Wednesday, December 22, 2004

The Malady of Beauty

The Malady of Beauty

Scream,
that which is the lingua franca
of our engulfing times.
The fairy's trail that has runaway
in a mortal flee from realities
shattered, there is,
a crown of daisies
that used to sit so high
on the throne, now of
majestic misunderstandings and common misapprehensions.

Our epidemic of wanton feelings,
gives birth to a consumption by a tempest of love-
such unseasonable emotions
could be the elixir we are all
in vain for.

This Swiftian dusk that descends
like a curtain of water
drawn up by the beams of the sun
leaves behind the solitude rocks.
Then the cliff that protrudes
becomes all too foreign to this naked landscape of beauty,
questioning its purpose of being
to decide eventually that maybe
in existing,
is reason enough.

It then comes to light that
the ugliness of self,
appears in the most affected of countenance.
Almost like the dust that is never allowed to settle,
tossing forever in a whirlwind,
that could never constitute
the sanctity
and religion of my mind.

The precocious apparatus of hate
is weaving in to catch up with this
maturing of experiences
and the raptures of memory
all fleeting and rushing by
with the aplomb of a quixotic love
never meant to last.

In one disappointing sweep
the flux of life reverses,
the unsketching of the imperfections
on that clean slate of paper.
Gradually we come to realize
the beginning is what we have been working towards
all this while.

We might as well cut off the bridge
dangling ever so precariously
like the only ligament left
threading your sympathy
to the hollow chambers of
those who really it.

The symptoms of our times,
the blots of red punctuated by the shrill
of the glorious cannon,
coupled with the nameless grenade
heralding that
the malady of our beauties
have thus been perfected.

_________________

Writer’s Commentary

There is, around us, a certain sort of a ubiquitous obsession with hate and revenge- to get that person down when the tables are turned against you, this need to rise above this subordination of pride and being. This leads to an inevitable state of the foreverness of tit-for-tat and the preoccupation in pushing people down to where they supposedly belong. Sadly, this leads to a malady of beauty, a black blot on a white sheet of paper which we were all born with.

Then we are left with screams, becoming the lingua franca of our existence because normal linguistic interactions are not valued any more. We need to scream to get our point across or the pain that has become such a trend only compels us to scream out loud. Anything that is beautiful will be hopelessly shattered, like a beautiful crown of daisies must succumb to our throne of ‘majestic misunderstandings and common misapprehensions’.

Our lack of true feelings to one another leads to this epidemic of feelings and the seething away of sympathy that is so in need but always so precariously available. The trendiness of the double entrendre leads to the facades being made and we are blinded by what could be real. So many of us yearn for a love everlasting, the grandest of love that would subsume us and take us away to a world separate from the rest. However a catch-22 situation arises whereby in wanting this kind of love, we are also inherently aware that our cynicism is the largest hindrance that leads to unnecessary suspicion and needless procrastination- in the end, a huge red-light to the ‘tempest of love’ that could actually be possible without these things factoring in.

Sometimes, simplicity is really a rarity, a concept that has much been overlooked. In existence alone, there is beauty and the age of innocence is a time we can only hope for- untainted purity that spells the displacement of ugliness, hate and the adversaries of any forms of human love and compassion. It is thus sad if we allowed our memory to rapture, our experiences to mature into a shape and form we cannot recognize, for these are the very ingredients that is the bedrock of our sense of being.

Finally there had been so much blood shed for senseless agendas that could be much averted. The dust is never allowed to settle because there is always incessant fighting and unquenchable hate that could catch up with everything beautiful that we hold so dear to our hearts. And at the end of it all, if this ‘apparatus of hate’ is allowed to take on a life of its own, this will be the full stop to the development of anything beautiful and the unstoppable perfection of the malady of beauty.

