This is the sum of all the work I did today.

My top 10 songs (in no particular order) to listen to while I luxuriously wallow in my own depression are:

1) I Am...I Said - Neil Diamond

2) Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word - Elton John

3) I’ll Never Fall in Love Again – Tom Jones

4) Piano Man – Billy Joel

5) The Trouble With Love Is – Kelly Clarkson

6) Crying – Roy Orbison

7) Hallelujah – Jeff Buckley

8) Eleanor Rigby – The Beatles

9) She’s Out of My Life – Michael Jackson

10) I Started A Joke – The Bee Gees

Honourable mentions go to Nobody's Child (Karen White), Are You Lonesome Tonight (Elvis Presley), Little Altar Boy (The Carpenters) Holly Leaves and Christmas Trees (Elvis Presley), Tears of a Clown (Smokey Robinson), Tracks of My Tears (Smokey Robinson).


My top 10 stoner songs are:

1) Comfortably Numb – Pink Floyd

2) Puff The Magic Dragon – Peter, Paul and Mary

3) Pass the Dutchie – Musical Youth

4) Legalise It – Peter Tosh

5) Cos I Got High – Afroman

6) Summertime – Janis Joplin

7) Yellow Submarine – The Beatles

8) Don’t Worry, Be Happy - Bobby McFerrin

9) Dream On – Aerosmith

10) Bohemian Rhapsody – Queen
Honourable mentions go to A Little Help From My Friends (The Beatles), Good Vibrations (The Beach Boys), Paint It Black (Rolling Stones) and Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 (Bob Dylan).

The battle of wills

I see you lying there before me, among the many others of your ilk.
Mysterious and magical, your face promises hidden and sultry delights I wouldn’t be able to find in any other.
And so, I decide that you it shall be. I pick you, choose you from all the rest and ask you to be mine.
I approach, my hands hungry to touch you, my eyes wanting to devour your every secret.
I pick you up. You weigh nothing, and I find it almost impossible to believe that under your feather-light weightlessness lies so wondrous a treasure.
I put you down on the cold, flat surface of the table in front of me.
As I run my hands all over your body, taking immense pleasure in the velvety smoothness of your skin, I wonder for a moment whether it is appropriate to do in public what I’m so blatantly doing to you now.
After all, I’ve been told that what we are now doing is the sort of thing that is only usually done in privacy, in solitude and in the closed confines of silent places.
And I tell myself, fuck it. And I continue.
But then, something happens. You turn off. You close yourself to me. I try to coax you to open, to reveal your innermost secrets to me but you don’t listen.
I try holding you in place. I try to keep you steady as I have my way with you. Yet, nothing works. You keep shutting me out. You keep brushing me away. You answer neither the gentle probings of my fingers nor the insistent strength of my sinews.
And I know I am losing you.
Then I realize there’s only one thing I can do. If I am to have you, I must first break you. Only when you lie helpless and unprotected will you obey my commands. Only when you are physically incapable of resisting me, will I be able to do with you as I will.
I know that you will never be the same if I do embark on this gruesome course. You will never be as beautiful again, inside and out. You will eventually come apart at the seams and fall to bits. You will be a shadow of the magnificent thing you are now.
But I don’t care. I must have you now and if having you means breaking you, break you I will.
And, break you I do. Without hesitancy, without doubt, without remorse, I break you.
I pick you and without batting an eyelid, snap your spine.
I hear the crunching and see the unnatural backward bend of your body and I know the deed is done.
I put you down again and note with satisfaction that you now lie open to me and indifferent to your fate.
And so I settle myself down to eat my roti canai and drink my Nescafe while I thumb through your pages.
Ahhh.....a meal and a good book. One of life's simple pleasures..

sLauGHteR iS ThE bESt MedICInE

Since everybody and his dog seems to be throwing in his two-cents worth about The Dark Knight, I figured I should too. (Heaven forbid society think me uncool for not bouncing onto the Batwagon!)

In all seriousness, I, unlike the rest of the watching world apparently, don't think the Joker is the best thing since bread came sliced, or that the sun shone out of Heath Ledger's now maggoty ass.

Don't get me wrong. He was brilliant. Oh well, since I'm going that far, I might as well go the full monty. He was (lets say it in a single breath now!) amazingmarvellousawesometremendousfantasticmesmerisingbrilliantastoundingbreathtakingterrific.

He is just Evil for the sake of being Evil, with no thought for profit or gain, no quarter given to mercy or kindness and revels in death, destruction and chaos.

He's the kind of personable chap even the Lucifer himself wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley. He makes Emperor Palpatine, Count Dracula and Hannibal Lecter look like Larry, Curly and Moe. He'd give Charles Manson and Ted Bundy the willies.

