When You're Gone

I think I will write 1 piece about songwriting, especially since Avril Lavigne is coming has been to Singapore.

What a song like “When you’re Gone” tells me is that Avril Lavigne is one of the most inconsistent songwriters out there today. Let’s start on the plus side. This song has a killer chorus. It is a CHORUS. It’s one of those soaring sing-along choruses that will easily stand alongside others like “My Finest Hour” (Sundays), “Voices Carry” (Til Tuesday), “I’ll Stand By You” (Pretenders).

This is one of those songs where the rest of the song somewhat pales beside the chorus. I can picture what happened: a great chorus pops into you head 1 day, and you got to write it down. But a great chorus doesn’t stand on it’s own, a great chorus is a magnificent roof, but you still need the walls to hold the thing up. So you write verses, verses which in this case are not really bad but are fairly undistinguished when put aside that CHORUS. It’s a fairly common problem that when you get a great chorus, the build up to it is not so great. There’s a bit of imbalance, and it’s like seeing a woman with fantastic butt and legs, but flat chest and mediocre face. It happens all the time. (I mean this for both songs and women.)

And she seems almost determined to follow up a great line like “when you walk away I count the steps that you take” with a clichéd clunker like “do you see how much I need you right now?”. I mean, common sense would have you follow that up with another line that begins with “when you…”, right? Unless she thought about it for 1 hour and couldn’t come up with something.

Similarly the main hook, “when you’re gone the pieces of my heart are missing you” is a good line, but the chorus ends with a limp “I miss you” (as if we didn’t know that already.)

But then I’m reluctant to criticize teenagers. There was this review which put it nicely (“everything is either a blowjob or a castration”). Every thing about her is black and white. Even her face looks like a panda. I remember what it was like to be a teenager, and I know that I will never look at life with such certainty again as I did when I was younger. Well let’s hope she stays in the business long enough for us to know what a middle-aged Lavigne sounds like.

I rate her as a songwriter. A good songwriter is somebody who has a knack for that catchy chorus. She reminds me a bit of Debbie Gibson (although their images are quite different.) The teenage precocious songwriters with high voices and the knack for hooky choruses.

Live and Let Die

When you were young and your heart was an open book
You used to say live and let live
But in this ever changing world in which we live in
Makes you give in and cry
Say live and let die

- Paul McCartney, "Live and Let Die"

Somebody put a few pictures of an obscure production by the NUS law faculty online. Through the Proust effect I suddenly remembered about what it was like to attend that production.

It was a musical about the Tiananmen square revolt, and it was written by a Law student who by coincidence was a senior of mine in my school. When I was in sec 3 I saw a school play of his, and I thought, this is great. I didn’t know that sec 4 students could write so well. Next year I wrote a play and staged it for the same event, and although it was a less happy experience than I expected, it was a dream come true for me and it feels great when you can cross out 1 item from your “things to do with your life” list.

But that was not the reason I attended the production. It was because of a violinist who was playing a bit part in that production. I had a crush on that violinist, who was codfish, whom you know from a few articles back.

I can still tell you what it was like to go there. I didn’t have a “reason” to be there. It was weird. There were ppl I sorda knew, and they were like, “who’s he with?”

To recap, I had met codfish while temping, and probably started having a crush on her without fully realising it at that time. But I KIV’ed her, probably for 4 years and then after a chance meeting we started corresponding by mail. (Yes when I say that I’m KIV’ing somebody it’s not the same as saying that I’m giving her up).

I was a little bruised and battered after my first year studying overseas. But towards the end of that first year I started writing to her. After I came home for a visit, we started talking on the phone. She happened to mention that she was involved in this production.

It took place at a location that almost certainly doesn’t exist anymore: the old harbourfront auditorium that got converted into offices probably.

I can certainly tell you that if I hadn’t lived through those emotions before and somebody tried to describe them to me, I wouldn’t have the faintest clue what he was talking about. But when you’re teetering on the brink, it’s this mixture of awe and fear and at the same time the expectancy of a wondrous and delightful experience. Even back then I was a little old to never have asked out a girl before.

I thought it was weird for me to pop into the dressing room and say hi when I hadn’t yet gotten to know her better. So I left. I didn’t want to admit that I had gone to a show all alone (I had faith in the playwright, though but still…) just because I had a schoolboy crush on some obscure fiddler in one corner of the orchestral pit.

