Inception, disexplained

I never really understood why people reacted to Inception like it was LSD; Nolan did a pretty good job in presenting his idea. And hence, I always thought explanation charts would have been much more in order for things like Nolan’s earlier Memento or crazy things like Primer (I mean, look at that diagram, it was confusing enough to warrant a mention in XKCD). Ok, all that aside, I just wanted to say I can’t quite believe that this explanation of Inception seems harder to understand than the original movie itself.

NS and bureaucratic buzzwording makes my head go in funny directions

In another interminable lecture, a dark epiphany coalesces in my mind and squats, inky, black, and brooding. It bleeds and melts and settles, one by one, with the shadows dancing upon the wall of my mind’s cave, indelibly staining everything. I sense myself, and find: a creature grown slowly bitter; a creeping ivy crawls across the spirit, choked off from light and life.

I remember, lit with the fuzzy, golden vagueness that tinges nostalgia, having dreams. Having aspirations, instead of desires. Fulfilling goals instead of needs. Through my fervent daily wish for the workday to end, I glimpse memories of waiting for another day and another chance to chase a glory insignificant enough to be attained.

I have substituted the joy of new days and new climbs for the despondency of routine, and the taste in my mouth is sour. I spit at what I have let myself become. I wish I could bother. Let me eat. Let me sleep. Let me wake and let me wait. Let the waiting be unbearable and the pain intolerable and let me bleed, bled until I am dry and withered and a husk and a pile of ashes, till I look forward to a fiery resurrection.

Sounds as sadistic as the original series. Score!

Ah, Simcity. So looking forward to this

Music: More To Life Edition

tenth avenue north is heart-breakingly good

 

 

Review: Hellstrom’s Hive

Most people first encounter Herbert through Dune (and all the subsequent books), and some of them go on to read his other stuff. I guess that makes me some sort of bastard child, seeing as I did read some of the Dune books before this. But I read them in my (very) early teens, and don’t remember much of them. For sure, they were more entertainment than tomes bursting with ideas at the time.

Seeing other people’s high regard for Dune, I feel that I owe the books a revisit with the maturity and wisdom of age. But to be fair, Hellstrom’s Hive, even though it has been described as “right at the lowest point of [Herbert's] form and it shows”, is still pretty good, notwithstanding the anachronisms to be expected of most sci-fi written during the cold war.

The novel focuses its attention on the core idea of a human hive society, built on the principles learnt from insects, and it delves deep into the implications of that idea. It is not a campy one-dimensional take on an alternative social structure; it weaves a careful investigation and thoughtful consideration of the alternative society with a decently paced plot that gets the reader to the finish.

The book takes time to delve into the perspectives of multiple characters, both inside and outside the Hive. By moving between both Hive perspective and motivations, and the all-too-human pawns and powerbrokers in the secretive government agency investigating it, the book forces the reader to consider competing models of social organisation.

The instinctive revulsion towards the de-individualisation (and, presumably, de-humanisation)of Hive life that the book provokes is balanced by an unsympathetic portrayal of uncaring bureaucracy. I found it impossible to cheer for either side; the greatest sympathy I could muster was for an individual pawn of the agency and his personal struggle in a world devolving into madness. The presence of human characters in the book forces the reader to confront not just the philosophical implications of the idea being discussed, but also to evaluate our gut reactions and to consider tangible consequences of ideology.

The book ends at a lull in the action, leaving the reader wondering about the fate of the world as the power of balance shifts. It may be unsatisfying, but it also forces the reader to decide what sort of ending he would prefer, and what that reflects of his worldview and his attitude towards the invisible social laws and forces of human life.

Seven-Second Hook

The New Yorker occasionally publishes some delightful long form articles, and they rarely fail to captivate. This is one of those. Be warned (if you missed the sentence right before this one), it is the sort of thing that internet users tend to instinctively navigate away from without half a glance, “tl;dr” flitting through the mind as chipmunk-sized attention spans compel the fingers to find the next three minute long video of funny cats; it would probably be worse if the default layout had the article on a single page. It is bad news for authors and essayists who want to be heard on the internet, but at least it means magazines and long-form print journalism will outlive newspapers for at least a little while yet.

Neatly segueing into a discussion about attention spans and appreciation for artistry in writing would be pointless if the reader has not actually read the linked article, so I exhort you to take a little time to read it (I promise, if you have the time to be reading this you have the time to read the article, unless you happen to be reading this as a distraction to put off working to meet a close deadline,  like, say, 4pm tomorrow).

