Old Familiars

Got tagged by C, an old Army buddy, in a photo album on Facebook with photos from the Taiwan training trip that we went on in 2006. I would like to link to it somehow from here, because 1) it is most likely that photos of the Army days would only come to me via these indirect sources, for, regrettably, I almost went out of my way to ensure I didn't get photographed in fatigues, 2) these pictures really bring back a surge of memories; we really did make something out of a bum deal, and despite everything, we did manage to have a fun and enriching time, and it is a real achievement, and 3) strangely enough, I seem to look better in Army photos than elsewhere, or at least I like these photos of myself better; maybe it's the neat haircut, or the universally interesting context.

But I don't feel that it's within my rights to do so, because 1) these are someone else's pictures in someone else's Facebook account, and doing so smacks of presumption, even if we did brave hell and high water together, 2) it is self-indulgent, because the people who can best appreciate it are the people who are in the photos and are thus already tagged; to other viewers, the meaning that they carry for me must needs ring hollow, and 3) it is against military regulations to post pictures of military activities (especially involving equipment) online. Nonetheless, I am surprised by how grateful I am that these pictures have turned up. It really does make a difference. It makes those experiences seem more real, somehow; it helps to integrate what we went through then with what we are going through now, and thereby helps to make a more complete person out of very disparate experiences.

*

Yesterday, after writing at SMU, went to meet up with Claud and Ian to go for a play at the Drama Centre (the one in the National Library). In fact, it was a six-play bill called the David Ives Project. Basically, it's six short, one-act plays by the same playwright, all dealing with the slippery nature of words: double-entendres, slips, faux-pas, misunderstandings, double meanings, ironies, puns and gibberish. It was really quite delightful, not only in the really funny wordplay, but also in the interesting stageplay: blocking, dramatic devices (some of which are patently out-of-this-world, involving instantaneous and non-linear time-jumps) and costuming. And all this was directed by someone I know (somewhat passingly); it kind of blows my mind that someone I recognise can actually direct a public, for-profit production, even before she is 21! But then again, she does come from the ACJC pedigree of big-budget, high-quality drama practitioners, so it is also something that is really laudable, that all their experience from school has not entirely been lost after graduation.

The plays I liked best were one about a man who falls in love with a washing machine (a play on the boys-with-toys issue), and one entitled The Philadelphia, about an existential phenomenon named after the American city in which one can never get what one asks for (part of a series of phenomena which include "Clevelands" and "Los Angeleses"). There was a particularly good one at the end in which linguistic inflections in terms of tone, imagery, expression and mood are explored. A couple try to converse with each other, and their conversation is tenuous and fragile: one small misstep in expression dissolves their nascent relationship, resulting in awkwardness or hostility. But each time they step wrongly, a bell rings, and they jump to the point in their conversation just before the mistake and are given a second, third, fourth chance to get it right. The snappy conversation, the whirl of moods that jerk from intimacy to alienation and back again, and the faux-pas whose larger consequences are barely grasped before the plot is rewound, all make this playlet most delightful to experience.

Anyway, speaking of old familiars, ran into Zhi at the play. We go way back - back to primary school days, when we were part of a clique of boys who all travelled together after school to our homes spread along the Eastbound train line. Lately, though, we had fallen out of contact, and our separate paths in JC and in Army (he is on a PSC scholarship) did not help at all, and it had come to the point where I would get third-party reports about his exploits, but I would not have opportunity nor cause to actually talk to him directly. And so, it was surprising and refreshing to be able to talk to him at length after the play, even going through the motions of our old tradition by riding the train back home in each other's company. Nearly six years of distance has left a lot to catch up upon, even if our old friendship no longer suited the shape of our current (pre-)college experiences. And so it was that when we came to instances of awkward silence, some other nugget of information from the previous years would easily flow in to fill the vacuum, delivering us from the painful rituals of meaningless sounds and gestures.

*

And tomorrow, the deluxe immersion in old friendships in Saigon will begin. Just spent the morning packing - or rather, spent all of fifteen minutes gathering all necessary and available articles of apparel and equipment and putting it all into the trusty backpack. These things, necessary and fundamental but essentially mindless, do become faster with practice. Later, going to do some minor shopping to top up on other essential stuff: batteries for the camera, a new sketchbook, currency. And then, at 5am tomorrow, I'll be at the airport checking in. It has taken a while this time for the reality of this trip to sink in, but now, at the cusp of departure, I finally feel the excitement starting to invade my soul and dominate my thoughts.

Field Report

The computer's back up to speed. Went out and about today to get all the broken tech stuff replaced. Dropped off the failed drive at the Central Post Office for it to be picked up by Hitachi, and then made my way down to the Acer Building. It occurs to me that there are certain undeniable advantages of living in a city-state, not the least of which is that you get all the benefits of a national provision of services on a local scale. So it is that if I were to service my laptop in the States, I would have to ship it halfway across the country, whereas at home, it's just a matter of hopping on the MRT.

Anyway, the Acer Service Centre was rather crowded when I got there, and I was a bit dismayed. But I have to say that their service was prompt and, more importantly, effective, and two scenes of King Lear later, I was walking out of the building with a new optical drive successfully installed, and with the prospect of once again enjoying this machine to the fullest.

*

And so it is, now, that I am on the SMU campus, writing in the field for the first time. It is a novelty to be accessing an online journal outdoors; previously, the best that I could have done was to rely on good old pencil and paper. There is a certain sense of empowerment that comes from being able to access all of one's information on the go. And I have to say that there is an element of a cheap thrill in this as well, for tapping away at a keyboard in the streets strikes me as such a characteristically undergraduate, or young, thing to do. After all, computing on the go comes across as a declaration of independence for the younger generation in everything from electronics ads to episodes of Globe Trekker.

The city around me sussurates soothingly. Where at home, tranquility and quietude are the norm, here, one is surrounded by hubbub and incessant murmurings. It has been raining for quite a few days now, and the growling of the traffic and the more melodious strains of tangential conversations that one hears but does not listen to merge with the splashing of the drizzle. That is not to say that concentrating is hard outdoors; rather, the soundtrack of the city is like a background score, enhancing the current action with the feeling of being right in the thick of it, rather than standing apart from it as an observer and scribe. Within the spontaneous and indifferent sounds of the city, then, I can draw out unique sensations and experiences. In this sense, then, the city is a symphony; the city speaks to me, even if it does not notice me.

And, incidentally, I also find that, even after so many years of walking these streets, and even after joining URA, this city can still surprise me. On Monday, my walk from Sim Lim Square to Bugis Junction took me past the Sculpture Square, a squat one-storey building (a rarity in the city confines!) with clean modern lines painted gaily and surrounded by various shapes in stone and steel. It was tucked next to NAFA, and while the larger and more imposing Academy had stood out before, I had never remarked upon its smaller and more interesting neighbour. And today, while travelling on a bus into the city from Jurong East, there was a point in the journey when I suddenly noticed that The Sail, the new and much-heralded premium condos next to One Raffles Quay, actually has two towers rather than one. When viewed from the Esplanade, which is how I usually view it, the other shorter tower is hidden behind its taller neighbour.

And so, I find that this city really is beginning to acquire the qualities of spontaneity, micro-level detail and street-level surprises that I have always thought of as being the defining characteristics of compelling places. It is magical, to suddenly experience a moment of feeling like you're in a new, strange and unexplored place, even while you are securely within the familiar bounds of a quotidian routine. The realisation, the feeling of dislocation, that thrilling disorientation, wells up within one and envelopes one's original assurance of familiarity, popping it like a bubble. And its fleeting nature only makes it more compelling in its wonder; the city offers such iridiscent moments of realisation to anyone who happens to be in the right place at the right time, and in that sense, the city is very generous to its inhabitants.

*

Yesterday, met up with KHwee and Joel for more planning for the Vietnam trip. Spent a few hours poring over backpacker sites and guidebooks. While I do think that it is only prudent to prepare oneself by doing the research, in order to know what to expect, and as a primer to point one in the right direction when one is on the ground, it does still strike me as odd that this research could be a communal activity. Previously, I had thought of it as a prerequisite action, just like applying for visas or renewing one's passport, and to do it together seemed as useful as renewing one's passport together. But I have to say that doing research together does open up a whole new can of worms. More eyes makes it easier to pick out interesting places and activities. And, crucially, this pre-trip research does go some way to reveal each of our individual tastes and expectations from the trip, and in this way helps to allay fears of a clash of interests on the ground itself.

I do think that it would have been easier to go by myself; one has more leeway to make plans, and one does not need to compromise one's plans in the interests of another's expectations. And indeed, travelling together is already a sort of compromise, even before the backpacks are dug out of the cupboard. It is a distraction from a complete commitment to exploration and discovery.

But now, it has also become clear that travel can, and maybe should, yield more than exploration and discovery. When one has travelmates, one's travel experience is as much revelatory as it is social and, as G pointed out, part and parcel of the experience is to place one's familiar relationships in a new context, and to discover new ways of talking to old friends. As such, then, it is true that I don't think the others are looking for the same things as I am on this trip; but then, in light of this realisation, it would be selfish and unfair of me to pursue the things I want out of this trip irregardless of what they want out of this trip. The need for compromise is clear; and the quality of these friendships is such that it should be easy to commit to these compromises, in the faith that the interaction of our interests, this give and take, will result in a combined experience that is more valuable and more enriching than anything we would be able to achieve ourselves. This is the faith, I think, that I should hold, going into the trip at dawn on Sunday.

