Rome Rocks

I caught the first episode of HBO's Rome last night, and it rocks. There is sex, violence, political intrigue and more sex aplenty within the 55 mins than an entire year of local television combined.

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The Train to Cool-ville

Bangkok is shaping up to be the creative capital of Asia. The design magazine Wallpaper* recently started a local franchise, and LA-based Japanese restaurant Koi opened a branch. After a few years of operation, the Siam Bed Supperclub continues to attract clubbers and design afficionados to its harem. Thai films and commercials still eclipse their South East Asian counterparts at international awards ceremonies and festivals. And if anyone is visiting Bangkok, they should check out the Playground!, a Collete store concept mall. I think the most exciting thing about Bangkok now is how everything is shaping up or evolving; that is when the atmosphere is most bustling and electric.

Read NYT's To Be Young and Hip in Bangkok.

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U.N. effort to spare condemned man

The United Nations has joined the Australian government and human rights groups in a last-ditch effort to save an Australian man sentenced to death in Singapore for drug trafficking. On Monday, Canberra said it was considering taking Singapore to the International Court of Justice....

Appeal hearings are usually over in minutes, with judges routinely giving their verdict before disappearing into their chambers. Lawyers would then have
to refer to their written judgment to take further action.

Letters to relatives informing them of the execution date are extremely simple, and contain just a few paragraphs. Humans rights advocates call the penalty excessive.

"The adoption of such a black-and-white approach is entirely inappropriate where the life of the accused is at stake," said Philip Alston, the special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions for the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. "Once the sentence has been carried out it is irreversible," he said last week. Yet Singapore refuses to compromise on what it says in an internal matter.

"Those implementing the laws here seem to be in a rush to win the cases and close their files," said Sinapan Samydorai, a spokesman from local civic rights group Think Center. "The government here seems to be unnecessarily cruel without any mercy given to those who have made an honest mistake. Why not give the person a second chance?"

Full article.

To sign the petition for clemency.

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CQ: The new Clarke Quay

The new Alsop-designed umbrella-funnel structures are up. They look interesting and their articulation rather quite nice. The roof is also translucent, which makes it a lot less imposing. Below the roof are qiant air vents that could drastically bring down the temperature on a hot sunny day like this. Together with the giant lilypads, new paintjobs for the buildings, and not to mention Crazy House and Ministry of Sound's tenancies, there may hopefully be a turnaround in the fortunes of this area.

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Old Thong Chai Medical Hall

I visited the Old Thong Chai with yz today. The nice lady boss brought us around the conserved building, which has been bought over by the American Living Products company, and also gave us a long sales pitch about DIY facials and being an entrepreneur.

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Hardball with Chris Matthews

How the Bush Administration orchestrated the war with Iraq.

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Rioting

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the city was plunged into a nightmarish episode of lawlessness, rioting and looting. My colleagues commented, as many people did, that it was surprising of the United States, a first world nation, that it could fall into such a third world anarchic scenario.

The media images that were being streamed online and transmitted across oceans to syndicated news networks and large media corporations added to the mental picture for viewers outside the US. Predominantly, the images were that of African-Americans, rummaging through damaged stores and strolling past dead bodies. Such images surprised many people, for they were such a stark contrast to what people were used to seeing in American media products and cultural exports.

Unfortunately, rioting in the US is nothing new. The largest rioting in recent times happen less than 15 years ago in 1992 in Los Angeles, where South Central burned as the Rodney King trial came to a close. And before that, civil unrest occurs regularly from the 60s (Watts, Chicago), 70s (Kent State, Weather Underground, Anti-war movement) and 80s (labor unrest, Contra crisis) in the US and its territories.

It is also easy to identify reasons for such unrest. The 1992 LA riots was about racial discrimination and police brutality surrounding the Rodney King beating. Hurricane Katrina was about the lawlessness and greed that caused locals to loot. These are however only trigger points. They are easy to pinpoint, but simplistic in nature. The LA riots was of course about racial discrimination and police brutality, but it was also about income inequity and the rising tension within minority groups and social segregation. And these were in turn influenced by the Reagan years of contracted social spending, welfare assistance and neglect of inner cities.

Similarly, when Hurricane Katrina hit, people were looting for basic food and necessities. What was largely overlooked by viewers miles away from the disaster, and informed by short 1 minute news brief and video footage on the local 9 o'clock news, was the larger issue of inadequate and inefficient federal emergency response. And an even larger issue is that of the minority population in the South, with low car ownership and underrepresented in politicial offices, who paid the ultimate price.

I have been watching the unfolding of the riots in France, and it too begs the same questions. The trigger point was that of youths being killed while running away from the police. But as the riots spread and more people become implicated, the scenario becomes clear. The demographic landscape of France, with its years of foreign migration, its Algerian legacy and the enlarging Muslim minority, slotted tellingly in poor suburban ghetto, is the story of the riots. Such social inequality which has been simmering for a while is only erupting now when triggered. And sadly, it is a story not only of France, but of many European nations.

(Doug Ireland investigates deeply into this turmoil in France in his editorial.)

In Singapore, we hear the same story but from a different angle. The racial riots of the 60s have been continuously brandished by the local government as a symbol for our need of racial harmony. More critically, we are reminded constantly of the possibility of anarchy (or that we would fall back into an uncivilized tropical jungle) once again if we breached our so called social contract. Thus, the government effectively takes away our freedom of speech, create unconstitutional seditious regulations and practice its own forms of eugenics and political quota system.

So what exactly happened during the racial riots of the 60s? Racial discrimination and income and class inequality would remain the usual suspects of such confrontations. But can we say that we have improved in those areas, or are we still a fragile nation, held together by thin threads of secrecy, active social engineering, political gerrymandering, ready to fall apart at any moment if we speak our minds?

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Citibank Credit Card

I received my credit card from Citibank this week. This is my very first credit card and I was really excited. To borrow from the VISA commercials, the euphoria of signing it for the first time is priceless. I think everybody remembers their first purchase, or for me, my first purchases!. I went shopping the very day I received the card and spent more than $300! Yes, I feel guilty about it. But I think that card has re-ignited my passion for shopping.

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LA Weekly: AFI Fest 2005

Scott Foundas writes,

"Yet, the impulse remains — the lust to be the festival that discovers the next Sex, Lies and Videotape or Pulp Fiction — no matter how compelling the evidence that there simply aren’t that many good films to go around. From Fresno to Frankfurt, the world is now saturated with film festivals, but the most meaningful discoveries continue to be made by Sundance, Berlin, Cannes, Venice and Toronto, as well as a vital secondary tier of festivals that includes Rotterdam, Karlovy Vary and Locarno.

"The others, to the extent that they insist on premieres, serve mainly to give false hope to filmmakers who should probably consider other career paths. AFI Fest might do well to take a page (or two) from the playbooks of the New York, Chicago and San Francisco film festivals, which long ago resolved to service their hometown crowds with the best films available at that particular moment — no strings attached — resulting in a festival-of-festivals atmosphere to which no single film event in Los Angeles can lay claim. (And I include the Los Angeles Film Festival in that assessment, despite the leaps and bounds by which it has improved in recent ears.)"

And Eric Khoo's Be With Me gets another positive mention by Scott Foundas in LA Weekly.

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