the2ndrule Issue 30
the2ndrule
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Jul 2002 email edition
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web edition: http://the2ndrule.com
Contents
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0. Edit
1. Instant Cafe Radio Episode 8 [Koh Beng Liang]
2. Morningstar [Shannon Low]
3. Grace [Ng Shing Yi]
4. Special Passengers [Teng Qian Xi]
5. Mother and child [Ong Sien Hong]
6. Construct - Excerpts [Brandon Lee]
7. Is that your tongue in my cheek? - Pornography and Art [Jason Tong and Kim Teo]
8. Graffiti art [Shannon Low]
Edit
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Art. That's what this is about. Alternative, irregular, subversive, art.
Art that's been accused of many things: obscenity, obscurity, inciting revolution.
If only it were so easy.
Art is more than the sum of past artistic work. More than painting, sculpture, photography, literature, music. Art is where we find the future. Just one of many dreams.
Enjoy the ride, but don't just sit back. Create yourself.
Please send your comments, suggestions and contributions to:
editor@the2ndrule.com
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2ndrule team : Koh Beng Liang, Shannon Low, Benety Goh, Russell Chan, Alfian Bin Sa'at, Jason Tong, Teng Qian Xi, Judith H
Contributors : Brandon Lee, Ong Sien Hong, Ng Shing Yi
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Instant Cafe Radio Episode 8
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Just add water
http://the2ndrule.com/issues/issue30/instantcafe.html
Palespakindiasraeli National Anthem
Coco Lee vs. Han Jin - So Crazy
Jose Padilla - Blues Del Bar
Coisa Nossa feat. Salome De Bahia - Procurando O Cam
Stefano Torossi - Running Fast
Mondo Grosso - Now you know better (Nitin Sawhney remix)
Malik - Deep Throat
Frasier - Tunnelling microscope
Mavis Fan - I Want We Be Together
Madonna - Borderline
New Order - Regret (Fire Island mix)
Cowboy Bebop Soundtrack - Cat Blues (Mr Scruff remix)
Merrilee Rush and The Turnabouts - Angel of the morning
- Selection and mix by Koh Beng Liang
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The Beatles were a boy band.
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Morningstar
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"Like fire licking air."
http://the2ndrule.com/issues/issue30/morningstar.html
- Photo and text by Shannon Low
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http://2advanced.com
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Grace
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The realization of perfect love is not a fruit of nature but of grace - that is to say, the fruit of an intersubjective accord imposing its harmony on the torn and riven nature which supports it.
Jacques Lacan was a psychiatrist by training. He lauded his mentor Freud for the key to our unconscious, and then overturned and humiliated the latter.
Question: "But how would our endless subjectivities ever intersect? Would we ever?"
D.K. said, I want to show you this. It's Lacan.
Consider the sentence. It is read linearly, but an understanding of it is conceived only in retrospect, synchronically. Its meaning is borne aloft the spaces between its words; generated in their interrelations; contained within the enclosure of its boundaries. Floating like a point.
But its boundaries, like all frontiers, are akin to skin. Porous; sensual; epidermal. It rubs against our minds, into the open carries like rippling water. Self-contained, yet colluding with the greatest of Western intertextuality: the Bible, science, music, religion. Fruit of nature: the apple, eaten of Adam for love of Eve. Torn and riven: a striving of Darwinist ecology. Harmony: of the spheres, and of the diachronic and synchronic axes moving across the musical bar.
I know nothing, except this: when grace dances, I dance.
Twisting, elusive: grace, and its elliptical twine through the realization of the sentence.
Question during expectant pause: "I'm sorry, was I supposed to say something?"
D.K. said, Oh no. I was just checking the pulse.
Question, in pursuit: "For pulse?"
D.K. said lightly, My grandparents were in concentration camps during the Boer War.
D.K. sat across my questions, a still, lean man with craven hunger in his face and a tendency towards flight. Greying stubble investigates the brown, cadaverous terrain of his jaw. His eyes are inalienably blue. His smile is a shock of white, beauty and terrible irony conjoined, inconceivable, annihilating. It is terribly ironic. Nothing here is tame, or honest.
D.K. said, I hope you understood. I hope we reached an intersubjective accord.
But do you read poetry? Do you read Kenneth Koch?
One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.
The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.
The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.
As the adjective is lost in the sentence,
I am lost in your eyes, ears, nose, and throat -
You have enchanted me with a single kiss
Which can never be undone
Until the destruction of language.
Permanently, to temporal ebb: deny and affirm. Question is: ...Do you? Would ever?
(May 10, 2002, Oxford)
- Ng Shing Yi
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the ordeal of wakefulness
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Special Passengers
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(transit room, Bangkok Airport)
(Spanish history notes) *Don Carlos, Philip II's son by 1st wife Maria of
Portugal (died in childbirth)
- huge pumpkin-like head, as if body could not support
- wandered Madrid thinking of Ana of Austria (unseen bride of his dreams)
- PII could never bring himself to use word "insane" when speaking of son*
The aeroplanes are taking off with placid grace;
orange bulbs stud the heavy wings like fruit.
I watch from the grey room
- *for special passengers*, the flight attendant tells me brightly -
as I revise my notes, too young to travel
as an adult, alone. The deaf Germanic couple
curled in purple cubes of sofa like golden cats
wake and their hands stir, white birds
sketching soundless messages (of love).
