What You Can't See Can Kill You

The past issue of LA Weekly has this beautiful picture of the city for its cover story on air pollution.
LA Weekly archives

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100 Years of Chinese Cinema

The Arts House has brought together a festival of old Chinese films to celebrate 100 years of chinese cinema. The films in this series ranges from fantasy (Na Cha The Great, 1974) to the erotic (Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan, 1972) and even horror (Human Lanterns, 1982). Drawn from the Shaw Studio library, the festival offers an interesting glimpse into the diversity of chinese filmic products for the past century.

I caught Journey to the West: The Cave of Silken Web, which contains some unexpected soft core erotica. Imagine the spider-vixens half-naked on a giant spiderweb with Monkey God looking on. And the film was made in 1967. In the theatre were also two middle-aged men talking loudly about their erotic VCD collection.

Some highlights include:
The House of 72 Tenants (Chu Yuan, 1972)
One-Armed Swordsman (Chang Cheh, 1967)
The Kingdom and the Beauty (Li Han-hsiang, 1959)
And a talk on "The Erotic in Chinese Films"

PS: Remember to stay clear of the lone middle-aged men

The Arts House

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Orchard Turn

The Orchard Turn site, which attracted much attention and scrutiny during Prime Minister Lee's recent National Day Rally speech, was launched through a public tender today.

It is a prime site, strategically located at the center of Orchard Road, which has too long been deemed as a linear, 2-dimensional experience. Not only will pedestrian linkages improve through facade continuity, underground walkways may also aid the chaotic pedestrian crossing on Paterson Road. The proposed Atrium space will hopefully provide some semblance of public space to Orchard Road, only if it is functional and inviting, unlike Ngee Ann city's imposing plaza. And the observation deck will help to reclaim some of the aerial space and visual vantage point for the public, lost to retailers and foreign tourists staying in the Marriotts.

At stake, however, are the mature trees and one of the few open spaces along the shopping belt. What could be tapped into are the lush greenery behind the parcel, with the tree-lined heritage road. Visual access to this greenery could be made through design elements, framing 'window' and the building layout of the proposal.

This important site could well be the last missing link to cement Orchard Road as the bustling commercial heart of the city. It has the potential to remake Orchard as an integrated and connected shopping haven and the public's playground.

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My Induction and Elitism

The induction course at my new workplace was held this past week. It was useful for we learnt a lot more about the different departments within the organization and how they come together (or not). Some of the talks were fascinating, especially the ones on conservation and urban design. And with the site visit to the Singapore River, the lessons became more real and tangible. And then there were the talks on corporate spirit and quality standards which were, to put it mildly, like someone poking their fingers at my eyeballs. Can you imagine the union leader spending 5 minutes reading off the list of my colleagues that have joined the union? Torturous.

It got rather intense near the end of the course when some participants came forward and maligned that they were ostracized by the course facilitators and the workscope of their department misrepresented and marginalized. Indeed, some departments within the organization do not get as much prominence as others. And time and again, people wonder why they are even part of this statutory board. (Historical linkages were the only viable answer for the umbrella assemblage). Anyway, the "marginalized" group (3 of them) accused the facilitators of elitism and looking down on the them.

It is difficult to reflect on this from my own perspective, for I admit that my own background and education history smack fully of the elite. Even if I don't recognize it, the top-ranked local schools I went to, the overseas scholarship I received, the English-speaking crowd I hang out with, the slight foreign lilt of my accent, the sports I play, the activities I do, and my position as a public servant in an organization that thrives on aesthetics and design (mainstays of the cultural elite economy) all contribute to a particular status that can be considered removed from the mainstream.

Although I live in Ang Mo Kio, I do not identify much with the Chinese-speaking crowd. I do not follow jue2 dui4 Superstar, and I rather watch Quidam than Snow.Wolf.Lake. My taste in music range from The Magic Numbers to Belle and Sebastian, and not KTV-friendly Jacky Cheung and Fish Leong. I play squash and tennis and take a swipe at the golf ball once in a while.

While Singapore prides itself as a middle-class nation with equal opportunities for all, signs of an enlarging income gap is all too apparent. When the then PM Goh coined the terms 'cosmopolitans' and 'heartlanders', they provided lingustic avenues to divide and identify. While I believed Mr Goh's intention was to portray an all-encompassing society with the necessary spaces for meeting individual aspirations and material identification, a separate process of segmentation was taking place.

