Kosovo

I read about Kosovo while at school. It was the last episode of the Balkan conflict of the 90s, or so we thought. I was supposed to have read this book, “Winning Ugly” which was a double edged assessment of the Clinton Administration / NATO’s handling of this conflict. But they couldn’t find enough copies of that book so we read an easier book instead. (Yay!)

I read that book eventually, a couple of months ago. On one hand NATO waged its first ever war and won it, which is why nobody calls it “no action talk only” anymore. But it won the conflict in a way which was a close shave, and plenty of mistakes were made on the way.

First off, the shameful way that NATO responded to the fighting in Bosnia and Croatia left their reputation in tatters. NATO decided that it wasn’t going to stand any more of Slobodan Milosevic’s nonsense, so it decided that it was going to use military force against Milosevic if he tried anything funny with the Albanians in Kosovo (like he did with the Bosnians). Well and good.

Unfortunately Clinton had this notion that the US army was too afraid of sustaining casualties to have a ground war. So what it tried to do was to bomb Belgrade into submission. It was only going to be a 2 week bombing, but it lasted a few months. The Chinese embassy got bombed. When they were asked what are you going to do if the bombing doesn’t work they said, I don’t know, it has to work.

Not long after the bombing started, Milosevic expelled a few hundred thousand Kosovo Albanians from their homes. A few hundred thousand people out in the open, and the winter approaching. Well this was very fortunate for Clinton and NATO because suddenly Milosevic was the really bad guy who had to be stopped at all costs. It was easier to get people to continue bombing Belgrade until Milosevic gave up.

Now here’s a plug for Clinton. Even at his most screwed up, Bill Clinton was much better than Bush. He understood the issues, understood what was going on, regardless of whether he had the courage or the wisdom to act correctly in the face of trouble. He managed something quite difficult: NATO had to act alone, because they knew that if they were to bring this issue up to the UN, Russia and China would veto any military action against the Serbs. But eventually he managed to convince Russia that it was completely wrong to support a bad guy like Milosevic. Most crucially, Russia had to tell Milosevic that it wasn’t going to support him any longer.

Eventually, this set off a series of events which culminated in Milosevic losing power. The Kosovo Albanians went back to their homes, and apart from a few poor Kosovo Serbians who probably had the shit beaten out of them, the story is over, and everybody lived happily after.

Or did it? The most alarming thing that I read in that book, to me, was that NATO did not allow Kosovo to hold a referendum about how it wanted to be governed. This is because the majority of the Albanians in Kosovo would want independence. Even after the conflict, Kosovo retained its status as an autonomous province of Serbia. So in a way it’s a time bomb – either the Kosovars change their minds about independence, or they will work towards it.

And it’s already happened – they have declared themselves independent. Serbia is refusing to recognise them, although a lot of countries have recognised Kosovo. I don’t know if they’re going to merge with Albania or anything, but at least they don’t want to take any more shit from Serbia.

Problem kids

Some guy from my uni wrote a letter to the listserve. He was going back home to finish his degree in NUS. He had been battling depression, going on food and exercise binges.

It’s not the easiest places. The work there is tough, the people are a little unfriendly – no better or worse than the average Singaporean. The weather is miserable. The food is American. Had to keep on telling myself that the salvation was me getting a supposedly world class education.

There was this other girl from that uni who had to return home because she attempted suicide. She was diabetic so she attempted an insulin overdose.

I used to make fun of all those people there who attended Christian Fellowship. It seemed to me like a bunch of fundamentalist crackos, even though around one third of the Singaporean community attended. But I am a little more sympathetic of those who turned to religion to get them through their days. Maybe I didn't mind it so much because I have a lust for bookish learning that approximates the Count from Sesame Street, and also because I'm probably less human than most other people.

I’m still glad I went there because you know me, I love learning. If you take away the stress of the exams and constant weekly assignments and the grumpiness of the population and the so-so food and the sleep deprivation I was like a kid in a candy store. There were some truly marvellous times.

But yes there were easier places to spend those truly marvellous times.

That which does not kill you only makes you stronger, but that which does – like, kills you.

Word from the mother (ship)

I pulled out my guidebook on funk and there he was, staring out at me on the cover. Of course they would put him there, the leader of the most colourful and most sampled band in funk music.

