To the celebration of slain hopes

Little Nonya: all the worst Channel-8-soap-opera cliches, fused with all the most hilarious excesses of hyper-melodramatic acting, condensed into one magnificent & pathetic attempt at epic storytelling.

No wonder s'poreans all love it.

Admittedly I only saw one and a bit episodes. But it seems to be one of those shows where even when you randomly catch say 20 minutes of it, you're likely to see at least a dozen super-melodrama cliches squeezed into that 20 minutes. It's that powerful. It's so god-awful it's great.

As D said, it's wonderful to see 40 years of junk in one series.

It's like the scriptwriters were commissioned to scrape the bottom of the barrell for every cliche and sensationalistic device they could find, and then masterfully weave them all into one series. Torture, rape, abuse, perpetually wide-eyed guy waving a carving knife, lovers running in slow-mo, etc etc etc.

I watched the X'mas eve episode, because I was at a friend's home for dinner, and the whole family there is addicted to the show, so I had to watch. Oh my god. It was so bad. So bad. It will haunt my dreams.

I caught a couple of minutes of the finale. It was a scene with the girl running in slow motion towards the guy, with lots of trees on either side of them, and she reaches him and says some cheesy lines that made me laugh.

The cheesiness is so brutal, when I lay on my death bed I shall still remember how cheesy the Little Nonya was.

I think Mediacorp is a shoo-in for the next of those Asian tv awards, they have outdone themselves this time in terms of sheer, ecstatic trashiness.

Your words shrivel,
secrete you and your figure,
contract, and, shuddering, recede
into the backdrop; meat
of this fruition. Passed out
through time like notes lining
the periphery of a composition.

They have dried into tea leaves;
teacup’s rim slipping into itself, the
room’s hollow, its curvatures
draped upon your presence.
Nestled in your residue.
Echoes of words emerging
as footnotes to these surroundings.

You encounter yourself
in nascence. You have carried
this scene inscribed as lines;
the tension between us
coming of age, like larvae ripening,
between keys
on the keyboard.

You have known the flesh of
your disclosures, etching itself
into itself. Their tongue giving
birth to itself, this utterance -
the spread of its legs,
your speech incised,
and carved into archetypes.

You feel the contours of your
voice, fashioning themselves
before they may register in me,
impressions through skin,
tracing themselves through,
tumbling out mute,
calm-eyed,

tamed primal landscape,
threads’ colours weaving
each other’s ontology,
the seams in limbo
methodically dissipated
into teatime’s rhythms.



-Mark Ho

My skin’s a
partition of these toilet cubicles.

When I have forgotten
which side of it I currently
lie on it shall bore
a new hole in itself so
the world and I may pass
through it.

Its surface a catalogue of functionality.
Mass-produced utility, a gloss
pregnant with anonymous graffiti
sandwiched still between layers of
cleaning agents.

What is this: the growth of a new eye upon it,
but transformation, metamorphosis,
one’s body birthed there, what is this
substitution of skin for a mute
wall between us -

We slip through it, like a Christian
confession. The sparseness is an alter.
Someone is turning a body into bread,
kneading it, kindling a fire;
fermenting, the bread broken
and ingested inside another.

A half-drawn curtain, its lines,
wrinkles baroque folds
holding excess in them;
the gap between the ground and it,
chattering, stripped of lips, morse
code, shadow-play beneath -

fleeting silhouettes, like the
repetition of doors from outside -
so many rhythms to
a waltz through gingerly
opening possibilities.




-Mark Ho.

