Whose Line Is It Anyway?

This is an unfunny entry, but the British cast of Whose Line Is It Anyway? was at Bar None on Saturnight and very, very funny. I think they might still be performing; please go see.

Fraternal advice

[At my cousin's wedding dinner - ]
Me: I can't fit into any of my clothes. I need a dieting plan.
My brother: Starve.

[no comment]

XZ sends a journalist's blog on the war in Iraq.

Reader Response

I found a copy of Calvin Trillin's With All Disrespect in the library - a compilation of his columns from The Nation in the 1980s - and in one chapter ("Moral Suasion for Grownups"), he writes:

I figure what the State Department needs is a series of commercials with Patti LuPone, in her strapless "Evita" gown. They could run on one of those blue-movie cable channels, to reach the diplomatic crowd. "I like strong men," Patti would say. "Also strongmen." She is, of course, smiling her knowing smile. ... "I met a strongman I thought I was going to like," Patti says. "I liked his cars. I liked his Swiss bank account." Patti suddenly looks very serious. "Then I heard that he closes newspapers and runs torture chambers and makes people disappear," she says. She shakes her head sadly. "And to think," she says, "for a moment there, I thought he was a cool guy."

And just where it says "torture chambers", a previous reader has written, in neat blue capitals, AT TANGLIN POLICE STATION.

The Incredibles [spoiler warning]

Everyone has been saying it's good and it is. The superheroes are running around saving the day. Mr Incredible and Elasti-Girl fight over who should haul a thief off to justice and fall in love. Then the city turns against the superheroes: Mr Incredible fails to capture Bomb Voyage because he's dealing with Buddy, his fanatic fan (My name's not Buddy, it's Incredi-Boy!), a suicidal man sues Mr Incredible for foiling his suicide attempt and injuring him in the process, a whole trainful of people sue Mr Incredible for assorted injuries after he manages to stop the train from plunging off the broken track to its death (well - its passengers' deaths). The superheroes are returned to their hidden identities, relocated and told to stay normal. And now the story starts - Mr Incredible (now Bob Parr - of course his name is Bob) is married to Elasti-Girl (henceforth Helen Parr) and they have three kids (Violet, a teenager perpetually hidden behind her hair and who can make herself invisible and project a force field at will; Dash, the primary school kid who can run so fast no-one sees him; Jack Jack, the baby, who appears to be normal), a tiny car and a house in the burbs. Bob works in insurance. He's a hulking man - all that muscle as Mr Incredible has now turned to fat - and cramped into a tiny grey cubicle. There's a great scene when he stands up in a cubicle far too small to swing a cat in and peers out over the cubicle walls and the camera pans back to a sea of cubicle walls. He's unhappy with his job and spends his nights with an old superhero friend, Frozone (Lucius) in his car listening to his police-scanner and doing superhero work on the sly. Helen worries; she wants him to be promoted in his job; she warns her children to be normal because that's what the world wants them to be; she just wants them all to lead a happy normal family life.

There is the wonderful Edna Mode, voiced by the director himself (Brad Bird), the fashion designer who used to design superhero costumes (back in the days when she designed for the gods, not for supermodels, what's so super about these models) and who designs a whole new set of costumes for the Parr family.

The rest is fairly standard. Bob gets a message from a mysterious stranger, Mirage. He is sent on a secret mission to destroy a rogue robot on a deserted island. Mirage works for someone whose office is in the heart of a volcano. Of course the someone turns out to be Buddy, the fan that Mr Incredible spurned back in the real world. Buddy (now Syndrome) has invented all sorts of cool things to make up for his complete lack of superhuman powers. He wants to get back as Mr Incredible. I'm going to stop narrating here because you know the rest and I'm lazy. And it's as heartwarming as cartoons should be, and slyly funny as the better ones are - poking fun at all kinds of stereotypes, from the Italian fashion designer to the disgruntled office-worker to the star-crazed fan to the mad scientist in a volcano to the sulky teenager hiding behind her hair - and sensitive to the normalities (normalcies? that's gotta be wrong) of office life and marriage life and all those other lives that creep up on us. And the baby is really cute, too.

