Pimpin' Off To Pusan
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Wednesday, 07 October 09 - 04:36 AM (GMT +08:00) By Khairil Mokhzani Bahar in Filmmaking Frolics |
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So for those not in the know, the last thing I did before becoming a hermit for a couple of months was a short film called 'Healthy Paranoia' for 15 Malaysia, a short film project where 15 local filmmakers created 15 short films about what we thought of our lovely country:-
And there's also a making of here:-
The flick was shot with the actual Minister of Health in the Ministry of Health itself and the dude was a pretty cool guy too. Amongst the other filmmakers involved were the late Yasmin Ahmad, Col. Kurtz himself - Johan John, the Suleimans, Benji & Bahir and a whole bunch of pimp daddies rollin' in the caddies.
When I took the job, I just thought it'd be fun to do a short film on a budget. Gig's a gig, right? What I didn't expect was to find myself with a sponsored trip together with the other pimp daddies to the Pusan International Film Festival in Korea.
Sweet.
Thing is, I thought since I have my 5D and haven't been doing enough with the damn thing, I figured instead of blogging about the experience I might as well video blog it. Of course, this depends on whether or not I find the time to edit and upload whilst I'm there (or whether I'm of sound health and mind during the trip to do so).
Regardless, here's part one:-
Wednesday is flight day. Let's see what bad craziness we get up to...
Melodies/Memories
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Wednesday, 09 September 09 - 01:24 AM (GMT +08:00) By Khairil Mokhzani Bahar in Brain Stew |
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In truth, however, music didn't really become ingrained into my bloodstream until I discovered that not only could I listen to it, I could make my own too. I was into poetry ever since my English teacher in prep school told me that I had a natural talent for it and I would often write poems to express whatever it was I was feeling or thinking, distilling the haywire of pre-pubescent thoughts into small, concise lines.
Hip-hop gave me the opportunity to express myself in music without having to actually learn how to play music. When I was about fifteen my father bought me a keyboard and I'd use the pre-set drum patterns as a beat whilst laying down some incredibly basic bass lines and write rhymes to lay on it.
When I discovered Nirvana it changed the playing field once again - Kurt was left handed, just like I was, and a friend of mine went about teaching me some very basic chords so that I could play some Nirvana tracks. I went from writing rhymes to laying down lyrics, and by the time I was in A-levels I was in my first proper band playing bass.
Ever since then I've been in one band or another, and ever since I've been writing songs.
These days I've found myself listening to a lot of music that I've heard a hundred times before, only this time I find myself really listening to the lyrics. I've heard "Hey Jude" a thousand times before but only recently do I find myself really listening to the lyrics. Lyrics were always what I was into in the first place - poetry, placing the right structure of words together in the right amount to express a specific feeling, an emotion, a thought, and doing so melodically.
It's amazing how music can sometimes just trigger something - how something someone wrote in another place at another time about something that has nothing to do with what you're going through, but somehow you relate to every word, every feeling the track evokes. Other times, a song can trigger something simply because in your mind and in your heart it's associated with some moment, some person, something, anything, and it floods your every pore, for better or worse.
I totally forgot Corinne Bailey Rae's "Like A Star" was on my playlist when it came on at random, and it just made me miss the person I associate that song with a whole lot more.
(Ironically, just as I wrote that paragraph above, "Love Hurts" by Nazareth came on. Either my Winamp player is being sadistic or I should get more mp3's. Or maybe just play "Surfin' Bird" by The Thrashmen on loop.)
You Do Not Fuck With This Man
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Tuesday, 25 August 09 - 09:56 PM (GMT +08:00) By Khairil Mokhzani Bahar in Geek-o-rama |
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You just don't. I can't think of a single movie where it would be a good idea to fuck with Clint Eastwood. And from some of the stories I've heard about in Hollywood, it's probably not a good idea to fuck with him in real life either. Shit, even when he had a monkey for a sidekick (sorry, I meant ape) you didn't fuck with his sidekick. And Gran Torino has every bad ass motherfucker Clint's ever played rolled into one bitter old son of a bitch.
I've been watching a lot of comedies for the past two months (though for about two days last week it was violent and bleak movies), just trying to keep my spirits up. 'Mallrats' has never failed me, nor has most of Kevin Smith's work (though 'Chasing Amy' is a bit too painful to watch) but it's been getting old and a lot of the new comedies feel... cheap. The last mind-blowingly refreshingly good comedy I saw was 'The 40 Year Old Virgin' and though there've been a few since that have been good, nothing particularly exciting or surprising.The last thing I expected was to find myself laughing throughout a Clint Eastwood drama.
Don't get me wrong - the movie's not a comedy, and I wasn't laughing at the movie as if it was so bad it was humorously good. I was laughing in surprise, in joy at watching the movie. Most of all, I was laughing in rejoice at how unabashedly badass Clint is.
Like I said earlier, this is all those characters of his that you've loved rolled into one - the political incorrectness of Dirty Harry Callahan, the no-bullshit attitude and moral code of every cowboy he's ever been from The Man With No Name to the Outlaw Josey Wales. All rolled into a man that's knocking on heavens door.
And he growls. He fuckin' growls, like a pitbull that you've just accidentally fucked with.
This is an old school man in every respect, and it's insanely refreshing to see a character like this on screen. He's not a bad man, and you can see his heart if you look past the unpleasentries. He's just a man, the way men were portrayed all those years ago, back when being a man meant something. And just watching this man go through this movie was an insanely fun ride.
And don't get me started on the direction and the script. I think anyone who's reviewed a Clint-directed movie has said the same thing - lean as fuck. Not an ounce of fat in the direction or the script, not a scene in that's unrequired, not a shot that's indulgent, just what you need and full stop.
By now you've probably noticed I haven't touched on the story at all. Why should I? There are tons of reviews out there and there's the trailer to check out. It's a movie where Clint is Clint, which is one of those things that are just a joy to watch.
Check it out. Find it. Slip it in your DVD player, sit back and enjoy. No CGI, no fancy editing, no pretty stars and starlets either banking in another paycheck or trying to prove their acting chops - just a good story starring Clint Eastwood. And if this truly is his last appearance as an actor, then it's a fitting end to a brilliant career.
Communication Breakdown
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Thursday, 20 August 09 - 07:58 PM (GMT +08:00) By Khairil Mokhzani Bahar in Brain Stew |
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But it'll never replace the real world.
What I write on my blog, I write for anyone to read. When I want to talk to my friends, I meet my friends. I look them in the eye and enjoy a conversation, because in my opinion there is no better way to communicate to another human being than face to face.
