For all the hype the first time never quite turns out as expected, not to say that it might not have been interesting nonetheless. Just different. I’ve been invited to blog here, to leave my textural traces that I assume shall be ephemeral, quickly dated and hopefully mildly interesting. It is a satisfying arrangement, like an inconsistent lover, I can come and go as I please, make my excuses whenever I go absent, and appear only when in possibly lucid form and in need some kind of extended twitter fix.
As a first entry, one does wonder what to start with, what would set the ground for subsequent texts. But the question arises can one really write fearlessly and freely in Singapore? A recent, fairly well attended by Singapore apathy standards, forum I sat in on curiously escaped mainstream media attention despite it having as its topic how cricket-inspired fashion is the new black... for men. Given the cold shoulder. Would that shortly be the case if I do in fact lay my thoughts out, having recently been privy to a new theory that one can in fact be ‘unconsciously subversive,’ as opposed to simply ‘having an opinion.’ Siege mentality apparently knows no OB markers, but we’ll save that for another post. In the meantime with tamed irreverence and genial irrelevance I’ll make do with oblique references, dodgy analogies and veiled provocations.
As some kind of zeigeisty stream of consciousness, the topic of the day is our obsession with the ‘filthy lucre’ that seems to be everywhere, epitomised by the integrated resorts becoming architectural reality and the opening of its consumer end on the island of our laser-eye national guard, given pretty much the whole outfit works on the one wallet-lightening principle. An even more recent forum I attended with the alliterative theme of home, heart, horizon (a little heart shaped hole in the word heart) confirmed that we’ve basically got sex (or the failure of our national breeding programme) and money on our mind. Foreign talent taking away jobs, buying up homes... money. What would make parliamentarians sit up over the lot of freelancers?... money. And in a recent privileged discussion on support for the arts, what makes the arts tick... money. Silencing tactic... ditto. All conversations seem to end up with the ONE, every which way you swing a small furry creature.
One moment we were talking about how artists need support, endorsement, promotion... and the next we had shifted gear to how if we could get artists properly paid to practise, the art could be sold or commissioned, art management companies could be created, more money pours in, and the overall value of the industry goes up! Ka-ching! The arts as the golden goose, helping everyone make money, become richer, better, stronger, faster... spiralling into some orgiastic frenzy of loot. Rightly so, as money needs to circulate, we’re familiar enough with that, because when you stop moving it about, you’re suddenly faced with the fact it tastes funny, has low comfort value when you lie upon it, and would barely cover you with much decency even within the privacy of your tightly packed public housing.
You would think some kind of a point would appear with all the rambling, and before one wanders off to check how to get the iPad, this is it. Perhaps we have lost our way if all discussions are halted, ended, prefaced by money. When principles, ideals, imagination surrender in the face of financial spreadsheets, we’re in deeper trouble than we pretend to be. When creative expression is contrasted with and is accepted as countered by ‘pragmatism’ (read money), we’ve lost all ability to reason, and then reason to create.
