Sidestepping The Real Problem : Why France Should Stop Being Stupid And Lift The Ban On The Burqa

France just passed the law banning the wearing of the burqa and niqab (face veil) in public which, to me, is a slap in the face and a kick in the balls to the nation's founding words: liberty, equality, fraternity.

I'm not speaking out because I'm a Muslim. I'm speaking out because I deem this an insanely massive violation of human rights. The French are the first ones to lash out against anybody who steps into their personal space or deprives them of free speech. In fact, the most common phrase in everyday French is "je m'en fous" (I don't give a shit) followed by "c'est comme tu veux", meaning "as you wish". And the most common phrase used to win an argument is "je fais ce que je veux" (I do whatever I want) and it's guaranteed foolproof. Rest assured that saying this can get you out of explaining yourself in any situation where you've obviously made a stupid decision and your plan backfired, but you don't want to lose face or hurt your ego. It gets people off your back instantly.

So it goes without saying that the French come hand in hand with their existentialist ways: I make my own decisions, you make yours, and I don't give a shit about what people think of me. They've been raised to say no to any kind of submission and to see everything with a skeptic magnifying glass, which is why they rejected religion and, as a group, are highly sarcastic.

Which raises the question: If you can practice your freedom of expression, why can't these women practice theirs?

My friends told me it's because these women are pressured by their husbands into wearing burqas, which is against the gender equality policy for which France has been fighting for so long. The problem is, most (if not all) of these women wear burqas voluntarily because of their faith, not because a man told them to. If it's their wish to do so, who are you to say they can't?

In my opinion, the ban on the burqa is a veiled (pun intended) attempt at ignoring the big elephant in the room, which is France's fear of Islamisation, a term they coined to denote the growing number of Muslims (mostly Arabs) in France and thus, the expansion of their cultural influences on the French constitution. It has nothing to do with protecting Muslim women from being oppressed by their husbands, or the fact that burqas might present a threat to society in the sense that hooligans could use burqas to hide their Kalashnikovs and rob banks in broad daylight.

The simplistic argument most used by the French to discredit the burqa (or any type of veil worn by Muslim women to cover their hair and body) is that it's degrading for women. For them, religion views women as lepers who should cover themselves in public. Anyone who obeys to this religious exigence is thus submissive and an outcast of the society.

The first thing they should understand is that the burqa is cultural in Arab countries, hence it shouldn't be associated with all Muslims.

Secondly, if a burqa is degrading because it reflects women's submission to men, then let me ask you a question. If a non-Muslim woman wears a sexy, body-fitting dress which hugs her curves in all the right places, is it not because she expects a certain degree of validation from onlooking men (and jealousy from onlooking women)? Is it not because she needs her physical prowess to be validated by others? This woman is thus dependent on people's perception of her body, which in turn brings her self-esteem and confidence. If her confidence is determined by men's approving glances, doesn't this constitute submission to men? Can this woman be considered in total freedom, or is she a slave to men's extremely high expectations when it comes to feminine beauty? A Muslim woman in a burqa doesn't need men to acknowledge her existence by using her physical attributes, which makes her independent of superficial prejudice. In this regard, she is more in control of her freedom than the skin-showing woman, which is a complete turnaround from the original stance that the burqa is degrading for women.

This is exactly why I think the French should stop getting their panties twisted, wipe the hypocrisy off their constitution, call a spade a spade, and deal with the issue at hand differently. I'm going to lay it down for you real easy: the French society views the Arab population as poor people with lack of education, benefactors of the French well-oiled health and social security system without contributing to it. They are perceived as a nuisance in an otherwise peaceful country, and their culture is impregnating the French national identity deeper and deeper, slowly shifting the traditional French values. This imposition is more and more seen as an invasion, as the Arabs are very vocal, passionate, and demanding when it comes to their culture. The problem is, the Arab population is multiplying exponentially and so is the visibility of their generally disliked habits. In areas of low-cost housing where the Arab population is predominant (usually in suburban areas of big cities), crime rates are very high.

So clearly what the French want is lower crime rates, which translates into smaller immigrant population, which also means "we need to get those Arabs out of here". That makes sense.

What doesn't make sense is, the crimes are the result of lack of income and education, and the burqa is not in any way the cause of these crimes. If there is a pressing need for any law to be reinforced in order to curb the uneasiness caused by the Arab population, banning the burqa is certainly not the way to start. It will only cause even more segregation between the French and the Arab populations, and increase sentiments of hate among the people.

Sidestepping the real problem by nitpicking on a garment is nonsensical. Time to strap on a pair and man up, France. Say what you really want to say, and stop penalizing the wrong people. Who cares if people see you as a bunch of fascist bastards. You can do whatever you want and you don't give a shit, remember?

Asia Is Not A Country

In case you haven't gotten the mood of this blog lately, I'll make it clearer. It's irritated mood. And this post is going to reinforce that mood just a little bit deeper.

On top of everything I haven't been fancying lately, there's another thing. It's talking about Asia like it's a damn country. Notice when people say Asians, the things that come to their minds are yellow people with slitted eyes wearing big cone hats holding chopsticks speaking in an undecipherable language consisting of only two words : ching and chong.

It's one thing to stereotype Asians with only one look. It's another thing to group them into one people of the same culture. Don't they realize they're generalizing about 3.879 billion people? That's more than half the population of the world. It's okay to be stupid, because God doesn't bestow everybody with the same intellectual capacity. But to be ignorant is just unacceptable.

