Yesterday, I met up with Jo and got to meet Davide, her forty-something Italian friend who’s just moved into town. At the small restaurant in the heart of Little India, we sat there feeling slightly grumpy, tired and slightly misanthropic, eating our chicken briyanis dinners, while Jo bubbled on about her day’s experiences.

Jo: (brightly) I bought thirty dollar earrings! Want to see?
(she takes out a pair of earrings — large round pearls set in silver)
Jo: What do you think?
Me: Looks nice.
Jo: What do you think I can wear them with? A white suit?
Me: Yeah, maybe.
Davide: They look like spaceships.

Given that comment, I was more inclined towards agreeing with him on his insistence on Italian cultural superiority.

Work has started on one front again, so things are a little crazy for me once again. I am glad to report that the Non-Profit Organisation that Jas had envisaged and conceptualised now officially exists. It’s called Foundation TRACK (To Reach and Connect Kids) and our projected work is to connect donors with low-income kids to help fund enrichment programmes. Jas, Alex and I are the co-directors and we’ll be coming up with more stuff to get the work going. (This is where the Student Council Teacher training comes in handy…)

…who’s in bloody Paris now with tons of electro floating around…

From our recent online conversation,

Shao: watching euro cup a lot… are you?
Me: I’M NOT.
Shao: RUSSIA.
Me: That’s the thing. I haven’t watched euro since it started.
Shao: why???
Me: because I’ve been so busy and there’s no kaki!
Shao: walau
Me: I miss watching with you.
Shao: dun scared I come back for world cup. ME TOO.
Me: Yeah man.

I met Yen at HV on my way back from creative writing class, and I told him that I had gone through a workshop session on the first assignment. He expressed some surprise that I would participate in such a course, and I found that reaction interesting, since I’ve had people telling me that I should write since secondary school, but he’s right in feeling that way as well. I think I’ve become more of a person who analyses rather than creates. My instinctive mode is to understand and explain.

I promised him that I would upload the piece here, but Wordpress really sucks with spacing. (I’ll find another way of getting it to you.)

Right now, the draft’s stuck between a narrative poem and a short story. People were perplexed over the plot (too long; I might need to break it into three poems, or turn it into a short story), and the switching between first and second points of views. I did appreciate a classmate’s determined effort to figure out what I was trying to do with the p.o.v. device. Once she figured it out, someone else declared it brilliant, but there definitely needs to be more work for people to pick it up.

So this is my conclusion: I tend to write things that have too many concurrent ideas (i.e. ambitious) and they are usually too implicit. Creative writing is somewhat of a struggle to me at this moment because honestly, I’d rather tell than show. In general, writing has never been harder for me on all fronts. At least, I can take comfort in the fact that Louise Erdrich took 13 years to write her short story “Revival Road”.

(Multicultural code-switching in poetry is big in the US apparently. People truly dig multicultural references there. It reminds me of our various elaborate plans to fetishize our Asian selves wherever else to even the stakes.)

Addendum: Some exciting news — the film column is quite confirmed (I’m starting with the September issue though). And I might get to write on parts of the Biennale? *fingers crossed*

I’ve started breaking into Utopia Deferred, Jean Baudrillard’s writings from the journal that he collaborated with Lefebvre and architects like Jean Aubert and Antoine Stinco from 1967 - 1978 called Utopie.

Sometimes I think my attraction to these French thinkers stem from the other weighty narrative that they lived through: May 68. From an interview with JB on Utopie:

How did you meet Hubert Tonka?

The whole thing began started with Lefebvre. I had known Lefebvre at the beginning of the 1960s. He was at the center of a group interested in urbanism. He taught at the Institut d’urbanisme and Tonka was his assistant. We got to know one another in 1962 and 1963. Utopie truly began at Lefebvre’s place at Navarrenx, in the Pyrenees, in 1966. Lefebvre and Lourau were already there…There, in 1966, I got to know the group. In fact, just before 1968. All of this really began right before 1968…

What was your relationship to the “enrages” at Nanterre?

Nanterre…the sociology department…Cohn-Bendit…the 22nd of March…We were at the center of the “events”. We participated in AG, we went to the barricades…The “spirit of May” circulated for several years at Nanterre. We still had a certain power. The students were behind us. We defended the department of sociology above all. This situation lasted until 1973-1974. I stayed on a few more years, through inertia. During the work of mourning, for me, there was no longer any activity. I had passed to the side of theory. Leftism, or what it had become, closed militarism, was no longer an option.

You were never tempted by Vincennes…

Why not? Lourau went there, Lyotard too…Tonka…Undoubtedly I should have gone, but I made a bet, I said: no, I’ll stay here, I’ll stay till the end, I want to see what happens, in the end, at Nanterre. I haven’t regretted having made this choice, even when it was clear that I couldn’t stay at Nanterre any longer. It was simply too late to go to Vincennes. The story, for me, ended at Nanterre…

Where do you situate Utopie in this intellectual and political context?

There were a number of movements like it during those years, analogous anticipations that wanted to be marginal. We should remember that there was still a phobia about official political action and about parties, a refusal of all political and intellectual nomenclature. The Situationists were closest to us, but the Situationists didn’t want to see anyone else. And we didn’t really seek them out. We had known them, with Tonka, at the beginning of the 1960s, just before their break with Lefebvre. The position of the Situationists, in 1968, became very problematic. Previously, at Nanterre, between the anarchists, Cohn-Bendit, and the Situationists, there was an extraordinary focal point, but the workers councils the Situationists extolled in 1968 seemed irrelevant to us. We had the feeling of having surpassed this kind of initiative. Debord disappointed us in 1968, with his “old moons”, and again twenty years later, rereading what he had written, cloning himself by saying: nothing has changed, what I said was absolutely true, there is nothing more to say about it. While completely recognizing the value of what happened before, he was nevertheless already fossilized for us. The 1960s were really extraordinary, more than the 1970s, which were more ’spectacular’. The 1960s were more rich, more complex, even if it was also during these years that I began mourning “politics”. For us, 1968 was already more than politics. It was symbolic, almost ‘metahistorical’. Thereafter, it was all over. In the 1970s, we passed beyond the end. Thereafter, we passed entirely to the side of theory. This is also the moment that Utopie effectively ceased all engaged activity, even all activity relative to architecture. We passed inexorably towards disappearance, a disappearance tending toward the most radical…

From City of Sound, “I come from Brisbane and I’m quite plain”* Cities have music scenes and that’s why ICT doesn’t enable decentralisation”: an argument is made that ICT technologies don’t necessarily decentralise, especially in relation to the creative industries, with the music scenes of cities as illustrative support.