Archive for July, 2010
Power
100% Polyurethane!
Pillow Talk
I have a new pillow. Well, a new main pillow anyway. It’s kind of small and claims to be a memory pillow of some sort, though I have to say, it seems to me that either its memory isn’t very good or I have no idea what it is remembering. In any case, it also has this funny smell, and I’m supposing that that has to do with the material, which is, as the packaging says, 100% polyurethane. It’s not a horrible smell, but it’s certainly distinctive. I’m not sure I like it any better or worse than my previous pillow, which was a fluffy feather-stuffed pillow turned not-so-fluffy feather-stuffed pillow.
Circus
Went to the circus show they’re having at Resorts World Sentosa. I’m no circus critic, but for what it’s worth, it was entertaining. Some parts were perhaps unintentionally hilarious, but that kind of helped. I think the company’s really important too, although that said, the right company can make anything work.
Jeff’s Back
I got my hands on the latest Jeff Beck album, Emotion & Commotion, and while it could perhaps be said that I’m more than a little biased where all things Jeff Beck are concerned, I’ve definitely been enjoying it so far. He’s always somehow stayed fresh and exciting to listen to for me, and this album embodies that pretty well.
Holidays (Or The Lack Thereof)
Oh no, a week before school begins. Time to get the rest of the house in order before heading into my final year. Looks somewhat intimidating, but there’s stuff to look forward to as well. I’m probably going to meet up with a couple of friends before we get started, and also watch a movie or two. Oh and I’ve yet to sort out all of my subjects so that’s going to get worked out pretty soon.
Computing
Oh the new computer’s basically completely done up. The remaining work actually lies with the old computer, with the scavenging of parts, transfer of data, complete obliteration of whatever I have to obliterate, and the disposal of all the remaining parts to come. I’m also really enjoying my time on the new computer and am glad that I got this chance to basically manage my home computer slightly differently.
Also, I want to be upgrading this compuer already somewhat, so I’ll be planning on getting some parts in the foreseeable future. I’ll start with a hard disk.
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OK Computer.
Services have been disrupted lately due (primarily) to computer problems. Things are looking up though, so I expect to be back at full capacity soon. I actually got the new computer on Saturday, but due to some err unforeseen circumstances, I only managed to get the Internet connection working last night. It’s all looking good now though, so I expect things to be back in order in the next couple of days.
Meanwhile, I’ve spent my time doing up photos, recovering data, and streamlining my original usage experience. I figured that a new computer was a good time to remove some of the trash, that is, some of the stuff I left hanging around after initially feeling excited about. I’ve packed up my feeds, for instance, and also cut down on my applications. Stuff like that.
Photos took a long while, but it certainly was a lot faster than I thought it would be. That’s down to the new specs, I reckon. I went through 1,500 photos in about 1.5 days. I wasn’t left with too many after that, which is probably a good sign, but even better is how efficient the whole thing is now.
As for recovering data, I’ve been reasonably successful. I’ve been unable to retrieve a tiny fraction of it (admin rights, and I’m too lazy to figure out a workaround), but it’s okay. It does encourage me towards a more complete fresh start anyway.
Bidding for subjects has started, an event that heralds the beginning of school. Competition is fierce this year, so I hope I get what I’m looking for.
Oh and in equally unrelated news, I’ve finished Ishiguro’s Nocturnes.
Meanwhile, I’m going to get back to fixing up the compuer. It is good to listen to music with something other than YouTube and lousy laptop speakers.
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Inception Impressions: Vacant Dreaming
Christopher Nolan’s Inception is in essence a heist film. Let’s start there.
Sleepwalkers
Inception builds its premise out of very simple building blocks. It is the marrying of a not unconventional science fiction foundation with the heist movie format. It also includes something of an emotional rope for the audience to hang onto. With these ingredients, a Chinese puzzle or a labyrinth–have your pick of metaphors–is presented, slowly picked apart scene by scene.
