Disgrace

Some things your government and its propaganda newspapers don't want you to know: the slums of Singapore.

Have we lost our humanity?

Reform Party

Excerpts from an interview Kent Ridge Common had with the Reform Party's Kenneth Jeyaretnam --

KRC: If there is any message you would like to relay to the NUS community, its alumni and students and staff from other tertiary institutions, what would it be?

KJ: My message is that it is possible to have hope. We can change things for the better but to effect this the Reform Party needs your support. We therefore call upon all Singaporeans not to be afraid, to wake up from their slumbers and come forward and support us. If you share our vision of a free and prosperous Singapore, where your government aims to raise your living standards rather than just to increase the size of the economy by expanding the population, where every citizen is empowered to exercise his or her rights and to express themselves freely without fear, where the years that you gave up to serve the country during NS count for something rather just being a millstone in the race to compete with foreign workers, then vote for the Reform Party.

Fengshui & Faye

I bought a sturdy chair, and I moved my desk to the window, and now there's light. Lots of light. And I find myself sitting here reading, thinking, looking out of the window into the horizon and right into the sunset. Is good. Good fengshui I think. Is all good.

Though I should be banned from Youtubing Faye. Someone find me another Chinese singer with that voice. That voice that I have fallen in love with for half a lifetime now. THAT VOICE.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH~~~

Tan Hong Ming

Look at these two Malaysian advertisements (out of the many on youtube), and be amazed by how mature and advanced the Msians are in discussing racial issues. Makes Singaporeans look like baby ostriches with heads stuck in the sand.

The hours

One of my favourite films is The Hours. It's a remarkable piece of art on many, many levels. Ostensibly, it's a film about three mundane lives of three women. It's split into three narratives running like a Bach fugue. The first narrative portrays the life struggles of the great Virginia Woolf in the 1930s just as she is writing her great novel, Mrs Dalloway. The second narrative is set in the 1950s, and revolves around a Laura Brown, who is trapped in a marriage with a devoted husband whom she does not love, and who reads the novel Mrs Dalloway and empathises with the protagonist in the novel. The third narrative is set in present-day NYC, where a Clarissa Vaughan (who shares the same name as the protagonist in Mrs Dalloway) is preparing a party for that evening (just like the Clarissa in Mrs Dalloway) for her good friend, Richard, who had just won a major literary prize. During one of the movie's climax, something happens to Richard, and Laura Brown from the second narrative enters the third narrative; and we find out that she is Richard's aged mother. In a way, they're all linked to the novel Mrs Dalloway; and in a way, they are Mrs Dalloway. Art and life woven into a lustrous spiral, and from it, a higher, greater art is created.

Three of the finest and most remarkable Hollywood actresses play the respective leads - Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep - who deliver the exquisite screen-lines penned by the acclaimed playwright David Hare. The movie is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, The Hours, by Michael Cunningham, who in turn had written his novel as a tribute to the great Virginia Woolf and her great novel, Mrs Dalloway. And coruscating throughout this luminous piece of art pretending to be a movie is the hauntingly beautiful orchestral, composed by none other than one of the last living classical composers of our time, Philip Glass.

Like all the good things that have happened to me, I can't really remember when I first watched it, or how I came to watch it. Probably someone lent me the DVD, and an innocuous movie-afternoon turned into one of those proverbial life-changing moments. I've watched the film many times since, and like all great things, like all great novels, great art, I take away something new, something different each time I watch it. Something I never knew existed in the film, despite the numerous viewings.

There is this particular scene in the movie, where Virginia Woolf tries to escape Richmond to go to London, but is stopped just in time at the train station by her husband. In that explosive scene, Nicole Kidman delivers a stunning, absolutely stunning performance, and with the most intensest of dialogues, just pure poetry. I shan't try to replicate it here; the effect would be lost. But watching the film again recently, and feeling all that I've been feeling lately, it was as if Virginia Woolf came alive and was speaking for me, was me.

So the gamut of emotions, of loss, of finding myself lost, and alone, and confusion, despair, and then that intermittent, temporary, glimmer of light and hope. And the thoughts of moving back to Sydney, of giving it all up and moving back altogether, thoughts of all those what-ifs and maybes; what if I'd remained in Singapore to teach; maybe I'd have been happier? Maybe it would've been the better choice? But all these come to nought when it comes to where I am now. I am happy where I am, I'm happy to have come. But the thesis is beginning to weigh me down and like Mrs Dalloway, I can't help but worry; worry if I'm good enough, if I can pull it off, buy the flowers myself in the morning and throw one hell of a party in the evening. Like Virginia Woolf, I can't help but feel for certain that I'm going mad again, that I can't go through another of these terrible times. That I shan't recover this time, that I'm beginning to hear voices, and can't concentrate. . .

That last few lines are from Virginia Woolf's suicide letter just before she killed herself. I'm not gonna kill myself and do what seems to be the best thing to do. But there were times I thought I was at my lowest ebb. And then there were times when I remembered, from the film, that while we defined our own humanity, we cannot find peace by avoiding life.

___

When the month of June was here, I had wanted to put up one of my favourite literary lines. I've put it up in this blog before, a few years ago. It's a line from Mrs Dalloway. But somehow I just didn't get to put it up. And June came and went. And then July, and August, and the winter, all have had their time and gone. Spring is now here, and September has arrived. Time really flies. Like that little sparrow you can never catch, living its own time in yet another spring September sky. One can only watch aside, look up from below, and admire such beauty, and hold on there, wishing for a fragment of time's precious fragility.

.... they love life. in people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.

-- Mrs Dalloway; Virginia Woolf