xiii

War at a distance has become the essential feature for all of us who live in comfortable first-world nation states. We read about the daily tragedies of Iraq, are reminded of the genocides in Africa, try to untangle the recent histories of the Central Europe and reflect on what things would be like if war came home. I've always been struck by that: "What if war came home?" One of the things I most vividly remember was when I was 8 and saw something in the paper about either the Vietnamese or the Khmer Rouge and being seized with an immediate anxiety. What if I got caught in a war? War at a distance but always already an unchanging reality.

Hearts and Minds is a war film. A war documentary shot in the 1975 just when the Vietnam War was winding down. It features a relatively small number of persons and key-players who are interviewed and in comparison to Stanley Karnow's epic documentary, Vietnam: A Television History (side note -- THIS is available in its entirety in the Singapore NLB system --apparently it runs slightly over 11 hours long but it certainly doesn't seem that long when one gets immersed in the tapes), its scope is definitely limited. Also, its format seems rather straight forward, edit talking heads with shots of the war and you have a take on Vietnam. However, Hearts and Minds certainly is a lot more personal in its approach. Interviewing Vietnamese farmers who have just gotten their homes blown apart, who have lost children; an American deserter who has decided to return because he can't go on living "underground"; Daniel Ellsberg who breaks down as he recounts the shooting of RFK; the American GI who is with a Vietnamese girl, who says into the camera, "If my girl back home could see me now ...": the war geographically, distant, is brought home.

And the war distant in time is brought into the present as well. One of the ex-soldiers being interviewed, a funny jive talking, quick-witted, filthy-mouthed Afro-American with a 'Fro, who talks about his experiences. Who can joke about using a dead comrade as a shield when American planes napalm HIS position. Who can joke about running through his napalmed position without his pants on because they get burned up, "How do you fight a war without your drawers!" Who lives with the war everyday, because as the camera pulls away from the stream of his commentary, we realize he doesn't have an arm anymore, doesn't have a leg. The destruction of war, lingers, is always with us.

xii - 2 and 3

Two truths are told ...

Finished watching the first Ingmar Bergman trilogy which starts with Through a Glass Darkly today. The next two installments are Winter Light and The Silence. It's not a trilogy in the same way that we think of Star Wars as a trilogy or the Terminator movies being related to each other sequentially. It doesn't even make the loose connections that Kevin Smith's "New Jersey" films make, with their strange "interconnectedness" and with, of course, Jay and Silent Bob ... But it's a trilogy at that deep level of existential questioning, on the level of "where is God in all this"? And perhaps that is where ALL connections, if we believe in connections, find some basis, in some kind of movement toward or away Presence and Being.

The second film in the trilogy, Winter Light, is the most overtly "christian" or religious of the three. It centers on a pastor of a small village being himself unable to work out any firm belief in his God. He has a strained relationship with his mistress (or maybe we should call her his girlfriend since his wife IS dead ... but do pastors have mistresses or girlfriends ?) and is unable to provide counsel to a parishoner in distress. All this in the bleak northern Swedish winter. All this in the cramped confines of a tiny parish church with it's oppressive low ceilings and uncomfortable wooden pews.

But the open landscape provides no relief either. In one of the most powerful scenes of the film, when the pastor has to attend to a death, the setting is without respite. The roaring river muffling out any sounds of human interaction and activity; relations are reduced to a mimed sequence of polite gesturing. But it isn't because these characters have nothing to say. No, instead, WE are just never positioned to hear it. Like a distant God, who sees moving mumbling lips in prayer, trembling tired knees, strained necks and bowed heads, but never hearing humanity.

The Silence was, in my opinion, the most artistically complex of the three. A consistent choice in staging these films -- the pared down cast with only about four characters interacting with each other. The Slience takes this further by putting a young boy, his mother and his aunt in hotel, surrounded by complete strangers, who don't speak the same language as they do. In fact, Bergman was playing a strange game with this one. I don't think it's even a REAL language that the rest of the people in the film speak -- even the shots of the newspaper isn't in any recognizable European language. So a little boy wandering about the ornate interiors, playing make believe games to entertain himself, while his mother has affairs and his aunt wastes away. A strained silence, engulfs the film because there is so little dialogue.