Asians are not all Chinese. Neither are we all Japanese. And not all of us speak in Sino-tibetan languages. We don't all have pictogram-based writing systems. A lot of us have double eyelids. Eating with chopsticks is not cultural to most of us (ask the 1.2 billion people in India for example, or people from the Middle East). Not all of us are Buddhist or Taoist or Confucians. We are not all good at maths. We don't like singing that much. Okay, we do. But not all of us, aside from Indians, Koreans, the Chinese, the Japs, Filipinos, Malaysians, Thais and Indonesians. Haha.

Self-deprecating jokes aside, we are not all just 'Asians'. If you want to seem less ignorant, say East Asians when you're referring to people from China, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, Hong Kong, Macau, Mongolia and Taiwan. Or even better, specify the country. But don't just guess. Just because I speak a language you don't understand and I have slitted eyes, doesn't mean I'm Chinese. For all you know I might be an Inuit person from Alaska. And just because I smile a lot doesn't mean "Asians love to smile".

Once I read this article about 'How To Do Business with Asians' and it made me laugh out loud. Tips like 'Bow down lower than a person with a higher ranking than you in the office hierarchy', or 'Avoid direct eye contact' are ridiculous. In Malaysia, we don't bow down... ever. Unless you're talking to the king, which most people don't get the chance to do in their whole lifetime. It's like the author just went to Japan for a month and clumsily concluded that Asians = Japanese.

In short, Asia is not a country. Stop saying "Asians do this, Asians do that". Because only some of us might do it, and I'm pretty sure most of us don't. Asia is a fucking continent, literally, because Asia's population has quadrupled in the past century. If that's not a fucking continent, than none of the continents are.

Osama bin Laden is as Asian as Kim Jong-Il, but you wouldn't see them as people from the same culture now would you?

How To Be Adults On Facebook

First of all, use your real name. Or, if you're one of those people who are completely paranoid about aliens seeking your personal data (but still can't help wanting to use Facebook), you can use your most common and easily recognizable nickname. But don't use cartoon character names, names combined with celebrity surnames (like "Bustamam Bieber") or names that are just plain stupid like "Jalan Mati" and expect people to accept your friend request.

Secondly, use a recognizable profile photo that makes people know it's you. Of course, you can distort the image any way you like, or photoshop the hell out of it to make yourself look like a million dollars because let's face it, our Facebook profile picture is the antithesis of the driving license picture. Why settle for a bad JPJ-conform picture as your default photo on Facebook when you can have complete control of the lighting, the pose, hairdo, and, being Photoshop savvy, are able to eradicate the smallest blemish on your face and destroy all proof that you possess skin pores. You can do anything you like with your profile picture, as long as you don't put a photo of a trash can. People who put trees and pots and cats as their profile pictures combined with stupid names such as "Perigi Buta" are so annoying they should be shot and steamrolled.

Thirdly, don't be passive aggressive on your status. I just hate it when people say "I love it when my room mates drink all of my apple juice", although he/she is aware that they're friends on FB. Drama will ensue in the comment section, although the rest of the people on their friend list don't give a shit. If you don't like something about someone, write a personal message directly into his/her FB inbox and talk it through. And by personal message, I don't mean writing "Hi roomie, could you please lower the volume when you watch porn late at night, because the walls are paper thin and I have early classes, thanks!" on his Facebook wall for all the world to see. Embarrassing people on Facebook is one of the easiest things to do, and the most childish too.

Fourthly, pretend to have a real life. A lot of young people spend more than 3 hours per day on Facebook #fact. But you don't have to update your status every 5 seconds, share EVERY funny video you stumble upon on the net, comment and like everything people put on their page, join every group imaginable, and change your profile picture so often your page looks like a Powerpoint slideshow.

Fifthly, stop stating the obvious. Writing "It's Saturday night!" on a Saturday night is just... dumb. Every Friday evening I see people putting "Finally it's the weekend" on their status, as if to reassure people that today is the last weekday of the week, because you know, some of their friends might not have a calendar. Stop doing it unless you have friends who, for some reason, are locked in a windowless basement room without a watch and/or a mobile phone, where the nights and days are a blur and they lose track of time and the only indicator of time at their disposition is their friends' FB status updates. ONLY then you're allowed to do it.

Lastly, don't exaggerate. When people put 1435 photos from a party they had last night, with status updates ranging from "excellent partyyyyyy!!!" to "the most amazing gathering in the whole worrrrllllddddd!", while I know for a fact that the party wasn't all that, it makes me puke. It's like Facebook is being the messenger of your made up happiness and your all-around awesomeness. Even if the party was great, you don't need to put up all five thousand pics on Facebook because a) most of the images have the same people in it, only with different facial expressions, and b) no one actually gives a shit. And please don't put photos of mundane everyday happenings like going to the supermarket etc. I don't get it when people post photos of them buying a watermelon, simply because well, buying watermelons doesn't deserve three thousand photos. If you think people are going to browse all of them one by one (or even ANY of them at all), you're one deluded, self-centred sonofabitch.

Thank you.

Damien Hirst is full of shit

Damien Hirst is full of shit. He's like the Lady Gaga of the art world, selling shock value instead of bona fide works of art. Of course art can be anything. You can spit onto the pavement and call it art. You can tear a piece of cloth in two, sew the pieces back together, name it "Patched Love" and consider it art. Art is everything and nothing, so where do we draw the line? I don't have the slightest idea, but I still think Damien Hirst just full of shit.

I don't care about his shark preserved in a tank. That's not art. That's just... fish, in a tank, preserved in formaldehyde. Just because some stupid rich guy commissions him to do whatever he likes and is willing to fork out millions of dollars for it doesn't make it art.

