Colin's Journal

9:00pm: Twitter Consolidation
Lately I've been hanging out at Twitter (username: colinlowyc), whose 140-character limit, in enforcing pithiness, encouraged me to write more in fewer words. This is opposed to LiveJournal, whose blank "Post an Entry" fields have proved more daunting than liberating. Here are my cranial oozings from the last month, organised by their vague topics, with some conjoining and chronological swapping for added coherence:

Hanging out at LaSalle
No point to live music if you can't see them play! I'd love for The Observatory to weave its sonic textures around a proper narrative next. The Life! arts journalists ended up rating Invisible Room as the S'pore Arts Fest's Best Test of Endurance. xD

Charm and I lay next to each other on the LaSalle turf and gazed up at the canopy. Security uncle told us to please sit up, there are CCTVs.

Attended Short+Sweet S'pore 2009, a festival of ten 10-minute local plays, at LaSalle last night with Charm and two ex-ACJC blokes. Charm breathlessly whispered each new plot twist: incestuous siblings, former sex professionals, straight-boy crushes who turn out gay...
#4: 7 RULES, a taut reversal of 7 mafia rules by a rising assassin on the kingpin enforcing them, sullied by a comic-relief waitress.
#3: BIRTHDAY SURPRISES, warm in the company of old friends, shared song and memories; cruel at the notion of time passed too assuredly by.
#2: LOVE & ROBBERY, a Bollywood-tinged farce of a guy and girl who meet-cute over trivial acts of misanthropy while held hostage in a bank.
#1: THE FRUITS OF WAR, a side-splitting, fruit-splattering saga of escalation between a dark-skinned girl and the boy who ignores her.

Movies
Watched Ang Lee's THE WEDDING BANQUET in the wee hours before booking in for COS duty this morning. Queer domesticity warms my soft heart.

BOYS DON'T CRY: Rural America? Boring + treacherous. Avoid!
THE WEDDING BANQUET: Urban America? Work stress + domestic bliss. Avoid parents!

RATATOUILLE: Anyone (who can reconstruct whole recipes from scratch with just a whiff) can cook.

TAKEN: dooming teenagers worldwide to clampdowns on travel by their paranoid parents, who believe that kidnappers lie at every foreign turn.

Must rent THE SUM OF US ('94) as part of my crusade to hunt down and watch queer movies that err on the side of overtolerance.

Also, gotta try REVOLUTIONARY ROAD in silence, on Charm's recommendation.

INDY JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE: Sturdy pulp movie, with stars (Ford, Connery, Phoenix) that knew they were stars, and how to act as stars.

Verdict on the 007 tussle: CASINO ROYALE proved that Daniel Craig was a great find; DUPLICITY proves that Clive Owen was the better fit.

National Service
Cookhouse uncle blessed my future teaching career. Gestures like these remind me that we don't need God to be grateful for what we have.

Pillaged apples from the cookhouse fridge for dinner. So, heh, it could be said that I'm detoxing on public funds.

I'm now a platoon sergeant to 20 men. A fellow 3SG dubbed me "sergeant mama" because most of them are fiercely protective of me.

Having become a platoon sergeant, I know now why my ex-teacher cringed when we then-students spotted her with her fiance at KAP.

I live as though my worlds (family, NS, academia, romance) don't overlap. Perhaps I have no other choice.

L.L. tried to guilt-trip me into extending his book-in time so they could cut his dad's birthday cake. I told him to stuff it.

In the army, my words have grown artless. This scares me when I have nothing to hide behind, and comforts me when I have nothing to fear.

The worst way to spend any chapter of your life is to wait for it to be over.

Potential post-ORD plans: the Gibbon Experience in Laos (http://www.gibbonx.org).

Dining and snacks
Crispy chicken linguine (aglio olio) with nori + iced lemon tea + chocolate truffle cake for $15.50 at Ambush, Taka B2.

Chicken kebab for $5.50 at Sultan Kebab, Peace Centre; then silky soya beancurd for 60¢ along Selegie Rd.

The new Pringles Extreme: Blazin' Buffalo Wing Super Stack offers Tabasco-tinged chips for $3.95!

Random thoughts
Off-centre phrases of the day: "provoke harmony", "ceramic bafflement".

Laymen tend to use "momentum" as the converse of "inertia", as though the latter only describes a tendency to persistent INaction.

You know what would be a great name for a university? AFAIK!