Saturday, October 09, 2004

Potluck of Intellectual Failings

In many ways, education is one thing we people thank whatever Gods we worship for. It makes us realises our rights, makes us think, allows us to climb whatever ladders with facilitation and ease and essentially makes us smarter. That's what WE like to think, like making hypotheses in a clean-slated world with no variables and exceptions.

But life presents us with diversity, colour and splashes of exceptions. I came into close contact with instances where the above doesn't stand true. I must say I am already situated in a very intellectually insulated environment where I don't quite come into contact, regrettably, with a lot of people not presented with education opportunities that are available to myself. But STILL i'm proven wrong, with regards to my widely-accepted supposition right at the beginning of this entry. With each incident I am about to relate, I find myself needing less and less explanation because honestly, intellectual failings are so plain and well, unchallenging.

Incident 1:
-'Eggs are not poultry, only the real chicken is.'
-(overhearing, decides to correct this heinous misstatement) 'Rubbish, eggs are dairy.'

And this is overheard straight from the premier law faculty here. Sue me.

Incident(s) 2:

And this is from a friend's beau, we went to the same junior college, supposedly the top one here and this is the crystallization of her intellectual journey, 12 years at the top of the academic platform-

http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=DAPHNEnZHUANG
(I realise by this unauthorised publication I might be infringing upon some privacy laws but I think I would be committing the even more serious crime of infringing upon the laws of intellectual guardiancy should I NOT release this).

Read and one will find immense number of classic examples of the point I want to make. I think no more words need to be said.

('I threw my armani cashmere jacket into the dryer in high heat thinking it would dry faster that way. IT frigging shrank. Fuck..'-> oh Please allow me to laugh myself to my grave)

Incident 3:

Need I say more? A picture sometimes is really worth that thousand unspoken words.



He would definitely go for D. But that's just my take, together with probably 4 billion other people.

This man is the most powerful man in the world, boy are we in good hands.

Friday, October 01, 2004

Criminal Fun Incorporated


The Great Gatsby 2004: the sass of youth in a trance-house age

Thursday, September 30, 2004

The Difference with God

as i exited the cinema after 'Saved!' today, there are certain things i can't help wonder and ponder. one thing said particularly stuck in my mind for some while- 'if God made us all so different, then why do we all want to be the same?' same, as being referring to we want to stick by the ten commandents, the same moral code, the same resulting behaviour and worse of all, expecting people to be assimilated into this generic 'sameness'. and for disclaimer and indemnity purposes, this is meant for agnostic or semi-believers who can stand the idea of challenging the basis of Christianity, it will definitely turn the guts of all atheists and evangelists alike, now that's a rare occasion that these 2 groups of people could agree on something.

'if God made us so different'. well from last i heard from someone, it's not all that really. It's God's challenge for an individual gone awry or further from the Light into the darkness. So if u're a born slut, u're challenged to be asexual; if u're homosexual, u're challenged to see the innate beauties of the other sex's genitals (i would think it's all about the sex right?); if u're fat, u're challenged to go on a diet without killing yourself; if u're ugly, then tough. so isn't that back to that disgusting theory where in the end, we must be that same mould of human being- sacrosanct, nun-like, straight or only loving plants, any other shape other than being fat, and beautiful (or telling yourself everyday that you are, when you really are not). just imagine a world of homogenous people, like mirrors of yourself all around. ok image not strong enough? go clubbing and you trying to pick someone up and obviously u have to quality check those around first and you only find yourself. scary, it has to be. But this situation would certainly find fans in Narcissists and megalomanics alike.