And the diamond-encrusted platinum skull? I could have done that, if I had enough money to buy 14 million pounds worth of diamonds, and a platinum skull. Whatever happened to modest sculptures conveying emotions and meaning? Art shouldn't be expensive to produce, it should become expensive due to people's appreciation. Today, artists throw insane amount of money down the drain so as to spark people's interest, urging them to say "I could feed my whole country with the money from that diamond-encrusted skull", creating some sort of awe around it thus further increasing its value, while one extremely crucial matter is completely being overlooked: the beauty of the so-called piece of art itself. But sadly, it doesn't have any. It's all about the money needed to produce it. Which is why Damien Hirst is full of shit. And Charles Saatchi is full of shit for being the enabler of this lunacy. And Tate Modern is full of shit for feeding off of Hirst's madness by displaying his stupid works.

If you're not sure why I'm ranting, here's a link you should check out :

http://www.complex.com/art-design/2009/07/art-beat-the-10-damien-hirst-works-you-should-know

If those are not shitty works of 'art', I don't know what is.

p/s : Haters like me are probably perpetuating the buzz about Damien Hirst because let's face it, good reviews or bad reviews, still all press is good press. And ranting haters are the positive factor in a celebrity's longevity, because once people stop hating you, it's because you've fallen into irrelevance and people no longer care. But still, I felt the need to vent about Damien Hirst because for so many years I've been bugged by the mere mention of his name, and naturally, it all snowballed into extreme hatred over time.

Collection

I don't really collect anything, and that seems stupid since I travel (relatively) often. I started collecting key chains, decorative plates and mugs a long time ago, but after a while I realized the plates were completely and utterly useless and took up a lot of space. And key chains are just tacky, especially since most of them are made in China, so what's the point of buying key chains from a bunch of different countries if they were all made in the same factory in Chairman Mao's land. And mugs? Well, they are pretty and very useful since you can never have too many mugs at home, but I always find a way to break my mugs. And I figured that given my clumsiness, plastic glasses are a safer bet.

I used to like collecting shirts too, especially the ones from Hard Rock Café. They are expensive, pretentious and are made from a very low quality fabric, but somehow I thought they are a quintessential symbol of a well-travelled person and I must buy one in every country. I even had friends who would order Hard Rock Café shirts when I went travelling, which was really weird considering they didn't go to the country, so why should they pretend to have been there?

Everything changed when I went to this shopping mall in Jakarta, and saw a stall selling bootleg Hard Rock Café shirts from every country in the world (even those that didn't have one). They also had Starbucks shirts, Planet Hollywood, United Colors of Benetton etc, from every frikkin country, each one sold for not even 10 ringgit. That actually got me thinking, I went to all these countries and overpaid for my original Hard Rock Café t-shirts, while other smarter people had been buying all of them here for a fraction of the price. And once worn, who could tell the difference anyway? No one's gonna check the label. Besides, the fabrics used were pretty much of the same quality (for real). So why did I bother collecting these stupid shirts?

So I stopped. And that's one of the best decisions I've made in my life.

Souvenirs are just for bragging, period. You buy a mug from Paris to use at home, so that when people come over they'll see it and say "You've been to Paris?" and you are able to say yes and continue gloating by recounting your travel. If someone gives you a souvenir from Argentina, you're still able to say "My parents/brother/best friend went there and bought this for me" and for some reason you are entitled to a certain amount of gloating.

I've even stopped taking a lot of photos. I've come to a point in my life where I don't think I need to prove to people I've done something or I've been somewhere. If I say I went to Portugal, and they're like "pictures, or it didn't happen", I couldn't care less. Why do I need to prove to someone that I've been to a country? If I lied, then I lied. It's not a crime unless it's perjury. The reason why I don't like taking photos anymore is because they are always deceiving. The best views I've seen are not always the most photogenic. So when I tell people about this scenery, they'd be like "Did you take photos?". When I show the photos to them, they'd be like, "Yeah, it's kinda nice." It's not the reaction that I wanted, because somehow when I was there, I felt a lot more, but the feeling and the ambiance didn't translate well into photography. And you'll be stuck with the image on the photo for the rest of your life, and that's extremely disappointing.

But there's still on thing I collect though. TV and movie memorabilia. I like collecting movie posters, anything with quotes from my favourite movie or series, Coca-cola glasses from the 70's, and t-shirts worn by actors in movies or series. I lost a lot of my posters when I moved last year, and I've broken almost all of my precious Coca-cola glasses since I'm maladroit and they are so frikkin fragile, which is a lethal combination. But the t-shirts I still keep. I have this one shirt from Fox River Penitentiary with Michael Scofield prison number. I also have a New York Herald Tribune t-shirt, like the one worn by Jean Seberg in Godard's A Bout de Souffle (not the same fit, of course).

And now I'm looking for Sheldon Cooper's Green Lantern shirt, very nerdy but very cool. Geeks are the new jocks anyway. I'm broke, so I don't think I'll buy it anytime soon, but I'll get my hands on it in the near future.

Almodovar

I'm revisiting Almodòvar.

He's awesome. Too awesome. An impossible amount of awesomeness for a single person. I love all of his films. Well, I didn't like Habla con Ella at first, but somehow it grew on me. Like chicken liver. I hated chicken liver before. But a month ago I went to this Indonesian restaurant that served chicken liver, and it was the best thing I've ever tasted.

Now I'm watching Todo Sobre Mi Madre. It's excellent.