1:13pm: Why Reading Too Much Feminist Theory is Bad for You
We mislead ourselves when we say that the movies (or any form of popular art) reflect our needs and desires, not only because this assumes a far more passive role for pop culture than it truly holds, but also because this upholds a false notion of our needs and desires as being independent of pop culture, as though they were Platonic ideals uninfluenced by the ebb and flow of our daily lives.

Instead, we should think of pop culture as doing one of two things: either 1) reinforcing our ways of identifying ourselves and our needs and desires, or 2) producing new, potentially fruitful ways of thinking about ourselves.

12:13am: Intolerance towards Intolerance

"You know more than you've told me, and I must have it."

"How marvellous. You have achieved perfect empathy with me, for that is the exact statement I have repeatedly made to you."

"An eye for an eye? How Christian of you."

"Unbelievers always want other people to act like Christians."

— Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

There is no contradiction for an advocate of tolerance to be intolerant towards the intolerant. You can substitute tolerance with freedom, non-discrimination, inclusiveness, pacifism, or any other ideal that seems to preclude hostility towards those who oppose it.

The only true paradox lies in turning your other cheek to those who would seize that chance to obliterate you entirely... especially if, in some terribly minor footnote of their philosophy, they have been advised to turn the other cheek themselves.

11:47pm: Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist

He cursed and thought with longing of the beach at Koh Phangan, its bone-white brilliance. Their itinerary since then—was it really only a week?—had been dictated by her: waking up each morning in yet another fleabag backpacker's hotel, she would announce that they were heading for such and such a place, and he would just nod, a willing captive. Time with the girl had a fluid, amnesiac quality: minutes turned into days and the days swallowed up memory, leaving him born anew each morning. Home seemed increasingly unreal, like the fakely upbeat American sitcoms that populated cable television wherever he went; the only reality was the girl. He wondered if this was what Stockholm's syndrome was like. Their mad perambulation interrupted momentarily by his fever, he thought to wonder for the first time what he was doing here. What he was doing with her.

(Back at Columbia, there'd been a girl, quicksilver-bright, raven-haired. They'd met at a sit-in to protest World Bank policies. Besides global economics, they'd shared a mutual interest in Miles Davis and Chinese history. His parents were not thrilled: Ellen, they told him, was the wrong colour, while he tried to persuade them of the absurdity of their bigotry in the land of the free. His parents needn't have feared. He and Ellen eventually drifted apart; she complained that he seemed to be experiencing life through a pane of glass. He worried that she was right. He hadn't thought himself capable of a coup de foudre; he hadn't thought himself capable of a lot of things.)

He woke in the late afternoon. He was puzzled; he didn't remember falling asleep. Experimentally, he sat up; the fever had broken and the swelling around his eyes had subsided, but he was aware of a gnawing hunger. He had not eaten all day. The girl, he remembered, was supposed to have bought lunch. She had left in the morning and had not returned. Her knapsack was gone.

He rushed down to the reception; no, they hadn't seen anybody leave. He bought a sandwich from the café and went back to the room, which looked more desolate than ever. Down the corridor, he heard squeals of laughter, the sound of clinking glass. He waited an hour. Two. At some point, he slept again. When he next woke, it was dark.

Travelling alone had a different dynamic from travelling with someone. Travelling alone, you answered to no-one but yourself. Travelling with someone else, you developed a viscous, vicious dependence on the other person. At least, he had; he didn't deceive himself that she was with him on anything other than a whim. He began a feverish crawl through the town, ducking into stalls, shops, bars. The town had seemed drab by day, but at night it took on a mysterious life. Winking coloured lights decorated the meanest stall and scooters carrying crazily heaped human cargo zipped along the pavements. He heard a great deal of laughter, which he couldn't account for, unless it was just one of the phantasmagoric effects of travelling alone, to imagine that everyone else was having a never-ending party from which he was excluded. The laughter, the coloured lights, all seemed vaguely sinister; he grew clumsy in his movements, began bumping into people and backing off with exaggerated apologies. Someone shoved him from behind, shouted, "Farang!" Foreigner. He whirled round; shadows flitted past him in the dark. He'd been mad ever to think he could blend in. He started to run.

