neurosis/ freedom mutterings

Rudely awakened,
fueled by a yearning-
without the loud sounds of drilling of concrete,
without the incessant nagging by elders;

A place,
where my soul is at peace and mine,
where I can look at the sky and smile,
where I am be-ing my self.

Neurotic to Them,
But I question,
how can one live in a place
where there is We without the I.

(by me)

incandescence

According to Woolf, being independent--owing nothing to anybody--is essential to achieve the state of mind necessary to produce great art. With material and financial independence, "no force in the world can take from me my five hundred pounds. Food, house and clothing are mine for ever. I need not hate any man; he can not hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me" (A Room 38). Material independence grants its owner an emotional independence, it allows one to be free of "grudges and spites and antipathies," (A Room 56) to have one's mind unclouded by "alien emotions like fear and hatred" (A Room 58-9). Woolf calls this state of mind "incandescence" (A Room 56).

Perhaps what is most important about the idea of incandescence is its requirement that one be free of emotions rooted in dependent relationships. The "alien emotions" that Woolf names such as "grudges, spites and antipathies" are emotions based in relationships, in communities and in dependencies; they are emotions that exist as reactions to other people--they are reactive, not creative. The idea of incandescence recalls that early memory of being alone, when Woolf's emotional experience was independent of others. As well, it reflects the connection Woolf makes between relationships and dependence when writing about her father and her early life.

In Woolf's view part of the danger of community is that it forces people into dependence, and that dependency locks a person into a limited and rigid world. In A Room of One's Own, this connection is made clear in Woolf's discussion of women's crippling material dependence, which leaves them incapable of producing work with "integrity" (73). This discussion is similar to Woolf's recollection of her father's emotional dependence, which locked him into a limited and dependent state of grief from which he often had "no possibility of communication" (Moments 126). Dependence, whether material or emotional, binds a person to a community, forcing them to live a partial life that is reactive, rather than creative. Independence, on the other hand, frees one to be incandescent, or "disinterested," to be unbound by relationships and communities in which one doesn't believe (Three Guineas 17, 38).

brain fuck

There is no House without Imagination

phenomenology

Man is a being to be imagined.

- Gaston Bachelard (Poetics of Reverie, 1960)

fengshui pointers.

i was researching chinese astrology when i came across two pages that listed dos and don'ts for designing stairs and managing your living spaces:

"Feng Shui of Stairs"

"Cramp Spaces and Narrow Corridors"

of the two, i think the one about the stairs proves more useful.

colosseum

watching all the games in the golden age of 1994 msia cup and league on tv. addictive. i am also very fortunate to be able to watch the 2005 and 2007 asean cups. TV coverage of the stadium’s roars is muffled coz they do not have mics all over the pitch like those overseas stadiums.

there was one match, spore vs bahrain i watched with jansen. against a superior opposition who were cowed by the kallang roar into play acting and wasting time. the half filled stadium stood and swore profanities, screaming for the ref to “fuck off” (seriously, 30000 pple shouting fuck off is quite a spectacle with concert like synchronisation of hands pumping). AFC promptly fined spore for that. but nothing beats the spontaneous self righteousness of a little nation that night.

really, no matter wat pple might say, nothing beats kallang roaring out majulah spore, not even national day. throwing toilet rolls as streamers. torn newspapers as confetti. kallang wave. referee kayu. singing ole ole all the way home on mrt. cheering hardcore gangsters running in to fight overseas gangsters.

football is passion, and at the very core, the very epitome of the national spirit that pple condensed into 90 mins. and spore teams throughout the yrs live for that moment for the full house, living their lives dedicating to trying their best in spite of a seasonal bandwagon crowd.

i can only hope the crowd that pays 16 dollar a ticket are not prim and proper ah sia giahs who suddenly got a nostalgic attack and start dreaming they had once been part of history. i only hope the mild and chirpy malay aunties in their tudong who turn into fervent fans do turn out too. and teach the impressionable kids over there the real meaning behind the kallang roar.

brings a tear to my eye

en bloc u how?

if hor... remy...

some developer come and enbloc ur bras basah flat.... alot of money....

then hor some pesky akitects come petition for gazette coz ur flat got history value....

how wld u react?

pondering...

