a statement as a leader. Later on, he invited the policeman over for a beer. This shows he's in touch with blue collar culture. If the policeman accepts, he's also accepting a reconciliation. If he keeps quiet, both parties treat it like a joke and there's no harm done. As for him turning down such an invitation, I hope that police officer only says that in private. That's something that a good leader does - he brings up issues, thrashes them out, and then reconciles people afterwards.
In any case, race is only but a form of class warfare. Class warfare will never go away. The notion of social status is deeply wired into the human experience. Race is different from class warfare, but in a way it is a form of class warfare. There will always be a means for people to differentiate who's the haves and who's the have nots. That will never go away. The rich will always get richer and the poor will always get poorer. The only exception is if a revolution or a war destroys everything and people start from scratch.
This is not a pleasant topic to talk about but what the hell. There are different dimensions of racism in western countries. I have learnt that it is not precise enough to talk about how East Asians are treated. It’s well known that East Asian ladies are quite attractive, and they get better treatment. At the same time, East Asian males are – well, less masculine, so they get a little more stick. It is quite well known that most heterosexual relationships between a Caucasian and a Chinese / Korean / Japanese / Viet / etc will involve an angmoh guy and an Asian woman. It is also true that more angmoh guys than women travel to Singapore, but you don’t know whether that is the cause of this phenomenon or whether the direction of causation is the other way around.
It is strange because Asian males have been the driver of incredible economic growth – we’re not slouches. But we are subservient and not very pushy, at least on the outside. These are traits that are considered attractive in a female and – frankly – unattractive in a male.
You will observe that for different races, the different gender will be more attractive. Black men are considered more attractive than black women, partially because of their reputation of having large dicks. Black women are – well the fact that I don’t even know what they’re supposed to be stereotyped as, that tells me that they’re low profile. I also suppose that black women suffer because the conventional standards of beauty hold that fair women are prettier. There are exceptions, eg David Bowie has a taste for black women in general, not just Iman, but he’s always been a little weird.
For angmohs, the guys are more attractive. The average angmoh male is considered more attractive than the average Chinese male, and the average Chinese female more attractive than the average angmoh female.
Who’s the first Chinese American in the US cabinet? Elaine Chao, a female. Who’s the first Black President? A male.
I suppose this is an undercurrent of the race debate that people don’t pick on. It’s already complicated enough to talk about gender alone, or race alone. But I think this is significant. I wonder why people don’t always mention this more often. It hasn’t bothered me a lot for quite a few years now, but I remember this fact for two reasons: the recent Virginia Tech murders. Both were committed by Asian males.
Yes, here’s another stereotype you can add to your collection. Asian males are ticking time bombs. I read this article that said that one of the differences between southern and northern Chinese is that southerners have a slow burning fuse and northerners have a quick temper. It may be true. Southern Chinese are notoriously passive aggressive. Singapore is one of the most passive aggressive places I have ever seen. People just bottle it in until the time comes, and then they explode. Anyway Edward Yang, the Taiwanese film maker who is my favourite director makes films about people bottling their anger inwards until they explode.
It’s not only the East Asians who have this, I think. I heard somebody say this about the Turks – they will smile back at you the first 10 times you slap them in the face, and on the 11th time, they will kill you.
Myself, I used to get very annoyed whenever I noticed a white guy going out with an Asian female, especially if she's Chinese. Now, much less so. These days I'm much less horny (which is true). Also I have gotten angry at this before, gotten into flame wars with people I'm sure are Caucasian males and after a few times, I've grown tired and seen the futility. Also, I've learnt the futility of anger, and also I've learnt that after you have rationalised something, and thrashed things out, it is more difficult to get emotional about things, good or bad. (Incidently that is one important function of criminal trials - families of victims, after a trial is over, after all the facts are pored over, are less likely to seek revenge, unless they are totally pissed off at the way the trial was handled.)
I've learnt to understand some of the gains that Asian males have made in this world. I've reminded myself - the tide is turning, the future is Asia. I've even thought of the racial stereotypes of the Asian male, and it is not all negative. You could call us timid but we could be circumspect. You could call us nerdy but we are hardworking. You could call us slavish, but is individualism really such a great idea? You don't get taken for a thug, which is the problem a lot of black people face.
You look at some of the Asian stereotypes that have made their way into popular culture, they are not that bad. The hyperactive Stephen Yan in Yan can Cook. Geeky but very knowledgeable and friendly. Mr Miyagi, one of the best teachers there ever was. Bruce Lee - OK, a little violent and narcissistic, but the hero of the underdog. It could be a lot worse.
#9's sister: An unpaired sock seems more distressing but less futile than an unpaired chopstick. I have both in any case.
Some random angmoh chatting up #9's sister: What about unpaired humans?
#9: What about I unpair your nuts?
When Obama was inaugurated, there was plenty of talk about how America had become "post racial", and suddenly the colour of your skin didn't matter. That was until last week, when a Harvard professor was arrested for breaking into his own house. In spite of his vehement protests that he was the occupant of that house, the police held him in a cell for 4 hours, before he got released.
Skip Gates was one of the most famous black professors in the USA, and the irony was that he wrote a lot about racial profiling: examples of police officers picking on black people and checking them out because they were black and more likely to be criminals. On one hand the more likely to be criminals part is true, and on the other hand, you could also call this blatant racism.
There's a lot of hoo-hah in the media about that incident. OK, Obama is PUSA, but it doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of people in prison in the US are black. This is not reparation for slavery because he did not descend from slaves (although Michelle did).
Of course there is hope that the majority of Americans have indicated that they would not mind a black man in the White house. But this does not mean that all the racists have gone away. With every action there is a reaction, and the reaction here is that some extremist minority will feel so threatened that he will start being a terrorist (like that guy who bombed the holocaust museum earlier this year.)
A digression here - the way that Obama handled this incident showed that he is a very good politician. He did not hold back from criticising the way that this case has been handled. He called the officers "stupid", knowing that the majority of Americans would have either agreed with him, or otherwise not blamed him for saying that. After the police union criticised Obama for that comment, Obama said that he would invite the officer over for a beer, and also Skip Gates.
