Should it worry me that the most clicked search term linking to this site is “Difference between scallops and mussels” ?

You know who you are, mollusk man.

I went to Disneyworld when I was ten, and I’ve avoided it ever since. I wasn’t tragically abused by Minnie Mouse or anything; really, I think it was the closest thing to magic I’d seen. I remember the Epcot globe perched above its huge dark lake, firework smoke lingering in the air, and all these little countries strewn across the water’s edge waiting to be explored, each with its own special rides and restaurants and passport stamps to collect. I couldn’t wait to go to every one. I remember sitting on a train – I don’t think it was even a ride, it was the monorail between the resorts -  and just sitting there for hours because I wanted to see all the dreamt up worlds: Pirates, The Wild West, Pixie, Futuristic – and in retrospect there was even one that looked suspiciously like a pirated Mandarin Oriental.

But I didn’t think of that then. I’m grateful for that. Truth is, I’ve avoided Disneyworld because I’m afraid that when I retrace my steps I’ll realise that the whole thing’s a sham. That these memories aren’t fluttering in the glow of real sunlight but around some shady, flickering artificial tube. That, like in a Stephen Chow film, the beautiful silhouette of a girl will turn around to reveal an awful old man digging his nose.

That horrible image has caught up with me. I came across this song the other day, Dixie, only to realise that it was the tune I’d been humming in my head all these years. I never knew the lyrics, but it was the theme music of the Disney resort I stayed in so long ago, Dixie Landings, and to me it’s stood for everything wonderful and sacrosanct about childhood marvel.

I know now that also it’s the Confederate battle song. It’s probably what the Klan sings before breakfast  – it’s performed by a blackface actor, comically exaggerates black slang, and talks  about a guy pining for his fantastic life as a cotton slave. Look away, look away, dixieland is about right – and Huck Finn says it better, so I won’t.

I guess all this matters to me because I think I’m starting to turn into an asian Eeyore.  It’s strange, but I can’t remember anything this year that has, to borrow an image from a much better writer, “summoned that magic ‘wow’ out of a bottomless top hat of skepticism and irony”. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not a cynic, or a stoic, or anything else that requires time living in a barrel. I still like clean laundry. But I’m honest enough with myself to know that I’m probably staring in the face of about forty years of writing futile things, poring over numbing spreadsheets, and enduring ridiculous corporate diagram after corporate diagram. Most of us are. And that is why, dear real-life, if I cannot further pimp out my purple A380, if I cannot have my ideals, then I would at least like to keep my sense of wonder.

If this is what turning twenty means, then I’m off to see the wizard!

I returned from Perth more than a week ago. It was my first attempt at a free and easy holiday, and consequently, it felt more rewarding and substantial than previous tour package holidays, because I actually went to places that interested me. Spending 5 days in the same city also allowed me to get a more complete picture of how Perth lived and breathed. It was not merely a gloss over an exotic locale, but an attempt to pierce beyond the veil of a different culture to experience its idiosyncracies and aspects.

I left on saturday morning, just after midnight. T3 for those of you who may not have seen it before.

Skipping the flight, which proceeded entirely in darkness. we come to the scene outside the hotel.

Before checking in, a sojourn into Perth’s famed King’s Park.

More macro shots of the diverse array of flowers there.

Path winding down to exit on freeway. So steep that climbing up evoked bad memories of the latter 4 kilometres of a 16 km fast march.

More macro flowers.

The Swan Bells at the harbour. Didn’t go in; expensive tourist trap. Its architectural definitiveness can be best appreciated from the exterior.

Generic evening view of skyline on the first day.

So we come to the second day, where we went on an expedition to the city’s port town, Freemantle, a wonderful tourist destination in its own right. Freemantle train station.

Lunch was served here, at Cicerello’s, a famous seafood restaurant.

Battered dory fillet, french fries, side serving of fried scallop and mussel, squid rings.

After-lunch walk around town:

View from high of the Freemantle beach:

Freemantle Maritime Museum. A curvaceous architectural curiosity.

This is me doing a Quantum of Solace thing.

We went back to Perth, eventually…

Artsy shot of the Palace Hotel against the BankWest Tower.

Home in Perth. Surprisingly comfortable, and excellent service.