Starting a New Read

I can scarcely believe my luck. At a stroke, within a day of each other, both the DVD drive of this laptop and my brand-new two-day-old portable drive failed, leaving me with a uselessly clicking hunk of metal in a hollow portable container and a drive that spins with anticipation, with optimism, pauses - and then gives up unconditionally. The laptop itself is still top-notch to use, and I daresay I still have nothing significant to complain about after a month and a half of using it. Indeed, times like this, when I am sitting on the floor of my room with StreamingSoundtracks.com playing in the background, and when I am typing out a day's thoughts, have become an integral, necessary part of my day. But without a functioning optical drive, the most valuable capabilities of this machine, and its potential for top-notch display, will be unable to be realised. And the prudence of a backup to the onboard drive is clear to anyone.

Had bought the SimCity Box on Monday along with my new (albeit failed) drive, with the thought of finally getting my hands on the SimCity 4 Rush Hour expansion pack. My intention was to install the expanded SimCity 4 in this laptop, as a foil against boredom or homesickness in New York - although one may think me utterly pessimistic or cynical to anticipate boredom and homesickness in a place as captivating and promising as New York. And anyway, I had wanted Rush Hour since it was released more than four years ago. But now that my DVD drive has broken down, there is no question of installing it on this machine yet.

The SimCity Box also came with three other games, namely the new SimCity Societies, the Destinations expansion for that game, and this weird concoction called SnapCity. The latter game, I think, has no place in the SimCity Box, simply because it was not a SimCity game that had been previously released, and so it doesn't represent any stage in the development of the franchise, back from when Will Wright first programmed the original SimCity (which came on something like ten floppy disks - remember what those were?), until SimCity 4 and Rush Hour brought his vision to a whole new level. As a longstanding fan of SimCity games, I found that the inclusion of SnapCity reeked of opportunism and a lack of artistic integrity on the part of EA.

And SimCity Societies also raised heckles among the fanbase when it was first released. First of all, its development had already drawn fire from the fanbase, because the game departed from the tried-and-true game basics of zoning, infrastructure planning and municipal finance, to replace it with a rather shoddy concept that doesn't resemble real-world city development at all. SimCity 4 ran on the well-deserved mantle of being the most realistic city simulator ever programmed - and even today, five years after its release, no other title even comes close. SimCity Societies, then, seemed like not only a step backwards, but also a step clean off the tightrope strung between the developers' artistic and professional standards, and the demands of the fanbase.

But I still bought it anyway, since SimCity 4 and Rush Hour cost $40, and for $10 more I could get three other games, even if I didn't actually want them. How's that for Singaporean giam-siap-ness? And, incidentally, notice how the older SimCity actually seems to be worth more than Societies, as demonstrated by the price difference between the two packages. Well, as it turns out, SimCity Societies demands a lot of computer power, and though I think this laptop can actually take it at a stretch, it would not be able to play the game over long periods of time (which is just as well, then, that my optical drive gave out before I installed the game). Tried it out on a desktop computer, and to my utter surprise, I have been rather hooked on it over the last few days.

That is not to say that SimCity Societies is better than SimCity 4. Far and away, the older SimCity is a better city simulator, in almost all respects save its graphics capabilities. It is also clear that Societies is far too easy, and for players of the older SimCity games, who expect fiendishly tenuous balances, compromises, macro-level decision-making and micromanagement, Societies was quite like a joke. It's like handing an engineer a box of Lego. But that being said, Societies is actually a good game. It seems clear to me that Societies is meant to appeal to the crowd that likes The Sims, because the city-building concept in Societies resembles how you build houses in The Sims: placing every architectural feature, every piece of furniture and every decoration and layer of paint by hand, paying painstaking attention to detail. But when you approach Societies from the standpoint of a player expecting SimCity 5, it fails to satisfy. I found myself finding it absurd that I could pick and choose where every building was, and my sims would happily live, work and play in all of them, even if I deliberately chose hellish slums, tenements and sweatshops. It was irritating to have to place every building, rather than just zoning a piece of land and letting my sims get to building their own world. In short, the sheer lack of initiative on the part of my sims felt fundamentally wrong. Compared to the riotous, demanding and conflicting sims of the older games, their bovine obedience seemed far too easy.

But then it occurred to me - SimCity Societies isn't about realism, but about artistry. It's a game meant for creativity, not for rigour. Where cities created in SimCity 4 inspire respect, because of all the careful effort that has gone into it, cities created in Societies attract the viewer. Where cities in SimCity 4 are awe-inspiring, cities in Societies are pretty. And when that clicked, when it became clear that Societies was not fulfilling my expectations because I was expecting the wrong things from it, I started to have fun with the sandbox-style of play, creating neighbourhoods one building, one plot, one tree, one prop at a time. With the sheer range of tools and objects, one can really get down and dirty and add texture and atmosphere to one's creations. And I remembered how, when I had played The Sims once upon a time, I had tried to use the Hot Date expansion to do the same thing: create detailed, realistic facsimiles of real-life neighbourhoods.

One of the real drawbacks of the game, though, is that you can attain a perfectly static steady state at any stage in your city's development, meaning that once you've built up every inch of space, there really isn't any incentive for you to keep playing that city. You can just walk around in its streets and admire the views; but there is absolutely no incentive to redevelop. While in older SimCity games, entire blocks were liable to be rebuilt according to shifting environmental factors, in Societies, you build 'em and forget 'em. You could leave the city to run happily by itself, and no changes would ever happen; no changes would ever need to happen. In a sense, then, this departs wildly from the old SimCity premise of being an endlessly engaging, open-ended game. Societies isn't open-ended because there is no real incentive to progress. But for this drawback to be corrected, we will have to look to the next instalment of the city-simulation genre, whether it comes from this franchise, or a new challenger to the crown.

*

Anyway - uncharacteristic gaming rant aside, I have started to read King Lear today, and just finished the first act. I've had the script for years now (it was a present from Britain back in the JC days), but have not had the time or patience to give it a go, even though I've watched two productions of the play. Now, I have the time.

But I still lack the patience, I think. I find it rather annoying to have to keep referring to footnotes to find translations and explanations for the old-style English. It feels like too much effort to have to spend so much time and brainpower to decipher the syntax even before one can ponder on the meanings, and certainly, when I started the first scene, and found that I had to refer to the footnotes practically every other line, I had thought to myself that it was not too late to give up and read something else. But the quality of the language, the intricate word-use, the sheer delight of the stageplay, and the oft-lauded themes and philosophies of the play have kept me engaged so far. Even though it takes an added effort on the part of the modern reader to understand Shakespeare, one must look past one's own troubles to appreciate the clear indications of the genius at work in the words that are there, have been there, and will always be there.

Haven't made much headway yet, but already, Lear seems to be a particularly compelling character. On the one hand, he is wont to be overcome by bouts of self-destructive irrationality, during which he seems quite frankly like a total fool, flailing wildly about, unconscious of the true extent of the power he wields, and thereby hurting the people most dear to him by either using overwhelming force, or finding he is impotent to stop affairs from rolling on out of his control. And so, on the one hand, he is the maker of his own doom, and quite culpable he is, too, for bringing it onto himself. But on the other hand, he seems perfectly self-conscious between the bouts of choler, and he is able to reflect on his own faults, and ponder (albeit uselessly) on how things had come to this. He may not be able to control himself when he acts as the agent of his own doom, but he is doubly cursed by being equally unable to avoid realising the sheer scale of the mess he has gotten himself into. He may irritate one, he may infuriate one, his doom may even seem to be justifiable; and yet, even at this early stage, one cannot help offering him a measure of pity.

High and Low

Yesterday was unexpectedly productive. Finished my last film from last week, Kuroshawa's High and Low, an intriguing crime flick about a police team chasing a kidnapper. The story goes that the kidnapper had snatched the son of a millionaire's chauffeur, thinking that the boy was the millionaire's son. After discovering the mistake, he still demands the ransom, and the millionaire spends one agonising night and day wondering about whether he should save his chauffeur's son. In the end, he pays the ransom, in the process ruining himself.

The deviousness of the kidnapper's plot, the craftiness of the situation, reminds me of Michael Mann's Heat. Certainly, there is a similar examination of how the cop, innocent bystander and kidnapper all descend into their own versions of depravity, whether in the pursuit of good or evil. How else to account for the kidnapper's perverse delight at his own mistake, when he thinks that the millionaire will inadvertently murder the child by refusing to pay a ransom for someone else's kid? Or how the millionaire careens wildly between furious refusal to furnish the ransom and stoic resignation to losing his money for no rhyme or reason? Or how the cop allows the kidnapper to murder a drug addict as part of his plan to make him receive the death sentence for a kidnapping, which would otherwise have only warranted jail time?

