Are you generic? Ordering a T-shirt online makes you special!
Lawrence warned us. Warned me...But I ended up...well, working for The Machines. Yes, I'm in media production. Is that so evil? People make jokes about lawyers...but not about those under the ooooo glamorous bright lights of the media world....right? WRONG.SUPER WRONG.
If you're a Jon Stewart dailyshow fan like me, you would've had a field day pointing out our lameness recently, with that sharp acerbic political perspective of yours. The power of blogging for instance has given everyone a perfect postmodernist platform to bash
the deceptive, devious bastards that bring you trash. Ermz...thing is, as much as I would love to be on the gravy train that is the MSM (money sucking machine...i mean, Mainstream Media), I am really just a floating, drifting, young lad who is freelancing while waiting for his college graduation ceremony post-summer, August '05.
So using "us" and "our" earlier, when I spoke of the mainstream media was pretty inaccurate. But
inaccuracy and the discovery of inaccuracies, are pretty trendy these days.And well, "pretty.inaccurate." sweeties like Paris and Britney continue to draw eyeballs right?
*Cue Britney's latest single "Why don't you doooooo~ something???" *
WHY DON'T YOU DOOOOOOOOOO SOMETHING~!OK! OK!
I'M DOING SOMETHING!
But it aint easy...
BECUZ,
like any other wide-eyed, idiotic young man who wishes to own sexy toys , I'm really just a deluded phony looking to make some money off my academic training (tv production and mass communication).
This makes doing something meaningful quite difficult. But I try.
I try to incorporate unconventional ideals into my work and work process. Incorporating ideals into the MSM however, have always been tough. Tougher than you think. There are battles, and the ideological wars continue to rage on all fronts, from my bedroom, to my workplace.
Websites like
"Are you Generic" carry a lot of hip, flashy ammo for the mouse-browse-rock-blog generation (me included hor...me be NOT THAT ANCIENT).
I love what "Are you Generic" stand for. Really! I do! Their messages are clear-headed reminders to couch-potatoes like me.
"Television sucks you in, evaporating your energy and diminishing your will to think..." ---
www.areyougeneric.orgSo...
Let go of the remote.
Get out of the sofa.
Do something meaningful. Like ordering an over-priced Red T-shirt online.
Larry's girlfriend forced him to model the tee. He was pissed off because the one-shot photoshoot cost him 2.4 minutes of "Desperate Houswives," 1.3 minutes of NBA highlights and o.4 minutes of Britney's lastest video, "WHY DON'T YOU DOOOOOOOO~ SOMETHING~!!????"
Bronze Bob. Triangle Pants...VS Oscar
My camera chief and my co-producer at work
Went on a shoot today at a Chinese clinic and managed to capture some interesting sights.
First up, I saw a boy (who was about 7 years old) hang around the clinic's waiting lobby. He was behaving like most boys his age --- playing with his toy, grabbing his mum.
But take a step closer, and you will immediately notice what was special about him. He was walking around nonchalantly, with 10 4-inch needles strategically inserted into his tiny head.
Aah, acupunture in action....I think he is here for a treatment session but boys being boys, couldn't keep himself rigid on the clinic bed.
Damn! I left my digital camera upstairs after shooting the bronze man in a red loin cloth. Shucks...great photo-op.....gone.
Oh, well, that leaves us with....
Bronze Bob. Triangle Pants!! Your brand new friendly neighbourhood hero.
We were grabbing shots of him for our TV program's opening sequence, and were very amused when he was introduced to us.
Apparently, the conservative management authority of this modern Chinese clinic found the need to add a touch of their Chinese conservativeness to Bob's bobby.
Exactly what motivated the conservativeness...I cannot tell you, because I have no idea. But I can tell you a bit more about good ol' Bob.
Bronze Bob, is actually a Chinese acupunture sculpture. And rather than bronze, as the pictures suggest, he's made out of hard plastic.
Bob has these lines and dots on him. In Chinese medical terms, they are known as Jing Mai (the lines, where an invisible energy flows through) and Xue Wei (the dots, where needling or massaging can impact our physical, mental, even sexual well-being....**)
[**Is that why heavily tattoo-ed people emit that strange, sometimes scary vibe? According to Chinese acupunture science...their electronic pulse field should be ALL SCREWED UP..hmmz...]
Anywayz, Bronze Bob seems like the proud and friendly cousin of Oscar, doesn't he?
But good ol' Oscar has something waaaaay cooler, literally --- the cold blade of the sword he holds (very carefully I might add) below his waist, in front of his jewels.
