the2ndrule Issue 05
The 2ndRule
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May 2000 email edition
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Web edition: http://here.is/the2ndrule
Contents
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0. Editorial
1. Left Turn at Alberquque [Alvin Pang]
2. The Misadventures of Semiotic Girl [Alfian Bin Sa'at]
3. Jack, Clara and the Underworld [Shannon Low]
4. Untitled [Joy]
5. Signifiers to the Poem [Cyril Wong]
6. Selection Rouge [Brandon Lee]
7. Artifice Beauty Inseminated [Dustin]
8. Exercise in China [Janel Hanmer]
Editorial
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"More of the same routine disguised as leisure." That's the most worrying sentence we read this month. What troubles us more are the flashes of identification. The 2ndRule is starting to feel like an easy-chair.
impulse :
Five months on from the time two restless young guys were sitting at a coffeshop after watching "Fight Club" and thinking, "We've gotta do something. We can't start a fight club. What else can we do?" And that was it.
friction :
A couple of weeks ago, we asked ourselves (and some other people), "Five months on. Is it time to wrap it up? Find a new edge? A new project?" We got all sorts of answers. "It's losing its edge, losing focus." "Let it grow naturally." And then one. "Do what you wanna do."
momentum :
We decided, "Push it as far as it'll go. If it ain't broke, make it better. This ain't the civil service." We're toying around with the website for the next couple of months, finding ways to stay on the edge, radicalise. The next time we find ourselves feeling comfortable, with the wind against our faces, we hope it's because we've fallen over the edge. Lean and hungry or fatted and bored? You choose.
Give us a hand, tell us what you think. We've been getting great submissions, keep them coming if you're insipired. And help us get this out to more people - forward us or email them. Thanks for all the support so far. Hope you come back for more.
email : the2ndrule@hotmail.com
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2ndRule team : Koh Beng Liang, Shannon Low, Benety Goh, Russell Chan, Alfian Bin Sa'at, Ong Ee-ing, Sim Pern Yiau
Contributors : Brandon Lee, Alvin Pang, Cyril Wong, Joy, Janel Hanmer, Dustin
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Left Turn at Alberquque
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(after Richard Hugo's 'Driving Montana')
The day is a woman who dumps you. Evening
slams in your face. Park too close to the road and you
risk keychain scratches all alongside
your new car. Lightyears from hope of any kind
your radio peters out in the tunnel, flying
dutchman, the latest Oasis track
stooped and hoarse like dwarfs whispering.
Whatever the next number,
you don't want to hear it. Your Honda stalls
and stalls again. Horns yell at you like irate wives.
Even static would be welcome at this point.
Morning arrives ahead of schedule. No
breakfast at seven. Management Meeting at ten, Premeeting at four.
Sign this, sign this, get someone to sign this twice -
The day already thought through, thorough
as a policy paper. Where did you stop along your life
and forget how to live? Was there a wrong turn?
A bad step? Did you die after all in your flat, the one
buried in the cliff face along with the other hundred white and
brown facades, the Ikea furniture you thought you loved
once? You remembered the ringing phone
the hard brown afterlife of graffiti staining the liftlandings.
You must have stayed a while, then drove on to wherever
you'd never be seen again.
Tomorrow will close again, the sky dark
as the mouth of a tired watchman, emergencyroom
cottonwool of clouds you press to your eyes. You are with the lost
people, without one fear of being found, in the dash
of traffic, soar of jetliner screeching, swirl,
merge and patter of hard rain draining
away into unremembered tunnels, you close your eyes
and swallow safety as the stripped antirust
skin of your Civic bursts and bursts and bursts
- Alvin Pang
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"Friends" actor Matthew Perry drives Porsche into porch. May 21, 2000
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The Misadventures of Semiotic Girl
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Clara walks through the tunnel. She feels like she's in a movie where she's a part of an obligatory crowd scene showing urban pedestrians in a ceaseless state of flux. Fancy editing will give the swing of her legs a blurry whir, transient wings whoosh up from her shoulders, her face an indistinct fast-action halo. Clara pauses for a moment, jams her brakes, tells herself that she can arrest space, suspend time. Instead she feels something inside her moving stubbornly, in circles, a tourist stuck in a revolving door.
She stands in front of a billboard poster and adjusts her hair, her reflection trapped in a landscape of fluorescent roses. The poster whispers its admonishment. Wrist-slaps her narcissism. IT'S ABOUT YOU. ALWAYS.
Clara checks her handphone and wonders whether she's had any missed calls. Like an electronic pet the phone lights up at her caressing its buttons. If only it could wag its antenna too. What was his name again? Jack, that's right. Maybe she should have subscribed to caller-ID. She was drunk she supposed, to have approached him at PHUTURE, to have invited him over to her place because her parents were out of town. And to pass him her father's pyjamas, his beach towel, even a bottle of her own eau de toilette after he had finished showering in her bathroom (THE FRAGRANCE FOR A MAN OR A WOMAN--is that with a question mark?).