Although the majority of Singaporeans stays in public housing and attended government schools, against this monolithic social profile is an internal segregation. While 'class' may not be a noticeable component of the local society, people were compartmentalizing themselves within the elite single-sex schools and the foreign-schooled community. The english-speaking and chinese-speaking form clear divides that extend over their choice of music, entertainment, television channels, literary materials and cultural iconographies. Some looked up to the advanced East Asian cultures of Korea and Japan as the golden benchmark, while others pride themselves on their affliation with American and British media, lingos and attitudes. Rather than be consciously choosing sides, I naturally found myself associating more with the English-speaking, CNN-watching, arthouse movie crowd.

As seen during the induction course, there were people like me and there were people that were on the other extreme. Friendly banters become exclusionary as we talked at lenghts about our scholarship bonds, our Western-inflected tertiary experiences and the latest watering holes and Poptart events along expat-saturated Robertson Quay and Club Street.

I do not know where this will lead the country to. But on the personal level, I see struggles and new alliances occuring between friends and family. I will no doubt find myself surrounded by more like-minded individuals, but the drive to understand the other will only grow more intense.

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Post Bar

I was at the Post Bar at Fullerton Hotel some weeks ago. It must be one of my favorite buildings in Singapore. A site visit down there on Wednesday with an URA planner with fascinating stories about the building really made a great impression on me.

If you are ever there, try to find the original entrance of the post office that had been conserved, as well as the entrance to the Tax Revenue House. A tunnel connecting the building to the waterfront is purported to still exist today. And look out for the plaque by the Polish community on Joseph Conrad, who wrote about Singapore in Lord Jim, a stone's throw away from the hotel.

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JUICE

A picture of me and Sharon popped up on this month's JUICE magazine.

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Blogs of Hate

Another case of the law extending its reach into cyberspace.

Previously, a US-based government scholar was threatened with a defamation suit for alleged remarks he made on his blog about his boss, a temperamental bigwig. These incidents raise some interesting questions about ethics and the rights of the cyber community.

1. Racism cannot be condoned. It is relatively easy to police overt racism, but isn't covert racism, the racism that is hidden under layers of indifference, ignorance, arrogance and stereotyping, condoned time and again by the public that is more insidious?

2. Besides the fact that it was a case of racial discrimination, how should the government police the internet? What level of anonymity and rights should bloggers and the cyber community enjoy? As a deterrant, how effective is the punishment? What are the boundaries of the police jurisdiction online?

3. Is public prosecution the best way to react to any inflammatory remarks online? Does the cyber community have the right and need to self-censor? What happens when the government starts to patrol the internet and enacts its own moral code for all net users?

TODAY: Net Closes in on Blog of Hate

"Two charged over online racist rants; other Netizens may watch their words

BLOGGERS have become used to letting off steam, while invective in Internet forums is nothing new. Yesterday, however, the online community received a little reminder that real laws still apply in the virtual world as two men were charged in court for taking their racist outpourings too far.

Benjamin Koh Song Huat, 27, and Nicholas Lim Yew, 25, were arrested and charged under the Sedition Act.

Investigations into the case, which has created a buzz among bloggers, began after someone called the police hotline at 3am on June 19 to complain that Koh's blog on www.upsaid.com "discussed topics that would disrupt racial harmony".

Koh faces three charges while Lim faces two for remarks made between June 12 and June 17 this year. If convicted, they could be fined up to $5,000 per charge or jailed up to three years, or both."- Ansley Ng

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Week of the Living Dead

A splinter in the eye is the best magnifying glass.

—Theodor Adorno

"Future historians can debate the exact moment when the freewheeling coverage of Hurricane Katrina gave way to media martial law. Was it when Fox News, after days of unlikely fairness and balance, began suggesting that the relief effort was now going well? When NBC blocked West Coast viewers from seeing Kanye West tell a fund-raiser’s viewers that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people”? Or when perma-chipper David Brooks beamed that the New Orleans debacle had really boosted Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential hopes?

For me, the turning point came on Saturday night when The Cryptkeeper sprung Larry King from his suspendered sarcophagus to host a three-hour broadcast with such fabled disaster experts as Eric Clapton and Magic Johnson. The show built to the appearance of Celine Dion, whose galloping emotionalism for once found a worthy cause. The Québecois diva launched into a teary, arm-waving, heartfelt speech about her sadness and frustration at what she’d seen in New Orleans, but King, eager to squelch such a display of true feeling — you could hear him impatiently gargling his phlegm — didn’t acknowledge Dion’s anger. Instead he praised Dion for contributing a million dollars to the relief effort (she deftly swatted aside the compliment) and then asked her to sing. Yes, the mangy old hack was trying to recapture the celebrity-driven America of just one week earlier.