First Year modules

2005 Semester 2 (July-November)
107-103 Ancient Rome: Myth and Empire (classics/history)
70% (Second-class honours Lower)

161-111 Great Ideas in Philosophy (philosophy)
79% (Second-class honours Upper)

106-186 Creative Writing 1: Autofictions (creative writing)
74% (Second-class honours Lower)

107-133 Introduction to Film Theory (cinema studies)
85% (First-class honours)

2006 Semester 1 (February-June)
760-101 Creative Writing: Ideas and Practice (creative writing)
77% (Second-class honours Upper)

107-132 Introduction to Hollywood & Art Cinema (cinema studies)
65% (Third-class honours)

Second and Third Year modules

2006 Semester 1
161-030 The Rise of Modern Philosophy (philosophy)
77% (Second-class honours Upper)

136-073 Critical Theories (social theory)
81% (First-class honours)

2006 Semester 2
136-077 Psychoanalysis and Social Theory (social theory)
76% (Second-class honours Upper)

131-034 Gender, Culture and Identity Politics (gender studies)
80% (First-class honours)

161-217 Kant's Metaphysics of Experience (philosophy)
76% (Second-class honours Upper)

161-035 Philosophy of Buddhism (philosophy)
86% (First-class honours)

2007 Semester 1
161-019 Greek Philosophy (philosophy)
73% (Second-class honours Lower)

161-214 The Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein (philosophy)
85% (First-class honours)

161-236 Nietzsche and the Dream of Reason (philosophy)
78% (Second-class honours Upper)

136-074 Modernity: Revolution to Social Movements (social theory)
90% (First-class honours)

2007 Semester 2
760-404 Deleuze, Lyotard and the Arts (creative arts)
77% (Second-class honours Upper)

107-240 World Screen: Aesthetics and Politics (cinema studies)
80% (First-class honours)

161-240 Chinese Philosophy (philosophy)
85% (First-class honours)

161-021 From Hermeneutics to Derrida (philosophy)
89% (First-class honours)

2008 Semester 1
672-316 Science, Reason & Reality (history & philosophy of science)
84% (First-class honours)

166-300 Contemporary Sociological Theory (sociology)
85% (First-class honours)

672-388 Terrorism: Shifting Paradigms (political science)
73% (Second-class honours Lower)

672-390 Democracy, Terrorism and Violence (political science)
81% (First-class honours)

Fourth (honours) Year modules

2008 Semester 2
161-431 Recent European Philosophy (philosophy)
86% (First-class honours)

161-448 Topics in Asian Philosophy (philosophy)
88% (First-class honours)

136-430 Theories of Modernity (social theory)
85% (First-class honours)

136-508 Social Theory Thesis on Hegel's Science of Logic
(continued into next semester)

2009 Semester 1
136-509 Science and Ideology in the 20th Century (history & philosophy of science)
***

121-409 Philosophy and Scope of Anthropology (anthropology)
***

166-407 Contemporary Political and Social Theory (political science)
***

136-508 Social Theory Thesis on Hegel's Science of Logic
***

The people who designed Microsoft Word 2007 (or whichever version it was that these irritating changes came about) are a load of super-fucking idiots.

Why the fuck do they need to change the way all the buttons are arranged and laid out, when people are already so used to the locations of the various buttons on previous versions of Word?

Now I have to spend a massive 5-10 seconds hunting around for the location of a button that I would've taken less than a second to click on the previous versions of Word.

What the fuck is gained by changing all the locations of the buttons, other than to make it look as if the designers of Word have been working on something? Have they got too much time on their hands that they have to screw around with something even at the expense of making it worse? They just have to make it NEWER, whether this "newer" makes it better or worse, easier or more troublesome to use than the older versions, seems beside the point to them.

Christ, the absurdity of modernity and its empire of dumbasses.