- Claire Tham, "Driving Sideways"

There's a prime dissatisfaction in being a critic. Plow through the latest, newly-hyped candidates for membership to the pantheon of Art and find it a chore: they've been borne of misguided impulses, for profit or bombast or dull elephantine Artistry. Stifle the growing dread as you work through the legitimate classics (respect, without resonance) and your "unseen" list dwindles. Rewarm a tinge of shame that you're dealing judgement while adrift in a sea of subjectivity; that your insights don't count for much, or arise often enough; that you're a failed artist treading safer waters. And always the nagging question: out of all these cries for recognition, why do you see yourself in none of them? Paradoxical emotions. Relief that your voice hasn't already been found in someone else. Sadness that, deep down, you truly are alone.

Lately I've had the thrill of discovering a shard of me—and in a movie, no less. I've never had that before, even though movies are my lifeblood. Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist is a new member of that band of "indie core" flicks, headed by Napoleon Dynamite and Juno, teen-centred, loaded with twee pop songs and crayon-font titles. This time, though, the movie divests itself of parents: for a night, the world is theirs alone, and their responsibilities only to each other. Nick, still licking his wounds from a breakup. Norah, unable to shake the notion that all her relationships—to music, to her ex—are a byproduct of her music-producer father's empire; that she has inherited all, with nothing to offer in return. Thom and Dev, fellow bandmembers, loyal friends to Nick, gay to the hilt, their sheer normalcy (in contrast to all those queer classics, ever fingering the boundaries) a sharp breath of fresh air.

With these four I already feel at home, to say nothing of Ari Graynor's hilarious arias of drunkenness. It hurts the movie that both leads' exes are thoroughly odious, especially Alexis Dziena, who fumbles with Tris as a reprisal of broad Mean Girls-type bitchiness. This was what Michael Cera moped over, believing he had lost a love worth keeping? Dziena (and Rachel McAdams before her) doesn't know how easy it is to be a bitch, without even knowing it, until you've hurt someone and realised it far too late. But enough about her: I'm stumbling with the others towards happiness, until the morning breaks.

1:56pm: Reviews: Watchmen and Kung Fu Panda
In case you were wondering: yep, I've been active on the net, just not around these parts. Here's a glimpse at what I've been up to, courtesy of ancal, who was a dear in helping me set up the site.

From part 1 of my Watchmen review:

There's a growing consensus that Zack Snyder's movie adaptation of Watchmen is faithful to a fault, but it's closer to say that the movie is faulty to the faithful. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' magisterial graphic novel poses a catch-22 to any would-be adapters: the nearer one hews to the source material, the farther one gets from matching its radical, far-reaching influences. We live in a post-Watchmen world, where cinema and the superhero genre have adopted so many of Moore's originalities as their own that an adaptation that merely animates the novel's plot and visuals at 24 frames per second will contribute nothing, save for an end to that pent-up potential with which the idea of a Watchmen movie has been ever anticipated. To that end, Snyder's Watchmen is the definitive Hollywood adaptation, hell-bent on destroying all that Moore's novel had stood for, while amping up its own lurid pleasures—and (fan)boy, does it succeed.

Let us dispense first with the myth of Snyder's "faithfulness". His slavish reproduction of the novel's images is nearly as flattering to Moore and Gibbons as the Tijuana bible of herself that a retired Wonder Woman-type keeps as a memento in Watchmen: it might be nice to be paid tribute to, but not when the alleged tribute simply reduces you to a fanboy's wank material. Audiences who think that this is somehow a "straight" or "literal" adaptation of the novel aren't paying enough attention. In the novel, while waiting in a food line, the sociopath Rorschach defends himself by scalding his attacker's face with a nearby pan of hot frying fat. In this movie, Rorschach has already taken down the attacker with his bare fists before he proceeds to smash a now-existent glass between him and the pan, hurling its contents into the felled man's face. This is more work for Rorschach than before, not less, so the change is not some attempt to pare the novel down to movie length. It is a celebration of excess. (Read the rest...)

From my Kung Fu Panda review:

Folks, here is a movie brimming with confidence from the get-go. With its bravura hand-drawn opening sequence (in a CGI movie, to boot!), we are quickly tuned into the movie's kinetic thrills, its splendid colour palette, its keen eye for theatrics, and—best of all—its penchant for mocking the overblown pomp of those theatrics, without denying us their pleasures. Instead it strips away the guilt around these pleasures, inviting us to indulge. "Legend tells of a legendary warrior... whose kungfu skills were the stuff of legend," enunciates Jack Black, even as his silhouetted hero strides in through the mist without a trace of visual irony, and we delight in this movie's notion that we can both celebrate and poke fun at our grandest cinematic traditions in one fell chuckle. (Read the rest...)

