the2ndrule Issue 20
The 2ndRule
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Sep 2001 email edition
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web edition: http://the2ndrule.com
Contents
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0. Editorial
1. Skateboarding [Koh Beng Liang]
2. Coffee Cafe [edlyn]
3. pulau ubin [Judith H]
4. No sign before [Alvin Pang]
5. Leah Remembers Stars and Mandrakes [Teng Qian Xi]
6. Playing Shostakovich [Ng Shing Yi]
7. the duality of the japanese meal [Joanne Leow]
Editorial
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There are those among us who don't feel at all affected by the recent tragedy, but for those who do, it is important not to get trapped within the competing biases in the non-stop news loops and the viral email rants, and to be able to carry on with life.
Even the normally aloof David Letterman had to devote 8 minutes to hear himself talk so that he could continue to do his show. So give yourself that luxury. Find a quiet place. Mull. Then decide if there's anything constructive you might do. Something symbolic, like donating blood. Or money. Then get on with your life. For what terror does is it stops you like a head lit deer, and if you don't move, they win.
*
Some of our regular contributors to the2ndrule have recently won awards:
Teng Qian Xi and Judith H were 2 of the 15 overall winners of this year's Simon Elvin Young Poet of the Year Awards, organised by the Poetry Society of UK.
Alfian bin Sa'at and brandon lee have won the first and second prizes in
the English poetry section of the NAC-SPH Golden Point Awards 2001.
Congratulations! You read them here first in the2ndrule.
*
We have shifted our URL to http://the2ndrule.com because it's easier to remember. Our corresponding new email is editor@the2ndrule.com , though you can continue with the old URL and address indefinitely.
visit our new look website: http://the2ndrule.com
send comments, suggestions, contributions to: editor@the2ndrule.com
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2ndRule team : Koh Beng Liang, Shannon Low, Benety Goh, Russell Chan, Alfian Bin Sa'at, Ong Ee-ing, Judith H
Contributors : edlyn, Alvin Pang, Teng Qian Xi, Ng Shing Yi Joanne Leow
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Skateboarding
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We filmed this movie on a lazy afternoon, mostly quiet except for celebratory fighter jets noisy in the sky. Instead of showing professionals nailing every single trick on some concrete staircase to a punk rock soundtrack, we want to show that not everyone takes it as a sport. Shannon uses a longboard, and the motion is more like surfing, more laid back, more like a stroll in the park. Yet the excitement is there, maybe more.
watch it:
http://members.tripodasia.com.sg/bengliang/sb_small.mov
- Koh Beng Liang
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Money laundromat.
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Coffee Cafe
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Excuse me, is this seat taken?
*
So we slouch fashionably
in a fashionable cafe alfresco,
dangling plastic coffee cups
in late afternoon, where renoir light floods
the scene; almost soft and beautiful.
Where your watch hangs, white scars glance off.
Instant affinity: I know these marks.
A sign posted on door: do not enter.
Rather apt. This is no love story, after all.
Idle talk bright aching smiles, indeed
the heart is a sterile site.
Thread lightly, tread lightly.
Still renoir still caravaggio still rembrandt
paint light, warm and undulating,
stretching canvas with such soft blazing;
and we are the portrait sitters talking casual
of our suicides as an everyday occurrence,
laughing light, light at you and me.
Such the intimacy of strangers,
given wings
to arrest Icarus --
here, sir, take my wings before you fall.
- edlyn
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"I want to make it clear to the American people that this administration will not talk about any plans we may or may not have. We will not jeopardize in any way, shape or form, anybody who wears the uniform of the United States."
- George W. Bush
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pulau ubin
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it cannot be denied
that the fields and forests
have their muds --
after all, morning dew
does mix with earth,
and they are fields of rain.
and the hens and cockerels,
they have to defecate somewhere.
it is also true that
such simple happiness here
is often found in thatched houses
(that burn easily),
down algae-choked wells,
and could well be boxed up and kept
in cement villages, complete with running water
besides, the sands you step on
are blackened with industrial oil and ugly mangrove,
the shards of glass make them dangerous,
they chip wounds away,
meld blood and sand too close
imported sand would do better,
it is silken, white,
the way this sand could never be
yes, all this is true. besides,
these sampans are small, and
the salt sea stings its passengers
too freely...
Today, Pulau Ubin will be given a "facelift".
They will mould her into something
prettier, remove the mud from her sand
Today, I return to the mainland,
leaving two small mounds of sand
on the concrete pavement
- Judith H
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"All you motherfuckers are gonna pay, You are the ones who are the ball-lickers. We're gonna fuck your mothers while you watch and cry like little bitches. Once we get to Hollywood and find those Miramax fucks who are making that movie, ...
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No sign before
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THERE was nothing in her behaviour in school that pointed to the 10-year-old girl wanting to kill herself. In the weeks before the school holidays, she was her usual cheerful self. The top pupil and school prefect ran errands for teachers and helped her classmates in their school work. 'Does this look like a girl who harboured thoughts of suicide?' asked her principal.