Well even though I was pretty pleased that it turned out to be more than just a schoolboy crush, even though we did end up as friends after that, I ended up severing ties with her a few years ago. Probably I was fed up with her condescending attitude, probably we found that I was getting less interested in film (she’s a film graduate student, and I wonder how her PhD’s coming along – it’s been quite some time already), and she was emphatically no engineer. She used to say that the best thing I said to her was that I would never leave her. I think I just wanted to piss her off.

I’ve been tempted to get back in touch with her, particularly after one time when she gave me a shout out on her blog. I decided not to, and for some funny reason not long after that her blog was locked.

I was a much more open person in those days. I genuinely thought I was going to become a new person – kinder, gentler, more open. Some parts of my teenage years were really nasty and it seemed to be all over at that point. But things didn’t work out. Or maybe I just didn’t have enough faith. There was a haze of confusion after the relationship ended, but after that for some strange reason I turned away from that kinder gentler thing. I became more hard, more dead. Maybe it was too much maths.

And that’s why that picture startled me a little bit – because you go back to all those times when there were forks in the road in your life, and you’re always wondering, “what would have happened if I had turned out differently? What if I went to this school instead of that, worked for this company instead of that?” What if I became the kinder gentler version of numbernine instead of being lazy and becoming a spoilt brat?

She looked great. She always looks great. But there’s something hidden, something vaguely inscrutable about her, as though she wears a mask. She looks a little like a sphinx. I’d wager she’s got a great sphincter although to my eternal regret I never got to find out.

She told me details of her unhappy childhood. At first, I thought, OK – not bad we got that much in common. (There is a significant correlation between those people who have unhappy childhoods and those people who leave their countries after they grow up.) But I don’t know how to put this nicely – she’s damaged goods. I wish she had her head screwed on properly – but if she did, she would be out of my league. That’s the tragic part – at that time I genuinely believed that I would not have had a shot at a chiobu unless she was a little sick in the head. I could have saved myself some problems if I had had walked out on her, but I stuck this one out because I believed that if I found somebody better she would want to walk out on me. I guess that’s why you find some people getting onto heroin even though they know what it entails – because they don’t really think they’re going to find other better forms of happiness.

For somebody as good looking as her to not be able to hold on to a permanent relationship, that is sad. For somebody as smart as her not to be able to achieve more in life, that is also sad.

So as much through laziness I will not contact her again. But during those first few days while I was corresponding with her, I was happy. It was a wild crazy sort of happiness in the beginning, and maybe a calm peaceful sort of happiness before all the problems started. And when I look back, I think that it’s that happiness that I miss and not her. That as much as she inspired it, I also created much of it in my own mind’s eye. Except that it’s probably long ago enough for me to not really understand it anymore.

Gustav

It’s been 3 years since Katrina. 1 year after that, Douglas Brinkley published his mammoth book on Katrina, “Great Deluge”. 1 year after that, it appeared in a bargain basin and I got it. 1 year later, I’m almost through with that book.

I suppose you’re wondering, why was I so interested in Katrina? When there are floods in India which are far more destructive, in terms of lives and property?

I suppose that if you were to look closely at most natural disasters they would all turn up plenty of drama, and it’s also that New Orleans is in America, and is therefore the most well reported of all natural disasters.

Why do you think that Cyclone Nargis shone the light on the Burmese junta more than the Indian Ocean tsunami? Because there was less reporting on Burma for the latter incident, and because aid workers were scrambling to more prominent places in Aceh, Sri Lanka and Thailand than to think too much about Burma. But when cyclone Nargis hit, Burma got condemned as the place where the junta was collecting everything for itself and not distributing it to the people.

I guess it has to do with how it’s New Orleans, birthplace of jazz. How it happened to the world’s richest country but they weren’t able to save their poorest people.

It was also a frightening picture of all hell breaking loose, of what would happen to America’s ghettoes if one day the USA were to stop being so wealthy. A society where everything had broken down but everything was kept under wraps had turned into one which was not only full of dysfunctional people but was also a natural disaster zone.

There were robberies, rapes, looting, rampaging, sniping. There was the hellholes that were the convention centre and the football stadium, where people were pissed off, had nothing to eat or drink, there was no sanitation, and people were crapping all over in public. (Although you must imagine that the situation is probably even more dire in places like Aceh and Bihar India, except that those ppl are OK with no sanitation because they never had it anyway.) There was the callous incompetence of the cronies that Bush 2 had appointed to the key aid agencies in the US.