The Silence was beautifully shot, with amazing lighting effects and camera angles. With mirrors playing off each other, smoke filled sillouettes, lone figures starkly placed against thick rich interiors, impossible closeups, partial objects -- fingers, glass, table top, water -- mingling. Atmosphere, creating a terrible nauseating implosion. Very much like Last Year at Marienbad but looser.




All this was heavy stuff. Maybe I'll take a break from Bergman tommorrow and watch something else.

xii What's past's Prelude

I'll admit that the viewing I've been doing the past couple of days has been leading up to my proposed project-- to get acquainted with Ingmar Bergman's films.

Till today, the only Bergman film that I've watched (and owned, this being my second DVD purchase, Farewell to my Concubine being the first) was The Seventh Seal. I've always liked it. It's harsh cinematography -- stylized symbolic moments -- against other relatively naturalistic episodes. A true mingling of high and low in the dance of death.

So I began today, to explore Bergman, to know him better. And I thought I'd look at something from around the same time as The Seventh Seal.

What strikes a dweller of the tropics is the strange eternal daylight of Through a Glass Darkly. It's supposed to be night but these are the Northernmost lattitudes, where it is almost always sun in the summer. The austere setting -- a scenic rocky coast where a lone rural holiday retreat -- evokes that realm of the outside. Outside what? An exteriority, sky and sea reflecting clouds, that cannot be placed within. In this "outside" of surfaces, Bergman delves into the heart of existential angst -- Where is God?

It might seem silly for a film to so overtly deal with an agnostic nightmare. Afterall, it was/is post-45 and God is Dead. But IS God Dead? The question must be asked both ways. We often think of the consequences of a Dead God. But what if God is not Dead, what if he is alive and well, and waiting to judge, waiting, like a spider (and this is the protagonist's conclusion) to enter one's body but then to not enter. To see the Face of God and then to realize one's God is not the God you grew up struggling with. A summer retreat. A writer, his two children, his son-in-law. One of his children, afflicted with a mental illness. The hypocrisy that emerges from the best of intentions. Yet all drawn together wondering Where IS God? A writer who WILL use the degeneration of his daughter's mind as fodder for his next novel. A husband unable to penetrate the decaying mind of his wife.

A younger brother -- and this isn't clear but I think it happens -- who finds himself incestuously involved with his sister, in the moment of her mania. Where is God in this?

To the cannibalized daughter, the impenetrable wife, the desiring sister, God is in the slit behind the wallpaper in the mildewed room on the top floor of the house. The voices draw her there and there she sees the face of God. God is a spider.

And this is a beginning. It's part of a trilogy that Bergman put out in which he thinks about God. And it's supposed to be the affirmative beginning ...

xi

Friday: Another double feature day
I should actually state, for the record that the place I've been renting these videos from is called "Kim's". They've got a store right outside Columbia, at about 114th Street, next to the NYPL. They've also got a stores down in the East Village and West Village. Anyway, I really like the store cause it has everything strange and avant garde, as well as commercial box office successes. I could spend an entire year borrowing stuff that I want to watch everyday and there would still be more. Anyway, I also like the fact that it's relatively cheap - a buck twenty five if you borrow and return on the same day, and only a buck if what you want to watch happens to be a "pick". This of course, can't compare to one of the best things that ever happened to Singapore -- the Library at the Esplanade-- where lots of great stuff can be got for a low low annual fee.

Which brings me to Friday's selections. The first thing I watched was The Dark Crystal. It was a "staff pick" so I decided to get it. Some background: I've got fond memories of this film because 1. It was the only thing I'd watch over and over whenever I went to my Dad's place, while growing up, 2. The new Agey thing about Evil-Good being part of the same plane of existence always intrigued me as a powerful narrative trick. And of course 3. I've always like the Muppets and Jim Henson and Frank Oz go all out in this one.

