Why must everything have names, have titles, have little misleading conveniences

Yeah, why? Having spent the last few months refusing to compose or write in fluent prose, acts which I decreed to be willing submissions to an existing order and system (yes, language has laws. Imagine if it had courts of judgement too, some of us would be facing the gallows), I AM BACK. Sean Lim's offhand reference to his blog last night brought me face-to-face with the startling reality that I HAVE NOT READ YOUR BLOGS FOR AN ABSOLUTE ETERNITY. And, yes, you have not read mine, for I have written nothing. (Shall I speak again?)

Bringing myself up to speed on your blogs was akin to sitting in a locomotive gathering speed. As I allowed your alphabet-constructed contraptions to grab hold of me an overriding theme engulfed me in a way reminiscent of the green blur of the country passing the train by (refer to War by JMG Le Clezio, it's full of such reversals). The overriding theme was loud and unmistakable in its unequivocal message (I am sorry my eschewal of regular prose has seen my opulent vocabulary ebb away by the cycles of the moon, hence the simple bisyllabic word 'message'), yet mellow and ambivalent in its sentimental undertones. Yes, you miss school. And your best friends, your 'lifelong' acquaintances come from ACS(I)'s class of 2008. Heard you. Love you. By the way, you notice my allusions to a certain element of the IB experience known as King Lear for IOC? Yeah, I can't leave the past behind either. (And by the way, if anyone wants to have a lively exchange of ideas on what the past means, this soon-to-be Oxford historian is always available to accompany you as you traverse the hallowed turf he has fallen, spellbound, so in love with.)

Have I lost you? If so, then I AM BACK! If not, excuse me in view of my prolonged absence. Okay, here's what this blog is going to do from hereon in, so put me back on your radars, people! As this Anglophile revels in his three-year pilgrimage to the cradle of civilisation, he will update you on what he does in England (probably on a weekly basis, my 25-book-long weekly reading list is going to eat up more of my time than Loh Yu Sheng can manage on the food of people around him :P). If I get lazy and reductionist, don't be surprised to see a standard blog entry formatted along the lines of:

- My best meal this week:
- I played this song the highest number of times on my iPod:
- I remember this quote the best:
- A really funny encounter:
- ............................

Grrr. Before I leave for the UK, though, I shall do some purposeful and pleasurable writing since presently time so generously apportions itself to me. In the works is an article on the relationship between fathers and sons, motivated in part by an article I read in an Indonesian lifestyle magazine, in part by my own relationship with my dad (one in constant flux, mind you), in part by the father-and-son songs I have in my iPod which came up in close proximity to one another on my shuffle last week. Disclaimer: it was an order completely arbitrary but upon whose pertinent items I imposed the categorisation 'father-&-son'. Expect lots of other literary allusions. Please don't bug me now about whether literature is really mimetic, okay? Save that for another day. Also to be published soon is my review of a fantastic restaurant for contemporary Chinese dining - Cassia, located within the premises of Capella Singapore on Sentosa Island. Celebrated my mother's birthday there. Did I mention it was the most fabulous meal I'd had all year? So much for my decided aversion to Chinese food huh.

Sorry, I'm tired. Excuse the large number of grammatical errors I've made on this page, which a rough count would probably put at somewhere in the region of 1000000. Tired people can't really count anyway.

Benjamin Button Makes A Curious Case Indeed

Sugar, spice, and everything nice. These are the ingredients chosen to create the perfect little girls. An easy translation into filmmaking language could be offered here. Sugar = fantasy, sweet but artificial. Spice = romance, no further explanation required. Everything nice = the feel-good factor; something equally vague, and broad enough to encompass all that is pleasing and delightful. And just what girls mean to the real world, is what 'flicks' are to the film industry. (I promise this is my only chauvinist joke for the day!) Unfortunately, the makers of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button accidentally added a special ingredient: Chemical X. Okay, so it wasn't a mysterious substance released from a carton labelled 'X', but the X-factor for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, as it would be for any film, is its packaging. This was its one chance to tell the world what exactly it was, precisely what it tried to do, and therefore how one can go about judging it.


