The Strokes

I love the guitar on this. I’d embed the vid but apparently it’s disabled.

Yishun, 7.45 pm

Sometimes, the only way I can make sense of things is to write them down. I have that line written very neatly in the notebook I always carry about, because it’s true. Words, crafted and set down, have a clarity that speech or thought can’t match up to, and I believe that. This isn’t to say that everything I write is true, but since this is a blog, I thought that that’s a distinction I should make up-front. The following is an exercise in writing, and should be read as such.

- Sam

” Very, very, occasionally, I get spells where I’m irrationally angry. If you’d happen to catch me a couple of hours before, or even after, I’d be perfectly alright. It probably wouldn’t even occur to me that there was anything for me to be angry about. I don’t just mean annoyance, I mean genuine anger at things far removed from me. I don’t often get angry if something immediate is imposed on me, like finding out a shop has sold something I expressly asked to be reserved for me, or having to wait an infinitely long time in a doctor’s queue, so the vitriol of the kind of anger I am talking about is a little bewildering, to me, sometimes. I understand that that’s a little odd, I do know that much.

So, what sort of things do I get angry at? This is a list, as far as I can remember.

I am angry that we are a generation saddled with an increasing confusion of choice, and that we are additionally insulted by the insinuation that this is a luxury. I am angry that we now have an unprecedented amount of responsibility for how we lead our lives and unprecedented access to conflicting information that tells us how to go about doing this.

I am angry that the things we buy and the music we listen to determines who we are for other people. I am angry that the wired environment we have been brought up in amplifies every individual decision a thousand times over and consequently reveals absolutely nothing about anybody. I am angry that Facebook exists because of what it implies about our identities, and tells millions of people around the world that the only kind of friendship is measured in volume, not quality.

I am angry that I am not the only one who feels this way. I am angry that there’s nobody else who does.

I am angry that half the writers I respect kill themselves, and the other half happen to loathe the world they live in. I am angry that tragedy is a necessary component of humour. I am angry that I am literate and consequently aware that so many great writers have come to the same depressing conclusions. I am angry that so many great bands have too.

I am angry that I have no ambition.

I am angry at the complacency of this nation-state. I am angry at people whose idea of success is becoming a neurosurgeon because, and only because, of the respect they hope to get. I am angry at the thoughtless optimism that ends up turning charity events into concerts. I am angry that some people believe the problems of this world can be solved by our politicians. I am angry that some people believe the problems of this world can be solved by ourselves. I’m angry at the contradiction that entails.

I am angry that I am young, and happen to have more intelligence than sense. I am angry at any insinuation that my anger is a phase, even though I recognise it to be. I am angry that I am just mature enough to see how immature I am most of the time.

I am angry that I have nobody to blame for these things beyond myself.”

Economical

Ernest Hemingway apparently once bet his friends $10 each that he could write a short story in six words. It went “For Sale: Baby shoes, Never Worn”. They paid up.

Wired magazine decided to ask lots of writers to have a go. I like these.

Weeping, Bush misheard Cheney’s deathbed advice.
- Gregory Maguire

Computer, did we bring batteries? Computer?
- Eileen Gunn

Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time
- Alan Moore

Longed for him. Got him. Shit.
- Margaret Atwood

Corpse parts missing. Doctor buys yacht.
- Margaret Atwood

Leia: “Baby’s yours.” Luke: “Bad news…”
- Steven Meretzky

Dorothy: “Fuck it, I’ll stay here.”
- Steven Meretzky

I’m dead. I’ve missed you. Kiss … ?
- Neil Gaiman

Kirby had never eaten toes before.
- Kevin Smith

The Good Ol’ Days

I miss Calvin and Hobbes. Life seemed…simpler back when there was a regular Calvin and Hobbes. Sure, I could read it again, but it’ll never be the same, because at the back of your mind you’ll always know that Calvin has no future. He ends. He’s not a living character anymore, and all those old comic strips are just memories, even if you’ve never seen them before.

I got the same feeling reading The Salmon of Doubt. It was the most depressing humour book I ever read next to Mostly Harmless, though I think Mostly Harmless classifies as ’sadism’ rather than ‘humour’.

Things from the Internet

Cat and Girl continue to be awesome. A lot of days, the comics are pretty hit-or-miss, and depend if your university days were spent in a cramped little shared room doing liberal arts. Today’s is great though. (The one titled ‘Model UN’)

It’s basically a run-on series of witty rejoinders mixed in with existentialism and self-deprecation.

