On "Home"

They appear like apparitions, dark silhouettes waiting to take shape by the "river that gives us life". The light shimmers but we cannot quite make out gender, race or individual identity. But some things are clear – they are children, young and energetic, and they are Singaporean. Welcome to the latest installment in the Great Singaporean Music Video.

When Dick Lee's homage to being Singaporean, Home, made its debut as a National Day song in 1998, people noted its honesty. It wasn't filled with the jingoistic injunctions ("Stand up, stand up for Singapore!), insecure declarations ("We're going to show the world what Singapore can be"), repetitive and flawed logic ("This is my family, these are my friends/ We are Singapore, Singaporeans") or the bare-faced lies ("Every creed and every race, has its role and has its place/ One people, one nation, one Singapore!") that had characterised previous attempts at the Singapore Song. In fact, it seemed to blend the intensely personal experience of finding one's place in Singapore and being rooted to the Singaporean landscape in a sincere and unobstrusive manner. No one was telling you that you were Singaporean or what you had to do to be one. Instead, there was a recognition that each individual's everyday experiences – knowing every "street and shore" and "winding through my Singapore" – were enough to authenticate one's sense of belonging to the country. This was certainly a Singapore Song with a difference. The fact that Kit Chan – a recording artiste that had made good internationally – sang it, seemed to underscore the fact that at last, here was a Singapore Song that was more than a mere collation of slogans. Finally, Singaporeans thought they had a Song that didn't need to be coerced from the vocal chords of thousands of school children, but one that could be enjoyed and taken seriously, precisely because it didn't take the task of Nation Building too seriously.

So what happens when there hasn't been a memorable Singapore Song in several years? The National Day theme songs in 2002 (We will get there) and 2003 (A place in my heart), were frankly, forgettable. The last decent attempt was Tanya Chua's 2001 composition, Where I Belong. In 2004, the Ministry of Propaganda (also known as the Ministry for Information and the Arts) has decided to take a hint from these dismal failures and forgo commissioning a song this year. But every true-blue Singaporean needs his daily shot of patriotic feeling, especially right around the end of July. The solution? Re-package the most popular Singapore Song in recent history as a feel-good music video. But as with every re-fashioning of art, and especially when the goals are explicitly ideological, much is sacrificed.

"20 Locations"

This is a music video about space. It seems appropriate, given song lyrics which emphasise the location of memory and the feeling of belonging in the tangible personal experience of specific spaces. But while the lyrics appreciate the particular experience of space, the images in the music video exteriorise space, turning it into a bland background of reductive symbols. Primarily, there are the images of water (the Singapore River, reservoirs, a coastal location), sky (poetically bleached from blue to white) and grass, lots of grass. Buildings when they exist, are either idealised fragments (an early shot of the columns at the Supreme Courts, the skyline of the central business district), empty (an interior of an exhibition hall) or too far in the background to be significant (a very distant long shot of HDB flats). Even as the children who are featured in the video go about experiencing Singapore's sights, they are shuttled through unseen streets and rivers in open air buses and boats, the over-arching sky and buildings devoid of life always streaming by in the background. The experience of Singapore's spaces is detached, touristy.

"63 kids"

The stars of this music video are children, school children from several local school choirs. They wear the same clothes, a white traditional-looking top and black trousers. One cannot make out which ethic tradition this type of dressing derives from, except that is vaguely Asian. The video is thus not one that acknowledges the ethnic diversity that is a fact of life in Singapore but a simplistic attempt to over-ride the complexities of culture via the short-cut of dressing everyone uniformly. While portrayals of equality between the races in Singapore are usually conveyed by casting the requisite number of representatives from each of the major races in a music video, this video goes further in attempting to erase every mark of ethnic identity. In fact, this blurring of ethnic identity is so effective that even gender becomes erased. The formless costume obscures, except in close-ups, the distinction between the masculine and feminine as well. The Singapore identity – shapeless, vague, mere voices in harmony.

Noticeably missing from the video are the vast majority of Singaporeans called "Adults". It seems strange, given the accumulated memories of places, experiences and relationships that form the central thrust of the song, that Adults, who would be prime repositories of these memories, are absent. From every single shot. In fact, there seems to be a predominance of the very young: with only fleeting glimpses of teenage students, the images that pre-dominate are of pre-adolescent children. What would they know of Singapore one asks? But it is not what they know about Singapore that is important. It is the message that Singaporeans can be nostalgic about their memories as long as they retain the energy and vigour of youth, regardless of age, that matters. As long as they do not try to actualise their pining for "that" Singapore. "This" Singapore, is a country for the young. The old (regardless of age) burdened by their memories and lived experience, are irrelevant.

