I am a Xiaxue convert.

This is a (almost) historic moment.

(1:39 AM) :: PsY :: pang t: i like reading your blog
(1:43 AM) Jac, and she who: you can start blogging like me
(1:43 AM) Jac, and she who: then i can be entertained back

No, this is not a response to the above, in case her ego gets inflated and happily drifts into the air and cannot retrieve back.
No, I don’t read Xiaxue or Dawn Yang regularly. But you know, as a Communication student and the two years of studying how media affects us and our daily lives, there has been a few discussions about the furor Xiaxue and Dawn Yang created over their lawsuit a couple of months ago.

I take my hats off to this lady.

No girl would ever ever do something so humiliating to herself. I laughed till I almost cried and went into stitches but I really really really must say this: XIAXUE, YOU ARE SO VERY FUGLY.

Now, you criticise me for being mean. Wait till you check out for yourselves.

Her “bestest blog entry”. HERE.
http://xiaxue.blogspot.com/2008/09/bestest-blog-entry.html

And at the other end, I haven’t forgotten Dawn.
HERE:
http://dawnwayang-official.blogspot.com/

You’ve earned my respect, man.

hello world hope you’re listening

forgive me if i’m young and for speaking out of turn.

I’m back. I hope I didn’t miss much

In Production – Old Sinalco.

Thanks alot, Shi Xiong, Kian Chong (I finally found out), Vicky, Xiao Hei (I still haven’t found out), Hangqi, Zeming, Kaiwen.:D

I hope it’ll be over soon.

the expedition

Weili: something wrong with the place. i dunno how to explain.
Chang: it looks scary.

Ok all those myths debunked. That place wasn’t as scary as we thought. Though the way up was a tad freaky partly due to shrubs growing around it and it being totally out of place among the lush vegetation that has obviously overgrown since it was being abandoned, those pictures you see just do not tell the whole story.

Me, Chang, Sarah, Chihua emerged unscathed from those brave commando mosquitoes and a minor scare we had when a bird swooped past our heads. Apart from that, we spent more time making merry and bumping into other pockets of people who made the place seem like a tourist attraction.

@ Old Changi Hospital (shot with Canon A540)

The head, at the end of the corridor. Look hard.

Hollow.

The hand that didn’t decompose.

Chang and his uncle towel and expensive equipment.

Forgotten.

Three.

I’ll upload more onto flickr soon.

the final cut

Please excuse our dialogue. My partner Shixiong was the Director cum Soundman cum Lighting man cum Grip (I was the Cinematographer) and audio simply wasn’t our top priority. Lesson learnt: Get more crew and don’t gey kiang!

But certainly, we hope the visuals, cast, and acting, together with location filming and the inclusion of montages we tried to “shock” audiences (the Eisenstein way, of course) by intercutting them within the two lines of action and the technique of varying the shot sizes would gain us some credit.

A film by Shixiong Liew and Sern Yong Pang. Presenting: Formless.

(To view in HD quality, click on “HD” on top right hand corner of the box. Then click on the blue text “watch this video in High Definition” which opens a new window and you can view in HD quality)

“Form is emptiness and emptiness is form Form is not other than emptiness and emptiness is not other than form.” – Heart Sutra

Final disclaimer: I am not a Buddhist (Shixiong is!)

on repeat (just really cant get outta my head)

And that so very catchy tune got me hooked since WKWSCI FOC 2008.

Deep in my heart, there’s no room for crying,
but I’m trying to see your point of view
Deep in my heart, I’m afraid I’m dying,
I’d be lying if I said I’m not

Welcome in, welcome in,
Shame about the weather
Welcome in, welcome in,
You’re welcome
It’s a sin, it’s a sin,
Where birds of a feather, are welcome to, land on you

Ya Ya Ya
You’ve got my eyes
And we can’t see, what you’ll be, you can’t disguise
But either way, I will pray, you will be wise
Pretty soon you will see, tears in my eyes..

As each day goes by, makes way for another,
We discover that we’re not alone
And each day we try, the best we can to recover,
All the feelings that we left below

google hits home

working title – formless

TWO locations in TWO days with a TWO men crew – the result: a TWO minute short film for our filmmaking module codenamed COM four TWO seven.

While not everything went smooth and flawless, SD (Standard Definition) is now a thing of a past as we embrace new technology with High Definition cameras and editing suites.

What remains the same is the fundamentals of technique, storytelling and style, which we’ve have to terms with occassional out-of-focus shots and bad sound.

But what more to ask for, with our formidable cast putting up a brilliant performance displaying their best effort in conveying emotions into our two minute Eisenstein montage film with homages to 2046 and Infernal Affairs.