The next day sees us taking a tour of the Swan Valley.

We were rather out of place; the remainder of the patronage consisted of middle aged American and Australian couples.

Anyway, Swan Valley is home to WA’s best vineyards and winemakers.

I knew the whole affair was overhyped!

Fruit.

Suffice to say the imbibing of alcohol took place, in extreme moderation, whereupon we returned to Perth to have dinner at some Korean joint. Ironic.

The next day, breakfast was had at a quaint cafe called Tiger, Tiger in some hidden alleyway. Its an open air concept, except sandwiched in an alleyway. Nice ambient lighting and atmosphere.

Today’s expedition was made to Rockingham, at the receptionist’s recommendation. Rockingham is a small seaside town not unlike Freemantle, except smaller and more villagey.

Another flower.

At this point some clarification is in order. We decided that it was necessary to visit Rockingham’s main tourist destination, the aptly named Penguin Island. We then proceeded to trek through the length and breadth of the entire town to get to the jetty, whereupon we missed the boat. But hey, there’s always another boat.

The beach:

The suburbs:

The lake:

Ducks:

Penguin Island (at last) with Penguins.

After walking through to the other side of the island, we have reached the end of the world. This is the Indian Ocean.

At this point my camera battery ran out, so here’s tomorrow. Its our last day. Notice the abrupt change in weather.

We went to a factory outlet and did random grocery shopping at Woolworth’s at Subiaco, but that isn’t too interesting.

Finally, airport:

And plane. Here’s me.

And that is the end of it.

Well, not precisely…

Some thoughts. First, WA seems an incongruously cosmopolitian place; half the residents are naturalized Australians with brown, yellow or blue skin. I saw Singaporeans, Chinese nationals, Indonesians, Japanese, Koreans (even a shop selling Korean DVDs and Korean instant noodles run by Koreans) at every corner, manning stores, walking to office, taking their white girlfriends out on a trainride, etc. Its a refreshing feeling to know that for once, you might not be immediately construed as a foreigner in a foreign land. A good feeling if you want to try blending in.

Second of all, the effusive, natural and spontaneous friendliness. Shopkeepers teaching us the basics of didgeridoo, non-intrusive attendants smiling at us when we enter the stores, helpful (if odd) passersby, and general indicators of a more open and friendly society than ours. Its kind of addictive, in a way. Its just a Western cultural foible.

I think I’ll post the entire album (400+ pix) up somewhere in the next few days.

***

Imagine, say, the Oval Office, with functionaries, aides, public service officials and other assorted personalities. Imagine the President of the USA, standing in the midst of all those people. Or perhaps more prosaically, based on the situation, imagine the Parliament House overlooking the dense, modernist skyscrapers of Singapore. How does your mind process such a scene? Mine is incapable of doing so without adding at least a sheen of cinematic graininess. The scene is literally like a movie. Actions, words are caught in the crystalline, fragile web of otherness, of fictive reality a few degrees removed from my own. A kind of solipsism of the mundane. When I think of President Bush, for example, I think of an actor who has so effectively inhabited his role that he has become Bush. He is Bush, and always has been, from childhood. This I can accept, viscerally, but only when it is concomitant to the idea that Bush is nothing more than a fictive portrait, that once my attention wanders away from my mind’s portrait of the scene, the President Bush will disappear, to be replaced with an idea and a person who inhabits that idea, the actor-Bush who is capable of being mundane and prosaic in a way that Bush-the-idea, the President of the United States, cannot. More directly put, I find it somehow difficult to accept, on a gut level, the idea that President Bush reads the paper in the toilet, or chokes on pretzels while watching a football game, or flashed le fingre at the cameras before a press conference. The events that lie outside of my immediate perception, especially those events with great import on the state of Humanity as a whole, are concealed underneath a veil of other-reality. The mind’s cinematic grain, so to speak. I suppose it is this very effect that restricts people from true communion with each other, across space and time. One has to experience something to fully appreciate it, on the gut level.