All this is set amongst the scaffolding of Japanese social conventions, and so we see dramatic eruptions of grief, and equally agonising feats of unnatural self-control. It all contributes to making the waters even murkier, and so one is not sure what each character is motivated by. Indeed, at the end of the movie, when the condemned kidnapper meets with the millionaire in the prison, the feeling that one comes away with is that fundamentally, the happenings were the product of a whim, and not a directed sort of malice. The kidnapper tries to put on a face of bravado, trying to efface any possibility of reading his trembling as regret or fear; but in the end, he is dragged from the cell amidst blood-curdling screams and writhing with superhuman violence. If there is any meaning behind the crime, it is lost amidst the wild cries of the condemned.

*

After that, went down to town to run some errands, splashing my way through a thunderstorm that loomed ponderously overhead and broke just as I stepped out of the door. Spent a good few hours wandering around Sim Lim Square, and discovered that the deals really do get better as you go up the building. On the sixth floor, after two hours of scouting, found precisely what I was looking for: a components seller who was offering 160GB of storage for a bit over 50 cents a gigabyte. It's amazing that, nowadays, we can talk of enough memory to hold whole libraries of books as being worth about half a canned drink. But after all, memory is cheap; comprehension is the valuable bit.

Dropped off the movies at the National Library, with a mind to borrow The Iliad there. It's the required reading for the first classes at Columbia, and I'm told that Columbia's alumni has bought a copy for all new students. But seeing how long it took to get single-page documents out of the US, I doubt it would reach in time. And yet, among all the versions that the National Library holds, it doesn't have the Lattimore translation. So, instead of taking home the book that inspired the movie Troy, I found a commentary on Lattimore's translation instead. Spent an hour reading the introduction of that commentary; for someone who has up to now shied away from literature originating before the 16th century, it was useful to have some pointers about literary and social conventions on the classical Greek period.

In the end, of course, it becomes clear that The Iliad isn't really a historical account but a dramatic poem. Indeed, what the writer (it could be that "Homer" actually refers to a club of writers rather than one man, apparently) was more interested to preserve were not the historical facts, but the sensation of having lived in and borne witness to deeds and times of extraordinary import. And as such, what had sounded to me to be an archaic sort of philosophical study is actually closer to literature (though that is not to say that literature doesn't also offer a gateway to, or indeed carry in itself, a bit of philosophy).

*

Incidentally, discovered that our recent upgrade to the Starhub set-top box has made the History Channel available to us, and watched a documentary on the structure of the Universe on Sunday night. It seems that, with the theory on dark matter and dark energy, the Universe itself is organised along postmodernist lines. How else does one interpret the presence of a separate kind of substance, more massive than all the stuff in the universe combined, and yet almost completely imperceptible to us? How does one interpret the existence of a sort of force that originates from vacuum, as it becomes clear that the emptiness itself pushes matter apart, and in the process creates more emptiness which then increases the repulsive effect?

It seems, therefore, that the Universe is condemned to expand at a runaway rate, and the little islands of normal matter that we exist on will become hopelessly isolated amidst a hostile void that, far from being a dispassionate onlooker, is itself complicit in sealing our isolation. One of the scientists quoted Frost's Fire and Ice; and it seems that the world will, actually, end in ice after all.

*

And last night, on the verge of falling asleep, I pondered on the date - and suddenly realised that I was missing one week. Or rather, the last week had passed in such a haze of monochrome celluloid, good conversations and fantastic food that I, having had no need to keep track of the time, had lost track of the date. And so, like suddenly discovering that one has reached the end of the book with nothing but a cliffhanger, I realised with a jolt that on Sunday, I will not be in the country anymore.

I guess I should mention something about the Vietnam trip now. As it turns out, Joel, KHwee and I are actually going to do that trip that we had talked about on and off since the Army days - or at least, we would be doing part of it. For, due to scheduling constraints, our grand two-week sojourn of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia has been truncated to a four-day stay in Saigon, which I hope is enough time to get to know the city a bit. We have plane tickets and accommodation; all that there is left to do now is to change some US dollars and Vietnamese Dong, and to pack the backpack once again.

And so, one more trip before August, which, now that I look at it, is really very close. Suddenly, for the first time since finishing my internship at URA, I feel like I'm short of time. It is a sobering thought. Nonetheless, one last backpacking stint, then, but this time with company. I have to admit that, thinking of Penang and Borneo, I am a bit wary of traveling with company. On the one hand, I should really be looking forward to this, because these are good people and great friends that I am going with. But on the other hand, I also realise that great friends may not make good travelmates, and that very few people actually look for the same things as I do when I travel, and precisely because they are great friends, I don't wish that something that may happen on the trip may come to spoil the status quo.

But then again, such self-conscious double-thought is in itself toxic to our friendship. Part of why it has grown to be so good, why it has lasted so long, is precisely because we throw it headlong into ridiculous risks, so confident are we in its longevity.

Aaanyway. Was applying for the overseas notification as per NS regulations, and thought that I may as well also apply for the exit permit and disruption of NS for my studies. That basically means that I won't be called up for reservist duty for the next four years, lest they catch me in the middle of exams or, heaven forbid, having fun in New York. But going through the website applying for the permit, and reading all the caveats, warnings and legal threats, it makes me feel as if I owe it to them to stay in Singapore, that it is in fact very selfish of me to be pursuing my education elsewhere, so that I won't be here to defend the nation for the next four years. Indeed, it feels as if I had loaned my own body from the government. How's that for patriotism, eh?

But the deed is done, and so, theoretically, I am my own man for the next four years. Which, as it turns out, is just about to start.

Through a Glass Darkly

I feel quite tired out with writing so much over the last few days, but the films that I've been making my way through steadily interact with the experiences that face me so compellingly that I feel like I owe it to the circumstances to record them down properly. It really doesn't happen very often nowadays, the feeling of the inspiration to write exceeding my need to write. Suddenly, I find that my writing here is impelled by more than my own interests; I find that I am writing for something more than myself.

Just finished Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly. I've watched some other Bergman films before, and I'm finding that his more realistic films speak to me more than his more fantastical portrayals, and so I find that I like The Face and this film more than The Seventh Seal, an opinion that would probably upset some Bergman enthusiasts. But it is a matter of taste; we are all agreed that Bergman is a master of the medium - perhaps even the master of the medium. Preferences among his films differ due to differences in the attitudes and perceptions of each individual viewer, and in fact it affirms his capability as a filmmaker who is able to faithfully and compellingly chronicle the spectrum of human experience, in that any individual viewer cannot approach his whole oeuvre without feeling a range of appreciation, revulsion, discomfort and awe in reaction to it. It is something to celebrate, that his work is not simple - not simple at all.

Symbolism, connotation and meaning are thickly layered throughout the film, so that everything - every shot - can be cross-examined and productively dissected. It would be futile to try to do justice to the whole film by writing about it in one short entry, and I don't think I will try to write something that is worth reading alongside watching the film. But there are certain things that immediately struck me, new meanings as well as familiar ones that have been portrayed with unexpected and uncommon clarity.

The whole film is set on a desolate coastline on a deserted island. Vast expenses of sea and sky are contrasted starkly with the puny artifacts of human presence, the rickety jetty that leads to the rough two-storey family house, and, further down the rocky beach, the broken hulk of a wrecked hull. The spartan backdrop serves partly to emphasise the actions and the human happenings, making them stand out more clearly against an unmoving or immovable scene, but it also serves to act as a counterbalance against the tendency to over-romanticise and sentimentalise the action, because one is always reminded of the triviality and vanity of all these human sussurations when compared against the scudding clouds, the crashing waves and howling storms of a much larger, much emptier world. Whatever one may feel in response to the characters and the happenings, the aspect of futility and pitifulness is emphasised by the omnipresence of the surrounding void.

Bergman is also careful and evocative in his use of fluids: the shots of ripples and waves that open the film, the empty waters dappling the brilliant sunlight; the slouds that billow and refract the light; the milk that one of the characters, a young boy, spills on the rocks of the beach in petulance, milk that is shockingly white and diffuses inexorably and somehow horrifyingly through the rock pools. On the one hand, the great expanses look uniform, but encompassed in that impression is a constantly chaotic process; there is a roiling; there if flux. And among this flux, the characters are set adrift; their intermittent grasp on conventions and reality make even the island seem like flotsam, as the references to the outside world (taking the form of an unseen farm with the island's only telephone connection, the boat trips to an unseen mainland for unidentified provisions, and a helicopter that visits the island as a shadow first and then as a retreating silhouette dissolving into a shot of the stirring seas) dissolve and ultimately turn in on themselves, effecting the impression of a true and complete isolation of the island and its inhabitants.