(BBC report on Angola) *Antonio's wife Andreza raises their family of five
in a ticket office - they consider themselves lucky to have escaped
intact from the war in the countryside...
Antonio lost both his legs to a landmine just after he arrived in what he
thought
was the safety of Luena.*
In the kingdom of the mine the two-legged man is king.
A wheelchair in one corner of the room holds
an Asian paraplegic; I do not look
when his twig-thin hands start pounding
nor when he froze and stared at the ceiling.
His toddler's whining irritates me
but I help his bespectacled plump wife move him
to a more comfortable couch. ("You are from Hong Kong?"
"From Singapore," I reply. "You are from Japan?"
"From Korea," they reply.) His child prances around,
red (non-toxic) lights in her shoes blinking
to the red of the striped socks coating her father's legs,
When I lift them briskly they drag like lead pipes
and the Korean's smile gleams, helpless,
as the grey room watches orange lights
trace old lines in the arriving night.
- Teng Qian Xi
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Do not let the gifted kid grow content.
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Mother and child
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(Oil on canvas, 18" x 24")
Previously unexhibited
http://the2ndrule.com/issues/issue30/motherandchild.html
- Ong Sien Hong
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"They say that time changes things,
but you actually have to change them yourself."
- Andy Warhol
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Construct - Excerpts
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(central) or (part 10, introduction)
The day you go,
I will tell you that I will be alright.
That you will catch my eye in all light.
Every edge on every surface will be
Your light.
My memory will redefine and shape
Entire buildings, streets and spaces
To your temper
In ways such that
Architects will tremble.
Our history will render it a monster.
No place to live alone
Or nurse a broken heart.
Dogs will lose their way home
On our streets. Cats will fall from great
Heights.
But for every path that leads to a blank wall,
One will map to a garden.
Dark corners will exist to balance
The overworking of my celebration.
II.
(subway)
warm air rose from a vent streetside.
Sitting right down center for hours :
The trains, shafting down and up
Past the girl, were a silver calm.
In waiting, she had grown patient
So much so that everything ran
Towards what they had started running
From and found an end.
This change was not only within.
People looked at her
As if glances left lingering
Could be messengers.
So that one party could summon a voice
Or will an outpouring from the other.
Absolutely nothing underground,
Did somebody dig a way out of alcatraz
With a spoon to find a lost world?
With a sky overhead all motion and no concrete
With a sound all ocean and no rattle.
Stop moving, stop your climbing
One handhold to another,
And these land anchors.
This New Age was truly a prison for the
Freedom it stole. Behind clean walls
Were gray bricks, cobwebs and steel bars.
One could only come free in dreams
With the eyes of ancestral memory.
She then assumed the things unseen.
There was a rat in the darkness
And loose change on the tracks
Ghosts in the halls.
And so above, grass grew and she was a tree
With old roots and new fruit.
Below, a damp leaf lay in her lap,
Eve of the jungle.
IX.
(office)
Last look.
Your picture on my work desk.
Is this then the culmination of our years?
There isn't much between this and your ring on my finger,
Like your clothes on my floor.
Or, perhaps, you out of my reach.
How so much could go lost so fast,
Is almost as hard to grasp as how
You left, ran free - and stayed with me.
I know the face staring into mine as well as I know the feel
Of its hands. Every curve and gentle blemish is mine.
Freckles from the sun. Hair-
From the tender black roots-
Great waterfall stretched fathoms beneath,
To their old ends.
The view from my window
Spots with a coming shower.
At the edges of my feet, bright blossoms
Scatter streetside, until out of sight.
X.
Homecoming.
Walking on these streets again,
I find the spot where you had once stopped
And gone the other way.
Then, I had only thought to follow you.
Today, you elude me in this city
Informed by divine missive.
A stranger to new coats of paint
And changed storefronts.
The time has carried disastrously. This
Is no more my home than I am your woman.
Yet I have felt the mnemonics of smell
Bridge continents, warp time.
Even as I call myself by another name,
Your misplaced scent in some doorway
Awaits me.
- Brandon Lee
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This used to be empty.
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Is that your tongue in my cheek? - Pornography and Art
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Tofu love.
http://the2ndrule.com/issues/issue30/tongueincheek.html
- Photos by Jason Tong, choreography by Kim Teo
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http://www.eboy.com
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Graffiti art
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Gerard is a graffiti artist. This is what he does.
http://the2ndrule.com/issues/issue30/graffitiarty.html
- Photos by Shannon Low
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Never forget where you've come here from
Never pretend that it's all real
Someday soon this will be someone else's dream
- Take That, "Never Forget"
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* 2ndrule t-shirts *
Non-uniform of the guerilla army. Now available at S$20 each.
Sizes: Girls (28,30), Boys (40,42)
http://the2ndrule.com/issues/issue24/2rtshirt.html
Please send your orders to editor@the2ndrule.com
Grace (c) 2002 Ng Shing Yi
Special Passengers (c) 2002 Teng Qian Xi
Mother and child (c) 2002 Ong Sien Hong
Construct - Excerpts (c) 2002 Brandon Lee
Is that your tongue in my cheek? - Pornography and Art (c) 2002 Jason Tong and Kim Teo
