Another song popped into my head. It wasn't fantastic or anything. But I thought, what the hell, write it down. One day, you're going to be old, and you're going to be glad to be even writing stuff of that standard. Don't be fussy. Build up a stockpile so that you won't regret it when you grow old.
I don’t really know whether or not to write this. I think I may have grown as a songwriter over the last 2-3 years, or maybe I have not. It’s not a coincidence that many people write their best songs before they’re 30. Songwriting is a process, whereby the best ideas, and also the ones that come most naturally to you, are the ones which get written first. So even if you do get better at it as time goes on, your best ideas are already out there, and you simply have to do something different.
Anyway, I’ll put a header on some of my points.
1. Songwriting is a black art.
When people say they write songs, the reaction is naturally scepticism. Why? Because the number of good songwriters out there is comparatively few. It is difficult. Like Bjork says on “Human Behaviour”: There is no map and a compass won’t do. Music theory teaches you relatively little, or at least it’s only half of the story. Music theory is like grammar. Just because you have mastered grammar, it doesn’t make you a great story teller.
2. Music theory.
Of course, having a music education helps. I have been educated in music almost all my life, and I cannot imagine what it is like to listen to music with an uneducated ear, so I take for granted that you will be able to identify notes when hearing them, you will identify chords.
3. Have an opinion.
The second task of a songwriter is to develop taste. Have an opinion about music. Every song, you like it or you don’t like it. Why does this speak to you? What is it saying? Why do some songs remain in the memory, and why do others fade? Why is this something you want to listen to over and over again, and why is that something that irritates you?
This is very important, almost the first skill you have to learn as a songwriter, because you will be using this skill to assess your own work.
I have learnt as much about music from music critics, as I have from my music teachers. I have read reviews about albums, and often wondered, why some albums get bad reviews and others get good ones. Sometimes, music critics are wrong. More often than that, though, they are right. And 20 years later, the critical opinion about a given piece of music should be secure.
4. Emotional vocabulary
Every chord is a colour. (Actually, some people think that every note is a colour too.) But chords are more important than which key of the scale you are playing. Irving Berlin only knew how to write music in the key of F. It doesn’t really matter.
Every chord, relative to the tonic, conveys an emotion. Understand the emotional impact of chords. Simplistically, major chords are happy and minor chords are sad. But not always. From I to IV is like going to a higher plane, and from I to V is going to a lower one. But not always. Inversions (ie changing which note of the chord is used in the bass) change the way the chords sound, and change the emotional shade.
More interesting than the I, IV and V are the relatives of these chords. Sometimes you will have the minor versions, the major versions, the extended chord, your 7s, 9s, 11s, even 13s. Augmented. Diminished. Suspended. Know your chords. This is important.
5. Chord progression
Chord progressions and melody in music are similar to plot and narrative in a story. Like a good maths proof (it is not a coincidence that I learnt how to write a song around the same time I was learning how to write a maths proof) a chord progression is a sequence of ideas which lead, logically to each other. Whether the chord progression makes sense or not, is analogous to whether it is grammatical.
6. Melody
A melody will typically contain certain notes that make up the chord. There will be transitional notes that don’t have much to do with that chord, and they are called passing notes. The melody needs to both be consistent with what’s going on in the chord progression, and at the same time it should be artistically appealing. That’s why writing a song is not easy – it’s like solving a simultaneous equation. You don’t want to have a melody which follows the chord progression like a slave. There’s no tension, and it’s boring. But you don’t want to have a melody that is not related to the chord progression either.
Somebody asked “what is melody” in a music forum. It is a very good question. Our most conventional notion of melody is that it is the part of music which is in the foreground, it is typically linear, with only 1 note at a time (like if 1 person is singing). It is a sequence of notes.
Any of these notions can be violated. The melody can be in the bassline. Counterpoint is what we call it when there are 2 melodies playing against each other at the same time. Harmony is what we call it when 2 or more non-clashing notes are played together. 2 or more voices can make up the same melody, they just sing different parts of it.
7. Form
Almost the first thing people will teach you when you have formal instruction on composition is the form of the music. ABA, AABA, ABABCA, etc. This is important, of course, but it’s like saying that when you write a story, your words must fall on a straight line going from left to right. Although this convention is important, it has very little to do with whether you are writing a good song or not.
There is only 1 thing to learn from the idea of form: big pieces of music are made of smaller pieces of music. How you arrange the smaller pieces is the architecture design.
What’s more important, from my perspective, is how those smaller chunks flow into each other. How everything combines together to form the narrative arc. Always pay attention to the bigger picture, and how the smaller pieces make up the bigger puzzle. Sometimes you can have 2 really spectacular pieces of music, and they sound awful when you put them side by side because the flow is gone. Sometimes you can tolerate having a boring part, because it gives you a break from the exciting part.
8. Hidden melodies
Moving away from our conventional idea of melodies to the bigger picture, we need to understand what is a melody, in a more generic sense. Melodies are narratives. They tell a story. They lead the listener through a series of logically connected moods, and represent an arc through the music for the listener to follow.
If you study the human brain, you will understand that stories are our method of organising information and making sense of them. One favourite technique we have of memorising long lists, is to make up a story where all the items appear in sequence, in the story. The reason why this works is because we are so well adapted to thinking about stories.
Similarly, it is difficult for me to memorise a lot of numbers (musical notes are basically numbers. Sounds inhuman, but deal with it.) But when they are arranged in a catchy melody – miracle of miracles, it’s so easy.
So when you extend the definition of melody, into something like a catchy hook, or a motif, or a drum figure, the definition becomes something like: foreground.
This should explain why hip hop and rap works, even though there are so few chords and melodies. It’s all hidden melodies – the brain still has something to latch onto. Maybe it’s the combination of wordplay, or the rhythm of the words, or catchy slogans.
But the cardinal rule is this: the brain still has to have something to latch onto. Something to think about. Take away chords and melody, maybe you have to make the rhythm interesting. Or maybe you have to make the architecture interesting, like how minimalist music takes away a lot of your points of reference, and instead you pay attention to how the mood shifts and changes very subtly. But music cannot be vacuous.
9. Borrowing ideas
I’m not good enough to come up with my own ideas. Maybe nobody is. I’ve always borrowed from others. It’s like building a nest, all your material is stolen from somewhere else. But the creation, the nest, is yours and yours alone. Unless you steal somebody else’s nest wholesale (or a significant chunk thereof).
So when you are starting to write, just steal. Take a piece here, another piece there, put it together in a way that’s never been done before. Take somebody else’s melody, and harmonise it with different chords. Take somebody else’s chords an put a new melody on it.