Un Tramway Nommé Désir

They're showing A Streetcar Named Desire in Paris, starting tomorrow. I'm elated. But I couldn't find any tickets and that sucks.

Isabella Huppert will play the part of Blanche DuBois, and I'm pretty sure she's going to nail it. She's only like the second greatest French actress after Catherine Deneuve.

Of course I'll get the ticket no matter what. I'm resourceful and relentless like that, and will get the job done by the end of the week.

The Squid and The Whale

I'm proud to announce that I have a new favourite movie. (Okay as I'm typing this Blogger is furiously redlining the word favourite as if it doesn't exist. I'm just going to write that a few more times just to piss Blogger off. Favourite, favourite, favourite, favourite. It's how the Brits spell it, dumbass, get over it.)

The movie is called The Squid and The Whale by Noah Bachbaum, starring Jesse Eisenberg from the Social Network fame. It's about a dysfunctional family (aren't all good Hollywood films about dysfunctional families?) trying to work things out. It's a straightforward story with intricate details on how a divorce affects children.

The reason I like this movie is because it shows how pretentious it looks when you talk about Dickens' novels, how ridiculous it is to talk to girls about The Metamorphosis, and how uptight it sounds when you say things like 'kafkaesque'. No, that's not the main theme of the movie. Those are just some literary references littered here and there during the course of the movie, but I pride myself on getting jokes and references in movies, whether it's a stupid one liner, or a clin d'oeil to Jean-Luc Godard's A Bout de Souffle. Even when watching Ferris Bueller the other day, as they were visiting the Art Institute of Chicago, I had to pause many times to recall the names of paintings (and their painters) Ferris looked at and gloated to myself when I got everything right.

Another thing I liked about this movie is the very appropriate use of Pink Floyd's Hey You. Of course, I've never been a big fan of Pink Floyd as I find their stuff intensely depressing, but over the years I've collected quite a number of their songs on my iTunes and somehow can never find the courage to skip them whenever my iTunes was playing one at random, so they've kinda grown on me (don't tell this to my ex-roommate though, because I'm still pretending to hate Pink Floyd whenever he's around).

As far as I'm concerned, parents getting divorced might just be the worst preventable thing that can happen to a child (I had to add 'preventable' because I know some might say "I don't think so. Your parents could die in a plane crash." Well that's definitely worse, but it's somewhat not preventable or at least not something your parents had control of, so it doesn't count.) When I'm getting married, I'll make sure it's something that will last forever so that my kids will not have to go through our divorce. It's ambitious, and bit stupid considering you can never predict what the future holds, but it certainly is not impossible. There's a reason why people vow 'till death do us part' at their wedding. It's because - as far-fetched as it sounds - it's still a plausible idea.

I recommend this movie to everyone. Although I do have one critique: Jesse Eisenberg can act, but only as himself. He's almost totally devoid of emotion which, luckily for him, is what the characters he's played often required. I do think he's talented, but somehow I feel like he needs some range in his acting. It's easy to play yourself in every film you do, but it's not always impressive.

Julie & Julia

I just saw Julie & Julia. Meh. Nothing special. I watched it because apparently Julia Child developed her passion for French food when she was in Rouen, the town where yours truly has resided for 3 years and counting. Although the Rouen shown in the movie has absolutely nothing to do with the real one. They must have shot it in another quaint French town nearer to Paris since all French towns look similar anyway.

I think the story would have been more interesting if they had focused more on Julia Child rather than weaving two different stories of Julia Child and Julie Powell together. I find Julie Powell annoying and whiny, and doesn't really contribute to the story.

I've seen several Nora Ephron films like When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail. Frankly, Amy Adams is just a younger version of Meg Ryan, Ephron's muse. Neurotic, clumsy and cute as a button. If this film was made 20 years ago, I'm pretty sure Meg Ryan would have been cast as Powell, no doubt about that. It reminds me of the series Samantha Who where Christina Applegate plays her character almost exactly the way Jennifer Anistion plays Rachel in Friends. It's like these directors have run out of ideas so they are telling actors, "Do you remember _____ in the movies/series _____ ? Do it exactly like that and get it over with."

And God knows I love Meryl Streep, but something's a bit off in this movie. She seems like she's trying too hard to be chirpy, and what's up with the shrill voice? Sometimes the way Streep acts in this movie made me think of Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire, very jumpy, very bubbly and extremely fake. But that's justified by the fact that the woman was batshit crazy, and Vivien Leigh pulled it off marvelously. Julia Child, on the other hand, was not crazy. So why play her like that? I think this is what Katharine Hepburn meant when she said she didn't like Meryl Streep because she could almost hear 'click, click, click' in Streep's head. It's like she's too mechanic when playing a part.

I liked the use of Charles Aznavour's Mes Emmerdes in the soundtrack though. Very French. And when I say that, I mean classy but vulgar. If only people knew how vulgar the French actually are. It's just that the French language is so beautiful that people seem to overlook the vulgarity of the people.

All in all, I think Julie & Julia is only okay. The only thing I had in mind after watching the movie was how the hell can I make boeuf bourguignon without using red wine?

p/s: Julia Child went to a bookstore called Shakespeare & Co., one of the very, very few English bookstores in Paris. I went there a couple of times and found it a tad expensive although, given the fact that good English reading materials (especially older ones) are hard to come by in France, the pricing is still reasonable. Luckily I've found 2 other cheaper - albeit a lot smaller - English bookstores in Paris so I don't have to go to Shakespeare anymore. Having said that, Shakespeare is still the best English bookstore in Paris in terms of size and number of books (used & new) available.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off

I love Ferris Bueller. Slick, witty and very, very cool. And live in the 80's. I've said it before, and I'm going to say it again. I love the 80's. The music, the films, the fashion sense. Ha. I know people give a lot of crap about the 80's fashion but I think it's super cool and needs to be brought back. Especially the Nike SB Dunk. Those are awesome knickers.

