S’porious Logic #1: n=I This is a series inspired by the illogic of some common arguments put forth by Singaporeans in the arena of public opinion and debate. ‘S’porious’ is a play on both ‘spurious’ (not valid) and ‘porous’ (full of holes) with ‘serious’ and ‘S’porean’. It sounds horrible, I know, but that is precisely the point, the illogic is horrible too. Class 95FM was discussing the fresh ballyhoo about Disremembering It is one of those nights again. I am painfully aware of everything, my thoughts, my twitching muscle below the left calf, the slight jogging ache in the right thigh, the pressing pressure on the temple, a tiny bead of sweat forming at the back of the neck, a nervous pinch in my molar, the crackling of the malt which only serves to heighten the awareness, my unquenchable thirsts, the humming David Marshall: A Bittersweet Remembrance I can’t write a ticker. Reading the Straits Times, after the budget hot air, Singapore seems to have gone placid, flat, even flaccid. That is not true. Go out into the heartland streets and the shady corners of downtown, and one could tune into the energies of a people, their faces and eyes giving off dreams, hopes, fears, fantasies, joys interspersed with moments of ennui. The people, ever Ethnosophy #2: Rac(ial)ist Children and Ghosts I’ve been thinking for quite a while now about what a senior grassroots leader told me some time ago at a racial harmony education event. He was an old guard who worked the ground when the PAP was still a left-wing party campaigning to build a nation out of disparate communal groups wrecked by racial politics; July 21, 1964, after all, came in the wake of the PAP-UMNO electoral battle that was New teeth for old My friend and fellow culture/history traveler, Lai Chee Kien, wrote this beautiful short reflection with many layers of meaning, sending it to me as New Year's greetings. I'm republishing it here with his permission. Happy 2008 everyone! About a year ago, Keppel Land announced a (then) new condominium project, Reflections at Keppel Bay at Keppel Marina (the former Chermin Wharf). Besides the Ethnosophy #1: The Fragrance of the Winds Punggol 21, the new town of the 21st century, the universal model of harmonious domestic living, where the kampung spirit returns through the farmland soil, naturally, to the technocratically ordered environment of steel, concrete, plastic, rubber and nature arranged in straight grid lines. In the doldrums of finance capital fleeing from its heart of darkness, Punggol 21 lay dormant. But as the Heartland Monument #6: Garden Dreaming Dream. A man without acclaimed qualifications, no lofty words to impress the savant, only a dream to be recognized by society for his work. Only a petite bureaucrat, an employee of the swollen state, he painted imaginations beyond the dreariness of dispensing grace to the population according to the rules and norms of laws and conventionality. His unconventional images spoke of fantastic realms, On 377A Nonsense in the Reasonable Hall of the Sensible Nation While homosexuals are a numerical minority, there is no such thing as 'sexual minorities' at law. Activists have coined this term to draw a beguiling but fallacious association between homosexuals and legally recognised minorities like racial groups. Race is a fixed trait. It remains controversial whether homosexual orientation is genetic or environmental, perhaps both. There are no ex-blacks but Implausible City #1: Witnessing Raffles On this historic site Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles First landed in Singapore On 28th January 1819 And with genius and perception Changed the destiny of Singapore From an obscure fishing village To a great seaport and Modern metropolis So reads the inscription on a white statue of a European, implausibly standing on the riverbank of a malarial river, implausibly decked out in Victorian Ethnosophy, Implausible City Two gestures that signify the serial complementation of monumental forms in the heartland, two vectors that stream from the symbolic impositions and authoritative inscriptions on the everyday consciousness of material life lived as such. One speaks of the eruption of heterodoxies that open up schismatic tears in the orthodox fabric of space and time. Here, random enunciations rise from the A hole in my sky Isamu Noguchi, The Sky, 1964 Sometimes, I just cannot get to sleep. There would be a swirl of images, illicit, secret and banal, combining to lull me to the curving tunnel that seeps away from my consciousness. But I would wake with a tremble or two as I touch the glossy blackness of the planar darkness of the tunnel. I don’t know. Perhaps, this time it is a confluence of incitements to invest. Heartland Monument #5. The CMIOs of Punggol. Rodin sculpts six despondent figures in varying postures of existential angst. They are unlikely images of heroes remembered in the historical imagination of the French nation: six leading citizens of the besieged city of Calais being led to their imminent death in the bloody hands of the marauding English, their own hands expressing the pain of their impending sacrifice. They were to be Musing (Dreaming of Singapura in Santa Clara) The ringing brings forth the voice of love Interrupting the slumbers of dream and fright There, affection glides along the slope of time Sliding down the gradient of truth