Don't get me wrong, I love how the internet connects millions together. Through Facebook I've managed to catch up with friends I thought long since forgotten and helped me pimp out whatever work or events or whatever I have to the public. E-mails have helped speed up work, helped me communicate with friends across the sea. And both have helped me communicate with others in general when I can't meet them.
But it's not a replacement. I'd rather talk to someone face to face than just read text or even through the wonderful world of Skype. I don't have MSN or Yahoo messenger for precisely that reason - it's like a poor excuse for a conversation.
Even the great communication tool we had before the internet, Alexander Graham Bell's telephone. It's great to communicate with, but it's not a replacement to me. If there's no other way to communicate but the phone or the internet I'll gladly use it but it's not a replacement.
I write this because I realize that with some people I know this is the only way they communicate with me, even if they're just a stone's throw away, and even when the shit hit's the fan and when there may be important things to talk about, it's still the phone, the net, anything. Anything but meeting up.
Perhaps with a lot of people these days there's no real difference, but to me there is a huge difference. Many people more intelligent than me have written reams of text on how things like the internet have severed real human interaction, real human connection, real conversations, making us lose touch of one of the many things that make us human - the fact that we communicate with each other.
When one person talks to another, it's not just their mouth that's talking, but their entire body - their eyes, their hands, their legs, everything. It's why on-line poker is never going to beat the real thing because it's sterile - you make a guess based on someone's on-line actions but you see nothing, absolutely nothing.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I would rather have a five minute conversation face to face with a friend of mine rather than a five hour conversation over the phone. If I can make time for a friend and they're in the same time zone as me, I would make time to meet them, especially if I thought what I was saying was important.
The internet, phones, whatever - they're all just tools of convenience, not replacements. And if a person meant something to me, even the slightest, I'd rather look them in the eye than stare at their profile picture.
Pretty ironic, I know, for someone who has a Facebook account, MySpace account, Friendster account and two e-mail addresses. But if there's one thing I realized today it's that if you're within short driving distance of someone and you spend more time talking to them on the phone or on the internet than meeting them face to face, either that person means as much to you as a random person that's added you on Facebook that you may have met but aren't too sure thus keeping your distance or you just don't want to meet that person (and vice versa).
Even starfish don't keep to themselves and they literally don't even have brains.
Kingfisher Birds and Bad Craziness
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Monday, 17 August 09 - 08:56 AM (GMT +08:00) By Khairil Mokhzani Bahar in Brain Stew |
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I was leaning against the railings in Taman Tun's answer to Lake Gardens, sipping coffee after a night of insomnia surrounded by octogenarians taking walks and practicing tai-chi, when I noticed the bird.
It looked like a kingfisher, though I'm not sure that particular breed existed in this country. Nonetheless, it took me by surprise. The bird seemed to be staring at the turtles just in front of it, popping up and blowing bubbles in the water, poking their noses out. Perhaps they were having a conversation, I don't know. What I did know was that at that moment there were no one-way conversations going on in my head that had kept me awake the whole night through.
Over 62 hours ago on a Friday evening I was sat in The Hub helping out TripleVI transfer footage from a camera to a hard drive. There were four tapes, a long and arduous process, and as customary for TripleVI whilst waiting he lit up a joint. After a while I got bored and decided to join in, only taking one or two puffs, just to pass the time.
And that's when it began.
I decided, whilst waiting, to put on a DVD - the Coen brother's "Burn After Reading". Perhaps it was the weed or perhaps the movie had been hyped up a bit too much by my fellow filmmaking friends. Regardless, we both starred at the screen wondering what the plot of the movie was whilst I, slowly, was losing the plot myself.
Five days prior to this event I had a revelation after a number of heart-wrenching moments with the Tamagotchi. The biggest revelation came when the Tamagotchi sent me a song that she had recorded for me many moons ago but at the time I could never receive it. Listening to that song made me realize more than ever that she did care for me, truthfully and honestly, and I truly understood two things. One, the immensity of how much I must have hurt her, and two, how much hope there was in the world.
The second part may seem confusing, especially in a post that offers no backstory nor names or faces of the parties involved, and especially since it's all written in a style that's a poor imitation at best of the great Gonzo journalist himself, Hunter S. Thompson, but in a nutshell what transpired in my head and heart was this: the Tamagotchi made me feel a sensation towards another person that I hadn't felt in more than a decade, a sensation I thought would only happen once in life and was gone forever. And the fact that it happened again, against all odds, is truly a sign of hope - that things do get better. I had ruined my chances with the Tamagotchi but in the long arduous process of pouring out our hearts and brains I was, in a sense, reborn in a strange way. I could see the path that my life was taking and I knew what that path lead to, and it was a path I had made a promise to myself as a child I would never take. It was this revelation that lead to my post on Love.
It was this revelation that kept me going through most of the week, together with the help of John, Paul, George and Ringo. But after TripleVI left, I realized the effects of that stinking weed.
Introspection, paranoia and increasingly negative and completely irrational thoughts swirled constantly through my head and my gut, coursing through my veins and all the hope that I had believed in throughout the week felt lost. Though I knew that there was nothing wrong with feeling emotions, whether good or bad, this feeling was completely irrational and, worst of all, fucked beyond compare.
The sensation continued over night, and stayed for the next two days. I'd alternate between having a level head and keeping things in control to feeling the insane urge to punt a terrier. On Sunday morning I woke up after a disastrous dream involving the Tamagotchi saying something so painful it bolted me out of the bed in an instant.
By Sunday night I couldn't sleep, for fear of more dreams.
From 1am to 6am I tossed, turned, switched positions and air cond temperatures, but nothing worked. My shoulders and neck felt particular fucked and nothing could be done. By 6.30am I thought to hell with it and had a shower. By 7am I was in the park.
At 7.15am I saw the bird.
Now, as I write this, I think most of the crap is out of my system, though I still feel some of it lingering.Most of it, however, dissapeared when I saw the bird. As the bird looked in one direction one of the turtles out of its sight popped up and faced the opposite direction, upwards.
And for some reason I was fascinated.
I tried to capture it in the picture above but I was too far away and didn't have my zoom lens. Regardless, I had to capture it. Like the dancing plastic bag in American Beauty, there was something magical happening before me.
Behind me, a muzak version of 'Rasa Sayang' was playing on a boom box as the golden oldies clapped through their exercises. Health buffs jogged with iPods on their arms and a bottle of water in one hand. The sky was a watered down version of night, with a stream of day trickling through it, slowly seeping into the world.
Somewhere, out there, was hope.