Ferris Bueller is the shiz. He's popular and gets away with everything. He knows the words to Danke Schön and Twist & Shout by heart, and sings them in front of thousands of cheering people. He drives a Ferrari like he just don't care. He skips school because he's already a genius.

When I grow up I want to be like Ferris Bueller. To him, the whole city is the Cheers' Bar, where everybody knows his name and is always glad he came.

By the way, what happened to Matthew Broderick's career? I remember him in Inspector Gadget but that's it. Oh and he's married to Sarah Jessica Horseface, that's all I know. He's such a good actor. It's a shame we don't really see him much these days.

Fork It Out If You Can Afford It, Cheapskate

I love a good bargain. Who doesn't? The feeling of buying something for a lot less than what's written on the price tag is just heavenly. I know a good deal when I see one, as much as I know when I'm being ripped off.

When travelling, I love to go to those street vendors hawking cheap, small memorabilia. Of course, it's good to be street smart when buying something off the street, especially since as a tourist you have this invisible brand on your forehead that says 'cash cow', very alluring to those key-chain sellers looking to milk you dead.

Over the years, I've learned to be more insistent when bargaining. When I went to Hong Kong, the racist Malay in me finally surfaced when I came across these Chinese vendors who tried to pass off obviously fake Emporio Armani belts for the real thing (stray threads don't lie) and sell them at exorbitant prices. I don't really fancy counterfeit stuff anyway, but I might have considered buying one if they had at least had the courtesy to admit that it was fake. I don't know the first thing about bargaining, so I tend to get ripped off pretty easily.

But while there are street vendors who try to make an easy penny out of unsavvy tourists like me, there are others who are just trying to make an honest living. When I went to Bali, there was this lady carrying a baby in one arm, and a handful of souvenir stuff on the other. She offered us 4 t-shirts for 5000 rupiahs (around 2 ringgit) which is sinfully cheap by any standard. I took 8 t-shirts, but one of my friends kept telling me I was getting ripped off since I could have gotten them for a lot less.

You know what? I don't care. This lady has been walking for hours with a baby in her arm, and all she asks for is 2 ringgit and she's not even begging. I don't crap money, but I know I can afford ten times that amount so why should I insist on an even lower price? That's just cruel. If you can afford to pay for an authentic Balinese whole body massage, you can surely fork out 2 ringgit to buy these t-shirts. Heck, you've paid 90 ringgit for one Hard Rock Café t-shirt and all of a sudden 2 ringgit for four shirts is too expensive?

Of course, I ended up buying those shirts and also some key chains, decorative chinese fans, pens and useless shiny shells (all these for less than 15 ringgit which my friend still considered exorbitant) but when the lady breathed out 'thank you' and looked at her baby with a smile that says 'we'll have something good for dinner tonight', I instantly knew that it was the best 15 ringgit I've ever spent.

Unlikely Discovery

The freakiest thing happened 10 minutes ago.

I was in the middle of watching The Color Purple (I just finished reading the book a couple of days ago) when all of a sudden I thought to myself, "This Celie girl reminds me of Tracy Chapman." I can't quite put my finger on it, but I'm pretty sure it's not her looks. Maybe it's her somberness, or the way she always manages to see the small good things in life in spite of her suffering.

Of course, as a potential sufferer of adult ADD, I paused the movie, opened up iTunes and put on Fast Car, my favorite song of Chapman and probably one of the greatest songs ever written. Somehow when watching The Color Purple, I could almost hear Fast Car playing continuously in the background, since the lyric is all about pain, hope and dreams. While humming along to the song, I looked up Tracy Chapman on Info Concert to see if by any chance she had a concert coming up in France (which she didn't). I also looked her up on Wikipedia just to know what she's up to these days.

Imagine my surprise when I learned that sometime in the mid-90's, she used to date Alice Walker, the author of The Color Purple!

Yes, I was watching a movie based on a book written by Walker, and somehow made a possibly far-fetched connection between the theme of the book and that of the music of Tracy Chapman, and found out that both of them actually used to date. Coincidence? Don't think so.

This either means my eyes are so perfectly in sync with my ear that I  can be a Hollywood music supervisor (the one choosing which song to be played during a scene of a film), or that I spend so much time looking up crap on the internet that I'm starting to get good at the 6-degrees of separation game thing.

post-scriptum : If you're into feminist literature or just curious about the lives of black people in the American South around the turn of the century, you should definitely get this book. Of course one can't help but be reminded of Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird when reading it, but The Color Purple doesn't only talk about segregation and racism, it also deals with the patriarchal black community where women are expected to get abused and take the back seat in everything. A very interesting read for me (and pretty light too, as I finished it in a day).

Schindler's List : Part II (The Movie)

Well I just reviewed the book, so now let's review the movie. (This is surely a first, as I'd never actually reviewed a book, but Schindler's List (or Schindler's Ark as it was originally known) is so good it deserves a lengthy review).

As per usual, I always find film adaptations somewhat disappointing. Spielberg's Schindler's List isn't any different. It's an astounding film by any standard, but doesn't hold a candle to the book. Sure, you'll say "Yeah, now you try cramping a 398-page long book on the Holocaust and see if you can do any better - or at least half as well."