Good, you’re back. Now we can talk about music. More precisely, about the pop which dominates the airwaves: the muzak backdrop of our daily routines that insinuates itself into the crevices of the subconscious, depositing persistent and poisonous tunes like an insidious virus.

Call me a counterculture hipster reflexively rejecting the mainstream , or prematurely aged and capable of only appreciating the music of my youth, I will regardless maintain that Party Rock Anthem is no Bohemian Rhapsody. Pop radio has become a rotation of smash hits produced by handful of songwriters like Ester Dean and producers like Stargate, performed by stars who possess the necessary ‘swag’. And the goal of that songwriting, of that production, of that performance, is not art but money.

“You can have two or three hot singles on an album, or no singles, and that’s the difference between selling five million copies worldwide and launching an eighty-date sold-out world tour, and selling two hundred thousand copies and having no tour. That’s like a twenty-million-dollar difference.”

-Tor Hermansen, Stargate

Like all other pop culture art forms, pop music is beholden to money.  With greater potential for mass recognition and huge earnings come more slavish devotion to fortune-generating smash hits. Large video game publishers have more or less settled on a model of gambling tens or hundreds of millions into a single make-or-break project and hoping for the next multi-billion dollar series such as Call of Duty or Mass Effect. The slightly more mature movie industry makes the same gamble (case in point: John Carter was likely an attempt at the next Transformers or Pirates of the Caribbean); the difference is that studios are rich enough, awards important enough, and filmmakers are influential enough that blockbusters are used to subsidise directors who want to win something at Cannes.

Pop music is no different, because there is so much more money in it than there used to be. The advent of online digital music stores has shifted the business from the album-centric model back to the days of hit singles. Goodbye concept albums, and hello iTunes top ten. Without albums but with customers able and willing to pay for singles 99 cents at a time, the business is all about smash hits nowadays. And what better way to produce a smash hit than pandering to the masses and exploiting their psychology?

“I go into the booth and I scream and I sing and I yell, and sometimes it’s words but most time it’s not. And I just see when I get this little chill, here— and then I’m, like, ‘Yeah, that’s the hook.’” 

-Ester Dean, songwriter

Ester Dean is a pop songwriter that does her best work when she is not writing; at least, not in the conventional sense. Her songwriting is not so much a putting of words in order, a conveyance of meaning, a missive from the author’s mind and soul. It is more akin to a spontaneous and irresistible urge to dance upon overhearing an infectious beat, or a passionate, furtive, kiss snatched from a stranger in the doorway of a club before hasty flight. It is a sensual craft, focusing on the ineffable primal reactions we all carry. It is the song that sticks in our head all day long, the bait that awakens the appetites within. It is feeling.

And such is the fate of all pop culture. To chase money is to chase broad appeal, and to chase appeal is to exploit the instincts deep within that humanity shares. It panders not to any kind of artistic taste or appreciation for beauty or wit, but to base needs, to what feels good. As the New Yorker puts it, “The words are more like vocalized beats than like lyrics, and they don’t communicate meaning so much as feeling and attitude—they nudge you closer to the ecstasy promised by the beat and the ‘rise’, or the ‘lift’, when the track builds to a climax.”

There is, however, reason not to despair. As Stargate ought to know, public opinion turns faster than any one person can hope to keep up with. Adele, with her much more sensible lyrics and sudden widespread success could mean the return of lyrics instead of words accompanying synthesised tunes designed to hook the listener. Nonetheless, the role of public opinion in shaping (popular) art is huge, and likely to keep growing. Like how videogames have splintered into money-spinning franchises and indie developers making art games, or movies into blockbuster sequels and Oscar hopefuls, music will diverge into pop and not-pop. Thank goodness that the not-pop of the day often finds itself part of a genre with its own set of dedicated fans.

 

A different class of classes

Again the curtain falls on another series of Singaporean university open houses, and we can begin to welcome the latest in a long line of university application exercises. From what I saw of NUS at their open house yesterday, it seems the school is getting swankier than ever; the complaints about elitism and class divides are getting louder in volume too, I presume.