Oscar: Ooi, careful hor.
Die! Metrosexual Die!
Again, something I saved from
Nerve.com. A gem. A real dig. Especially if you care about personal grooming, knows how to cook, manage 15 pull-ups a day, and knows Karl, as in Marx, instead of the retired NBA truck Malone.
-------------------------------------------
Abercrombie & Fitch, what hath thou wrought? The pretty boys on the frat-house clothier's shopping bags taught a generation of heterosexual men to shave their chests. Then Maxim, the aggressively hetero men's magazine, extended its brand with . . . hair coloring. "Metrosexuality," the press dubbed it — a cultural movement led by urban men eager to embrace their "feminine sides" through grooming and shopping! The New York Times published an article titled “Metrosexuals Come Out.” Queer Eye for the Straight Guy became a TV hit and a seeming cultural mandate. Last month, presidential hopeful Howard Dean tried to seize the Banana Republican vote by declaring himself metrosexual; the next day, he discreetly retracted the statement, confessing
Howie, we're with ya. But before we could reach for some ipecac and collectively purge ourselves of this concept, Da Capo Press released
The Metrosexual Guide to Style: A Handbook for the Modern Man by Michael Flocker. To recap: it's a book about a trend that doesn't really exist and a label that means nothing.
Fittingly, for a book that bills itself as a "Guide to Style," it's rather lazy in that department. (A typical revelation: "From tuxedoes to T-shirts, Armani provides consistent quality pieces.") Elsewhere, passages on what wine goes with which food and how to determine the best hairstyle for your face are interspersed with didactic tutorials on art and travel that read like emails from your know-nothing, know-it-all friend: "There is a commonly held misconception that Parisians are always very rude to Americans visiting their city. This notion has been perpetuated over the years, but is not always the case." Amazing.
| Like hand-me-down Drakkar Noir, the odor of status anxiety wafts from these pages. |
That the book would have the intellectual gravity of Marcus Schenkenburg in a wind tunnel is no surprise. Like its similarly designed shelf-mate, The Hipster Handbook, The Metrosexual Guide is a crass attempt to cash in on a trend manufactured by style writers for glossy magazines. we've never met anyone who described himself — or anyone else — as a "metrosexual" or a "hipster," yet somehow these demographically ideal lifestyle specimens crawl out of the woodwork just long enough to go on the record before morphing into the next new, new thing.
As the term "yuppie" was to the '80s or "hipster" was to the late '90s, "metrosexual" has become a lazy catch-all, something you can call any guy who manages to shave himself properly or who falls short of John Wayne in the rugged-masculinity department. But like those earlier terms that warped into epithets, "metrosexual" doesn't say anything about the person being referred to, but plenty about the person making the reference.
The odor of status anxiety wafts from these pages like hand-me-down Drakkar Noir. Here's Flocker on etiquette, for example: "To some, the rules of etiquette may seem outdated, stuffy, and unnecessary, but the fact remains that they serve as a sort of social weed-whacker eliminating unsavory growths from popping up in the world's finer gardens." Or his justification for the metrosexual man's fixation on clothing: "For centuries, pharaohs, kings, and czars bedecked themselves in furs and jewels while the underclasses toiled hopelessly clad in dull flea-bitten rags." (Now that's what I call historical significance!)
This anxiety reminds me of all those articles about the Decline of the White Male that were published at the tail end of the early '90s. Much sociological ink was spilled explaining how feminism, affirmative action and gay rights were lowering the esteem of white men. Perhaps the rise of the metrosexual can be seen as a grasping for relevance — cultural, sexual, and (with Dr. Dean joining ranks), political — by these forgotten white shadows. By stealing plays from the gay playbook (assuming, of course, that things like "shopping" and "grooming" are inherently "gay"), maybe the metrosexual male can retake the field of American culture!
That's why Flocker's book — and the whole metrosexual moment — is so devious. It pretends to be about breaking down barriers, about embracing diversity and stretching gender roles, yet in the end it supports the same old thing. A cursory glance at men's magazines from the late '50s and early '60s reveals fear and dread of the breakdown of traditional hierarchies in articles like "You Have to Horsewhip Your Wife" (Jem, January 1957) and "Women Don't Want Equality" (The New High, March 1959).