Spreading the On-Line Presence
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Thursday, 13 August 09 - 02:39 AM (GMT +08:00) By Khairil Mokhzani Bahar in Brain Stew |
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So yeah. So far since I first joined Terapad I haven't had too many complaints (apart from only being able to mess around with their templates and not being able to put your own layout) and since I've got my fingers in a couple of pies I've been doing up different websites for each of these thingeys.
1. Rollin' Sixers
Click here or the pic above to check out the site.
Though the band may have a MySpace and a Facebook Group page, I figured a website would help as well for use as a general place to put stuff up at (God, my grammar sucks tonight).
2. Checkered Past
Click here or the pic above to check out the site.
For my filmmaking stuff, since it';s all been under the banner of Checkered Past it was high time I did a website for the stuff. Both this and Sixers page haven't got much on them yet, but give it time, people.
3. Kraftwank
Click here or the pic above to check out the site.
Finally, one for the love, people. As some of you may know most of the stuff I do is packed with a lot of DIY-ing, and almost everything I know about filmmaking and musicmaking I learnt from the web, so why not create a site sharing the stuff I've learnt as well as the stuff I discover on-line?
Incidentally, I'm looking for fellow DIY creatives to add their own posts of experiences to the site. If you're interested, holla back via the contacts section. Or buzz/mail me. You probably know me if you're on this site anyway.
So there you have it. Three new sites which hopefully will not be left neglected and un-updated.
Yeah, right.
Experience This
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Wednesday, 12 August 09 - 06:37 PM (GMT +08:00) By Khairil Mokhzani Bahar in Filmmaking Frolics |
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I sincerely believe there are two types of writers, especially when it comes to screenplays.
The first type channels specific life experiences of their own into their writing - the names, faces, places and outcomes may be different to what happened, but the similarities to those real life experiences are there. Perhaps it's too exorcise whatever demons the writer may have lurking inside them, perhaps it's just because they're not too imaginative.
The second type writes purely from their imagination, either what they wish would happen or wish wouldn't happen in the world - the fantastical, the imaginary, the down-right weird. These are the ones whose ideas often start off with "wouldn't it be cool if..." or "imagine this..."
The best writers have both traits.
I reckon I've always belonged to the former - the type that writes about what he's experienced - but I've found myself turning more and more towards the latter.
The recent ideas I've been coming up with have been filled with large explosions, fight sequences, espionage, poker and Satan. And I'm quite sure I know why.
Because up until recently I've been blocking out my experiences for the past few years.
My original reasoning before this was that I needed to write something that made some dough or write something in Malay which makes me very nervous as the main thing I love writing is dialogue, but the fact of the matter is they're all just excuses.
It's strange - I've actually been complaining to myself that there aren't any personal experiences to write about when in actuality there have been plenty. I've just either not been able to see it from the correct point of view or simply didn't want to touch those experiences again with a ten foot pole.
It feels good to be able to look at things the way I used to again. It's incredibly refreshing, for one. The instability in some of my more human traits are still there, but they're no longer something I want to hide or repress. To accept life as is, the experiences life gives you, is a good feeling indeed, and I think I know what things to write about now.
Like my bowel movements.
Love, Or Something Like It
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Monday, 10 August 09 - 01:15 PM (GMT +08:00) By Khairil Mokhzani Bahar in Brain Stew |
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Let's talk, you and I. Let's talk about love.
It's been a good long while since I actually wrote about anything deeply personal, and for good reason - I knew what I would write. And I think I'm a bit too old to be writing self-serving emotional dhiarhea that's poorly disguising the want and need for someone out in that big ol' cyberspace to understand, to say "it's okay" and kiss one's botty better. And if it wasn't a post about that, it would be a post full of macho posturing, an attempt to build up confidence and armor to shield one from the pains of emotions whilst simultaneously trying to tell the world "look at me! I am strong and powerful and I can withstand any shit you give me!"
Balls to that.
From the moment I started blogging I believed that there is nothing else to blog about but the truth. If you believe in something or feel something and are absolutely ok with the idea that you believe or feel that something then there should be no fear in writing about it. I enjoy writing, that's what I do, and one of the things a blog helps me do is keep writing, using them words so that I don't not write so good as I used to have.
And right now I feel absolutely ok with talking about my life with regards to love.
"The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread." - Mother Teresa
Ever since I was a child I'd been fascinated by the concept of love. It was something I had seen on TV and in the cinema and read about in books and it appealed to me - this unexplainable phenomenon that brought people together, filled with passion and affection and romance. Whilst most boys my age were still under the impression that girls had that mysterious and infectious disease called 'cooties' I had no qualms with the opposite sex and I still don't. Whilst my peers may think of women as something to be conquered or approach with caution I think women are fascinating creatures.
Even though the 'cooties' disease no longer became infectious as girls turned to women but instead mutated into a monthly scheduled emotional defect known as PMS (that's a joke, ladies. Have a sense of humor for God's sake).
And of course, over time, one grows up to the age where girls and boys start 'discovering' themselves.
"Where there is love, there is pain." - Spanish Proverb
I remember my first crush with a French exchange student. I remember the moment I laid eyes on her and remember the dizzying sensation of being in her presence.
I also remember a different dizzying sensation of being in her presence after she went out with a guy who pretended to be my friend so that he could get closer to her and make a move.
Ouch.
I remember my first love. I remember how connected I felt to her, how incredible that first kiss under a tree in Hyde park felt and how insanely good it felt to be with someone who felt something for me.
I also remember being dumped over the phone and subsequently beating the phone up. I remember still trying to be friends with her whilst consoling her over how heart broken she was after a friend of mine who went out with her after me dumped her and I remember said 'friend' enrolling in my A level college and being a total dick as far as this past relationship was concerned.
Double Ouch. Goddamn. I hope at the very least my circle of friends is better than it was back then.
I'd go on with more examples, but they'd start to look repetitive and the point is clear - love can be a painful goddamn thing to experience. Unrequited love, more to the point. Plato once said that "love is a grave and mental disease" and in a way he's right - love defies all forms of logic and reason. It is every single emotion ever possible to experience, both positive and negative, bundled into one huge heart shaped blob.
I know a lot of people who've experienced the things I've written above - the heart ache that comes with love, and as time goes by and people get older I notice how much love shapes a personality. Or rather, the hurt of love. It reaches to the point that it becomes a dirty word, much dirtier than 'fuck' or 'shit' or 'Rais'.
In particular, I've seen how heartbreak can cause cynicism. How it creates defence mechanisms designed to protect from heartbreak yet at the same time turning the person into someone who doesn't believe in love.
I've seen countless friends who've gone from helpless romantics to mysoginistic players. I've seen girls go from sweet and adorable to pessimistic and cold. All within the single snap of the fingers of love.
And, for a time, I was set to go the same way too. All the way until I met someone who made me feel like that sixteen year old underneath a tree again.