Against this, the issue of perceptions is brought out. In the film, there are four characters: Karin, a young woman who is losing her mind to schizophrenia, her husband Martin (played by the consummately expressive Max von Sydow, who also did the magician Vogler in The Face), her father David, a successful writer in the process of finishing a novel, and her younger brother Minus. For Karin, her illness casts her off from the familiar anchor points of what we would normally regard as reality; or rather, sets her free to perceive the things around her in radically different ways. She starts by hearing things, and then goes on to seeing things, and her hallucinations modify her behaviour towards the people around her, especially her brother, until they also start to lose contact with certainties that are taken for granted. Minus finds her coming onto him as if she viewed him as a replacement or substitute for Martin; David admits to a detached fascination with the development of Karin's illness, a fascination that he says horrifies him even as he feels a need to dutifully record her disintegration as material for future books; Martin tries to tether Karin to reality through sensual appeals, but finds her pushing him away. And yet, all the characters lose their bearings on old certainties while maintaining a disconcerting clarity and self-awareness, so that David can discuss with Martin a secret desire for Karin to die conveniently, and Minus can converse with Karin as she reveals her fear of going insane to him. But the most disturbing moments of clarity come in Karin, who, even as she shifts between worlds uncontrollably, can describe the sensations to her enthralled family vividly and lucidly, and can even experiencethe fear of losing her mind even as she loses her mind. Karin's illness sets not only her own mind free, but unfetters those of her family as well, as they begin to think things that are not allowed, things that fascinate them because they had not imagined themselves capable of thinking them before. Madness, like magic, liberates the mind.

There is also a clear problem of communication. The idea of individuals essentially being islands isolated from each other is not new; man is an island, but no man should be an island. Previously, this idea had been evocatively brought out for me in Winterson's Gut Symmetries, and it was not a long shot to interpret the film's symbols of islands and boats in the terms that Winterson used. On the one hand, we have obstacles to communication. Karin finds that her own husband is too literal and practical to understand her metaphorical and symbolic attempts to communicate what she is perceiving, and turns to Minus as an eager and unquestioning receptacle of her...well, "parables" is the closest term I can find to what I see in the film. Minus complains that David is never around, being too caught up in his writing abroad and, even at home, seeming distant and incapable of connecting with his family. David also keeps a diary which contains his private thoughts about Karin's condition, a diary that Karin stumbles over, to catastrophic results.

And on the other hand, we have fumbling, even desperate attempts to cross the gulf that separates one individual from another. David and Martin talk most candidly about Karin when they are on boats in the middle of the water, and while they are moored offshore on a trip to town for provisions, Martin confronts David about his diary. In that episode, David confides a disturbing story of how he had learned of Karin's illness while abroad, and had made up his mind to commit suicide. He had rented a car, had set out to drive off a precipice, and had already found himself empty of all emotions and connections as he sent the car careening towards the edge, when the engine suddenly stalled, and he rolled to a stop with the front wheels hanging over the edge and with him gripped by terror and a (somewhat unlikely) renewed love for his distant family. And Karin, Martin and Minus put up a play for David, a play about an artist who is asked by a ghost to choose love even at the cost of death, in a sense then to choose a purely poetic trade and end. The artist backs down from the trade at the last minute, turning away from the gates of death. David feigns approval of Minus' writing attempt, but the children can see the contempt that roils just under the facade.

Here, then, in an environment refracted by madness, we see, on the one hand, people withholding what needs to be said, and on the other hand, people using whatever means they have on hand to get through to other people. Two forces erode the effectiveness of the communication: firstly, the enormity and complexity of the truths they want others to understand, and secondly, the complexity of the rituals and the imprecision of their vocabulary, so that the act of communcation, the attempt at connecting, becomes the central challenge rather than the more crucial meaning that needs to be communicated. Here, again, Karin's madness seems to be an advantage. In one scene near the end of the film, when her illness is coming to a head, she stands in the middle of an unused and decrepit room, standing ramrod straight and talking to the torn and mildewed wallpaper. She keeps repeating, "I understand." And if we can see schizophrenia as a sort of unusually acute and accurate psychic communication between the imagination and the consciousness, then indeed she does understand, clearly and precisely. The painfulness comes from seeing her father and husband huddled at the door, staring at her in incomprehension. The pain is in her inability to communicate to others what she has clearly grasped through her modified perception.

In the film, there is also a hint of Bergman's longstanding fight with the nature of God. It's something that is perhaps more clearly brought out in The Seventh Seal: a sort of agnosticism, a yearning to acknowledge the existence of God that is tortured by an inability to find faith. Through the course of the film, Karin is subjected to a repeated hallucination, in which she enters the decrepit room and hears voices telling her to prepare for the arrival of something. She sees people in white, "bright and good" people as she calls them, all looking at a door expectantly. She says that she doesn't know what exactly is expected, but she thinks it is the Second Coming. And, at the end of the film, she is in the room repeating "I understand", because apparently the arrival is about to take place. The door to an empty closet creaks open; she looks at it expectantly. Then, she shrieks and screams and goes into hysteria. When the men calm her down, she describes what she had seen: a spider, which had emerged from the closet and tried to violate her, and had crawled over her body and face and then disappeared into the wallpaper. She describes being unable to take her eyes off its eyes; she finally concludes that "I have seen God".

However, in the end, this theme seems to be rather clumsily treated, because in an epilogue that by Bergman's own admission had been hastily appended, David and Milus come to the conclusion that God is in fact love, and that the existence of love in this world is enough to believe that God exists. I agree with this viewpoint, but Bergman is right; it is not a viewpoint that I expected the characters to come to after what they had gone through, and in its abruptness it seems artificial and contrived. But then again, maybe that was Bergman's intention, to create this impression of contrivance in the viewer.

Another extended theme is the characters' anticipation of a storm. The men keep asking themselves whether it will rain when they're out at sea, and although it may be a social phenomenon to talk pleasantries about the weather, their persistence still creates a sort of futile anticipation and expectation of something that may never come, like what one can find in Pinter's The Dumbwaiter or (at least I am told, since I've not actually read it myself) Beckett's Waiting for Godot. There is a very powerful scene, though, when Karin suddenly becomes convinced that it will start raining, and runs off by herself. Milus searches for her all over the seafront, and eventually finds her huddled in the hull of a wrecked fishing boat just as the storm properly starts. Amidst the mould, flotsam, broken rafters and crazily tilted decking, we see Karin lying in her stylish summer suit, on the verge of being soaked through. It is as if we are seeing into her mind, in that frame. And then, as thunder peals and rainwater pours into the shattered hull, Karin suddenly lunges at Milus, and the siblings careen towards a moment of incest, before the camera cuts away. One is left wondering whether Milus, too is loosed from the bonds of reality; but I get the impression that he actually did restrain himself before it went too far, or at least I would like to think so.

However, at the end, it is also revealed that Karin's mental condition is hereditary, and it is possible that Milus' hyperactivity throughout the film is an early symptom of it in him. While waiting in the wreck for Martin to call an ambulance helicopter, David admits to Karin that he had tried to escape from the family because he could not bear the thought of seeing the illness that had overcome his late wife take Karin as well. And indeed, in the epilogue, when Milus bursts in on David and demands an explanation for why Karin had relapsed, there is a certain madness in his eyes. And yet, in the end, one gets the feeling that Karin is the prop for the family; she is the one who is trying her best to get them all to come to terms with her condition, through trying to explain to them what she is going through, and comforting them when they come to her and confess their shameful thoughts to her. At times, her laying of her hands on her family members in compassion almost seem like acts of benediction. This only goes further in amplifying the ambiguity of her condition: it is disconcerting, and it is liberating; it is demanding, and it is forgiving; it is delibitating, and yet it is empowering.

All in all, therefore, it is a great film to watch, certainly worth the time to see it and then to think about it. It is a rich film, in that it packs enough substance to warrant hours of interpretation, and even multiple viewings. And yet, in a testament to Bergman's storytelling skills, it is also a generous film, in that the insights it is pregnant with are not couched in abstractions and inscrutable symbology. It is therefore insightful without being obstruse; it manages to be compelling without being confusing. And it is definitely a film that deserves every bit of recognition that it can get.

I Vitelloni

Yesterday, met up with my old friend and colleague from the Army days, one of the other commanders from my company. We went to watch The Dark Night, which, I have to say, is a splendid movie, deviously dark and disconcertingly cunning. It is remarkable how the writers could come up with such twisted schemes for the Joker, and yes, Heath Ledger plays a rather mean Joker, who comes across as perceptive and yet detached; he sees the terrible results of his machinations, but he just doesn't care. He is thus the ultimate anarchist, and in a way also fully in control of his own life's destiny.

The movie really is worth watching on the big screen, being one of the rare action films that actually have something new and interesting to say. The plot and the characterisation fully bring out the tension between good and bad, virtue and vice, resulting in a compelling melange of vested interests, hidden agendas and ulterior motives. It is unusually juicy for an action flick, and though I have never read a Batman comic before, the movie seems certain to be an accurate reflection of what the original graphic novelist had in mind.

But anyway, I digress. So I met up with an old Army pal, and we went to the movies, and then retired to a late and slow lunch in Paradiz Centre, taking the chance to catch up. It was a good reunion; this was one of the few professional relationships that crossed over to attain a personal aspect, largely out of the force of his will, I have to admit. I was lucly to have met him in the unit, because it certainly made life there much more pleasant to have someone to properly talk to. And I guess, after two years, it is only fitting to come out of it with someone with which one can laugh over the inept security guards in The Dark Night, and reminisce about all the crazy and scandalous things we did and encountered on our tours of duty.