If the anxiety ain't new, neither is the vanity. Whether they were called Beau Brummels, fops, dandies, fancy lads, Teddy boys, mods or pimps, certain men have always been willing to spend inordinate amounts of money and time on self-maintenance. One need look no further than Muhammad Ali (an African-American style icon ignored — like most black culture — in this lily-white book) pronouncing himself "So pretty!" to find a non-'90s example of this. Or what about Warren Beatty in Shampoo as the flounciest heterosexual hairdresser in Beverly Hills? Or John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever complaining to his working-class dad: "Would ya just watch the hair! Ya know, I spend a long time on my hair!" Pick up any old issue of Esquire and you'll find ads for After Six tuxedoes, which "kind of make [you] feel part of the upper crust" and Kanon skin products for "the care and preservation of the male body for living, loving and enjoying life to its fullest."
| What's missing is any awareness of how real people live and what real people do. |
There's really no need for a "guide" to this "new male ideal" (as the back cover calls it), since it's not new and it's far from ideal. Any trend that's solely predicated on buying shit should be regarded with the utmost skepticism by anyone over the age of thirteen. But self-identified metrosexuals like Flocker not only buy the shit, they actually buy the trend as well. And here's where The Metrosexual Guide's biggest failure is evident: what's missing is any awareness of how real people live and what real people do. For example, I live in a city. I shave with a bowl and brush. I smear on Kiehl's aftershave. But I also wear the same shoes I've had since college and rake leaves in paint-splattered pants. I'm not a paper doll waiting to be outfitted with a lifestyle.
The metrosexual, despite his numerous hairstyle and accessories options, is a one-dimensional being. Maybe that's why this book — and the term that inspired it — feels so flat. (Last month, Mark Simpson, the writer who coined "metrosexual" in 1994, pronounced it dead. And apologized. So can we let it go? Please?) With all of its definitions and graphics, the Metrosexual Guide reads like Flocker's attempt to shape metrosexual mythology the way Dick Hebdige did for mods, rockers, punks, and skinheads in his seminal Subculture: The Meaning of Style in 1979. Problem is, the metrosexual myth-spinners don't know dick, and it shows. n°
Matt Haber has written for Spin, Entertainment Weekly, New York, Salon.com, and Wired. He lives in Brooklyn and writes for http://www.lowculture.com/
Welcome to Box Republic
Talking to a box.
Be Herd. Be Hurt. Or be Heard?
We wear the mask that grins and lies
It hides our faces and shades our eyes,
This debt we pay to human guile
With torn and bleeding hearts we...
smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties
- P. L. Dunbar
..... and MOUTH!!! with myriad...subtleties
I shot the man who wanted to sing
For those who saw the version of "Numa Numa Boy" without the lyrics.
Si te rog, iubirea mea, primeste fericirea
Ti-am dat bip =P
-----------------------
Dragostea Din TeiMaya heeee~
Maya hoooo~
Maya haa~
Maya HaHa~
Alo, salut
(hellow, greetings)
Sint eu, un haiduc
(It's me, an outlaw)
Si te rog
(I ask you, )
iubirea mea
(my love)
primeste fericirea
(to accept happiness)
Alo ~ alo (hello, hello)
Sint eu picasso
(It's me, Picasso)
Ti-am dat bip
(I sent that beep)
si sant voinic
(and I'm brave)
Dar sa stii
(But you should know that)
nuti cer nimic
(I'm not asking for anything from you)
Vrei sa pleci dar numa numa iei
(You wanna leave but you don't wanna take me)
Numa numa iei numa numa iei
(don't want to take me...don't want to, don't want...don't want to take me)
Chipul tau si dragostea din tei
(Your face and your love from the linden trees)
Miamintesc de ochii tai
(And I remember your eyes)
Vrei sa pleci dar numa numa iei
(You wanna leave but you don't wanna take me)
Numa numa iei numa numa iei
(don't want to take me...don't want to, don't want...don't want to take me)
Chipul tau si dragostea din tei
(Your face and your love from the linden trees)
Miamintesc de ochii tai
(And I remember your eyes)
Te sum sa-ti svum
Ce sint acum
(I call to tell you, what I feel right now)
------------------------------------------
There's a whole bunch more to the original lyrics but Numa Boy's performance ends on that bit.
Get a life~! Go do something else.
The NBA All-Star Game's on ESPN, Iverson's headed for MVP honours. Re-watch those Josh Smith slam-dunks from yesterday won't ya...wooooa!!
Bad Sex with a new girlfriend AND a psychotic ex
After a while, these things end up in an archive that requires payment to access. I'm not trying to violate anyone's livelihood here. Due and proper credit are given in this re-post. This article's from Nerve.com and I admire and love what it stands for. I just figured it'd be such a pity for fun stuff like this to end up in a locked archive, and not be spread and known to more urbanites.