11:45am: Happy Chinese New Year, Mr Phang!
(To my brilliant Physics tutor, whose hilariously ugly and misleading website can be found at Physics.com.sg. Be sure to check out the FAQ.)

While the army has kept me busy in the past year, I'd like to take some time to (belatedly) thank you for your guidance through my upper sec and JC years. When I first joined your class late in Sec 3, I was a near failure in Physics and had little motivation or interest in the subject. I was reluctant to take tuition as it seemed demeaning and potentially fruitless, and I only relented in a last-ditch effort to save my grade. Upon arrival at your then-HDB unit, I was pleasantly surprised to find that you had refurbished a room into a professional, conducive teaching environment complete with IKEA furniture, and further awestruck to learn that yours was a one-man operation under a (tax-free?) home business scheme; I think your immense prowess as a tireless entrepreneur is commendable and should not go unnoticed.

Quickly you turned my skepticism about tuition around, thanks to many unique aspects of your teaching. First, you had accumulated a wealth of experience in the common mistakes that students make in Physics after over a decade of teaching, and found memorable ways to teach us to spot and avoid the traps set for us in exams -- whether general (e.g. the Five Deadly Words) or specific (e.g. the proper use of R = V/I and its variants). Many tutors usually bring up these errors in the post-mortem of a tutorial, test, or (god forbid!) exam, but you would use directed questions as you taught to catch our errors before they solidified in our minds. Second, you would also condense various topics, or at least show us how they were different sides of the same concept -- Young's double-slit test and diffraction gratings, circular and gravitational motion, etc. -- which helped to simplify often-needlessly complicated topics, making them easier to recall. Third, you often emphasised precision in language and rigour in answering questions, two things that Physics tutors often take for granted or dismiss as not under their job scope; your answer keys tended to be more comprehensive than most schools' and were an unmissable resource in my studies. Fourth, you provided a tiny pleasure in your class by wielding your metre rule over us, ready to "chop" our heads off if we got the answer wrong, which was a source of pride whenever I spotted a trick question that felled my classmates. Fifth, your offbeat analogies and self-admitted bad drawings added a welcome candidness to the classroom. And the list goes on...

I loved that, as the years passed, I became a "Phang veteran". I was able to recognise a repeated question, joke or your idiosyncratic trademarks, like your disdain for CCA as exemplified by "Phang's Law", which inversely related grades and CCA hours (and you managed to integrate that into a lesson about isotherms!), and your story about watching a three-hour long firefight being your longest CCA session. From my corner seat at the back of the room, I watched the place evolve, expanding into the kitchen and another room, the Five Deadly Words joined by a photo of a Calculator, your metre rule replaced by a toy sword with red marker ink as the "blood of dead students". My grades also improved drastically, such that I topped the Physics exam among Hwa Chong's GEP cohort in Sec 4, and among the Singaporeans in J1. Indeed, I walked out of the A-Level exam hall knowing I was assured of an A in H2 Physics. With my enthusiastic endorsements, improved peer teaching skills in Physics and the testament of my grades, I also convinced a number of my friends to join your class, including Leonard, Sara, Siew Ching, Che Hao and my sister.

Thanks so much for your inspiration! I am now on track to becoming an MOE teaching scholar, having been awarded their Education Merit Scholarship, and I look forward to applying the techniques that you taught me, and your love for your subject, to my own future students. My sister has also recently gotten an A1 for Physics in her O-Levels, no doubt thanks to your guidance as well. I hear from her that you've moved to a bigger place to accommodate your growing class size, and while I will miss that familiar HDB unit opposite RI, I wish you all the best for the future.

Sincerely,
Colin Low
Hwa Chong Institution (College Section)
Class of 2007

7:46pm: The Year in (Short) Review
On a morning of my two-week BMT confinement on Pulau Tekong, my bunkmate was reading the newspaper when he said: "Whoa. The guy from Brokeback Mountain died."

I thought it was a joke; I was worried for Ang Lee. "What, who?"

"Heath Ledger."

"What?"