He knows that he's the first black president, and the black community would be looking to him to at least make 1 comment about this incident, and he duly obliged, without killing himself politically. He didn't shy from making a statement as a leader. Later on, he invited the policeman over for a beer. This shows he's in touch with blue collar culture. If the policeman accepts, he's also accepting a reconciliation. If he keeps quiet, both parties treat it like a joke and there's no harm done. As for him turning down such an invitation, I hope that police officer only says that in private. That's something that a good leader does - he brings up issues, thrashes them out, and then reconciles people afterwards.
In any case, race is only but a form of class warfare. Class warfare will never go away. The notion of social status is deeply wired into the human experience. Race is different from class warfare, but in a way it is a form of class warfare. There will always be a means for people to differentiate who's the haves and who's the have nots. That will never go away. The rich will always get richer and the poor will always get poorer. The only exception is if a revolution or a war destroys everything and people start from scratch.
This is not a pleasant topic to talk about but what the hell. There are different dimensions of racism in western countries. I have learnt that it is not precise enough to talk about how East Asians are treated. It’s well known that East Asian ladies are quite attractive, and they get better treatment. At the same time, East Asian males are – well, less masculine, so they get a little more stick. It is quite well known that most heterosexual relationships between a Caucasian and a Chinese / Korean / Japanese / Viet / etc will involve an angmoh guy and an Asian woman. It is also true that more angmoh guys than women travel to Singapore, but you don’t know whether that is the cause of this phenomenon or whether the direction of causation is the other way around.
It is strange because Asian males have been the driver of incredible economic growth – we’re not slouches. But we are subservient and not very pushy, at least on the outside. These are traits that are considered attractive in a female and – frankly – unattractive in a male.
You will observe that for different races, the different gender will be more attractive. Black men are considered more attractive than black women, partially because of their reputation of having large dicks. Black women are – well the fact that I don’t even know what they’re supposed to be stereotyped as, that tells me that they’re low profile. I also suppose that black women suffer because the conventional standards of beauty hold that fair women are prettier. There are exceptions, eg David Bowie has a taste for black women in general, not just Iman, but he’s always been a little weird.
For angmohs, the guys are more attractive. The average angmoh male is considered more attractive than the average Chinese male, and the average Chinese female more attractive than the average angmoh female.
Who’s the first Chinese American in the US cabinet? Elaine Chao, a female. Who’s the first Black President? A male.
I suppose this is an undercurrent of the race debate that people don’t pick on. It’s already complicated enough to talk about gender alone, or race alone. But I think this is significant. I wonder why people don’t always mention this more often. It hasn’t bothered me a lot for quite a few years now, but I remember this fact for two reasons: the recent Virginia Tech murders. Both were committed by Asian males.
Yes, here’s another stereotype you can add to your collection. Asian males are ticking time bombs. I read this article that said that one of the differences between southern and northern Chinese is that southerners have a slow burning fuse and northerners have a quick temper. It may be true. Southern Chinese are notoriously passive aggressive. Singapore is one of the most passive aggressive places I have ever seen. People just bottle it in until the time comes, and then they explode. Anyway Edward Yang, the Taiwanese film maker who is my favourite director makes films about people bottling their anger inwards until they explode.
It’s not only the East Asians who have this, I think. I heard somebody say this about the Turks – they will smile back at you the first 10 times you slap them in the face, and on the 11th time, they will kill you.
Myself, I used to get very annoyed whenever I noticed a white guy going out with an Asian female, especially if she's Chinese. Now, much less so. These days I'm much less horny (which is true). Also I have gotten angry at this before, gotten into flame wars with people I'm sure are Caucasian males and after a few times, I've grown tired and seen the futility. Also, I've learnt the futility of anger, and also I've learnt that after you have rationalised something, and thrashed things out, it is more difficult to get emotional about things, good or bad. (Incidently that is one important function of criminal trials - families of victims, after a trial is over, after all the facts are pored over, are less likely to seek revenge, unless they are totally pissed off at the way the trial was handled.)
I've learnt to understand some of the gains that Asian males have made in this world. I've reminded myself - the tide is turning, the future is Asia. I've even thought of the racial stereotypes of the Asian male, and it is not all negative. You could call us timid but we could be circumspect. You could call us nerdy but we are hardworking. You could call us slavish, but is individualism really such a great idea? You don't get taken for a thug, which is the problem a lot of black people face.
You look at some of the Asian stereotypes that have made their way into popular culture, they are not that bad. The hyperactive Stephen Yan in Yan can Cook. Geeky but very knowledgeable and friendly. Mr Miyagi, one of the best teachers there ever was. Bruce Lee - OK, a little violent and narcissistic, but the hero of the underdog. It could be a lot worse.
Saturday, 12 September 2009
Political Philosophy
Some of the courses where I learnt the most interesting stuff in school didn’t even have anything to do with my major. One of them was political philosophy. I asked a senior which courses she liked taking, and she told me that a good course was political philosophy, so that was one of those that I took.
It was not bad, and the teacher was lively. 2 lessons stuck out in my mind.
First was Hobbes. His theory of society was something that was truly dark. He saw people as atomised entities, a rowdy mob of people who just did whatever they felt like doing unless they were restrained by violence. His theory was an argument against anarchy. Basically people will take advantage of each other to the fullest extent. They will fuck each other over for nothing. Moreover they are so equal in strength and abilities that nobody will really win. There will be a permanent state of chaos and anarchy. In his most famous phrase, he says that life like this will be “nasty, brutish and short”.
And that is why we need a government. We need to have a person who is king. We give away some of our rights, and pay him for protection. It might be a tyranny, but it’s still better than nothing.
I supposed in a way it was an extension of what I saw in America. People hardly had any deference to each other. Not to say that they are necessarily rude, but they don’t really have that keen a concept of structure as we do in Asian culture. But then again, having grown up in Singapore, deference to authority was more or less automatic. If I was disobedient to my teachers or my parents, it was because of a moment of weakness, like I didn’t do this piece of homework, or I didn’t do what I had to do because I was lazy. But to stand up and challenge them, or outright defy them, that was totally out of the question, even though we did discuss with our classmates the strengths and weaknesses of our elders.