So here goes. If you really love this stuff and wanna get more of it, you can grab a premium subscription to Nerve.com. I'm too poor to afford one at the moment.
-------------------------------------------
One autumn when I was in my mid-twenties, I found myself attracted to a woman who ran the coffee bar at a used bookstore. Please don't commit suicide after reading that last sentence. It's just where this story begins.
She didn't work near where I lived, so I came up with reasons for being in her neighborhood. I was working on a "story." I had to run "errands". I was shopping for a "book." For weeks, I leaned on one elbow across the counter while she steamed milk, and I listened to her talk, because I'd read somewhere that listening is seventy-five percent of what makes people believe you possess sexual charm. I learned that she was recently divorced and that she'd gotten her nose pierced to signal her independence.
"I'd really love to spend some time with you," I said, every day.
Eventually, she submitted.
"I close at seven tonight," she said. "Why don't you come over to my place?"
Oh, yeah. It was rarely this easy for me. I felt so confident that I didn't get to her place until almost 7:15.
She lived in a small studio in a large building at the corner of a noisy intersection. After the divorce, she'd put most of her stuff into storage. Her only furnishings were a plastic chair that looked filched from an events hall at the Y and a double frameless futon that folded into a couch, the type of thing that usually only appears in a dorm. She had no dresser. Clothes were strewn about the room in piles of various sizes and shapes.
Also, there was a man in her apartment.
"This is Eric," she said. "He works at the video store downstairs."
"Hey," I said.
He didn't look happy to see me.
She gently touched my arm.
"I have something to show you," she said.
The only other rooms were a walk-in closet and a bathroom. We went into the closet. She laced her arms "Please take me home with you instead of him," I said. "I deserve it." |
around my shoulders and drew me close, giving me a soft, deep kiss.
"I'm so glad you're here," she said.
Then we went back into the apartment and watched a movie with Eric. When the movie ended, she yawned and said, "I'm really tired. I'll see you guys later."
Eric and I rode the elevator together without talking.
She had me on a short leash from then on. In retrospect, she was going through a serious rebound, and I should have played it as such. But I was immature and she was soft, and smelled like nice flowers, and she looked so cute in a semi-dangerous sorority sister sort of way. I rarely found myself with the kind of girl who could, in fact, go wild. So I hopped the train whenever she called.
On Halloween, she invited me to a party thrown by the patrons of a bar that largely catered to Goths who liked to ride motorcycles. When I arrived, dressed, per usual, as Scary Helmet Man, she was on the couch making out with a fey, dangerous-looking young man. He wore white face powder, black lipstick and eyeliner, and a black vinyl jumpsuit. I decided to help myself to some Everclear punch.
Within a half hour, I couldn't feel my feet. She sat between Tommy Gnosis and I, kissing him, with a hand on my knee. I wasn't technically against a three-way, but the guy said to me, "You're very conventional, aren't you?" so that pretty much ruled out the grand experiment. When he got up, she folded toward me, purring like a bobcat. We wriggled together.
"Please take me home with you instead of him," I said. "I deserve it. I like you."
Later, as the glare of the streetlamps melded with the first peeps of dawn through the cheap plastic slats of her shutters, we lay together naked on her bed. It wasn't very comfortable. My tailbone pressed against the floor.
"I don't…" I said. "I can't…"
"Shh," she said, as she slid a Trojan into my hand. She was lying there like an oyster begging to be shucked, so I stumbled my way across her body and put my lips to her neck. We slid together with biologic ease. I gave her nearly five good minutes before I passed out drunk.
We didn't go out again until Valentine's Day.
After that, I didn't press too hard. The holidays came, and there were other romantic entanglements. Still, I was really surprised when I stopped by the bookstore one day and she said, "I want you to have a really special Valentine's Day."
She could see I looked nervous.
"Don't worry," she said. "I'll buy dinner."
"Oh," I said. "Great."
"And," she said, "we can have dessert back at your place."
Hummuna!
When the night arrived, I showed up at her apartment to find her poured into a charming strapless black dress. Good lord, I realized, I was a man on a date with a woman! This was my town, and I knew the perfect place to go before dinner: A singer-songwriter showcase in Wicker Park where my crazy ex-girlfriend was playing.
A "crazy ex-girlfriend" is a stock character in love-life narratives, and the person in question is hardly ever actually crazy, but I mean it literally. The poor woman who sang and played guitar that night was actually committed to a group Her gaze said, "Please don't hurt yourself." |
home several years later. She had many terrible problems, but she could also be so mean that sometimes you couldn't feel sorry for her. It wasn't hard for her to bring people to her level.