I'm far from complaining about the film. It's just the way I feel about adapting something to the big screen while trying to be completely loyal to the storyline. You just... can't.

Why am I saying this? Well first, you can't transcend from words into moving images without losing the essence of literature: poetry. If Poldek Pfefferberg had wanted this book to just be another true account of things, he wouldn't have needed Keneally. He could have just gone to another run-of-the-mill writer and gotten it published all the same. Would the story have been told? Yes. Would the message have been delivered? Sure. But would it have had as much impact? Absolutely not.

For example, for people who didn't read the book, would the shower scene in Auschwitz be as moving? I doubt so. For in the book, the prisoners were said to have speculated about gas chambers in Auschwitz and grown fearful of them, although they were all still in Plaszow and such a killing method didn't exist there. So when they were mistakenly brought to Auschwitz instead of Oskar Schindler's factory in Zwittau, and asked to strip down before going into the shower room, the prisoners were having their worst nightmare realized as they were persuaded that, instead of water, the showers would emit deadly Zyklon-B gas and immediately kill them. To their pleasant surprise, water came out (albeit a bit icy). That was why they cried for joy.

And of course, the story of Josef Bau getting married in the concentration camp didn't make it into the movie, which is such a shame because people would have liked to hear love stories during the Holocaust, especially one involving a German guy and a Jewish girl.

Another problem I found in the movie was the casting of Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes. They both looked so much alike that if I hadn't read the book, I would have thought that Oskar Schindler was a person suffering from a multiple personality disorder who would save a Jew one day and kill another Jew the next day. They both played their respective characters extremely well though, although I doubt that the real Schindler and Göth were half as good looking. And is it me, or was the book version of Amon Göth a thousand times more sadistic and murderous than the one in the film?

All in all, I still enjoyed the 3-and-a-half hour film thoroughly since it helped put images on the people and the places in the book. I wouldn't have known how enormous the ghetto was, or how the trains looked like if it weren't for the movie.

And the cute little kid in the picture above? It's Olek Rosner, one of the kids who survived the Holocaust by hiding in a pile of human shit. And most importantly, he looks like me when I was 6 years old.

Schindler's List : Part I (The Book)

I am obsessed with The Holocaust. Not in the Nazi "The Final Solution to the Jewish question" way, of course. It's more towards the amazement that the killings of these people were done coldly, swiftly, in quantities unprecedented, by means ranging from the most primitive (beating and hanging) to the most modern (electric fences, gas chambers, lethal injections); and most importantly, with the rest of the world kept in the dark about it.

I bought Schindler's List (the book) about 4 years ago, but never actually got around to finish it. 50 pages was my personal record, at which I would stop reading in favour of some other more fun activities, start becoming oblivious of the book's existence, and later forget everything I'd read. Lather and repeat.

Throughout the years, I've had the chance to visit one of the concentration and extermination camps in Dachau, read books and biographies of people involved directly or indirectly in the Holocaust, talk to grandchildren of the Holocaust survivors (a friend of mine actually has a grandmother who fled Hungary to escape the Nazi), and even talk to some Israelis I met during travels. Having been raised in a society where Jews and Judaism both mean scheming, money swindling, slick bastards whose only raison d'être is to corrupt Muslim people and conquer the world via fraudulent means, I've grown apprehensive of the Jews. In my country, a mere mention of the word Yahudi could cause endless debate on how the Jews are comparable to rats - dirty and resilient, with a cunning mind.

I watched Sophie's Choice a couple of years ago, and was appalled by the atrocity of it all. The idea of a Herrenrasse, the Hitler ideology, the punishments carried out on people who didn't have the chance to be born Aryan, the decadent lifestyle of blue-eyed German officials whose livers got to enjoy filtering the best Martelli cognac at the expense of unpaid Jewish labourers, most of whom would end up dying by virtue of their race.

So I picked Schindler's List (again) off my bookshelf, determined to finish it once and for all. I spent, in total, almost 25 hours on the train during the holidays without, at all, reaching for my iPod. The book was engrossing enough, even with Thomas Keneally deadpan penmanship. He didn't let emotion or judgment weigh in on his writing. Every torture, every killing, every act of suffering was presented as matter-of-factly as possible, with extra attention to details. He didn't make Oskar Schindler a saint, because at the end of the day, he was still one of the SS-officials who reaped profit from the system. He was a big drinker, gambler and womanizer, who might even have been involved in transactions of the flesh in order to get what he wanted.

The only difference between him and the other Nazis, was that he had a heart. This led to the compiling of the famed Schindler's List, a list of Jewish workers he wanted transferred from the Plaszow concentration camp to his enamelware-cum-artillery components factory, to be used as factory workers. People begged, fought, and bribed to be on the list, because they knew what the list actually symbolized: deliverance. They heard rumours on how the soup at Oskar's had more body, how his workers got to eat twice as much bread, how the doctors at Oskar's actually cured people instead of administering lethal injections, and how no one would die if they worked for Oskar Schindler. Next to Plaszow, Oskar's factory was not just a haven, it was a paradise.

I loved the book. And from now on, I will swear on Thomas Keneally's writing style. If there's anyone who can make true accounts of gruesome stories literary and poetic, it's Keneally. During the course of the book, we skipped from story to story, from a person's point of view to another. It took more than just bland recounting of a story to make it interesting, and Keneally knew it all too well. That was why he told the story of three-year-old Genia who witnessed the assassinations of the adults around her, the story of the German Josef Bau courting a Jewish girl he fell in love with and ended up marrying in one of the prisoners' barracks, the story of Schindler and his philandering ways, as well as the story of the villain Herr Kommandant Amon Göth, to whom murdering a person is as trivial as lighting up a cigarette.