But thinking about an atomised society made me see human relationships in a completely different way: what if a lot of the people I saw in real life didn’t have any kind of special relationship with me? Like they weren’t a teacher who I had to defer to, a drill sergeant I had to obey or get assraped in detention barracks, or a parent who at one point in my life was some kind of a deity? What would all these people be like if I were to relate to them as though I were a peer?
Now, I suppose, this is one reason I had never heard of Hobbes until I got to America. What he was proposing was in some way the opposite of Confucius, although they are some similarities. The crucial difference is this: Confucius would never start from the standpoint of everybody being of equal status. This situation, even if it were hypothetical, must be completely inconceivable, which is probably why I had never thought of it that way, no matter how rebellious I had been when I was a teenager.
The similarity is that both of them come to the conclusion that there has to be some higher authority in any society. But their attitudes towards this higher authority are different. For Confucius, this is simply the way that it is, that it always has been. Hobbes will ask “why should it be this way?” But Confucius will never even allow this question to be asked. Just shut up and listen. Confucius will say that deference to authority is the highest virtue. Hobbes will say, well, anarchy is really bad and messy, so I guess we’ll have to settle for tyranny instead.
But after this, my attitude towards people was going to be very different. I would be more judgemental of people, even my elders. Before, I would ask, “who are you in relation to me?” And if that person was a superior, I would treat that person as a superior first and foremost, then I would think about what that person is like as a human being. After that, the reverse would be true. Some part of me would defer to a higher-up even though he’s a dick, because there is a limit to the amount of unrest that I’m willing to cause. But primarily I would think about what sort of a person he is as a human.
I suppose all this is part and parcel of growing up, that there are no more superiors like the ones you had as a kid. That you have to make your own decisions, your own mistakes. I suppose I would have picked this up after spending enough time in a western country. But I think it was Hobbes famous story of the war of man against every man which sealed it for me.
Plato and the noble lie.
Nowadays when it comes to the big argument between Plato and Aristotle, I’m more inclined to side with Aristotle. Aristotle is more the realist, and Plato the idealist. But Plato appealed to me more at first.
He held that there were 3 types of people. First was the philosopher, the educated scholar. Second was the warrior. I forgot what the 3rd category was. The first one would be king, because he is wiser and smarter than the rest. (Sometimes I believe that this is just a geek fantasy on his part). For the second type, the problem was how to tame him. The warrior had to believe in a cause so great that he would lay down his life for his country. He had to believe that this made him a great person, a bigger person than he would otherwise be.
You have to construct meaning out of the miserable life of being a soldier. You have to give him prestige, and make him out to be a great man. Even though he's not the real leader, or the one running the show.
The last thing I did before entering uni was to be a soldier. I wasn't much of one, actually, and spent 1 whole year being a clerk. But unfortunately our NS is long enough that I still spent a substantial period of time being a soldier. It made me think about what it was all about. At first, during BMT, I bought the whole thing hook line and sinker. When you're fresh, you don't always know what it's all about. But later on, we did start to question the absolute authority people had over us. We were being fed the noble lie, and some of us bought it whole.
To be sure, the noble lie is not entirely a lie. It is heroic to stand up for your tribe, no doubt about that. There was a disturbing book that I read not long ago which argues that somewhere deep inside of the human psyche, we love war. I would guess that is true, because war is so terrible that it is difficult to imagine anybody engaging in it unless he loves it in some way. The noble lie was there to make us love it.
But what were the 2.5 years? I had very little expectation of the 2.5 years except that my parents were always nagging at me that if you don't get your shit together the army's going to eat you up. But there was a lot of pointless bureaucracy in the early days. A lot of having to wait for the rest of the company to get things done. A lot of lousy food. A lot of pettiness and backstabbing. A lot of pretending to work. A lot of janitor work.
I could have approached it with a better attitude than I did. After 6 months I was completely in the mode of "avoid all possible work". And sometimes I wondered if this attitude did spill over in other aspects of my life.
Let's ask ourselves whether this lie is even a noble one. In the early days of the republic, we definitely needed an army, because we never knew whether our neighbours were going to kill us. But after 20-30 years of nothing happening, everybody doing great, you had to wonder about the war.
In a place like the armed forces, it is full of people who give up an easy life for the security of an iron rice bowl. Are they predisposed to change? I don't think so. Even when the army wants and needs to change, you will have a few stubborn buggers fighting till the last breath against that, everybody defending his turf. It was a very bloated army in those days, with a lot of people shuffling around and not doing very much. I thought that it was a great thing that they cut down the length of service to 2 years, because seriously, we don't need such a large army.
After defending our sovereignty for so many years, the armed forces risks having the rug pulled out from under them. The concept of sovereignty is somewhat perverted because this world has become so inter-connected. Can you imagine Toa Payoh waging war against Ang Mo Kio? That is never going to happen. There are some times when I wonder whether Singapore vs Malaysia is going to be like that.
The nature of the threat has also changed a lot. In an introduction to his book "The Utility of Force", a British general who served in Bosnia points out that the old model of the war, which had 1 state fighting against another state, is gone. The last such war took place in 1973 between Egypt and Israel. Practically all other wars since then have been guerilla wars.
Is our army up to this task? Have we evolved?
Understandably, the fact that such a war has not happened is not the reason why we can dismantle our army. It could well be that the reason why these things don't happen is that every nation in the world has armed forces which prevents this from happening. But the fact is that we can still cut our armed forces by a very significant amount, and that will not change the fact that nobody wants to invade us.
The other thing is that somebody wrote a book on a more pernicious and pervasive form of the noble lie. Thomas Frank, "One Market Under God". In the 1990s, in corporations all over the world, rights have been taken away from the workers at the bottom of the corporation, as it exposed the dark side of America's miraculous economic growth.
Workers were all persuaded to work harder and tougher for the company even though their wages were being cut. They were being told "this is for your character." They were given a substantial amounts of "freedom" in return for their medical benefits being cut away. Starbucks aimed for "flexibility" and not telling their workers when they were going to show up for work until a few days beforehand. They were to act as though they were perpetual college students.