towards space Images slip to and fro and through emoting waves A late night of inspection reveals nothing Only the beckoning of early morning sours My spirit soars to circle the plains of innocence Force, this life settles into Heartland Monument #4. No Ball Games. Rene Magritte paints a pipe and paints an announcement of surreal negation: “this is not a pipe”. The image takes on a new significance, or rather, it is almost emptied of meanings, in the sense that meanings become residual, remnant and on the edge of being ruined. With the pronouncement that this is not a pipe, we no longer see a pipe but a painting of a pipe. The pipe, the pronouncement and Heartland Monument #3. Hallowed Time. Time is a precious entity when one is so consumed by the ever-receding horizons of passions, of indulgences in family, friends and students (apologies for being consumed, only just, as it was all productive). In the silent corridors where the insecurities resonate with vacuous sound and fury, reverberating as rants and boasts in other spaces, the latter, the students, is the sanctification of my Heartland Monument #2. Value Life. Keith Haring junks his brushes, moves to New York, descends into the subways, crayons his iconic gestures on black advertisement boards, leaves a semiotic equivalence, a message for democratic posterity. Here, a middle-class artist seeks not to identify with plebian voices, knowing the outcome is only an artificial communality that hides the condemned individuality of the bleeding-heart gentry A Requiem Heartland Monument #1. M/Cycle Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrap the monument to focus collective consciousness on an icon in our habituated visual field. Plastic and fabric render the static and the predictable a dynamic flow of soft edges. Likewise, the public turns away from the structure of orthodoxy and heresy into a variegated terrain of clashing, merging, ricocheting opinions. The public is set on edge. The monument Refusal A drizzle, windy tones, the passing howls returning home. I fell to the sighs of fulfillment, consumed by the play of images. Then a message in the night brings words that refused to fade away. Realities merge in my consciousness, and I hear the flapping of the wings of dream. Refusal, variations on a theme, renditions on a whim, where is this taking me? Not rejection, the emptiness of pushing The Missing Piece Monty's dare Literary memes: tagged and distracted Hardback or Paperback: Paperbacks, as I believe in the ephemeral existence of words Highlight or Underline: Highlight, the colors are psychedelic and fade with time Lewis or Tolkien: Tolkien, as Lewis cannot deal with his loneliness E.B. White or A.A. Milne: White, the spider made me cry T.S. Eliot or e.e. cummings: cummings, for his prescient post-structuralist iconoclasm Stephen King or Scars The cry of desperation that deflowers the innocent Precious acts of revenge plunged with full cognizance A prayer for redemption that spills the blood of another Casting off the used vessel that has ceased to bother Quiet nights of saving grace enacted only for gain Words of love spoken to be turned into painful bane Stealing intimacy with a dizzying conspiring scent An illicit touch to send Hazy Memories of A Distant Sun Displacing 9/11 There are two sides to the coin that bears the face of neo-liberal globalization. One is the maximum security state, its forces out to police the perpetual state of emergency. The IMF and World Bank meet for the annual think-in in my country, under such a security state. This is globalization symbolized by the twin towers of 9/11. The commemoration is danced with bullets to American rock songs Most (un)popular indie radio in Singapore Closure The wake of a realization sends the bleary eye ablaze Arousing from the slumber when scales fall off Tangents return to their eternal revolving recoil Futures remembered, pasts imagined, presents forgotten Unconscious forces assert the order of peace once more The dissenting will suffers the return of lack Nothingness, as desires return to the darkness of night When fantasies are laid bare by Siapa nama kamu? Muck The richness of life can be fathomed, The texture of time tasted with a single beat. Strum, whine, hum, lick and dig from the mines. A shout to blind heavens, swinging soul, cry, Beat the skin, tear the strings untouched. Spit on the Chinaman, the rubbers of the rakyat. Noble screams of savage presents, future tears of opiated pasts. Malaya, O Malaya, white ghosts haunting the yellow-brown hues Wavering Sail A morning chill shivers the seasoned traveler Nights of long adieu haunt a clear summer sky The sail is folded against the call of the gulls Sailors heartened to the embers of homely love The tide inches them towards the ashes of time A horizon as blue as the deepest oceans Holds dangers already foresaw in cards An Italian night of shattered hopes and dreams A French night of safe delusions and mrbrown’s Return The exilic intellectual does not respond to the logic of the conventional but to the audacity of daring, and to represent change, to moving on, not standing still. - Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual Brown has been banished into exile. Again. We have always been banished, those of us who call ourselves fully Singaporean but do not fully agree with Singapore as defined for us by