Quick Updates

Many things are happening, that keep me from starting a proper travel blog. Apart from the fact that I am not technically travelling, of course. Not till the 21st. But home is where all the exciting things happen, and I've been away so long that every observation I make is new and surprising. Observations such as, beware of large kualis of stuff being deep-fried by the sides of roads and hawker stalls. I can feel the heat emanating from the kuali as I walk past. And then there's the crazy traffic, politics, friends who talk about politics, food, and...more food.

And so the headlines:

Yet another family member falls prey to mosquito-borne disease, but not too bad. Just two days in hospital. He thinks he got it from my housing area, hurray for home.

***

Turns out the political secretary found dead outside MACC headquarters, Teoh Beng Hock, is a relative. We don't know him personally, but he was a cousin of my generation in the second degree. Really not the best of omens as I consider the possibility of a career in politics, as a political secretary in particular. My aunt sent the family some money. This suicide under mysterious circumstances has all the trademarks of an incipient dictatorship, but it's more likely the result of the terrible randomness that plagues Malaysian bureaucracy. Somewhere, somehow, someone who doesn't know a thing about a proper bureacratic investigation was put into a position with too much power and too little regulation. He might have decided to emulate what he watched on TV. He might have been too short-sighted and lacked the self-awareness or reflective ability to understand human behaviour beyond the limited scope of psychological manipulation (and other associated techniques) during interrogation. Or this might really be a suicide (but chances of that are very low. Even if it was a suicide, it was not for personal reasons). Nobody knows, but everyone will remember.

***

I've had interesting conversations with everyone I've met, mostly about the state of Malaysia right now, the possibility of improving traffic in KL, the Malaysian "relak aje" mentality as opposed to the Singaporean kiasu mentality, the difference between ideals of community and actual community (which is not so ideal), and so on. This is the biggest plus about being back home for me. Everyone has something to say about life as they see it, and it's always a unique worldview with inimitable experiences. Not that this is unavailable in Singapore, but the latter does suffer from a kind of homogeneity because of the generic mould that people have been raised into. There are fewer differences to mirror oneself against; the tensions one faces in society there don't seem to promote contemplation beyond the surface of the material life. Whereas in Malaysia everyone is so caught up in the question of identity, especially in the racial and political aspect, that we can't help but be cultural observers. The accuracy of such observations, often made with untempered prejudice, is questionable, but it still makes for lively conversation.

Reflecting on these conversations, I see that one of the reasons Malaysians talk so much about politics is the need to come up with a counter-narrative to the incoherent and failed state narrative. On the other hand, the government of Singapore has forged a very strong state narrative about the road to success which the majority has adopted*. Malaysia consists of various groups who now claim separate migrant and non-migrant histories, but who all want the same thing. All the state talk about 1Malaysia and putting on a show of official visits will not resolve the fact that we are now, more than ever, split along racial lines, believing different things about where we come from and where we are going as a nation. And for all our regular Malaysian talk, meta-narrative through criticizing and cracking political jokes is not enough of a solution. It's a good thing, and necessary, but not enough. Even writing and producing really good academic papers on the current situation is not enough (though still absolutely necessary). It takes the co-operation of the people in power, on the political side, and most of the time they're not listening, or they don't understand what abstruse-sounding academics say. Is there a solution? I can only think of very banal and practical ones. No theories.

*Yes, the rise of a state narrative is a cycle between government and culture, apart from other factors, but I'm not about to start a political studies essay on the extent to which each is an influence on the other.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

A sequel with a vengeance. It did all the horrible things you hope sequels never do, and did it with gusto too. Irrelevant (and often campy) details such as Mrs. Witwicky's loopy behaviour, Sam's maladjustedness, and the sexual awkwardness (or obsession) of adolescence, which, in the first movie were touches of humour, got blown entirely our of proportion in the second one. Campiness pretty much upstaged the noble autobot mission for half of this 150-minute long flick, followed by an interval of aaargh! aargh! aaargh! chased by deceptic---aargh! aargh! aargh! And then a long explosive battle scene when everybody gets their 15 minutes of fame, except for the autobots. The US army gets about half an hour, so does Optimus. The other bots just flash in and out of the scenes, unlike the first movie where there was at least some effort at drawing out the characters of the different bots.