But I think that Parliament / Funkadelic (for all intents and purposes they are the same band. George Clinton got his gang to record under a new name because they got caught in a lawsuit) were never really introduced to a Singapore audience. In the 70s, if you listened to that type of music it meant that you were the sort with long hair, doesn’t study hard at school, takes drugs, will probably be involved in a teenage pregnancy, and will live wretched and miserable in a ghetto for the rest of your life. And you won’t be one of the yuppies who cough up $60 to go to Esplanade to watch George Clinton.

However you could be one of those people who lose a lot of money betting on football, and therefore be a major sponsor of the construction of the Esplanade. Life ain’t fair. If you really had a plaque that listed down all the individuals who contributed to the Esplanade building fund, you would get a lot of Tan Ah Kows.

Anyway I have also plonked down $20 for Portsmouth to win the FA cup at 1.75 odds. It seemed a sound investment until 5 minutes later I remembered that Harry Redknapp has a bad record of losing to smaller teams.

I had never been to a Mosaic show before, so I guess it was not good that I missed Tortoise (by all accounts one of the best shows Singapore has ever seen) or Chick Corea or Pat Metheny. Or Femi Kuti! How could I have missed Femi Kuti!!! (Femi = son of Fela Kuti)

Anyway it wasn’t surprising when I saw that I would be upgraded to the floor seats so my wisdom in getting the cheapest seats was somehow vindicated (although when the box office clerk asked me if I was sure that I didn’t have any concessions it became clear to me that I could have gotten a student to buy my tickets for me and gotten in without much fuss.)

The crowd had a huge proportion of ang mohs (only ang mohs have heard of him.) I said to Nat, who I talked into going along (I thought he was a regular concert goer because he went for Pat Metheny, only to find out later he was not.) I said to Nat, I’m probably the only Chinese here who’s not an SPG. (Nat’s Indian).

As usual, Gary Shider turned up in diapers. I told people before that some nutcase would turn up in diapers but they thought I was kidding. It wasn’t a 20 piece band (and if there were 20 guys back there I wouldn’t blame them for resting a few after they got so spectacularly snubbed by the Singaporeans). There was some short guy at the keyboards who doubled up spectacularly as a saxophone soloist. Although that didn’t make up for the disappointment that he was the entire brass section. (I was hoping for something akin to the horny horns.) There was a stagehand who doubled up as a guitarist and contributed some blistering Hendrix solos. Drummer, bassist. Bassist doesn’t get the spotlight but in the original Funkadelic Bootsy was arguably the second most important guy in the band. The other keyboardist didn’t get much spotlight, and I guess it’s not that easy covering for Bernie Worrell. There was a 3rd guitarist, and 3 backup singers, although one of them, some white chick, got a solo spot.

The proceedings were somewhat disrupted with the latest incarnation of Sir Nose D’VoidOfFunk angling for more air time than he was given, and had to endure Gary Shider telling him to get the hell off the stage.

They ripped through a few songs at the beginning, without George Clinton. “Funkentelechy”, a few lines of “promentalshitbackwash enema squad”, and the standard “Bop Gun (Endangered Species)” opened the set. Can’t recognise all of the stuff that was played but many of the standards were there: “flashlight”, “p funk”, “Tear the Roof off”, “One Nation Under a Groove”, “Get Off Your Ass and Jam”. But no “Maggot Brain”, “Aqua Boogie” or “Night of the Thumpasorus Peoples”.

George Clinton is almost 70 and you wouldn’t expect him to last the whole set. He turned up 1 hour into the show dressed up as Kenny from South Park, keeping his hood on, dramatically pointing his finger at everybody in the band. Still has a hell of a voice though.

They couldn’t go full out for the entire 3 hours, so there was slow jams that got a bit draggy at times. But the highs – like the vocalist’s solo spot, where she worked Marvin Gaye’s line “throw up both my hands” (from “Inner City Blues”), “Nature Boy” and “My One and Only Love” into what she was singing. Like the triple Hendrix guitar freak out. Like Sir nose rippling his pecs like he was some crazy caterpillar, doing acrobatic backflips and a motormouth rap, when not holding up posters like “I am Sir Nose” or “Fuck George”. Or when they dragged up 10 lucky audience members (all female) on stage to dance during the finale.

I would love to do a version of “flashlight” one day, except that we use British English here and it would be Torchlight. You could throw in the Singaporean alphabet soup for the lyrics: “PAP”, “SIA”, “MRT”, “WP”, “ISD”, “PSA”, etc etc.