Dominic Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is our leading man. He’s a thief who operates in dreams, where he is capable of procuring, for instance, information that would perhaps be harder to obtain in the waking world. He gets that one-last-job chance when Saito (Ken Watanabe) hires him to perform an inception, the supposedly more difficult task of inserting a thought into someone’s head (as opposed to extracting it, of course).
It’s a job of some importance, because Saito is a man of considerable influence, considerable enough that he is in a position where he can call off the criminal charges against Cobb and allow him to return home to his children again.
Cobb, of course, takes the offer, and goes onto assemble his team. Through the eyes of young Ariadne (Ellen Page), we get taught the rules of the game. This here is the first half of the film, an instructional section where we are taught what’s possible in dreams and what’s not.
Through it all, we are introduced to the boundaries, the target, and the plan. We are also introduced to Mal (Marion Cotillard), Cobb’s deceased wife. In the process, it becomes clear that she haunts Cobb to such an extent that it affects his ability to do his job, although to say more would perhaps be indiscreet, even if it is a film that doesn’t depend on a major plot twist or an ingenious secret.
Indeed, like most good heist movies, Inception is about the unfolding.
The Thinking Man’s Action Film
The premise of Inception is not complicated as long as you stick with Nolan and allow him to lay the groundwork. Many have said that it’s something of a brainy thriller, which it is, in the way that it’s not simply about big guns and pretty explosions. It takes slightly more brainpower to understand what’s at stake (such as why we can’t die in this particular dream) and every proposed resolution (such as a method of providing a kick in free-fall) when compared to your average summer action movie.
Because Nolan assumes that his audience will be able to keep up with him, he avoids condescension. Events unfold almost like clockwork, defining rather concretely the film’s pulse. To that end, Inception successfully combines summer blockbuster thrills with a measure of intelligence. It’s popular entertainment presented in a cerebral package. That is to say, there is no doubt that this is an entertaining film. In an almost metronomic way, Inception proves engrossing.
Intelligent Design
This cerebral approach to the action movie is arguably best represented in the second half of the film, an extended finale sequence that is in essence one gigantic set-piece. Having completed its instructional phase, Inception enters its execution section. Cobb’s team attempts to pull off the heist of a lifetime by devising an elaborate plan of such complexity that it is probably simplest to describe it as a matryoshka doll of dreams.
The best parts of this second half also represent the best parts of the film. It’s wonderful entertainment to watch as pieces fall into place or as things go awry. Nolan (and Cobb) work with a team of seven as well as a collection of realities, with the effects of each reverberating through to the next. It’s impressive primarily because virtually no character or reality is left in the lurch, and also because of how every little element seems to fit nicely together in this enormous machine.
Dream a Little Dream
Of course, the excellent execution phase of Inception is helped by the fact that it is a pretty movie. In fact, the whole film is all rather aesthetically pleasing. Its liberal use of CGI has been featured prominently in the trailers, and rightly so as well, because not too many other films contain scenes of a city folding onto itself or exploding spontaneously into bits.
I am partial, however, to the gravity-less situations, a particularly memorable use of practical effects. There is something oddly beautiful about watching sleepers floating about in free space, seemingly oblivious to the firefights taking place around them. These effects also allow for some well-choreographed action scenes taking place across gravity-less corridors.
Huff and Puff
For all its beauty, precise execution, and clever structures, however, Inception falls a little flat when you realise how empty it is. It surprised me when I arrived at the end to realise how little the emotional weight that the film mustered.
The whole movie hinges upon the relationship between Cobb and Mal. It is the crucible within which we are supposed to find ourselves moved by our leading characters. It is also the basis of the existential themes that the film attempts to tackle. It is, as I said, the emotional rope for the audience to hang onto. In a manner of speaking, this relationship is meant to imbue the film with purpose and direction, some kind of meaning. But it doesn’t.