I peered over his shoulder at the headlines, but the printed words seemed to belie the truth. I felt like Ennis at the end of Brokeback: there was some open space between what I knew and what I tried to believe. I hadn't been bowled over by Heath in Brokeback as many had; for me his performance was too mannered and he looked too contemporary for the part of Ennis Del Mar. But celebrity actors, the decent ones who place their hearts in their characters instead of the glitter and fame, are like your friends. Heath had been a reliable presence, and out of nowhere he was gone. What complicated things further was the force with which his Joker later took over Gotham City and The Dark Knight itself, skulking in celluloid, untouched by death, nearest to unanimous love for a movie performance than I had ever seen. I felt the pang of seeing a person's last attempt at legacy on Earth, knowing that not even his death could mar the Joker's testament that he and Batman were destined to duke it out forever, because he had transformed the Joker into a god, and gods last forever. I knew then too that I was meant to pursue movies for as long as I live, for their immense power to move us, to entertain us, to clarify and complicate how we understood our lives and other people.

In this year I discovered the genius of Charlie Chaplin, how he brought the most enduring and beloved character of the silent age to ever-more glorious heights in City Lights (1933) and Modern Times (1936), almost a decade after 1927's The Jazz Singer forever redefined how we viewed, no, experienced the movies. For the first time, I had a movie soundtrack bleed into my heart: Michael Nyman's stirring score for The Piano (1993), like a mood that passes through you, haunted me long after I had seen the movie. Like the piano of the film was for its heroine, this score was at once my companion in tough times, an expression of my moods, and a prize to behold and envy. I witnessed a strange dissonance upon realising that I loved Kung Fu Panda more than I did Wall-E; I was beguiled by Orson Welles' magisterial performance in and the unconventional structure of Citizen Kane; and I still eagerly await Sean Penn's Harvey Milk in the upcoming month.

There were others in this past year who seemed to have broken out of the movies into the world. Thanks, Mr Obama, for defining my generation and giving me hope; thanks, Miss Fey, for re-asserting the importance of entertainment in culture and politics; thanks, Mr Milk, for devoting your life to making our history part of everyone else's.

Here's to a happy new year, folks.

4:15pm: Not a prison for privilege

Eventually, my rejection of authority spilled into self-indulgence and self-destructiveness, and by the time I enrolled in college, I'd begun to see how any challenge to convention harbored within it the possibility of its own excesses and its own orthodoxy. I started to reexamine my assumptions, and recalled the values my mother and grandparents had taught me. In this slow, fitful process of sorting out what I believed, I began silently registering the point in dorm-room conversations when my college friends and I stopped thinking and slipped into cant: the point at which the denunciations of capitalism or American imperialism came too easily, and the freedom from the constraints of monogamy or religion was proclaimed without fully understanding the value of such constraints, and the role of victim was too readily embraced as a means of shedding responsibility, or asserting entitlement, or claiming moral superiority over those not so victimized.

- Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope

Ten months into my army life, I feel the need to re-assert my misgivings about those adolescent issues that often surface in the midst of all this military drudge work: the existential crises; the fears about college, work and lost friends; the rage at the systemic abuse of our personal time. Winding through a near-silent camp grounds to our barracks one night, Bingqian asked me how I could be so chipper all the time. He said he had wondered how, in junior college, I could lie belly-down across a public bench to read a novel, oblivious to averted glances; and he said he wondered now why the army didn't seem to sap my enthusiasm, even though it offers few good reasons to be enthused. We spend a lot of time on small sacrifices now, to prove that we can afford them in an improbable war. We heave dummy loads. We slap on camouflage cream. We swipe at mosquitoes. We get grazed, and bruised, and slathered in sweat and mud and self-doubt. Worse, we have to put up with insufferable superiors, who are either smugly assured that even the time allotted to us for rest can be snatched away, or too absorbed with themselves and their omnivorous standards to notice.

"Partly it's just my disposition," I replied, quashing the niggling voice that protested that I did resent all those things, and that they often deflated my enthusiasm. Because I did believe that I was still happier than most people -- at least I wanted to believe it, since it made me feel special -- and so readily applied myself to the puzzle of why this was the case. I recalled how my boyfriend had noted that most people tread and retread the same paths in life, for all its endless variety, because they are hard-wired to react to certain situations in a given way: perhaps mine is to accept that life doesn't owe a coherent meaning to anyone, and pointless adversity is part of its complex tapestry.

I wonder how my army mates do it, other than by burying themselves in resignation or denial. Some of them complain at their peers, and when I once asked what the point is if your complaint isn't reaching anyone who could help to change your lot, one answered that it didn't matter -- it was a perfectly useful coping mechanism. But then it strikes me how much of this complaint stems from privilege, from the underlying assumption that you should be doing in life whatever it is you want to and are good at, rather than this soldiering thing that you've been forced into.