In short, he is one of the greatest villains in cinematic history. All that talk about a posthumous Oscar really is warranted and not just the work of a PR machine on overdrive.

But for me, the movie can be summed up in two words: Harvey Dent.

While Ledger's portrayal of the clown prince of crime is mesmerising in its intensity, Eckhart's depiction of Gotham's white knight is a study in character development.

He brings out the best in the the idealistic District Attorney out to clean Gotham's crime riddled streets and imbues the character with moral strength, unquenchable fortitude, immense courage and the dogged determination to see good triumph over evil.

And then the Joker blows his world to bits.

When Dent becomes Two-Face, you don't hate him. You weep for him. You weep for all that he was and all that he has become.

You weep because you see that every evil, every vile cruelty is not so much an act of wickedness but a cry of pain, a cry of misery and a cry to be put out of his suffering.

Despite the trail of murderous destruction that he wreaks, despite the horrifying choices he makes and despite the terrible things he does, Two-Face is still one of the most sympathetic villains I have come across.

If Ledger were to not get the posthumous Oscar he is worthy of, I would choose Eckhart as the man to win it over him.

Gary Oldman more than does justice to the role of James Gordon, while Eric Roberts, Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman all acquit themselves reasonably well too.

Sadly, Christian Bale himself was the most disappointing member of the cast (lets leave out Gyllenhall - the only reason she's even in the movie is to facilitate Dent's transformation). Batman is arguably the most complex and intriguing of all comicdom's caped crusaders, but in The Dark Knight, he is a strangely one-dimensional cardboard cutout.

Is it because he is so completely eclipsed by the baddies? I don't know.

What I do know is that while so much effort was put into making the action scenes spectacular and in giving Batman more cool gadgets, relatively little was put into highlighting his inner turmoil and the conflict raging underneath the cowl.

For example, while he could, without a qualm, let Ras Al Ghoul die a fiery death in Batman Begins, he does not kill the Joker - a more dangerous and devious villain. While we all know that Batsy's code is to not kill, more could have been done to explain the motivations behind this.

When Joker threatens to kill one person every night unless the Bat reveals his true identity, we see a very muted response to what must have surely been a mind-warping conundrum.

His reaction to (SPOILER ALERT!!!!!) Rachel Dawes' death is equally muted and unimposing. I mean, this is the same man who, having seen his parents gunned down, dresses up as a winged mammal and flits from roof to roof in response. You'd at least expect him to tear off a couple of Joker's limbs for blowing the love of his life to kingdom come, wouldn't you?

Yet, even with these inadequacies The Dark Knight is a spellbinding tale. It is not one painted in shades of black, white or even gray.

Rather it is splashed with the bright purple of the Joker's suit, the toxic green of his hair and the blood red of his grinning maw. It is a painted with the brittle brush strokes of Two-Face's burnt and deformed face.

And it is accompanied by a duet of manical laughter and anguished howls.

WHAT IF THEY LIVED?

Elvis
Elvis He would have probably have died sometime in mid-2006. In 2004, he'd have released, That's All Right: 50 Years On, his first album in 20 years. It would have been produced by Rick Rubin, and, like Rubin's work with Johnny Cash and Neil Diamond, would have been bare, stripped down and minimal. It would have been hailed as one of the best albums of the year, Elvis best work since his Aloha from Hawaii concert and a shoo-in for a Grammy. It would have been the high point of a career that had gone seriously downhill since he narrowly cheated death in August 1977. Fans around the world watched with sadness as the King of Rock n' Roll's drug-fuelled lifestyle led to a downhill slope he never fully recovered from. His battle against the bulge was as well documented as his various aborted comeback attempts. The newer generations wondered what it was their parents saw in the foolish old man arthritically flailing about the stage, clearly doped up to his eyeballs and struggling to remember the words to his signature numbers. The only things that went worse than his music careers was his film work and his family life. Never the greatest of actors, his releases in the 80s were so bad they couldn't even be called B-grade movies. Bleary-eyed and paunchy, his romantic loverboy roles would have been hilarious if the lecherous pairings of Elvis with women young enough to be his granddaughters were not so paedophilic. Friends said he lost interest in his music, and in life itself, after Priscilla left him, taking Lisa Marie with her. A succession of incresingly vapid and hollow-eyed girlfriends did nothing to bring him out of his funk. At his funeral, his fans - the legion of once screaming teenyboppers now in their dotage - ruefully said said That's All Right was too little too late. They couldn't reconcile the bald and stooped old man, flabby gut hanging obscenely over his belt garter, to their memories of the sleek, gyrating Adonis of their sepia toned memories. They said it would have been better if the 1977 overdose had killed him.