Combine genres in a way that has not been done before. Chinese with Indian. Dub with classical. Avant Garde with Gregorian. Whatever.
10. Experience
I started “writing” music when I was 8. I wrote the first song I was happy with when I was 21. Yes, it takes that long. If you start off as an adult, your learning curve will be shorter. But you have to wait a long time and put up with stuff that doesn’t work. Then you learn your lesson from point number 3: assess it like a music critic.
If you can’t finish songs, KIV them. A few songs were stuff I KIV’ed from when I was a teenager, and now I have the experience to complete them, to solve problems I wasn’t able to solve back then.
You might learn some tricks. Like repeating a phrase because it sounds better the second time. Or ending a song abruptly. Or throwing in an unexpected chord.
After a while, the seam that you are mining will be empty. Then branch out, try a different form of music and see what happens. There are a lot of songwriters, they were very good when they were young, and then they lost it. Or rather most of their songs were written and as a consequence they ended up repeating themselves. There wasn't much that was new. Brian Wilson - his last great album was merely to finish a project he abandoned when he was young. Paul McCartney - was never as great a songwriter as when John Lennon was around. Lou Reed - wrote most of his great stuff before he was 30, with the Velvet Underground.
Is songwriting a young man's art? Or is it that people always run out of ideas no matter what? Only a few years ago, when I wrote something good, I'm like, "damn, I never knew I had it in me." Now it's like, "wait, didn't I just write this before? aren't I just piecing together some other stuff that I've done before, and done better?" After your best ideas are out in the open, it just gets more and more difficult.
Saturday, 13 February 2010
A random conversation with Harry Redknapp
I thought that maybe fat boy is not such a good moniker, I’ve decided to call him Harry Redknapp instead.
#9: Yeh, I actually had a female housemate for 2 years.
HR: You never got to sleep with her.
#9: Yeh but I was not interested in her.
HR: It doesn’t matter if you’re interested in her or not. Tell me, did you sleep with her? No?
#9: What does it matter if I didn’t sleep with her, of course I didn’t. I wasn’t interested.
HR: Let’s not talk about irrelevant stuff. The fact is that you did not sleep with her.
#9: HR, we’ve been colleagues for years. But you have never fucked me in the ass either.
HR: Er yeh who wants to fuck you in the ass? You’re so ugly.
#9: That’s besides the point. You had more than 7 years to fuck me in the ass and you’ve never done anything.
HR: What does this have to do with what we were talking about?
#9: Enough talking rot. Now tell me, do you want to fuck me in the ass? Because if you want it, I can give it to you right now baby.
HR: What are you doing? Get off me!!!
Oh and happy year of the Tiger to you guys out there.
#9: Yeh, I actually had a female housemate for 2 years.
HR: You never got to sleep with her.
#9: Yeh but I was not interested in her.
HR: It doesn’t matter if you’re interested in her or not. Tell me, did you sleep with her? No?
#9: What does it matter if I didn’t sleep with her, of course I didn’t. I wasn’t interested.
HR: Let’s not talk about irrelevant stuff. The fact is that you did not sleep with her.
#9: HR, we’ve been colleagues for years. But you have never fucked me in the ass either.
HR: Er yeh who wants to fuck you in the ass? You’re so ugly.
#9: That’s besides the point. You had more than 7 years to fuck me in the ass and you’ve never done anything.
HR: What does this have to do with what we were talking about?
#9: Enough talking rot. Now tell me, do you want to fuck me in the ass? Because if you want it, I can give it to you right now baby.
HR: What are you doing? Get off me!!!
Oh and happy year of the Tiger to you guys out there.
Saturday, 6 February 2010
This is My Story
Well you know that MPH at Raffles City is going to close down for a while so that they can build a secret tunnel to the Assplanade MRT station. So they are having a crosing down sale. Plenty of books for cheap, so I went down to hoot. It isn’t like warehouse sales, where there are plenty of cheap books, but it’s all shit they don’t want.
I got a few books that I could only find elsewhere at full price. But that’s not the main point about this blog post. It’s that… who else should I find in the store but Kassandra Kong.
Now not all of you will know who K Kong is but late last year there was a book by this Singaporean author who caught my eye. “This is My Story”. Now for a book, that was a dumbfuck title if there ever was one. All books are “my story”. Which book isn’t? To be sure, there are other books which have similar titles. Like Antony Trollope’s “The Way We Live Now”. Or there are great novels which are semi-autobiographical, like “Remembrance of Things Past” or “Dream of Red Mansions”. But it’s easier to forgive them because they are talking about an entire milieu, an entire social setting.
So this is meant to be nothing more than an autobiography. An autobiography written at the ripe old age of 22. My story. And what is my story? I fell in love with a bad boy, I went through 2 abortions because of him, and he fucked my sis as well. How dumb is that? Do you want to walk through the rest of your life carrying a sign saying “I am stupid”? No? Then why would you want to write a book like that? 2 abortions! How does that old saying go? Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. She thinks that her sister doesn’t want to talk to her anymore because she’s pissed off. I think it’s about the shame of having a dumb sis. If my sister were like that, I’d… actually… OK, never mind.
To be sure, there were other books written by women who complained about their sister sleeping with their boyfriends. One of them was “Hillary and Jackie”, which was actually made into a movie. Now that was scandalous. I think some people thought that the book was written in bad faith.
So she was sitting there, twiddling her thumbs and waiting for people to come, like a teaching assistant at office hours during the first week of class. There were some agents, taking photographs. I don’t think people wanted to go up to her. She wasn’t bad looking. If I were her boyfriend I would be some kind of sex maniac too. But she was being shunned. Very conspicuously, I might add, considering how crowded that place was on Friday night, and I could see her scanning the room with that shit eating grin on her face.
I was thinking to myself, “Jesus Christ has a well-earned reputation as being a great guy because only people like him are thick skinned enough to talk to people like you.” Lepers and prostitutes, that sort of stuff, you know.
Ever since I picked up that book (did you see that book? It has her looking very glum on the cover, all curled up and staring at her feet, like those mediacorp drama series actresses who go to the shower to wash up after being violated) – I had a good mind to talk some sense into her and tell her that while it was no big deal, all the stuff that went on in that book, it was extremely stupid to write it in a book and publish it for the whole world to read. Unless it has great literary value – which I doubt, from what I can see on her personal web page. You just don’t go announce yourself like that to the world. You don’t write your autobiography at the grand age of 22. Just ask Vanilla Ice. Why are you writing a book? Are you trying to tell people something they didn’t already know? Some men are jerks. Wow, what an earth shattering discovery.