It reminds me of the people who can't simply bear it out to that fateful two-year mark, because they lack the money or smarts or the opportunity afforded by being born to the right parents in this country. When we were swabbing the interior of our vehicle, my driver once asked me "Why did you choose JC over poly?", as though it were a choice people had to think about. I listened to Clifford, one of my men, boast about the daring schemes they hatched in their childhood days to shoplift tote-bagfuls of Ferrero Rocher, or frozen meats for a barbeque, not for their inability to pay but simply for the thrills of it. When I expressed my admiration for their ease at such dangerous thrill-seeking, he replied, "Aiyah, sergeant, we live in different worlds mah." And I recalled that starless night we were waiting in an abandoned built-up area for our bus to arrive, and my staff sergeant asked us if we had any questions. One of us ventured, "Staff, what do you see for your future in the army?" My staff sergeant kicked at a pebble as he paced, and after a moment's silence, he said, in a subdued voice: "Don't ask that sort of question, lah."

These are the stories you miss, in the towers that meritocracy built.

(P.S. Sorry about the length. This is my post-JC rebellion against the influences of The Economist and my KI teacher, and marks my new influences of Dr Nick Davis, Pauline Kael, and a certain president-elect that needs no linkage.)

7:23pm: Why Do I Care So Much About The US Elections?
Not least because I feel like a citizen of the world, and the world's fate will be affected by whoever steps up to become the leader of its military and economic superpower.

Not least because I am proud of the American dream, and I'm ashamed that being Singaporean has never made me proud in the same way.

Not least because I care for basic human decency, and justice, and truth, and competence.

And not least because I've long felt that our generation needed defining beyond the technologies and terror that have marked it, and no one has clarified it so starkly as Mr Obama has for me.

... what's in it for you?

1:09pm: Vicky Cristina Barcelona
The Association for Visually-Handicapped Cinephiles must have found some serious blackmail material on Allen, because twenty years ago he would never have had a narrator suffocate the life out of his characters.

Typical example:
Narrator: "Juan Antonio rushed out in the dead of night."
Subtitles: "Juan Antonio rushed out in the dead of night."
Shot of: Juan Antonio rushing out in the dead of night.

That said, it almost doesn't matter, because the two eponymous characters have barely any life to be suffocated. Rebeca Hall (as Vicky) plays the engaged straight-woman who rejects Juan Antonio's (Javier Bardem) sexual propositions, despite wanting them, getting them, acting guilty over them, going back for more, then pretending nothing ever happened because omgsorrycan'tdothisI'mnotinterestinglikeyou!!. Whereas Scarlett Johannson (as Cristina) just keeps getting roles in Allen's movies so that he can legitimately get pretty-man surrogates to grope and undress her on film. I can't tell which offends me more, her lifeless eyes or heaving bosom.

Both davidchew and nuuq have rationalised that Allen used this narration to underline the smothering structures under which these characters are placed -- and it would fit into Allen's recent topical obsession with sticking to passionless, "safe" relationships (as he did with the far-more execrable Match Point). Yet Allen doesn't mine the engaging complexities of this potentially interesting scenario as he did in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), wherein Michael Caine and Barbara Hershey actually seem rejuvenated by their dalliances. He doesn't care to explore how Vicky intellectualises her "love" for Spanish culture without showing a whit of passion for anything in the movie; or how Cristina willingly strings herself on painter Juan Antonio's leash, and allows his even-more-artistic ex-wife to cohabit with them, in order to ply herself with more self-worth than she feels her own talent accords her (one monologue that shows hints of displaying this arrives too late and never arises as an issue again).

The ex-wife Maria Elena scorches a hole into the film as she strides in at half-time. Penelope Cruz, spinning gold from mercury, catches every comic nuance of Maria's overemotive goddess without reducing her into a harpy. It takes a genius like Cruz to take a simple dramatic beat -- not facing Cristina when she's angry at her -- and layer it with the hilarious implication that her character is searching for a knife to stab Cristina with. I wouldn't have minded an entire film with Juan Antonio and Maria Elena at centre, a sort of heterosexual (pansexual?) Spanish remake of Happy Together, with Vicky and Cristina catalysing their hypnotically violent relationship at the edges. Yet Woody Allen no longer seems to retain the old wells of empathy and creative ingenuity that would allow such a bold move. He's now more interested in how people rationalise happiness in their dead marriages, while lusting for someone different, and not doing it well. One almost wonders what this might mean.