modernism

i just realised, the critique of modernism with a decidedly architectural determinism is merely a veiled attempt to uphold the moral integrity of the profession and its relevance.

it is a bitter jealousy that behind the monolithic, uncanny, completely void of aesthetic could still breed cultural life. it is thought to be blasphemous that architecture had no role and effect on the cultural incidences that sprout out naturally from socisalisation.

architecture, itself, could not come to terms with the fact that it is never all encompassing.

sorry

hmm. just tots. i hope i dun come across as callous or apathetic, or too sombre.

the above tschumi manifesto is to be taken literally.

this post is in reply of the drownings in lower seletar reservoir yesterday. the flagship project of PUB's Active Beautiful Clean waters programme.

earlier i posted some whimsical pictures of the model remy and me made. basically we participated in the masterplanning of the lower seletar reservoir park. those in the team and the clients had harboured very lofty ambitions of the project. images of pple kayaking, playing in the waters, splashing abt, aplenty. children of the sun and water. sparkling clean water.

never this....

in the project team, not a single member having a passion and knowledge of outdoor sports, no one an expert on water safety. for every project, we were instructed to design with safety of the public in mind. a very intangible and subjective notion.

therin lies the very vast gap between the user and implementor. the completely dissociated history of water culture in spore (ie, u dun see orang lauts, bumboat operators, or kelong fish farmers drowning do u?) vs the utopian imagery of unbridled safe fun, the total regulatory rationalisation of safety factors design.

for every designer and user, there are thousands of pple trying to bridge the huge gap. the huge gap precisely becoz of the complete disempowerment of roles of user and designer,

and there we were, carelessly drawing up plans, carried by euphoria of being released into the play pool, photoshopping images from somewhere else, misleading the general public from our supposedly higher academic standing. the river sectional drawings were not scrutinised in detail.

i am sure certain things cannot be faulted, certain things are purely accidental. however a tinge of uneasiness hangs in the air. that i had participated unknowingly in a dream that turned out to be someone elses' nitemare.

remy told me once that koolhaas wrote that architects and planners should be tried for war crimes because of the profound effects of subjugation and control they had on the masses via design. and we, unknowingly, murdered pple with our naivety, idealism and aultruism.

sorry.

conversation of the day

zihao says
lee hsieng loong is correct when he say sporeans materialistic
jitao enbloc everything one
one day istana also enbloc

amelia says:
HAHAHA!!!

moral high ground

Asked how the design world has responded to his carious Homeless Vehicle [sic] Wodiczko throws back his head and laughs at the pretensions of the so called 'designer decade'...

"The minute you present a proposal, people think you must be offering a grand vision for a better future." They can't see a thing like the Homeless Vehicle or the Poliscar as the 'concretisation' of a present problem, a makeshift trasitional device, or an aesthetic experiment.

Instead "they think it must be designed for mass production, and instantly imagine 100,000 Poliscars taking over the cities".

laos

hmm. laos... very enchanting country. only remaining socialist country in ASEAN. poor, but never desperate. in vientiene, the provincial capital, most buildings are less than 3 storeys tall. no traffic congestion. no signs extreme poverty like beggars or crime. the children are earnest and dignified, preferring to work rather than beg.

unlike the end of the world scenarios forwarded by castells or william lim of asian cities, wat i saw here is uncannily peaceful and lazy townships. neither is there a dichotomy of dual economies that sets the rich gated communities against the deprived poor. here in laos, mansions and dilapidated wood houses stand side by side, tuktuks parked beside the toyota prados. this country doesnt feel communist or oppressive at all, or even the presence of a state or government.

either i am blinded by romanticism, or there is really something unique about laotian culture. its resilience and self dependence of the people.

lao GDP comes mainly from... rice and tourism. it is non industrial. it doesnt even have a train system. its best interstate bus service called VIP bus breaks down several times enroute.

it is idylic. but it is unfair for me to say it should remain that way. i dun believe it is right for rich brats like me to put pple into a time capsule or a theme park for me to enjoy.

right now it seems lao will face a surge of tourists in the coming years. already prices for tour packages are soaring, gentrified by the hordes of tourists with their american dollar. china in 2006 passed a new regulation allowing chinese to travel freely into laos, which is expected to contribute to 25% of tourists there. how will the laid back culture handle the surge of materialism coming straight into their very doorstep? (literally, many of them operate in shophouses and guest houses).

lets all hope that a sensible future for them, not one that is marred by senseless short term gratification that left a bitter taste in other vice ridden countries as they tried to take off to modernity overnight. let these children enjoy a decent future and happiness.