And once again, history repeats itself.
(Except this time no back-stabbing friends were involved, thank fuck.)
But like Kyle in South Park (or is it Stan?) I learnt something today (or rather, over the course of the past month). I learnt that I too could easily take that one step closer towards being colder, more cynical, more pessimistic and more of a mysoginistic cunt.
But I also learnt that I'm not gonna. And I'm not gonna for a very simple reason - I believe in love.
"Love doesn't make the world go round. Love is what makes the ride worthwhile." - Franklin P. Jones
Some would say that hardening up and accepting that love is a bitch is growing up - it's becoming a man. The type of man that sleeps all night, works all day, cuts down trees, eats his lunch, goes to the lavatory, spends his Wednesdays shopping and has buttered scones for tea.
Or something like that.
There are people out there who'll tell you that love and romance is a dated concept, an explanation for sexual urges for the times way back in the day when having a shag in civilized society required marriage. There are those that'll tell you that to fall in love is setting yourself up for hurt. There are those that'll tell you that there's no point in love, it's just something to explain the crush your feeling when your young. They'll tell you it's a fools game, a childish concept and something one should grow out of in their teens.
Well, balls to that too, you bunch of pessimistic cowards.
I'd rather be a sixteen year old hurt by love but still believing in it rather than a thirty year old who thinks women are nothing more than sperm receptacles.
I believe in love. I believe in the sheer joy and beauty and the awesomeness of it all. I believe in hope, that things can get better. I believe love because to believe in love is to be idealistic, and there is nothing wrong with idealism. Like love, people stop being idealistic the second all their hopes and dreams shatter.
To believe in love, to be idealistic, to believe in hope in the world is akin to being like a child, and what the fuck is so wrong with wanting to feel like a child again? Do you remember what it felt like to be a child before 'the real world' started creeping again? Life was fucking fantastic back then! You believed anything could happen, anything could be done, anything was possible. Lego would have you transfixed for hours!
But as people grow up and these feelings get shattered people start to face the world with a more 'real world' attitude - self-defense and self-preservation sweats from their every pore. And I look at all these people and I just think it's sad.
Without love, there would be no such thing as art. It's the reason music and movies seem so hollow these days - the love is gone and replaced by materialism and wealth. The last four brilliant films that I saw which came out recently were Slumdog Millionaire, The Wrestler, Star Trek and In Bruges, and in each one you can feel the love the filmmaker and the actors have for the material, the sheer passion in it. Two of them were big hits, two were small indie flicks, neither category matters - the love was there. I wish I could list down the last four brilliant music tracks I've heard recently but unfortunately, I hear no love on the radio except when they play an MJ track in memory of the man which just further shows how terrible music has gotten nowadays. You may like Lady Gaga, but I wouldn't let her ride my disco stick for a bazillion bucks.
I will not tell a lie. This past month I have gone through more pain than I could ever possibly imagine, but I also realized something - even though I had pretty much given up on the love that I felt when I was a young, bright eyed lad with so many pimples I looked like someone drew a face on a lychee peel, even after all that I still ended up meeting someone who made me feel like how I felt when I was Khai the human lychee boy. And whilst I can do without the spots I don't ever want to grow up again as far as love is concerned because it is an incredible feeling.
The only difference between now and then is at least now I'm a little wiser, a little smarter and a little more savvy. One of the biggest things I've found that's held me back for the past few years is that I forgot how to dream and hope and most of all, love. And though it's because of these things that I now find myself unrequited, it does not validate the belief that to dream and hope and love is to be hurt constantly. No. If anything, it proves that anything is possible. Absolutely anything.
It would be so much easier to say "fuck you" to love. It would be easier and a lot less painful to 'accept' that shit will always hit the fan so you better fling some shit back, but then I remember what I used to tell myself when I was growing up - I used to tell myself that I never want to grow up. Now, to reduce ones self to the mind set of a child is pointless because we grow, it's inevitable. But it's not impossible to change one's point of view, to look at everything with that same child-like innocence and belief in the impossible. Imagine looking at the world through those eyes, except now your a little older, your a little wiser, and you know how things work. Imagine how goddamn incredible that would be.
These were the thoughts that helped me sleep last night. This was what went through my head when I still felt the pangs of pain. The Dalai Lama once said "we can live without religion and meditation, but we cannot survive without human affection", and he's right (come on, he's the Dalai Lama. Are you gonna question the Dalai Lama?). I believe that all those people living with their shields and body armor merely think they're happy because they've cut off the concept of love from their lives in order to survive. I'm not knocking it at all, everyone has a right to live the way they wanna live. But I do think that deep down they could be so much happier.
I've gone through a helluva lot emotionally, but I'm still standing. There are people out there who are living with the threat of death or poverty or persecution every waking hour and for some of these people, love is what holds it all together. I have seen true love work in the flesh before my very eyes in all ages, races, shapes and sizes. I've seen it when it works and when it does it works beautifully.
"Love is a promise, love is a souvenir, once given never forgotten, never let it disappear." - John Lennon
Love is something that will never be understood and I hope it never will. It's that search for the meaning of love that has given us some of the greatest things in the world, more so than the search for the meaning of life which has given us a ton of books written by men who spent so much time thinking all the hair on their heads went to their chin.
I know some of you may be thinking "what a hopeless romantic". That's ok. I'd rather be a hopeless romantic than a pessimistic cunt any day of the week. I believe in love and I believe in hope. I believe in child-like, wide-eyed idealism. And I'm not ashamed of it.
...
...I also believe in a good hard shag between two consenting adults purely for the pleasure of it and as a closing line to inject some humor in these proceedings. I now leave you to your regular reading schedule whilst I examine these slides of the mysterious 'cooties'.
You want to kiss my lucky egg?
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Thursday, 06 August 09 - 06:18 PM (GMT +08:00) By Khairil Mokhzani Bahar in Brain Stew |
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For those not in the know, Kinder Surprise was a chocolate egg (and very yummy chocolate at that) which was hollow and inside you'd find a capsule which contained parts for a toy you could make. And not just stupid crappy toys that you'd throw away, but collectible toys such as these:-
I'd always wondered what happened to them, especially when I got back to Malaysia and saw a Kinder sign in a shop and rushed to the area where it was to find Kinder Bueno.
Now, whilst Kinder Bueno is made from the same company and uses the same yummy chocolate, I still missed them eggs. I loved those eggs. You'd open them up and find all kinds of cool toys, you'd never know what you'd get. Even the capsules became toys, used for filling all kinds of random tiny crap.
Then one day I walked into a 7-11 and discovered something called Kinder Joy. It was egg shaped. I bought one with the giddiness of a school girl and opened it up...
