Friday was the last workday of 2006 for many people (I still have Tuesday), so the mood at the office was unusually chilled out. After 5pm, people started to slip into party mode.
Cue Mike Oldfield (though I’m sure funkier things were playing in the heads of my colleagues):
Booze started to appear, and it was interesting to discover that we actually had proper glasses for champagne, wine, etc. We even had nice pint and half-pint mugs for beer:
This is a nice opportunity for a mini rant. Screw the so-called surger-treated beers that pubs and bars are trying to foist on us in lieu of real draught beer. Surgers are supposed to turn regular bottled beer into a close approximation of beer from the tap. Does it work? Heeeeell no! It tastes like flat bottled/canned beer, and at best has 60% of the qualities of a good draught (good creamy head, smooth, etc). Even canned draught beers, such as the canned draught Guinness in the photo above, are better. In fact, I’d say canned draughts are 85% as good as the real thing. Check out that thick, milkshake-like head.
I’ve always thought that sensualists are a fairly resilient bunch. By sensualist, I mean someone who revels in sensory experience; not merely someone who’s sensual. Good times are obviously preferable to bad times, but the sensualist is content to feed on, and savour, both.
Are there any liabilities in this kind of world view though?
For instance, I remember a line I read years ago in Stephen Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant about how to hurt someone who’s lost everything: “Give him back something, broken.”
Is there a corollary for sensualists then? How do you hurt someone who finds all experience worthwhile? The only answer I can think of is to qualify that previous statement with “sensory experience” instead of pure experience. Chuck the sensualist in a sensory-deprivation tank and she’s screwed. But if he has a bottomlessly rich and abstract intellectual life, even that might not be enough, short of brain damage or grievous physical harm.
I guess I’m left with what I started with - the sensualist is seriously hard to screw over.
On that note, here’s one of White Zombie’s better known songs, More Human than Human.
There’s a reference to a Blade Runner character, Roy Batty, in the song:
I am the Nexus one,
I want more life,
Fucker, I ain’t done, yeah
Those lines remind me of this exchange in the movie:
———————————- Eldon Tyrell (God of Biomechanics):I’m surprised you didn’t come here sooner.
Roy Batty (Replicant / Artificial human):It’s not an easy thing to meet your maker.
Eldon Tyrell:And what can he do for you?
Roy Batty:Can the maker repair what he makes? I want more life, fucker.
Eldon Tyrell:The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long - and you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy.
Roy Batty:I’ve done… questionable things.
Eldon Tyrell:Also extraordinary things. Revel in your time.
———————————-
The sensualist would be content to revel in her time, instead of railing against mortality.
I finally saw the Chinese movie The Banquet, which was released earlier this year, and the bottom-line is that despite nice choreography and obvious ambition, it’s a draggy movie with an abysmal ending.
A large budget and plot inspired by Hamlet couldn’t save the story, which lingers painfully on microcosmic feuds and tensions that are never fleshed out satisfactorily. The overall style of the movie is also questionable, with the specificity of styles like Greek masks, kabuki makeup and Chinese outfits jarring a bit disconcertingly. What takes the cake is a scene where members of a theatrical troupe continue to strike dramatic poses as they get slaughtered by assassins.
There’s plenty of build-up, but nothing substantial seems to come out of it other than a Jacobean pile of bodies by the end of the movie. Two-dimensional characters like the absurdly naive Ophelia character and the emperor also don’t help the plot. Each time something pivotal happens, I’m left asking why.
All this contrasts with 2005’s The Promise, directed by Chen Kaige. The Promise is also set in a completely fictional pseudo-historical world. There are fewer nods to specific historical epochs though, and as far as I can tell, all the costumes and imagery were designed from scratch with little reference to fact. All of this aids suspension of disbelief, and abets the creation of a mythical world that’s larger than life. There’s plenty of surreal artiness, but it supports the story instead of fighting it.
My favourite scene in The Promise is when the Goddess tells the heroine that in exchange for material comfort, she will never have love. The Goddess smiles the most chilling smile as she says it, and Chen Kaige insisted on the smile during filming in order to produce that unsettling contrast of a chilling curse delivered benignly. That’s painstaking micromanagement but there’s a point to it since it furthers the plot and atmosphere.
I suppose my dissatisfaction with The Banquet also stems from me having seen a little too much of Zhang Ziyi on the big screen lately. Yes, she’s incredibly popular, and not too bad an actress, but after Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Musa, Memoirs of a Geisha, and now The Banquet, I’m looking forward to seeing some fresh new faces on the screen the next time round. 2001’s Musa actually parallels 2003’s Warriors of Heaven and Earth plotwise but I found the latter much easier to watch, largely because Vicki Zhao made for a much more likeable female lead than Zhang Ziyi.
I wonder how I’ll find the latest period-type movie to hit the big screen, Zhang Yimou’s Curse of the Golden Flower, starring the wonderfully inscrutable Chow Yun Fat and the (to me) equally inscrutable Gong Li. We’ll find out soon enough.