Most of this is down to the film’s treatment of Cobb and his family. It gives me no reason to bother about him, his two faceless kids or his wife. In fact, I wouldn’t even consider his wife a character. She is–appropriately, one might say–a shadow of a person, a caricature more than a believable human being. That works fine from a technical standpoint, but it does leave me with very little to care about. As for Cobb, it is strange to observe how flat he is compared with the rest of his crew. He isn’t as funny or as charming as some of his colleagues; he has a threadbare background story; and he is basically a nervous man quite on the edge as he perform the most important job of his life. I shouldn’t be able to summarise him like that.
In effect, Cobb is much like the structure of this film. He is a puzzle, a riddle, waiting to be solved. But people are not films, and when the picture ended, I couldn’t help wanting someone to care about.
Two-Pronged Failure
You would think that even if the Cobb’s love story didn’t work out right, we would still be left with rich material to work with. After all, that same relationship is at the heart of the movie’s larger, existential themes. There is no question that the film signals in this direction and tries to ask questions such as how we know the world around us is real and how real is real enough for us.
They are basic philosophical questions, no doubt, much like the basic components with which Nolan creates his engaging finale. The difference, however, is that the film seems reluctant to tackle these questions with the same enthusiasm. It is incredibly frustrating to watch as the script signals in that particular direction, only to steer clear of them save for the occasional superficial retort.
I also can’t help thinking that the conspicuously absent existential angst on the parts of both the lead characters may have given us something to care about.
Dreaming Big
At one point in the film, Eames (Tom Hardy) tells Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) rather cheekily: “You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger.” In terms of scale, structure and aesthetic design, Inception does that pretty well, but in terms of its thematic approaches, I wonder if it could’ve done with a little bit more. At the same time, I wonder if the design of the film lent to the deepening of such problems.
Inception is a film built on logic. One thing always leads to another; there are boundaries on more or less everything because it was designed as something of a game, with its own set of rules; and resolutions have to be allowed within the context of the film. This creates a compelling action movie, but it doesn’t serve the film’s other aspirations so well.
For one thing, it prevents it from exploring the ambiguous nature of reality. The set-up virtually begs for a more ambivalent treatment of this, but things occur so literally in Inception that one never seriously doubts if a particular world is a dream or the real world. (Save, of course, for the scene in the ending, which really just comes across as a cheeky afterthought rather than a significant development of the existentialist themes.) For a film about the tenuous nature of reality, reality doesn’t come across as being very tenuous at all.
This also kills any remaining sympathetic potential with Cobb and Mal because the film’s simplistic treatment of dreams and reality results in Mal coming across as being simply insane.
In a way, the film is trapped in its form. It is unwilling to tackle the uncertainties that lie outside its rather systematic structure and suffers for it. To me, it wouldn’t have been such a problem had the film not pointed in the direction of some of these themes. As it stands, it just seems afraid of breaking its own rules, of being more than a primitive existentialist meditation, and of dreaming bigger.
All Smoke, No Fire
Inception is like a good magic trick in the way that it is something that is constantly entertaining to watch. It is, however, also like a magic trick in another way. Many good magic tricks rely on misdirection, and Inception is no different. It busies itself with a lot of imagery, a lot of action, and a fair degree of structural ingenuity, but it succeeds and fails entirely on the basis of this grandiose design.
Again I will say that Inception is a heist film, and it works best on that level. It is smart, cool, and thrilling in its own intelligent way. It’s a puzzle that unfolds somewhat elegantly with each passing minute and yet also a riveting action movie.
Where it falters, however, is in the narrowness of its ambition. That’s not to say that it is a film that lacks ambition. Visually, it contains some of the most expansive and properly realised imagery in film in a long time. Thematically, too, it seems to want to punch above the weight of the average summer blockbuster. Perhaps one might say, for example, that it is an extended metaphor about film-making. Or perhaps one might call it a movie about what’s real and what’s not.