...to find this:
Two brown furry balls in a gelatinous goop that looks suspiciously like some form of male secretion and another section for the toy. The toy itself, meanwhile, was nothing in comparison to the toys you'd get from Kinder Surprise. Toys such as this:-
That is apparently a picture frame. You can take out the face and put your own pic in. Whoopee.
(Thing is, shooting Ampang Medikal was so insane that myself, Chen-Chen and Kat would go and buy tons of these Kinder Joys trying to get the latest boat or picture frame. In retrospect, we should've just gone to Toys R Us and bought something really cool).
I had always wondered why Kinder Surprise wasn't sold here, and why it was so difficult to find when I went to other countries too, until I discovered that most countries such as the States have recalled them because parents think they're dangerous.
The fear is that it is dangerous to children under the age of three and they might choke on the little bits or just swallow the capsule whole without realizing there is a toy inside. This leads me to believe that there are some insanely stupid parents out there who should be taken out onto the street and shot.
The company knows that it could be dangerous for children under three, which is why the packaging states it's not for children under three due to the tiny bits. Apparently there have been many Kinder Surprise related deaths which can only lead me to two possible theories:
1. Dumb ass parents are giving these chocolates to toddlers below the age of three, or
2. Children under three crawl out of the house without their parents knowledge, go to the candy store and purchase these things themselves because the chocolate is a toddler's equivalent to crack.
When I was a kid, we looked forward to buying a Kinder Surprise. If our parents bought us one, it was happy days. We liked the chocolate, but more importantly, we wanted the toy. The toy was everything. We knew there was a toy inside it, that's why we fucking wanted it. And at least my parents were clever enough to buy it for me at an age when I understood what was inside.
What kind of dumb fucking parent gives a toddler chocolate with tiny toy bits in it? Were the Cadbury's bars sold out? Shouldn't you be feeding the baby milk and rusks? Or can none of these parents read the print that says there's a fucking toy in it?
I miss them Kinder Surprise toys. Canada has them. Perhaps I should move there.
Skate Or Die
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Friday, 31 July 09 - 04:44 PM (GMT +08:00) By Khairil Mokhzani Bahar in Brain Stew |
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So I was walking around One Utama today with the express intent of getting a haircut when I saw that my regular dude wasn't in the shop and I didn't really trust anyone else in there to cut my hair since he'd been trimming my head pubes since I started shooting 'Ciplak'.
It was then that I remembered the Reverend's SMS last week, foretelling of a new skate shop in the new wing. Curious, I thought I'd go and check it out and sure enough, there it was opposite F.O.S. - The Push.
To see this shop in One Utama was a pleasant surprise - when the Asian X-Games came to Malaysia the country went 'extreme sports' crazy and buying a decent skateboard was pretty easy. Extreme, Radioactive and a whole bunch of other stores sold skateboarding equipment as well as the already established skateboard shops. Skate parks started popping up all over the country.
Then, after they left, so did most of the interest. Only the really enthusiastic skaters were left and the stores slowly dissapeared or concentrated on just clothing with a deck or two available around. To see a dedicated skateboard shop in One Utama was pretty unexpected.
What was even more unexpected were the decks they had. In particular, this one -
It seems that Krooked have brought out a bunch of old school style fish decks. In particular, a bunch of Mark Gonzalez reissues as well as two types of fish decks branded Zip Zinger and Zig Zagger.
And yes, you guessed it, I bought it.
To understand the fascination with this huge, poorly color coordinated monstrosity you have to know my history of love for skateboarding. See, when I first got into skateboarding, back when I was nine or ten, most skateboards and skaters looked like this:-
When I was a kid, though, I had no idea where the skateboard shops were in Malaysia, and instead had those stupid toy ones you get at Toys R Us with the crap plastic wheels. When I got back into skateboarding when I was about 21 I bought myself a proper deck - a Powell Peralta blank deck which I drew on myself but never took a photo of so as time went by and I skated the thing more and more the original image of a giant Godzilla-sized sumo wrestler attacking a city with the words "Who's Ur Daddy?" have long since eroded.
The thing was, technically I couldn't afford it now. At least, not till Monday. But monetarily I had just enough cash. I inquired about the price for a full set up then went off for a cigarette to think about it.
After one cigarette, it was decided.
See, I haven't bought something that I just want in a long time. Everything I buy when I do go shopping can usually be justified - clothes are justifiable, humans need clothing. Shoes are justifiable, humans need shoes. The Canon 5D I recently bought, though something I've always wanted since I saw the footage of it, is predominantly for my work as a filmmaker more than anything else. Even anything guitar related can be justified by my involvement in a band.
There is absolutely no need to buy another skateboard. I've got two older decks that still work fine. It doesn't benefit my work, it's not required as part of everyday life, there is no way of justifying this purchase.
But I want it. I haven't really treated myself to anything in a long time. The sheer pointlessness of the purchase and the nostalgia it brings back was enough to help me decide. I walked back and told them to set it up - stick on the grip tape, pop in the bearings, screw on the trucks and voila.
The wheels are 65mm in diameter compared to my old deck's 56mm. The trucks are much longer - I was originally going to use my old trucks but the board is a lot wider than my old deck so the longer trucks are to give it a wider wheel base. And it's not just the width of the board but the length is much bigger too.
As I walked back with my board in hand, holding it by its trucks, I couldn't help but smile. I never thought I'd get a deck like this. I always hoped that I could go back to England or the States once more so that I could search for a deck like this, resigned to the thought that I'd never find it here. I can't wait to try this board out and start skating again and even if I don't end up skating regularly again, it's fucking beautiful by itself.
You Can't Show That In Public!
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Tuesday, 28 July 09 - 04:45 AM (GMT +08:00) By Khairil Mokhzani Bahar in Brain Stew |
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"Police Block Movie Screening In Kg Buah Pala
Police blocked the screening of the movie “Gadoh” at Kampung Buah Pala tonight.
Dozens of police were at the kampung to stop the residents association from showing the movie in the open air along the main lane passing through the village on the grounds that it was an illegal gathering, the movie was controversial, and the event didn’t have a police permit.
The 70-minute movie, produced by media communications group Komas, “explores our perception of identity and challenges our hatred of the other”. Check out the trailer here.
So far, the movie has been screened in Penang at D’Space (Weld Quay) and Disted College. It is also scheduled to be shown at USM on Wednesday night.
Kg Buah Pala is believed to be under close police surveillance ahead of a 2 August deadline for residents to vacate the premises in favour of a property developer. The Penang state government, however, has revoked the development order for the developer’s project on the site of the village."
