To a Crowd of Dusty Trees

 

I was thinking about you, not too long ago.

It must have been that time you wrote to me…

When you said you’d leave the biting winter to go home,

just in time to remember how pretty it could be.

That was the time you were writing your papers,

when you were close to the end of school.

You must have been smiling…

when you said you’d get a new car,

to drive down to the countryside, 

as soon as it was over. 

 

 

Or perhaps it was a little longer before that.

It might have been that time you spoke to me…

When you told me you were going away,

just in time to hide out in the winter,

how pretty I imagined it would be.

That was the time you went away from school,

and you cared not to write your papers.

I remember you smiled…

when you said you were selling your beaten car,

to fly away to a place you once knew, 

and to catch the start of winter.

 

 

And then I almost forgot about you.

Perhaps it was some time too long ago.

Until the day I was told you were gone…

When you were found in your car, not far from home. 

It made me recall that time in school, 

when you laughed at how cold a winter could get,

at a drive down the countryside,

and at the thought of writing your papers.

I remember I smiled…

at the mention of your beaten car,

for it made me imagine life,

and how so pretty it could be.

 

 

So now when I think of you,

in a time I’m certain I could never know,

I’m made to imagine how those days of winter,

had eaten you up inside…

as I imagine your new car,

lying dead off the beaten road.

I heard they found it down the south coast,

so I imagine you were going to your countryside.

I was told it was your birthday,

so I imagine you remembering,

all the places you once knew…

through a fog on the window, to a crowd of dusty trees.

But most strangely I also imagine you, 

with a gas mask over your face…

 

 

Perhaps school was too long a time ago?

Or perhaps I just can’t ever remember you, 

without your smile.

 

How I Would Finally See Them Disappear (O Courage – My King, My Fist!)

How I Would Finally See Them Disappear (O Courage – My King, My Fist!).

 

How I Would Finally See Them Disappear (O Courage – My King, My Fist!)

So I procrastinate by writing down random thoughts all over Ismail Xavier’s ‘Historical Allegory’ article… but at least I try to compile them together to make myself think I’ve done something useful with my time. This is, of course no poetry, but simply a result of my lack of ability to write in prose-form.

For my beloved Malaysia(ns) in their bedrooms…

 How I Would Finally See Them Disappear (O Courage – My King, My Fist!)

 

There I was,

lying so quietly

still,

in the stifling confines

of my lived space.

When the urge to scream,

Forced

Itself upon me.

I was frightened,

for reasons I could find no way

of knowing.

O why, should I have allowed myself to be so frightened?

I could not,

from any one corner of my powerless frame,

see the vindication

for it

Since there seemed nothing for me to be frightened of.

So I remained,

just as I knew I should,

so quietly still,

when I felt myself scream…

Only to hear its echo

Within the bloody walls

and the inner most depths

of my heart.

 

 

 

And there I was,

closing my eyes

as tightly and cowardly

as I only could.

O why, O why should I have allowed myself to be so frightened?

And upon having to

open them once again,

I began to see the walls

Around me

slowly and in such manners so painfully quiet

Fade their colours away.

And there and then again,

I was struck

with the urge to scream.

But just like before,

my voice could not find its way out

of my bloody ticker.

And as the walls

Around me

Continued to submit itself

to such revolting expels,

I realized to my horror

that it was beginning to bear

The ugliest of transparencies.

 

 

 

There I was,

my heart beginning to burn.

With every scream…

struggling, straining and stinging,

I felt its sore…

More, more and more.

And at every ounce of blood

that my heart would

pump, pump and pump,

I would feel it burn even more.

And my poor, quiet soul,

would scream even louder.

And my poor heart,

would sting and burn,

would sting and burn,

More, more and more and more…

O why? O why? Should I have allowed myself to be so frightened?

Yet there I STILL was,

with that splitting pain one would feel

If only a needle should

Force itself

To pierce right through,

So slowly and quietly,

an open and most bloody of wounds.

O why? O why…

I felt the pleadings

Within me.

But as I had feared,

the colours of the wall

Faded completely…

 

 

 

There I was,

in my lived space,

Within those four walls,

no,

Within glass walls

with silver linings

Around

each of their borders –

How ugly and clear

How cold and captivating.

My heart began to pump

even harder and louder.

Then there I saw,

in the distance,

Faces that glowed

With such incomprehensible life…

With the most blindingly radiant of

Eyes,

With the most painfully striking of

Smiles –

The most beautiful of Princes and Princesses…

Gliding toward the glass walls

Around me.

Their gaze were fixated

on me.

Like sewing threads

Tightening my lips;

Like plaster and clay

Covering my eyes;

Like the blood that

Nailed my feet

To this soil;

Like the nails that had

Pinned my soul

To this coffin.