At one point, he so vividly described the cold weather in which the prisoners were told to strip naked and run around, and I happened to be reading while waiting on an open-air platform of a train station (it was 3 degress outside) and shivering to my bones, that I felt as though I was one of the Jewish prisoners. Running for dear life.

I'd recommend the book to anyone if it weren't a bit hard to read, both grammatically and figuratively, as Thomas Keneally - as exceptional as he is as a writer - tends to emblazon his sentences with lengthy descriptions in between commas, so much so that oftentimes I got lost in descriptions and missed his point entirely.

It's still a great book (the Booker Prize it received can attest to this). I know my holidays have been enriched because of it, and now my perception of the Jews has radically changed for the better.

Hits and Misses

"A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read ‘The Lost Symbol’, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it." - The Economist

Well said. I couldn't agree more. As a matter of fact, I've read two of Dan Brown's novels and found them well-researched, highly entertaining and very clever... since I was 16 at that time and didn't know better. In fact, I actually introduced The Da Vinci Code to everybody around me to the point that by the end, the pages in my copy were falling off the binding. I actually thought he was the best writer around.

Now that I've had the opportunity to travel the world, get more exposure on worldly literature and snap out of my immature conspiracy theorist phase (and I have to say phew.. good riddance!), I've come to realize that Dan Brown isn't all that. I'm not saying he's a bad writer, far from it. He's a terrific writer, he knows how to combine history, religion, conspiracy and entertainment in order to make a book irresistible not only to the highly educated (who eventually find his books to be shitty, by the way), but more importantly to the masses. It's just that his writing lacks poetry. It doesn't hurt to rhyme once in a while, or to throw euphemisms, or to actually tell a story beautifully instead of telling it by means of straightforward delivery.

When I went back to Malaysia a few years ago, I went to Kinokuniya just to browse around. I love doing that. And having friends who could never be punctual if their lives depended on it, I find my book-browsing hobby a blessing. In fact, I once waited at a shopping complex for 2 hours (or was it 3?) for a friend and I made no fuss because there was an MPH bookstore nearby and I spent the whole time finishing a book on Carl Sagan.

Anyway, I went to Kinokuniya and all I could see was these Stieg Larsson books piled up on the best-sellers shelf, next to the Twilight novels. Apparently people were buying them like hot bread, although I had never heard of them. I didn't even know who Stieg Larsson was.

So I took one copy, went to an isolated corner where's there's a small stool, and read away. After 20 pages, I could not go on. It was not bad, per se. It was just that my mind was urging me to stop, because I had already read this kind of stuff before. Over and over again. By hundreds of different authors with different styles, but all with similar ideas and execution. How and why Larsson's books have all been translated from Swedish into hundreds of languages, I'll never know.

This might come of as a snobbish entry. Maybe because it is, I don't know. My point is, people need to crawl out of their caves and look at books from a different angle. Just because a book has a glossy cover and is being hawked by the most reputable publisher, doesn't mean it's a good book. It only means this publisher's got dough and good PR people.

I have nothing against pop culture. I just get irked when it dumbs people down.

Yentl

We were strolling on the Champs Elysées, when suddenly Yasmin saw Fnac, a French media store selling electronic stuff, books and DVDs.

"Let's go in, I need to find a couple of things," she said, tugging me along. We went straight to the DVD section.

"Oh I love this movie," she said, pointing to About Schmidt. "I've never seen it," said I, a bit woefully. At that moment I really really wished I had seen it so that we could talk about the film. Or anything, as I was like a puppy, so eager to please and to impress.

"Really? I'll buy it for you," she said. Then she grabbed a Sidney Lumet DVD (I can't remember which film it was, in fact I'm not even absolutely sure if it was really Sidney Lumet) and said laughingly, "This guy is so brilliant, he could film my hand and make it look like a million dollars." She also picked up a couple of other DVDs, one of them Barbra Streisand's Yentl. She told me it was impossible to find it in Malaysia and that Yentl had the best musical score of all time.


And now I'm watching Yentl for the first time. I can't help thinking of Yasmin. She truly was one of the greatest filmmakers Malaysia ever had.

What's Your Addiction?

Lux Æterna from Requiem For A Dream. This piece of music is every bit as incredibly disturbing and gut-wrenching as the film itself. It is so beautifully crafted I can't stop listening to it. Alfred Hitchcock managed to associate violin with gore, and Darren Aronofsky - or more precisely Clint Mansell and The Kronos Quartet - took that to another level in that they produced hauntingly beautiful music that stays with you and not just annoying high-pitched violin noises that make you grit your teeth.

I love Requiem For A Dream. I read that Aronofsky wanted Giovanni Ribisi in the role of Harry, which would have been awesome as I'm a big fan of Giovanni and can totally see him killing it as a heroin junkie. Jared Leto was fine though, although in the beginning I had quite a hard time believing he was an addict due to his clean-cut image. Jennifer Connelly is superb. I first saw her in In The Bedroom (a shitty movie, but Jennifer was great in it) and then in A Beautiful Mind (she did Requiem first but I saw A Beautiful Mind first so yeah.. and who cares about chronology anyway) and I thought her mind-blowing. There's something about her that says disconnection, as in she seems distant in her roles, but at the same time she's very relatable and real. Am I making any sense? Okay let's put it this way. Zooey Deschanel is also distant and disconnected (and hot!) in 500 Days Of Summer, but in a more flaky and stoic way, while Jennifer is more emotive and expressive but still somewhat spacey and out of reach.

