the2ndrule Issue 40
the2ndrule
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June 2003 email edition
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web edition: http://the2ndrule.com
Contents
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0. Edit
1. A Tribute to the Reader [Alfian Bin Sa'at]
2. Fairy Tale [Ng Shing Yi]
3. Instant Cafe Radio Episode 17 [Koh Beng Liang]
4. Stikfas on wheels [Jenny Chan]
5. Stikfas goes finds his true self [Deborah Lee]
6. Vincent [Chelsea Khoo]
7. Wild Inu! [David Low]
8. Lexicon [Nicholas Liu]
9. How, Now? [Sherlyn Xie]
Edit
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the boy and the girl were in love or so the boy thought yet the bOY WAS trapped INSIDE his own mind he wanted to REACH BEYOnd hiS OWN CONSciousness his own lonelINESS BUT THE mIND THE HEART the soul of the girl WERE UNFATHOMABLE TO HIM AND So he reasoned if tHEY LOST THEIR VIRGINITIES TOGETHer they would achieVE A HIGHER A DEEPER AN EVERLasting union but he is CURSED TO EXIST CURSED WIth skeptical doubt is he a BRAIN IN A VAT IS HE dreaming is she dreaming are tHEY IN THE SAME Dream we give up control over our liVES TOO EASILy we let masks be put on our faces we lET WALLS surround us we think we are safe in our casTLE And the evil cannot cross the moat nobody is perFect even machines fail yet we are getting better all the time at expecting perfection whatever happened to trust and love?
We're always looking for new work to publish. If you've got any writing, graphics, music, animation or video you'd like to get featured in the2ndrule, do get in touch with us. 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
Contributors : Ng Shing Yi, Jenny Chan, Deborah Lee, Chelsea Khoo, David Low, Nicholas Liu, Sherlyn Xie
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A Tribute to the Reader
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(for Rizal)
To the Reader, all men are open books. Women, understandably, are only half open, but for the most part, depending on light penetrability and the angle in which they are held, still legible.
The Reader begins by examining hairstyle - this tells him whether the text of what he is reading is written in cursive or script. Bald people are written in shorthand. This graphological information, however, is sometimes useful, and most often not.
Foreheads are read like the spines of books - for the title, but more importantly, for the tell-tale signs of wear. Logically, the greater the number of wrinkles, the thicker the book. On some people this stigmata is not indicative of the girth of the book, but how many hands it has passed through; in other words, how much they have suffered.
The Reader does not have the gift of prophecy; he merely reads people - their endings and the future plot of their lives are beyond the scope of his powers. But there are those people who happen to be read with great predictability. Much like monthly magazines which rotate unvarying articles, only by different writers and in different arrangements of words: the cyclical worlds of fashion and politics, the generic deja vus of horoscopes and advice columns, the carousels of gossip and stock markets.
Over time, the Reader finds himself engaging in the habits of a librarian. He classifies. Executives look like self-help books. Students appear as textbooks, but most as vandalised textbooks whose pencilled graffiti reveal more than the printed text. Housewives are cookbooks, letters from overseas children, and religious books, or rather, underlined passages from religious pamphlets. Factory workers - the Communist Manifesto, but the censored version, since the Reader after all lives in Singapore. Secretaries are romance novels, whose contents are more florid and more preposterous in inverse proportion to the monotony of their dictated notes. The pervert has dog ears, and the criminal those of a wolf's.
There is no refuge to be taken in grooming - stockings, ties, bangles and hairclips are unable to throw shadows onto the exposed words of open books, or rather, distract the Reader's eyes with their glittering. The Reader penetrates through such deceptions. He reads such people as copy-written text for advertising, which traffic in the stereotypes of Success, and Wealth, and Youth.