Watching it after what must be about 15 years (?), I realized how much one's tastes and opinions are shaped by the specific mode of consumption. Not that I have particularly fond memories of hanging out at my Dad's place. There was nothing to do except to take in the extremely neat living room and lounge on the fresh Ikea furniture. Nothing to do except bemoan the fact that he didn't own books, had only one other silly video -- Victor/Victoria -- and a bunch of Witney Houston CDs. Nothing to do by play Donkey Kong Jr. on an old Nitendo handheld -- the only game that I've managed to run the scores right round the hundreds and back to zero. So The Dark Crystal was something to watch. Watching it yesterday was painful. It's really slow: it doesn't help that it's life-sized puppets or men in suits playing to roles (making them clumsy and awkward), it's also about a dying planent, making things deliberately slow. I guess I've been spoilt by jump cut editing and a brisk storyline.

The other thing I borrowed in my trip "down amnesia lane", was Amadeus. I've had fond memories of the film ever since I watched it as a kid. It was made in 1984 so I must have seen it around the same time as I was stuck with The Dark Crystal. I even had a pirated copy of the soundtrack on tape. Must have watched its irreverance on the cusp of telling my psychotic piano teacher that enough was enough and not touching the piano for the next 5 years. Anyway, this trip was much more rewarding. Tom Hulce and F Murray Abraham were just brilliant in counterpoint and it's so brilliantly campy I started to wonder what I saw in it as an eleven year old. There IS a tremendous amount of dialogue that I find wickedly funny now that I couldn't possibly have appreciated then. I guess the fact of the genius that never gets his due because he can't play the politics of court and the tremendously insecurity of Salieri in the face of Mozart's raw musical genius was what drew me in. So -- 1 out of 2 is not bad when one reaches back to a strange time.

Don't you just love those old movie posters that used to be hand painted ...

x

Another Movie Day but the review is a hang over from what I didn't get to yesterday.
Along with Rashomon, I watched the first three parts of Krzysztof Kieslowski's 10-part "Decalogue". What first attracted me to checking him out was a strange faint memory of watching "Blue", part of the "Three Colors" trilogy made for France's Bi-centennial celebrations -- a polish man making French films ... -- and the fact that each story in the "Decalogue" revolves around each of the Ten-Commandments.
But only obliquely. The story that I enjoyed most yesterday, though enjoyment should perhaps be replaced with appreciated, because of emotional resonance, was the second one, "Thou shalt not take the Lord's name in vain". A old old doctor and his relationship with his patient's wife. A complicated affair but he swears, and lies and his patient's condition, tangling up the lady's motives and plans, and heartaches. Everything austere, as I like my films, everything concrete in Polish HDBs. Every film with a scene where the stove must be lit, with matches, without which there would be no hot water, for a bath, for a tea, for coffee.
Today, two more films. I first watched "The Last Temptation of Christ". I must admit I watched it because i) Scorsese can do no wrong ii) it's a been banned from my viewing most of my life and I vividly remember having a conversation about this -- why it was banned -- on a school bus just as we passed by the Bishop's house ... Anyway -- Scorsese is better with the grit of streets than the dusty deserts of Palestine and having not yet watched Mel Gibson's ultra-catholic "The Passion", I guess I can't say anything about "realism". But the dream sequences and the strange way that the camera stays on faces much too long, in a disconcerting manner, made it worth watching. I did think it portrayed Christ's humanity very powerfully. William Dafoe made an unlikely Christ but Harvey Kietel's Judas was excellent. And the nice thing about DVD is that the extras confirm certain intuitions -- the shots of Golgatha and the march up the Via Dolorosa, were modelled on Italian / Flemish paintings.

The other film, was Edna's pick. The Grave of the Fireflies [?], a Studio Ghibli Anime. Pretty moving for a cartoon, I guess. Yikes, what lack of commitment in responding to a film!

ix

If part of the goal of this life were to life memory and allow the ramifications of meandering, half-remembered flashbacks to dictate the moral centeredness or valuation of belief, how then does the fact that we always remember inaccurately affect moral identity?

Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon examines, like Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, dives deep into the subject of memory. But unlike the playful teasing non-event that "Rosebud" is (or is it a transcendent signifier, for if I remember correctly the NAME on the first sled that the young Kane holds is NOT "Rosebud" -- if I remember correctly ...), Rashomon works out morality against memory, a difficult pairing indeed. For one is fickle, interior and composed of image and the other is spoken, acted upon, enacted.