However, there it’s ambitions stutter. Inception lacks an emotional core. Its main emotional thread functions on the basis of stereotypical signals (family man, tragic love, etc.) rather than true development. The exploration of its themes also lack sufficient depth to convey, for instance, the fear of living in a counterfeit world. As a metaphor for film-making, it fails to capture the visceral aspects of art-making. As an existentialist’s action movie, it doesn’t do enough to offer any perspective. In fact, it doesn’t do very much at all.
In the end, Inception is a good movie, especially in the crowded league of summer blockbusters. It’s pleasant enough to watch from start to finish and has its moments of cleverness. Still, I think it’s possible to come out of the theatre feeling more than a little disappointed. It is a film trapped in its own form, such that it is unable to express its bigger, bolder dreams.
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Seasons of Change
Yesterday, I read a little note from a friend of a couple of years now who is moving onto another stage of her life. It was a sort of thank-you and a sort of goodbye. I told her that we should promise to keep talking. It seemed like the right thing to do, the proper thing, or maybe simply the human thing.
It reminded me of several things, not the least of which is the fact that that’ll be the rest of us in a year or so, moving on with our lives and probably saying our thank-yous and goodbyes as we should. I had to learn the hard way that things never stay the same, and even if I have, sometimes you can’t help feeling that it would be nice if they did, just for a little while.
Change can be frightening, mostly because it implies the unknown. Where will I be in a year? What will happen to us? How will I remember these things and people around me? How will I be remembered? Will I be remembered at all? There’s a mild existentialist desperation involved in it, I suppose, kind of like literally grasping at straws and trying to hang onto the bits and pieces of your life.
And sometimes it seems to me as though it would be better if we could make these goodbyes more final. If we could really leave things behind, we would stop struggling to hang on. That is, sometimes I think I shouldn’t keep fighting, shouldn’t persist in trying to keep up with the people around me. I’ve only ever succeeded a couple of times in doing so, I think, and in those cases, only marginally. It’s just so difficult to get involved in someone else’s life the moment he or she leaves your immediate sphere of interaction. As one of those people would say, it’s just the way life is.
That I keep making such promises, therefore, only serves to highlight how futile it all is. And perhaps there is a point to be made here about the inherent futility of our faculties of memory and the powerless character of our lives, but let’s not worry about that. Let’s just say that I think we can only try to hang onto ourselves and our friendships, because if we didn’t, it just seems like throwing in the towel on something that could otherwise be brilliant.
That is, you can’t live in apathy, and neither can you live in fear.
July never seemed so strange, in the words of a certain Mr. Meloy and the irresistible Decemberists. They’re words that have never seemed more appropriate for me, and yet I look at it and I think it’s probably just another season of change, like the ones that have come before and the ones that have yet to.
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Big Breakfast #03: art and authentication
As usual, written in something of a hurry. And certainly with a more rambling attitude than before.
Today’s edition of the Big Breakfast takes on a less critical and more personal tone because the past two stories have dealt with something of considerable importance to me. Both “Malvern Hills” and “Nocturne” deal in part with the cost of making music, and in that way, explore the nature of art-making. So it’s going to be less critical and more reflective (or rambling, depending on your mileage).
In “Malvern Hills”, the narrator—I don’t remember him having a name—struggles to find acceptance among the music circles. The first reason that he proposes is that he doesn’t have the equipment, which is all quite fair, to say the least. The second reason perhaps comes across as being more perplexing. One would think that the fact that he writes his own music should be something of a bonus. That creativity is frowned upon seems inherently self-defeating in the field of music.
Whatever the reasons, it leaves the narrator more than a little frustrated with the state of affairs. He doesn’t give up, though. He retreats to the hills with every intention of writing more music and even starting his own band when he leaves the hills. It’s a position that involves quite a bit of confidence, and it says something that he keeps going. “If disappointments do come, you will carry on still.”