"1 mission"

I could suggest that the impending handing over of the State into the hands of new Prime Minister who wants to be seen as a fresh young successor (he turns fifty-two this year) to the dynasty that is now rightfully his, might motivate the political symbolism of youth. I could suggest that the sanitised images of Singapore merely confirm his reputed aversion for the common man. But no one would believe me. Or I could suggest, that old men wait in the shadows of Cabinet, appearing like apparitions, dark silhouettes waiting to take shape by the river that has brought us life ...

The Video

On This Day

I taught two new classes. J one classes whose teacher has just given birth - standing in teacher. I wonder about the whole thing. It's been several years teaching but I think there is something infinitely testing and challenging about having to do a lesson with a new bunch of faces. Anyway -- did a pretty run-o-the-mill video lesson -- nothing sparkly or flashy.

I really feel like I'm never going to leave cleanly. I've just got too much that isn't moving. I've still got holiday marking to do -- yes -- stuff from JUNE, a J one Comprehension, Testimonial to write (those are moving, thank goodness) and a Compre to set for the Prelims. In my time of dying, I will be found with a Red Pen in hand muttering. "Truth ... truth ..."

Wish I could put away most of this and start concentrating on saying goodbye. I suppose the rush of things that I am doing means that I won't really realise that I'm going to miss faces, places and bodies -- until I'm gone. Which, perhaps, isn't too bad after all.

Have you wondered

if you'd take my in your arms and tell me that the charms that flow from your milk-shake hair will envelop us in a mueslin cloth floating free from time? I often think of half-felt impulses, words caught by the web of propriety in my throat -- words stumbling with the lub-dub of my beating heart but becoming formless in the noise of consciousness. Thickly, there is no heart that would bear this. You paddy foot around with strange ideas -- rejecting sanity like the distant barking of dogs or the rattling exhaust pipes ill-fitted on ramshackled lorries.

You looked at the fillets of sting-ray waiting to be barbarqued and wondered about the oozey slime that gives their skin a sheen and makes chomping pleasurable. Cartiledge and bone confused and compressed in my chomping jaws.

Brigning it all back

I attended an inane MOE schoarship presentation today -- not because I was interested in qwhat the minister -- who has never been a teacher -- had to say but because I affirm the life-gigving impulses that all who want to teach have -- inherent in their mixed motives and less than altruistic aims. I nbo longer side the machoine with its impulses and superficial comments abot refoire. I am my own institution -- I believe in the idiosyncratic melange of curiosities that spring from tbe heat oppresssed brain. I pay back every bond in full knowledge of the social condemnation that teachers must sufgfer oince they decide to exist within the System. Once you call yourself an officer of the MOE , a Head of department or a supporter of the initiatives, YOU yes you (not me) are a cog in the system -- a willing servant in the machine -- a willing victim waiting for your moment when you can stop pretending and spring from the camo of being liberal and unmask you puritanical conservativism -- your need for the inante order your need to stuff everyone's loose ends into your own arse, into your own broom of the system never keeps clean but mops up the excrement that flows from the looseness of your ever-refined never tight enough system. Youir speeches about blue skies, innovation and screwing enterprise, are a prize gem gangrened and rotting like an amputated limb that twiches and squirms and will not declare that its end is nigh. I forsake you ALLL -- you screw balls high on political correctness and polite applause -- you believers that you will change the methods of divide and conquer -- there is nothing more. I screw with tartlets and cream, reigning supreme in the dream of vast empty spaces where we are left, finally alone.

I attended a scholarship presentation today. You could tell, from the eager faces and the firm naivete who is gonna be the one screwing my ass in ten years time. Work hard -- you screwers -- then you can tell me to file my ass in your purple and pink folders in tens years time -- and demand that this wine that I consume be bled form me -- like the sap from a trunk that has lost its loins! Now's the time to wonder how archaic memory is when it remain lost and searching in the peninsula of half forgetting and purple fortutide. I am so pissed on red -- I am missing my every other key stroke. I have the precision of a padfoot -- pronged and screwed inside out by and inceipient desire to be different -- an original taste of the never more ever after.

