Q2 2025
December, 2022. In the Tate Modern in London. I walk past Yves Klein's IKB 79, this scorching ultramarine that felt so pure that it was repellant at the same time. My eyes hurt, I scoffed and I walked away. 3 years later, I come across an intriguing film screening at the museum. I go with my friend, and the screen is blue. Perhaps the screen is not working. It remains that unforgiving blue for 5 more minutes, and we realise this is the movie. The screen remains this colour the whole hour and a half, and we have to fight with all our wills (sometimes, to no avail), to stave off the natural conclusion of soft comfy seats and a freezing room.
I drift in and out of attention as the narrator amongst bustling sounds of the city tells us what it feels like to die. I don't wish to dampen the context and make it palatable for anyone. He's dying of AIDS in the UK, in the 1990s, and the experimental drugs he was put on have made him blind. And that's why he can only see blue.
Sometimes I have to stop listening so that the grief doesn’t puncture my lungs right there, but it's a beautiful movie. We laugh guiltily after the movie about how we weren't prepared for the experience, and then I went home and read about it. The uncompromising blue shows up more lurid in the pictures than it does on the screen, where it looked more pale and sickly.
In the end of the movie there is a poem, that lulls me gently into a feeling of melancholy and loss, and then, abruptly, the movie ends. The blue shuts off, suddenly and with no respite. That is death, perhaps.
I could be trite and say this has been a quarter punctuated by death. But I don't think that's true, I think death just is a part of human life. And perhaps I've been seeing it in more places as I wizen with age. In May, I was lucky to see Lady Gaga use death as a metaphor for rebirth in the most theatrical of ways possible, with two friends I plan to grow old with. She kills her pure self on a chess board, and her undead pure self drifts in and out of a dream before she reconciles with her two halves. Black and white, good and evil, it's a theatre of false binaries. But it's fantastic, and it's really difficult to explain the nuances of moral ambiguity to the beat of Bad Romance.
Before that I watched Macbeth in the rain, which somehow made it better, because all the murder and the treachery happens in the stormy skies. And then I went to a way more laidback and groovy Thundercat concert, which was so much more fun! But even there, Thundercat talked about Mac Miller, and how he remembered him. It felt like a celebration, and it helps that Thundercat is just so funny. He talked about doing PCP on stage, clearly, no one media trained him.
One day in June I watched a Tamil funeral procession go past my block. A coffin, decorated with flowers, and loud, resounding drums beating an upbeat rhythm out into the neighbourhood. If it weren't for the crowdsurfing corpse on the shoulders of 8 men, I would have thought it was a festival. They swayed with the coffin on their shoulders, back and forth, back and forth, and everyone watched. Cars lined up behind the see-through funeral truck.
It was amazing, honestly, to see the world slow down to let this community take its time to grieve together. No honks, just a quiet respect. I can't think of any other situation where Singapore's traffic would slow down to a halt. In the pragmatic economics of this hyper-efficient city, a sliver of humanity peeked through. An unspoken compassion, to not interrupt their celebration of a life, and love.
In the rest of June I was drowning, a little bit, in work and a lot of conversations about where exactly I wanted my life to go. I'll save you the boring mundanities and let you know that the conclusion is that I don't know. It's a difficult time for everyone, and I have realised I am still embarrassingly afraid of failure, even though failure is a fact of human life. To soften the sharp edges of the uncertainty that comes with being In Your Twenties, I've been trying to lose myself in new sidequests (or the more colloquial term, hobbies).
I bought some air dry clay to make misshapen trinkets out of, flower plates and little bowls to keep my excessive jewellery collection. They look slightly odd, but in a way that makes them HandmadeTM and not just, you know, bad. It's a very grounding activity, because you can't do anything else during it. Your hands are all clay-ed up, and you can't touch any screens. And you have to focus on how you're molding the clay. It's incredibly therapeutic, really.
I started learning Python, for no reason, really, other than the fact that I now have access to Minecraft Education and it's actually really fun to learn stuff on Minecraft. So recently I've been thinking to myself "I really want to go back home and play Minecraft", which is not a sentence I ever thought I would have even thought. Goes to show nothing about your identity is set in stone, or rather that identity is both a process and outcome. Or maybe it's not that deep, you know? It's just Minecraft. Anyways I'm having a lot of fun on Minecraft and learning Python syntax.
But on the point of identity, I thought about how for the past year or so I've been contemplating what actually makes up your identity. Now I think I've been thinking about it all wrong. I think identity is a process, and that you can cycle through different signifiers of you who are but the way you form who you are is distinct to you. I don't think there's much of a point in clinging to different aspects of yourself as a definition -- I think we will all become unrecognisable by the time we die. In every way possible. So our identity is really just made up of the experiences that got us to the present.
Funnily enough the reason I thought about this was because of a joke circulating the internet, on the performative matcha drinking, Clairo enjoying, Bell Hooks reading, 2020s metrosexual (who now just gets accused of being bisexual) -- well, if you drink the matcha and listen to the Clairo, and read the Bell Hooks, then maybe that's who you are? Even if you do it as a performance, isn't all of our identity a performance to a certain extent? I remember there being a sociological theory about this. So good news for the male Clairo enjoyers, even if your music taste is kind of shit, it's still a real part of you. Even if you read the Bell Hooks and your worldview is based on a get-pussy based Marxism, it still is a real part of you. Of course, you're also annoying, but that can’t be helped.
Then I watched this incredibly pretentious French art-house documentary-film called Sans Soleil about a white guy who essentially really likes Africa and Japan (and like, there's a lot of those) -- my best friend said it was a movie she could imagine an "art guy jacking off to", which is really both a compliment and an insult. It was a beautiful movie, even though I was exhausted after a long week at work and the French voiceover was melodic and gibberish to me (there were subtitles, but I did fall asleep for 10 minutes). It was about posterity, and the human endeavor that's obsessed with recording and making memories. In a generation that's so obsessed with photo and video, how is memory formed. Nowadays you can take pictures of everything -- but we end up making memories out of nothing.
I guess it all comes down to intention, focus and being present where you are. I think that's why the first movie I watched, Blue, was so jarring to me. The atmospheric sounds of the hospital, the street, the ambient sounds accompanying the voiceover, really draw you into the narrator's life, even though there is nothing but blue on the screen.
It's now been 6 months into the year, and everything is still quite shaky, and I can't really commit to any one path of my life yet. But the past three months have made me very aware of the fact that while I do have time, I also will die one day. So that makes me think of what really matters to me. I can't imagine the answer to that is money. But I'm not really sure how to define what really matters. I have always lived life with an optimistic nihilism, but it's been really difficult to maintain that optimism over this year. And just nihilism by itself is actually actively bad for your well-being. So perhaps it is time to start searching for meaning, or to start believing in something. We'll see.
songs:
david // lorde
time will tell // blood orange
if she could see me now // lorde
losing you // solange
shapeshifter // lorde
books i’ve read this year i really liked:
the agony of eros // byung-chul han
agua viva // clarice lispector
a cup of rage // raduan nassar
leopard-skin hat // anne serre
perfection // vincenzo latronico
i should write a bunch of reviews on these tbh. for next time
my new york times 21st century top 10 movies (in no particular order):
yea!!! woohoo!!!