Some stills from our impressive Sony XDCam CineAlta PDW-F330 with Canon lens.

No longer the teenage textbook

I was at the convocation ceremony a couple of weeks ago and saw the graduation of the class of 2008. Adrian Tan, the author of the popular Teenage Textbook back in 1988, was the guest-of-honour of the event, and his address was one of the (if not, the) best I’ve heard in a long long, long long time. But, listening to him read out the speech in person definitely beats reading this whole chunk of text hands down.

Life and How to Survive It

I must say thank you to the faculty and staff of the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information for inviting me to give your convocation address. It’s a wonderful honour and a privilege for me to speak here for ten minutes without fear of contradiction, defamation or retaliation. I say this as a Singaporean and more so as a husband.

My wife is a wonderful person and perfect in every way except one. She is the editor of a magazine. She corrects people for a living. She has honed her expert skills over a quarter of a century, mostly by practising at home during conversations between her and me.

On the other hand, I am a litigator. Essentially, I spend my day telling people how wrong they are. I make my living being disagreeable. Nevertheless, there is perfect harmony in our matrimonial home. That is because when an editor and a litigator have an argument, the one who triumphs is always the wife.

And so I want to start by giving one piece of advice to the men: when you’ve already won her heart, you don’t need to win every argument. Marriage is considered one milestone of life. Some of you may already be married. Some of you may never be married. Some of you will be married. Some of you will enjoy the experience so much, you will be married many, many times. Good for you.

The next big milestone in your life is today: your graduation. The end of education. You’re done learning.

You’ve probably been told the big lie that “Learning is a lifelong process” and that therefore you will continue studying and taking masters’ degrees and doctorates and professorships and so on. You know the sort of people who tell you that? Teachers. Don’t you think there is some measure of conflict of interest? They are in the business of learning, after all. Where would they be without you? They need you to be repeat customers.

The good news is that they’re wrong.

The bad news is that you don’t need further education because your entire life is over. It is gone. That may come as a shock to some of you. You’re in your teens or early twenties. People may tell you that you will live to be 70, 80, 90 years old. That is your life expectancy.

I love that term: life expectancy. We all understand the term to mean the average life span of a group of people. But I’m here to talk about a bigger idea, which is what you expect from your life.

You may be very happy to know that Singapore is currently ranked as the country with the third highest life expectancy. We are behind Andorra and Japan, and tied with San Marino. It seems quite clear why people in those countries, and ours, live so long. We share one thing in common: our football teams are all hopeless. There’s very little danger of any of our citizens having their pulses raised by watching us play in the World Cup. Spectators are more likely to be lulled into a gentle and restful nap.

Singaporeans have a life expectancy of 81.8 years. Singapore men live to an average of 79.21 years, while Singapore women live more than five years longer, probably to take into account the additional time they need to spend in the bathroom.

So here you are, in your twenties, thinking that you’ll have another 40 years to go. Four decades in which to live long and prosper.

Bad news. Read the papers. There are people dropping dead when they’re 50, 40, 30 years old. Or quite possibly just after finishing their convocation. They would be very disappointed that they didn’t meet their life expectancy.

I’m here to tell you this. Forget about your life expectancy.

After all, it’s calculated based on an average. And you never, ever want to expect being average.

Revisit those expectations. You might be looking forward to working, falling in love, marrying, raising a family. You are told that, as graduates, you should expect to find a job paying so much, where your hours are so much, where your responsibilities are so much.

That is what is expected of you. And if you live up to it, it will be an awful waste.

If you expect that, you will be limiting yourself. You will be living your life according to boundaries set by average people. I have nothing against average people. But no one should aspire to be them. And you don’t need years of education by the best minds in Singapore to prepare you to be average.What you should prepare for is mess. Life’s a mess. You are not entitled to expect anything from it. Life is not fair. Everything does not balance out in the end. Life happens, and you have no control over it.Good and bad things happen to you day by day, hour by hour, moment by> moment. Your degree is a poor armour against fate.

Don’t expect anything. Erase all life expectancies. Just live. Your life is over as of today. At this point in time, you have grown as tall as you will ever be, you are physically the fittest you will ever be in your entire life and you are probably looking the best that you will ever look. This is as good as it gets. It is all downhill from here. Or up. No one knows.

What does this mean for you? It is good that your life is over.

Since your life is over, you are free. Let me tell you the many wonderful things that you can do when you are free.