No big deal if you’re 70, and you just like to tell a saucy tale about the good old days when half the population was after your ass. No big deal if you’ve achieved greater things in life, like, say Tori Amos, then you can go and tell the whole world you were raped and people will still think of you, primarily as a good singer-songwriter, to be loved and respected for something more than what’s between your legs. No big deal if you’re Francoise Sagan, you write “Bonjour Tristesse” and you become a literary sensation at the grand old age of 18. But you need to be talented for that.
I just couldn’t bear to go up there and tell her. I don’t know why. I would have preferred there to be people going up to talk to her, and maybe I would offer a dissenting viewpoint. But I think that mine is actually not a dissenting viewpoint, it is the majority opinion. I look at the forums that come up when you google her name, and they find her creepy. Fellars, this is very Singaporean logic. But I do not want to be the one who has to tell her that she has screwed up, if that’s what everybody thinks. I do not want to be the only one going up to say hi to her. I don’t want to be the creepy pervert to tell her that I open her book up to the page where he does that to her, and then I smell the paper that it’s printed on.
Ultimately, though, I realised that all those objections that I made towards her book, taken one by one, do not really form a solid case for arguing that writing that book was stupid. In the end it was just a question of taste. Something like that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. And this is a mouth, remember, which is mostly immune to foul odours. It’s very hard to explain to someone why it’s OK to read “Memoirs of a Geisha” and not “Memoirs of a Prostitute”. (Actually I read part of that (geisha) book some time ago. What I find extremely creepy about that book is that it’s written by an ang moh man. If I were writing that book I would be jacking off half of the time.)
OK, a digression. Somebody actually compared this expose to Bonny Hicks. But I think that Bonny Hicks was just being very frank about what the life of models was about. And moreover I don’t think most of it was as sordid as this. I still got her book lying around somewhere. No I don’t jerk off to Bonny Hicks because it’s bad luck to masturbate over dead women. My Bonny lies over the ocean… my Bonny lies over the sea…
I convinced myself that the excuse for inaction is this: she’s dumb. And since she’s that dumb to be writing and promoting stuff like that, it’s futile to try to knock some sense into her, since the only direction you can knock her is up. But most importantly of all, I am a virgin. And I don’t think that virgins should be lecturing people about whether or not they should write about their sexual adventures.
I got a few books that I could only find elsewhere at full price. But that’s not the main point about this blog post. It’s that… who else should I find in the store but Kassandra Kong.
Now not all of you will know who K Kong is but late last year there was a book by this Singaporean author who caught my eye. “This is My Story”. Now for a book, that was a dumbfuck title if there ever was one. All books are “my story”. Which book isn’t? To be sure, there are other books which have similar titles. Like Antony Trollope’s “The Way We Live Now”. Or there are great novels which are semi-autobiographical, like “Remembrance of Things Past” or “Dream of Red Mansions”. But it’s easier to forgive them because they are talking about an entire milieu, an entire social setting.
So this is meant to be nothing more than an autobiography. An autobiography written at the ripe old age of 22. My story. And what is my story? I fell in love with a bad boy, I went through 2 abortions because of him, and he fucked my sis as well. How dumb is that? Do you want to walk through the rest of your life carrying a sign saying “I am stupid”? No? Then why would you want to write a book like that? 2 abortions! How does that old saying go? Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. She thinks that her sister doesn’t want to talk to her anymore because she’s pissed off. I think it’s about the shame of having a dumb sis. If my sister were like that, I’d… actually… OK, never mind.
To be sure, there were other books written by women who complained about their sister sleeping with their boyfriends. One of them was “Hillary and Jackie”, which was actually made into a movie. Now that was scandalous. I think some people thought that the book was written in bad faith.
So she was sitting there, twiddling her thumbs and waiting for people to come, like a teaching assistant at office hours during the first week of class. There were some agents, taking photographs. I don’t think people wanted to go up to her. She wasn’t bad looking. If I were her boyfriend I would be some kind of sex maniac too. But she was being shunned. Very conspicuously, I might add, considering how crowded that place was on Friday night, and I could see her scanning the room with that shit eating grin on her face.
I was thinking to myself, “Jesus Christ has a well-earned reputation as being a great guy because only people like him are thick skinned enough to talk to people like you.” Lepers and prostitutes, that sort of stuff, you know.
Ever since I picked up that book (did you see that book? It has her looking very glum on the cover, all curled up and staring at her feet, like those mediacorp drama series actresses who go to the shower to wash up after being violated) – I had a good mind to talk some sense into her and tell her that while it was no big deal, all the stuff that went on in that book, it was extremely stupid to write it in a book and publish it for the whole world to read. Unless it has great literary value – which I doubt, from what I can see on her personal web page. You just don’t go announce yourself like that to the world. You don’t write your autobiography at the grand age of 22. Just ask Vanilla Ice. Why are you writing a book? Are you trying to tell people something they didn’t already know? Some men are jerks. Wow, what an earth shattering discovery.
No big deal if you’re 70, and you just like to tell a saucy tale about the good old days when half the population was after your ass. No big deal if you’ve achieved greater things in life, like, say Tori Amos, then you can go and tell the whole world you were raped and people will still think of you, primarily as a good singer-songwriter, to be loved and respected for something more than what’s between your legs. No big deal if you’re Francoise Sagan, you write “Bonjour Tristesse” and you become a literary sensation at the grand old age of 18. But you need to be talented for that.
I just couldn’t bear to go up there and tell her. I don’t know why. I would have preferred there to be people going up to talk to her, and maybe I would offer a dissenting viewpoint. But I think that mine is actually not a dissenting viewpoint, it is the majority opinion. I look at the forums that come up when you google her name, and they find her creepy. Fellars, this is very Singaporean logic. But I do not want to be the one who has to tell her that she has screwed up, if that’s what everybody thinks. I do not want to be the only one going up to say hi to her. I don’t want to be the creepy pervert to tell her that I open her book up to the page where he does that to her, and then I smell the paper that it’s printed on.
Ultimately, though, I realised that all those objections that I made towards her book, taken one by one, do not really form a solid case for arguing that writing that book was stupid. In the end it was just a question of taste. Something like that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. And this is a mouth, remember, which is mostly immune to foul odours. It’s very hard to explain to someone why it’s OK to read “Memoirs of a Geisha” and not “Memoirs of a Prostitute”. (Actually I read part of that (geisha) book some time ago. What I find extremely creepy about that book is that it’s written by an ang moh man. If I were writing that book I would be jacking off half of the time.)