They spent two hours on a mattress she had brought out into the living room. She noticed that he had a tattoo on his upper arm in the design of a barcode, and she predicted how it would become popular quite soon, and then turn into a cliché overnight. She felt sad for him. Which was fatal for Clara during sessions like those, because suddenly she looked up and saw a boy (A BOY!), biting his string necklace, face frowning in concentration, occupied with his eager, urgent rhythm. When he saw her staring at him so intently like that he broke into a smile, and she saw his dog-tag pendant (another fad with a limited shelf-life?), gleaming, like a gift for her he had been hiding between his teeth. She was trembling. AFRAID? SURE, OF NOT LIVING.
With a suddenness worthy of the most formulaic plot twists in Hollywood history, he kissed her. Her eyes could have widened in surprise at its tenderness, his eyes could have shut as it neared her face with routine self-assuredness, and Clara knew then that she was in love. This was what sex was about, this healing, this repairing of all the invisible pillow-and-tears bruises on her face by a rain of kisses. PHILLIPS. LET'S MAKE THINGS BETTER. Amen.
Perfectly reasonable for her to give him a call. It is, after all, two days since they exchanged slips of paper bearing each other's numbers. MAKE YOURSELF HEARD, a poster urges her, but a few steps later she stumbles into another kind of advice, one which insists that he should make the first move, BECAUSE I'M WORTH IT. She walks on, her handphone held up clumsily in her hand like some portable lie detector of street advertisements, and she finally runs into the exhortation JUST DO IT. Two out of three. Clara digs her fingers into her handphone.
It was a girl who answered the call. Hello? went the voice. Hello? It was a sweet voice, a bit cloying perhaps, but sweet. This is not happening, thought Clara. She did not wander around in town, window-shopping, catching glimpses of her face in innumerable reflective surfaces, wondering if that was the face that he saw, that he too could have loved, for this. Why is this happening to her? The voice stabs her with one more hello before the line goes dead. Why? MAYBE SHE'S BORN WITH IT. MAYBE IT'S MAYBELLINE.
Clara climbs into a cab. Her eyes are tired, perhaps from a day of scanning into a crowd, hoping that she would suddenly spot his face the way she did a few nights ago. Where are you off to, she would ask, and he would say, nowhere, what about you? She would also reply the same way he did and then they would have set off into the sunset. Perhaps they would have asked each other the same question simultaneously, and then laughed in unison, two psychics giggling. Instead it is the cab driver who asks Clara where she is heading. Why can't she just say Home and have him understand, why must she spell out her address for this joke of a man driving a car enveloped by these omnipresent, oppressive roses? It was like riding in a hearse, complete with its own banner of condolence: BECAUSE WE LOVE YOU.
11 PM, and Clara's sister is watching television. Clara locks the door and bolts it because she is the last one home. WHAT'S NEW? BY PANASONIC. The dinner has been kept in the fridge. Her cat is already asleep. Nothing has changed.
In the bathroom, Clara has decided that she will shower with the lights off. A dim light streams in from her kitchen through the frosted door. Naked, in the dark, the one thing Clara needs right now is a God. Or a sign. She feels the warm water stream down her skin, erasing her. When did she first learn to lie to herself? Maybe it was the day she first learnt to read.
Clara digs her fingers into her scalp, smoothing out the impalpable foam. She hears her handphone ringing in the living room. Clara stares at the toiletry rack and a Johnsons Baby Shampoo bottle catches her eye. NO MORE TEARS. She freezes, her hands clasped at the back of her neck. She closes her eyes and waits, until she is absolutely certain that the ringing has stopped.
- Alfian Bin Sa'at
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Kannykka - a Nokia trademark and Finnish slang for mobile phone that passed into generic parlance and means "an extension of the hand."
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Jack, Clara and the Underworld
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Jack rides a hard house tune onto the trancefloor, where a girl he knows is waiting for him. A girl he met ten minutes ago, fawning on the edge of a barstool, mouthing the words of an "Underworld" track.
"SKYSCRAPER, I LOVE YOU"
He zooms into her lips, her tongue, the glace cherry in her mouth, as the beat becomes a buzz on the inside of his head. He can read her mind from the way she adjusts her skirt and locks his eyes.
"PORN DOG SNIFFIN' THE WIND, SNIFFIN' THE WIND FOR SOMETHING NEW
PORN DOG SNIFFIN' THE WIND FOR SOMETHING VIOLENT THEY COULD DO"
The bass guides his steps, as he steps towards her.
In a large white-walled apartment with matt silver light fittings, the lights brighten gradually, but to Jack, they're flashing. The walls alternate between white, black and darkness, and her short hair brushes against his face. He can feel her scent saying,
"WILL YOU BE MY BIG BAD THING? MY TOTALLY DISORIENTATOR"
"My parents are out of town," and she leads him into the living room.
There's a deep rhythmic pulse in his body as he kisses her dark and long. HE ZOOMS INTO HER LIPS, HER TONGUE, THE GLACE CHERRY
Sunday morning, Jack is on his way home, the scent of someone else's perfume on his skin, interlaced with flashes of music and scenes from the club the night before. Focus, pan. Focus, pan.