The Zoukout party proper wasn’t the really the highlight of last night. It was the booze starting from 5pm. Here’s a shot of the stash this morning, after we’d been through seemingly countless bottles:
Breakfast at the roof of the hotel the morning after was better than I expected though. It’s darn near miraculous that I’m not a heck of a lot more hung over, but I guess gentle sights like this are part of the reason:
It’s been said that the measure of a great song is how good it sounds when played unplugged - just a voice and an accompanying instrument. I’m a huge fan of many kinds of electronic music that simply can’t be translated into unplugged performances, so in those cases the yardstick doesn’t apply. Midge Ure’s “Breathe”, however, always struck me as a wonderful song that could theoretically be played unplugged, but probably wouldn’t sound good. Well, I was wrong. Breathe to make me breathe…
[13:18] lacrimosae: bro u and i….. are drowning. slowly but surely. sinking feet first into a lake of honey
[13:18] me: yes
[13:18] lacrimosae: and loving every second
A friend told me recently that teachers are the horniest creatures around. My instinct was to laugh and wave away such a gross generalisation. I mean, I have several teacher friends who don’t look particularly like nymphos of satyrs (though how can one tell).
Look at these two good friends of mine, who work in the education industry. A nice, normal-looking couple. Sure, the guy is a hellrider on his motorcycle, but that doesn’t say anything. Ah well, I’ll never know.
Anyhow, it was good catching up with this couple since I hadn’t seen them in two months. They bought me dinner at the Mouth Restaurant at Chinatown Point in gratitude for helping them out with a new motorcycle purchase. The food was quite nice, though I was there to catch up, not to eat. Those two look exactly the same. They said I’ve lost a bit of weight though, heh.
Later that night, I checked out a really nice place I’ve been curious about. Stars-in-her-eyes has much nicer pictures of the evening since she has a real camera, but I did manage to snap this on my Sony Ericsson K800. Definitely worth going back.
Last Friday, I was on top of the world. Well, on top of Singapore, anyway, literally. Friends and I decided to check out a bar we hadn’t been to before, which has an undeniably breathtaking view of the city spread out below. A glassblower friend suggested the place because she thought it was nice and quiet. Nothing could’ve been further from the truth. Really bad music combined with a group of unattractive-looking people trying to get it on made my eyes, ears and brain ache.
To be fair, people have a right to do piglet dances on the dance floor while rubbing against each other, and if I didn’t like it, I could leave. Well, the problem was we couldn’t leave straight away because we were there partly to show a Japanese friend the view.
He seemed to be noticeably less distraught than the rest of us. Must’ve been the tourist perspective - everything’s an interesting curiosity.
But we did eventually escape to have supper with Stars-in-her-eyes at the prata joint next to Fong Seng (can never remember the name). All’s well that ends well!
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. - TS Eliot, “Little Gidding”
This is a pretty popular (and therefore abused) stanza of poetry. It’s so popular that I first came across it printed on a T-shirt someone bought me when I was 12. I keep coming back to these four lines over the years, and it’s interesting to chart how my perspective has changed. The words stay constant, but the meaning has morphed in sync with life’s ravellings and unravellings.
It used to evoke raw potential, and teased my mind about revelations that would visit me in the amorphous future. Then I munched on life a bit, and life munched on me too, making me feel more ambivalent towards all this stuff about exploring. Fast forward to today, and here I am, looking at the words again.
Eliot’s sentiments are definitely clearer now after looking at the same old things through different philosophical lenses. Perception is never about a thing in itself - brute objects interacting with the world according to laws of physics. Instead, we bring meaning with us. As John Milton’s devil is Hell incarnate in the sense of bringing his pain around with him, even when he’s outside Hell, so we carry our versions of the world in our heads.
But beyond the main sentiments, a newfound revelation is the importance of opportunity. My friends and I have noticed how opportunity has a tendency of striking from the past. We’ve bumped into old contacts, friends, etc, that we never thought we’d meet again, and the circumstances of revisiting these links to our past have been interesting, to say the least. My initial reaction to relationships and choices coming full circle was that life has a twisted sense of humour, but after musing on it, it seems pretty obvious that prior connections would spawn current ones. But the real puzzler is how often old connections turn out to be the right connections for present situations. Why should length of acquaintance make an older contact more suitable than a new one? If they’re right for the job, then they’re right for the job, even if you’ve only know them for a day! But it hasn’t turned out that way, and I’m not sure why.
Being Warm passed me this really interesting article about the probability of finding true love. The gist that I got from it is that you need to keep yourself open to opportunity because knowing what you want is not enough.
…edging away from the kind of people who are the current focus of your affections (in the hope that, say, a Florentine millionaire-poet-ski champion will come knocking at your door) makes the chance of success drop away much more quickly than it would for normally distributed phenomena.
This implies that your best chances come from seeking out and sustaining friendships with the people you already like most, rather than devoting too much time to the exotic alternatives. Rare things become near-impossible once you compound their rarity - say, by buying a lottery ticket only on your birthday.
So what’s one to do? Keep yourself open to fortune but there’s no need to make a contrived effort. Then, you filter the people you meet through the sieve of your personal standards. Keep it up, and maybe you’ll get lucky. Let me know if this works for any of you.
VERSUS 