It's the Same

I've shuttling too much in the real world for the longest time.  I've been most pragmatic about what living entails.  I've been paying my dues and concentrating on work, tying up loose ends and making sure things that need to get done are properly done.  In a moment, the rain will stop and I will feel that urge to be unreflective and entirely dull to these pulses that rise.  Perhaps it only takes two moments -- one the immediate present and then the confused step to re-create that moment in writing, circling the moment, turning it on its head, confusing the moment in time, with time.  An observation that grounds writing in the real world:
 
I went to borrow books today -- at the Orchard Library.  Borrowed two Tim O'Brien books -- both on Vietnam.  I must confess that I am often disappointed by the NLB system because books that are supposed to be on the shelf often go missing, are placed in the wrong section or have disintegrated into the pages of more frequently borrowed titles.  Anyway -- I was pleased that I managed to get what I wanted.  There is a dread I feel when I borrows books that has haunted me all my life.  I actually have this strangely silly fear that I won't read borrowed books -- that'll they'll merely exist as mocking reminders of my nobler intensions, on my bookshelf.
 
The shared community of the borrowed book.  Thousands of eyes skim through its words.  All of us borrowing from its moments and curves of language, disengaging in a thousand private moments to lift that mug to your lips or to stare at the next passer-by.  Epiphanies discharged, scattered on a page.  Perhaps.

viii

If Alan Resnais made highly structured and architectonic masterpieces, the other crest of the "new wave" of French film in the 1950s is represented by an almost diametrically opposed spirit. Play, freedom, joy, the apparent lack of continuity and direction, are elements that combine to make films such as Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Godard's Breathless such wonderful experiments in film.

Both are about society's marginalised - a troubled adolescent and an aimless drifter/conman - and both find pleasure in filming the little mundane situations that characterise ordinary existence. Taking out the garbage, running through traffic, struggling to light a cigarette, lazing around in bed. All these moments come together in a patchwork of experience. The camera sometimes lingers on a scene for an extremely long time, capturing conversations and encounters in a single take. We see the awkwardness of characters negotiating cramped spaces, without the cinematic convensions of continuity editing cut or the neatness of framing characters economically within the space. Characters move off the screen but the camera lingers on the empty bed, the deserted stairs, the abandoned window, hoping that our protagonists will return, so that it can resume its voyeuristic appraisal of what it means to be human, at the fringes of societal convention.

And what chracterisation and acting. The irrepressible character Antoine Daniol, who Truffaut felt was such a wonderful creation that he consistenly returned him throughout his film making career. The strange combination of a suave, reckless but increasingly alientated and desperate French con-man with a hesitant American student speaking stilted French, Godard's early recognition of a post-war clash of cultures. The conversations seem trivial but the unexpected erruption of emotional response to the most mundane comments are a priceless insight into the way we value what others have to say to us - even if we're on the run wanted by the authorities.

And what tragedy. Where the draw of new experience or the beguiling presence of someone so enchanting means you will risk getting caught to both escape and return to danger, in order to love.

vii

"Excuse me, didn’t we meet at that party last year?"
The worst of pickup lines perhaps, but the premise of Last Year At Marienbad, another Alan Resnais film. Nothing happens in it. A man tries to convince a lady that they met the previous year at a lavish mansion resort. She cannot remember. Throughout the 2 hours, he gnaws at her, feeding her, repeatedly bits of memory, describing what she was wearing, how her hands were palced, the statues that they stood under. All this shot in gorgeously arranged black and white, where the actors are props and the props – the interiors, wooden furniture, ornate paneling, baroque ceilings, unending corridors, lush carpets, polished surfaces, miles of mirrors, unopened doors and a impossibly symmetric garden - are explored incessantly. The tension arises from whether or not we remember correctly or accurately scenes that are shown over and over, not repeated ad naseum but layered textures of images that seem so similar that we ask, "Haven't we been here before?"
The actors are props. Many scenes have the cast frozen, standing statue-like but never statuesque as the protagonist find the moment, enact their little tete a tetes. A glass drops, shatters. Nobody moves but the waiter, and the camera stays on him for the excruciating length of time that it takes for him to pick up every piece. The shots vary – up close then a jump cut from high in the rafters – the mundane becomes pregnant with tension as the rest of the world stops.
The third character. The lady’s lover or husband? "Let me show you a game that I never lose." "If you never lose it is not a game." "I can lose – but I never will." The running action motif, that simple game where sticks, cards, tokens are placed in a rows then eliminated, the loser being the one forced to pick the last one. Played over and over with a variety of opponents, in different spaces – always a climax – will he lose? "I never will" he fires a gun – at her? In the bedroom. But she is left, standing and unsure at the end of that impossible garden that casts no shadows, wondering if her memory, which has come to believe she did once love, serves her well.

v

v - 2/6/2004






my feet hurt. i've got corns. i can think of several reasons why.

1.  didn't wear proper shoes during the dec hols and lounged around in flip flops too much. now that i need to wear proper shoes everyday - my feet used to them and are thus rebelling. 