And today, had lunch with YS since she'd come back to Singapore once again after an overseas project. Talked at length about university life and what it may bring, because it is now four weeks to the day (to the hour, almost!) to my own departure. She mentioned that I should get packing, but I really can't think of anything to pack that would require me to start a month in advance. Also pondered over the discrepancy between the idealised idea of college life that I'm entertaining now, and the reality of college life that she has experienced. Now, on the very cusp of August, I am really beginning to feel a bit uncomfortable about departing; a part of me definitely wants to stay in this state in which I can anticipate something incredible without having the prospect of finding out its accuracy hanging over my head. But, as she says, the thing is to approach this new experience with as open a mind as possible; expect nothing but the unexpected, and don't treat the experience as an entitlement, as if the university owed it to me to be a fun experience.

But equally, with the creeping reluctance to leave the state of inertia that I find myself in now, there is also an opposing need to leave that is also coming into clearer focus now. Meeting up with the two of them over the last two days, as well as the other meetings throughout the week, has made me realise how few people have remained the way they were two years ago. It is true that, among the people who I keep in regular contact with nowadays, the people who I can talk to openly and frankly with supreme confidence now form a larger proportion. However, that doesn't negate the fact that there are increasingly fewer people with which I can talk to in such a way. Increasingly, people who I had thought of as familiars have shown themselves to have become too different for the old certainties and trust to remain relevant. Or, equally, perhaps my priorities have shifted so much over the last two years that we no longer share the common perspectives of the past. It doesn't matter whose fault it is; the fact is that, people are moving on, as should be the case - and I risk being left behind if I don't move on myself.

Over the last year, August has approached like the dawn of a new era, filled with hope and promise. Now, as I can take a closer look at departure, it is increasingly becoming clear to me that August will also signify the end of another era, that the two periods of comparatively rich life are not in fact compatible with each other. The years since JC have been fun; have become less fun over time, but it is still beyond reproach. The coming years in Columbia, I trust and anticipate, will also be fun. But they will be fun in different ways, and the experiences are based on different assumptions and circumstances. And perhaps, to fully commit to one, the other must be allowed to fade away.

Also, just finished watching Fellini's I Vitelloni, a story about five men who've grown up in a small town and realised that they've outgrown the town. Life in the town has been reduced, for them, to a dead end, or rather a circle within which they can sustain childhood certainties while idly speculating about lifting themselves out of the rut. In the film, too, an era ends, but perhaps with nothing to take its place. The boys try to cling to old mannerisms, childish pranks and attitudes that sit uncomfortably with the grown-up responsibilities and positions that they are now expected to assume without complaint. Some of them try to cling to old assumptions and attitudes, and those assumptions and attitudes come into conflict with changed circumstances and hurt the people around them. One of them, after marrying the sister of one of his friends after impregnating her, continues to go around flirting with other women as if it were a game. Another uses childish threats of violence and parental intervention to try to prevent his sister from eloping with a married man. They seem to fail to see that the time for such behaviour has passed, or if they appreciate that fact, they are too scared of ending up with nothing to fuel their lives with, and cannot bring themselves to give up old certainties on a risky gamble with the uncertainties of the present.

And as I stand on the brink of August now, I find that Fellini's movie seems like an omen. I realise that by going away, some things will be lost; have realised for a long time. But only now do I begin to appreciate just how much of the past is at stake, how much it could cost to go all out in the pursuit of the promise of August. Maybe, when I am in the thick of it, and have found something, some people, to replace or substitute for what has been lost, I will feel the tradeoff has been worth it. But at this point, without the certitude that something worthy of taking the place of what I have now lies beyond August, I can only try to hold on as long as possible to what I have - or what we have, or what I believe we have. It is only natural.

Citizen Kane

Spent today watching as much material as I can out of the rather sizable stockpile I have at the moment. Am on the brink of finishing another anime series, The Count of Monte Cristo, by the same studio which also did Last Exile, Gonzo. I'm told that it is really nominally based on the French original of the same title written by Alexandre Dumas, but I haven't read the original, so I can't really say. It's definitely a decontextualisation, a rather strange merging of classical Parisian architecture and digital-age technology, in which empires are stellar rather than territorial, and being a "provincial" means you're an alien and not simply from the countryside.

There are moments in this series that really do grip me, especially when they seem to play the kill-main-character card to exquisite dramatic effect in a duel to the death, only to reveal that the vanquished character in the suit of armour is not who we think it is, but, in a move that is even more tragic, is actually his friend, who took his place to save his life. But then, in a jolt, I realise that the story is rather similar to your usual melodrama arc, with tangled romances and past intrigues coming back to haunt the characters, and then the magic dies away. And I figure that the rather bizarrely exuberant colour combinations and animation techniques are meant to signal that we're supposed to look at the story from another angle, a different perspective, in the way that the studio has decontextualised a French classic, but it still hasn't struck me what exactly is the alternative perspective that I'm supposed to use.

Well, four more episodes before what I predict will be a satisfyingly good ending. We'll see then if there is another magic moment. At this point, the story is good fun, and is gripping, but I don't think it will be memorable in the way that Last Exile is. And, incidentally, I detect a trend in anime, or at least in Gonzo anime: the characters like to use certain phrases rather frequently, to the point when I am beginning to learn them - "honto" is the top scorer, followed closely by "gomen". I guess that also says something about the Japanese mindset or perspective on society...

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More importantly and impactfully, though, watched Citizen Kane, Orson Welles' best-known, and arguably only known, work. Recommended by Joel as it is reputed to be the best motion picture ever made, and picked it up a few days ago from the library. I have to say that, on first watching, it didn't strike me as "the best film ever made". Certainly, there is remarkable technical mastery in the camera shots, the props and the acting, but on first watching it, I didn't get any thrill of sympathy or shock. It didn't tell me much that I didn't already know of, in terms of ideas, but to be fair, it was probably the first film to portray the ideas that I know of now; I just encountered them elsewhere before watching Citizen Kane, and that has robbed this film of its breakthrough value.

But it does bring out an important point, I think, in why people think this is the best film ever made. Watched a documentary on the film that came on the bonus disk, and you encounter opinions that talk about how the film was unprecedented, groundbreaking, unheard of in that time. Welles got a contract that gave him so much control over the film that it had rival directors hating him out of envy; Kane was the first film he made, and he got more say over it than accomplished directors ever dreamed was possible. And he took a shot at a media mogul, a sort of role model for Murdoch, who struck back at the silver-screen satire of his decadent life by using his newspapers and influence to try to kill any chance of the film being screened. In this way, then, Kane is the best film of all time because of its context, because at that point in time, its content set a lot of precedents for approaches, devices and ideas that we take for granted in today's cinema. From the perspective of a latter-day viewer, therefore, the significance of this film is derived more from its historical and social significance, than from the inherent genius in the film itself, for many people after Kane have emulated his style, and some have, I daresay, improved upon it.

In this way, then, Citizen Kane is not the best film of all time, because that depends on who you ask and what they mean by "best". But it certainly was an influential film; possibly, it was the most socially influential film of all time, in that it captured the imagination of the public, became a tool in the fight for freedom of expression against the overwhelming power of the establishment, became a symbol of an epic struggle between two American personalities of epic proportions. In terms of its social impact, therefore, the making and screening of Citizen Kane can be said to be a defining moment in American, if not world, cinema. The film entered social folklore; it earned a place in the American consciousness because of what it came to symbolise not due to its own content as much as due to how Welles, the real-life Kane (a newspaper publisher called William Hearst), the studio and the public seized its existence as a cause celebre.

The film is certainly full of tropes, themes, symbolism, clever camera angles, nifty lighting and impressive stage design (Kane's palace of decadence, Xanadu, is an architectural marvel in its own right; there is a scene in which the great hall in the castle-mansion is filled with crates of everything imaginable, because Kane allegedly collected everything - it looked like they simply photographed the prop store of the studio). Much of its meaning and its significance, though, I can't guess, because I suspect that much of it is extratextual, and would make more sense if viewed in the context of the time, and are therefore sort of like inside jokes that are temporally out of reach of my comprehension.

In and of themselves, though, both the film's inherent meanings and extratextual relationships are still rather compelling. It's basically a caricature of the life of William Hearst, and we see how Kane starts off as a whimsical inheritor of a vast fortune, and decides to devote it to the task of building a vast media empire founded upon a series of tabloids (complete with "you provide the prose poems, I'll provide the war" tactics). He marries twice, is divorced twice, fails in his bid to transform his social power into political power, and ends up passing his last days in a cavernous, half-completed pleasure palace-turned-mausoleum, opening the film with his cryptic dying word: "Rosebud". The overarching impression is of a man with incredible genius, luck, determination and drive, who compulsively sets himself ridiculous challenges (first by building a newspaper from scratch, then by trying to champion the cause of the workingman, while trying to win the love of one of his wives by forcing her to realise her childhood dream of being an opera singer), careens from one to the other as if propelled by an insatiable desire and search for something, and always coming out dissatisfied.

