A MISUNDERSTOOD ASPECT of film criticism is that it’s supposed to be objective. Since cinema itself is not objective, why should criticism be?
I’M THE SORT OF GUY who walks into a book store and I hear books calling out to me to buy them. I’m a walking radar of unknown pleasures.
MY FRIENDS have a joke about me. Whenever I see people, I’m always giving away books from my collection. They call it decluttering and an evocation of Marie Kondo. I beg to differ: I refuse to allow history to die with me.
KNOWLEDGE of any use has to find new homes and become new food for thought.
A BOOK THAT SHAPED ME is Antoine de St-Exupery’s The Little Prince. “What is essential is invisible to the eye.”
X'HO (aka Chris Ho) wrote the best column on Singapore contradictions in the “X’Ho Files” [a column in BigO Magazine] that we published for over a decade. Plus he did the best spoken word rendition of the Alfian Sa’at poem, “Singapore You’re Not My Country”. I think it took three takes. He cried twice.
Essentially a contrarian, this was why Chris could be with totally disparate groups of people; from glam local celebrities to foreign construction workers. He loved to explore the opposite world.
The Apocalypse Now soundtrack kept in the best parts of the dialogue [from the movie] and the sprawling double disc set allows you an almost complete cinematic experience. Finally, Marlon Brando’s mumbling can be heard in stereo: “The horror, the horror.”
I once had tickets to see Rickie Lee Jones and Billy Bragg but I gave them away. The only artiste I ever wanted to see live, died in 2021. Her name is Nanci Griffith.
ASTREAL'S MUHAMMAD ALKHATIB, who organised BigO Magazine's 40th Anniversary Celebration*, asked for inputs on the band line-up. I told him that since he is organising it, he should have a free hand. When you are in the creative environment, and working with creative people, you have to, at least, let them be creative.
JOURNALISM, in general, is mostly bought and mostly sold. As Noam Chomsky’s and Edward Herman’s 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent, puts it, the controlling investment interests and the dependence on advertising revenue are invisible chains on free-thinking journalism.
I’VE DONE [face-to-face interviews] too many times before and to actually enjoy it at this age would suggest some hidden masochistic tendency. Either that or a prodigious propensity for propaganda (as perhaps veteran politicians are apt to have).
ONCE I had to interview Derrick May, one of the totems of the Detroit Techno music scene and we went to a hawker centre. EM Forster’s struggles with cultural barriers in A Passage to India, came to the fore as May wasn’t in the mood to talk. He was tired, hungry and didn’t feel like explaining himself so whatever little that he uttered in-between mouthfuls of hawker food, was cobbled into a short piece. Not everyone can change water into wine.
DUNNO WHY but I always remember the interviews that were total failures.
I OBJECT TO the impact and effect of AI on my viewing and listening experiences. I do not wish anyone to second guess what I would like to see and hear. It prevents simple innocent discoveries.
SATYAJIT RAY'S THE MUSIC ROOM (1958) is my favourite film. It’s about a landlord who squanders his family fortune on his love of music. How many of us will do this today?
WE WERE MUSIC FANS. Michael Cheah, Stephen Tan, the late Chris Ho, Gerrie Lim, Lim Teck Lin and I met in the 80s; four of [us] worked at The Singapore Monitor (a rival paper of The Straits Times) and another worked overseas as an entertainment journalist. When the Monitor closed in 1985, the shock woke us to the idea that a local rock magazine about music and pop culture was crucial; mainly because many of our fans/newspaper readers kept asking us to do something else. [So we did BigO Magazine.]
BIGO became the first magazine in the world to give free CDs together with the issues. Part of the genesis of this innovation was that since we couldn’t get local radio to play local music, we thought that we should just put the music itself into the hands of the fans.
MICHAEL DIED but he lived his dream: he wanted to establish an independent Singapore rock ‘n’ roll magazine and he did it.
I GUESS BIGO WAS LIKE A ROCK BAND. And just as the shock of losing John Lennon sank into the surviving Beatles, we knew that an era had passed. But [we are] grateful that we took that long journey of over three decades together.
[ALONG WITH] BIGO'S CLOSURE, George Harrison said it best: “All things must pass.”
HEAVEN is a place where I can finally meet Nanci Griffith, Sandy Denny and Laura Nyro, three of the greatest female singer songwriters, who made music so personal and long-lasting.
I’M STILL AN AVID TOY COLLECTOR, specifically Major Matt Mason, vintage GI Joe/Action Man and Star Wars.
THERE IS ONE TRUTH about collecting that isn’t apparent until you age. It’s far easier to collect than to sell your collection.
BUDDHISM makes the most sense these days; impermanence is the code of the road.
*Tickets for BigO Magazine's 40th Anniversary Celebration are on sale. The two-day concert festival is held 12-13 April at The Blackbird (8 Lock Rd, Singapore 108936) at Gillman Barracks and features acts like Force Vomit, The Oddfellows, The Pinholes, Opposition Party and many more. Day one is sold out.