If you think about it, he must have some remarkable sense of self-confidence if he carries on in the face of such persistent disappointment. It is a hard thing to trust yourself; it’s easier to have someone to tell you that you’re on the right track. For the most part, the narrator doesn’t, and in spite of this, his passion for making the music that he wants to make subsists.
Whether you like him or not, the narrator stands firmly for what he believes in. It is a stance that causes him much frustration, as epitomised by the encounter when Maggie asks that he stop practising. Her manner comes across as condescending, which infuriates the protagonist. At this point, there is no question of the selfishness exhibited in his reaction, but his anger suggests a permanent friction—permanent, that is, as long as he stays the course.
The world around us is a practical one. Pragmatism is in fact sensible. The making of art, on the other hand, requires a definite degree of romanticism and dreaming. In an artist, the two necessarily have to find a balance, a task that can seem all rather Herculean. To me his indignation is promising because it means he hasn’t yet given into fear. (Compare this sense of coherence to Steve’s uncertainty.)
In short, the narrator in “Malvern Hills” has a stubborn insistence on making music his way. There is nothing to suggest that he is on the right track. In fact, almost everything seems to tell him otherwise. Therefore, it stands to reason that he persists out of belief in his work and his fairly tremendous self-confidence. The truth is, he may have no choice. No matter what happens around him and to him, his mind will always return to “that bridge passage that [he] still hadn’t got right.”
On the other hand, we do not find the same courage in Steve from “Nocturne”. If anything, these two protagonists share similar beliefs in terms of their music, but differ Steve is not quite as brave as his songwriting friend. To my mind, Steve sees the worth and measure of art, despite the admission that he’s “no stickler for artistic integrity”. Yet, not being quite as confident as the songwriter, finds himself hoping to get into the “big league”
Surely I can’t be the only person in recognising that this “big league” is nothing but the price of admission. If he doesn’t make it to the big league, Steve will essentially find himself left with the odd jobs and daily rehearsals. In effect, he will just remain trapped in his soundproof room, oblivious to the rest of the world as it is oblivious to him. It makes one ask: is it enough for a musician to hone his craft all by himself, to hear himself approach some kind of greatness alone? And how does a musician know if he’s any good anyway?
If you look at it this way, Steve’s ambition to make it to the “big league” is nothing more than a method of authentication—it allows him to say that there is some universal or even artistic quality to his work, that it’s no longer simply a functional undertaking. His aspiration to succeed is arguably driven by the want to prove—to others and to himself—that his music is more than just a form of employment.
So, poor Steve, left with little choice, it seems, buys into the commercial world—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he sells himself to the commercial world. After some halfhearted displays of defiance, Steve finally agrees to an op. Admittedly, he seems to have been duped into doing so by the preposterous lure that his manager lays out for him—“Once you’re healed up, she comes back…” It’s so preposterous that I cannot bring myself to believe that Steve seriously buys it. It appears to be more of an excuse, a shield to hide behind in case anything goes wrong or if he changes his mind. It allows him to hide his shame should he have to—notice how he blames Bradley for talking him into it near the end of the story.
Steve is a man who is not willing to allow his music to speak for itself. Fair enough, since this approach has never got him anywhere. It has, in fact, left him quite aggrieved, as with the case of Jake Marvell. Yet he forgets that in our world, popular opinion does not often affirm artistic merit. Nevertheless, very little avails him, and if he doesn’t have the nerve to believe in the isolated music of his soundproof room, then he’ll have to buy his metaphorical ticket and get his true and unappealing looks altered into the constructed image of a popular musician. The “real world”, so to speak, forces him to forge an artificial self.
The thought of it is somewhat depressing. After all, what sort of perverse game would have you sell your artistic dignity and integrity in order to prove your artistic merit? Musicians struggling to find validity in a society of commercialism; art fighting for its life in the face of pragmatism. It’s not a theme that’s by any means new to fiction, but it remains a compelling one because it describes part of the process of creating art.