The plot of the movie is driven by a reporter's search for the meaning of the cryptic word, and he interviews Kane's old acquaintances and colleagues, one of which gives him this interesting viewpoint: maybe it refers to something he never gained, or something that he had lost. In a life defined by a compulsive drive to acquire as much material possession of the world as possible, and characterised by an intense but ill-defined search for something, this seems like a crucial insight. Eventually, it turns out that Rosebud refers to a sledge that Kane had gotten as a child, which was burned as junk after his death by his butler. On another level, "Rosebud" was Welles' idea of a dirty joke to play on Hearst's mistress; watch the documentary The Battle for Citizen Kane for more details. But I personally think it refers to something he never got; maybe it's symbolised by the sledge, but I don't think it actually means anything concrete. The word acts as a symbol for whatever Kane was pursuing all his life, and though he could feel he was pursuing something, it is likely in my view that he wasn't really aware of precisely what he was pursuing. It functions something like "the horror, the horror!" (incidentally, Welles had proposed to make a film adaptation of Heart of Darkness, but the studio wasn't enthusiastic and turned him down; that led to his making Kane instead).

There is another possibility: that he was striving to gain people's love. It comes up twice in the film, when Kane has what may amount to heart-to-heart talks with two of the other characters. It's not clear what they mean by "love" precisely: one uses the term in relation to how he tries to gain the "love" of the voters in his campaign by trying to "make them a present of liberty", by becoming their champion, while the other says "You don't love me, but you want me to love you", in that simple inversion capturing what may actually prove to be an important distinction.

Or rather, it is an attempt to defy death and ignominity, by embedding his legacy in the world both materially (through his copious purchases) and emotionally (through his behaviour to other people, which are possibly intended to make them feel like they owe it to him to remember him). If this is the case, then the movie is somewhat elegantly triply ironic. Firstly, Kane's worldly possessions are crated and the junk burned, so his material "memory" curls up into the dusk sky from a chimney in the last shot of the film, and his emotional memory is distorted because people recall him in unsympathetic terms, arguably in terms that he would rather not be associated with in death. Secondly, it is ironic because nowadays, practically no one remembers Hearst, while Citizen Kane has immortalised his caricature. And thirdly, while Welles prevailed in getting his film screened after all, his budding career in film was effectively beheaded by Hearst's counter-offensive, so what we remember of Welles now is what survives him in Kane. In this sense, then, two larger-than-life lives have mutually neutralised each other, leaving behind only what survives of them in celluloid and monochrome. On three levels, then, characters who tried to achieve a measure of immortality have ironically managed to preserve something, but something which is far less than they had intended, and something quite different from what they had had in mind in the first place.

A final point of potential irony, then: the movie may be nominally biographical (of Hearst), but is Citizen Kane autobiographical? Some of the interviewees in the documentary remarked about how Welles seemed to merge his character with Kane's when he starred as the titular character; certainly, there are some deviations between Kane's life and Hearst's, deviations that seem to mirror happenings in Welles' early years. But what is rather striking is, as one interviewee pointed out, how Welles' life came to resemble Kane's life. Like his film character, he had risen to incredible levels of fame and influence, with his apogee at the time that Kane was made, and had been brought down by infamy to pass his final years in comparative obscurity. In a sense, then, Welles had grown into Kane; Kane had grown on Welles. And in a sense, the vanities, egotisms and hubris portrayed in the film have also come back to plague the film's very existence, and the lives of those who are related to it, in a poetic but surprisingly disconcerting way.

One Month

Yesterday, went down to the Esplanade Library to borrow some films. I was inspired by Joel's stories of spending days on end watching marathon after marathon of celluloid escapades, and anyway, it has been very, very long since I last visited that place, which has held a special fascination for me since it first opened. Discovered that yes, they are actually building something to replace the old, demolished Outdoor Theatre, and it looks like the new, improved one is about twice the size of the old one, with shading sails anchored to graceful arches and a central column as tall as the main building. Right now, though, it still looks like an archaeological excavation of a minor Roman amphitheatre, but at least there is something there, after almost a year of dalliance. I look forward to future performances under those new sails.

But anyway - moviehunting in the Esplanade Library was rather therapeutic. Picked out every Criterion Collection DVD I came across, and then went to sit down to sift through the trove and pick out a nice range of movies. And so it was that I came away with a bag filled with Citizen Kane, Fellini's I Vitelloni, Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly and Kurosawa's High and Low. Among them are films that are fabled and hold a mysterious allure from being acclaimed but unfathomable. And I figure that now that I have the time, I should take the chance to watch these works, especially the seminal ones.

Also came away with the pleasure of browsing library shelves again, searching for a title and tracking the numbers and letters long the spines. There is something specially heartening when one is faced with full shelf, when there are ranks upon ranks of full shelves open for one's perusal. There is a certain enjoyment in browsing through the selection, a particular satisfaction in finding what one is looking for. It has been a long time since I've faced a bookcase that isn't my own; it has been four months since my last book purchase, and I had rather forgotten that delightful feeling that is specially reserved for obtaining books.

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Afterwards, went to watch the HCI String Orchestra concert at VCH on the invitation of one of the old students. And I daresay that school concerts are really a steal, at least for amateur audiences like me, who can't really tell the difference between a great performance and a good one. I don't know anything about music: keys and chords baffle me, and one should not throw the Latin and Italian terms at me at all. But I did know that the technical mastery of the orchestra was beyond reproach (at least beyond my reproach), and I know I liked the sound of the strings, the full-bodied swells and wanes of the sound, and the way that strings can surprise you without losing their elegance. Somehow, strings always strike me as the most decorous of the musical instruments (although I can't tell the difference between a violin and a viola, or a cello and a bass).

They did some rather interesting things yesterday. I quite liked the St. Paul's Suite, with its fast pace and constantly changing volume. I could read it somewhat like a piece of writing, and in that sense it meant more to me, or I could discern more of the meaning and therefore enjoy it at a deeper level. There was a piece played by the guest orchestra from St. Nick's that was fully pizzicato, and so there was the somewhat bizarre but nonetheless delightful sight of a violin (or viola) and a cello (or a bass) being strummed and picked like a guitar. And there was the encore piece by the HCI orchestra, played totally without the conductor's assistance, that was punchy and rhythmic and sounded like an action movie.

There were also some rather touching moments, moments of drama that added that extra dimension to the concert, making it from a technical exercise into a true performance. Some orchestras can be mechanically perfect, but others who are more adept always remember that they are on a stage, and a stage demands some sort of theatre. And so, I was especially moved by the violinists who swayed with the swelling music, the bows that soared and dived in unison with one another and the conductor's baton, the cellist who played so hard that the spike of his instrument dislodged itself from the floor, the other cellists who played even as their bows frayed under the force of their music. And I was rather taken by the conductor, who was so unassuming and humble on the stage. After receiving the customary bouquet, he went around distributing the stalks to his musicians, ending by giving the paper-wrapped filler and the bow to a bewildered bassist. And, after starting the orchestra on the encore, he simply walked away and stood in a corner as the boys played on flawlessly. That was something that I had never seen a stage leader do before.

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And today, took up my own instrument again for an artistic purpose, because the old band is getting together again for what could be our last gig. One of our classmates is going off next week to begin studies in Australia, and so we figured we would give him a surprise at his send-off. And so, the band that was formed four years ago on a whim during CAP, the Cult, will be reprising our classics on Friday, together with all our mystique and shadowy mystery.

It was really fun to start playing those old songs again, and to listen to our old recordings and remember the previous times that we had played. The band had been a product of circumstances, the outcome of the chance encounter between many diverse and whimsical characters, who were so fun to play with because they were all determined not to take themselves so seriously. I still cannot help but laugh at some of the songs that we came up with, which were so earnest and yet so irreverent. It really was a stroke of luck to have been in the right place at the right time, and to have been swept up by this phenomenon to become a part of it.

*

And after, met up with Chern for dinner and a walk around Chinatown. The last time we did this particular trip, it was last year, and I was right in the middle of NS, and she had just finished her first year at college overseas. Now, the circumstances were much changed on my side, but I am gratified to find that the fundamentals of our friendship have remained largely intact. It was easy to laugh together at the missteps of the various ministries who are trying to convince her to join their ranks, easy to share notes about travel experiences and travel plans, easy to chat over plans at university next year.

And just as I mentioned to her, today marks the one-month mark in the longstanding countdown to August. This time next month, I will be in Hong Kong waiting for my transit to the next leg of my journey across an ocean and a continent. It seems unbelievable to me, now that I am here, at the long-awaited time. I had grown used to waiting, and to talking about university as if it were a phenomenon that had nothing to do with me. Her experiences and the experience of other friend who have had two years of study have come together to coalesce into a fantastical image that I hold now as my impression of what life in Columbia must be like. It is a myth, the way in which I am rationalising what awaits me in the coming months. And now, on the 16th of July, I find myself improbably, incredibly, within real reach of the reality that is represented by that myth.

Bastille

Went to KHwee's place for another of our class gatherings on Saturday, staying over for the usual fare of cards, board games and Munchkins. And, as usual, it was uproariously hilarious; I will never get tired of the antics that we can get up to at his place. They are all of a theme, but the variations on the theme are multifarious enough to keep me hooked. In this way, there is the certitude of entertainment and camaraderie, with the tantalising possibility for surprise.