7:11pm: Nostalgia
When I was fifteen, lying spread-eagled on the pontoon of a floating hotel in Thailand, the star-cobbled night sky bobbing in my vision, I learnt with a profound clarity that my country had snuffed out the stars. A star's breath could course through centuries of darkness to find a humble solace in our city lights, only to please the blind deserts and forests and seas; or be smothered by the sun, or the violent lights of a city that knows no sleep, a city like mine.

"It's like sperm."

"What?" I tilted my head to face the hammock. Han's face peeked out, flickering under an oil lamp's glow.

"Starlight. It must be a tiny amount that reaches us, you know. The rest just burns through space for years and years before fizzling out at the edges of the universe. Like how most sperm is simply wasted."

"Let me get this straight. Are you romanticising sperm?"

"Not like it's anything new - the miracle of birth and all that. Millions of sperm have to die so that sometimes, just sometimes, one gets through and a baby is born. The tragedy is that some people won't even give them that chance."

I crossed my arms. "So, what, are you against wanking now? Having a sudden bout of ex-Christian guilt?"

"Huh, if I am, that'd be the least of my sins." He chuckled. "And I'd blame the rest on you."

I smiled and returned my gaze to the stars. We stayed quiet for a while, listening to the Chao Phraya river sluicing beneath us on its route to the sea, thinking about what we hadn't said, keeping a vigil for the futures that we could not have.

4:37pm: Obama '08?

I have nothing to add that hasn't been said by pundits who have followed this presidential race more closely than me, but goddamned if this isn't a great speech. Move aside, Martin Luther.

9:22pm: Terms of ContraDiction
Yifan: the newspaper wrote about ContraDiction.
Yifan: and they phrased it... very strategically. obviously careful planning had gone into it.
Yifan: it's now an event about "gender and sexuality".
Yifan: they did mention that Alfian (gay), Cyril (also gay) and Yi Sheng (also gay) would be there.
Yifan: but they didn't say anything about the gay part. =p
Colin: heh. because it would be redundant, like, how many famous local poets are straight.

ContraDiction
organised by Ng Yi-Sheng

An evening of queer writing - including poetry, drama, blog entries and songs. Readers will include Ng Yi-Sheng, Teng Qian Xi, Chan Sze-Wei, Zhuang Yisa and Maia Lee, with original music composed and performed by Iris Judotter and Yak Aik Wee. (Licence from MDA approved. Rated R18.)

Date: Sunday, 12 August 2007
Time: 7:30 - 9:30 pm
Venue: 72-13

8:54pm: Peculiar Chris
I missed the chance to borrow Peculiar Chris again this weekend! Pelangi Pride Centre has three copies but it opens on Saturdays at 4-8 pm, which is a tiny window to squeeze through for a student like me. The National Library catalogue shows that it's missing a few copies, and I wonder why. Flushed down the library toilet by homophobes? Nicked by queers hoping to keep a small piece of themselves, since the book's no longer in print?

After catching Asian Boys Vol. 3: Happy Endings (quite the misnomer of a play) I've needed to read this book. The best stories make you wish that their characters had existed, so that you would know they had once been real. For we should not break our hearts for those who have lived only in them; and playwright Alfian Sa'at, in the first half, recreated the characters of Peculiar Chris with startling realism. At least his own brand of it, where he would take caricatures and slowly knead their complexity into being. I felt for Ken, his fears and yearnings made palpable in a quiet rendition of Ralph McTell's Streets of London; and I felt for Chris, a teen forced into a grown man's choice, and who picked wisely but wrongly.

(Hilariously, in one scene Ken played Romeo and Chris' girlfriend played Juliet, as Chris watched. A later play on "Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?" was ripe for the picking, though it was passed by the playwright -- yet does it not boil down to that, when love is found in the right soul but wrong person?)

The second half veered into didacticism and "happy endings" that it did not earn, and I was left with the emotional tatters of the first. I need Peculiar Chris then, to exorcise these unhappy shadows. The woes of prelims and my KI paper do not compare.

11:09pm: Battling ignorance in a tiny way
( Is there a place for God in public morals debate? )

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God has a place in public morals debate

I REFER to the recent Straits Times article entitled 'Is there a place for God in public morals debate?' by Senior Writer Chua Mui Hoong (ST, May 18). My view is that God cannot be excluded in public morals debate. It is not a matter of willingness.