To wit, coming back to the metaphor of the cinematic grain, what do movies like the upcoming W (President Bush’s biopic) or perhaps Tropic Thunder, or Saving Private Ryan, with its graphic, no-holds-barred depiction of the gore and death of warfare, mean to us? To me, it is precisely such fictive portraits that reinforce the intangible veil between my reality and the reality of the other. It’s called the fourth wall, which is never to be spoken of by the actors themselves, but nevertheless exists in the mind of the viewer, who abandons his sense of incredulity in favour of the fictive experience but enthuses, ironically, of the fourth wall’s very intangibility after the said experience, thus acknowledging its reality even more. Movies, in other words, reinforce the sense of dislocation between the viewer and the fictive subject matter. By watching a movie like W, for example, the viewer obtains an intellectual and artistic understanding of the reality behind the fictive portrait. Nevertheless, the impression of the cinematic grain, of the fourth wall’s sequestering of the viewer and the viewee, becomes even stronger. Viscerally, the viewer begins to see the events of the world outside his own as being like movies. Being fictive portraits, idealized portraits that somehow proscribe the very prosaic and mundane facts of life. For life cannot be captured wholly without losing some of its experiential integrity. The very fact that life is staged in movies leads to the creation of that fourth wall, which, in any case, exists because of the artificiality of the scene. That the scene is not spontaneous in any meaningful way (barring the adlibs that have gone on to become great quotes from movies: cf Heere’s Johnny!). Meaninglessness, or chaos, is either excised from the portrait or made to carry extraneous significance. Thus is the meaningless mundane transformed to significance in a movie, and by that very token, loses its mundane aspect, thereby creating, once again, the impression of the ever-important cinematic grain.

In conclusion, I have droned on about two things: one, the dislocation between a viewer’s reality and the reality of things he does not see, called the cinematic grain effect; as well as the propensity of an artistic format, of a fictive representation of reality, to reinforce that dislocation by adapting the world into a format that the viewer can accept viscerally, in turn informing the viewer (falsely) of the very artificiality of the reality that the fictive format was based on, giving him the impression of otherworldliness. The former is already a fixture of most human imagination, movies only reinforce it; but I am in no way dissing art. There is nothing wrong with viewing life as a movie, because, despite everything, it is one. It is a format in which the roles of the actor and the character are reversed. And insofar as the human imagination lacks the capacity to achieve a visceral understanding of the things it does not see, it can partially make up for that lack by informing itself intellectually, on a conscious level. Why else does one read the news, if all the world is not a stage in which the farthest end lies so far beyond the horizon that the viewer cannot see it?

***

In other news, Spore!!!!!!111One

Something oddballsy that I came up with during a night’s onset of delirium. It was originally going to be longer, but I decided against it, lest you all think I am insane.

Libretto of a Tragedy

Pvt. Lee Hirebus walks down the stairs.

But at least it will be fun
Marchin’ under the sun
Livin’ large with the bud and the gun
The life of a ladies’s dream…

It’s like livin’ on a silver screen…
It’s like nothing I ever seen…

The chorus:

Like a silver screen, a silver screen he says…
Don’t know a mule’s bleat from a horse’s bray…
You think the military
Will be all fun and games
You think that fighting furious
Is like kissing a dame
Well son I gotta tell you
It ain’t flowers and fame
Wearing that goshdarned green beret!

Upon Mr Tan’s request I’m participating in and propagating an admittedly interesting meme. Now we shall see how many hits this gets, or, perhaps more realistically, how few.

If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, even if we don’t speak often, please post a comment with a memory of you and me. It can be anything you want — good or bad. When you’re finished, post this little paragraph on your blog and be surprised (or mortified) about what people remember about you.

August, a month of many squandered possibilities.

1. Olympics. However bad China’s human rights record may be, and whether or not the countries of the world pour sanctimonious umbrage upon it, shouldn’t matter. The Olympics are an idea, a vision of shared humanity fruitfully expressed through friendly sport and competition. It doesn’t matter how many doses of steriods are consumed this summer, or how many pointed memos sent to foreign service officials; I honestly think that the Olympics should be celebrated if only for what it can represent – the ability of our species to collect together for the sake of accomplishment and fraternity.

2. National Day. The Parade may seem a farce compared to the lavish and spectacular Openings of the yesternight, but once again, we should just sit back and allow our pride to overcome our cynicism. Once again, Singapore is a concept, and NDP celebrates that concept.