OK, a digression. Somebody actually compared this expose to Bonny Hicks. But I think that Bonny Hicks was just being very frank about what the life of models was about. And moreover I don’t think most of it was as sordid as this. I still got her book lying around somewhere. No I don’t jerk off to Bonny Hicks because it’s bad luck to masturbate over dead women. My Bonny lies over the ocean… my Bonny lies over the sea…
I convinced myself that the excuse for inaction is this: she’s dumb. And since she’s that dumb to be writing and promoting stuff like that, it’s futile to try to knock some sense into her, since the only direction you can knock her is up. But most importantly of all, I am a virgin. And I don’t think that virgins should be lecturing people about whether or not they should write about their sexual adventures.
Monday, 1 February 2010
Why numbernine is single part 2
Not a bad weekend for me.
I had dinner with some old friends from colllege, and I bumped into some chick I knew from school back then. Well not some chick I knew from school, but I knew her by face. And suddenly we were talking like old friends. And I'm wondering, all those times when I didn't go out and have a lot of friends in JC, was it because the ladies were more dao, or was it because my head was too far up my ass for me to understand that they weren't going to bite my head off? Well it was funny, so that was somebody who could have been a friend, but wasn't.
On Saturday I spent 2 hours stirring up 2 pots of pineapple pulp. Some of you might see the results of it pretty soon.
I helped my father put together powerpoints for a lesson (actually he did all the content himself, and I was just doing the layout. I also taught him how to use a thumb drive, and how not to put it into the wrong hole.)
In between I had a nap and when I woke up I had a new song playing in my head. While out for dinner, I passed by Borders. They had a few penguin classics that were on sale for pretty cheap, and I was tempted until I remembered my promise to myself: no new books. Think about reading the existing ones first. Anyway there was a book called twitterature, where you had all those old literature masterpieces, rendered through twitter. "Anna Karenina" was a hoot, especially that part about some real hip grinding with Count Vronsky. The last part was also blackly funny, because it ended with "the user account has been deactivated" ("Anna Karenina" ends with the title character committing suicide.)
Then on Sunday I did some programming. I had listed a few books on bookmooch, and 3 or 4 were snatched up immediately. At the same time, somebody else bought a few of my books. In all I'm dispensing of 9 inches of shelf space.
I bumped into my boss while near the library. I read some books. There was a book that I borrowed from my cousin while stirring pots. It was about the new version of Excel. Did you know that the new .xlsx format is simply a few zipped up xml files? Just change the extension to .zip, unzip the whole thing, and then you can see, in plain text, just what your excel file looks like.
I also looked through a textbook on assembly language - understood the difference between stack and heap memory.
I tried out some of the food stalls at Liang Court. Then I rushed back home and swam 1km. While doing that, I came up with another song, bringing my total up to 2. Writing songs is like masturbating. When you haven't been doing it for a while, there's a lot of seed stored up. There were a few people horsing around in the pool and once, a chick landed up right in front of me when I was lapping. (Lapping means swimming laps, no other meaning is to be inferred by this). So that was a happy memory.
I went back upstairs, hung around for a bit, and then I drove to the coffee shop to watch Arsenal vs Man U. It went badly for Arsenal and I drove home after the first half.
All in all, a quite productive weekend. So I was wondering, suppose I had a girlfriend, I wouldn't have had much time for her this week.
But not all weekends are like this.
I had dinner with some old friends from colllege, and I bumped into some chick I knew from school back then. Well not some chick I knew from school, but I knew her by face. And suddenly we were talking like old friends. And I'm wondering, all those times when I didn't go out and have a lot of friends in JC, was it because the ladies were more dao, or was it because my head was too far up my ass for me to understand that they weren't going to bite my head off? Well it was funny, so that was somebody who could have been a friend, but wasn't.
On Saturday I spent 2 hours stirring up 2 pots of pineapple pulp. Some of you might see the results of it pretty soon.
I helped my father put together powerpoints for a lesson (actually he did all the content himself, and I was just doing the layout. I also taught him how to use a thumb drive, and how not to put it into the wrong hole.)
In between I had a nap and when I woke up I had a new song playing in my head. While out for dinner, I passed by Borders. They had a few penguin classics that were on sale for pretty cheap, and I was tempted until I remembered my promise to myself: no new books. Think about reading the existing ones first. Anyway there was a book called twitterature, where you had all those old literature masterpieces, rendered through twitter. "Anna Karenina" was a hoot, especially that part about some real hip grinding with Count Vronsky. The last part was also blackly funny, because it ended with "the user account has been deactivated" ("Anna Karenina" ends with the title character committing suicide.)
Then on Sunday I did some programming. I had listed a few books on bookmooch, and 3 or 4 were snatched up immediately. At the same time, somebody else bought a few of my books. In all I'm dispensing of 9 inches of shelf space.
I bumped into my boss while near the library. I read some books. There was a book that I borrowed from my cousin while stirring pots. It was about the new version of Excel. Did you know that the new .xlsx format is simply a few zipped up xml files? Just change the extension to .zip, unzip the whole thing, and then you can see, in plain text, just what your excel file looks like.
I also looked through a textbook on assembly language - understood the difference between stack and heap memory.
I tried out some of the food stalls at Liang Court. Then I rushed back home and swam 1km. While doing that, I came up with another song, bringing my total up to 2. Writing songs is like masturbating. When you haven't been doing it for a while, there's a lot of seed stored up. There were a few people horsing around in the pool and once, a chick landed up right in front of me when I was lapping. (Lapping means swimming laps, no other meaning is to be inferred by this). So that was a happy memory.
I went back upstairs, hung around for a bit, and then I drove to the coffee shop to watch Arsenal vs Man U. It went badly for Arsenal and I drove home after the first half.
All in all, a quite productive weekend. So I was wondering, suppose I had a girlfriend, I wouldn't have had much time for her this week.
But not all weekends are like this.
Saturday, 30 January 2010
A New Decade
Like I said on one of my previous posts, whereas 2008 was the year of the end of long roads, 2009 for me was going to a year I would get off my ass and seek a new life. To what extent have I been successful?
Computer science: the plan was to plough through all my CS textbooks so as to have the same amount of knowledge that a CS undergraduate would have. So far it looks like I won’t get it all done any time soon. I’m half way through compilers, and I’m trying to cram in the most salient concepts of operating systems. Operating systems is easier because there are fewer basics, fewer ideas, and the rest is application. Got through some systems analysis.