There were a few main reason why the big companies were able to get away with this. One of them is the hype surrounding the "new economy" that was being remade by the advent of the internet. You could believe that "everything's changed" and the old rules didn't apply. I'm sure that a lot of bosses had fun making up the new rules. You had internet startups where a few of the earliest employees had to work like slaves for a few years, in the belief that they were this close to conquering the world, only to see the bubble pop and all their efforts come down to nothing.
Another reason is that bosses had changed their image, and wisely (for them) decided to become more hip and trendy. You could come to work in T-shirts and jeans. You bosses listened to rock and roll, just like you!
Another reason is a whole slew of management theorists which line up to persuade you that the whole meaning of your life revolves around hard work. I agree that a lot of your life revolves around hard work, but this is just emotional manipulation. People now came to work to have fun and attain spiritual fulfillment (which probably means they didn't need to have fat paychecks anymore, I suppose.)
Thomas Frank is a cultural critic, so he didn't touch on many of the economic reasons, chief of which is this: China and the rest of the world are driving wages of all people in developed countries down. But I will refer to his work because it tells us all that the noble lie is alive and well.
My workplace instituted a training program that tried to develop management talent at work. It is a good thing that is long overdue, because training is the best way of transmitting values that we want in our organisation. One training aid raised my eyebrows, though. It came from a booklet written by various SAF personnel, a series of essays where people talk about their "defining moments". A lot of the essays - well they talked about "I must do my best for this, for that, etc etc. I should push my limits a little further". Others were in the vein of "I must be more thoughtful of others".
There was a bit of ambivalence about reading that book. There are some parts, which are in the vein of "more effort", which I don't like - asking them to work harder is not unimportant, but the effects are temporary. You can inspire people, but can you inspire people to work harder every day? You can do this by making a systemic change. You can change the environment in which they work. Otherwise, getting people to put in more individual effort alone is not going to work.
Elsewhere, though, I liked it that you see the workplace as a community of people, and I like it that people are actually thinking about the values in the workplace. That a team is more than just numbers and performance.
I don't completely agree with Plato - he talks about the noble lie, but it is not a lie. It is something that has basis in reality. I would call it a half lie, no more than that. There is this social divide between people who think for a living and people who work for a living, Plato doesn't seem interested in overcoming that.
I know that I always appear quite philosophical to people but my family, at least those in the older generation are people who have always worked for a living, and who have always believed in the practical over the ideals. For me, ideals serve only one purpose: they are a means with which we seek to understand the world, they are a framework with which we learn about our environment. Once that purpose is served, it's time to throw away those ideals, open your eyes, and see how things really work in reality.
It was not bad, and the teacher was lively. 2 lessons stuck out in my mind.
First was Hobbes. His theory of society was something that was truly dark. He saw people as atomised entities, a rowdy mob of people who just did whatever they felt like doing unless they were restrained by violence. His theory was an argument against anarchy. Basically people will take advantage of each other to the fullest extent. They will fuck each other over for nothing. Moreover they are so equal in strength and abilities that nobody will really win. There will be a permanent state of chaos and anarchy. In his most famous phrase, he says that life like this will be “nasty, brutish and short”.
And that is why we need a government. We need to have a person who is king. We give away some of our rights, and pay him for protection. It might be a tyranny, but it’s still better than nothing.
I supposed in a way it was an extension of what I saw in America. People hardly had any deference to each other. Not to say that they are necessarily rude, but they don’t really have that keen a concept of structure as we do in Asian culture. But then again, having grown up in Singapore, deference to authority was more or less automatic. If I was disobedient to my teachers or my parents, it was because of a moment of weakness, like I didn’t do this piece of homework, or I didn’t do what I had to do because I was lazy. But to stand up and challenge them, or outright defy them, that was totally out of the question, even though we did discuss with our classmates the strengths and weaknesses of our elders.
But thinking about an atomised society made me see human relationships in a completely different way: what if a lot of the people I saw in real life didn’t have any kind of special relationship with me? Like they weren’t a teacher who I had to defer to, a drill sergeant I had to obey or get assraped in detention barracks, or a parent who at one point in my life was some kind of a deity? What would all these people be like if I were to relate to them as though I were a peer?
Now, I suppose, this is one reason I had never heard of Hobbes until I got to America. What he was proposing was in some way the opposite of Confucius, although they are some similarities. The crucial difference is this: Confucius would never start from the standpoint of everybody being of equal status. This situation, even if it were hypothetical, must be completely inconceivable, which is probably why I had never thought of it that way, no matter how rebellious I had been when I was a teenager.
The similarity is that both of them come to the conclusion that there has to be some higher authority in any society. But their attitudes towards this higher authority are different. For Confucius, this is simply the way that it is, that it always has been. Hobbes will ask “why should it be this way?” But Confucius will never even allow this question to be asked. Just shut up and listen. Confucius will say that deference to authority is the highest virtue. Hobbes will say, well, anarchy is really bad and messy, so I guess we’ll have to settle for tyranny instead.
But after this, my attitude towards people was going to be very different. I would be more judgemental of people, even my elders. Before, I would ask, “who are you in relation to me?” And if that person was a superior, I would treat that person as a superior first and foremost, then I would think about what that person is like as a human being. After that, the reverse would be true. Some part of me would defer to a higher-up even though he’s a dick, because there is a limit to the amount of unrest that I’m willing to cause. But primarily I would think about what sort of a person he is as a human.
I suppose all this is part and parcel of growing up, that there are no more superiors like the ones you had as a kid. That you have to make your own decisions, your own mistakes. I suppose I would have picked this up after spending enough time in a western country. But I think it was Hobbes famous story of the war of man against every man which sealed it for me.
Plato and the noble lie.
Nowadays when it comes to the big argument between Plato and Aristotle, I’m more inclined to side with Aristotle. Aristotle is more the realist, and Plato the idealist. But Plato appealed to me more at first.
He held that there were 3 types of people. First was the philosopher, the educated scholar. Second was the warrior. I forgot what the 3rd category was. The first one would be king, because he is wiser and smarter than the rest. (Sometimes I believe that this is just a geek fantasy on his part). For the second type, the problem was how to tame him. The warrior had to believe in a cause so great that he would lay down his life for his country. He had to believe that this made him a great person, a bigger person than he would otherwise be.
