alternative worlds

It finally rained.

That and a public holiday make a perfect reading day.

First up was Joan Didion's 1970 novel Play it as it lays. Having read her A Year of Magical Thinking recently, I had picked up a collection of her essays and this novel. Though set in the Hollywood of the 60s, it is perhaps less about the Californian sunshine than the somewhat toxic and barren Nevada and Las Vegas - the venom of rattlesnakes, the nothingness of chance on the game table, and disrupted childhoods (abortions, a child in hospital, mothers who die in the desert). Of course, there's drugs, alcohol, parties, loveless sex, depression, divorces, expired careers and suicide.

All of this would be too much to read if not for the elliptical, episodic structure - the short, brutal bursts, minimising yet intensifying the readers' contact with Maria Wyeth, our Virgilian guide into this hell, but not quite.

It is readable also because it is so distant from our tropical island - in time and space. But maybe the 2 "Integrated Resorts" will change something.

Then, a nap.

Followed by this about yet another world - Chester Brown's graphic novel Louis Riel:A Comic Strip Biography, about the life of the 19th century Metis (part French, part native Indian) leader in Canada. Exiled and admitted to an asylum before he led a final rebellion, Riel is quietly introduced into the narrative as someone who happened to be able to speak English, a reasonable young man. But he soon grows in scale until - at one point - he claims to be a prophet and the 2nd Christ who is to liberate the Metis, God's new chosen people.

And like Didion's novel, this historical biography is a page-turner! Bound by the 1.5by1.5 inch frame, Brown's story is sparse and disciplined, his lines are simple, clean; but the story and lines are energetic.

"I think one of the reasons that our history looks uninteresting is that the telling of it is left in the hands of the Canadian government," Chester Brown says in an interview.

How true! After all, it is not in the interest of governments to tell colourful, varied histories. Governments provide, or want to provide, coherent narratives - towards their own intended ending, of course. As colourful as the shades of propaganda would allow. Reading Brown's comment, I remember this book, possibly the only graphic novel about one of the most colourful periods in Singapore's modern history. There's surprisingly little written about Joe Yeoh's To Tame a Tiger (still available at Kinokuniya). A google search provides only 3-4 relevant links, none of which reveal much about the writer or the context for his book being written. Was this graphic novel commissioned - paid for by some government grant? But the story is not always a flattering picture of PAP, though mostly safe and expected in its viewpoints. Of course, maybe the impulse to mark it as being or not being pro-PAP is a problem in itself - as if PAP was our only reference point.

Anyway, this has been a perfect day for reading. And I won't spoil it by getting into island-gazing. The sheets are still cool from the afternoon rain - still perfect for reading - and sleep.

=====
Reviews of Louis Riel:A Comic-Strip Biography here and here; and to find out more about Chester Brown here.

What you learn at art class (part 4)

longevity versus immortality versus AI

That all good things do come to an end -

OK, so endings have marked 2007 so far for us amps anyway - this passing away - and not just at art class.

Still, when I handed in a set of 6 prints on Monday for assessment, officially marking the completion of a whole year of part-time printmaking classes, there was a sense of something valuable having come to an end. I haven't written much about these classes in the last 6 months because work had kept me away from them half the time. A real pity. Because in these last few months, the classes had covered several techniques for screenprinting and photo-etching...techniques which demand a whole new level of care, focus, precision - and patience.

Even if they do take time.

I think there's supposedly a whole go slow movement in managementspeak. But it's better to ignore that universe. For me at least, art offers perhaps simpler lessons.

One evening, having rushed to class some 2 hours late, I was too flustered to do any work, so stood around observing instead the teacher A with a classmate G by the mechanical press. They were preparing an etching for print and it seemed a rather delicate design. With an hour left and the assessment deadline in a fortnight's time, G got into a bit of a rush and had left some ink on the edges of his acrylic etching. A seasoned printmaker, A had immediately noticed and stopped it going under the press.

Somethings you just got to do things real slow in printmaking, otherwise the whole print gets botched up and you end up with nothing. That's the lesson of printmaking, A said in mandarin. I overheard and replied - the lesson of printmaking is that all its lessons also apply to life. To which she laughed and proceeded to help G produce a really stunning piece of work.

Awww, tuesdays with ampulets!

=========
Some earlier arty lessons: part 3; part 2; part 1.

15

us amps are happy with HK graphic design magazine idN's open policy of publishing all entries to their 15 anniversary logo design competition. J made 2, together with many many others whose names go from addison chen to zhu lei.

But on the topic of 15, friends, here's a trick I learnt about HDB lifts (or does it work for all lifts?) from a 12(?) year-old girl who got into the same lift as me, politely asked what floor I lived on, mis-heard my answer, pressed the wrong button, heard my correction, then - voila manages to clear the erroneous selection on the lift panel! I was amazed. But when I told J about it the little trick I had learnt, he just laughed with some disdain. Supposedly, everyone knows that all you have to do when you press a wrong button on the lift, say 14 instead of 15, you just have to simultaneously press all the buttons on the same row as 14 (say 13, 14, 15) and the lift resets to blank.

resting place

At the columbarium. (our flickr sites are back up again.)

Over the weekend, J and I learnt 2 things about real estate.