2.  I'm fat.

3.  I'm thirty this year.

of course the last two reasons are just standard replied for everything that isn't quite pleasant for this year.  And yes I just realised that the kids I'm teaching this year are born in the year of the tiger as well - making them a whole zodiac cycle younger.  Wow - what was I doing when they were born? 

Avoiding having to do assessment books for the PSLE.  Raising money for the ACS building fund.  Riding on the 154 trying to convince one of my best friends not to betray us all and go to RI.  Playing tennis a lot.  you know - i really can't remember that much.  Maybe I'll fair better if I just stick to today.

ah - yes did my part for the PAP.  sent out 100 leaflets to the kids for them to sign up with the feedback unit.  I even had a nicely placed quote at the end of my instructions to the CT Reps about playing an active part in building the kind of society we want.  I don't suppose anyone will bother with the leaflets.  Of course with my legendary administrative incompetence, I parcelled all the leaflets out and stapled them into groups for distribution, only to find that I had about 40 left over.  I'll probably have to dump them because if they sit on my desk too long someone will think that I've been sitting on work ... 

I realised also that I'm an amazing procrastinator.  I looked at a kid in class and knew that I had to ask him for work that he owed me.  But I didn't.  Saw him later again - and remembered again - and didn't.  What's going on?  Some sort of strange assurance that consciousness is all?  Or do I predict, on some level, that he's going to say that he's not done the work and I'll have to ask him why and enact that whole ritual ....

I got a great idea for pple who don't bring their reading stuff for reading.  Came to mind during one of those periods today.  It's what the Head of Lit used to do to his students who didn't prepare for Lit tutorial at good ol NUS ... I'm looking forward to springing it ...

 

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*smiles* Sounds Diabolical, can't wait to see what punishment you bring down on the unsuspecting...wait...AHHHHH I forgot my homework...lol Good luck with your students and your corns for that matter. [Buggyone]

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I wish MY teacher wrote an online diary. Sometimes we forget our teachers have lives i guess. I forget that all the time till I read your stuff. [Contusion.]

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Could I borrow the Full Metal Jacket show? :)

Hope your feet get better soon.



- The Callous, Cynical Bastard

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hmm. Open book pop-quiz? :-) [Tempest Blue]

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have you been showing FMJ to 'dem kids again?? *tsk tsk* i wish you proscrastinated more when you taught us, that way i wouldn't have had to decline politely each time ;)



wotcher gonna do? make them write a story?



-fey

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oh yes, roar roar... haha...

oh dear, what evil ideas have E.Lit teachers at NUS been putting into mr lim's head? must be rather nasty... =S

^_^ [moi~]

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had a corn last year. dug it out with a penknife. very painful - not recommended.,

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vi

Hiroshima Mon Amour is as pretentious viewing for a Saturday afternoon as any film gets. A late 1950s French film shot in black and white that depicts an intensely erotic two-day affair between a French actress and a Japanese architect, that takes place in Hiroshima fifteen years after the bomb with flashbacks to German occupied France, is bound to draw accusations of being over-determined and too artificially self-conscious. But it works. The haunting music score and the beautifully composed shots of people lounging in empty, deserted spaces, grappling with the past makes for delicious viewing.
The opening montage sequence – the bodies of the lovers wrapped up with each other against shots of Hiroshima after the bomb – is a powerful reminder that the personal always partakes of social and political memory. As the film proceeds, the female protagonist, a french actress Elle, relates the affair she had in WW2 with a German soldier – "I was barely 18 and he was 23" – and the subsequent ostracism that she suffers at the hands of her parents and the community. The flashbacks of the beautifully spartan French countryside – "In France the Loire is known for its beauty" – stand as an effective contrast to a Hiroshima that twinkles late into the night. It is a Hiroshima that wants to forget the past and rebuild itself, but remains "haunted by the day of ten thousand suns". In a bar the couple sit, as the Hiroshima night sky is dominated by a replica of the Effiel Tower. A strange meshing of cultures, a strange thwarting of the ability to forget.
And they speak to no one else. Even when they talk to each other – he asking the questions, she painfully remembering – they seem to barely notice the presence of the other. In a particularly memorable scene at the train station, they sit on a bench with an old lady between them. In a rare moment of naturalism, the old lady asks the architect, "Is she from France?" and the camera lingers on a brief exchange where he explains that they are in love but very sad that they must leave each other with the coming of the morning. And on cue, the camera pans to the other end of the bench, to find that Elle has left. The intensity of the affair must not be spoken of. To do so exorcises the emotions that haunt it, that make it so destructively appealing.
It’s one of those movies that make you wonder about those little moments you’ve spent noticing someone else and wondering where their past resides and how the past has led them to this point. Get it and watch it – it’s in the Esplanade.