 

 

 

At that,

the thought of all my ‘sins’,

Forced

Itself upon me.

Those stubborn desires

of mine,

the perverse thoughts

of the mind,

and those most savagely willful indulgings.

O why? O why? Should I have allowed myself to be so frightened?

My heart began to pump

More, more and more,

Louder and harder

than ever before…

So loud,

that I could hear it in my ears,

So hard,

that I could feel it in my throat.

O how terribly sorry I was made to feel…

O Why should I have allowed myself to be so frightened?

 

 

 

There I was,

as the urge to be punished

Forced

Itself upon me…

To punish me

for all those ‘sins’…

To plaster my mouth,

that I may speak no more;

To put needles through my eyes,

that I may see no more.

O why? O why? Could I have not allowed myself to put a needle through my eyes?

For what use were they then?

When they be captivated

Only by the most painful of sights…

When they should see only these

Glass walls

Around me

and those beautifully cruel

Princes and Princesses.

As they inched close-r and close-r…

with Their eyes

sharper than the sharpest of needles…

I could see Them

Watching me,

More and more;

I could hear Them

Listening more and more

to my heart’s violent screams.

 

 

 

And there and then,

My heart did scream

Louder than before…

No,

Louder than ever before.

I could feel the needle

Touching the very surface

of that open wound.

They reached out

Their hands,

and placed Their pointers against Their lips…

O why? O why? Should I have allowed myself to be so frightened?

And still there I was,

as They then reached out

Their hands

Toward the glass walls.

I could  see –

O how painful it was!

Their ears closing in…

I could hear –

O how violent it was!

Their eyes drawing near…

As Their hands moved to border on the surface

of that cold, ugly and captivating

Glass.

And then

I thought…

about that needle.

Yes, all of a sudden,

I thought…

 

 

 

I thought about…

My eyes, my mouth and my ears.

 

 

 

And then,

right then,

there occurred a most peculiar incident,

at the very time

I recaptured

The forgotten act of thought.

What was so peculiar…

but, I think, less unfamiliar,

was that before my heart was to be punctured,

that is,

the split second between

Their hands touching the surface

of the glass,

and the needle inside penetrating

that of my heart…

I saw

In my eyes,

I heard

In my ears,

I felt

In my mouth,

For the first time in my living…

The most unpleasantly uncomfortable of all silences.

And

I thought…

Yes, I…

Thought,

in the loudest of voices –

Piercing, splitting and stabbing –

“O why? O why? Should I allow myself to be so afraid?”

 

 

 

And at that,

I

Stood up,

For the first time in my

Life.

I

Reached out my

Hand

and

I

Clenched it.

I

Raised it up

to punch and puncture the stale and stifling air

as

I

Exclaimed,

at the top of my

Voice…

 

when

Pump… Pump… Pump…

“Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!”

 

War Images and the Mechanical reproductions of ‘Film’.

I like to consider myself an avid admirer of all things – art. But then again, who isn’t? I am still quite a long way away from my winter escape to sunny Europe. So it is perhaps rather unsurprising that my attempt to read the quite brilliant piece – ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductions’ by Walter Benjamin, managed to stir up imaginations of Van Gough, Magritte and of the idea for an experimental film involving European train stations. But more importantly, I thought about Laura Mulvey and Lev Manovich, whose writings seem more characteristic of the usual painstakingly difficult-to-read scholarly material. But what is even more important than speculating the extent of my humble brain capacity and occasional dyslexia, is recognizing in their writings a measured and common thread of concerns relating to film and/or the photographic image. I apologize in advance for the length of this post. But being the mentioned ‘avid admirer of all things – art’, I must, at least briefly, share here the very interesting subject of discussion canvassed by these authors, by which I cannot help feeling affected.

They are essentially about the shapes of changes in the ways in which objects and the images of those objects are being produced and reproduced. Mulvey (2006) and Manovich (2000) talk about the ‘death’ of the times in which our views and perceptions as seen through camera lenses were documented through the ‘natural magic’-al combination of light and photo-sensitive material. A process of which is substituted today by numerical systems and digitalized information. The cinema, more in this age than ever before, seems fixed on ridding any association with the authenticity of the pictured object, creating a visual culture that settles for nothing more than the art of indexical animation. Walters ventures into more detail on the effects of mechanical reproductions, expounding the decay in the authenticity and the changes inflicted on the traditions embedded into any unique aural/visual experience.

“The desire of contemporary masses to bring things “closer” spatially .and humanly… is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction.”