There are times when the Reader encounters difficulty reading people. This is the equivalent of one stumbling onto foreign words in a book. How do you read someone with a scar at the back of her ear, with eleven raffia strips tied around his wrist, as if they once held the keys to eleven birdcages, who sings lines from a Cantonese opera (memorised from a transistor radio) in a crowded train, who reads an upside-down newspaper in a bus (even if it turns out he was only reading the solutions to a crossword puzzle)? At times like these, the Reader mutters to himself, 'There are many things in this world that are untranslatable...', but not with despair, but humility.
The question that has often been asked is, 'Is it possible then for us to read the Reader?' Those who have met the Reader can testify that there is a striking way in which he dresses, with his corduroy pants, and red shoes, and T-shirts with arcane slogans and images. He keeps his hair long, sometimes let free in the imitation of some animist living on one of the unnamed islands of the archipelago, sometimes tied at the back like one of those masterless and unemployed samurai known as the ronin. He also keeps a moustache, and wears a pair of sunglasses once belonging to his friend's mother - even at night. His gait is sly; a mirage on two legs. Of the various names that the Reader has collected, we shall mention only two extremes, 'pseudo-intellectual' and 'urban shaman'. And perhaps another one, which cannot decide on which extreme it wants to be on: 'the Reader'.
The answer: yes, it is possible to read the Reader. As a matter of fact, he seduces responses from even the most indifferent around him. He receives curious glances and disapproving stares; distances widen, faces are averted. And this is the Reader's secret to reading other people. In those moments, the books around him find their spines suddenly bent, their pages offered for more intense scrutiny. For the Reader knows that delivering judgement does not mean that one gains invulnerability - on the contrary, we betray ourselves at that very moment, and reveal the deepest seams of our insecurities.
- Alfian Bin Sa'at
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http://www.pixelmunky.com
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Fairy Tale
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I will start where it all begins,
With a breaking sun and trace of day,
A searchlight in a wintry kingdom.
White cold draws near; the bark of trees
Turns black with last night's sleet.
It cannot fall from foreign skies,
It loses its wings, its dove's head,
To the dance and foil of irony.
It is dazed as a bluff of snow,
An emptied blue-aired clarity.
It speaks in a wordless aria,
Or keeps its peace in fiction's cot.
It defends itself with hapless tears,
As weak and true as a brutal fall.
It is dead as reddening leaves.
It watches at the frontier of chance
The hope it had castled, a child of nowhere,
No immortal home to rest its head.
It watches your different skies,
The dark of a star, the sleep of a tale.
(Nov 22, 2002,
Providence)
- Ng Shing Yi
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'I was off my face at a party on ecstasy and mushrooms and I spent ages staring at this painting, mesmerised by it. Then Bono comes up and asks me what am I doing. I tell him, "This painting is fucking incredible". And he goes, "Robbie, that's the window".'
- Installation art fan Robbie Williams, from Jack Magazine, May 2003
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Instant Cafe Radio Episode 17
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Happier than a masturbating bear!
http://the2ndrule.com/issues/issue40/instantcafe.html
Playlist:
National Anthem - Canada
(thermometer beeps)
Tosca - Boss On The Boat
KC and the Sunshine Band - Boogie Shoes
Ursula 1000 - Mambo 1000
Powerpuff Girls - Love makes the world go round
(Karateka sounds)
Will Smith - Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
Ghost World Soundtrack - Miranda Lionel Belasco
Spike Jones - The Charleston
Bjork - Isobel (Motorbass remix)
Cowboy Bebop Soundtrack - Tank!
City of God Soundtrack - Vida De Otario
City of God Soundtrack - Funk Da Virada
(Finding Nemo - Crush quips)
Mr Scruff - Fish
White Stripes - Seven Nation Army
Nuyorican Soul - Roy's Scat
TV Themes - Mind your language
Weezer - Good Life (acoustic live)
- Selection and mix by Koh Beng Liang
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How to make a book
http://phatpipe.benbrown.com/snm/03/how_to_make_a_book.mov
by http://sonewmedia.com
So New Media is an ultra-micro-mini publishing house whose goal is to seek out, publish and promote new authors. Each book is a labour of love, edited, printed, cut and bound in-house by the So New Media team, and available for purchase at affordable prices. Check out their website to buy a book.