What we got up to, I think, will not be related here, but will still join the canon of stories that we can look back on in the future. Over our usual prata breakfast at the usual place, as the sky lightened and the clouds turned rosy, we reminisced about the strange and fantastic happenings in class all those years ago: the idiosyncrasies of various teachers, our little traditions, the games we played and the conversations we had. I've said it before, and I will keep saying it: there will never be a class like ours ever again in The Chinese High, partly because the school would do everything in its power to avoid the formation of a class as troublesome as ours again, but more importantly because we were the unique product of a distinctive meeting of circumstances and personalities.

Over breakfast, one of us pointed out something really true, that we all share the same stories, and all it takes is a well-dropped name or punchline to trigger the memories in everyone. These conversations thus seem to consist of a lot of incomplete sentences and much more guffawing. In JC, and I reckon in college to come, my friendships tended to be based on memories that are shared one-on-one, whereas in secondary school and, to a lesser extent, in the Army, relationships are founded on collective experiences. It is a different sort of camaraderie; in a way, it is stronger and more dependable than individual links. Memories draw strength from their bearers, and the more there are, the longer they last, and the better foundations they tend to make for social relations.

There is, then, a kind of oddity and unlikelihood in this circle of friends that continues to surprise and fascinate me, I who stand amidst a phenomenon that, quite frankly, I had not expected to outlast secondary school. And the thing is, I can see us continuing on just as we are right now, no matter where we go over the next few years, what will happen to us in the intervening time, and who we will be when we come back and meet again. I look around the table, and I see future doctors, government officials, business leaders, academics, bankers and artists; but I also see familiar faces and younger times. I put the extra effort to keep in touch with people mainly because of two reasons: firstly, it is so easy for the shared thing to be eroded, and for people to drift apart and for the past to fade away. But, parallel to this, it is also delightful to do so, and this delight is based on a conviction that these people will fundamentally never drift away. And it is my belief that this particular circle is based more on the latter than the former; this means it is very precious, and its robustness and fortitude in the face of changing times makes it even more so.

*

Yesterday night, my parents laid newspaper all over the coffee table, got a plastic bag ready for the seeds and shells, and cracked open six durians. It was a feast. I had not tasted the fruit since Borneo earlier in the year, and it was good to bite into the creamy flesh and lt the thick, heady sweetness suffuse my mouth again. I find that durians eaten at home taste nicer, their taste perhaps being enhanced by the fact that Singapore imports many high-quality durians to fulfill the cravings of a demanding audience, but also by the accompanying family members all gathered around the opened shells, some periodically standing up to crack new segments and to pass around the prickly shells with the yellow flesh nestled within.

And afterwards, like I have been doing since time immemorial, I chose a particularly deep shell and filled it with water, cradling the makeshift vessel and sipping the curiously fresh-tasting liquid from it. Apparently, the water from a durian shell is meant to clear the smell from one's breath and to help the thick, dense flesh sit better in one's belly. But the scent of the fruit will continue to linger on one's fingertips like a memory, like a shadow, for days on end.

*

An old teacher and friend sent me the link to this song yesterday, and, listening to it, I am once again struck by how much beauty is within the power of people to create. This song, and this particular rendering, is truly beautiful. Listen to the words carefully, and look at Mandy Patikin's face as he sings; he borrowed the words from a musical, but he adds his own meaning to that which the words bear naturally. In his face, and in his voice, lie stories and the combined weight of the past and imagination.

Esmin Green

Was just reading up on the recent issue of the woman who apparently fell over on her face in a Brooklyn emergency room and lay supine and twitching for an hour, during which she quietly died and several hospital workers simply stood around waiting for her to get up on her own. The incident itself is shocking - even, if I may be so bold as to comment on a product of a society rather far removed from my personal experience, disgusting. I mean, how hard is it to approach someone to verify at least a minimal level of welfare? How hard is it to extend a bit of concern? And it is more than a little disturbing that I will be at the mercy of such a healthcare system pretty soon, a system in which proper treatment is not a right, and in which the right to life is in proportion to the size of one's chequebook. But what really got to me are the comments that are posted after the various online articles.

It does scare me that people in the US can bring themselves to say such things about and to each other. That is, of course, not to say that the thoughts that they express are not shared at least in some degree by the people here too. That is also not to say that the reasoning behind their opinions is flawed inherently (although, if I may again be so bold, there are some pretty idiotic and stupid opinions out there; there may not be a right answer, but there are without a doubt such things as wrong answers). But what they say does reveal a disturbing lack of basic compassion for their fellows. Many first reactions took the case as evidence to support various political positions on universal healthcare; on one site, a reader rightly pointed out that 14 posts were posted before anyone thought to ask what seems to me to be the obvious question, which is why people are so apathetic in the first place. And rather than questioning one's own behaviour to the people around one, most repliers seemed more concerned with questioning one's philosophical stance on the subject.

I have to say that I have never held formal politics or philosophy to be fundamentally necessary to daily life, and so I am definitely biased; but still, isn't there something wrong with people who can look at someone dying on a net video clip, and then so easily jump from the very real tragedy to an abstract theoretical position? And I wonder how many people's comments reflect their actual lifestyles. On the one hand, I hope that the people there will really not be as heartless as they seem in their comments, but then again, how many people only get worked up over words and never translate any of this into positive action? These people (and debaters, bureaucrats and politicians everywhere) seem to me to be too caught up in nuances of language and intellectual positions, without feeling any acute need to act on those positions. If that is not a symptom of apathy, if that is not a symptom of a depraved sort of self-indulgence, then I declare I don't know what is.

But of course, to be fair, probably these incidents and the replies aren't reflective of reality over in the States. I can imagine that the people who actually do something about this to help will not be bothered to come online and at all high-and-mighty amongst their peers. I hope this really is the case, I sincerely do. It would be a great blow, I think, to discover that such insensitivity, odiousness and myopia can actually pass off as normal in everyday life.

Picture Trips

Went out yesterday on a whim to take some more pictures, and yesterday's sojourn took me back to Terminal 1 in the airport again. It's a pity that these large information boards seem to have gone out of fashion, because while Terminals 1 and 2 are graced with two apiece, Terminal 3 only makes do with prodigious quantities of plasma. It's a shame, really: I like these boards. They have a sort of quaintness to them, they are endearing in their analogue nature, and a flight doesn't seem properly scheduled to me unless it appears on a board like this. Illogical, I know, but how can one ignore the romance that is atached to such boards? What symbolises an airport, after all, besides planes, runways, the tower and these boards?

Anyway, as my timing would have it, arrived in time to actually see my flight scheduled on the board. I remember, almost two years ago, gazing at the same board and wondering when my own turn would come, and thinking that each of these names, famous or incognito, worked like magic words on my imagination, incantations that could transport one into a world of fantasy. It sent a thrill through me to look at the board this time and think to myself, Yes, there is my flight, and I will be boarding it in a little less than 40 days' time. The words and numbers on the board don't just seem to me to be information; their presence up there is a promise.

*

What brought me out yesterday was originally an intention to go have a look at some art exhibits being hosted for free around town. Went down to the Tyler Print Institute to look at a show of works from Matisse, and also to the Goethe-Institut to peruse photographs of artwork in the German Parliamentary Buildings. Was struck by how seemingly easy it is to create such artwork. I mean, Matisse could create the impression of a woman with nothing more than several smooth strokes of the pencil, and the photographer Jens Liebchen's works seem to consist of little more than clever positioning of the camera and the subjects. And yet, out of those simple lines and images emerges meaning; Matisse's lines interact with each other, even dance with each other, and out of their conversation comes an impression on the viewer's consciousness. And ensnared in the postures, the positions and the expressions of Liebchen's subjects is a sort of tension, between what already exists around them and what is yet to be created, between thought and action, between awareness and execution, such that what is captured is not a snapshot but something incomplete, a slice out of a whole process. It strikes me like poetry; how the various components in and of themselves may be meaningless, but how the meaning arises from the interactions between the components. It strikes me like how an individual brick's allure is conjugated by its context in a wall, an installation, a structure, to have its own characteristic elegance multiplied by its relationships with its surroundings to become part of something profoundly beautiful.

Therein lies the trick, isn't it? Or at least, one of the tricks. A creator has to be very aware of his tools, but even more so of how the effects of his tools relate to each other. For behind the stroke of Matisse's pen and behind Liebchen's shutter must be more than whim and randomness, I believe (though the reasons why I believe this is part of an entirely separate philosophical argument). I do think it isn't hard to be technically proficient in what they do; one can copy the techniques of the pencil and the viewfinder. But what sets them apart is that they know how to use those techniques to communicate things to their audience.

And I look at my own attempts, and realise that really, sketching and photography for me are more like technical exercises rather than creative processes. I don't draw or snap to express as much as I do so to record, and therefore, my scrawls and shots won't have that beauty in meaning particular to artwork. This is especially true, I think, for sketching; beyond looking pretty, I don't really have any concrete purpose for them. And I think that does constitute a real barrier to mastery: not only the lack of expressive purpose in the exerices, but also the lack of conviction that having an expressive purpose is a vital component in making these exercises really valuable in the first place.