It was as though somebody up there had overturned a very large rock, and exposed the festering reality underneath the shiny façade. Suddenly a lot of things which were simmering under the surface just exploded. The friendly black people who used to frequent your stores suddenly became part of the rampaging horde of looters. The smiling neighbourhood policeman suddenly became the guy who shut you away from a shelter. The mayor, normally full of oratorical bluster, suddenly became the coward who couldn’t do anything.

What made this special and unique though, was the presence of snipers everywhere who would just shoot aid workers and make it impossible for them to do their job without risking their lives.

But in the end, why did I spend so much time reading that book? I guess I just have this bad habit of picking up a book on a whim and finishing it because I can’t stand to leave books unfinished once I’ve touched them.

Asspartame assplosion

I just attended my first shotgun wedding. It was a hoot. There were so many snide comments to be passed. The groom made a speech about how marriage has taught him the values of self restraint. If he doesn't learn it from knocking people up when's he going to learn. I also sniggered when the Justice of Peace read out that a marriage is a convenant to be entered into by both parties of their free will.

At my table were myself and 2 friends, and the rest were people I had never met before. One of them was a boy of 8-9 years, hyperactive, si beh irritating. And he was holding a box of mints, popping them into his mouth at an alarming rate. One of my friends was looking on in horror, saying "does he know that aspartame in large doses has a laxative effect?"

He disappeared for a while. Coincidently the other friend and I went to the toilet. We did not like what we saw. The boy had his trousers off, legs covered with shit, and trousers covered with shit. It was a little difficult to breathe in the toilet. For some funny reason he thought that a good way of getting rid of the shit was to fling his trousers around and spray shit everywhere. The Indian janitor was screaming bloody murder at him. (This is a wedding, remember, in a hotel of a decent standard where the last thing he was doing before giving the boy grief was to spray antiseptic and fragrance into the urinal.)

So I walked back to the table, and I said to the guys at the other side of the table, "hi, your friend is in the toilet, and there is shit everywhere." It took a while for those words to register. Soon enough, they were laughing when they came back. They reported that the boy was crying, and probably it was because the janitor was also crying. I watched the horror of the crap guy's family's faces when they got news of this incident. Eventually they boy got sent home.

3 Dead Directors

I used to watch movies a fair bit in college. And as you know, the sort of movies they tend to show in college cinemas tend to be the more arty farty kinds. You could say that my college days were the high watermark of my relationship with cinema. Back home, either it was the dearth of good films (I could always rent films from the Ass-planade but opted not to) or probably that as with music, there is this golden period where you first encounter cinema, and it's all new and fresh and beautiful, and there are so many

Well during my days at the college cinema, I got introduced to 3 great directors, and all of them died last year, all within a month of each other.

I wouldn't have known that Edward Yang was dead. If it was announced in the papers, I would have missed it. I only knew because there was this article on Cai Qin and it announced that her former husband Edward Yang died recently. Goddamn.

My favourite of the 3 is Edward Yang. He is, together with Hou Hsiao Hsien, the 2 great directors at the forefront of the Taiwanese New Wave movement. I've only seen his 2 most famous films, but they are among my favourite movies, ever. One is "A Brighter Summer Day", and the other is "Yi Yi".

One thing that Edward Yang is famous for, and this is also true of HHH: whereas western film tends to put the camera very close to the subjects, and places the viewer right in the heat of action, they put the camera very far away, to capture the surrounding landscape as well. The takes are long, and there are a few cuts. It is very unusual in cinema to focus on the background as much as the action but I suppose there's this theory that Asians have a different way of seeing the world - in terms of relationships, rather than in terms of an actor divorced from its surroundings. So when you can see the background, it is more like theatre, you are reminded that the actors are forever under the influence of the workings of the cosmos, this mysterious thing called fate that rules all of us.