(1) The most expensive real estate you can buy is in a columbarium.
Assuming the base area of an urn is 400cm2, or just 4% of a 1 square meter(sqm), 1 sqm of columbarium real estate ranges from S$15,000 to S$300,000! Our apartment, for instance, works out to be only about $2400 per sqm.

OK, the comparison is glib, but as we walked around the Bright Hill Monastry columbarium in search of a better resting place for Ma J's ashes, all there was on everyone's minds was just how much more it would cost - and why. For some of J's family, there was of course other things on their minds - if they should offend any of the spirits. There was a smell of incense everywhere, and an incessant chanting. Even in the air-conditioned columbarium room, there was chanting played over the PA. Needless to say, for me, there was nothing restful about this place.

>$600 for a 60 lease. "HDB"-style, though the room felt like one in the Cambridge university library I rememmber.


>$2,000 on a 75 year lease. An alternative collumbarium at some Taoist nunnery in Bishan. With the white concrete shelves, this felt like a quieter, airier and brighter library.


>$3,800 to $12,000 a unit for all eternity, the price varies depending on whether the location is at eye, foot or ceiling height; and the distance from a central hallwhere the statues of the Goddess of Mercy (I think) stand. Each spot is colour-coded. Gold for the $15,000 spot, blue for $3,800, so that even in death, we are marked by colour and wealth. But it still looks like a locker room.


(2) It's always about the living.
The story is that Pa J has been feeling uneasy about allowing Ma J to be cremated, against her last wish. He did not like how, after being cremated, Ma J's ashes are lying in an urn, stacked on the second row of a crammed shelf in a glass cupboard. This is despite the large paper house the family had burnt for Ma J, equipped with a paper Mercedes benz and two maids.

But once he decided that he would place Ma J's ashes in an air-conditioned room, in a locker-like spot costing $8000, the furrows between Pa J's eyes disappeared, his shoulders lifted, the red in his face lightened. He had done Ma J right at last.

This being a weekend of no rest, I'll stop and say goodnight here.

superpower

My superpower - playing dead. Image and apron by J.

This is how I feel. Which dear J captured so well in an apron he painted for me... a greenish soursop heart walked over by 2 birds, a gigantic spleen, a blockish blue liver ("because our body is 3/4 water!"), lungs looking like aged blood stains, and wriggly intestines with an escaped bloth of blue liver. There's no stomach. It's spread all over behind the heart and spleen - yellow, all bile.

Why I do my job, I have almost forgotten. And when I think about what I've gotten myself into, I think I somewhat fear being entrenched in some system. wheyface asked if my job is taking up "mindspace" (her lingo for an invasive job, taking away precious personal space and energy to think - and write), she was spot-on.

J wrote in his photoblog: "The PM said that for a small country of 3 million people, what the Singapore Government said actually registered on the Super Power's (US) radar, that is really something. That makes me laugh."

That's the kind of system and its thinking I fear. The ability to laugh, I miss.

Earlier this week over dinner with CT, Singapore's #1 comic expert, was telling us about Marvel Comics' latest civil war series, why Captain America must die and what I imagined is America's dialectical political imagination. The North-South myth, and the underlying belief in the self-regenerative power of conflict within. A belief sympathetic to conspiracies.

It was midnight on our walk home from dinner, J has been telling me about some TV series, Heroes. I asked if he could design or choose any superpower to have in the world, what it would be. After the initial "I can make anyone do anything I say" and deciding that was too boringly villain-ish, he decided on the cop-out "Everyday I can have 3 wishes come true" - ah, yes, the Aladdin-man. I couldn't think of any for the longest time. Fly? but where to? Teleportation? But it would be too dull to be able to go so many places but essentially alone. With much deliberation, I would rather not have a superpower, I told J. But I would love to be very good at making things. A talent and a skill, maybe. But not in excess of what is human.

homecoming

J: Last night after dinner, they told me about all the supposed creepy things that have happened since. Did you hear what they said?
Y: Nope. You mean they saw Ma J's ghost?
J: Something like this. One night, sis-in-law C dreamt that Ma J was lying just beside the dining table talking to her. She can't remember much about what was said, except Ma J asking her to look after Pa J. It seemed that that the next day, Pa J found a very large moth resting on the same spot!
Y: It's the season for moths again.
J: The thing is Pa J believed that it was Ma J's spirit, and so they placed a chair over the moth, in case someone accidentally trampled on it. That night, he took the moth into his bedroom. But the next morning, Pa J no longer found the moth beside him. Instead, he found the moth resting by at the telephone [Talking on the phone was Ma J's favourite past time next to cooking] - in fact, it had died. He cremated the moth.
Y: Ah.
J: Everyone now believes Ma J has come back to resolve whatever was necessary.
Y: So why are they spooked out, if they believe it's just their own mother?
J: There's more. After the cremation, Pa J went out and there was no one left at home. But it seemed that at 9.30am or so, his handphone registered a missed call from that same phone the moth had died on.
Y: Someone called and forgot about it?
J: I don't know. Do you believe in ghosts?
Y: No. Spirits maybe. At least generally that the spiritual world is real - and not quite something we understand. But not humans turning into ghosts or moths.

Like J, I only hope Ma J is not some speechless moth, who with its stillness and death attempt a romance's resolutions and reconciliations.

J's photoblog & account here.
image by J, taken with our new Ricoh GR!