The show went long that night. As my date and I sat in the audience, I began to feel very hungry. When I get hungry, I become a little crazy myself. My ex-girlfriend was on second-to-last. She'd obviously seen me in the audience, because as she took the stage, she said, "This first song's about meeting your soul mate. I'm sure Neal knows all about that because he's here on a date. Hooray for Neal."
The combination of my hunger and the sneer in her voice loosed my sanity from its moorings. Throughout her set, I sat there with gritted teeth and serial-killer eyes and metaphorical steam coming out of my ears. My date looked at me sweetly. Perhaps she could see that the fingernails of my right hand were digging into the flesh of my left arm. Her gaze said, "Please don't hurt yourself."
Alas, that was something she couldn't prevent. After the show, we went outside, where I punched a wall. I said, in a voice less than subtle,
"THAT STUPID BITCH! SHE'S TRYING TO RUIN MY LIIIIIIIIIIIIFE!"
And then, I added, "ARRRRRRRRRRRRGH!" and punched the wall again.
My date hailed a cab. I got in, having expended my quotient of manic-depressive behavior for the night. She gave the driver her address.
"Aren't we going to get dinner?" I said.
"Not tonight," she said.
"What about sex? Can we still have…"
She shook her head sadly. "I think you have some things to work out."
You're one to talk, I wanted to say.
I didn't see her again, though from time to time she'd drop me an email to tell me that something I'd written was naïve. Then she got married and I got married, and all banter ceased. The last time I heard from her, she asked me to write an article about a device she'd invented that prevents toddlers from throwing their sippy cups.
Sorry, I told her. I don't do public relations. But if she's reading this now, and it's certainly possible that she is, I wonder if she'd be nice enough to send over a sample. It sounds like something we could really use around here. Bad Sex With Neal Pollack appears monthly at Nerve.com.Neal Pollack is the author of The Neal Pollack Anthology Of American Literature, Beneath The Axis Of Evil,and Never Mind the Pollacks: A Rock and Roll Novel. For a daily dose of his satirical brilliance, visit his website, www.nealpollack.com.He lives in Austin, Texas.
TECHNO. RE-DEFINED.
Salu! What would we do without Web-cams and infectious beats.
Help us find this kid.
He's our new hero.
William Hung?
Forget that UNTALENTED performer driven to fame by media madness.
THIS, IS THE REAL DEAL.
THIS. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, IS TECHNO. RE-DEFINED,
(oh ya, the links posted here had problems loading up in my Firefox browser. Gotta use I.E)
Less tarnished...less worried.....
...
"These old holiday photographs are the kind new lovers are always shown. Somehow it is more vital than almost anything else, in those first early weeks, to give the new person some glimmer of how full of life you once were. Here, you are saying, without using words, this was my special self, this was me, less tarnished, less worried, more hopeful, infinitely observant. See, how uncovered by fat my bones once were? Family albums are pilfered. You want to turn back into the photograph child you proffer to your new lover, hoping that in this way evidence of old relationship wounds and wrinkles coursing like some kind of land erosion across parts of your face will be miraculously waived. You want the new lover to see the beautiful lines in your lips before those very lines began to cross into the skin under your nose and mouth.
I warm immediately to people with strong childhood memories. On the other hand if people tell me they can remember nothing of their childhood or its holidays I look at them carefully, wondering what reason have they to lie. I love to meet women and men who can recollect crying their eyes out on the car journey home from holidays."
--- Excerpt, "Paradise is a place" by Gillian Mears
...
Chinese New Year 2005 came and went, whoosh, just like that. But the beguiling sweet mandarin tanginess of the celebrations stayed with me.
I had a front seat, stage-side view of Singapore's only rock concert on Chu Yi (1st Day of the Chinese Lunar New Year), courtesy, of my jamming cousins, QW and JW.
They had matching red t-shirts on.
Kurt, as in the Cobain who shot himself, would've frowned. But if they wore black tees, my grandma would've frowned. And if grandma frowns on Chu Yi, then everyone down the family tree will probably have to join her in the same expression when they come to visit...
So, sorry Kurt. Red tees it's got to be.
Other than red, there was pink. This other cute little sweetie-cutie-strawberry-pie of a cousin taught me how to say, "TEEEEger!! Won't YOu ever STOOPPP BOUNCING~!!??" with loads of dramatic zest. The little dynamo displayed surprisingly early camera savviness, and a thespian flair.
QQ automatically says "Cheeeze..." and holds up 2 fingers whenever she sees a camera on her.