But the show stopper in the movie must be Ellen Burstyn as Sara Goldfarb. Her portrayal as a lonely woman addicted to prescription pills is just pure genius. She brings this frightening bipolar quality to the character the way Meryl Streep did in Sophie's Choice. And Streep went on to win an Oscar for that (just sayin'). Sara Goldfarb's monologue about being old and ignored makes me cringe. It's so true on so many levels that I wouldn't want anyone past 40 years old to see this movie lest they'll end up being junkies.

All in all, I've watched Requiem many times and each time, I got goosebumps. Hats off to Darren Aronosfky, and I can't wait to watch Black Swan (also by him, plus there's Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis totally doing it).

M

I've seen one of Fritz Lang films, Metropolis, and I didn't like it but nevertheless was extremely impressed by it. After all, it was 83 years ago. It's touching to think how far we've come since then.

I don't think I even managed to sit through the entire film since the subject matter of dystopic capitalism was quite hard to stomach given the picture quality, the frantic nature of characters in silent movies and not to mention, the missing scenes that they later had to replace with title cards depicting what was happening at the moment (I still remember one of the cards saying, "The princess fell down", or something to that effect and it was pretty damn funny).

So last night I tried to watch M, also a film by Lang only this time it's a talkie. It's one of the oldest courtroom dramas, and God only knows how much I love courtroom dramas (Kramer vs. Kramer, Philadelphia, To Kill A Mockingbird (both the book and the film), In Cold Blood (only the book as I've never seen the film) and Legally Blonde (one of the best chick flicks ever haha). M is considered Lang's magnum opus, so it should be good.

The verdict?

I kinda like it, but it's not something I'd watch twice. I mean it's pretty awesome for a German Expressionist film, but somehow I failed to derive pleasure from watching the movie. I think I'm gonna have to be 15 years older (and a lot more mature) to be able to actually love this film.

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

I'm rewatching One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. One of my favourite films of all time. In my opinion, while Jack Nicholson evidently steals the show in this one (as in every other film he's in), this film has one of the strongest cast ensembles, from the nurses to each one of the mental patients.

Playing a mentally ill person must be one of the hardest challenges for an actor. I remember Leonardo DiCaprio killing it in Gilbert Grape (I hate him now, but let's not forget that he used to be good), Vivien Leigh in Streetcar, Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, Rani Mukherjee in Black, Mr. Os in Adik, and of course, the mighty Sean Penn in I Am Sam.

I refuse to put in films like American Psycho and As Good As It Gets in the list, as I don't really find the main characters crazy. In American Psycho, Christian Bale is a very well-groomed and well-mannered psychopath, and psychopathy is not really a cuckoo-kind of mental illness, IMHO. And Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets is just obsessive compulsive, and that's not really a mental illness as much as a personality tic. Although, I'm no shrink so everything I say is from a layman's POV.

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest is one of the films I would want to keep in my future movie room (of course I will have a movie room in my future 3-acre mansion) and watch every other Saturday night with my kids so they will grow up better than other kids whose cinematically-challenged parents make them watch cartoons all day long.

By the way, isn't this the most awesome way to store your cigarette pack? To hell with rectangular bulges on your pants, T-shirt sleeves FTW! (Although I do have doubts concerning one's ability to pull this off if one is not Jack Nicholson.)

Stupid Films That I Absolutely Love

Everyone has a stupid ill-fitting t-shirt or pair of jeans or even underpants that they love to wear on weekends or even anytime when nobody's around. It might look horrid, but damn it's comfortable. In fact, I have these Aeropostale pants that I would rather not be caught dead in, ever, but which I put on every night. I'm absolutely confident that they are a must for a good night sleep, without which I would be the crabbiest, most groggiest sonofabitch during the day.

Speaking of tattered comfortable clothing, I also have a list of guilty pleasure films that I love to watch whenever I'm bored and have absolutely nothing to do. They are nowhere near the best films list, not even in the 100 miles radius. But they're so good it's the only thing I want to do when it's raining outside and the temperature's dipping into the sub-zeros. I call them my 'Aeropostale movies'.

1. Demolition Man

This is my number one Aeropostale movie. I've watched in since I was maybe 6. And I never look back. I've got all quotes and unfunny jokes committed to memory, down to the subtlest indefinite articles. It's a movie set in the year 2032, where society is ruled by a single man by the name of Cocteau and food is in the form of 3 flimsy lines of sauce. People wipe their asses with 3 seashells instead of toilet papers, and sexual intercourse involving fluid transfer is not just frowned upon, it's against the law. Police officers use tasers powered by liquid nitrogen (?) and they are not acquainted with martial arts skills since they are not trained to deal with 20th century criminals (because in 2032 apparently everyone is an abiding citizen ahah how about that). The most ridiculous thing must be the profanity-detector machine which every room in every building is equipped with, and it's sole purpose is to issue a fine every time a foul word is uttered.

This movie is the reason why Sandra Bullock is my most favoritest actress on Earth because she just has a way of making stupid lines believable. And Stallone has never been more stoic, but he kicks ass in this movie (surviving a burning building full of explosives? Classic.)

And Wesley Snipes is just the most bad-ass of all bad-ass criminals. He makes Cyrus The Virus look like Forrest Gump. I mean, if he were aboard the Con Air, he woulda flown that goddamn plane.

I fucking love this movie and am not afraid to say it. Haha. This is my answer to Ebert's Shawshank Redemption.

Okay I would love to continue writing down my list but suddenly I feel so hungry so I'm gonna have to cut this into several postings. Later.