I... really don't know what to say about this. I know they didn't have permits, that technically it's illegal but... for God's sake, man. I haven't seen the movie (and now I'm not sure if I will), but from what I understand it's a movie about racial tolerance, what in God's name is wrong with that?!
I can't even think of a single witty quip to say about this. Not one. First Yasmin Ahmad passes away, now this. Am I ever going to be able to write something happy and nice about the state of the local film industry or will every post I put in this blog about local films be negative?
"That will be all, Francois..."
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Tuesday, 28 July 09 - 03:01 AM (GMT +08:00) By Khairil Mokhzani Bahar in Brain Stew |
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So for the past few weeks I've been going through a lot of comedy - part of the motivation was for the purposes of research and inspiration on a project I (hopefully) may be working on, the other was simply to laugh.
The thing was, half the time I wasn't laughing as much. In fact, a lot of times I found myself forcing a laugh and not the way one does in order to be polite when someone tells a crap joke, but because I knew the joke was funny, I understood why it was funny, and I was supposed to react in the way one does when someone finds something funny. I wanted to laugh, more than anything, because laughter is the best medicine.
Perhaps it was the very reasons why I wanted to laugh that made it difficult to laugh, I don't know, but in any case it wasn't working. My laughs were polite lies. Though I knew and saw and understood the humor in the situation, I wasn't laughing as much as I would have been, which is a pretty depressing thought for anyone trying to write comedy sketches (which may or may not be something that I'm currently working on. Mum's the word).
Comedies that I loved and laughed over many many times weren't working their mojo as much as they used to, which was just frustrating. For years, 'Mallrats' and the audio commentary have cheered me up regardless of anything, but perhaps I'd used it once too much. And due to the fact that I'd seen every Monty Python movie and sketch at least five times, watching the parrot sketch was more like watching a lecture on the makings of good comedy writing.
The thing is, the reasons why I wanted to laugh weren't really all of it. More than that, I wanted to discover something that completely took me off guard, just like when I was fourteen, flipping through the TV channels and discovering a movie which I thought was a medieval Arthurian legend type epic until King Arthur chopped off a Black Knight's arm and said knight claimed it was only a 'flesh wound'. I remember the complete confusion in my head, I was stunned at surreality. It was as if everything I knew about life, the universe and everything had suddenly been turned on its head...
...and I laughed my fucking brains out.
Comedies now haven't taken me as off guard as that. Certain jokes or style of jokes have become the norm. Nowadays there appear to be only three types of comedies - the semi-improvised adult stylings of Ferrell, Apatow and Rogen (which I enjoy but are beginning to get a bit stale), the light situational comedies of anything featuring either a young teenage type in a fish out of water scenario or middle aged adults in some kind of relationship mix up (which I tend to avoid) and the complete and utter crap of the "insert-recent-movie-genre-to-spoof" movies such as Disaster Movie, Superhero Movie, Epic Movie and Date Movie which makes one wonder if 'Airplane' ever even existed (my opinions of this type of comedy are fairly obvious but I didn't want this line to feel lonely without any brackets though now I feel like Immanuel Kant since that fucker doesn't know how to use a fullstop either).
A few days ago Tony Blair V2.0 popped over with his hard drive so that I could copy Ricky Gervais' "Animals" stand up video and, upon viewing the hard drive's contents, found a whole bunch of comedies I had been wanting to see again.
First, I watched 'Animals'. Quite funny, pretty decent. Then seasons 2 and 3 of 'Blackadder', which I already had embedded in my memory so well that I'd watch them on loop whilst playing Puzzle Bobble on the PS1 (shut up, gamers. If I had a choice I'd be playing ice hockey on a Sega Mega Drive). After that I took a trip into the eighties - 'Ghostbusters' made me feel more nostalgic than anything else and reminded me of the times I'd make a proton pack out of a cereal box, tissue box, toothpaste box, some toilet rolls, string and a paper plate. 'Ghostbusters II' made me realize that I had every line (and I mean every single line) embedded in my head, complete with inflection, tone and accent, including the lyrics to the songs in the movie (completely didn't realize when I was a kid that I was listening to Run DMC). I also somehow knew every line to 'Weekend at Bernies', which made me wonder how many frickin' times I used to watch this movie as a child, and why. Eddie Murphy's 'Delirious' stand up, on the other hand, made me miss the Fuck-You-Man's young raw talent more and more.
Memory lane over and done with, I went on to some of the newer stuff. Some of them I couldn't even finish. I could see what kind of funny they would be from a mile away and promptly clicked them off. The HBO half hour 'Flight of the Conchords' live show had me giggle quite a few times (them boys is talented) and got me curious enough to check out the TV series.
Earlier this evening, I finally watched three episodes. And I'm sorry to fans everywhere of the show, but I couldn't sit through it. I just couldn't. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood, maybe it's not my cup of tea, maybe the hype has been raised about it so much that my expectations were off the scale. In any case, the only time I laughed was during the music video of "She's so hot, boom". Preferred the live show more. In fact, just to get me in high spirits again I quickly switched on another episode of 'Blackadder'.
After that I started searching for funny stuff on the net. I was mainly searching for an incredibly fucked up episode of Rainbow that someone sent me a link to ages ago. I then started looking around YouTube for gag reels and blooper vids from movies, as sometimes there's nothing funnier than watching a pair of comedy professionals trying to outdo each other in the hilarity stakes until one of them cracks up.
Somehow, I ended up on a gag reel of some of the outtakes from the seventies Pink Panther movies starring Peter Sellers, and as I was half watching it, I suddenly saw something that made me crack up laughing in a way I haven't done in such a long time it's silly.
And the best part? It wasn't the blooper that cracked me up. It was the actual gag they were trying to do which was only about twelve seconds (that you can view by clicking here) but was so incredibly simple, so incredibly well timed and executed and so hillarious that I laughed so hard my ribs hurt - the only form of pain that I welcome with open arms.
Well, doubled up arms clutching my body in agony whilst being unable to stop myself from laughing.
I had never really thought much of Peter Sellers before this because, quite frankly, I was never properly introduced to the man at the right time. When I first met Peter Sellers, it was as a young teenager. I knew an acquaintance that was the son of a friend of my parents who was in university and studying film and he passed me two videos that I "had to watch". One of them was episodes of 'The Prisoner' TV series, the other was 'Dr. Strangelove'.
The guy said it was an important comedy that I absolutely had to watch, but in truth I was too damn young to appreciate the thing and switched it off halfway.
(Somewhere out there, I hear a dozen filmmaking friends of mine reading this in horror and shouting the words "blasphemy!" in a loud, Spanish Inquisition-way. By the way, couldn't appreciate 'The Prisoner' either at that age. Ooh! I think I just heard "double blasphemy!" shouted out).