*

But - it did make me feel good, looking at what beauty is possible at the hands of real people. It reinforces one's faith in the world somewhat. And it's a start, in getting my mindset back into a more appreciative and charitable mode in preparation for August. Was talking with Kels the other day that I felt like I had to get in touch again with the kind of intense appreciation that we had back in school, when everything was so much more immediate, and everyone was so eager to experience Beauty and Truth and all that jazz. But of course, back then, we approached this task with the abandon of spontaneity, and now that I am aware of its desirability, that selfsame self-consciousness is sort of a barrier to reclaiming that old burning. So, after all, I can still nurture appreciation, but it will be a different kind of appreciation, one tempered by awareness, one that is more detached. For better or for worse. But at any rate, some elevated degree of compassion for others is needed, I think.

*

Making my way steadily through the complete plays of Oscar Wilde, and finally read The Importance of Being Earnest yesterday. I have to be frank: Wilde's earlier plays really did not appeal to me, especially the more fantastical and allegorical ones. But once he started to write more realistically, he does succeed very well at making hilarious fun of social norms. All his plays have members of the aristocracy who seem either immensely enlightened or recklessly irreverent, saying all sorts of politically-incorrect things to tease and titillate one another.

But what he's really good at is setting up complex and improbable scenarios of relationships between characters, which produce shocking developments and revelations throughout the plays. It may come across at times as somewhat of a Deux Ex Machina device, but at least the outcomes are funny. And so, we have a cocktail of irrepressible characters, improbable scenarios, insufferable humour and surprises at critical moments that yank the plot back and forth along the bounds of credulity. In effect, then, we have an example of a dramatic sitcom.

I use the term descriptively, rather than disparagingly, because it seems to me on first reading to be true: Wilde's plays derive a lot of their humour from the absurd and comical situations that his characters find themselves in. Take The Importance of Being Earnest for example. By my count, there are four cases of mistaken identity, four unfortunate misunderstandings and three forbidden romances that work out well in the end. JY once summarised the play for me, saying that in the end everyone ends up married - and it is true.

But equally, this was a play that I quite liked, because it's the first one in a long time that has actually made me laugh out loud on the train. It really is good fun to read, and even though one cannot help shaking one's head in incredulity, one also cannot help but appreciate the comic factor. I mean, with lines like "Lady Bracknell, I hate to seem inquisitive, but would you kindly inform me who I am?", how can one avoid cracking a smile at the sheer delightful absurdity of it? And I do think one has to be a bit forgiving; after all, when Wilde pulled his "I am your father" gag, that particular approach was not yet a cliche.

Beyond the absurdity and the comedy, though, there are two striking things that run as a common thread throughout his plays. One is his fondness for repeating patterns, in the form of characters with parallel situations, ironic do-overs and second chances and structurally mirrored dialogue. He does something similar in the fantastical fables in A House of Pomegranates too, using repetition of structures to emphasise escalating stakes and fantasies in a ritualistic sort of way; to draw a rough analogy, it's like how repetition is used in "The Twelve Days of Christmas". In the plays, they also serve to emphasise either comedy (because why would anyone repeat something in real life except to make an ironical point?) or the tragedy (because how can one remain indifferent to a tragic event that is about to repeat itself?).

The other is love, and how it can survive all the trials of both tragedy and comedy to bring people together. In these plays, love overcomes filial piety, vengeance, fraud, temptation, folly, caprice, aristocracy, debasement, morals and purity, even, to unite two people who have set their hearts on each other. Love works in mysterious ways and unites two people, throwing them convenient lifelines at crucial moments. Wilde seems to have a great faith in the power of love; and I say this descriptively, rather than disparagingly. It must be nice to be able to feel that kind of conviction; it must be one of a kind. But for the rest of us, at least we can still delight in the laughter and the tears that are incidental to the central issue.

101st

As a matter of course, I do still read all the blogs on my blog rounds on a regular basis. It is something to look forward to every day, to keep up to date with lives that are no longer connected by face-to-face proximity. Some of the blogs have grown bittersweet, because I cannot any longer sympathise or comprehend what I am reading as well as I used to. But I still think that, as a point of principle, it is important to continue reading. And so I do, day after day. I continue to read what you write.

*

The day before, went out for dinner with Joel, KH and YJ, who had just come back from Melbourne, fresh from a semester of medical studies. It was hilarious; this was a guy who once wrote, during a final-year English exam, a short story about a babysitter who ate her charge and the family dog as well, a person who himself ate an article during the morning reading periods because the offending item was too boring, and who ate an eraser just to prove a point. And in between his strange culinary habits, he found the time to tackle various members of our old gang from behind and set the batch record for number of consecutive kicks of the capteh (but even as I look back now, I notice that the memories are somewhat faded; one must be careful not to inaccurately attribute memorable activities to any particular memorable person, and in this was condense multiple personalities into one and use that one as a proxy for the many).

Went in search for porridge buffet (for the uninitiated, that's basically a Teochew idea where you get many dishes of various meats and preserves to go with plain white porridge), but settled instead for a steamboat buffet. The restaurant gave us all individual steamboats, which I thought was no good at all, since one tiny little pot was not nearly enough to properly cook lots of food, and anyway, steamboats are meant to be communal. Afterwards, adjourned to the nearby 7-11 because the restaurant did not serve free water. There was a ledge in the store for filling in TOTO tickets, which also had a good view of the street outside, so, lacking any concrete plans to go anywhere else, we hung out at that ledge and nursed our Slurpees with talk of university life and absent friends. Interesting, how the ubiquitous convenience store can become unlikely venues for good conversations.

After, went in the direction of the train station with a vaguely-formed notion of going home, but passed by the closed Coffee&Toast shop at Citylink Mall, and sidetracked to sit at an empty table, which clung to a lingering aroma of fresh brew and bread (truly, is there as effective and visceral an advertising method as propagating a delicious aroma?). We were in a strange conundrum: we didn't want to go back yet, because we were already 21 years old, and at this age one thinks that any time before midnight should be considered early, but on the other hand, we had to catch the last train because Nightriders did not run on weekday nights, and so we were somewhat bound by the concerns that had restricted our outings since schooldays. But then again, there was something comforting in the awareness that some things have stayed the same; that, indeed, for these people, it has always been easy to pick up from wherever we left off, and indeed, it is inconceivable for me to ever lose contact with them.

*

Yesterday night, met up with Kels, who came back from Cambridge last week. In a corner of my mind, I've always seen her as something of a glimpse of what might have been, because she's doing the course that I had gotten into two years ago, but which I had given up because of NS. In an alternate universe, I would also be in a Cambridge college, doing the SPS programme, and at this point in time probably fretting over my final-year dissertation and contemplating the approaching end of a golden age, the end of a borrowed time away from the Army. But as it turned out, it was not to be. The alternative, as it turned out, is a good replacement; it can even be regarded in some ways as a superior arrangement. But I daresay there will always be a part of me who will wonder about that big what-if, that road not taken, as it were, and what kind of person would have come out of taking that road.

Anyway - had cold soba that night, because the steamboat of the previous night had proved to be quite lethal to my stomach, and over the refreshing and cleansing fare, talked about EDB, URA, universities and, delightfully enough, teaching. Kels had done a stint at RJC, prior to going abroad, so we could compare notes and reminisce about classes. This is, I think, a privilege of all teachers, and relief teachers get this on the cheap, because we take classes without paying the high personal costs exacted on real teachers. And after, went looking for dessert (Hokkaido ice-cream from Takashimaya, to stay faithful to the theme of the night) and strolled along the darkened and thronging Orchard Road, pointing out what has changed over the year, what has come be seem more important from the perspective of one who has been away, and whether signing our respective bonds had been the right decision.

Such friendships, I think, are curious entities. On the one hand, they are fundamentally strong, being built on a shared past that doesn't shift, even if one's perceptions of that past may change. On the other hand, they are seemingly fragile, because as the shared past becomes more remote from the present, one tends to lose the vocabulary that one can use to talk meaningfully with the other party. It creates a strange relationship, in which one must effectively make the acquaintance of a stranger, and then, after a point, one suddenly finds oneself talking easily and frankly, like in the old times.

Of course, as it turns out, for some people the second phase does not happen, and one feels overwhelmed with a feeling of awkwardness and alienation. But, thankfully, though each loss is felt keenly, these are in the minority. It also occurs to me that I have probably already made the best friends of my life, and anyone who comes after this will sem to be more like functional acquaintances, unless one gets really lucky. In fact, when I think of it, I have not really made new friends since coming out of JC. If I lost these friends now, I would really not know what to do.

*

At any rate, I'm feeling much better after the last two days. They have shown that some parts of normal life can continue, and it is good to be able to get out of the house. After the gloom of the past week, this feels like a new day: it really feels like something big is starting to happen. I think I will make it a point to get out every day from now on; although I may not have specific business outside home, at least when one is out, one is in the position to be surprised by chance encounters. That is the healthy thing to do; that helps to put my perspective right, to pull it out of the narrow confines of its inward-looking contemplation, and to align it with the real world out there.