Saturday, June 27, 2009 / 9:09 PM

"Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around--nobody big, I mean--except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff--I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going. I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be."

(The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger)

Thursday, June 18, 2009 / 9:34 PM

Books about drawing are one of my favourite things, one of my sybaritic allowances-- mostly because they never do me any good. And this, predictably, has done nothing about my bumbling maladroitness about the drawing pen. The writing pen, sure, I could scribble out a few things, could make them sound enough like poetry. Drawing-- I gave up on perspective drawing, ink drawing, scribble-men drawing. In truth I can neither draw nor color; everything goes over the coloring-book's lines, everything is too indistinct, hanging there nebulous but familiar, like a distant aunt you can't remember the face of, having, at the same time, a disturbing desire not to.

Friday, June 12, 2009 / 9:48 PM

A waitress who, bringing a plate of food to the table, says, "Who is serving the fish and chips?" I barely managed to restrain myself from going, "You."

Wednesday, June 10, 2009 / 10:01 PM

Up is an utterly brilliant film. Forget the totally ludicrous premise of 20,000 helium balloons attached to a house, transforming it into an unbelievable dirigible (and this was done with a Sears lawn chair once before)-- it's a Pixar movie, for God's sake, so it might be sensible to switch gears, like one does when reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Anthropomorphized animals, unbelievably spry septuagenarians, floating houses-- it all comes with the territory. And Up works with it-- hell, it isn't close to magical realism, it's outlandishly comic-- but it works.

With balloons-- hundreds! thousands of them!-- tethered to his house, Carl Fredricksen-- a crotchety, cantankerous old man, recently made a widower-- flies to Paradise Falls, a distant childhood dream shared by his late wife. To his chagrin, Russell-- a Wilderness Explorer with one badge to complete, 'assisting the elderly'-- ends up on board. To follow all this with a trite 'hilarity ensures' would detract from the sad seriousness that drifts along like cloud cover behind the film's comic front. Certainly it is mostly funny, but I can't bring myself to classify it under the 'action- adventure' tag. It's more than that.

Sunday, May 31, 2009 / 9:47 PM

HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME

Wednesday, May 27, 2009 / 10:08 PM

Politics According to Cows:

SINGAPORE DEMOCRACY:
You have two cows. You get fined for detaining cattles in a flat.

The falsely-democratic/ one party monopoly/ authoritarian dig will never, never hold a candle to the one that goes: 'I did (insert action that is illegal in Singapore but symbol of awesomeness and/or freedom and/or common sense elsewhere). I got fined.'

Monday, May 25, 2009 / 10:09 PM

People really ought to stop saying that there's no love in the world. One should instead, bemoan the absence of good grammar, because the question 'Is it understand?' reaches a new level of stupidity.