..........
Stay pink, go wink.
; )
Here's to a less tarnished, less worried year for us all.
A hideously fun, and large party
Let us presume, that it is a hideously fun, and large party,
it is a large city, and you are here.
And the colour is grey.
You...
“…dipped it in a vat of sadness, rubbed it in disappointment, squeezed out excess desperation and zipped it back on.”
And in that instant, the world made sense.
[ in complete ideological stagnation ]
well-read without being pretentious. Dazzlingly
You're sweet. You're tough.
You don't back down. You're vulnerable.
You're willing to take dance classes with me.
You cry
I...cook.
Let us presume, that it is a hideously fun, and large party,
it is a large city, and you are here.
And the colour is grey.
The train is very crowded and the music is loud
imagining our bodies and our faces,
and you are all smiling and dazed.
and our kisses, and our embrace.
And I took my frozen coat, and
“…dipped it in a vat of sadness, rubbed it in disappointment, squeezed out excess happiness and zipped it back on.”
ONE OF THE PEOPLE IN THIS ROOM RIGHT NOW WILL BE IN YOUR BED
for the sake of perfect symmetry.
------------------------
Khoonzi.
Paradise is a place.
The colours of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky,
are also on the faces of people going by..
I see friends shakin' hands, sayin' "How do you do?"
They're really saying "I love you"
I hear babies cryin', I watch them grow
They'll learn much more than I'll ever know
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world
Yes, I think to myself, what a wonderful world
Oh yeah
.................................
Last minute plans can be wonderful.
She was still the same old, same old. The same hamster pokemon of a smile. The same engaging Qing dynasty eyes. The same sleek black hair...
But so much more..beautiful.
A different air.
An evolved...........poise.
Yes. Poise. I think that was what she gained....and what I lost. But well, I've realised being a "poise-less" dimwit comes more and more naturally to me these days. No point playing the suave, when I havn't got the slick. Or am I regressing? Maybe I'm just distracted.
It was good to see her again. So many great memories. Funny memories.
Like shouting "WHHHAT????" into the ticketing machine, after it spat out a pre-recorded robotic message of gratitude.
I thought a parking attendant was trying to warn me about something through the machine's speakers.
WHHHHATT???
Lousy parking skills. Again.
...........
Black eye-liner. First layer. 2nd layer. Greenish blue eye-liner.
We talked. About her. About her dad. her mum. her driver's license. her dog. her teeth. her jaw. her shirt. her shoes. her books. her dentists, orthodontists. her caffeine abstinence. her career. her loves. her near marriage. her glitch. her annoyances with the wrong people sending her flowers.
About me. About my brother. About my career. About my pointless protracted meandering worries. About my fears. About my options. About my choices. About my coconut ice-cream, and how she hates the shavings. About my girl. About my hair. About my impatience. About my driving. About my car accident.
About ambitions. About the quarter-life crisis. About inner-peace. About anxiety. About t-shirts from paris. boots from new york. plastic-wrapped-stashed-in-a-corner-painting-belonging-to-mum from Singapore.
About LVMH.
It's MHLV. Ahhh. Not LV and MH. Or LVMH
Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton: world leader in luxury......
Lipstick? Deep-pink. No lip-liner. I think.
Mascara. Not too sure.
The "Rock Girl" cursive stitched wordings done with red thread works only on her. I can't fathom anyone else who can pull it off.
That can't be her mother's handbag. But well, she's the right person to carry it. Funky.
Chatterbox is empty. Waitresses stand around chit-chatting.
She sits across the small table. I wish we were lounging on the comfy sofas at Equinox sipping something irrelevant. But well, I guess this arrangement gives me a good opportunity to scrutinize an old friend. I'm also guessing we steal moments to scrutinize the pores and zit-marks on each other's faces. That notion made me smile. It was silly...but typical of our mutual vanity.
We talk about bleaching our pearlies. She spent S$900 on laser treatments. I took the S$400 plastic-mould-fluid-bleach route.
Her nose is a little fleshier than I remember it to be.
But her voice is the same.
I mumble and she has difficulty hearing.
Too much cranked-up Green Day back in high school I think.
We leave Chatterbox.
We remember going to Berlin, in Hong Kong.
It's a sweet memory for us.
Some people we know have left Slick City Singapore for good.
Empty Singapore streets.
Clean. Empty. Clean. Neat. Empty. Neat. Empty. Traffic-lights.
New York is terribly busy at 2am with people jostling to cross streets and crowds filling up McDonalds' like it's lunch-time.