diversity is a wonderful thing. i would want to believe that God or whoever's having the ultimate remote control wants this world to be that. or how else would there be enough space in heaven? or that hedonism is more fun? or that the beautiful ones know that they are?it is the basis that hierarchies are derived, elitism finds joy in, and vices such as envy and greed have foundations in. so indirectly it's almost God's fault that these things come about? Encourage differences, diversity and pop goes the weasel alright. and on a dimmer note, i wonder who are the people that really want to perpetuate and is in support of the furtherance of this concept called diversity? (ans: the rich, the beautiful and from the way i see it, certainly not the damned)

in which ever ways the movie can be seen as a forgettable teen flick, there are still certain commendable things about this film. The most striking being that it's brave enough to set the basis of the entire film of probably the most taboo topic in evangelical America, next to maybe 'Gulf War II was started purely out of the idiocy of our President'. It goes beyond the guilded fences of Christianity might not be the best bedrock of one's existence. It can be self-confidence, self-belief and the power of human love and dreams. Another thing that was pretty cool was the fact that it allowed Americans to see how religion can actually destroy and ironically bud evil into the staunchest of them. Ultimately maybe things need to be taken with a pinch of salt and in moderation.

The scene that could enunciate all this encapsulatingly well is when Hilary Faye threw her bible at Mary and blurped, "I'm [fucking] filled with God's love". And Mary quipped, "so this is a weapon now?"

ha, bible-throwing.

Friday, September 24, 2004

Indie Glam

there are some things around that are just stylistically impossible for things we know to be mundane and 'everyday'. But chic just gets its way around and presents to us things out of the realm of artful possibility (think industrial glam and dirty chic). But this is too much really:




it is simply, ladies and gentleman, a shoetree.

i mean it's like manolo (yep, he's the designer) saying use this horn, buy some good shoes to go. everything screams style and chic. the dilemma now being should i buy it just for its aesthetic purpose or because it can be functional (don't be silly now). shoehorn made it the shape of an impossible stiletto, who would have thought of that? i'm railing now, i really should keep my cool.

*gawk*

Thursday, September 23, 2004


What a welcome..(Prague review coming up)

Saturday, September 18, 2004

Life's Surrealism

it's an unfamiliar sense of surrealism that engulfed me when i realised that the plane had landed, ever so safely, at Heathrow airport: the same airport that had welcomed me just 3 months ago. and all around, even on my tube journey to Canary Wharf this feeling still latched on like a woodpecker to a tree. like Ealing, Hammersmith, people stiffing their upper lips ever so refinedly and that fall weather that is all alien to me, that cotton still works and wool too hot. it's perfect, albeit the wind chilled me somewhat but never too badly.

the flight was tolerable i suppose. food was conceptualised by gordon ramsay of London (i chose that word cos i hardly thinks that he manually prepared ALL the bloody meal sets for everyone), managed to chat up two people next to me and service was great, considering i knew one of the stewards and he presented me with a pass that had me zoom past the immigration lines faster than the Russians can say 'nyet'. well nearly there. and the tube ride was absolutely sufferable, if it was summer and the train was choked with humidity and stenches of overworked sweat glands then it would be an entirely different story.

i'm getting used to the fact that i'm in London now. and then moving along to another part of Europe. i'm grateful mainly and contended with what i'm blessed with.

but suckers ya all..haha. I AM in london.

Thursday, September 16, 2004

Par l'avion

As i do my inadvertent packing for yet another trip I come to confirm my love for flights, the longer the better. It gets worrying though that i come to a verge whereby i feel the need to actually plan what i want to accomplish on the relatively long flight. so 13 hrs can get me either a real good sleep, arriving at Heathrow impossibly fresh or tying up the pain-in-the-arse assignment so that i will not come back with an impossibly unmanageable post-vacation blues or indulge in the fine realm of Krisworld that is almost impossible to go missing it by. so see what i mean? no itinerary, everything will be as messed up as Ek's hair.

so now, of german riesling and frank kafka, i bid adieu ever so temporally to all those out there who had wish me well. one week!