SHE'S SAT ON THE EDGE OF A BARSTOOL. ADJUSTING HER SKIRT
SHE'S SAT ON THE EDGE OF A BARSTOOL. ADJUSTING HER SKIRT
Two nights later, Jack is on a stonewalled bridge, leaning over water. The girl's face imprinted in his mind in white strobe light.
"WHY DON'T YOU CALL ME I FEEL LIKE FLYING INTO
WHY DON'T YOU CALL ME I FEEL LIKE FLYING INTO
WHY DON'T YOU CALL ME I FEEL LIKE FLYING INTO
WHY DON'T YOU CALL ME I FEEL LIKE FLYING INTO"
He presses "YES" on his mobile, waits for the tone and lets go of the phone. And watches the illuminated face sink away into the dark water.
- Shannon Low
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The city is alive with plots.
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Untitled
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My throat is cut, and
mud seeps in
I choke and reach
Outwards but never touch
those hands that reach for me -
the last dust
of light
catches bloodshot
Eyes.
Fear cracks its whip.
- Joy
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Free of form.
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Signifiers to the Poem
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1
It can never be written.
We hint with adverbs.
Apply adjectives like water
to a plant. Still,
it will never grow
for us. Hidden,
even allusions
can be false, misleading.
And it stays with its back
to you. Turning
when grief calls its name.
But it will only be
a glance, temporary.
2
Dont step into it:
a quagmire of nouns.
Unmarked mounds of earth.
Here lie your determiners.
And you sink in too, only
because you want to,
imagining you will find
it, beating and whole.
3
You arent in control.
But youll think otherwise.
Wielding language like a halberd,
your helmet gleaming like a poem.
Hearing voices, you enter a war
in your armour of images.
But the enemy is yourself,
flushed with symbolism, a sword
he will hold to the light,
catching the sun on his blade.
And just like you, he too
will win.
- Cyril Wong
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In the future, we won't just watch television. We'll experience it.
- Panasonic ad
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Selection Rouge
(a sub-$20 wine available at Cold Storages)
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Selection Rouge on a table top
"for all cheeses, pasta, steaks and chicken"
from "exquisite vineyards in the south of france"
where sunlight pleads the juices thicken
and alsatians lie by the fireplace fields.
Selection Rouge today half-price
stacked in crates by the cereals and rice
along aisles pushed by wrought iron carts
where lonely single men decide
and the checkout girls work day and night.
Selection Rouge! All freedom and independence!
from all the meaningless paths of reason!
and all framed small round faces smile
kitchen table god salvation.
- Brandon Lee
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Singer Kit Chan fasted for thirty hours to raise awareness for world hunger.
Check out www.worldvision.org.sg
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Artifice Beauty Inseminated
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Another day, another night.
Life passes more like a routine contravention of itself.
Life is no longer life.
Lifeless.
Devoted to ends that lack substance.
Pursuits that lead us to a satirical existence.
The fine line between existence and living is no longer blurred
It is obliterated beyond recognition.
Those who walk the line and those who question its purpose.
Every week, the exponents of the game complain of its rigors.
Every week, they claim to ditch their responsibilities and burdens.
To what do they turn to?
More artifice.
More of the same routine disguised as leisure.
Even nature is made up and intricate cosmetic pains are taken
to make sure our botanical efforts looks good.
We obsess so much over the control of our living environment
And it is that control that results in our total relinquishment of the spontaneity with which we should be LIVING with.
Not existing from day to day
Worrying about trivialities and petty judicious irritations that seem to plague us.
It's our nitpicking that creates the problem not the mere presence of it.
Another day, another night.
What we achieve is important, but does it need to be quantified?
Quantified by physical terms, monetary substantiality, fame or otherwise.
Rarely anymore do we judge our success or happiness by what we ourselves feel.
And wasn't that the point of living in the first place?
Another day, another night.
Piece of advice I received once.
Put yourself on your deathbed and see yourself regretting not doing something
Every time you feel restrained by fear.
I'd rather dare and be hurt
Than fear and never know.
And live happy
Rather than exist safe.
- Dustin
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Live life with Passion! Panda Brand Condoms.
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Exercise in China
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We circled the track four times
a week, spitting thoughts to the side
between our work on breathing.
We'd convince ourselves to walk
only to start running the same loop
over and over again; it builds
bodies, or character, or
something. I can make it, I can
make it, we can make it.
- Janel Hanmer
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You are here.
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Left Turn at Alberquque, (c) 2000 Alvin Pang
The Misadventures of Semiotic Girl, (c) 2000 Alfian Bin Sa'at
Untitled, (c) 2000 Joy
Signifiers to the Poem, (c) 2000 Cyril Wong
Selection Rouge, (c) 2000 Brandon Lee
Artifice Beauty Inseminated, (c) 2000 Dustin
Exercise in China, (c) 2000 Janel Hanmer