Return of the Modern

Apparently Taniguchi, architect of the new MOMA building now back in Manhattan, said to the museum trustees, "Raise a lot of money for me, I'll give you good architecture. Raise even more money, I'll make the architecture disappear." And they raised almost a billion dollars for him, so he did. "The customary sensations that buildings give us - of secure enclosure, of masses of matter firmly supported - are diluted by a black gap, a mere quarter inch wide, that runs along the bottom and top of every interior wall, even at the base of weight-bearing pillars, so that everything, subtly, floats. The...aesthetic accomplishment [of the gaps] is to dematerialize the walls; the visitor moves through spaces demarcated as if by Japanese paper screens." (John Updike, "Invisible Cathedral", The New Yorker, Nov 15, 2004)

Paul Goldberger from the same issue: "In 1997, the museum snubbed the radicals and hired Taniguchi, who represents not the cutting edge of architecture but, rather, a carefully wrought, highly refined modernism - a cool and reserved aesthetic that has more in common wiht the Modern's original credo than with the expressive direction of recent architecture and museum design."

Makes one want to visit the Modern just for its design, and I did enjoy the tiny pared-down Modern they had in Queens while they were renovating the main building.

[Note to self: post longer entry, or at least read the rather technical article Von linked.]

[No puns]

10-year-old toast which has the face of the Virgin Mary.

Personal Ad

My dears, I downloaded Trillian and it automatically added my MSN and AIM contacts, which are far and few between, but not my ICQ contacts, which are slightly greater in number. If you see me online, please message me and I'll add you. Although, of course, if you never want me to talk to you online again, then this is your chance.

Today, we shine

as a beacon for Asia in organ donation and transplantation.

When you read that, did you see a beacon tower poking out of a mound of organs? No? Never mind.

Prophetic

I ran into one of the office attendants in the photocopying room today and he informed me, quite out of the blue, that unless I broke my bond within the first four years of the bond period I would never do so and before I knew it I would have worked thirteen years at the office just like him.

I have two comments:

(1) what, is it written on my face? and

(2) thirteen years?

Livejournal Watch on the Weblog

I don't know these people but I wish I did. Read the rest of the Weblog too.

I also wish I had the Wowee Zowee album and could write about Derrida (yes I know it's two different people writing entries about Pavement and Derrida. So?), but that's neither here nor there.

It's universal

The new poet laureate of the US writes like a CAPper.

Hobbes: Reprise

BBC Online poll: Have you lived in a country without a government? Send us your experiences.

As usual

I just did something exceedingly stupid and feel the need for absolution of some kind.

(Clearly, frittering away office time and resources counts in no way towards penance.)

Photos from Japan

Say hello to Von.

(For the record, I am not an ambulatory brain. Come to my office and they will tell you that I am a blot upon the landscape, and mostly a comatose blot at that.)

Self-Improvement

[A strangely apt but somewhat unfortunate time to find this poem.]

Self-Improvement

Just before she flew off like a swan
to her wealthy parents' summer home,
Bruce's college girlfriend asked him
to improve his expertise at oral sex,
and offered him some technical advice:

Use nothing but his tonguetip
to flick the light switch in his room
on and off a hundred times a day
until he grew fluent at the nuances
of force and latitude.

Imagine him at practice every evening,
more inspired than he ever was at algebra,
beads of sweat sprouting on his brow,
thinking, thirty-seven, thirty-eight,
seeing, in the tunnel vision of his mind's eye,
the quadratic equation of her climax
yield to the logic
of his simple math.

Maybe he unscrewed
the bulb from his apartment ceiling
so that passersby would not believe
a giant firefly was pulsing
its electric abdomen in 13 B.

Maybe, as he stood
two inches from the wall,
in darkness, fogging the old plaster
with his breath, he visualized the future
as a mansion standing on the shore
that he was rowing to
with his tongue's exhausted oar.

Of course, the girlfriend dumped him:
met someone, apres-ski, who,
using nothing but his nose
could identify the vintage of a Cabernet.

Sometimes we are asked
to get good at something we have
no talent for,
or we excel at something we will never
have the opportunity to prove.

Often we ask ourselves
to make absolute sense
out of what just happens,
and in this way, what we are practicing

is suffering,
which everybody practices,
but strangely few of us
grow graceful in.

The climaxes of suffering are complex,
costly, beautiful, but secret.
Bruce never played the light switch again.