She tells me this as I turn right at Raffles MRT station and drive towards Fullerton.
I tell her about a lame writers' forum on Violence in Contemporary Literature at the Asian Civillisations Museum. It was lame because they didn't mention Chuck. Good Ol' Chuck who wrote Fight Club.
I hit the curb while tryin to give her directions to a scenic walking trail that's past the bridge, across the river, in front of us.
Then I reversed and hit the curb again. She looks worried. I find the situation comedic.
Thank god for big wheels, and low kerbsides.
Earlier, we drove past the Esplanade. We stopped in the middle of the road, and contemplated taking pictures with my digital camera. Alas, we didn't. Too much caution and infectious poise =P
We listen to jazz.
Cliched but perfect. Louis Armstrong
I see trees of green, red roses too
I see them bloom....for me and you
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world~
The CD came with the Toyota.
She plans to buy a Volkswagen.
I tell her Hitler helped design the Beetle. He made it look cute.
I mispronounce Fiat. Fee-Yat? Fyat? Fiv-yet?
I send her home. She remembers a lunch appointment tomorrow.
Turn right here. Then left. Then right. Do you want to see Tspoon?
I thought he would be asleep at this hour?
She cuddles him like he's her little baby boy. He didn't bark. Licked my hand and fingers.
Tspoon is not a smelly dog, I thought to myself. Very docile and friendly! I love the little fella.
We take pictures.
I see skies of blue and clouds of white
The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world
Paradise is a place.
It was the title of the book she gave me.
Utopia was a stretch. But it wasn't too bad a way to grow a night older.
Oh yeah.
Grey with scattered snow
Did you know
there are machines that can generate poetry? The lines created by their lifeless ticks and hums might be as meaningful and beautiful as an Eliot or a Frost or a Lawrence or a Kerouac piece, simply because of our very unique ability to contextualize and fantasize.
Did you know,
if you took the first lines of these 5 D.H. Lawrence poems,
1) A Winter's Tale
2) Baby Tortoise
3)Letters from Town: The Almond Tree
4)Under the Oak
5)Last Words to Miriam
and combined them, they'll make another poignant piece open to your very own melancholic interpretation?
Yesterday the fields were only grey with scattered snow
You know what it is to be born alone
You promised to send me some violets. Did you forget?
You, if you were sensible
Yours is the sullen sorrow
Did you know,
you can yell out loud and call your boss a "Baby Tortoise!" without getting into trouble at the annual company retreat?
Yes, you can. Only if you knew poetry, like you knew how to recite this piece from memory ::::
Baby Tortoise by D.H. Lawrence
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| You know what it is to be born alone, |
| Baby tortoise! |
|
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| The first day to heave your feet little by little from the shell, |
| Not yet awake, |
| 5 | And remain lapsed on earth, |
| Not quite alive. |
|
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| A tiny, fragile, half-animate bean. |
|
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| To open your tiny beak-mouth, that looks as if it would never open, |
| Like some iron door; |
| 10 | To lift the upper hawk-beak from the lower base |
| And reach your skinny neck |
| And take your first bite at some dim bit of herbage, |
| Alone, small insect, |
| Tiny bright-eye, |
| 15 | Slow one. |
|
|
| To take your first solitary bite |
| And move on your slow, solitary hunt. |
| Your bright, dark little eye, |
| Your eye of a dark disturbed night, |
| 20 | Under its slow lid, tiny baby tortoise, |
| So indomitable. |
|
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| No one ever heard you complain. |
|
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| You draw your head forward, slowly, from your little wimple |
| And set forward, slow-dragging, on your four-pinned toes, |
| 25 | Rowing slowly forward. |
| Whither away, small bird? |
| Rather like a baby working its limbs, |
| Except that you make slow, ageless progress |
| And a baby makes none. |
|
|
| 30 | The touch of sun excites you, |
| And the long ages, and the lingering chill |
| Make you pause to yawn, |
| Opening your impervious mouth, |
| Suddenly beak-shaped, and very wide, like some suddenly gaping pincers; |
| 35 | Soft red tongue, and hard thin gums, |
| Then close the wedge of your little mountain front, |
| Your face, baby tortoise. |
|
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| Do you wonder at the world, as slowly you turn your head in its wimple |
| And look with laconic, black eyes? |
| 40 | Or is sleep coming over you again, |
| The non-life? |
|
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| You are so hard to wake. |
|
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| Are you able to wonder? |
| Or is it just your indomitable will and pride of the first life |
| 45 | Looking round |
| And slowly pitching itself against the inertia |
| Which had seemed invincible? |
|
|
| The vast inanimate, |