UTown has been up and running for a goodly period; long enough for people to settle in and replace the unoccupied ghost town feel with some life, but not long enough to lose its lustre to the inevitable collection of grime and dated-ness that is the preordained fate of all but the most spectacular buildings. Right next door there is frenetic work on the Yale-NUS campus; the site is seething to erect more shiny new edifices for the latest NUS prestige project. Meanwhile, the (unnamed) people I went to open house with who are set to matriculate at NTU in 2013 are bemoaning their fate, mostly because NTU increasingly seems “inferior”. And people probably don’t feel any better when  reactions from NUS undergrad tour guides range from “WHAT who’s going to NTU and why?!” and “APPLY TO NUS IT’S GREAT”.

Notice that “inferior” is in quotes above; wholesale judgement of the inferiority or superiority of an institution compared to another is so absurd that is ought to be a non-issue when we touch on the topic of higher education, or education as a whole. Yet, it persists in Singapore. There exists a class hierarchy in our nominally meritocratic and “good-across-the-board” school system that we cannot shake, no matter how much better educated our children, youth, and people are. Ironic, that the first-class education we provide fails at getting people to take off their blinkers, make reasoned and critical comparisons and judgements, put aside a class mentality and ladder-climbing drive, or stop taking masochistic pleasure in feeling aggrieved. Instead, what we have is an ingrained tendency to arrange educational choices in a rigid hierarchy of “better” and “worse”, a desperate need to reach for the top of that (absurd) ladder, and, when feeling particularly hard done by, a penchant to spout accusations of elitism. But then, why should we be surprised that the system appears to be elitist, when we have chosen a life of absolutes, of black and whites, of “this” being definitively better than “that”?

Our malaise is a hangover from all the ranking we do at earlier stages in the educational journey of our children, including but not limited to streaming, loads of standardised right out of kindergarten, school rankings, and the ever-important national examinations to select the few that qualify for admission in those “better schools”. And don’t think for a moment that it simply reflects the desire of parents to give their children education of the highest quality; it is as much about status as it is about quality of education. Parents that cared only about the quality of their child’s education and intellectual development could better spend the hours volunteering at a brand-name primary school reading with their child instead.

We have mistaken popularity, status, and exclusivity for quality. In our collective minds’ eye we envision a pyramid of educational virtue, the ultra-difficult to enter foreign universities at the pinnacle, followed by the less selective ones, and then the popular courses at local universities with far more applicants than places, below which are the less popular courses, and so on. It paints a picture of applicants who, by and large, do not know what they want to learn out of a university education, nor what the universities can give them. The applicants apply for whatever seems popular, because, “hey, if lots of people want in, it’s got to be good right? And if I get a place, I can feel superior to everyone else who didn’t.”

Well, it seems I’ve gone on moaning about education in Singapore yet again; it seems there is no shortage of ways in which it falls short (please, pardon the pun). Apart from exhorting students (and myself) to not let schooling interfere with education, what is to be done about our endlessly kiasu Singapore?

Get off your bum, stop wasting time, and do something proper kiddo

This is worth a look, methinks.

Malingering and moral judgements: Ethics in the army

A tableau:

An NSF officer, let’s call him 2LT Siao On, is in a hospital waiting room. Two rows behind him sit two NSFs in their green uniforms, showing off their conspicuous absence of rank badges. Our good officer can’t help but overhear the two of them (let’s call them PVT Chao and PVT Keng) discussing ways to convince the doctor to grant them additional medical leave. 2LT Siao On is disgusted. He shakes his head, and proceeds to complain on a public domain (say, Facebook) about the state of the SAF, and implicitly suggests that every conscript soldier should be as dedicated to the cause as he is.

What’s wrong with this scene? Is 2LT Siao On justified in his condemnation of PVTs Chao and Keng?

I’ve made some assumptions in analysis; bear with me. For the sake of argument let us assume:

1. There is no immutable, objective rightness. I.e., 2LT Siao On may believe serving NS is a worthy cause, but he, and any others who share the same belief, may not be any more correct than others who disagree.
2. PVTs Chao and Keng have valid reasons to believe the SAF is an unworthy cause for their time and effort. (They might believe nationalism and patriotism are outmoded, unnecessary, or downright detrimental to humanity. They might loathe rampant mismanagement they have witnessed first-hand in the service. It could be something else I haven’t thought of. Surely there is no shortage of valid reasons for a conscript soldier to believe his service is for an untenable cause)

In our scene, we have two parties that hold different, possibly opposite views regarding the subject of NS. 2LT Siao On sees it as a glorious sacrifice one should be proud to make, worthy of utmost effort and dedication because it is of utmost importance. PVTs Chao and Keng see NS as service to a cause they cannot and do not believe in or support. 2LT Siao On is a zealot for the cause, while PVTs Chao and Keng are slaves to it; the difference is their subjective evaluation of the worthiness of the cause, and their subsequent willingness to serve.