Financial planning: I had a few meetings with the fiancé of a long lost friend, who somehow convinced me that I was a potential customer. 3 sessions later, I told her no thanks, and I dunno if she was pissed off at me.
Later on, a friend of mine approached me with a business proposition that was as lucrative as it was shady. I thought about it for a while, thought I would play a small, bit part. It didn’t work out. His old business partner sabotaged his business plan. In the end, he left and joined an insurance policy. He became the second person to (unsuccessfully) sell me a policy this year.
A new job: I took on a new function at my workplace midway through the year, one that’s closer to the front. I’m sick and tired of doing the same old shit which may not have meaning to the larger scheme of things. So far it’s not been a disaster although a lot could have been better. I’m learning and mastering stuff I should have mastered a long time ago. Things are a little more stressful.
Romance: Some of you may recall that the fiancé of my long lost friend had set me up with a friend of hers. It was a disaster that didn’t work at all. Much later in the year, I had a few dates with teapot. Unfortunately it didn’t work out. But I did think that I should go out hunting. Now’s a good time, there won’t be a better time than now.
I have to figure out what's wrong. One complaint I'm getting is that I'm boring. This is true, especially for people who are not on the same wavelength as me.
Music: It was all right. I wrote a few songs that I was quite satisfied with. Some of my compositions are on midi now, but MIDI is a shitty medium. I have the arrangements in my head, some idea of what it’s supposed to sound like, but my demos sound like crap. But at least I have fleshed out all the ideas, written down all the notes. In theory I just have to find the right sounds to match all my stuff.
I've had a few tryouts. I did think that I was quite psyched after that, but a lot of it's not my work. I think there's still some more work to be done before I start advertising myself as a "keyboardist". Still, I'm glad that I actually went to find some people to jam with.
Johor: I’m helping my computer illiterate father with some of his paperwork, but most of the time he does his own thing. He’s an incredibly hard worker. I don’t know why I have such a hardworking father, and such a hardworking sister, but myself, I’m such a passive person.
I’ve also gone on some trips to Malaysia to explore the place, and occasionally help with some shopping. My father and I planted 2 trees, and 1 of them died although the other is still alive. He’s always wanted to teach me how to manage a property and I still have to learn.
Housework: Other than some half-hearted attempts to follow my parents to the wet market on Saturday mornings, I haven’t been able to make much progress on this.
Is this why I’m always feeling tired these days? But I’ve hardly begun to live my life. I’m only doing stuff that I should have started doing 5 years ago. Well 5 years is not a very long time anyway.
Health-wise, things have not been very good. My family members used to marvel at my ability to skip meals and not get gastric problems. Later on, I've realised why this is so: I don't stress myself. I've been living such a horizontal life for so long that I never had any stress. This year, the first time in a long time I've seriously considered my future, is also a year I've had more problems with my stomach than any of the preceding years.
And let's not talk about a really crappy December where I've been laid low by flu and it's taken forever for me to get better. At a time when I was clearing leave and supposed to have some fun times, I'm sick.
I noticed that I have changed my life a lot in the last 2 years that ended with zero. 1990 was the end of the childhood and the beginning of the troubled teenage years (although it should never have been as troubled as it was). 2000 was the first year after I glimpsed at a lot of possibilities that opened up for me in 1999 - although being a big bookworm was the main possibility that was opened up. I'm also due for a big change now. Some of these changes have been for the better, but many have not.
For the last few years, I had been content to bury myself in a lot of books as well as the occasional long distance run. Gone are the days when I can say that a weekend has been meaningful just because I managed a 20 km run (and I doubt I'm going to run such distances anytime soon.) Gone are the days when I would treat 1-2 hour bus rides as an OK thing because I can always read some more, when I would shake legs at a cafe for hours and a book. There was a time, when I thought, give me the warm glow of lights above, a book, and a cup of coffee / tea before me, and I will always be content. I would be reading investor reports, and figure out how to be much richer than I am today. I would be reading computer science and magically become an uber geek. How was I to know that I'd be bored of that within 6 months? It used to be, if I had nothing better to do (and when have I had anything better to do?), I would just pick up a book, and read and read. But now I'll practice not picking up a book for once, and see whether things will take place.
In fact the last few days have felt like what it was like in college, when I just spent hours alternating between useful activity, and fretting about time passing by and getting older. (I was not a bookworm in college - I budgeted my brain power strictly for the stuff I had to read, because it consumed so much mental energy.) Being alone in a dank, dark house, going to bed at 4 in the morning and rising at 9 (afternoon naps have become necessary.)
I will probably not have a mid-life crisis. Mid-life crises are for people who have accomplished what they want in their 20s and 30s, then have nothing else left for them in their 40s. It looks like I’ll be busy for some time.
Computer science: the plan was to plough through all my CS textbooks so as to have the same amount of knowledge that a CS undergraduate would have. So far it looks like I won’t get it all done any time soon. I’m half way through compilers, and I’m trying to cram in the most salient concepts of operating systems. Operating systems is easier because there are fewer basics, fewer ideas, and the rest is application. Got through some systems analysis.
Financial planning: I had a few meetings with the fiancé of a long lost friend, who somehow convinced me that I was a potential customer. 3 sessions later, I told her no thanks, and I dunno if she was pissed off at me.
Later on, a friend of mine approached me with a business proposition that was as lucrative as it was shady. I thought about it for a while, thought I would play a small, bit part. It didn’t work out. His old business partner sabotaged his business plan. In the end, he left and joined an insurance policy. He became the second person to (unsuccessfully) sell me a policy this year.
A new job: I took on a new function at my workplace midway through the year, one that’s closer to the front. I’m sick and tired of doing the same old shit which may not have meaning to the larger scheme of things. So far it’s not been a disaster although a lot could have been better. I’m learning and mastering stuff I should have mastered a long time ago. Things are a little more stressful.
Romance: Some of you may recall that the fiancé of my long lost friend had set me up with a friend of hers. It was a disaster that didn’t work at all. Much later in the year, I had a few dates with teapot. Unfortunately it didn’t work out. But I did think that I should go out hunting. Now’s a good time, there won’t be a better time than now.
I have to figure out what's wrong. One complaint I'm getting is that I'm boring. This is true, especially for people who are not on the same wavelength as me.
Music: It was all right. I wrote a few songs that I was quite satisfied with. Some of my compositions are on midi now, but MIDI is a shitty medium. I have the arrangements in my head, some idea of what it’s supposed to sound like, but my demos sound like crap. But at least I have fleshed out all the ideas, written down all the notes. In theory I just have to find the right sounds to match all my stuff.