God is the author of morality in human history. In other words, moral standards and moral values originate from God, in monotheism the Supreme Being and in polytheism, the Supreme Beings, who transcend human beings. Be it Confucianism which is strictly a value system, Taoism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Judaism or Hinduism, et cetera, all religious faiths that believe in an absolute Supreme Being or absolute Supreme Beings share the common values about sex, family life and procreation, and are against homosexual sex.

There are many other common values shared by different religious faiths. For example, Buddhism stresses the importance of cause-and-effect relationship in a human life. Likewise, in Christianity, there is this natural law known as 'you reap what you sow'. If we sow the seed of approval for homosexuality, we are going to reap the grave consequences of it in due course.

Medical science cannot offer solutions to all human problems as it deals with only one aspect, the physical aspect, of human life. We humans are not merely physical beings. There is a soul - intellect, emotion and will - and many believe that there is a spirit within us. They cannot be seen under the microscope. However, just because we cannot prove their tangibility does not deny their existence. Regardless of whether we like it or not and whether or not we have a religion, we are moral beings as we are born with moral instinct, a sense of propriety, known as conscience.

There is such a thing called guilt, which is not imaginary. When one violates his/her moral instinct, one feels guilty about it. Nevertheless, conscience can be distorted if it is given in to depravity of the mind and rationalisation. Therefore, to people of different religious faiths, to debate and discuss moral issues and morality without God is akin to a little child who wants to be independently responsible for his/her own life and behaviour without the care and constraints of his/her parent(s); no matter how sophisticated and how impressive the arguments may be. Public laws should not violate the common values of different religious faiths of its people.

Esther Chan Nek Fa (Ms)

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Invoking God does not advance the public morals debate (link)

I REFER to the letter 'God has a place in public morals debate' by Ms Esther Chan Nek Fa (ST Online Forum, May 26). While Ms Chan notes that some people need the concept of a supreme being to validate their moral values, it is untrue that this must be the case for everyone, or that all theistic religions share the same moral values as Ms Chan claims. Ultimately, the reasons why God should be excluded from the public morals debate still hold.

Not all members of our society believe that a supreme being is needed for moral values to exist. Most agnostics and atheists have moral values that they hold dear, yet they do not require the concept of a supreme being. In fact, Ms Chan raises Confucianism as an instance of a value system, even though Confucianism posits no supreme being to justify the moral values that it promotes.

Furthermore, Ms Chan is wrong to say that all religions that posit a supreme being share the same values, not even in sex, family life, procreation and homosexuality. Monogamy as central to Christianity is not shared by Islam, where a man can have up to four wives. Taoism, Buddhism and Hinduism tend to refrain from making judgements on homosexuality, where Judaism and Islam are more vocal. Indeed, it must be noted that moral values are not fixed within each religion itself, let alone across all of them. For instance, various schools of Christianity are divided on issues such as contraception, homosexuality and divorce.

Ms Chan's example of how different religious faiths share other moral values is also bewildering. She claims that Buddhism stresses cause-and-effect relations in one's life, while Christianity holds a natural law that 'you reap what you sow'. Yet I do not think that anyone, religious or not, would deny that all our actions have consequences. Not only does this principle not show that approving homosexuality will have 'grave' consequences, Ms Chan does not concede to some obvious differences in moral values between religions. For instance, controversies over the wearing of headscarfs have erupted largely in Islam; few other religions have been as strict about modesty in dress.

Ultimately, the problem with invoking God in the public morals debate is that it does not help in guiding us to a reasonable conclusion. The idea of a supreme being does not inherently contain any specific moral values. If all parties were to start with the assumption that a supreme being has validated their own particular values, then the public morals debate would be fruitless, as there is no way to reconcile such dogmatic assumptions.

This is why Senior Writer Chua Mui Hoong found it important to exclude God from the public morals debate. By appealing to the common ground between ourselves and those of different faiths, we can allow others to better understand with our position [sic]. Indeed, Ms Chan follows this principle herself at one point, when she mentions that we are all moral beings 'whether or not we have a religion'. It would serve us well if we followed this principle as the debate continues.

Colin Low Yu Cong

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Post-mortem

1. The Straits Times' online readers must have ADD or something. The editor chopped my above six paragraphs into 20, most of them a single sentence.

2. The appalling part is that the editor added "also" and "but" to "Ms Chan does not concede", giving "but Ms Chan also does not concede". Yet he did not remove "with" from "understand with our position"!