Since then, I didn't really touch on Peter Sellers much. By the time I was at an age where I probably would have been able to appreciate it, I was too snobbish about comedy and, from everything I'd heard, Sellers' stuff was mainly slapstick and I thought, quite foolishly, that slapstick was a lesser form of comedy and instead preferred wordplay.
(Which probably explains why a blog post about how I enjoyed watching moments of Peter Sellers' comedies has become this fucking long).
But now, after that simple twelve second gag, I was hooked. I searched throughout YouTube for other Peter Sellers moments of Great Comedy and found myself laughing so hard I ended up with a migraine and realized that I was completely wrong about my thoughts on slapstick, completely and utterly wrong. There was only one reason why physical comedy is so rarely funny these days - because very few people can top the perfection of Peter Sellers' comedic timing, the precision in it. The simplest of gags become so much more in his hands because he understands what I now believe to be one of the most important rules in slapstick - that you never see it coming. I did not expect what would happen in that simple twelve second gag. A gag so simple yet so perfectly hidden.
So far, after my many YouTube searches, this has been the funniest by far - a scene featuring his most celebrated character ever, Inspector Clouseau, in 'The Pink Panther Strikes Again':
(if the embedded link doesn't appear, click here)
The slapstick gags are so insanely simple their genius. People go on and on about his chameleonic talent in being able to create so many characters, and I totally agree that his characterizations are bar none, but his slapstick... my God, his slapstick is beyong compare and after watching this, I really, seriously wonder what the fuck Steve Martin was thinking when he attempted to do The Pink Panther himself.
Perhaps I'm reading too much into it. Perhaps I'm over analyzing the reasons why I laughed so damn hard in an effort to try and explain to my own brain why the gag had me completely in stitches. Perhaps you'll click on it and find it isn't that funny, I don't know.
For me, however, this simple experience of watching a YouTube video has been cause for celebration. After overloading myself in the past decade with so much 'intelligent' comedy, witty wordplay and improvised lines of mirth, slapstick is something I most heartily welcome.
And in the hands of Peter Sellers, it's absolutely brilliant.
No Bikes, No Bitches, No Trannies, No Fun.
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Monday, 20 July 09 - 08:25 PM (GMT +08:00) By Khairil Mokhzani Bahar in Brain Stew |
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Anybody read the Sunday Times yesterday? I myself hardly ever read newspapers but picked one up because there was an article on the 15Malaysia project. That's when I saw the front page - 'Mat Rempit and Drag Queens OUT'. Apparently, rempits are now banned from film and television because "it is a fact that each time a movie about Mat Rempit is shown in the cinemas, police have to be on high alert".
This has happened because the Inspector General of the Police sent a letter to the Home Ministry stating this fact. I assume because outright banning something is easier than actually educating the public on why illegally racing on the road whilst trying to perform outlandish stunts on a kapcai.
And it's not just rempits. Illegal car racing portrayed on screen will also take a hit. Drag queens are out, as are scenes of men wearing women's clothing, even if it's in a 'Some Like It Hot' type of comedic scenario. No more lose women to be portrayed on screen. No gays or effeminate men in general.
I think it would be safe to say that chase scenes in general will probably be banned at some point, together with fight scenes of a violent nature, women in short sleeve tight t-shirts, the flashing of the ankles and dogs.
I don't have to tell you how inexplicably stupid this news is to me. Local films were in a bad enough state as it is without adding more restrictions. What, pray tell, is the rating system for, then? And are these laws going to be applied on international films as well, or do they get a pass since they're not Malaysian henceforth no one in this country will try and emulate them?
The thing is, I saw this coming. I saw it coming when the first 'Remp-It' movie hit the cinemas. The second I saw the trailer, with it's illegal racing and stunts and scantily clad women I thought to myself, "I can't believe this got past the censor board! I just hope everyone doesn't jump the bandwagon and keep one-upping themselves trying to see what they can get away with or the government's gonna ban it all."
Then this movie comes out:
"Bohsia: Jangan Pilih Jalan Hitam". Great. That's helpful. Sure enough, this movie was one of the ones talked about as apparently, after this movie came out, the amount of rempit activity doubled.
I don't believe in censorship. I believe in ratings to give the public due warning of the content of a movie and to stop younglings from checking out porn at the wrong age. But censorship, especially at this magnitude, is downright obscene.
If you ever wonder why local movies are so dissapointing, look at it this way - creativity is hampered because of censorship laws such as this, combined with producers' greed in wanting to produce something that has all the elements that will sell yet at the same time too afraid to try something new and creative.
And it's this same greed that's landed us in this shit in the first place. We know the government will ban something if there's enough figures to show that it can be related to something that will harm the rakyat, we can't help that. This is the country we live in. And as much as it'd be nice to change that, adding the straw that breaks the camel's back is only going to hamper it.
Dear God, when will there be some kind of news that will allow me to write something nice about the local film industry for once?
Hammer Time
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Sunday, 05 July 09 - 03:16 PM (GMT +08:00) By Khairil Mokhzani Bahar in Brain Stew |
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When we're recording in the Hub, in order to not piss off the neighbors we try to let as little sound as possible leak out, so we close all the doors. Once when we were recording the Reverend wanted to go to the kitchen. A few minutes later he couldn't get out. The door knob was stuck. No matter how much you twisted the knob it wouldn't budge.
This was a couple of months ago, and since then that door hasn't been opened, so instead of the square doughnut shape of before, the living room became a horseshoe.
Now, I'm not a big believer in Feng Shui or anything like that, but ever since that day the house didn't feel... right. I could sense, deep down, that something was amiss. Not being able to open that door didn't let things flow properly. I can't explain it, I just knew things weren't right. So today I decided to fix it.
I took out my toolbox and started work. First I tried to find the little button on the doorknob to allow you to dismantle it. No such luck. Then I tried prying the lock open with a pair of pliers. No luck there. Then I tried everything from the otherside. I tried to find the mechanism. I tried to find something I could understand, physically, so that I could fix it.
After an hour of sweating in a hot kitchen trying to figure it out, I gave up and picked up the hammer and started whacking the damn thing in frustration, hoping I'd break it off completely, leaving a big hole in the door but at least the fucker would open.
After three or four whacks, the door knob was fixed and opens properly.
My flatmate in university used to say whilst fixing things "when in doubt, give it a clout". Those words have never rung more true. To hell with DIY manuals. Just beat the fucker with a hammer.