I remember watching "Yi Yi". I went in not expecting anything much more than the run of the mill arthouse film. I was fairly astonished when I came out: I thought it was one of the greatest 2 hour films I had ever watched, until I checked my watch and discovered that the film was 3 hours long. I might put up a review of the film somewhere, but maybe not here. The subject matter is hardly inspiring, it is a portrait of a family, all struggling and going through difficult phases - the father trying to get a project off the ground, and at the same time an old flame appears at the wedding, and tempts him into an affair. The mother is sick and tired of life, and retreats to a monastery for a few weeks. The eldest daughter is going out with a guy she finds interesting, and also racked with guilt at possibly having caused her grandmother's stroke. The cute but curious young son goes around with a camera, just like the director himself, shooting things that other people can't see. Also, in having a crush on a female classmate, he experiences the earliest stirrings of adolescence.

One thing I picked up upon, and this was confirmed when I read an interview with Edward Yang: all the members of the family could the same person, going through different stages of life. By putting these episodes together and attributing them to different members of a family, he condenses the whole experience of a life into a single film, and that's one of the things which makes the film such a stirring experience. In one of my favourite scenes, when the father and his old flame were reminiscing about their younger days, his daughter was acting it out with her boyfriend, and the director juxtaposed both scenes together to underline that his daughter was replaying events that happened in his youth.

One cannot discount a tinge of homesickness at play when I saw this. I live in Singapore not Taiwan of course but you can't deny that Singapore is a hell lot more like Taiwan than the US.

"A Brighter Summer Day" is one of the most ambitious movies I have ever seen, and it succeeds brilliantly. I think one reason why I rated it highly is because when you grow up in Singapore, you are not very conscious of history, that you are carrying a torch that has been passed down to you from generations back. I think there is something in us that yearns for some semblance of a history, and that is why Royston Tan's "881", as well as Jack Neo's "Homerun" have been such hits. So whenever I see a history film about our part of the world, particularly if it concerns the 20th century, I'm interested. I didn't like it at all that our Ministry of Education is so coy about letting Singaporeans learn about their post independence history. There is nothing in the history textbooks. All you see are ang mohs in their colonial outfits and their wigs. I liked "brighter Summer Day" because it showed the real stuff, the gang fights, the strict schools (eerily similar to many of our SAP schools), even the forced confessions obtained through the good ol' air conditioners. (Back then they didn't have air conditioning, so they used ice blocks.) Now you know why that film made me feel so homesick. Good old ISD!

I am frequently surprised that while Hong Kong and Taiwan cinema are very well regarded internationally, Singapore has comparatively little to offer. Tsai Ming-Liang is actually a Malaysian who moved to Taiwan. I think, when watching Edward Yang's films, I got this briefest notion that Singapore does have what it takes to have a great film industry, and probably did so in the 60s, before the motherfuckers shut them down.

Then again, I think a little about how a small cinema scene can suddenly produce a few geniuses, before the scene fades away. How small footballing countries like Holland, Hungary, Austria and Uruguay have produced a short generation of geniuses against the odds.

Oh by the way the other 2 cinema geniuses who died last year were Antonioni and Bergman. I liked the films by them that I have watched ("l'Avventura", "la Notte", "l'Eclisse", "Seventh Seal", "Wild Strawberries") and they are among my favourite films but I have less to say about them.

Striptease

Sometimes you got to watch the shit that comes out of your mouth. Like for some reason when having lunch with colleagues we were discussing some illegal club which had a striptease act. Then somebody brought up the prospect of my becoming a stripper in front of a female colleague (call her Edna Mode), and asked me if I dared to do a strip show. So I said, if she dares to watch, I will dare to strip.

Well as it turns out I have been forced to make good on my word. I'm still trying to work out a set of circumstances that will make things less embarrassing for me. Still looking for a time when all the bosses will be away, and will try to ban any form of photography from the event.

OK, last paragraph was written way back in March. Well I can't remember why there was no striptease there and then. The second time around, I wanted a colleague there to be a mediator. Let's call him fat boy. Fat boy wasn't around. And after that the thing lapsed.

A few months passed, interspersed with long periods where I was not in the office. I was away for a total of 5 weeks, due to a long vacation and a stint at ICT. So on the first day I came back from ICT, somebody brought it up again. So I said to Edna, let's go to the computer lab, and then I'll strip for you. Then she followed me there, half expecting me to chicken out, I think.

It was over very fast. By the time I had half of my shirt undone, she ran out, covering her eyes, yelling, "somebody strike me blind! I can't watch this ugly fuck!".

Well it's been conclusively shown that she's the one who daren't watch, rather than me who daren't strip. Final score: numbernine 1, Edna Mode 0.

Moral of the story: don't fuck with numbernine.