In an advertising sense, there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the marketing of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Acclaimed as a film that was 'philosophical', 'intriguing', et cetera, because it explored the abstract concept of 'living life backwards', it appealed to people like myself who like to think they are highly intellectual. Crowds and Oscar nominations came, but it is this point beyond which we cannot hail this film as a roaring success. With its self-professed philosophical inclinations as expedient yardsticks against which to measure its achievement, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is found to be still, still, far wide.


The course of philosophy has embossed the word 'life' with a meaning deeper than the mere trajectory of human progression from birth through to death. If I may borrow an allegory from John Lewis Gaddis' The Landscape of History, then I will elucidate. We are all like wanderers, moving in an arbitrarily-defined forward direction. Problem is, we walk backwards (ie we face the landscape from which we have come and have our backs turned towards the expanses into which we go). We are clueless as to what kind of land our next step will take us onto and are similarly unable to see the scenery that surrounds us until the moment we are passing it by. We live a life of memories (anybody wants to join me and my WSC buddies at the National Museum this Sunday for the screening of The Persistence of Memory?) because everything we know about that constitutes our being and existence resides in the realm of the past. It would perhaps be apt to pause here and think about what it means to do all this backwards.

Admittedly there is a range of possibilities. For starters we could have the scenario of the wanderer operate in exact reverse. One faces the direction in which he walks, hence seeing all that he approaches and possessing the power to change his course such that he eventuates wherever he desires to. At the same time, he forgets all that he has done and all that he has been, and lives a life of dementia paralysed by the loss of memory. Alternatively, we could invert the journey (ie have our man start where he should have ended) and have the wanderer walk a pre-programmed route back towards where he should have started, gaining as he moves the understanding of how he came to arrive at the former (ie journeying towards an epiphany).

And yet all this is besides the point, for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is neither. He does not have the psychic ability to foretell his future (and as such remains distinctly human in the movie), nor does he forget about the girl of his childhood years (until the painfully lame bout of dementia he experiences in his 'old age/adolescent' phase; more on this later). Neither does he begin the movie with a consciousness or identity that he spends the plot figuring out how he constructed. There is none of the predestination, implicit in either of these scenarios, in the life of Benjamin Button. His actions all carry unknown consequences, some of which he lived to regret, and others to cherish. Neither would be possible had the outcome been a given (assuming people, given the choice, don't act in a manner that brings an unfavourable end).

Since Benjamin knew nothing of the future he walked into, he must have had his back facing the direction in which he walked. Since he had full responsibility and autonomy over where his path ended (in that this destination would result from the actions he took), he could not have begun walking at the 'end point' towards a known 'start point'. The one thing that differentiated him from a conventional human being was that he was born old and haggard, and died, as a baby, knowing and caring about nothing; but this distinction is a merely physical one that fails to prevent Gaddis' model from being applicable. It alters the condition of the wanderer at each of the two points but fundamentally leaves untouched the nature of the journey itself. This dearth of abstraction makes the character aphilosophical in nature.

A closer evaluation of the film yields the realisation that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button does not merely fail to break new philosophical ground, but also comes up short in disguising its true identity as a conventional flick. At its heart is a romance that is deeply touching, saddening, but vaguely magical. It is the implausible story of two individuals whose paths come together like a dream fulfilled after the nightmares of clandestine candlelight meetings and Parisian mishaps. That the affection begins in spite of an ostensible age gap, blossoms in spite of the numerous tribulations and setbacks, and survives in spite of the ironic (though highly expected) reversal of roles at the film's end, makes it seem immense and moving. And yet its basis is fantasy. We are left under no illusions that Benjamin's peculiar condition underpins the romantic element of the love affair, and yet we realise that this condition is an unrealistic and implausible one. What transpires is an understanding that any statement emanating from Benjamin Button is most applicable only within its own fantastical confines. The odd splash of humour and the inventive juxtaposition of a wizened head and a toddler's torso (which is purely aesthetic in value) are, amongst others, elements which maintain a spirited audience and a nice tally from the box office.

What ultimately damns The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is not that it roughly fits the criteria defining a flick, for this is forgiveable if it proves itself to possess a timeless and universal quality that we can appreciate beyond the immediacy of sensual or emotional enjoyment. Its more critical failing is its interpretation of living life in reverse being unimpressive to anyone well-versed in the parlance of philosophy. Perhaps it is a tad harsh to expect a philosophical dissertation from a work designed simply to rake in the dough, but one would hope that the publicity people cut out the misleading intellectual pretensions, call a spade a spade, and market The Curious Case of Benjamin Button as nothing more than a feel-good flick.