James Dean
James Dean It was ironic that Dean cheated death while driving his Porsche Spyder only to die a few years later in the same car while playing the part of a stock-car driver.The first accident, in 1955, came as he had just burst on to the scene as a devilishly handsome movie star who seemed destined to be Hollywood's torch bearer for the next decade. For a while it seemed as if the car crash had smashed his future as gruesomely as it smashed his legs. But, with a determination that became the stuff of countless articles, anecdotes and stories, Dean fought his way back from the brink.In a coma for two months, and his legs mangled in the wreck, nobody expected him to pull through. But pull through he did. When asked in interviews later how he managed to steel himself for the 9 months of intense physiotherapy, Dean would always have a perplexed look in his eyes."What would you have expected me to do? Lie back and let the accident lick me? Stay an invalid for the rest of my life?" was his stock answer.He did admit that the crash made him reassess his life and throw himself more frenetically behind his work.In the decade that followed, he amassed a body of work that became legendary. Anything and everything he touched immediately turned to gold. The critics loved him, but the audiences loved him more. Drama, action, westerns, epics, comedies, horror - he did them all. Good guys, bad guys, fathers, sons, priests and playboys - he played them all. His romances became the stuff of legend, the most memorable being his courting of young Tina Turner. Their interracial relationship became the talk of the town and played as important a part in ending segregation as did Rosa Parks refusal to give up her seat on the bus. Even though the relationship eventually ended, Turner always referred to him after that as "the great love of my life".His second accident - this one fatal - occurred in 1967. His directoral debut, the movie was about an aging race car driver who is killed in the race that would have won him his first championship. Poignant and touching, with gripping race squences, the movie won Dean an unprecendented posthumous double Oscar - for best director and best actor. He won a five minute standing ovation at the ceremony. The scene of his crash was used in the movie, as was the actual footage of the desperate attempts to save his life. The tears were real.




Kurt Cobain
Everybody always predicted that Cobain was just crazy enough to one day take a gun to his head. Nobody would have ever, in a million years, thought he would end up as the quintessential suburban dad, complete with the minivan and white picket fence.It was on Oprah, in 2004, a full decade after he had left the music scene once and for all that he revealed how close the predictions came to coming true. He broke down - as everybody but Tom Cruise does on Oprah - and admitted that he had gone so far as to write out his suicide note and point a shotgun at his chin."I hadn't felt the excitement of listening to as well as creating music, along with really writing for too many years," he said, sobbing like a new-born babe."I was so high on heroin and valium that I had no idea what was going on around me. I just needed to escape. "And then I pulled the trigger. And nothing happened. I pulled the trigger over and over and nothing happened. So, I just went to sleep hoping I would never wake up again."I woke up the next day and found that the only reason my brains were not all over my wall was because I had forgotten to load the gun. It was then that I decided that it was either my music or my life," he said.That same day, Cobain held a press conference to announce his immediate retirement from music. He sold everything he had, bought a mid-sized house in a leafy Atlanta suburb and all but disappeared from the public eye.Rolling Stone called it "music's greatest loss since Lennon was killed". Time magazine put him on the front cover. CNN had an hour-long special report on him and his work with Nirvana. Everbody mourned his exit as leaving the industry so much the poorer, but Cobain himself has no regrets.As he told Oprah - "I'd rather be a live, ordinary man anytime over being a dead legend."

The Death of Patriotism, part deux.

Ground rules have to be established. The rule is simple - NO NAMES. Not yours, not mine. Call it fear or call it caution. I like the freedom the anonymity (or the illusion of it) gives me and you. I know who you are, you know who I am. The world doesn't need to.

If I think up any more rules, I'll make sure to put them up. Gee, I like being king of my own little cyber world.... I could get used to this. :)