I've had a few tryouts. I did think that I was quite psyched after that, but a lot of it's not my work. I think there's still some more work to be done before I start advertising myself as a "keyboardist". Still, I'm glad that I actually went to find some people to jam with.
Johor: I’m helping my computer illiterate father with some of his paperwork, but most of the time he does his own thing. He’s an incredibly hard worker. I don’t know why I have such a hardworking father, and such a hardworking sister, but myself, I’m such a passive person.
I’ve also gone on some trips to Malaysia to explore the place, and occasionally help with some shopping. My father and I planted 2 trees, and 1 of them died although the other is still alive. He’s always wanted to teach me how to manage a property and I still have to learn.
Housework: Other than some half-hearted attempts to follow my parents to the wet market on Saturday mornings, I haven’t been able to make much progress on this.
Is this why I’m always feeling tired these days? But I’ve hardly begun to live my life. I’m only doing stuff that I should have started doing 5 years ago. Well 5 years is not a very long time anyway.
Health-wise, things have not been very good. My family members used to marvel at my ability to skip meals and not get gastric problems. Later on, I've realised why this is so: I don't stress myself. I've been living such a horizontal life for so long that I never had any stress. This year, the first time in a long time I've seriously considered my future, is also a year I've had more problems with my stomach than any of the preceding years.
And let's not talk about a really crappy December where I've been laid low by flu and it's taken forever for me to get better. At a time when I was clearing leave and supposed to have some fun times, I'm sick.
I noticed that I have changed my life a lot in the last 2 years that ended with zero. 1990 was the end of the childhood and the beginning of the troubled teenage years (although it should never have been as troubled as it was). 2000 was the first year after I glimpsed at a lot of possibilities that opened up for me in 1999 - although being a big bookworm was the main possibility that was opened up. I'm also due for a big change now. Some of these changes have been for the better, but many have not.
For the last few years, I had been content to bury myself in a lot of books as well as the occasional long distance run. Gone are the days when I can say that a weekend has been meaningful just because I managed a 20 km run (and I doubt I'm going to run such distances anytime soon.) Gone are the days when I would treat 1-2 hour bus rides as an OK thing because I can always read some more, when I would shake legs at a cafe for hours and a book. There was a time, when I thought, give me the warm glow of lights above, a book, and a cup of coffee / tea before me, and I will always be content. I would be reading investor reports, and figure out how to be much richer than I am today. I would be reading computer science and magically become an uber geek. How was I to know that I'd be bored of that within 6 months? It used to be, if I had nothing better to do (and when have I had anything better to do?), I would just pick up a book, and read and read. But now I'll practice not picking up a book for once, and see whether things will take place.
In fact the last few days have felt like what it was like in college, when I just spent hours alternating between useful activity, and fretting about time passing by and getting older. (I was not a bookworm in college - I budgeted my brain power strictly for the stuff I had to read, because it consumed so much mental energy.) Being alone in a dank, dark house, going to bed at 4 in the morning and rising at 9 (afternoon naps have become necessary.)
I will probably not have a mid-life crisis. Mid-life crises are for people who have accomplished what they want in their 20s and 30s, then have nothing else left for them in their 40s. It looks like I’ll be busy for some time.
Thursday, 28 January 2010
Rebel Rebel
In 1968, there were a lot of student rebellions all over the world. In Czechoslovakia, in the US, in Mexico, in France. To a lot of people, it was a curious sight. These were the baby boomers in their teens, and especially in the US, they were the most pampered and indulged generation in history (although I think that succeeding generations were even more indulged.) Suddenly they thought that life wasn’t good enough for them?
The late 60s were a time for the counter culture. The postwar boom had created a standard of living that was higher than anything else you ever saw in human history (in the West anyway). But it also brought with it a stifling conformity. So counterculture was born. It was about young, idealistic teenagers rebelling against strict social codes (long hair, smoking pot, love and peace). Some of it was a rebellion against capitalism, against the Vietnam War, against the “straights” – the nerdy, conservative, square types.
Hippie culture has some enduring legacies. Body shop, with its emphasis on sustainable development and care for the earth, embodies some hippie culture values. A lot of the computer industry was founded on hippie values. The internet was designed to be democratic, so that no large organisation, or no government was able to control it. It’s not a surprise that much of Silicon Valley is located on the outskirts of San Francisco, which was the capital of the hippies. Steve Jobs was a hippie. Ben and Jerry’s was founded by 2 hippies. Although, considering that a lot of hippie culture was virulently anti-corporation in nature, you could say that at least some of the hippie values were betrayed in the process.
The green movement was also greatly connected to the hippies. They rightly saw that man was destroying his environment, and even though they met with varying degrees of resistance, people are finally realising that humans on this planet are living a basically unsustainable lifestyle. But people are selfish, and you cannot preach to them by saying, “look, you are destroying all these plants and animals.” They’ll tell you, “we have a right to our way of life”. So instead we call it Climate Change now, because the message now is, “you can destroy the plants and animals and pump poisonous gases into the sky. But after that you will suffer because the sea level will rise and life on this planet will be less livable.” This is also a reason why, when I hear the words “climate change”, it is with a sense of shame.
The hippie culture has also spawned a free love culture, where people were much less restrained when it came to sex. Pre-marital sex became much more common. It lasted around 15-20 years, and that lifestyle ended (or at least became much less widespread) when people started hearing about AIDS.
I’m thinking about the nature of rebellion, now from the vantage point of somebody well into adulthood.
Yes, I don’t like conformity. I’ve said it. I know I work in a place which values it above just about anything else. I know that to a large extent, you need to have common standards in order to make the organisation gel together. And I know that there are many workplaces which have an even stifling culture than mine. I still have to grapple with that problem.
My instinct has always tended towards rebellion. I was tardy about work at school, (although, when I did do my work, I always gave it my best shot). I made goofy comments in class. I often detested people for the simple reason that they followed the crowd, and took on the values of “society”.
During my film buff phase, I always had a weakness for films about teenage rebellion. OK, “Rebel Without a Cause” is too obvious. But I liked “400 Blows”, “And Your Mother Too”, “Dreamlife of Angels”, “Brighter Summer Day”. There were others about people making their way in this world, in the face of adversity, like “The Crowd”.
Ultimately, though, what does rebellion mean? On some levels, it is absolutely necessary. Revolutions were borne of rebellion. You just felt that you had to have a better life, and then you destroyed the old way of life, simply because anything else would be better. Sometimes this was true, but often it was not. The Russian Revolution was largely a tragedy for all concerned (except maybe a few top-ranking Communist Party cadres). Mao Zedong had a dictum, “we must destroy before we build”. A lot of his actions have turned out to be totally disastrous.