So the avenues we walk down,
full of bodies wearing faces,
are full of hidden talent:
enough to make pianos moan,
sidewalks split,
streetlights deliriously flicker.

- Tony Hoagland

[For XZ]

From Auden's "In Memory of W. B. Yeats"

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

On Sex and Chocolates

Thomas sends this article: Libido linked to love of chocolate

WOMEN have compared chocolate to sex for decades. Now doctors have discovered a scientific link between the two.

According to Italian researchers, women who eat chocolate regularly had the highest levels of desire, arousal and satisfaction from sex. But for men, the findings of a British study were not so good....

...In the chocolate/sex study, urologists from Milan's San Raffaele hospital questioned 163 women about their consumption of chocolate and their sexual fulfilment.

"Women who have a daily intake of chocolate showed higher levels of desire than women who did not have this habit," the study found. "Chocolate can have a positive physiological impact on a woman's sexuality."

Dr Andrea Salonia, author of the study - funded by a university, not by the confectionery industry - said women who had a low libido could become more amorous after eating chocolate.

She believes chocolate could be particularly medicinal for women who shun sex because they are suffering from premenstrual tension.

"Chocolate is not like a food, it's like a drug," Dr Salonia said. "Women who suffer mood swings as a result of their menstrual cycle may also suffer a dip in their sexual function. I strongly believe eating chocolate may improve their sexual function."

The research also looked at smoking and coffee consumption, but found no links with sexual enjoyment.

From The Sunday Times of London

Holding Hands

My (sec 4) brother tells me that his friend broke up with his girlfriend. Oh I'm sorry, I say. My brother says, that's ok, they weren't very close. But they did hold hands.

Don't you want to be 16 again - or at least at an age where holding hands represented an escalation of romantic affection - and there was all the rest to come?

[because]

How do you make such implacable choices?

You said once (someone told you) that three things were needed: great doubt, great perseverance, great faith.

Whatever you say, I do need someone to tell me it isn't quite that stupid to find a dream and follow it.

John Peel

Have been so wrapped up in myself that I forgot I meant to say - I know John Peel died a while ago, but I didn't get round to saying it, and there should be a moment of mourning, however belated.

Of Scrabble, Brownies, Ice-cream and Other Necessities

Dinner(ish) with S and cp and J and jy at Westlake and then back to S's sans cp for scrabble and Folly Molly and Arrogant Worms (the cows song) and Swingle Sisters (all courtesy of J's ipod mini) and the most obscene poem ever written about a cunnin' vending machine (please someone write about it) and of course ice-cream and brownies and cookies, because are we ever at S's without chocolate in some form or other?

If there's one thing to be grateful to the Singapore education system for, it's for throwing me in with this bunch of people. Somehow, miraculously, we appear to all still be in touch and able to talk to each other and to hold a conversation - I don't have conversations with people in the office; we either gossip about our colleagues or discuss our work but we don't converse, exactly - and to not be told that it's silly or childish or spoilt to want to be happy, where happiness is a function not just of friends and family but of doing something one enjoys. And it's not a stupid question to ask, what do I want to do? (Though J's quotation from the Sandman echoes uncomfortably in my mind - that when we get what we want, we find that it is what we wanted.) Which is all to say, thank you S for having us over; I'm glad we did manage to get ourselves to your place after all (and not succumb to inertia, which was what I was going to do); next time I'll bring gin.

Wilco

is playing in Madison Square Garden on New Year's Eve. I offer this information for what it's worth.

Don't you wish I kept to silence?

Things To Do

Go to the gym.
Take up yoga, pilates, aerobics classes.
Learn to dive or wakeboard.
Learn a new language.
Study for the CFA something (Chartered...Financial...Accounting?).
Remember that at least one of the objectives of policy-making is the maximal convenience of the civil service.
Remember that at least one of the objectives of submission-writing is to get people to notice the brilliance of your arguments (all the more for being limited to 4 pages, 3-sentence paragraphs and monosyllabic words).
Not argue with the entire top hierarchy of the office.
Not make facetious and/or frivolous remarks to any of the top hierarchy.
Dress appropriately for the office (no t-shirts, no jeans, no suspicious footwear).
Express equal parts horror and curiosity when it is suggested that the office should mount an expedition to a gay club.
Read Pratchetts over and over again.
Read intelligent books and meditate over reviews not written.
Write letters in my head to people I once knew and now talk to only in the desperate reaches of my imagination (there is an Eliot poem that talks about memory reconsidered as passion?).
Stop taking the term "depression" in vain; there is depression with hospitals and drugs, and then there is what someone called reiterated whining.
Pull myself together and stop complaining.