You have to construct meaning out of the miserable life of being a soldier. You have to give him prestige, and make him out to be a great man. Even though he's not the real leader, or the one running the show.
The last thing I did before entering uni was to be a soldier. I wasn't much of one, actually, and spent 1 whole year being a clerk. But unfortunately our NS is long enough that I still spent a substantial period of time being a soldier. It made me think about what it was all about. At first, during BMT, I bought the whole thing hook line and sinker. When you're fresh, you don't always know what it's all about. But later on, we did start to question the absolute authority people had over us. We were being fed the noble lie, and some of us bought it whole.
To be sure, the noble lie is not entirely a lie. It is heroic to stand up for your tribe, no doubt about that. There was a disturbing book that I read not long ago which argues that somewhere deep inside of the human psyche, we love war. I would guess that is true, because war is so terrible that it is difficult to imagine anybody engaging in it unless he loves it in some way. The noble lie was there to make us love it.
But what were the 2.5 years? I had very little expectation of the 2.5 years except that my parents were always nagging at me that if you don't get your shit together the army's going to eat you up. But there was a lot of pointless bureaucracy in the early days. A lot of having to wait for the rest of the company to get things done. A lot of lousy food. A lot of pettiness and backstabbing. A lot of pretending to work. A lot of janitor work.
I could have approached it with a better attitude than I did. After 6 months I was completely in the mode of "avoid all possible work". And sometimes I wondered if this attitude did spill over in other aspects of my life.
Let's ask ourselves whether this lie is even a noble one. In the early days of the republic, we definitely needed an army, because we never knew whether our neighbours were going to kill us. But after 20-30 years of nothing happening, everybody doing great, you had to wonder about the war.
In a place like the armed forces, it is full of people who give up an easy life for the security of an iron rice bowl. Are they predisposed to change? I don't think so. Even when the army wants and needs to change, you will have a few stubborn buggers fighting till the last breath against that, everybody defending his turf. It was a very bloated army in those days, with a lot of people shuffling around and not doing very much. I thought that it was a great thing that they cut down the length of service to 2 years, because seriously, we don't need such a large army.
After defending our sovereignty for so many years, the armed forces risks having the rug pulled out from under them. The concept of sovereignty is somewhat perverted because this world has become so inter-connected. Can you imagine Toa Payoh waging war against Ang Mo Kio? That is never going to happen. There are some times when I wonder whether Singapore vs Malaysia is going to be like that.
The nature of the threat has also changed a lot. In an introduction to his book "The Utility of Force", a British general who served in Bosnia points out that the old model of the war, which had 1 state fighting against another state, is gone. The last such war took place in 1973 between Egypt and Israel. Practically all other wars since then have been guerilla wars.
Is our army up to this task? Have we evolved?
Understandably, the fact that such a war has not happened is not the reason why we can dismantle our army. It could well be that the reason why these things don't happen is that every nation in the world has armed forces which prevents this from happening. But the fact is that we can still cut our armed forces by a very significant amount, and that will not change the fact that nobody wants to invade us.
The other thing is that somebody wrote a book on a more pernicious and pervasive form of the noble lie. Thomas Frank, "One Market Under God". In the 1990s, in corporations all over the world, rights have been taken away from the workers at the bottom of the corporation, as it exposed the dark side of America's miraculous economic growth.
Workers were all persuaded to work harder and tougher for the company even though their wages were being cut. They were being told "this is for your character." They were given a substantial amounts of "freedom" in return for their medical benefits being cut away. Starbucks aimed for "flexibility" and not telling their workers when they were going to show up for work until a few days beforehand. They were to act as though they were perpetual college students.
There were a few main reason why the big companies were able to get away with this. One of them is the hype surrounding the "new economy" that was being remade by the advent of the internet. You could believe that "everything's changed" and the old rules didn't apply. I'm sure that a lot of bosses had fun making up the new rules. You had internet startups where a few of the earliest employees had to work like slaves for a few years, in the belief that they were this close to conquering the world, only to see the bubble pop and all their efforts come down to nothing.
Another reason is that bosses had changed their image, and wisely (for them) decided to become more hip and trendy. You could come to work in T-shirts and jeans. You bosses listened to rock and roll, just like you!
Another reason is a whole slew of management theorists which line up to persuade you that the whole meaning of your life revolves around hard work. I agree that a lot of your life revolves around hard work, but this is just emotional manipulation. People now came to work to have fun and attain spiritual fulfillment (which probably means they didn't need to have fat paychecks anymore, I suppose.)
Thomas Frank is a cultural critic, so he didn't touch on many of the economic reasons, chief of which is this: China and the rest of the world are driving wages of all people in developed countries down. But I will refer to his work because it tells us all that the noble lie is alive and well.
My workplace instituted a training program that tried to develop management talent at work. It is a good thing that is long overdue, because training is the best way of transmitting values that we want in our organisation. One training aid raised my eyebrows, though. It came from a booklet written by various SAF personnel, a series of essays where people talk about their "defining moments". A lot of the essays - well they talked about "I must do my best for this, for that, etc etc. I should push my limits a little further". Others were in the vein of "I must be more thoughtful of others".
There was a bit of ambivalence about reading that book. There are some parts, which are in the vein of "more effort", which I don't like - asking them to work harder is not unimportant, but the effects are temporary. You can inspire people, but can you inspire people to work harder every day? You can do this by making a systemic change. You can change the environment in which they work. Otherwise, getting people to put in more individual effort alone is not going to work.
Elsewhere, though, I liked it that you see the workplace as a community of people, and I like it that people are actually thinking about the values in the workplace. That a team is more than just numbers and performance.
I don't completely agree with Plato - he talks about the noble lie, but it is not a lie. It is something that has basis in reality. I would call it a half lie, no more than that. There is this social divide between people who think for a living and people who work for a living, Plato doesn't seem interested in overcoming that.
I know that I always appear quite philosophical to people but my family, at least those in the older generation are people who have always worked for a living, and who have always believed in the practical over the ideals. For me, ideals serve only one purpose: they are a means with which we seek to understand the world, they are a framework with which we learn about our environment. Once that purpose is served, it's time to throw away those ideals, open your eyes, and see how things really work in reality.