Yang Kwei-Fei
aka Yokihi (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1955, Japan)

Streets of Shame (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1956, Japan)

Gion Festival Music
aka Gion Bayashi (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953, Japan)

Signs of Life (Werner Herzog, 1968, Germany)

Manhunter (Michael Mann, 1986, United States)

Hunger (Henning Carlsen, 1966, Denmark)

The Wind Will Carry Us (Abbas Kiarostami, 1999, Iran)

Blackboards (Samira Makhmalbaf, 2000, Iran)

Into the Wild (Sean Penn, 2007, United States)

Daywatch (Timur Belmambetov, 2006, Russia)

Be With Me (Eric Khoo, 2004, Singapore)

Le Enfant terribles (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1950, France)

The Crucified Lovers
aka Chikamatsu Monagatari (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954, Japan)

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964, France)

Rumble Fish (Francis Ford Coppola, 1983, United States)

Burn After Reading (the Coen Brothers, 2008, United States)

King Lear (Grigori Kozintsev, 1971, Soviet Russia)

Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 2005, Iran)

Boy Meets Girl (Leos Carax, 1984, France)

The Willow Tree (Majid Majidi, 2005, Iran)

Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1963, Sweden)

Hamlet (Grigori Kozintsev, 1964, Soviet Russia)

Macunaima (Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, 1969, Brazil)

Hour of the Wolf (Ingmar Bergman, 1968, Sweden)

The Exterminating Angel (Luis Bunuel, 1962, Spain)

Sisters, or The Balance of Happiness (Margarethe von Trotta, 1979, Germany)

Mr Death: The Rise & Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr (Errol Morris, 1999, United States)

Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone, 2006, United States)

2 or 3 years after first doing the online test on http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp, I took it again, and got INTJ again.

Your Type is
INTJ
Introverted Intuitive Thinking Judging
Strength of the preferences %
78 50 25 11


Qualitative analysis of your type formula

You are:
very expressed introvert

moderately expressed intuitive personality

moderately expressed thinking personality

slightly expressed judging personality


Those percentages make sense. So i suppose my judging-vs-perceiving is fairly well-balanced, which is good, although i'm pretty sure i do still lean towards judgement. It explains my outter practical indecision, alongside my needing to both find / perceive / search for some kind of meaningful sense in things and to organise things' meanings in my mind to settle some need/purpose/desire of mine. Maybe it explains my switching between different theoretical and philosophical explanations for my engagement with everything around me.

And my thinking-vs-feeling is well-balanced enough to not make me a cold abstractive robot, although maybe that kind of explains why my mind and heart have been slugging it out recently.

1. god i hate the windows vista media player. why the fuck do these dumb people change something that works and is so familiar, just to make it look "new"?

2. encouraging citizens to have more and more babies is stupid. (the idea of having a child is dumb enough by itself.) we should have less babies, not more. (if possible, none at all.) the country has an aging population? great news. the idea of pouring taxpayers' money into helping bring more babies into the world essentially as a means for increasing the labour-force seems kind of insulting to human dignity. what about using this money to help already-existing humans in the country who are living in crap conditions they can't break out of? The government can't even deliver enough help to humans who are already suffering here in this world, and it wants to pay to bring even more humans into this world.

3. tv mobile is BLOODY ANNOYING. when they're not showing Just For Laughs programs that are so damn annoying that they're downright depressing, they're showing such god-awful local shit that's so embarrassing it makes me want to crawl under the bus seat and hide. today tv mobile was showing a local program on the speak-good-english campaign and singlish. jesus christ I felt like throwing something at the screen.

4. the speak-good-english campaign is amateurish. those poor souls who still promote the campaign are in serious need of our pity. the argument that "lower-educated" singaporeans will be unable to switch back and forth between singlish and angmoh english is something you'd expect more from a garden-variety GP essay. if "lower-educated" singaporeans after a minimum of 10 years of education can't learn to speak non-singlish english without the help of perpetual bombardments fuelled by a long-running lame campaign like this, our education system must be pretty badly screwed. funny how the campaign warriors can blame the Phua Chu Kant tv show while saying nothing about the army; I reckon a rather large portion of singlish I've heard in my life came from the 2 years in the army, which was years after the singlish-on-tv issue had first been raised. (incidentally, that's also the place I met a lot of so-called "lower-educated" singaporeans, including those who were regulars in the army.)

5. thestraights times' political editor's piece in the saturday section today on human righhts. MY GOD.. so many things wrong with that piece.