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Stikfas on wheels
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http://the2ndrule.com/issues/issue40/stikfas_jenny.mov
Click to play the animation
For more info, contact jennycjt@hotmail.com
- Jenny Chan
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"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody."
- Bill Cosby
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Stikfas finds his true self
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http://the2ndrule.com/issues/issue40/stikfas_deborah.mov
Click to play the animation
For more info, check out http://www26.brinkster.com/debdb
- Deborah Lee
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Fancy a handbag?
Check out Takashi Murakami vs Louis Vuitton
http://www.kaikaikiki.co.jp/index-e.html
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Vincent
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http://the2ndrule.com/issues/issue40/vincent_chelsea.mov
Click to play the animation
For more info, contact lckhoo@pacific.net.sg
- Chelsea Khoo
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http://www.tetsoo.com
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Wild Inu!
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http://the2ndrule.com/issues/issue40/wildinu.swf
Click to play the animation
More Wild Inu! at
http://www33.brinkster.com/dancedog
For more info, check out http://www.deviantart.com
- David Low
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US finds evidence of WMD at last - buried in a field near Maryland
Julian Borger in Washington
Wednesday May 28, 2003
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,965319,00.html
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lexicon
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it's easier to be modern than not
with phone and fax and iseekyou.
everything exists, in short
hand. are you keyed in
logged on
tuned out? w(ho needs a soliloquoy
when a msg will d0, ya?)ords
stretch easier now, all the better
to bundle you in them (enigmas
are so last century).
how do you resonate
in PHP?
- Nicholas Liu
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Tic Tac Tone - In Transit :: a cappella music.
DBS Arts Centre - 21 June 2003 - 8pm
http://the2ndrule.com/issues/issue40/intransitflyer.jpg
Tickets at $16, order online at www.tictactone.com
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How, Now?
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In reply to:
"Beauty and Mortality -
Can death be beautiful? Does death make you cry?
Can beauty be mortal? Does beauty make you smile?
How long - do we wait - to be beautiful - or to die?"
(Editorial, May 2003)
How, Now?
The enlightened bourgeoisie speaks
But better war than foolish peace, we agree else we'll perish
"Are we not perishing now?"
the questioner smiles delicately, fishing for the smote cherry
He fumigates the aggrieved air with his cigarettes
one hundred unsettling thoughts fly in his head
-Women!
-poor deluded soul!
But he taps the ashes and appears to say nothing.
Band tuning up their instruments plays a discordant tone
the ivory notes clunking in deadened air-
a poor rendition of an irretrievable age
but the middle class substrate listens and nods
Arrived too early for disillusion and deception
for the candlelight and cocktails
nothing but the lined face on the other
and their eyes distilled in the empty glasses.
Waiting for her to inevitably ask about the wife
but she plays the absorbed dumb fool
fingering the salted rim of her second glass
so they heard the bartender hum his foolish thought
in the quiet.
Sundered apart in the need to see their reflections
fearing to be forgotten-the haunted diaspora
searches the dim room for mirrors.
disquietude hangs like a heavy eye in closeted room;
waiting for darkened clouds to storm the equator.
- Sherlyn Xie
(Early Apr '03)
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D'oh: Expressing frustration at the realisation that things have turned out badly
- Oxford English Dictionary, 2001
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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
A Tribute to the Reader (c) 2003 Alfian Bin Sa'at
Fairy Tale (c) 2003 Ng Shing Yi
Stikfas on wheels (c) 2003 Jenny Chan
Stikfas goes finds his true self (c) 2003 Deborah Lee
Vincent (c) 2003 Chelsea Khoo
Wild Inu! (c) 2003 David Low
Lexicon (c) 2003 Nicholas Liu
How, Now? (c) 2003 Sherlyn Xie