This is not, to quote one of their album titles, “the awesome power of a fully operational mothership”. That would be one of the best shows to go to. But I wouldn’t pass them up if they came to Singapore, just like I wouldn’t pass up Prince or James Brown (if he’s not charging a bomb). Well James can’t come because he’s dead anyway. But it was good enough.

One character in the P funk mythology is Sir Nose, the straight laced geek who doesn’t understand funk. One big problem with the concert is that there were too many Sir Noses in the audience. Nat was hollering himself hoarse but he also thought it could have been better.

I have favoured those large, loud, outlandish bands who are willing to go out on on a limb. But I think when you start dressing up like clowns and fooling around you people treat you less seriously and there is some slighting of your musical qualities, even though “anything goes” is such an important part of the creative process. I have always thought that Captain Beefheart, Sly Stone, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, Prince, electric era Miles Davis and Michael Jackson have typically been punished for sometimes letting their clownish antics overshadow their great music.

(the above being the review for the George Clinton concert on 10th March, belatedly published.)

Merchant of Singapore

A lot of us did this for “O” levels. It’s a story that a lot of school kids in Singapore know. And you know Singapore is a shipping hub with all those merchants everywhere.

And in the same year I did my “O”s, There was a gang in my class of 3 guys. Now you know my school is famous for being a nerd school (even though the most famous alumnus – LKY – is a gangster), which is why when we have people smoking and cursing in Hokkien in my class I give them a lot of respect.

That’s when it hit me the other day, that a beng version of the Merchant of Venice would be a great idea. Consider the possibilities:-

Shylock is a loanshark. When he makes his plea, he’ll say something like, “you guys are only doing this to me because I’m a beng. Does a beng not have feelings?” But if you are really really brave, you can make him Indian who lapses into Tamil when he gets angry, and you can have the rest of the cast call him a “chao bhayee”. But that would mean the film will never be released in Singapore.

Bassanio is a cheongster. Always going to the hottest nightspots, always spending money like a drunken sailor, vain, narcissistic and always living beyond his means. I never really liked that guy and it’s just sad that in Singapore you can reach out and grab him out of any given crowd.

Antonio would be the rich businessman. Now it’s very unlikely these days that he would be a merchant who needs his goods to be delivered and they don’t arrive because of the weather. So maybe either he’s got credit problems now because his capital is tied up in bio research, or he will only get paid when he delivers a software solution but his programmers have hit a snag.

Now we always suspected that Antonio and Bassanio are gay lovers. There will be no need to speculate anything in this movie. It will be out in the open, completely explicit and unexpurgated.

Portia can be the classic Ah Lian. She will always be skimpily dressed and will have a killer figure. It could be unexpected that she will become an attorney but there’s nothing wrong with Ah Lians being very quick thinkers and being very sharp on their feet.

If the movie really revolves around the Singapore shipping industry we can have most of the dialogue in Hokkien. We can also have Portia lapse into Hokkien while the judge always reminds her to “use channel 5”.

Fried Dumplings

Was on one of those management courses again. This time the instructor was the same as another one

Here’s a dialogue that took place in the course. They were trying to list out some factors in our work we aren’t able to control.

Instr: OK, #9, we’ve come to “bosses”. Can you give an example of how you would cope with not being able to control your bosses?

#9: Yeh. Like you manage their expectations.

Instr: OK, how would you go around managing their expectations?

#9: Like I write them a nice letter, see, and thereafter they no longer expect me to turn up for work.


Later on I was talking to one of those guys at my table, and he was telling us about this time somebody in his office threw a security pass at his manager’s face. I thought, whoa, that’s a little dramatic, but his department, being a frontline department is a very dramatic place. I asked him if that counted as a resignation. He said, “I don’t know, it could be a resignation or a firing, but what we do know is that they called the security guards to escort him out of the premises.”

So I said, it’s unlikely I’ll know the name of the guy who threw the security pass. But do you know the guy he threw the pass at? Then that guy said, well I work for him. Anyway it’s fried dumplings. Fried dumplings! I whistled… well heck no wonder.

Fair and Balanced reporting

JAKARTA - MOMENTS before their Adam Air Boeing 737 aircraft crashed into the sea, killing all 102 people on board, the two pilots were frantic.
'This is really bad. It is starting to fly like a bamboo ship. Pull up. Pull up. Pull up!' screamed one.