I consider this comic to be the epitome of intelligent wit.

So I’m coaching again

Started debate coaching again. I didn’t realise how much I missed it. This is going to sound going to be egotistical, but it’s nice being right about everything for once.

There’re only a couple of things I’m good at. One of them is being able to sound correct about complex problems provided I’ve got enough information to bluff my way out and the person listening doesn’t know better. The other is literature, which I enjoy, though I think I write better prose than poetry. I get a lot of questions about whether I’m psyched about uni. I guess I am, but the problem is I can’t do both the things I’m good at at once. They’re not exactly complementary fields of study, and the way I see it, anything I pick means me giving up something else I’d like to do. No, I don’t want to do philosophy. Or be a lit teacher/professor.

On the flip side, I also get that it’s a little unfair that I am good at these things, considering I’ve never worked for either. The old saying about hard work isn’t true at all. Not that I’ve never worked for anything. I have seen some smart people fail at things because they didn’t try, but I have yet to see anybody become genuinely good at the things I am good at through hard work. It’s hard to explain. If I’m looking at an issue or a passage things just…occur to me. It’s kind of like how some people are naturally intuitive about fashion, or interior decorating. I just happen to be better at academia, which is slightly more marketable.

So I’m not really complaining, just saying, is all.

Blade Runner

I’ve been watching it again. It’s better than I remembered. It’s one of those shows you watch the first time around and get disoriented by the lack of car chases and the bizarre villain, and then you watch again and are astounded that you were dumb enough to be looking for car chases the first time around.

There are very few good movies that require annotation to watch properly.

-

My mom recently watched a collection of short stories on film and asked why art has to be so depressing. It’s a good question. Here is a list of some of the things I have (re)seen or (re)read recently:

Beneath the Planet of the Apes

Catch-22

Death of a Salesman

Ran

The Crucible

Against the Day

Blade Runner

In 4 of those, the principle character dies, with one more implying his/her death. In 5 of those, society is revealed to be morally bankrupt. 2 of them are outright apocalyptic. The only one that wasn’t really depressing was Against the Day, because it had a kind of uplifting ending, but to be fair I didn’t understand the book so it’s possible I missed something.

I wonder if artists are unusually perceptive or if they just happen to lead unusually depressing lives. It’s also possible I just need to start looking up less depressing artists.

Edit: Like Jane Austen, yeah. Or Sylvia Plath Virginia Woolf um. Oscar Wilde?

R.I.P. : A Serious Man

Articles like this one are one of the reasons I continue to read The Economist. You get lots of measured, not necessarily objective, analysis of interesting political affairs, you get examinations of different schools of thought in resolving global problems, and occasionally you get interesting obituaries. Like the one for Jonathan Routh.

“He could have gone into the army, like his father. His liking for footnotes might have suited him to be a historian… he might have cut a figure in the city; for the accent was right, and he always looked dapper with a brolly. But what Jonathan Routh preferred to do was dress up as a tree, wait at a bus stop and enquire which bus would take him to Sherwood Forest.

He also attempted to take a grand piano on the London Underground, and persuaded a group of tourists that Nelson’s Column needed holding up.

…

As a painter he showed a penchant for formal figures suddenly released from all constraints. He painted nuns driving racing cars and flying balloons, the pope windsurfing… Queen Victoria, on an imaginary trip to Jamaica in 1871, doing the hula hoop or the limbo dance, riding a zebra and driving dodgem cars.”

And then he gets immortalised in an Economist obituary. It’s not a bad way to go. I’ve always liked the British sense of humour in (most) of their comedies. A lot of the early stuff was about strait-laced people going bananas.

Stop the WordPress

The Spore Creature Demo is out.

It’s basically lego, but with the raw essence of life itself in place of building blocks. This isn’t ‘Spore the game’: this is ‘Mini-game from Spore that EA is charging money for’. Cunning. Will give it a look-see regardless, to see if I can make a fanged Kirby.

Update:

Ok you HAVE to try this. It’s incredibly fun. I made a Crocasaur, he’s such a dear.

I’ve always wanted to see one of these.

The premise is he plays both parts of a comic double act.

Reading Haruki Murakami while Listening to Tiger Baby

I don’t know why this never occurred to me before. This is like realising you can go out and eat your favourite ice-cream whenever you want to.