Saturday, 5 September 2009
Dead Hobbies
1. This isn't really related but I sometimes think about the hobbies that I used to have. One of them was Transformers. They were really a big thing during my time. I didn't have transformers toys but I liked Mask toys. Had quite a few. Zoids too. And then the miser genes I inherited from my old man kicked in and I said to myself, "why am I keeping all this junk in my house?" Some people never get rid of these hobbies, which is why you see grown up men still having Transformer toys in their cabinets. I'm different, and while I will still marvel at the ingenuity of these toys, they're done for good.
Also I still remember the time when I had the burning desire to be a playwright. I used to watch a lot of sitcoms and analyse the flow of the dramas and plots. I only paid attention at literature classes when they are talking about literary devices, because they are the working tools of a playwright. I usually don't give a shit about memorising essays and getting A1s for literature. My literature teacher bragged that one of her former students who was a good playwright didn't take her advice to write simple and uncontroversial essays, and he got an A2 instead of the A1 everybody expected him to get. I can see her point but if you asked me to get an A2 in lit instead of writing a school play, I would have taken the school play instead. (I got A2 for lit and I was happy with it because I used to get Bs all the time.)
But my playwriting career is over. It will take work and effort to get back the momentum I once had. I entered the 24 hour playwriting competition in 1999 (I won something) and in 2004 (I didn't) and I considered entering again in 2009 but I eventually didn't.
I still remember 6 months ago when I was still running 5-6 hours every week, in order to get myself ready for the marathon. Considering that I am a little reluctant to run half marathons in the future, this is another vanished hobby of mine.
Blogging? I used to blog a lot more often than I do now. I used to entertain thoughts of having a very well read blog until some unfortunate flame wars have put paid to that notion. Once a week, I can still maintain that momentum now. I still have something to write about. I'm blessed with a lot of creativity - it takes an extraordinarily long time for me to run out of ideas. But maybe one day I will.
So a lot of people call me a bookworm. Yes, but the mountain of books I used to have on my reading list is now a small pile and eventually it will go down to nothing. I don't know if it's coincidental. I used to look forward to the weekend because it would be time to myself to read what I want, and now I'm a little sick of reading, I have problems doing it for more than 1 hour at a go. And then I will have to find my next hobby to occupy myself.
I have another hobby - not really a hobby because I can't do it all the time. It's songwriting. I've been thinking about how to take it to the next phase, so that will occupy my free time for a while.
A new hobby of mine would be learning about computer science. I once considered that as a major but took Maths instead. Now I'm wondering. Of course this is reading, but it does mean that another subject that I really used to enjoy reading about would be slowly phased out - that's history. I now have a framework of world events and their significance, how we got to what we are today, so further study is no longer necessary.
2. As for work - I thought about how I looked at it. In around the 4th or 5th book, Harry Potter learnt that he was placed in the care of his aunt and treated like a Charles Dickens character for a reason - that whole place was magically protected against Voldemort. Unfortunately that's my attitude towards work at the moment. They're treating me better than Uncle Dursley is treating Harry Potter, but that's not saying much. If you want to think about how long you're going to stay in a place, think about how you'd feel if you were asked to take over your boss' job. Would you like the work? Or is it just a fatter paycheck in the end?
There are many worse places than my job, I know that. It protects me from idleness, having a completely purposeless existence. But are all thinking jobs like that eventually? Just sitting behind a desk, and churning away at data? Would I find some other job, and eventually, run into the same problems, getting tired of it all? That's the issue. I think this issue could be far deeper than something you could solve by switching lines.
I think that when you’re doing something – anything, actually, there are 3 stages – the beginning, the middle and the end. The beginning is usually quite rough, and you’re trying to learn the ropes, trying to be good at what you’re supposed to do. The middle is more comfortable, you’ve found a group of people you’re comfortable with, you’re getting by in your work. The end is not very comfortable, knowing that another new beginning is ahead of you, trying to make that new beginning happen, having to do a lot of things at work that you’ve been putting off because you were never comfortable doing them in the first place.
I’m getting old. I look at people at work who are 5 years younger than me and I think that I am looking at myself in a funny mirror, because that is the destiny that I could have taken, a road that I could have gone down, but instead I chose not to go down. And every time you go past a big big junction in life, you’re always wondering, could I have gone the other way?
They are articulate, polished. More conscious of their self image, and usually thinking about how other people are going to interpret what they say.
If people project a good self image, is that good for the company, or are they merely selfish people who are looking out for number one? I don’t know. What I do know is that this method of doing things was so foreign to me that I simply did not bother to try to take it up. I could have done that, but I wouldn’t be me. (Which may not be such a bad thing, considering the number of people who have come up to me and advised me to “stop being yourself”)
They believed fully in their careers, and the primacy of their careers. I gave up on it almost as soon as I had begun, in a fit of pique, when I was going through some difficult period. At that time I was totally sure that my future lay elsewhere.
But something strange happened. I developed a curious respect for the way that things were done at my workplace. Why do I use the words “curious respect”? When I was in secondary school my bio teacher took the whole class out on an excursion to a mangrove swamp. At first I thought that it was a very dreary place, and it is the epitomy of unproductive land. But later on he explained how things worked in the ecosystem, how the mangrove prevented the river from washing away the soil from under the rainforest, how it was a home to many animals like Kermit the frog. I wrote at the end of my report that I had developed a curious respect for the mangrove and he wrote back that he liked that comment. As with the mangrove swamp, so with my work place.
As for my workplace, it is the closest thing you get to a war zone. As a student in school I despised the military, and swore never to join the SAF, and how I got to join something that’s even more war-like than the SAF (let’s be honest here, the SAF doesn’t fight wars) is one of the big quirks of fate. But you always have to remember that all harsh words are said in the heat of the moment, all mistakes are made in the heat of the moment, it is so difficult to judge them because this is war, and all sorts of crap takes place when there is a war going on.