Although Katrina’s devastation was centered along the Gulf Coast, her saga became a bleak snapshot of our national soul. “It defies comprehension that the United States can look like this,” said CNN’s Jeanne Meserve on Wednesday, an idea that became the week’s mantra. The chaos in New Orleans was like something you’d see in Liberia or Sierra Leone, observed CNN’s undervalued Jeff Koinange, one of the rare black reporters on our screens, not something you expect in the richest country in the world. Put simply: This couldn’t be America.

The problem, of course, is that it was. Not only did Hurricane Katrina shatter our illusions of exceptionalism — no god singled out the U.S. for exemption from disaster — it challenged our belief in the fairness and efficiency of our social order. When the 17th Street Canal was breached, another levee burst in our national consciousness. What poured in were truths normally ignored by our national media and, let’s be honest, most of us in our daily lives.

Within hours, even the dimmest viewer couldn’t fail to notice that those trapped in hellish conditions were precisely the people who routinely remain invisible in this country — the poor, sick, aged and uneducated, most of them black. The ones Michael Harrington famously dubbed The Other America.

Suddenly, the Others were right in front of our noses, and the major media — predominantly white and pretty well-off — were talking about race and class. Newspapers ran front-page articles noting that nearly six million people have fallen into poverty since President Bush took office — a nifty 20 percent increase to accompany the greatest tax cuts in world history. Feisty columnists rightly fulminated that, even as tens of thousands suffered in hellish conditions, the buses first rescued people inside the Hyatt Hotel. Of course, such bigotry was already inscribed in the very layout of New Orleans. One reason the Superdome became a de facto island is that, like the city’s prosperous business district, it was carefully constructed so it would be easy to protect from the disenfranchised (30 percent of New Orleans lives below the poverty line)..."

- John Powers, LA Weekly, Sep 9 2005

LA Weekly: Week of the Living Dead

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Branding a City

The Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) is the national planning agency in Singapore. It oversees all physical planning work, grants public and private development and planning approvals, provides some public amenities and coordinates with other government agencies.

The motto of URA is "To make Singapore a great city to live, work and play in." Funny enough, the word "in" was a new addition to the slogan. Most of the URA stationery still says "...a great city to live, work and play". I guess they realized the grammatical error rather late. However, the all-encompassing but simple tagline has lost its ring due to this need for grammatical-correctness.

Interestingly, the old URA slogan was "Towards a Tropical City of Excellence." This was phased out aptly at the time when the government and the public were debating the issue of Singapore being a hotel rather than a home. Apparently, the image of a tropical city gelled more with a Banyan Tree 3Days 2Nights at Phuket.



Even more coincidental is that downtown Los Angeles, which I just returned from, has a similar slogan. "Live, Work and Play. Downtown Los Angeles" is used to revamp the image of the downtown, away from a dead and dangerous place after office hours and into a bustling 24/7 haven of activities and residential opportunities. Its slogan came at a time when the Japanese economy was stalling and foreign investment was trickling off. The adaptive reuse ordinance established several years back also helped resuscitate the ailing housing market within downtown. And as the Lakers moved to the Staples Center and were playing well, which was a few years ago, the entire downtown was clamoring for luxurious loft apartments and prime office space.

Granted that the idea of living, working and playing within a small geographical confine is a target for many cities, the Singapore planning authority's motto, in its attempt to be comprehensive ends up run-of-the-mill bland, a little clumsy and overly simplistic.

On a side note, someone asked me the other day for my definition of a great city for the in-house magazine. My reply - A great city is a city that sucks you instantly into the flow and vibe of the place, where every turn of the road is a surprise and that to anyone, it feels like home, is home and will always be home even when one is away.

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Lion Dance Competition @ Ngee Ann City

I stumbled across this massive Lion Dance competition at Ngee Ann City last week. I was amazed at the skills of the performers throughout the 20 mins I was glued to the unfolding spectacle. The two performers from the team I saw were strutting on unwieldy 10-metre high posts, often on one leg, or balanced on the other performer. What was more impressive was the large crowd that had build up. Although I had knew of television telecast of such events, I now know how dramatic and exciting the competition can be. Someone should organize a international competition and invite the top performers from around the globe. I'm sure that will be a great media event and tourist attraction.

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The Real Costs of a Culture of Greed

"WHAT THE WORLD has witnessed this past week is an image of poverty and social disarray that tears away the affluent mask of the United States.

Instead of the much-celebrated American can-do machine that promises to bring freedom and prosperity to less fortunate people abroad, we have seen a callous official incompetence that puts even Third World rulers to shame. The well-reported litany of mistakes by the Bush administration in failing to prevent and respond to Katrina's destruction grew longer with each hour's grim revelation from the streets of an apocalyptic New Orleans.