Seven Thoughts Before Bedtime
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Saturday, 04 July 09 - 04:10 AM (GMT +08:00) By Khairil Mokhzani Bahar in Brain Stew |
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Thought#1: The Tell of Seeing the Tell in Poker
Poker is often thought of as being the same as gambling, though the differences couldn't be further, depending on how you choose to play it. Gambling is a game of chance and odds, of probability, and in a casino the odds are never in your favor. A mathematical genius may be able to calculate the odds and make calculated bets in a game of blackjack, but at the end of the day probability is the only thing you have to calculate.
Poker, on the other hand, is different. True, there are the odds associated with the probability of pulling the hand you wish to be dealt and the hand that your opponent may have been dealt but good poker players, really good poker players, may never even have to see their own cards to be able to win a hand against a lesser opponent. This is because of the way one bets on poker - you bet against your opponent or opponents, and they in turn bet against you, and now you have a new factor to play with.
The human factor.
Body language, mannerisms, speech patterns and habits, all these and more become parts of the game. A good poker player will be able to spot whether or not someone has a good hand or is bluffing simply by looking at them, seeing how they behave when they bet or look at their cards.
Sometimes people have a tell - a small habit that gives away a certain action. For example, when a person is bluffing, they may scratch their head a certain way before making the bet. The person probably doesn't even realize he does it, but a good poker player can spot this.
My thought, however, is this - let us assume there are two incredibly good poker players playing each other, Mr. A and Ms. B. Let us say Ms. B has a tell that gives away something about how she bets. Mr. A will now know how to bet accordingly from Ms. B's tell, right? Well what about this - what if Mr. A has a tell when he notices Ms. B's tell? What if Ms. B notices? What does Mr. A do in this situation?
Who is more likely to win?
Here's another thought - what if Mr. A knows he has a tell? And what if Mr. A's fear of showing the tell is noticeable to Ms. B, almost like another tell?
The thought goes back and forth like tennis. In movies where poker is in the scene they always talk about the tell but they never explore it this far - it's always one person who has a tell (usually the bad guy) and the good guy spots the tell, full stop, the end. Tells are noticeable cues in body language, however slight, that a person may pick up on. Now, if you have two people who can instinctually notice each others tells, what happens? More over, what if the act of hiding said tells creates more tells?
Thought#2: Irrational Thought/Instinct
There have been many times where my instinct and my rational thought have been at odds with each other. My instincts may tell me A, thought my rational thought will tell me that it is most definitely B because logically it has to be so. Then in the end I discover that it was A all along.
This would make one think that I should just follow my instincts, correct? Aha, if only things were so simple. There is, in fact, another variable in the equation - irrational thought - and the problem lies when I cannot tell the difference between irrational thought and instinct.
The problem in differentiating the two lies in the fact that neither of them stem from rational thought. The best way I can think of describing the difference is that instinct is unexplainable yet irrational thought is emotional. I can't explain where the instinctive thought or act comes from, but I know that the irrational thought is driven by emotions, negative ones.
However, if the differentiation was so clean cut then this wouldn't be a problem. But often when instinct kicks in it is related to an emotion, though not triggered by it, whereas the irrational thought is triggered by the emotion. In both cases, however, there is a relation to an emotion felt.
This dilemma has been a problem many a time because there is often an action that needs to be taken based on whether or not I can differentiate between instinct and irrational thought, and often times my actions are based on one when it was the other all along.
Thought#3: Karma
In the words of Earl Hickey, karma is a funny thing. I must add, though, that it's only funny in retrospect. At the time itself when karma takes effect, the boomerang thwack of bad karma from past mistakes can often fill you with regret. However...
Thought#4: Moving on from the Past
...one needs to move on from ones past. The fact is so obvious, yet often so difficult to do. So many of the posts on this blog since the move from The Ballad of Justin Guber have either been about regret or about moving on from the past. I'm getting there, I think, but one step at a time.
Thought#5: The Yin-Yang
When I was a young teenager I was fascinated by this symbol - the simplicity in its design to represent a concept of equilibrium mesmerized me. As I got older, I began to dislike the symbol - sometimes you just wish the scales would tip to the good more than the bad. The reason why I was fascinated by it as a young teenager was because it gave me hope - that as bad as things were, they will equally become better, we just don't know the time line of when that will occur, but the thought that it will can give one a glimmer of hope, as it did me all those years ago.
Thought#6: Quotes
"For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love." - Francis Bacon
That is the full quote. I was actually thinking of the first half of the quote (up to the pictures bit) which I associated with Short Circuit 2. When Number Five said that it always hit home. After I did a search on-line, I discovered the rest of the quote and who it was by.
What's funny is another quote that has always stuck in my head is, as it turns out, also associated with Francis Bacon:-
"Knowledge is power".
There was another quote that's always been stuck in my head, and it's always been paired with the "knowledge" one above:-
"Ignorance is bliss." - Thomas Gray
The Catch 22 of the two quotes put together makes it very yin-yang, doesn't it?
Thought#7: The Reasons for Blogging and Other On-Line Activities
This thought, I guess, has been around as long as I've been blogging. There've been a couple of posts about it here and in the Ballad as well already, but it's a thought that I always come back to.
See, when I was younger I used to have a diary and I'd write in it whenever I had a thought or whenever I was down and needed to put all those emotions somewhere. I think (though I'm not certain) the reason why I used to write in a diary, especially when I was down, was not only to express a lot of those emotions and feelings I felt at the time but I guess there was the hope that someday there would be someone who'd read it and understand, a kindred spirit as it were.
Right now, however, I'm writing in a blog, knowing full well that anyone can read it. There's also my Facebook account, which I regularly check and update with little goings-ons in my life in the status updates bit. I even have a MySpace and Friendster account which I don't use at all now.
But the fact that everyone can read it, that when writing here I know full well that everyone can read it, that there is an interesting thought - how much of that knowledge effects what one writes when writing a blog or changing our status update or posting a pic on-line? When we put a piece of our own personal life in a public venue such as the internet, be it event or thought or action, how much of it is loaded with an ulterior motive? How much of it is filled with the expectation that someone is reading it? Are they narcissistic endeavors? Do we crave attention? Do we hope it will trigger something?
Sometimes we write on-line in such a way that we manage to express a thought or feeling whilst at the same time giving nothing away - a public vagueness, as it were. The thoughts and feelings are there, but they're not. At least, not to the public eye. The words could be translated in a hundred thousand ways but only with enough knowledge of the persons here and now could you feasibly deduct exactly what the motivations are for writing the words in the first place, though even then you can never actually be sure and since nothing is truly explained the writer has full deniability even when one deducts correctly.
Why do we do this? And does anyone remember how we used to live and socialize before the internet was created?
These are the thoughts that keep me awake. G'night, everybody.
... More items are available in my News Archive