Emmanuel Goldstein

I think we've all had briefings about the conduct of anti-terrorism operations. We've had to do anti-terrorist operations that might result in somebody's death, and a few days before we started, there was a talk by a psychologist from the civil service.

I thought it was going to be very similar to the talk that I was given 3 years ago when we had the same operation, but I think that they've revised it. 3 years ago, it was just somebody talking to us, asking us if we had compunctions about killing a man when we had to. It was more simple. Now, they had this pep talk where they tell us about the larger socio-political context of terrorism in our region. As somebody who reads a fair bit about terror, I thought I would say some things about what was being mentioned in there.

I didn't expect everything being said to be true or accurate. It's sad but we don't completely trust our government these days. My memory of the talk is hazy because it took place a few days ago but I did jot down a few points that I disagreed with.

The talk seems to imply that Al Qaeda is still active. In a way yes and no. The original Al-Qaeda has not been captured, but they have been rendered ineffective. Most of the terror comes from offshoots of Al Qaeda. It's just like everybody uses IBM compatibles, but not actually IBM computers. And that is why it is not so easy to call the conflict against terror as a "war" because wars as we understand them involve treaties between well defined entities like governments. Terrorism is a guerilla war. Agents of terror are not Al Qaeda themselves, but rather they are spin offs, and organisations which take the example of Al-Qaeda. It's like Al-Qaeda is McDonald's and JI is Burger King. McDonald's invented the concept and the organisational structure of the fast food restaurant, and the rest followed in its stead.

The implications are slightly different because this is not a limited war. There is only 1 way to defeat terrorism, and that is for the terrorists themselves to give up. As of now, there is reason to believe that terrorism is on the wane because people see no point in blowing themselves up when the lives of people in rich countries go on as before.

They talked about examples of terrorism in the world. Nobody mentioned the Jackal or Baader Meinhoff, but they talked about the PLO and the IRA. Strangely enough nobody mentioned the Haghanah. Nobody mentioned that Israel used terrorist tactics against the British in order to obtain their independence.

We went into the reasons for terrorists to attack Singapore. One of the reasons is our ties to the USA. The psychologist outlined correctly one of the reasons why the Arabs don't like the USA: they just come over and take over all the oil and try to get it for as low as they can. But the other reason is something they didn't mention: the USA unconditionally supports Israel, even though they have a very unfair advantage over Palestine. People think about Israel getting terrorist attacks all the time, but they don't really ask too many questions why. A large part is that Israel doesn't have the balls to ask their own people to stop building settlements in the occupied territories.

This injustice is one of the main things that terrorist preachers pick on, rightly or wrongly to convince people that the world is out to get them. Whether it is a legitimate reason is something else but the more important point is that it is something that people can pick on.

Another point they keep on emphasising is that Singapore is not resiliant. Terrorist attacks will have a great adverse impact on Singapore. True, New York and London may have recovered from their respective terrorist attacks, but Singapore might not.

Now this is offensive. We all know that governments milk the terrorist threat for what it's worth: you need us. You need to give up your civil liberties and your rights to us so that we can better protect you from the devil that is out there. Now Singapore goes one up and exaggerates the impact of something that has yet to happen. These things don't work if you don't ratchet up the fear factor up one notch. Ever heard of a city that has been destroyed by a terrorist attack? You could kill 3000 people in NYC and life still goes on. This is the ultimate disillusionment of the terrorist: that life still goes on.

To be sure, there are cities which have shown to be in unmistakable states of decline. Detroit. Los Angeles. Pittsburgh. Marseille. We know that a city can surely fall as it can rise. But terrorists cannot destroy us. Possibly a declining economy can. Are we more vulnerable than Bali, Madrid, Tel Aviv? Are they saying that Singaporeans are soft? Is this a self fulfilling prophecy?

The rise of China is unfortunate for us, actually. One of the worst things to happen to us if the Uighurs were to start becoming terrorists. Whereas in the last 10 years terrorists have been targeting angmohs and their own fellow Arabs (wtf?) now they will be targeting Chinese as well.

But it hasn't happened yet. The US is slowly winning Iraq, and for now terrorism is on the wane. It's been something less compelling this time than 3 years ago. Of course it's a useful exercise for us to go and test ourselves with an exercise. But I just feel quite uncomfortable noting that long after the threat is gone, they will still go on putting us on exercises like this.