The Death of Patriotism

When I was a schoolboy, my friends and I would sometimes talk about what we would do if war were to ever break out. In our youthful naiveté, we all agreed that if the worst were to happen, we would fight, and be willing to die, for our country.A decade has passed and more has happened than just the addition of a receding hairline, a few wrinkles and some extra pounds. Somewhere during that decade, my love, loyalty and patriotism died. It wasn’t a natural death. Rather it was a slow, agonizing death that came from brutal, systemic torture inflicted by the very people who were supposed to guide and care for me – my leaders.With time and maturity, has come the realization that I live in a racist state. Worse, I live in an unashamedly racist state. A broad, sweeping and unfair statement perhaps? Well, consider the reasons behind my assertion.Recently, I read for the umpteenth time how the government is aiming to increase the Bumiputra influence in the political and economic sectors. This despite the fact that we already have a Bumiputra Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister. This despite the fact that most of our Cabinet consists of Bumiputra representatives. This despite the fact that most government departments heads and staff are Bumiputras. This despite the fact that most government-linked companies have Bumiputras at their head. This despite the fact that every university vice-chancellor is Bumiputra. I could go on and on, but you get the picture I’m sure.The amazing fact is that nobody seems to be the least bit bashful about this in-your-face racism. Terms like Malay superiority and Ketuanan Melayu keep getting bandied about by all and sundry. What are these people trying to say? That the non-Malay’s sat on their arses and waited for handouts? That the non-Malays were handed the keys to the kingdom of heaven on a silver platter? That we didn’t earn our right to live here?Where would Malaysia be without the Chinese tin miners? Where would Malaysia be without the Indian rubber-tappers? Where would Malaysia be without old Ah Seng the merchant? Or Thangamma, who broke her back laying tar for roads? Or for that matter, where would Malaysia be without the educated Malayalee and Ceylonese civil servants who served the government in the early days of our nation’s youth?At the same time, where would Malaysia be without the Bumiputra who planted our rice and caught our fish? Or the many Bumiputra soldiers who fought and died for us?The fact is that we are all equal partners in this, share and share alike. Nobody deserves more and nobody deserves less. We have all contributed to our nation’s growth and we are all responsible for its future.Yet, we have come to a point where the matter is not up for discussion. The non-Bumi is a second-class citizen. Period. The Chinese businessman knows he will never have as strong a chance as a Malay does when it comes to getting a contract or a tender. The Indian academic knows that he will never attain the top post at his university simply because of his race.We pay more for our houses, we pay more for our cars. We get fewer rights, fewer perks and fewer loans. We don’t have trust funds. We don’t have anything, in a nutshell.Nobody is allowed to question this arrangement. Nobody is allowed to criticize it. Nobody is allowed to debate it. We get slapped in the face with the “fact” that our forefathers signed “the social contract” agreeing to the Bumiputras’ special rights and privileges.What if I disagree with the contract my forefathers went into? Don’t I get a fucking say in the matter? Am I supposed to be bound to this “social contract” ad infinitum? I’m supposed to pay for the sins of my fathers? My sons too? How about their sons and grandsons?This is the only place I have heard of where the vast majority enjoys extra privileges at the expense of the minority. Make no mistake, this is not a fair and a just fight for equality. This is a fight for EXTRA and ADDITIONAL benefits, something which is both unfair, unjust and inhumane. That’s right. INHUMANE. After all, what is humane about a good student being told that her scholarship award is going to a less deserving candidate simply because the quota has been filled? What’s humane about a hardworking civil servant being passed up for promotion time and again because he is not a Bumiputra?The worst part is that this system doesn’t not even have the effect its architects wanted it to have. They claimed they wanted to elevate the Bumiputra to the level of the other races. Yet, when the original 1991 deadline came and went, the Bumiputra had still not got their “fair” slice of the economic kuih lapis. Fast forward 17 years later and it seems that they are still no closer, which means there is still no end in sight to the NEP. I sometimes wonder whether the NEP has in fact weakened its beneficiaries instead of strengthening them.
In the meantime, the underprivileged non-Bumi is forced to become stronger, wilier and more adaptable to survive in this rotten system. The non-Bumi has to learn every dirty trick in the book in order to survive. Worst of all, the non-Bumi ends up filling his belly and nursing a deep grudge, a deep hatred against the leaders and the country that has forced him to slog for every crumb of bread he puts in his mouth.Whatever I have said in this posting could very well be seditious, going by the fluid definition of sedition this nation seems to have. I neither know nor care. I find it hard to pledge love or allegiance to a country that places so little a value on my life and my being.If there ever comes a time when I will no longer be regarded as a lesser man than the Princes of the Earth and if there comes a time when I will be judged by the content of my character and not the colour of my skin, I might change my mind.Hell, if that happens I might actually be willing to fight and die for this godforsaken country!

The Royal Bitch

My latest resolution is to not bitch anymore. Or rather, to no longer bitch about people who piss me off. How long this noble resolution is going to remain afloat, I really can't say, especially considering my lengthy history of failed resolutions and lengthier list of failed attempts at reviving failed resolutions.
Whether it is about the twat in the office whose been my nemesis since day one, the kid who made a careless comment that cut me really deep, the friend who irritated me deliberately and maliciously knowing that he was annoying me or the mother who forgot my birthday, I have resolved to not bitch about it.
I shall attempt to exude only good vibrations and earn good karma by being saintly and benign, turning the other cheek, doing unto others as I would want others to do unto me and all that jazz. You get the general idea la.
After all, when even my nearest and dearest start calling me The Royal Bitch, then I know that I've been ranting and raving way too often.
And so, I have resolved as of this moment to, whenever I feel the urge to bitch, merely satisfy myself with a martyred look, a face turned up to the heavens and the sorrowful voice saying, "God Bless Them."