Rashomon is essentially a story told over and over. A rogue Samurai/Bandit, played by that Kurosawa stalwart Toshiro Mifune, played strangely with gasping inexplicable gestures and hysterical laughing, meets a Samurai and his wife along a deserted path in the forest. He wants her. He wants her without having to kill him. So he tricks, tempts and ties the Samurai up, has his way with the Lady and then ... And then is where the film begins. The Samurai is found dead -- that much we know. Everything else in-between, in those moments that films never dwell upon, between the "rape" and the death of the "victim" (not the Lady in this case but the Samurai who has to witness the rape of his wife) is thrown up for grabs. And memory sets to work.

What happens in-between is told first by the Bandit, then by the Lady, then (and this, except in the hands of Kurosawa, would otherwise be cheesy) by the dead Samurai, through a Medium and finally, by a peasant who just so happened to be in the woods. Each telling remembers differently, has the scene replayed in a reconfiguration of details. Was it an epic battle between the Bandit and Samurai? Was it the Lady who wanted her husband dead? Was it all a silly accident? Memory slips according to the position of each subject, according to the unearthed desires that shape the Memory's course.

The Colonization of Cyber Space

Mainstreaming -- themes

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/148949/1/.html

1. control control control
2. compete compete compete
3. Market Market Market

Next time Disappear ...

M's'k Lstnd o'r n o'r to

Here are my current 20 -- I'm stuck in the past, past before my own being somehow--
I play them over and over and over and over and over and over.
Obsessions.

1. Bob Dylan -- Tambourine Man. This being the man's best song almost absolutely. This being that strange morning dawn moment. Blurring into a hazy morning. You need to memorize it and let the strings of these things called words ripple and tingle off your tongue with the Dylan man.

2. The Beatles -- Revolution #1. Ok. There's a cute line about Chairman Mao.

3. U2 -- Pride in the Name of Love. I've put on the version from the Unforgettable Fire and that's the one I listen to. Partly because most of my U2 life I've listened to the Rattle and Hum version. Anyway, there's supposed to be a strange underlying narrative in the play-list -- so read on.

4. Oasis -- Wonderwall. Only because it's such a strange lyric ... a mantra ... like "I would prefer not to."

5. Cat Stevens -- The Wind. A teeeeneeee weeeeeneeeee track. Just over 1.40 min. But the guitar work is great. "But never never never never" Never a more economic use of the word.

6. Sufjan Stevens -- The Dress looks Nice on You. Another one with great guitar work. And the banjo is just so creepy. Almost like a strange acoustic version of an Edge riff ... ringing ringing. I'd put like more Sufjan Stevens tracks but it wouldn't be fair to my more deeply rooted loyalties -- I mean some of these guys have seen me through many a long night.

7. Elton John -- Tiny Dancer. Ok -- I'm not a soundtrack kind of guy. But you need to check out the Almost Famous Soundtrack. Neither do I much like Elton John (only liked him in the Muppet Show doing the whole Crocodile Rock thing). But there's this scene in the bus where Stillwater and their entourage (those divine groupies) are like squabbling and arguing and then everyone's really pissed and sits sullenly. Then they start singing this and there's a strange out of tuneness that brings everyone together. It's a great moment and I'm a sucker for that kind of stuff.

8. Pete Yorn -- Just Another. I really liked his first album. I don't like his other album.

9. The Beatles -- I Will. Another great small track. I've got a theory about the song. They probably worked out a fabulous melody (it's great) and had a nice idea about the IDEAL woman who was a smile in the crowd or passed on the train (the one you'll "wait a lonely lifetime for"). Whatever. Anyway -- they get to the point in the song where they need to write a bridge. And so they throw it away in absolute cliche. Go listen to it. It's an amazing contrast. But reading more pseudo psycho analytically, the song's really about two desires. The beautiful bits are directed to this woman that Paul McCarthny isn't with -- ok -- the ideal woman. Then the bad bridge is the pledge / vow of constancy to one's girlfriend / wife / partner. OOOoooo all that repression going on in 1.44 mins. Read that way, it's great.