I look back at those guys, who developed the right attitude towards the place, and I wonder if it was possible to have a positive attitude win over the lazy cynical attitude that eventually took over me. For me it is a constant battleground between those two. Among my colleagues there are a few who have that positive attitude, a few whose lazy cynical attitudes have won, and the rest, for the most part, are battlegrounds. I think my bosses were not good enough psychologists to realise that I was a battleground, and at first only saw the lazy and cynical side. Eventually, though, they found out.
I also think about that one part in my life when I did try to overcome my snide and cynical attitude, and try to be nice to everybody at the same time. It was a happy, hopeful period in my life and not coincidently it was also the one time in my life I was going after a chick. Who knows how differently history would have turned out if I had won her over? (But I made the judgement call - probably a correct one - that she wasn’t worth the trouble.)
Well in a way all roads are connected and just because you turned this way on one junction, it doesn’t mean that you can’t turn back. And sometimes it might be fun to just wonder what it would have been like if I hadn’t taken this particular turn.
So even at this late stage in my work, I still feel like I'm learning new stuff. I'm taking my time. Eventually the time will come when I feel that this is no longer the case, and after that... toodle loo....
3. There’s this mahjong game that I won’t forget. I played it on Bintan, with a few friends (Shingo may have been one of them, I can’t remember.) Now I’m a mahjong novice, and not that experienced, I take too long to think of my next move, people usually get a little irritated with me. Usually that’s what happens. My brain works better in parallel rather than in series. I excel at solving problems which require some unusual and novel solution, rather than doing something repetitive over and over again and doing it well. So making fast and good decisions in mahjong, I’m not good at it.
There was this incident where I already had what it takes to "hu" and I didn't even know it, it took Totoro's husband, looking over my shoulder to tell me.
But there was this game, I had basically a formation, and was just missing one more tile to complete it. After a few moves, I began to sense that the tile was never going to come, so I set about dismantling 1 section of that formation, and building something else, and I won that round.
Leonpix who was overlooking it was surprised, and he started off in his machine gun Mandarin about what I did (I roughly got the gist). It was probably something he wouldn’t have done, something that he perceived to be really risky.
As you might know, risk is all a matter of perception. Risk is about something that is unknown, and people have a different set of criteria when they are talking about risk.
The way I saw it, I had 2 of a kind and I was waiting for a third. It was possible that somebody else was also holding on to the other 2 tiles, in which case I would never be able to get it. The chance of success, in continuing on my current path, was approximately zero. Better for me to break that 2 of a kind (this is risky too, because it could allow somebody to game. But it was still a risk worth taking.) and then risk building up another formation. I would at least have around a 50% chance of success. In this calculation, what I was doing was not risky at all, but an oblique way of maximizing my chances of success.
But I suppose we all have this thing about holding on to what we have. We think that a bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush. But sometimes the bird in your hand is not the bird you want, and there are more than 2 on the bush.
What I have read about psychology is that people usually have a very distorted view of risk. People tend to over exaggerate the sensational ways of dying. For example, terrorism. If I were to take a cold hard look at terrorism, I would not believe that I would die like that. OK, maybe my not working in an office tower has something to do with that belief. But I commute to work, and I use one of the most crowded MRT stations, and every morning, there is a traffic jam. All it would take is 1 suicide bomber with a backpack, and he could take out approximately 200 people if he’s in the middle of a
In other things, we tend to underestimate our risk. Land travel is risky. The number of people who died as a result of the 9/11 attacks is 3000. In America that year, between 2-3000 people died in car crashes. So why does 9/11 “change everything”, whereas car crashes don’t change anything?
Also I still remember the time when I had the burning desire to be a playwright. I used to watch a lot of sitcoms and analyse the flow of the dramas and plots. I only paid attention at literature classes when they are talking about literary devices, because they are the working tools of a playwright. I usually don't give a shit about memorising essays and getting A1s for literature. My literature teacher bragged that one of her former students who was a good playwright didn't take her advice to write simple and uncontroversial essays, and he got an A2 instead of the A1 everybody expected him to get. I can see her point but if you asked me to get an A2 in lit instead of writing a school play, I would have taken the school play instead. (I got A2 for lit and I was happy with it because I used to get Bs all the time.)
But my playwriting career is over. It will take work and effort to get back the momentum I once had. I entered the 24 hour playwriting competition in 1999 (I won something) and in 2004 (I didn't) and I considered entering again in 2009 but I eventually didn't.
I still remember 6 months ago when I was still running 5-6 hours every week, in order to get myself ready for the marathon. Considering that I am a little reluctant to run half marathons in the future, this is another vanished hobby of mine.
Blogging? I used to blog a lot more often than I do now. I used to entertain thoughts of having a very well read blog until some unfortunate flame wars have put paid to that notion. Once a week, I can still maintain that momentum now. I still have something to write about. I'm blessed with a lot of creativity - it takes an extraordinarily long time for me to run out of ideas. But maybe one day I will.
So a lot of people call me a bookworm. Yes, but the mountain of books I used to have on my reading list is now a small pile and eventually it will go down to nothing. I don't know if it's coincidental. I used to look forward to the weekend because it would be time to myself to read what I want, and now I'm a little sick of reading, I have problems doing it for more than 1 hour at a go. And then I will have to find my next hobby to occupy myself.
I have another hobby - not really a hobby because I can't do it all the time. It's songwriting. I've been thinking about how to take it to the next phase, so that will occupy my free time for a while.
A new hobby of mine would be learning about computer science. I once considered that as a major but took Maths instead. Now I'm wondering. Of course this is reading, but it does mean that another subject that I really used to enjoy reading about would be slowly phased out - that's history. I now have a framework of world events and their significance, how we got to what we are today, so further study is no longer necessary.
2. As for work - I thought about how I looked at it. In around the 4th or 5th book, Harry Potter learnt that he was placed in the care of his aunt and treated like a Charles Dickens character for a reason - that whole place was magically protected against Voldemort. Unfortunately that's my attitude towards work at the moment. They're treating me better than Uncle Dursley is treating Harry Potter, but that's not saying much. If you want to think about how long you're going to stay in a place, think about how you'd feel if you were asked to take over your boss' job. Would you like the work? Or is it just a fatter paycheck in the end?