All's Well That Ends Well

Hear, nature, hear. Dear goddess, hear!...

And so all of you are gone. And not reading this. I never thought it would come to this, but pangs of loneliness have crept up upon me as I shared parting words and a mutual reluctance with a number of friends as, one by one, they were grabbed by the long arms of BMTC Tekong. First went the one person who never failed to make me laugh (Dec 3), and next the person who was the first I went to when I needed someone sensible/sensitive to help me deal with the emotional aspects of life I am less proficient in (Dec 11), and then went one of the few I regarded as an equal in an intellectual sense, one the hours with whom I spent discussing, debating, arguing, reasoning, rank among the most enjoyable of all (Jan 8, with just about everybody else). I understand now why school is a gift. Just meeting people, to exchange greetings, to bitch with one another, made for an enjoyable experience. Living in the buzz that was the year 6 level stands as the polar opposite to the chaste serenity of spending the majority of my time in my bedroom. While still I am glad to leave some aspects of life in school behind me, the 9 quiet months that lie ahead seem like three endless winters. Then, of course, comes the light and the first of my 3 Christmas presents (figure out what those are if I haven't yet told you).

I guess it's goodbye if I haven't said mine to you, if you haven't entered army, and if you bother to hear me. And so ends this phase in the life cycle of my blog. There's none of you left to read about the disgusting innards of my conceited existence, and so it's time to return this space to what it was meant for. Posts from henceforth shall be of an academic or inquisitive nature, till such time as the collaborative blog under Kenneth Lim's administration be ready for me to, with my dung, embellish. So long.

SIGH

Those of you who watched Wall.E in VivoCity with me at the end of August will remember me shelling out on a new set of earphones for my iPod. Well, they lasted some four months. Even Apple's fared better. Granted, they were of an obscure and unreputed (please distinguish from disreputable!) brand, but one is entitled to expect slightly better? For what length of time they lasted, though, these in-ears provided a level of comfort and sound quality that left me more than pleased.

Compelled by necessity, I purchased a replacement set from Harvey Norman yesterday. Ostensibly more durable, they looked a good buy. Looked. In truth, they are awful. Though they are in-ears, they are completely incompetent at blocking out external noise and require the volume on the iPod to be adjusted to three-quarters of a bar for decent listening pleasure. That's triple what my brandless ones used to demand of my iPod. The sound quality itself leaves much to be desired.

It was then that I realised what enjoyment and satisfaction are like. These two idols in our lives which we worship and pursue with pious devotion are plausibly of a temporal and ephemeral nature. What is the use of having an obdurate and hardy item at your disposal if all it does is annoy you with subpar levels of performance and satisfaction? Its lengthier lifespan is just a longer stay of time for it to irritate. And often objects rendering a good level of enjoyment either wear themselves down (because we use them so heavily) and become useless, like a pair of spoilt earphones); or lull us into a state of expectation (as opposed to appreciation) that we take such enjoyment for granted and start finding fault with its less blatant shortcomings. In short, our infinite wants will never allow our possessions to be both good and lasting. You either have something nasty that persists as a nuisance, or drain enjoyment from one particular source and move on to the next when your marginal utility decreases below your threshold of acceptance. The better choice is obvious here.

不追求天长地久, 只在乎曾经拥有. Such sentiments may border on the Nihilistic, but they do not deserve short shrift. Perhaps if you joined me and watched the drama series that runs at 2.30pm each weekday on Channel 8, you would be more inclined to agree. It explores Nihilism in a humorous and highly forgiving manner, which is rather interesting. Hang on, this here might just be something good and lasting. It's called Channel 8. :p

Peekaboo!

I'm not dead yeah. Just playing too much FM to blog. I have no idea what is to become of this space when you guys enter army and there's no one left to read my pathetic utterances. Maybe God will keep me in some dilapidated part of Malaysia, where there's no Internet connection and where people dream of an upgrade to a latrine. Then I'll have an excuse to leave this place be. Next up though, commentary on The Green Mile. Should start soon. (No Cheuk Ho that is NOT alliteration!! The first word is out, at the very least.)