("No sign before girl's suicide" Straits Times 23 Aug 2001)
The truth, always, a little less than art:
Not the troubled cell of some precocious
martyr, secrets carved on a desk's pained skin;
sheets bleeding floor-ward, dissembled linen;
as morning sliced through in twenty places,
scattering motes in the room's broken heart.
Instead: some matching confection of pastel,
Hello Kitty arranged on shelves painted eggshell-
white, a vase of pink gerberias by the mirror.
The bed, most likely, was well-made, seat
tucked neatly beneath table, books piled on
books in unperturbable mounds. Our error
is confounding loss. As if the language of defeat
were an alien tongue. Or needs translation.
- Alvin Pang
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"...we're gonna make 'em eat our shit, then shit out our shit, then eat their shit which is made up of our shit that we made 'em eat. Then you're all fucking next.
Love,
Jay and Silent Bob" (moviepoopshoot.com)
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Leah Remembers Stars and Mandrakes
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"Go and catch a falling star;
Get with child a mandrake root"
- Song (Go and catch a falling star), John Donne
He spends his days working in the fields,
sweating in the wheat's pale gold.
When I go to the well
or call the children from their play,
I see his back dipping and falling
in a steady unstoppable rhythm.
But my eyesight is bad;
now, I don't miss what I had
never wanted. When he first came
I was spinning futures from the stars,
and barely noticed the new kid, son of the aunt
who married some foreigner. My sister
is the one with time to smile at visitors.
His eyes slipped over me like oil from water
to settle on her face, covering flesh with gold
for seven years. But it was me they sold
in those years. It was me they veiled,
pushed against him, my fists clutching
only darkness. His blind hands
roamed my flat silent body,
happy until morning
unmasked my face. His I couldn't see;
the records make it very clear:
*he loved Rachel more than Leah*.
He did his duty during the years
of forever. Most nights I spent alone
with the children. Sometimes
I lay outside, fractured vision
melting the known stars
flickering on other eyes, other places.
I wanted them to flare my distress
signals, a silver SOS
to lives beyond one line on one page:
*Leahs eyes were weak
but Rachel was beautiful and lovely*
and traded two mandrakes for a night of love.
On the day she pointed out
their usual tree. I waited
curled against the amber evening chill.
He gave no greeting and no smile; still
I said, *You must come into me;
for I have hired you for my son's mandrakes*,
the words falling from my mouth
as if into oil - extinguished, ineffectual.
Before he woke I slipped beneath his arm,
stumbling across a plain of stones,
quartz stars dying in the sun.
One more artless morning had begun.
- Teng Qian Xi
(* italics)
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"I think Singapore has to unclench and get a little fibre in its diet."
- Colin Goh, talkingcock.com
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Playing Shostakovich
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I do not read music.
At 7:45 discourse on postmodernism
reached a heightened pitch, resulting in your fevered voice
and my tepid intellectual arrogance.
(a thesis I had written last semester
vested in me an absolute authority
on transitional insecurities and cinematic existentialism,
while you screamed "Will Smith was the lead in Six Degrees of Separation?")
Yet we were relaxing in knowable concerns
when agnostics both, we touched on deconstructionist linguistics
and ivory-tower anthropology in the UN,
which left no place for God between frontline and backseat.
I do not speak music,
but when you finally quiet down enough to fall asleep, oracles sigh
in your smile. This is at 4 or 5, where
our cessation of words collapses an affirmation
and I no longer know why we bother, at all.
At 8:01 the first violins choose assonance
and all shuttered minds or is it souls are stretched over adulating nails
till the last gasp of the trumpet, where dimensions
implode, and all ground is lost.
More alone than ever, 10:30 on Potsdam Platz,
I fended, loved you.
- Ng Shing Yi
(the poem in its original formatting is on the website at http://...)
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"Can you imagine people going out and buying a DVD when tragedies are occurring everywhere?"
- Kurt Barnard, publisher of "Barnard's Retail Trend Report"
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the duality of the japanese meal
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My wife was a runner
he says,
sizing me up for the chase
She's about your height
and your weight
(on me
would feel the same)
We cook
often
One cook,
the other slave
There cannot be two cooks
in one kitchen
Well said
is it up to me
to disrupt the calm
wedded bliss?
10,000 books
he says
Would you catalogue
them?
I've been looking for
someone.
- Joanne Leow
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donate: www.helping.org
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Coffee Cafe (c) 2001 edlyn
pulau ubin (c) 2001 Judith H
No sign before (c) 2001 Alvin Pang
Leah Remembers Stars and Mandrakes (c) 2001 Teng Qian Xi
Playing Shostakovich (c) 2001 Ng Shing Yi
the duality of the japanese meal (c) 2001 Joanne Leow