Rebellions were often an expression of democracy. The French Revolution was something that ushered in the modern democracy, even though people hardly commemorate the Terror that followed: you didn’t know who else would be guillotined in the morning. (Well maybe a few nutty people like Pol Pot thought it was a good thing.) It is a very useful check and balance against tyranny, and something that I feel could have been used a bit more.
I used to feel ashamed that people of my generation did not stage rebellions, and often deferred to the government. Then again, it is not always true that people in my generation are less rebellious. I wondered why the Vietnam War protests were so much more famous than the Iraq war protests. In a way a great amount of discredit has to go to the US public for allowing the Iraq war to happen. I don’t really know how much they are ashamed of themselves, or the torture of Iraqis that took place by the US Army. But later on I found out that there was a big protest in the UK, and a record turn-out, to demonstrate against the Iraq war. I can’t remember the figure – half a million? That was a great thing. But it scarcely went reported, because, unlike 1 generation ago, news broadcasters have become very wary of giving credence to that sort of thing. The Iraq war destroyed the reputation of Tony Blair, who had up til then been a hugely popular prime minister.
So what are rebels? Do people rebel just so that they felt good about themselves? Rebels do their work under very dangerous circumstances, and a lot of the great rebels of the past have attained great stature, simply for standing up against a system that was morally wrong. Gandhi. Martin Luther King. Mandela. And to a lesser extent, Aung San Suu Kyii and the Dalai Lama.
But my tendency towards rebellion is probably now tempered with some hard-nosed conservative thinking, and after all, you have to understand the system before you try to change it.
Does rebellion build anything? No. Rebellion is destructive. Destructive does not mean no good, because in many cultures, we understand that creation and destruction are both part of the great plan. Hinduism has a god for creation and another for destruction, even though I can’t remember their names offhand. Taoism has yin and yang, the cycle of life, where one begets the other. Even in the West, harvest is often equated to death, a tacit acknowledgement that some yield is gained from the destruction.
But rebellion alone does not build anything. Some of the regimes that came about as a result of a rebellion would be worse than what they replaced. There was ZANU-PF, which replaced the white rule in Zimbabwe. Living standards have plummeted since then. There is South Africa, which may or may not be faring better than under Apartheid. The feminist movement promised a better world for all, but at this point, the gains are quite modest compared to the promises, and for that matter, the ladies are beginning to realise that men live quite a shitty life (even if they don’t bitch about it as much as women.) And then there was communism in Russia – enough said.
It was the luck of the draw when it comes to changing regimes. Sometimes you will get LKY – a pain in the ass, but he makes life better for all. Sometimes you get Ferdinand Marcos.
The other thing about rebels – there are rebels who rebel because they want to shake things up and change. Then there are others who are merely dissatisfied with the current system, but offer no solutions. You’ve seen them before, those people who throw spanners for the sake of throwing them. And they talk vaguely about making things better. They offer no solutions. In fact, they are the people who just prefer to stew in their own juices all the time, and enjoy the benefits of being part of the system, and yet reserve for themselves the right to complain about things they don’t like. Most of us are like that some of the time, and that is not unusual. However it becomes really grating when that person starts to assume the heroic mantle of the rebel leader, and that’s when he starts being laughable.
Of course, it could be that half-baked ideas eventually evolve into works of genius, but more often, they end up as nothing.
And there are other rebels, who have ideas which work well on paper but when it comes to the implementation, they are let down either by faulty execution, or the idea wasn’t very good at all. In the end, though, if ideas don’t work, there’s usually a part of the theory that the originator of the idea didn’t want to consider. And that person would usually be quite stubborn about brushing away that part of the theory, because that would mean he had to throw away his ideas.
Because ultimately you have to look at the big picture. Rebels are celebrated in our culture for various reasons. One of them is that the act of destruction is more spectacular and dramatic than constructive acts. You get more publicity, more airspace. Another one is that when people around you are pissed off with a certain regime for certain reasons, you can be a focal point for their collective voice by speaking out against the injustices of the incumbent system. That is easy. You are the popular voice, and you cannot be wrong. But talk is cheap, and what would happen when you are actually the one elected into office, you’re the one who’s in charge? Can you reform the system? Can you make the changes you promised, without making the system substantially worse as a result?
I’ve seen my being rebellious for at least as many wrong reasons as well as right ones. I think that you cannot be a rebel your whole life. You cannot be a rebel without a cause, it doesn’t make sense in the long run. Even Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols was circumspect enough to admit, “I don’t know what I want but I know how to get it.” It shows that he acknowledges the limits of rebellion. In the end, it’s just a means to an end, and you have to figure out what you’re really getting into, what you’re really doing all that for.
The late 60s were a time for the counter culture. The postwar boom had created a standard of living that was higher than anything else you ever saw in human history (in the West anyway). But it also brought with it a stifling conformity. So counterculture was born. It was about young, idealistic teenagers rebelling against strict social codes (long hair, smoking pot, love and peace). Some of it was a rebellion against capitalism, against the Vietnam War, against the “straights” – the nerdy, conservative, square types.
Hippie culture has some enduring legacies. Body shop, with its emphasis on sustainable development and care for the earth, embodies some hippie culture values. A lot of the computer industry was founded on hippie values. The internet was designed to be democratic, so that no large organisation, or no government was able to control it. It’s not a surprise that much of Silicon Valley is located on the outskirts of San Francisco, which was the capital of the hippies. Steve Jobs was a hippie. Ben and Jerry’s was founded by 2 hippies. Although, considering that a lot of hippie culture was virulently anti-corporation in nature, you could say that at least some of the hippie values were betrayed in the process.
The green movement was also greatly connected to the hippies. They rightly saw that man was destroying his environment, and even though they met with varying degrees of resistance, people are finally realising that humans on this planet are living a basically unsustainable lifestyle. But people are selfish, and you cannot preach to them by saying, “look, you are destroying all these plants and animals.” They’ll tell you, “we have a right to our way of life”. So instead we call it Climate Change now, because the message now is, “you can destroy the plants and animals and pump poisonous gases into the sky. But after that you will suffer because the sea level will rise and life on this planet will be less livable.” This is also a reason why, when I hear the words “climate change”, it is with a sense of shame.
The hippie culture has also spawned a free love culture, where people were much less restrained when it came to sex. Pre-marital sex became much more common. It lasted around 15-20 years, and that lifestyle ended (or at least became much less widespread) when people started hearing about AIDS.