| And the fine brilliance of your so tiny eye, |
| 50 | Challenger. |
|
|
| Nay, tiny shell-bird. |
| What a huge vast inanimate it is, that you must row against, |
| What an incalculable inertia. |
|
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| Challenger, |
| 55 | Little Ulysses, fore-runner, |
| No bigger than my thumb-nail, |
| Buon viaggio. |
|
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| All animate creation on your shoulder, |
| Set forth, little Titan, under your battle-shield. |
| 60 | The ponderous, preponderate, |
| Inanimate universe; |
| And you are slowly moving, pioneer, you alone. |
|
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| How vivid your travelling seems now, in the troubled sunshine, |
| Stoic, Ulyssean atom; |
| 65 | Suddenly hasty, reckless, on high toes. |
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| Voiceless little bird, |
| Resting your head half out of your wimple |
| In the slow dignity of your eternal pause. |
| Alone, with no sense of being alone, |
| 70 | And hence six times more solitary; |
| Fulfilled of the slow passion of pitching through immemorial ages |
| Your little round house in the midst of chaos. |
|
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| Over the garden earth, |
| Small bird, |
| 75 | Over the edge of all things. |
|
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| Traveller, |
| With your tail tucked a little on one side |
| Like a gentleman in a long-skirted coat. |
|
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| All life carried on your shoulder, |
| 80 | Invincible fore-runner. |
The Amazing Race against Fear Factors to become the Surviving Idol
I wrote the above title in late Jan 2005, while I was working on my final research essay. The essay was for the "New Communication Technologies" module in my B.A Mass Communication program. Throwing that imaginary show title into the mix was my way of trying to lighten up what was supposed to be staid academic exposition.
The Amazing Race against Fear Factors to become the Surviving Idol.
Well, what you see now is something that went through a few revisions.
Humor...is difficult to attempt.
1st Attempt:
Survivor XXIII : The Amazing Race against Fear Factors.
[Do the Roman numerals make sense? This looks pretty lame.]
2nd Attempt:
Survivor XXXXXIIII : The Amazing Race against Fear Factors to become The Apprentice
[haha. I laughed. Donald Trump's hair. Donald Trump's famed coiffure to be chewed on and swallowed, in order to beat this roadblock. Can you imagine chewing on that blonde combover? At the finishing point, you'll vote off the clueless couple, be forced to drink cow bladder blend, and then French-kiss. If you shove your tongue down your lover's throat, you'll win a trip to Hawaii ]
3rd Attempt:
The Amazing Race against Fear Factors to become the Apprentice Idol
[Pretty good? But the mother of all big-scale reality shows was missing from the line-up. I wanted to include Survivor. Somehow.]
4th Attempt:
The Amazing Race against Fear Factors to become the Singapore Idol
[Local context...didn't work for me this time round. Lame index rising...]
5th Attempt:
The Amazing Race against Fear Factors to become the Surviving Idol
[ok...there we go...I hope it garners a guffaw out of my tutor.....Now I'll have to make it work within the context of my essay....Well done meekia, you smart-aleck]
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When I ended up with the 5th and final version, I thought to myself..."How juicy! Perfect for parody!"
Loads of ammunition for satire! Loads of creative space for comedy!"
Maybe I can use it as a title on my blog and write something really funny.
Oh well. Maybe.
The Amazing Race against Fear Factors to becoming the Surviving Idol.
Maybe that's the perfect title for fame seekers who got invovled in the gaming process known as Blogging?
Maybe it's just us, fragile and temporal....trying to fight the erosion..the withering of our sweetest and happiest moments by the fleeting force known as time...
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[F]ar more sophisticated devices have begun to appear on the scene, above all, video systems and micro-computers adapted for domestic use. Together these will achieve what I take to be the apotheosis of all the fantasies of late twentieth-century man—the transformation of reality into a TV studio, in which we can simultaneously play out the roles of audience, producer and star. . . . Every one of our actions during the day, across the entire spectrum of domestic life, will be instantly recorded on video-tape. In the evening we will sit back to scan the rushes, selected by a computer trained to pick out only our best profiles, our wittiest dialogue, our most affecting expressions filmed through the kindest filters, and then stitch these together into a heightened re-enactment of the day.
Regardless of our place in the family pecking order, each of us within the privacy of our own rooms will be the star in a continually unfolding domestic saga, with parents, husbands, wives and children demoted to an appropriate starring role.
—J.G. Ballard, "The Future of the Future"