Yet the problem is much deeper. For half a century, free-market purists have to great effect denigrated the essential role that modern government performs as some terrible liberal plot. Thus, the symbolism of New Orleans' flooding is tragically apt: Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Louisiana Gov. Huey Long's ambitious populist reforms in the 1930s eased Louisiana out of feudalism and toward modernity; the Reagan Revolution and the callousness of both Bush administrations have sent them back toward the abyss..."

- Robert Scheer, LA Times, Sep 6, 2005

The complete article can be viewed at:
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-scheer6sep06,0,2842553.column
[dg, thanks for the article]

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Macabre Reminder: The Corpse on Union Street

by Dan Barry, NYT Sep 8, 2005

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 7 - In the downtown business district here, on a dry stretch of Union Street, past the Omni Bank automated teller machine, across from a parking garage offering "early bird" rates: a corpse. Its feet jut from a damp blue tarp. Its knees rise in rigor mortis.

Six National Guardsmen walked up to it on Tuesday afternoon and two blessed themselves with the sign of the cross. One soldier took a parting snapshot like some visiting conventioneer, and they walked away. New Orleans, September 2005.

Hours passed, the dusk of curfew crept, the body remained. A Louisiana state trooper around the corner knew all about it: murder victim, bludgeoned, one of several in that area. The police marked it with traffic cones maybe four days ago, he said, and then he joked that if you wanted to kill someone here, this was a good time.

Night came, then this morning, then noon, and another sun beat down on a dead son of the Crescent City.

That a corpse lies on Union Street may not shock; in the wake of last week's hurricane, there are surely hundreds, probably thousands. What is remarkable is that on a downtown street in a major American city, a corpse can decompose for days, like carrion, and that is acceptable.

Welcome to New Orleans in the post-apocalypse, half baked and half deluged: pestilent, eerie, unnaturally quiet...

To read the rest of the article Macabre Reminder: The Corpse on Union Street

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At www.scipionus.com people are using the power of technology, via Google Map, to update the public on the flooding conditions of N'awlins.

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"As the water recedes, more and more decaying bodies will testify to the callous and stumblebum administration response to Katrina's rout of 90,000 square miles of the South.

The Bush administration bungled the Iraq occupation, arrogantly throwing away State Department occupation plans and C.I.A. insurgency warnings. But the human toll of those mistakes has not been as viscerally evident because the White House pulled a curtain over the bodies: the president has avoided the funerals of soldiers, and the Pentagon has censored the coffins of the dead coming home and never acknowledges the number of Iraqi civilians killed.

But this time, the bodies of those who might have been saved between Monday and Friday, when the president failed to rush the necessary resources to a disaster that his own general describes as "biblical," or even send in the 82nd Airborne, are floating up in front of our eyes.

New Orleans's literary lore and tourist lure was its fascination with the dead and undead, its lavish annual Halloween party, its famous above-ground cemeteries, its love of vampires and voodoo and zombies. But now that the city is decimated, reeking with unnecessary death and destruction, the restless spirits of New Orleans will haunt the White House."

- Maureen Dowd, NYT columnist, Sep 7, 2005

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Postcards from friends adorn my empty cubicle for now.

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My Cube

This is the view from the window of my cubicle. I enjoy anything with a panoramic view. Tanjong Pagar offers so much contrast, day and night. It is bustling with office workers on weekdays, and Maxwell and Amoy St Markets are always packed.

And when the sun sets, the streets become alive with clubbers and pub-goers, who just hours ago were toiling away in the glass-cladded office towers. Shophouses also line the streets surrounding my office adding much visual interest and some semblance of history. And a block from my office stands a half-completed condominium project, one of the tallest in Singapore. Budget concerns aside, I am eyeing for a bigger cube, a real apartment in this building, in this awakening part of downtown.

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This is Singapore

This is Singapore. The iconic tourist symbol of the Merlion, a half-fish half-lion constructed fantasy of the public sector, stands phallic in front of the still nascent skyline, spewing an endless flow of treated water into the very reservoir it uses to supply itself.

I was born here a quarter of a century ago, and have returned once again after a four year sojourn. The same Merlion, now scrubbed down, has been relocated to a more prominent position unobscured from the Nicoll Highway bridge. This proves that even the most sacred of government fantasies can be transplanted and cleaned up when the need arise. Just as the urban fabric of Singapore has witnessed, new buildings continue to plough over the native land, new land rises from the ocean, nostalgia giving way to pragmatism.

This is the country I call home, and even more so now that I am a civil servant.

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