I haven't any idea what I'd do otherwise. I don't think I could try to read political theory again, and this is in some way a loss for me (though a boon for political theory and the academic world in general). I know how strange that sounds and it's not a bad thing to be less starry-eyed and of course I wasn't any damn good at theory to start with, but it would be nice to think, wouldn't it, that some day it would be possible to go read Arendt in the New School? I came across a phrase of Henry James - some character describing himself as a "perfectly-equipped failure" - except that I'm not very well-equipped at all. Does a handful of quotations count as equipment? At least we'll die with harness on our back?

(Thank you for listening, for writing back, for calling, for keeping in touch, for offering a lifeline of words. Make a snow angel for all of us back in Singapore and think fondly of the sun.)

Litany

Does it seem to you that everyone is restless, unhappy, depressed, insane (showing signs of incipient insanity, in any case) or all of the above? More than usual, I mean. So what would it take and what's your escape plan?

Being Good and Doing Good

Keynes in 1938 recalling Bloomsbury: "Our prime objects in life were love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge. Of these love came a long way first."

The essay is here.

A Problem of Conjugation

Minzhi just gave me the word "onsittan". It means "to oppress".

Good night now and don't let anything onsitteth you!

In lieu of an escape plan

[There is a way of telling this.]

Have been out of sorts and cranky lately, mainly because I loathe the office. Half the work is boring (because gambling regulation and tax are frankly rather boring subjects when you get down to the details) and half is interesting in parts (the parts that do not involve answering other people's questions); the office, on the other hand, takes all possible joy from work. I swear the office makes people even bitchier and more cynical than when they came in, and that takes some doing. This particular entry (and so many of the previous) is probably a case in hand.

It's all wrong, isn't it, to be all angsty and teenagey past the age of fifteen? Shouldn't we know what we want to do and find some way of getting there, rather than mope around sullenly? I put this question to Reidar (who will now never ask me how I am again) and in reply he gave me a TLS essay on the difference between being good and doing good, which compares Keynes and Shaw and which I will put up on this site when I figure out how to (it's too long for a blog entry).

Pink lights

[There is a way of telling this.]

Today we set out on an expedition to Mustapha and took a detour down Desker Road. There are pink lamps lit over some open doorways, and in the garish pink light sit girls with their legs crossed or old women guarding the doorway (and one resting by the door with her walking aid - but perhaps that household enjoys pink lighting). Food afterwards and then the muchness that is Mustapha. Doesn't Mustapha remind you of those gigantic discount stores in the States? With everything piled high and nothing that you would really want to buy (except the electronic stuff. And the food. Always the food).

Apart from that there isn't much happening that I can remember, but that's partly because it's 5 a.m. in the morning.

Movie count:
- Bride and Prejudice (pure Bollywood with rather unfortunate bits of dialogue in between the singing and dancing - the movie follows Jane Austen faithfully except for extraneous characters like Kitty and the Hursts, witty dialogue and biting social commentary);
- Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (as cheesy as the title promises);
- Motorcycle Diaries (Gael Garcia Bernal is gorgeous, and the movie is quite picturesque too);
- Hamam (thought it was too sentimental about Istanbul, but then again that was the point of the movie).

Book count (excepting the fluff and Pratchett and Wodehouse re-reads):
- John Updike, In the Beauty of the Lilies (my first Updike, and beautiful and understated);
- a couple of Gore Vidals (soap opera);
- Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot (can't say anything about this in one bracket);
- Reading Lolita in Tehran (a woman professor teaching literature at the university in Tehran under the post-revolution fundamentalist regime in Iran. You should read this, even if you're the sort who shies away from books with Nabokov works and exotic cities in their titles);
- Going Postal (thank you Su-Lin for borrowing it from the library!)
- Minzhi's (copy of) The Bear Went over the Mountain (sorry, darling, for hanging onto it for so long. It's amazing).
- Jose Saramago, Blindness (first Saramago and am still reading).