The Combantant Body & A Prisoner of the Assumptions and Dogmas.

a few weeks ago, when Qiaos learnt from a little bird that i was facing difficulties in school and life here, he dropped me two notes of encouragement via email. in his latter email, he remarked on institutional processes:

The greatest lesson I learnt from being in London was that societies are constructed differently to yield different kinds of people, who will perpetuate their societies in some ways. I tried to convey some of this in my Western architecture history class, but I felt that it was dimly understood: the combatant body that underlines a society like Australia's is very alien to Singapore in some ways. This is perhaps one of the reasons why dislocation can be so traumatic.

this got me digging for a very old transcription i received from my good friend Rhao some 8 years ago, which i feel is worth some critical contemplation.

As in the political sphere, the child is taught that he is free, a democrat, with a free will and a free mind, lives in a free country, makes his own decisions. At the same time he is a prisoner of the assumptions and dogmas of his time, which he does not question, because he has never been told they exist. By the time a young person has reached the age when he has to choose (we still take it for granted that a choice is inevitable) between the arts and the sciences, he often chooses the arts because he feels that here is humanity, freedom, choice. He does not know that he is already moulded by a system: he does not know that the choice itself is the result of a false dichotomy rooted in the heart of our culture. Those who sense this, and who don't wish to subject themselves to further moulding, tend to leave, in a half-unconscious, instinctive attempt to find work where they won't be divided against themselves. With all our institutions, from the police force to academia, from medicine to politics, we give little attention to the people who leave--that process of elimination that goes on all the time and which excludes, very early, those likely to be original and reforming, leaving those attracted to a thing because that is what they are already like. A young policeman leaves the Force saying he doesn't like what he has to do. A young teacher leaves teaching, her idealism snubbed. This social mechanism goes almost unnoticed--yet it is a powerful as any in keeping our institutions rigid and oppressive.

[...]

(...) Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this:

"You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been abale to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourselves--educating your own judgement. Those that stay must remember, always and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society."

Lessing, Doris. Intro to The Golden Notebook. (1971)

"I would continue to survive".

[...]

Anyway, I say, this morning on the radio, I hear that laziness is our genetic and evolutionary condition. That our bodies gravitate towards this, though social conditioning makes us feel that we need to be accomplished, to constantly be accomplishing. I hear that many animals, if you watch them long enough, spend their days wandering around in circles, digesting their food, and sitting still. That ants and bees are like batteries: they are born with a certain amount of energy and if they use it all up early, they die. That many animals, for this reason, rest in order to survive, to ensure longevity.

I have long thought, I tell the counsellor, that if I stood still long enough, I would continue to survive. Not only would I be safe in my own home, I would be conserving my resources. I would be stopping time, slowing down its process, removing my association with it, putting things on hold until I'm ready to deal with them.

"Meanwhile, life happens," says the counsellor.

"Not to me," I say.

"Well then you're making a choice," she says.

Anyway, I say, I've always assumed this of my mother as well. I see her moving in circles, moving the fruit from bowl to bowl, shuffling the same piles of paper around, napping each day to restore energy, for what? To move more piles?

I heard on another radio show, I tell the counsellor, that this is the nature of depression: that unfocussed wandering, that need to sleep, that disinterest in life's business, a feeling of being overwhelmed by life's maintenance, subsumed by sloth.

So now I wonder if depression is not actually the absolutely correct biological response to living in America. If, in our society, the best answer is to nap, to move in circles around one's territory and digest slowly. I mean, there's just so much coming in, so much noise, so much junk mail, I tell the counsellor. I mean, look at Flo, wandering around the house sipping Diet-Rite raspberry soda ever since I introduced her to it, and me, padding around the apartment, while Michael works, feeling dismay at the piles of paperwork on my desk, feeling a strong urge to climb up on my desk and lie down in those piles and nap.