The most important is this: do not work. Work is anything that you are compelled to do. By its very nature, it is undesirable.Work kills. The Japanese have a term “Karoshi”, which means death from overwork. That’s the most dramatic form of how work can kill. But it can also kill you in more subtle ways. If you work, then day by day, bit by bit, your soul is chipped away, disintegrating until there’s nothing left. A rock has been ground into sand and dust

There’s a common misconception that work is necessary. You will meet people working at miserable jobs. They tell you they are “making a living”. No, they’re not. They’re dying, frittering away their fast-extinguishing lives doing things which are, at best, meaningless and, at worst, harmful.

People will tell you that work ennobles you, that work lends you a certain dignity. Work makes you free. The slogan “Arbeit macht frei” was placed at the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps. Utter nonsense.

Do not waste the vast majority of your life doing something you hate so that you can spend the small remainder sliver of your life in modest comfort. You may never reach that end anyway.

Resist the temptation to get a job. Instead, play. Find something you enjoy doing. Do it. Over and over again. You will become good at it for two reasons: you like it, and you do it often. Soon, that will have value in itself.

I like arguing, and I love language. So, I became a litigator. I enjoy it and I would do it for free. If I didn’t do that, I would’ve been in some other type of work that still involved writing fiction – probably a sports journalist.

So what should you do? You will find your own niche. I don’t imagine you will need to look very hard. By this time in your life, you will have a very good idea of what you will want to do. In fact, I’ll go further and say the ideal situation would be that you will not be able to stop yourself pursuing your passions. By this time you should know what your obsessions are. If you enjoy showing off your knowledge and feeling superior, you might become a teacher.

Find that pursuit that will energise you, consume you, become an obsession. Each day, you must rise with a restless enthusiasm. If you don’t, you are working.

Most of you will end up in activities which involve communication. To those of you I have a second message: be wary of the truth. I’m not asking you to speak it, or write it, for there are times when it is dangerous or impossible to do those things. The truth has a great capacity to offend and injure, and you will find that the closer you are to someone, the more care you must take to disguise or even conceal the truth. Often, there is great virtue in being evasive, or equivocating. There is also great skill. Any child can blurt out the truth, without thought to the consequences. It takes great maturity to appreciate the value of silence.

In order to be wary of the truth, you must first know it. That requires great frankness to yourself. Never fool the person in the mirror.

I have told you that your life is over, that you should not work, and that you should avoid telling the truth. I now say this to you: be hated. It’s not as easy as it sounds. Do you know anyone who hates you? Yet every great figure who has contributed to the human race has been hated, not just by one person, but often by a great many. That hatred is so strong it has caused those great figures to be shunned, abused, murdered and in one famous instance, nailed to a cross.

One does not have to be evil to be hated. In fact, it’s often the case that one is hated precisely because one is trying to do right by one’s own convictions. It is far too easy to be liked, one merely has to be accommodating and hold no strong convictions. Then one will gravitate towards the centre and settle into the average. That cannot be your role. There are a great many bad people in the world, and if you are not offending them, you must be bad yourself. Popularity is a sure sign that you are doing something wrong.

The other side of the coin is this: fall in love. I didn’t say “be loved”. That requires too much compromise. If one changes one’s looks, personality and values, one can be loved by anyone.

Rather, I exhort you to love another human being. It may seem odd for me to tell you this. You may expect it to happen naturally, without deliberation. That is false. Modern society is anti-love. We’ve taken a microscope to everyone to bring out their flaws and shortcomings. It far easier to find a reason not to love someone, than otherwise. Rejection requires only one reason. Love requires complete acceptance. It is hard work – the only kind of work that I find palatable.

Loving someone has great benefits. There is admiration, learning, attraction and something which, for the want of a better word, we call happiness. In loving someone, we become inspired to better ourselves in every way. We learn the truth worthlessness of material things. We celebrate being human. Loving is good for the soul.

Loving someone is therefore very important, and it is also important to choose the right person. Despite popular culture, love doesn’t happen by chance, at first sight, across a crowded dance floor. It grows slowly, sinking roots first before branching and blossoming. It is not a silly weed, but a mighty tree that weathers every storm.

You will find, that when you have someone to love, that the face is less important than the brain, and the body is less important than the heart.

You will also find that it is no great tragedy if your love is not reciprocated. You are not doing it to be loved back. Its value is to inspire you.

Finally, you will find that there is no half-measure when it comes to loving someone. You either don’t, or you do with every cell in your body, completely and utterly, without reservation or apology. It consumes you, and you are reborn, all the better for it.

Don’t work. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated. Love someone.

You’re going to have a busy life. Thank goodness there’s no life expectancy.