6. apparently a certain old man thinks criticisms of the legl system from an overseas organisation is a "conspiracy" to bring "us" down. jeeze, who's the one being paranoid now. (and they say sporeans who're wary of criticising the gvernment are being paranoid.)

7. I hope this new Batman film is a lot better than the last one, which was an overrated mess.

am i missing something here..

on Yahoo! Singapore news page:

"S’poreans join global Earth Hour effort to spread climate change message

Singapore is playing its part in a global effort to curb climate change.

Businesses here have been switching off the lights in their buildings for an hour between 8pm and 9pm.

The event called Earth Hour was held for the first time in Sydney last year. 2.2 million people and more than 2,000 business people took part.

Singapore companies like CapitaLand are flicking the switch at nine of its buildings such as Capital Tower and Raffles City.

But the worldwide effort is not just for the big players.

In Punggol, youngsters got involved too. More than 300 students visited thousands of homes to urge residents to turn off their lights and join an Earth Hour event at Punggol Community Club.

"They are still not very clear about global warming. But when we go and talk to them about this and sell the idea to them, many are really willing to go forward and help," said one youth volunteer.

Other schools, colleges and businesses in Singapore have also signed up to turn off their lights. Other cities like Melbourne and Chicago are also part of the global effort. — CNA /ls"


...and here's the next news item:


"Singapore conducts live demonstration of lighting for F1 race

Singapore has tested a small section of the lights that will be used for the country’s first ever Formula One race in September.

On Saturday evening, a part of St Andrew’s Road was lit up to simulate daylight.

It took about 8 to 10 minutes for the lights — which measure about 3000 Lux — to charge up.

Once fully fired—up, it was as bright as daylight, or four times the brightness of the National Stadium.

Two trusses measuring 32 metres each were used to hang 16 lights or lighting projectors.

The lights were installed four metres apart at a height of 10 metres.

S Iswaran, Minister of State, Trade and Industry, said: "This lighting part is the crucial part of the process as you can imagine. We want to make sure that the lighting system is done in a manner that is safe for the drivers and the spectators and at the same time, one that enhances the experience for everyone."

The man behind the whole set—up is lighting expert Valerio Maiolli.

He gave the assurance that driving at high speeds under these lights is safe, even if it were to rain heavily.

Mr Maiolli said: "If you are on the track like the driver, you don’t see the rain, if you are on the grandstand you see the rain."

A total of 1,500 lighting projectors will be used for the five kilometre Singapore circuit.

The lights will be powered by 12 twin—power generators.

Another first was also revealed — in the place of regular flags, electronic flags flashed onto an LED panel, will make its debut for the world’s first F1 night race.

Installation of the lights will be carried out in phases starting end—May, and is expected to be completed by the first week of September.

The public can view the test lights from Sunday till 6th of April.

These will be on from 7pm till midnight. — CNA/ch


jesus christ.

if you wanna save electricity, how about, like, FUCKING HOLDING THE GRAND PRIX IN THE DAYTIME?


another suggestion: get rid of that absurd orgy of ugly christmas decoration lights that get dumped onto orchard road for 5 or 6 weeks every year.

essentially Earth Hour in Singapore was a way to help those 300 ever-so-innocent students, "youngsters", and "youth volunteers" feel good about themselves (similar to students' visits old folk's home to "chat" to old folks and bring them biskets).

These occasional injections of self-esteem and youthful idealism won't hurt.

(Other than the minor effect that in a few years they look back at these mostly-imaginary differences they're making and feel a bit embarrassed. (Something I do every day.))

http://sg.news.yahoo.com/afp/20080324/tts-science-physics-cern-c1b2fc3.html

Imagine how many severely malnourished people can be fed with SIX BILLION dollars.

How much green technology can be sponsored to reduce climate change, how many schools can be built for populations lacking education, how much health care can be provided for populations severely in need of health and medical care, how much research in major diseases and epidemics can get funded.