I mean, why are so many people taking Prozac, me and Flo included, if not to counteract some instinctive drive, a drive that is not moving us toward death and inactivity, but, in fact, is moving us toward life--a life of inactivity. Maybe Prozac is a bad idea, I say, maybe it will just wear out my batteries. I think, perhaps, I tell the counsellor, that by napping, my mother is preserving herself, trying to stay alive until the storm passes. I always thought that depression meant giving up, surrendering, but maybe it's a kind of vigil, a keeping of the faith.

"But see, that's the kind of circular thinking that is a symptom of depression," says the counsellor.

"Well, it makes sense to me," I say.

"It's a way to work around the shame you feel at your own inactivity. To give it credence, when really, what you need to do is just get up each morning and begin to move with the world."

I explain to her that the radio show talked about this, too. That the world moves at a pace that has been established by a few--and that those people are feeling particularly guilty about something or they wouldn't be moving so fast. That if you are playing music in a room, and you ask someone to cross that room, she will do so at the pace that has been established by the music. That we move in rhythm with our surroundings. Society moves at the established pace and then tailors all its expectations to it. Perhaps my mother, I suggest, is a renegade in her napping; she's composing a symphony of slumber.

I go on to explain the other things I've learned from the radio show; that many of society's dysfunctions come from our busyness, our frentic movement. That we need to operate in the moment, to wash the dishes when we are washing the dishes. To be with the dishes. "My mother is like that," I tell the counsellor. "She has always been with the dishes."

"Of course she's always been with the dishes," says the counsellor. "Only men who've quit high-paying jobs find dishwashing to be interesting."

"It's true," I say. "These Zen-dishwashing people are always men."

"Sure," says the counsellor. "They have the economic power to make it a lifestyle instead of a chore. How many milligrams do we have you on now?"

[...]

Olson, Shannon. Welcome to My Planet.Viking: Great Britain, 2000. P139-141.

...
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in other news:

"Time In A Modern City".

When the first studies of urban sociology appeared, city planning experts and intellectuals rushed to affirm the undeniable existence of a real city culture. In a very general sense, it could be said that culture is the way in which a certain time and space relate to each other: the conjoining of a populations's forms and behaviours. The comprehension of a culture then, depends greatly on the definition one has of the space and the time in which one is growing and developing.

"... We all felt that time is different: we were in the city where by definition everything goes faster, especially time. Time flies, it gets away from us, but at the same time it weighs heavily on us and drags its feet...", points out Carlos Fuentes in the novel already mentioned.

Before Christ was born, people perceived time as cyclical. Seasons changed throughout the year. Night and day were two phases of the same circle that appeared not to do anything except spin on its unchanging centre. However, from the moment of Jesus's birth, the West entered fully into historical time. A line of demarcation was drawn before and after and cyclical time disappeared from the human mind. Modernity went even further: 'The Modern Age is the first to exalt change and make it its foundation. Difference. separation, heterogeneity, plurality, evolution, development, revolution, history: all these words can be condensed into one: Future. It is not past times nor eternity, it is not the time that is but rather the time that yet does not exist and is always on the point of being', explains the Mexican writer Octavio Paz in The Children of Mud (Los Hijos del Limo). Modern humans, especially the urban ones, have made future life their goal, something that is by definition unattainable. The life of people in the city becomes one of constant negation. What the person of the past found in repetitions of yesterday, now always brings with it a denial of what happened yesterday and a race towards the future.

With electricity, the differences between day and night dissolve with the flick of a switch. Active time can continue after dark, and so sensory stimulation for the city dweller never stops. Time in modern cities is always accelerating.

With the evolution of capitalism time itself has needed to be rationalised. It has been restructured, and divided, with periods allocated to different activities. When traffic lights are red, cars must stop; when they're green cars can go. At seven in the morning, we talk about the 'rush hour'. On Sunday night all the roads leading into the city are full. 'In this way the technique of metropolitan life is simply unimaginable without an extremely punctual integration of every activity and mutual relationship to the content of an unvarying, impersonal schedule', says George Simmel, an urban sociologist. One arrives at the paradox of a time that is both cyclical and historical: urban routine -- a routine that locks us into schedules and chronologies that are both perfectly defined and have perfectly defined boundaries.

Senosiain, Javier. "The Modern City". Bio-Architecture. Burlington: Architectural Press, 2003. P97-100.