The other yelled: 'Crazy, this is crazy.'

Their last recorded words, captured by the cockpit voice recorder, were released yesterday by investigators who blamed errors by the two pilots and a faulty navigation system for the crash on New Year's Day last year.

Investigators found that the pilots had accidentally disconnected the autopilot system while trying to fix a problem in the navigation instruments.

'Without the autopilot, the plane went out of control, listing to the right and pitching down,' investigator Santoso Sayogo told a press conference yesterday.

The plane was flying from Java to an airport in the east of Indonesia when it spiralled from the sky at a height of 10,000m. It took around two minutes to hit the sea, investigators said.

Several days passed before fishermen and navy boats located floating wreckage off the island of Sulawesi. Both flight data recorders were eventually found on the sea bed. The plane's mostly intact fuselage remains under water.

No bodies were recovered.

Transport Minister Jusman Syafei Djamal said Adam Air had registered 154 defects in the Boeing 737-400's navigation system in the three months before the crash, showing that the plane was poorly maintained.

Indonesia's transport safety chief Tatang Kurniadi said: 'The accident happened because of a combination of several factors, including the failure of both pilots to intensively monitor flight instruments, especially in the last two minutes of the flight.'

The pilots had reported the navigation system problem but sounded unconcerned, even joking just 20 minutes before the plane went down.

Later, as they tried to fix the problem, the autopilot disengaged, causing the plane to bank to the right.

The pilots were apparently unaware that they were now flying the plane and ignored 'a number of initial alerts, warnings and changes to displays' indicating the jetliner's increasingly critical situation, the National Transportation Safety Committee report said.

They were so preoccupied with the repair work they were attempting that they did not act to stop the plane's descent and prevent it from going out of control.

Well, there’s that article. Is there anything wrong with the article? I don’t think so. But look at the way that the Straits Times headlined it. “Pilots were joking and unconcerned just before crash”. This is a blatant foul which makes the pilots look really bad. But is this true?

We know that the pilots made a serious mistake in disconnecting the autopilot while trying to repair the navigation system. But that is not due to negligence. Nobody who makes a mistake in a split second should be blamed too much. If they are joking and laughing well their job is a stressful one and you can’t expect anybody to be serious all the time. Everybody knows that Indonesians like to laugh and joke.

It’s clear that the airline is to be blamed for faulty maintenance. Or you could even attribute it to the proliferation of all these budget airlines proclaimed not long ago to be the great and wonderful thing of the future. Airplanes so wonderful they don’t even need to be maintained. Governments who think that when they hands off and not regulate commercial air transport industry they are not fucking around with peoples’ lives.

Most convenient thing to do in this case is to let the dead assume all the blame. Meanwhile I feel sorry for the pilots who not only have to screw around with shitty equipment and endanger all their lives but risk these reporters slanting stories against them and letting their families face the wrath of the victims’ families.

Music Teacher

A dream last night. Actually I only remember dreams during the daytime, when I’m napping or about to get up.

I was in the MRT, and I bumped into my music teacher who taught me from when I was 8 to 11. She was this strict, no-nonsense kind which I respected more than I liked. (I can say the same for the other main music teacher but I respect him more as a pianist than as a person.)

We hadn’t met since I was 11. She asked me what’s going on in my life. I said that I am sitting on 20 songs that I think are good enough but I haven’t made demos of them. She said yah I know you can write music*. So what are you going to do? Time is running out, better get yourself together.

Later on I was talking to 2 of my classmates**. It was their 11 year old selves. Those were the ones who were always better with their hands than I was. They were mature for their age, but still kids nevertheless.

I was of the opinion, and still am, that among all my classmates, I had the best musical brain and the lousiest hand eye co-ordination. I am the Dr Dre who can’t rap, or the Burt Bacharach who can’t sing.

* my first compositions were written under her tutelage. Years later I bumped into a former classmate who met the teacher, and he said that the teacher told them I have music intelligence. My teacher’s Singaporean of course, which means they can only bear to praise you when your back is turned. So while I only dreamt that she said that, it is likely she does have that opinion in real life. Too bad I was lousy with my hands.

** No, Eunice wasn’t one of those 2. For some reason we hardly spoke in class.