3. Crysis. A game that’s given me alot of entertainment, and alot of grief. Buggiest thing in existence, surpassed only by NWN2.

I am in Brunei presently, for reasons best left unsaid; that being said, it’s a moderately interesting place, filled with pirated DVD stores, a single, well stocked mall (that I would rate as being on par with, say, Jurong Point) some nice cybercafes, and not much else. Nice place, really. The city we are near, Bandar Seri Begawan, is relatively modern and polished, a kind of suburban-ish Singapore with Malaysian styles and modes of dress. The outskirts, though, may be a tad more conservative. But we won’t be going there so it makes little difference.

***

Let it be said that when in Brunei, there is little to be done but watch movies. Within these three days, I’ve probably watched more movies (and TV shows) than I have for the past three months. I’ve watched (and will watch) movies like The Fountain, Hellboy II (in a cinema, mind you), The Last King of Scotland, The Pursuit of Happyness, Be Kind Rewind and others. I was also introduced to a very funny (but unfortunately cancelled series, Arrested Development. That, and trawling aimlessly around Gadong, a district in the capital, has been the summary of my slovenly pursuits.

More soon. Or not.

***

Recently I satisfied a long craving for subtle horror and played F.E.A.R, a self-described John Woo style action shooter mixed with elements of Asian horror. It’s interesting how the human mind can trick itself into believing in perceptions that are so self-evidently synthetic, especially given the bias of it being aware of this artificiality in the first place. To wit, I know F.E.A.R is a game, and I know the creepy little girl in it is a product of some game designer’s imagination, but tell me to play it alone at night with the lights off, and I will refuse. The same is demonstrably true for other genres – but I do not begrudge our ability to fool our own brains into a paradoxical state of knowing credulity. Our ability to respond to fictive untruth in a way that both entertains and educates us is one of the great assets of humankind.

Also, my latest literary conquest is The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. It is a strange, unconventionally plotted book. It is almost entirely focused on the recollections of the protagonist, and brings the reader into his psychological interior in a way that doesn’t give away the whole story. The protagonist narrates his thoughts and perceptions seemingly without being aware of the fallacy that his past mistakes present to the readers, a true display of craftsmanship by the way of the unseen storyteller – especially when we see that the book is essentially a long, involved attempt at storytelling – it is presented in the form of a diary. It is compact, to the point and rarely meanders, even if the protagonist does, physically traveling through the English countryside.

***

If I were an interior decorator, my trademark would be unrestrained minimalism. I would deal in shades of white and pastel set off by strategically placed shafts of natural light. There would be no ornamentation in my rooms – only clean lines and curves and the subtle interplay of colours, serving as a backdrop, a complementary scene, to the functional components of the environment. At most, a vase here, a bouquet there, to serve as an offset, a juxtaposition of non-functional form with functional formlessness. Windows would serve as the portals, the gateways, to riotous, verdant variety outside, whether it be the tops of trees, an urban landscape, or the serene vistas of ocean or mountain.

I was inspired by a visit to Lim’s in Holland Village, a shop dedicated to selling all kinds of odd antiques, geegaws and keepsakes, ranging from jewel boxes to huge, life-size statues of indeterminate origin. Not that I don’t appreciate their aesthetic value to someone appropriately inclined, but I would never stand for such gaudy ornamentation in any abode of mine. I abhor clutter. I like the feeling of being in an aerie, of being high up. Such will be my future abode. No clutter, no geegaws. An Apple-product like homogeneity, made individual by the unique touch of my minimalist aesthetic sense and the functional amenities that I will of course fill the house with.

One thing in that shop did catch my attention, though. Wind chimes hold a kind of appeal for me. The pleasing, musical chimes they produce signal wind, and connote peace, serenity, and a feeling of being on high. They may offer one a sense of excitement, as forerunners of the storm, being the sense of calm that precedes it. For no storm comes without the period of almost eerie serenity that is characterized by the stately billowing of the clouds assembling for their final dance through the skies, and the cool wind that sends them along on this majestic journey. It is the wind, and its evocative, musical power, that I like, and wind chimes merely crystallize and focus that sense of serenity into something tangible to be experienced and appreciated.

***