There are many worse places than my job, I know that. It protects me from idleness, having a completely purposeless existence. But are all thinking jobs like that eventually? Just sitting behind a desk, and churning away at data? Would I find some other job, and eventually, run into the same problems, getting tired of it all? That's the issue. I think this issue could be far deeper than something you could solve by switching lines.
I think that when you’re doing something – anything, actually, there are 3 stages – the beginning, the middle and the end. The beginning is usually quite rough, and you’re trying to learn the ropes, trying to be good at what you’re supposed to do. The middle is more comfortable, you’ve found a group of people you’re comfortable with, you’re getting by in your work. The end is not very comfortable, knowing that another new beginning is ahead of you, trying to make that new beginning happen, having to do a lot of things at work that you’ve been putting off because you were never comfortable doing them in the first place.
I’m getting old. I look at people at work who are 5 years younger than me and I think that I am looking at myself in a funny mirror, because that is the destiny that I could have taken, a road that I could have gone down, but instead I chose not to go down. And every time you go past a big big junction in life, you’re always wondering, could I have gone the other way?
They are articulate, polished. More conscious of their self image, and usually thinking about how other people are going to interpret what they say.
If people project a good self image, is that good for the company, or are they merely selfish people who are looking out for number one? I don’t know. What I do know is that this method of doing things was so foreign to me that I simply did not bother to try to take it up. I could have done that, but I wouldn’t be me. (Which may not be such a bad thing, considering the number of people who have come up to me and advised me to “stop being yourself”)
They believed fully in their careers, and the primacy of their careers. I gave up on it almost as soon as I had begun, in a fit of pique, when I was going through some difficult period. At that time I was totally sure that my future lay elsewhere.
But something strange happened. I developed a curious respect for the way that things were done at my workplace. Why do I use the words “curious respect”? When I was in secondary school my bio teacher took the whole class out on an excursion to a mangrove swamp. At first I thought that it was a very dreary place, and it is the epitomy of unproductive land. But later on he explained how things worked in the ecosystem, how the mangrove prevented the river from washing away the soil from under the rainforest, how it was a home to many animals like Kermit the frog. I wrote at the end of my report that I had developed a curious respect for the mangrove and he wrote back that he liked that comment. As with the mangrove swamp, so with my work place.
As for my workplace, it is the closest thing you get to a war zone. As a student in school I despised the military, and swore never to join the SAF, and how I got to join something that’s even more war-like than the SAF (let’s be honest here, the SAF doesn’t fight wars) is one of the big quirks of fate. But you always have to remember that all harsh words are said in the heat of the moment, all mistakes are made in the heat of the moment, it is so difficult to judge them because this is war, and all sorts of crap takes place when there is a war going on.
I look back at those guys, who developed the right attitude towards the place, and I wonder if it was possible to have a positive attitude win over the lazy cynical attitude that eventually took over me. For me it is a constant battleground between those two. Among my colleagues there are a few who have that positive attitude, a few whose lazy cynical attitudes have won, and the rest, for the most part, are battlegrounds. I think my bosses were not good enough psychologists to realise that I was a battleground, and at first only saw the lazy and cynical side. Eventually, though, they found out.
I also think about that one part in my life when I did try to overcome my snide and cynical attitude, and try to be nice to everybody at the same time. It was a happy, hopeful period in my life and not coincidently it was also the one time in my life I was going after a chick. Who knows how differently history would have turned out if I had won her over? (But I made the judgement call - probably a correct one - that she wasn’t worth the trouble.)
Well in a way all roads are connected and just because you turned this way on one junction, it doesn’t mean that you can’t turn back. And sometimes it might be fun to just wonder what it would have been like if I hadn’t taken this particular turn.
So even at this late stage in my work, I still feel like I'm learning new stuff. I'm taking my time. Eventually the time will come when I feel that this is no longer the case, and after that... toodle loo....
3. There’s this mahjong game that I won’t forget. I played it on Bintan, with a few friends (Shingo may have been one of them, I can’t remember.) Now I’m a mahjong novice, and not that experienced, I take too long to think of my next move, people usually get a little irritated with me. Usually that’s what happens. My brain works better in parallel rather than in series. I excel at solving problems which require some unusual and novel solution, rather than doing something repetitive over and over again and doing it well. So making fast and good decisions in mahjong, I’m not good at it.
There was this incident where I already had what it takes to "hu" and I didn't even know it, it took Totoro's husband, looking over my shoulder to tell me.
But there was this game, I had basically a formation, and was just missing one more tile to complete it. After a few moves, I began to sense that the tile was never going to come, so I set about dismantling 1 section of that formation, and building something else, and I won that round.
Leonpix who was overlooking it was surprised, and he started off in his machine gun Mandarin about what I did (I roughly got the gist). It was probably something he wouldn’t have done, something that he perceived to be really risky.
As you might know, risk is all a matter of perception. Risk is about something that is unknown, and people have a different set of criteria when they are talking about risk.
The way I saw it, I had 2 of a kind and I was waiting for a third. It was possible that somebody else was also holding on to the other 2 tiles, in which case I would never be able to get it. The chance of success, in continuing on my current path, was approximately zero. Better for me to break that 2 of a kind (this is risky too, because it could allow somebody to game. But it was still a risk worth taking.) and then risk building up another formation. I would at least have around a 50% chance of success. In this calculation, what I was doing was not risky at all, but an oblique way of maximizing my chances of success.
But I suppose we all have this thing about holding on to what we have. We think that a bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush. But sometimes the bird in your hand is not the bird you want, and there are more than 2 on the bush.
What I have read about psychology is that people usually have a very distorted view of risk. People tend to over exaggerate the sensational ways of dying. For example, terrorism. If I were to take a cold hard look at terrorism, I would not believe that I would die like that. OK, maybe my not working in an office tower has something to do with that belief. But I commute to work, and I use one of the most crowded MRT stations, and every morning, there is a traffic jam. All it would take is 1 suicide bomber with a backpack, and he could take out approximately 200 people if he’s in the middle of a
In other things, we tend to underestimate our risk. Land travel is risky. The number of people who died as a result of the 9/11 attacks is 3000. In America that year, between 2-3000 people died in car crashes. So why does 9/11 “change everything”, whereas car crashes don’t change anything?
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