Ishiguro’s musicians are not saints—they shouldn’t have to be. It’s true that they’re not always likeable, that they are often morally challenged, and also that they’re sometimes infuriatingly impractical. Maybe it is in this way that Ishiguro reminds us that they are human, as all artists are. That art is a human endeavour is fundamental to understanding why we champion it.
It is in this way that we find some of the challenges of making art illustrated in reading these two stories. In particular, they show how difficult it is to authenticate the value of one’s work—that is to say, how difficult it is to tell how you’re making anything that’s of any good. Steve chooses to do so by chasing after the “big league”. The songwriter in Malvern Hills is stubborn enough to stick to his guns. Whether or not either is ill-advised is up for debate, but what is clear to me is that they’re both going to keep going. Perhaps that is the nature of art, and, as Beckett would have it, even when we can’t go on, we’ll go on.
I’m reminded of the courage that the artists I admire possess. It is the courage to dream and to remain defiant. It is the courage to stand against the tide when you have to, even with the looming possibility that you’re on the wrong track. Most of all, it is the courage to face the soundproof silence, the blank page, the empty stage, and come out with the confidence that you can and will say what you have to say.
There is a scene in “Nocturne”, the most absurd scene, in which Steve, face bandaged, stands on stage with a turkey in his hand—or rather, his hand in a turkey—and is faced with a stranger talking on the phone. The stranger dismisses this curious sight as “some kind of magic show maybe”. I wonder how differently he would think if he had heard—or, indeed, read—the whole story.
It’s probably not so far removed from watching one of his performances. Imagine that: an anonymous man on a stage stands with a saxophone, an instrument that you recognise but can’t quite identify with—a metal turkey, if you will. If you don’t dismiss it all as just some kind of magic show, how he got there and what he’s going to tell you could actually be magic. It could be a jazz piece, a ballad, or indeed a nocturne.
But until he gets that affirmation, this anonymous man will have to find hope in the hopelessness. Whether or not he does so by staying true to himself may be a secondary point, because whatever it is, an artist must first be able to keep going.
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Death, Undeath, and Football
Not Dead
The book club is not deceased. It came back to life the week I went missing from the internet. It’s certainly not what I would call fighting fit, but I guess there’s a shred of hope. Also, I’m lagging behind and better try to catch up.
Still Dead
My desktop, however, has not managed a similar resurrection. That accounts for most of the disruptions to my everyday life. Take, for example, the long-since dusty photo feature at the top of the main page here.
I have also taken to listening to music off of Youtube on my crappy notebook speakers. That’s the double whammy of losing your desktop and your earphones at one go.
Picky
I have to start picking my subjects. Hmm. I’m thinking about doing a minor, but I’m not too convinced about that because it involves something of a gamble since I’m not sure how well I’ll do in those, and it also involves doing a couple of extra subjects. We’ll see.
Contentious Sports
Oh I watched the World Cup finals. It was in fact the only full match of the 2010 World Cup that I watched. I thought it was a poor game and a terrible advertisement for football. Too little football and too much of histrionics.
I also disagree with what most of the press (and football legends) have been saying in that the Dutch were rough and totally anti-football. Sure, there were a number of bad tackles but I chalk that down to nerves. The anti-football claims are especially irksome because, if anything, the Dutch attacked as much as if not more than the Spanish. It was a reasonably positive performance, to be fair.
On the other hand, the Spanish team disgusted me sometimes. Well, not the team as a whole, but I wasn’t convinced about a number of the fouls they were awarded. I was also surprised to see Iniesta still on the pitch because I remember retaliation being a red-card offence. Most of all, Busquets’s constant complaining and provoking seemed to characterise the darker side of a mentally manipulative Spanish team.
But that’s the way football is. It’s so easy to have an opinion and so easy to pick a side. Perhaps the most objective thing that can be said about the match is that it was a poor one and we should all just forget about it as soon as possible.
Quote
“I don’t think that people accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable. It seems like religion and myth were invented against that, trying to make sense out of it.”
David Lynch.
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