Sunday, September 12, 2004

Not fated

it simply irritates the daylight out of me. 'Maybe it's all not fated', 'let fate decide' or 'fate doesn't want this to happen'. apart from the fact that i am a little more irritable nowadays i think that's just unaccomodateable in this world where already so many things are uncertain and arbitrary. ain't one suppose to grab fate by the neck and shake it up and tell it who the boss here is? ain't one supposed to get one's life sorted out and not resort to dismissive overtones or rejective stances when life gets tough? ain't it just responsible not to leave things to an absolutely unknown, completely unestablished concept that might just all be downright romantic fluff (please do not start with me on religion)?

yes that's always the unexplained and things i believe that should be left that way. but when things go tough or inconvenient, i just don't think one should shaft these untimely inconveniences to the hands of well..nothingness. in anyways i think it could all be better (albeit not euphemistically) if one puts it as 'i tried but i don't foresee a desireable outcome' or 'time will tell'. (yes for those discerning readers and my hopefully discerning conscience, the last was purely for ironic effect).

fate can't decide when one should pursue someone. fate does not decide when things go wrong. you pursue, you fix things, you prevent things from developing into the phase where they need fixing, you make it happen or not happen and at the end of it all, u decide. But at the onset of things if things don't seem to go right, then i suppose it must be that bigger, probably fluffed-up thing called fate that must be in force, that it could not have meant to be when all things are against you. then again, when one doesn't try, how does one come to the conclusion that it's not going to work? how much is pride worth anyways?

a facade of strength you say? well i refuse to relent to reality and start sighing with this thing called fate, so in any case anything fails, or anything that i said backfires, it's just God's will. shalom.

Thursday, September 09, 2004

Looking Down from the Offices of Elitism

the title holds much truth (please don't glare). just need to officially record here that Wong Partnership has probably the best view of a law firm here. even a random window has a full bird's eye view of the whole harbour, and those pokey things we like to call the Esplanade Theatres. big perk to work there. Elitism sure finds its way to the nicest and the best.

Monday, September 06, 2004

Quotient of Reel and Real Intelligence

channel surfing does bring about serendipitous finds sometimes. this is how i chanced upon the movie 'IQ' on a supposedly crap-daytime TV timeslot. and i assure you it's most aptly named.

it's a really smart movie.i just felt the necessary impulse to put all these witty yet fused with that slight notion of pop culture kind of quotes down. never know when they might come into good use because accident's don't happen. what accidents are to the general population is the product of the subconscious wanting not to believe in the series of events coming together to result in an incident that does not seem to fit into the quantum of the time and space that they are situated in. so thus there seems to be some truth in these Freudian quips huh.

1.
Boris Podolsky: James! How's the rat business?
James Moreland : Well, actually it's mostly students I'm experimenting on now.
Kurt Godel: My God, the mazes must be enormous.

2.
Albert Einstein: Are you thinking what I am thinking?
Ed Walters: Well what would be the odds of that happening?

3.
Bob Rosetti: You're Albert Einstein!
Albert Einstein : Yes
Rosetti : E equals M C squared!
Albert Einstein : [laughs] I hope so.

4. (and my personal fav)
Kurt Godel: I would rather be an optimist and a fool than a pessimist and be right.


Saturday, September 04, 2004

Puke and bad acting

well both literally happened but not with one incident, although it does quite aptly go together. i'm still reeling from the actual belief that i caught 'A Cinderalle Story' starring Hilary Duff when i don't even adore her and am convinced without reading any sort of reviews or hearsay that it's gonna be, well, not quite the cinematic pleasure a self-respecting movie-goer would expect. but the point is i was under duress and undue influence and that's my defence in case anyone finds out i watched it.

so where do i start? the running amock of cliches that just screams 'please kill me' or the real one emotion face of the male lead whom i sincerely don't care to remember his name for. and who's he kidding, being that scrawny, poster-boy, trying to act out as a football captain? i need FAR more drinks than that. anyhow, hilary duff was alright in that teen flick, i'm-just-in-this-movie-for-exposure sort of way. the script just hollers the fact that it's trying to be smart but trying being the operative word. Like when Hilary's best friend was driving like a female octogenarian, she quipped 'I'm looking for the Fast and the Furious, not Driving Miss Daisy'. yes, that was sheer touche. and i must have mentioned the one-emotion, i'm-definitely-cool-but-trying-to-tone-it-down male lead which you wouldn't miss. i think that was a league of humour in its own right. but oh well, cynicism and pedantic picking aside, it's a feel good movie. one comes out feeling saturated with all the cliches that could possibly be conjured up in the world and getting killed by the faux pas romance between the leads that clearly had little chemistry to begin with, it's easy on the brains. so i guess it's all back to TGIF.