I’m thinking about the nature of rebellion, now from the vantage point of somebody well into adulthood.
Yes, I don’t like conformity. I’ve said it. I know I work in a place which values it above just about anything else. I know that to a large extent, you need to have common standards in order to make the organisation gel together. And I know that there are many workplaces which have an even stifling culture than mine. I still have to grapple with that problem.
My instinct has always tended towards rebellion. I was tardy about work at school, (although, when I did do my work, I always gave it my best shot). I made goofy comments in class. I often detested people for the simple reason that they followed the crowd, and took on the values of “society”.
During my film buff phase, I always had a weakness for films about teenage rebellion. OK, “Rebel Without a Cause” is too obvious. But I liked “400 Blows”, “And Your Mother Too”, “Dreamlife of Angels”, “Brighter Summer Day”. There were others about people making their way in this world, in the face of adversity, like “The Crowd”.
Ultimately, though, what does rebellion mean? On some levels, it is absolutely necessary. Revolutions were borne of rebellion. You just felt that you had to have a better life, and then you destroyed the old way of life, simply because anything else would be better. Sometimes this was true, but often it was not. The Russian Revolution was largely a tragedy for all concerned (except maybe a few top-ranking Communist Party cadres). Mao Zedong had a dictum, “we must destroy before we build”. A lot of his actions have turned out to be totally disastrous.
Rebellions were often an expression of democracy. The French Revolution was something that ushered in the modern democracy, even though people hardly commemorate the Terror that followed: you didn’t know who else would be guillotined in the morning. (Well maybe a few nutty people like Pol Pot thought it was a good thing.) It is a very useful check and balance against tyranny, and something that I feel could have been used a bit more.
I used to feel ashamed that people of my generation did not stage rebellions, and often deferred to the government. Then again, it is not always true that people in my generation are less rebellious. I wondered why the Vietnam War protests were so much more famous than the Iraq war protests. In a way a great amount of discredit has to go to the US public for allowing the Iraq war to happen. I don’t really know how much they are ashamed of themselves, or the torture of Iraqis that took place by the US Army. But later on I found out that there was a big protest in the UK, and a record turn-out, to demonstrate against the Iraq war. I can’t remember the figure – half a million? That was a great thing. But it scarcely went reported, because, unlike 1 generation ago, news broadcasters have become very wary of giving credence to that sort of thing. The Iraq war destroyed the reputation of Tony Blair, who had up til then been a hugely popular prime minister.
So what are rebels? Do people rebel just so that they felt good about themselves? Rebels do their work under very dangerous circumstances, and a lot of the great rebels of the past have attained great stature, simply for standing up against a system that was morally wrong. Gandhi. Martin Luther King. Mandela. And to a lesser extent, Aung San Suu Kyii and the Dalai Lama.
But my tendency towards rebellion is probably now tempered with some hard-nosed conservative thinking, and after all, you have to understand the system before you try to change it.
Does rebellion build anything? No. Rebellion is destructive. Destructive does not mean no good, because in many cultures, we understand that creation and destruction are both part of the great plan. Hinduism has a god for creation and another for destruction, even though I can’t remember their names offhand. Taoism has yin and yang, the cycle of life, where one begets the other. Even in the West, harvest is often equated to death, a tacit acknowledgement that some yield is gained from the destruction.
But rebellion alone does not build anything. Some of the regimes that came about as a result of a rebellion would be worse than what they replaced. There was ZANU-PF, which replaced the white rule in Zimbabwe. Living standards have plummeted since then. There is South Africa, which may or may not be faring better than under Apartheid. The feminist movement promised a better world for all, but at this point, the gains are quite modest compared to the promises, and for that matter, the ladies are beginning to realise that men live quite a shitty life (even if they don’t bitch about it as much as women.) And then there was communism in Russia – enough said.
It was the luck of the draw when it comes to changing regimes. Sometimes you will get LKY – a pain in the ass, but he makes life better for all. Sometimes you get Ferdinand Marcos.
The other thing about rebels – there are rebels who rebel because they want to shake things up and change. Then there are others who are merely dissatisfied with the current system, but offer no solutions. You’ve seen them before, those people who throw spanners for the sake of throwing them. And they talk vaguely about making things better. They offer no solutions. In fact, they are the people who just prefer to stew in their own juices all the time, and enjoy the benefits of being part of the system, and yet reserve for themselves the right to complain about things they don’t like. Most of us are like that some of the time, and that is not unusual. However it becomes really grating when that person starts to assume the heroic mantle of the rebel leader, and that’s when he starts being laughable.
Of course, it could be that half-baked ideas eventually evolve into works of genius, but more often, they end up as nothing.
And there are other rebels, who have ideas which work well on paper but when it comes to the implementation, they are let down either by faulty execution, or the idea wasn’t very good at all. In the end, though, if ideas don’t work, there’s usually a part of the theory that the originator of the idea didn’t want to consider. And that person would usually be quite stubborn about brushing away that part of the theory, because that would mean he had to throw away his ideas.
Because ultimately you have to look at the big picture. Rebels are celebrated in our culture for various reasons. One of them is that the act of destruction is more spectacular and dramatic than constructive acts. You get more publicity, more airspace. Another one is that when people around you are pissed off with a certain regime for certain reasons, you can be a focal point for their collective voice by speaking out against the injustices of the incumbent system. That is easy. You are the popular voice, and you cannot be wrong. But talk is cheap, and what would happen when you are actually the one elected into office, you’re the one who’s in charge? Can you reform the system? Can you make the changes you promised, without making the system substantially worse as a result?
I’ve seen my being rebellious for at least as many wrong reasons as well as right ones. I think that you cannot be a rebel your whole life. You cannot be a rebel without a cause, it doesn’t make sense in the long run. Even Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols was circumspect enough to admit, “I don’t know what I want but I know how to get it.” It shows that he acknowledges the limits of rebellion. In the end, it’s just a means to an end, and you have to figure out what you’re really getting into, what you’re really doing all that for.
Sunday, 24 January 2010
Gary Neville vs Carlos Tevez
Wayne Rooney misses a goal. Wayne Rooney says fuck. Nobody says anything.
David James concedes a goal. David James says fuck. Nobody says anything.
Fernando Torres powers past Nemanja Vidic and scores. Vidic says fuck. Nobody says anything.
Gary Neville shows his middle finger. The horror! The horror!
David James concedes a goal. David James says fuck. Nobody says anything.
Fernando Torres powers past Nemanja Vidic and scores. Vidic says fuck. Nobody says anything.
Gary Neville shows his middle finger. The horror! The horror!
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