Jan 2004

iv - 1/29/2004






Actually - I've cancelled this entry like twice.  Because I'm looking for a "decent melody" - essentially - the plot is this.  I want to complain about how school is all about everything except teaching and learning.  That minimal effort can be put into the classroom, as long as you wayang in all the other important facets of school life.  The College is celebrating its don't know what anniversary - so all our efforts have to be channelled in that direction.  Thank god for people that are more "on"/ obedient than me - they can go celebrate all they want and cook up a storm - I'll just tag along and do whatever crap they want - actually an important principle in these matters - for stuff like that - less is more ... who is gonna care who celebrated what after the event.

Of course there's the moral issue about the amount of money that is going to be spent on the celebrations.  But 10 yeas in ACS - every year donating money for some cause or other - has taught me that pple will go to all sorts of lengths to raise money - even if its for a silly book that glorifies the achievements of a school - even if it's for a silly plaque to hang on the wall - there are lots of rich pple out there folks - who are willing to buy their little piece of gratitude from schools that have a reputation to sell.

On a more sickening note - I'm supposed to help with some MP attachment programme.  This is like an eternal joke played out over and over again.  Suck at Mandarin - get posted to SAP school. Don't like grammar drills - end up teaching English.  Vote for opposition - now need to arrange programme for students to be attached to "political leaders" (most of whom I might add have never stood for election and have never won the popular vote).  Even better - I get to play clerk - to make all the bloody arrangements so the creme de la creme can saunter in to "shadow" the "political leaders", and learn about the delicate issues that shape our "plural society".  At least I don't have to go down to any meetings - but I still have to talk to these pple assoc pple about arrangements.  Ok - it hasn't been that bad so far - I've talked to one and she said she would settle the programme.  Whatever.  I think the kids should just go for it and be completely mercenary - it looks good on their profile.

On a brighter note - I've been quite a computer nerd this last month in school - been designing a computer quiz that'll knock the socks off the kids (hopefully).  It's all about western art - a little on music.  Was nice to look at all of those pictures again and to read about the stuff.  I actually think that one gets more into this kind of stuff when there's a reason for you to - I mean I never thought twice about visual art - or at least art history - until I was in JC - and that had a lot to do with studying Hist Paper 5.  Anyway - one of the most awe inspiring times - was at the end of J1- we went to St. Petersburg - and visited the Hermitage - brilliant - Peter Paul Rubens.  That's a man who knows the attraction of the body, or corpulance.  So - that got the interest going.  I still like Baroque and Renaissance painters - but really am more in the abstraction of the 20th C - Matisse esp.  Actually it's a damn poseur thing - must like that which is esoteric.  Whaterever.

On an even brighter note - I've done reasonably well for all the exams that I killed brain cells studying for in Dec!  I got 760 (99%) for the Verbal (ok slightly embarassing cause I teach english - it was the reading compre I tell you ...) and 800 (92%) for the Math  (that's one for the Arts crowd!) in the GRE General test.  I also got 6/6 (95%) for the writing.  My proudest score was for the Lit GRE - 730 (98%) - not bad for three bloody hours of 230 MCQs ... - of course the scores really don't mean a thing if a uni thinks that you studied in Singapore and therefore suck anyway - but let me just savour the moment?

One for the road -

 

Henri Matisse Jazz "Icarus"

:)

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Right on! (I am a teacher also!) [bent twig]

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Those are some insane scores... I feel very su now...

congrats in any case! Would love to try out your quiz, but it doesn't seem to be suited for me in anyway at all. [Grandioso]

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hahaha... mr lim... ur ranting damn funny.. :) [AnGeL^6587]

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Aloha. U're a good teacher, really. Sorry that class couldn't be any better.



- The Cynical, Callous Bastard :)

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mr lim, congrats!! woah... they sound like astronomical results to me... =P

i simply adore magritte's works!! heez...

yeah, this anniversary thingy's really getting on ppl's nerves nowadays... just cos someone's got the dough, others have to do the work... oh well... =S

^_^ [moi~]

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=) [public_prosecutor]

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love the picture, impressive scores. -fey

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wow that's super high scores u got...congrats!



*mutterx...clever scheme,,,grabbing the "future elites" and brainwashin em to be pro-pap...blast em...* [psst]

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eh donate to my card leh. maybe they'll name the fire extinguisher after you. you know the "lim meng teck fire extinguisher"

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eek. the amount of crap admin work i see my mum doing just to get a decent period of teaching in... i totally sympathise with you...



~mi'er

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