and the puke portion has the dubious honour of naming my darling Shu Hsien as its main perpetuator. she sure did 'perpetuate' a ridiculous amount of vomit. that was some way to usher in the weekend huh? but i guess it's all in the festive spirit of needing to feel relaxed for a birthday party for a good friend and how can one refuse a drink from the most benigned-intention of birthday girls? it's a first for Hsien and i'm rather positive that she might not be repeating her vomitus act anytime soon.

a blast of ways to welcome the much needed weekend.

Wednesday, September 01, 2004

In the violence of the hour

should i be published, i think i'll bename my anthology 'In the Violence of the Hour'. I like the certain surge and that momentum in that phrase, almost a sort of carpe diem existence and most certainly encapsulating my quasi-existentalist beliefs that life should be lived out to the most- no regrets and certainly no sorrowful reflections or damnable retrospections. 'Violence' is this virulence of cathartic expression to me, the enmeshing of pathos, anger and forceful execution. It reminds me of (somewhat) Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading. Can't fully rationalise why that's the case (apart from the obvious actual violence involved) so i'll just leave it to the imagination of the people who's familiar with the text.

i guess it also shows my working process through it all, that i write only when i'm inspired which also incidentally reflects the truest form of my emotions at that time. And as with violence leaving a permanent mark, etched onto the minds of those who experienced it, i write because only words, writings, defy the concept of time. Only they taste perennity, become time-in memorial, leaving permanent marks on people who feel them and taste them with their senses. Another theorem i adhere to pops up: power begets power, money begets money and creativity begets creativity. Then one can say elitism is on perpetual roll. Hallelujah.

i'm veering. so that's that and in this hour, my schedule will turn violent should i not go back to my books. comments welcome as to mon titre d'anthologie .

Tuesday, August 31, 2004

Olympics

it's strange that this sense of loss pervades when the 28th Olympiad closed just a day ago. it's not that i smashed on my face while hurdling or that i splashed spectacularly while diving to garner a flat zero or that my family will be entirely executed should i not get a medal for my government. i think it's an amalgamation of the intense emotions that's being shown while all these are going on. the disappointment, the ecstatic joy, the tears and the arms thrown freely in air, in victory of course. that spirit it has to be when all one has put in, either pays off on the highest podium of sports or being let-down drastically when all that the athlete has done was to pour in his best. and plus it's 16 days of these emotions that's being brought up to stage over and over again that has its effect. so until 4 years later I guess i have to make do with the completely uplifting, entirely inspirational environment i'm in. tough.

interesting trivia du jour: the word 'personne' in French or person in English is actually negative in itself. Par exemple: Je ne vois personne, absolutely displacing the use of pas when negation is being employed in French. So does that make the French misanthropes?Or why would they in any common sort of sense negatify the whole concept of the 'person'?Just random thinking but it did catch me by utter surprise that there are words in French, especially this one, that contains the whole idea of negation.

August's End

At August's End we have come to engrave onto my time a new page of recorded history that i call mine. A sketchy, debonair atmosphere sometimes staunched by the presence of this unaccomodating humidity around. A discussion of minds, put down in the most laudable of all possible forms of communication. It shall be honest, diligent, fusion of dreamlike beauty with the ugly head of reality and be the fundamental touchstone of this existence we like to term it life. So without too much of the relation of modern-day gloom and the drone of habitual routines for the moment, the sash is cut and my blog (in want of a more archaic and classical mode of expression) shall be set in motion.