And scientists pour it all into building a big beautiful machine in an exciting quest to find out physical-cosmological truths about some super-small sub-atomic particle named "the Higgs Boson".... all in the name of a great beautiful Truth which has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the practical concerns of most people in the world.

Yes, that's the spectacular absurdity of what some scientists do.

Scientists do plenty of good. Those who do work that has practical relevance to our lives are great. But just don't go thinking that scientific work somehow always has more practical relevence than, say, the humanities. A lot of times it's also spent on theoretically spectacular but practically absurd/useless projects like this. Simply to satisfy their own curiosities. Very very expensive projects.

The name of "Truth" by itself shouldn't be a good enough justification for funding projects like this. There's plenty of Truth in the world but the reality is that a lot of it doesn't have even the slightest use in humankind's practical concerns, except for those physics nerds who happen to find the "Higgs Boson", like, really really interesting.

Why did God create the parasites.

How do people commit torture for hours as part of their job, and then go home and kiss their spouse and teach their kid to read?

If there is a God, why did He give so many of us (that includes me) the ability to do violence, or to be complicit in violence every day, and then go about living our life or converting it into a banality? I'm seriously asking.

When this world has elements like this in it its hard not to feel rather disturbed to be existing in it.

Yes I know this sounds dumb and emo but I've had an uneasy mind thinking about it today.

Things like this actually happen, like it's the most ordinary thing in the world, and we're so able to just go along with it.

it is a wretched thing, this.

it is so wretched.

turning it inside out doesn't save it, this. no it does not.

no it does not. no it does not.

turning it inside out doesn't save it, this.

no it does not. no it does not.

turning it inside out doesn't save it this,

no it does not. no, it does not.

does not, no it does not, does not. does not.

no does not, does not. it does not. no does not.

it is so wrteched, this.

it can only be fled.

but it cannot be fled.

only turned inside out.

it cannot be fled.

only turned inside out.

only turned inside out.

turning this inside out cannot save it, this. no.

you must live on your tail.

consume yourself, for that is all there is for you.

I want to perish!

TO PERIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIISH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I want to perish.

TO PERIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIISH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

stupid valentine's day

1. spent 23rd birthday mostly lovesick.

2. sheesh.
it is not very fun to have an infatuation. at all.

3. it's only fun when the other person is attracted to u too. and single. and responds very positively.

4. of course that's something i should've already realised at 16.

5. sheesh.

"Religion is for people who are afraid to go to hell, whereas spirituality is for people like me who have been there."
- Dave Mustaine

let a distinction be drawn between rhetoric and poetry (even if the distinction is not always clear-cut or present). let us aim for the occasional poeticisation of debate, as opposed to its usual oscillation between rhetoricisation and narrow-minded calculation.

let there be poeticised spaces opened up for insistent pondering, provocation and dialogue, instead of a lazy consumption and forced consensus; expansive thought instead of quick-fix calculation.

sometimes, one of the most important things about poetry can be when it presents and reveals itself as neither fact nor science nor math nor myth.

40.8 degrees celsius here in melb today.

gawd.

still don't understand why the Aussie Open isn't be organised 5 weeks later when it's a bit cooler.

of all times they have to have it right smack in the middle of the Aussie summer, when it's bloody hotter than ever.

still not quite as bad as last january when it went up higher than 42 degrees on one day.

was looking through the Yahoo! Australia news section for Victoria (http://au.news.yahoo.com/local/7news/vic/). christ. nearly every item seems to be about death, bad weather, tragedy, and/or crime.

u'd sorta get the impression that either Victoria is a sensationally depressing place or that the person choosing which news items to list is a junkie for breathtaking misery and suffering, perhaps from watching too much Today Tonight or A Current Affair or those Aussie soap dramas.

k just took a look at the news items for the other states. mostly just as tragic.

hmmn. doesn't anything remotely inspirational ever happen here.