–          Benjamin Walters (1979)

That was brief. A lot more where that came from. But for fear of OVER-exceeding the word limit and causing too premature a death by boredom, I’ll get back to the imaginations that Walters’ piece produced in my head. One of my research assignments this semester was concerned with how war related films have been framed to incite different perceptions and feelings in audiences. One of the films I watched (on youtube) was a 1941 German Nazi war propaganda film entitled Sieg Im Westen. Commissioned by the Oberkommado des Heeres (or The German Army High Command), the whole 114minute film was made up entirely by news-reel footage of very REAL happenings on the battlefields and on the German home front. The sequence of images, compiled for the local German viewership, was accompanied by spoken explanations of the Nazi’s reasons to go to war. It included assertions about a benevolent and peace-loving Adolf Hitler, who was forced into leading the country to war because of overseas threats aimed at the German people. It was interesting to see how filmic documenting of historical events can be framed and re-contextualized to create different meanings and affections to and for history, experiences and life itself. It was also very interesting to think about the developments that have gone into the processes of production, distribution and exhibition of this particular example of the art of film:

It was life recorded onto photo-sensitive material, cut up and pasted together by some 1940s splice-and-thread machinery. Then copied multiple times, lit up projectors in theatres around Germany, and gave new meanings of worldly events to its locals. Sometime between then and about two weeks ago, it was converted into a matrix of numerical and indexical systems, wired onto the world wide network, and hosted on a much loved video sharing web-site. Two weeks ago it lit up a singular macintosh  monitor in room 114 of the Robert Webster Building in UNSW, Sydney, and treated me with new meanings of the developments in the art of the cinema and in perceptions of art itself.

Today, as I read Walter Benjamin’s work of art, imaginations and understandings of Mulvey, Manovich and Sieg Im Westen were re-produced; and now at this very moment as I ‘write’ this, I am quite blatantly doing it again.

And if you have read all that were re-produced in this post, pictured or at least voiced my imaginations in your head, then surely you understand that you too are part of this Age of Mechanical Re-productions.

But then again, who isn’t?

 

Patents, Generosity and Ethics

“We are entering an age where everything is only limited by our imagination” – (Dr. Craig Venter, 2010)

The above quote was taken from a video interview with Dr. Craig Venter, one of the leading scientists involved in the controversial and successful efforts to create synthetic life. The Mycroplasma Laboratorium – a REAL and living cell claimed to have been made from scratch via the seemingly limitless boundaries of bio-scientific engineering/imaginations – has attracted its fair share of speculations, doubters and of course (yes, you guessed it) moral outcry. The same old ethical concerns that have threaded the waters of some other fantastical and similarly infamous imaginations such as cloning and ‘designer’ babies, seem to permeate through anything and everything concerning the word ‘life’. And of course, it is not too difficult to understand why that is.

But aside from the usual hullabaloo that ascribes suggestions of ‘playing God’ to scientific endeavours such as this, a rather different form of ethical conflict is now beginning to resound more prominently in the public’s earshot than ever before. The matter of ownership/sharing seems to have been formulated to challenge the limitations of our imaginations in this (dare I say it) globalized era. Guided to fame in the high-pressure melting pot of ethical discussion by the music industry, file and data sharing is now also a raging subject for more scientifically related chatter. Sharing of scientific data and research material has been made possible by trans-national links throughout the global scientific community. Putting that infrastructure to use will, as its proponents believe, create a higher degree of potential for discovering more effective solutions to at least some of the sixty-four thousand dollar questions lingering around our hospital beds, on the streets outside and in the skies above. But while the idea sounds rather amicable, for many, it is sadly a somewhat idealistic one. For it is difficult to imagine scientists, such as Dr. Venter, who commit themselves to years and years of work and research, whose lives rely so heavily on the monetary investments that fund their efforts, willing to allow their hard work to be left unprotected by copyright laws and possibly relinquished of creative attribution as a result of the processes and laws exercised in and for data sharing.

Interestingly, it seems that Dr. Venter is considering doing the somewhat unthinkable. Reserving the rights for a scientific innovation or discovery is one debatable issue in itself, as is messing about with anything concerning the word ‘life’. The somewhat unthinkable is in fact the attempt to patent or copyright a living organism such as the Mycroplasma Laboratorium (however ‘synthetic’ it may be). But what’s more important than fussing about the moral issues related to this somewhat unthinkable decision, is of course fussing about the absolute unthinkable. It is perhaps unfortunate that we can only hope (and should not think) that what the latter entails does not involve patenting, copyrighting or owning life, in every sense of that word. Mindful of the accelerated pace at which science and bio-engineering seem to be advancing, I dare restrict myself from the thought that I am sounding overly fantastic here. After all, aren’t we entering an age where everything is only limited by our imagination?