Turning to the question of moral obligation and justification, I present two possible scenarios:

1. NS is in opposition to the beliefs of PVTs Chao and Keng. Are they morally obliged to sabotage, what is to them, an “evil organization” by malingering and performing poorly, as well as actively working to promote alternatives?  If they are not morally obliged, are they morally justified in doing so?

2. PVTs Chao and Keng are disillusioned with NS. They see no value in their service beyond supporting an ideology they reject. Are they morally justified in abandoning service in pursuit of freedom or personal pleasure? (Noting that there exists a bias against hedonism in favour of traditionally noble values such as patriotism, honour, discipline, and sacrifice?)

If you ask me, it seems clear enough that a moral obligation exists to actively work against a cause that (one believes) is evil, supports evil ideology, or perpetuates misery or suffering. And as a slave for an evil cause, one has a moral obligation to seek freedom; although freedom itself is of no value, there is an obligation to utilise freedom to pursue a causes one considers good and right.

Less clear is the reaction to a cause one rejects, but does not condemn. If a cause is not evil or in opposition to personal beliefs, but only incongruent, there is justification to refuse service to it. But it is not clear if there is justification to pursue freedom for its own sake (although, in our scenario, it is more likely for pleasure’s sake), especially if the rejected cause enjoys widespread support from most other people. And there’s the rub, because the most likely scenario is that PVTs Chao and Keng are looking to slack off  for personal freedom, only to subsequently squander that freedom on personal pleasure instead of any cause they believe in and support, while 2LT Siao On shares a widely held belief that NS is an honourable and good cause.

So, 2LT Siao On condemning the PVTs. Can he or can’t he? What do you think dear reader?

EDIT: Well, that might not have gotten at what I really wanted to ask. Instead of whether or not 2LT Siao On should or shouldn’t be condeming our PVTs, I should be asking when our PVTs have moral justifications for their actions (i.e., keng-ing)

Old Boys’ Diplomacy

I’ve recently read S. Jayakumar’s Diplomacy (and put up a short review here; frankly, it’s not very impressive). I’ve come away from it with the impression that Singapore’s foreign affairs and relations with other countries are managed by a select cadre of senior diplomats. Names that regularly show up include Tommy Koh, Bilahari Kausikan, Kishore Mahbubani, and Jayakumar himself. Diplomacy draws on the author’s personal experiences from his time in MFA, so it is at least partly excusable that the book features Jayakumar’s close, long-time colleagues in his mostly anecdotal accounts of work in the diplomatic corps. But it does not discount the fact that this group of elite diplomats have been playing musical chairs with the positions of permanent representative to the UN, ambassador at large, and permanent secretary for foreign affairs for a considerable time.

Jayakumar also makes constant references to his close personal friendship with (long-time Indonesian foreign minister) Ali Alatas, and how it has greased problematic diplomatic relations. There are also numerous references to how his other personal relationships has helped in resolving issues with other countries. I cannot pretend to be closely acquainted with the machinations of government or the conduct of foreign affairs, but I cannot help but wonder about a couple of things. Firstly, how much of international relations, especially in regional ties between geographically close neighbours, is influenced by and dependent on an old boy’s’ network, both locally and cross-border, and is it plagued by insular, one-track navel gazing and barriers of entry for new diplomats in the marketplace of ideas? Secondly, to what extent is supposedly democratic statecraft shaped and dominated by a select cabal of ministers and civil servants, and how health would that situation be?

The answer to both questions is, in my opinion, a worrying, intractable conundrum. Unless an entire population can become knowledgeable, interested, and active in public life, and enabled (possibly technologically) to influence that public life through direct democracy on all issues of importance, we will be stuck with a small elite of power-brokers and technocrats running the show. It is not necessarily a bad thing, but we ought not to have pretensions to anything else, especially in a single-party democracy with the civil service and the party existing symbiotically. And although issues will remain decided by those select power-brokers, we can avoid the worst outcomes by ensuring organic (i.e., not party-directed) renewal of that group and truly meritocratic entry to that group, in order to avoid the pitfall of navel-gazing, slap-on-the-back old boy’s politics and policymaking.