10. Janis Joplin -- Me and Bobby McGee. And you thought I wouln't have any women on this list. The narrative of the road trip. The hetero-social transforming into the hetero-sexual. I only came around to listening to Janis Joplin a couple of years ago when I decided the taboos that were placed upon her in my youth were no longer working their spell (she featured prominently in book about satanic music I read and was haunted by when I was a kid). Anyway, her voice just drives you into the raspy keys of energy, like BLUES singing that's good enough for everything else.

11. Ella Fitzgerald -- Cheek to Cheek. Another soundtrack song that I'm a sucker for. The film: The English Patient. And the scene: they're carrying Ralph Fiennes and dancing with the stretcher out in the rain. I might have remembered it wrongly but that whole tension between the paralysed / almost dead corpse and the swing that Ella brings to it. The intimacy of skin against skin against the scorched destruction that has become the non-face of the English Patient. "A plum plum" indeed. I had a version with Ella and Louis Armstrong taking the whole song one after another. That was great. But it was in a hard disk that died.

12. Nina Simone -- I Loves You Porgy. The spare piano and the smokey vocals. Nothing can beat this version.

13. Ella and Louis -- I wants to stay here. Ok I know it's the same song as the Nina Simone track. But the stark contrast in treatments has never ceased to amaze me. Now if only Billie Holiday had a version.

14. Kings of Convenience. I Don't Know What I Can Save You From. Every late night conversation remembered.

15. Lauryn Hill -- To Zion. This is like the most I can go with the whole hip hop thing. It's probably the most touching thing I've heard. From a Mother to a Child.

16. The Fugees -- No Woman No Cry. Must have an example of even more non-standard englishes being the basis of a great song. This is a "remix" thing with Steve Marley. I kinda like it cause it has applications about their new life in NY ("project yard in Brooklyn") coming from Haiti. "Redemption Song" would have made it to the list but I don't have a ready MP3 in my iBook of it.

17. Oasis -- Stand By Me. Best opening line in a song.

18. U2 -- Ultraviolet. Out of all the U2 tracks I could pick why this one? I guess right now it isn't one of those that I'm tired of. The funky guit is great. That's how inane lyrics ("baby baby baby light my way???) are transformed into great anthemic statements. I always think of a dark earthscape (or is it the moon? ultraviolet radiation having wiped out mankind) then riding waves of sound on the layers of distortion and reverb, memories of the past, in "whispers and moans".

19. Oasis -- Champagne Supernova. It's a COSMIC song. Which helps draw the list to a fitting close.

20. U2 -- MLK. Never a better ending.

Maybe I should do another.

Letters to Myself

Against an Analytical Tradition

To analyse it, would seem impossible. Can we, then, by the citation of some of those instances wherein this thing of whiteness -- though for the time either wholly or in great part stripped of all direct associations calculated to impart to it aught fearful, but, nevertheless, is found to exert over us the same sorcery, however modified; -- can we thus hope to light upon some chance clue to conduct us to the hidden cause we seek?
Let us try. But in a matter like this, subtlety appeals to subtlety, and without imagination no man can follow another into these halls.

Melville, Moby Dick, 162.

Letters to Myself

Read it -- in BIG GULPS -- read and move on keep on reading not stopping to read to think but let reading be the lapping thinking thought is reading on

Lines, lapping:

          It is enough Glocester,
to say where it is,
had you also the will to be fine as

          as fine as fins are

                              as firm as

          as firm as a mackerel is
          (fresh out of water)

                              as sure

          as sure as no owner is
          (or he'd be to sea)

                              as vulnerable

          (as vulnerable as I am
          brought home to Main St
          in such negligible company) (MP 24)

The LINE is enlongated by its redoubling turning in on itself. Or is it dense -- repeating its similes as textures? OR is it a schizoid LINE entangled (as a net fishing mackeral fin) pulling in jerks and spasms?

"(W)hat I want to emphasize here, by this emphasis on the typewriter as the personal and instantaneous recorder to the poet's work, is the already projective nature of verse as the sons of Pound and Williams are practicing it. Already they are composing as though verse was to have the reading its writing involved, as though not the eye but the ear was to be its measurer, as though the intervals of its composition could be so carefully put down as to be precisely the intervals of its registration." (Olson, Projective Verse)