P.S. If you have somehow stumbled upon this page, read through the post (till this point) and have not seen the awesome video for ‘the coalition of the willing’ (that proposes methods for countering climate change), here it is. I think its a very interesting idea and this is my humble effort to promote it. Also the animation and art work are great!

 

Video journalism/documentary project – The Tragic Caveman

Short documentary/VJ project, made for (UNSW) ARTS 3061 – Video Project.

Film Synopsis:

Given the task to film a documentary/ VJ project on the theme of ‘disaster’, we went on our way to Silverwater Prison to film the protest against the imprisonment of Bondi Caveman, Jhiymy ‘Two Hats’ Mhiyles.

 

Micropolitics for Community, Identity, Stability: Google connects

“Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance…feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumble puppy… In Brave New World, (people) are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short… Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.”

–Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (NY: Viking Penguin, Inc., 1985), vii-viii.

Reading about micropolitics got me thinking about one of the episodes of Hungry Beast in which there is a mapping of how Google is going/trying to take over the world. I thought it was a good example of exposing the micropolitics involved in the connections between google’s various services as well as the possible ulterior motives embedded in and for their functions. Of course the information in the video are mostly based on theories, but nonetheless it presents an insightful and factual account of what Google has been up to. It is perhaps easy to forget or ignore the fact that we are being more permissive than ever before in submerging ourselves into the various virtual networks and ecologies that surround us. It probably isn’t such a bad thing. We are after all only living or putting to good use the shapes and designs of our new social organization. But it is quite interesting to take a peek into the operations of those working networks and ecologies (or at least an example of it), to have a look at some of those profiting from our helpless dive into this information age. Maybe even to sneak a glimpse into the future, just in case there is any need to prepare ourselves for who will be our ‘Ford’ once we’ve reached the depths/heights of this our own Brave New World.

 

Pictures for presentation

Rajesh’s room – interior

Rajesh’ house

 

New Media and the Revolutions we’ve all heard of

Among the twenty explanations BBC’s Paul Mason lists as ‘’reasons why it (political upheavals, revolutions and the like) is kicking off everywhere’’, there is one that can very well sum up his and the more general opinion on the rather buzzing matter that is the sudden rise and domino-like propagation of revolutions throughout all those places you’ve already heard of. He says:

“They all seem to know each other: not only is the network more powerful than the hierarchy – but the ad-hoc network has become easier to form. So if you “follow” somebody from the UCL occupation on Twitter, as I have done, you can easily run into a radical blogger from Egypt, or a lecturer in peaceful resistance in California who mainly does work on Burma so then there are the Burmese tweets to follow. During the early 20th century people would ride hanging on the undersides of train carriages across borders just to make links like these.” (Mason; BBC News, 2011)

‘Hanging on the undersides of train carriages’ seem quite suspiciously like an allegory for the ways in which aspired revolutionaries of yesteryears might have or had to have gone about their business. The progressive state of technology and its accessibility today seem to have stifled the cynics who, in the past, may have had reasons to believe that the unrelentingly backward-oriented mind sets of certain parties in certain places – with certain fingers in certain pies – would never be able to or even want to catch up with the standard of advancements that science and technology was at then only beginning to offer. ‘Technology’ and all of which that rather sophisticated word entails have not only provided new platforms and tracks for the revolutionary train to permeate geographical borders. It has worked to spread messages and awareness about dirty fingers, dirty pies and suspicious politics to such large sums of the public to a point where ideas of uprisings and upheavals need not lay hidden under the likes of train carriages any longer.

All this reminds me of my wonderful country Malaysia, which of course loves boasting its great food and great culture, but are always awfully shy when it comes to pointing out how distressed its people are with their government. I wrote a paper about two years ago now on authoritarianism or rather what scholars like to specify as ‘soft-authoritarianism’ in Malaysia. As some may already know, Malaysia is one of those countries who gather no shame in blatantly censoring and even repressing the much loved freedom of speech. (This is of course my own opinion derived from extensive research on the matter.) I will not go into that here simply because I wouldn’t know where to stop (or begin). But the reason for bringing this up here is because I think it is essential that we remember to not only look at Egypt and Tunisia and Libya in the event that we feel compelled to reappraise the impact of technology on our relationship with politics. It is rather sad that in many cases today, the retardation of socio-political development seem to persevere despite the fact that many of those countries pay so much time and effort to be on par with all the tremendous advancements our beloved digital age seem to churn out time and time again.

 

Postcard for A Better World

Digitale made for film class. Meant to be ’emotional’ – with still images and narration. I couldn decide if i should put music in the end. But the one i decided to submit was without music. Here it is.

 

 

with music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0f3Ym49oP4