I could rip the screenplay and storyline apart, but then it is a teen flick meant to ride on the wave of profits and hype generated by the first movie, so maybe it's not worth the effort, nor even fair to do so. I'll just say that it had something going for it, but flashy CGI cannot make up for the terrible pacing, in which each meaningful chunk of the plot deflates in an anticlimactic and prolonged joke of a scene, like Mrs. Witwicky's antics, or the twin robots' antics, or Witwicky's roomate's antics. Perhaps the team was aiming for the comic book's ability to pitch from slapstick comedy to rough talk, to noble ideals--mashing and bending genres. But it looked more as if, in putting together big, flashy and putatively emotional scenes, tastelessly decked out with innuendo and campiness, they lost artistic control of the overall effect.

There is truly nothing like a bad sense of rhythm to spoil what ought to have been at least an enjoyable movie. The beginning was a series of repeated episodes about the ridiculousness of Sam's family and the awkwardness of his first day at school, hyper-exaggerated by his actions under the influence of the Allspark (no, it's not a type of drug). The middle was generally a lot of running and screaming and things exploding left right and centre, followed by more running and screaming; it felt like a failed hybrid of horror and action. Even the climactic battle scene dragged on a little too long, despite being so fast-paced that one hardly knew who was who at times (which is all part of the fun, I feel, in this particular movie)--this mostly again the fault of random cut scenes to irrelevant jokes that dragged on for half a minute at a time. Hey, forget slow motion, there's nothing like campiness and weepiness in the middle of a big battle to impress upon the audience the all-important desire to focus on the fight. Yes, camera, let us see anything except that smart-talking soldier or hysterical college kid, please please, please.

Well, to admit, I only watch these movies because I admire CGI, and I think special effects artists who put so much work into their creations should get admired. Scripts and screenplays coming out of the US don't seem to hold much right now. All bowing to mass consumption, profit margins and the like. It's obvious when a screenplay rehashes to an audience what the writers/producers think the audience wants. You end up with an inchoate and contradictory piece, rather than a piece which says something, if not about the world, at least about itself.

The Reunion--2009

"So, what did you guys do in Seremban?" my dad asked.

I don't really know. Too many things, it would seem. Surprising that so much life could be squeezed into (or out of) just two days together. We visited the istana lama Seri Menanti. It's not very grand or elaborate, except for its mortise and tenon woodwork and wood-tiled roof. A very concise palace, with chambers that are just large enough to hold court. The balai berundang, where the king and his advisors would hold council, is scarcely the size of an average master bedroom. I was impressed. The irrational nationalist in me took this as evidence that the feudal system in the Minangkabau region was fairer than that in Europe, in that the royalty did not seem to draw massive profits at the expense of its people...but on second thought, it'd take far more rigorous digging to prove a hypothesis like that.



We also spent the evening talking about our lives, and what we've been through since the last time we saw each other (I mean saw each other and really talked, which was about two years ago). And gathering the threads of each person's story, I realise just how much growing up we've had to do in these past two years. Growing up in the sense that we've had to learn to deal with loss, with failure, doubt, and with current decisions and their future consequences. In a different sense, it's been a struggle to not become grown up, like the grown ups I never admired for being bitter and self-righteous and who seemed to always think they were right simply because it was unthinkable to be grown up and wrong at the same time. The toughest lesson I've had to learn this year is that God does walk with us through all the horrible things we go through. It's often easier to blame ourselves, blame others, or blame God and then decide that we have nothing to do with Him. It's much harder to blame God and deal with what comes out of that. Because it's a relationship that just won't go away. That's a very tough lesson, the kind that took Job and his buddies took about 40-odd chapters to learn.

At the end of my 42 chapters, will I be a hardened self-righteous cynic like Bildad, or a stupefied and awed Job? I do not want to live in the kind of grown up world where relationships mean nothing besides work done and salaries paid, something sold and something paid for at the supermarket with nothing more than a blink of the eye to mark the exchange. Society has developed, society has progressed, but to what end? This wasn't the world I ordered over ebay. I just woke up to it one morning. Alas, the world is not made to order. There're always grown ups to deal with. And the grown up inside us, who're the most insidious of all.
















I'm glad to be a child of God.
I don't think there's any other
way to stay a child in this world.