Life with Playstation is one of the applications that Sony has made freely available for the Playstation 3 console, as part of its positioning as a lifestyle applicance. It’s one of those software “to chill by”, an information age lava lamp. Features include headlines provided by Google news; weather forecasts; and live web cam images via the Earth Television Network. Everything is localised to cities, selected by using the controller to spin the gorgeously realised, satellite-imaged globe.

The live web cams, with headlines juxtaposed beside them, look exactly like those video installations we see now and then at SAM — the ones with repetitious footage of foreign cities, commenting on the bridging of distance and time, the dreadful state of the world, etc. This time, however, it is an utterly consumerist applicance that is making a statement about the connectedness the current world. This time, commerce itself proves a better commentator on commercialisation and globalisation, than the artistic institution.

Right now, the default mood musak lulls me to sleep. The slowly spinning sphere has the hypnotising effect a snow globe, except with a god’s eye of the world instead of a white landscape. I wish the full news display could be customised though — the white of the page is too much a glaring contrast to the dark, blue-green globe, especially in a darkened living room.

I close the news browser and lay back. For now, it’s better to imagine the lives of people in those bright spots and dark patches, than to actually read about them.

Consider the statement, “Many books claim they can change how you look at life. Few actually do.” If I go on to say this book changed me, it’d sound like a huge endorsement from me for The Black Swan. Because most people would fill in the last bit of the logical circle: This book changed me, therefore this book will change how you look at life.

But I said no such thing. All I’m sayin’ is, 1) I really like this book. 2) Odds are, for any book, there can only a few books one’s lifetime that has that kind of effect — unless one is an impressionable nut.

And this is how book endorsements work. But I digress, badly.

The basic argument of The Black Swan is simple, you can probably find many fine summaries of it elsewhere. The subjects themselves are well-tread territory: the confirmation and narrative fallacies; abuse of the Gaussian curve (hello Central Limit Theorem!); and so on.

What is striking about the book was not the ideas themselves, but Taleb’s remarkable awareness both of the dangers of the Narrative, and the inescapability of it: we can’t stop understanding the world through the lens of stories. Taleb admits his ideas were not arrived at in deep discussion with some Nobel nominee, but were chanced upon in a Lebanese bomb shelter in ’75, reading William Shirer’s wildly inaccurate predictions about the European war while mortars were landing outside. This is rare honesty for a serious economics book, where the plural of anecdote is often derisively described as “not data”. And for me, this was an uncanny vindication of all those nascent suspicions I had when I was an ignorant wee lad, that what my favourite books had to say about how everything in the world worked, were actually wrong. “Well there’s no other way to explain how the world works,” said all my profs in college. As the ongoing economic crisis shows, reality has a classy way of Giving Explanations the Finger.

The Black Swan‘s colourful, provocative style reminds me of the old erudites like Mencken and Chesterton. Interestingly, like Douglas Wilson, Taleb has a huge vendetta against thinking in the Platonic plane. Friends who read the book with me hated Taleb’s incessant name-dropping — Eco, Montaigne, Mandelbrot, etc. But it so happens it’s the kind of name dropping I like: the old thinkers, anti-populists, philosophers who have dropped out of footnotes of popular literature, because they have become too unrecognisable, too unfashionable. The people whose ideas are valuable precisely because they failed to become cliches.

But anyway. My biggest practical take-away was this: in risk-taking, one needs to look at the consequence, and not just the probability. Intuition and social pressure often guides us to act “conservatively” — take only the “modest” risks, ignore catastrophic consequences if the odds are small or “unpredictable”. But the events that change one’s life are by nature uncommon and unlikely. Following the conservative strategy (succinctly summarised in Sir Galton’s famous “Regression towards Mediocrity”) only leads to — surprise — mediocrity. Worse, it also leaves one unprepared for unforeseen events of incredible impact.

So follows some totally tangential beliefs of mine, whichThe Black Swan helped validate (read: I get to blame the book if I’m wrong!):

• Life insurance is infinitely better than lottery, even though the promise sounds identical:  “For less than 20 cents a day, you can potentially earn six digits returns”. ‘Cos there’s just two certainties in life: Taxes, and that other one.
• Not every one can be a polymath, but it’s still better to be a dilettante than a specialist. Facts, figures and non-fiction of any particular genre/discipline must, by necessity, yield diminishing returns. Anyone who’s ever dated an engineer or an accountant would know.
• Humans—psychologically and biologically—are quite predictable. They lend themselves easily to generalisable statements. History, however, is quite another thing. So we don’t ever learn anything from history — that’s just how predictable we are.
• We tend to minimise downside risks and exaggerate upside risks, despite that fortune favours the bold. For example, I ought to go talk to that girl in the corner. I really should. Upside risk: a new friend, or even a new romance. Downside risk: rejection, life goes on.  (“Next!”)
• Epistemology, the philosophy of knowledge — is infinitely more meaningful than Metaphysics, the philosophy of reality. “The fault,” said the Bard, “lies not in our stars.”

There is a scene in Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea where the young boy Sousuke excitedly shows off his new friend Ponyo — swimming in a pail — to his kindly lady friends at the elderly home. Most of the old women pay obligatory complements to the creature’s cuteness, except one who is gripped in fear the moment she lays eyes on her: “A goldfish with a human face! What an awful, ominous thing! Quick, throw it back in the sea! Lest a tsunami come upon us!”

Those conflicting reactions pretty much sum of what is wrong with the movie.

Ponyo is the most kid-friendly Miyazaki Hayao movie to date. So kid-friendly that many adults, of whom there is a significant following for Studio Ghibli’s animation features, will trouble accepting the story at face value. It’s not too much to say the old man has gone to the opposite extreme of his previous Howl’s Moving Castle, which was admittedly quite abstract.

Ponyo revisits Miyazaki’s favourite theme of liminality, this time taking inspiration from oriental folk tales of sea princesses who wed their human lovers. Brunhilde, born of a goddess and a human magician who renounced his humanity, escapes her undersea dwelling to discover the human world as well as the love of her life, the five year old (!) Sousuke. In order to become human, she takes on a new name, steals his father’s magic, and unleashes an unprecedented disaster upon the human world. Well, sort of a disaster — it’s just human civilisation getting submerged under a risen sea, that’s all. But no one would get hurt, so squarely is the story pitched at children.

Bafflingly, the artistic direction is in complete contradiction with this G-rated world. Despite the cutesy, simplified style of art, the depiction of magic is often creepy, and that of mother nature surprisingly realistic. The howling winds and harrowing waves are sure to inspire anxiety in those who have experienced a real typhoon or, in my case, who still remember the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. Sure, it’s a feat of animation, but can I believe that no one dies in a world where storms like this exist?

The arti does little to help the simplistic story and the extremely straightforward motivations of the characters. Most reviewers appear to have forced themselves to accept, along with the adult characters of the story, that in this pre-juvenile fantasy world, people can find love at five years of age. But again, I have real trouble with this. Sure, tragic was the fate of the little mermaid’s fate she traded her fins for human legs in that other story. But I honestly don’t know what to make of a girlfriend who was born an anthromorphic goldfish.

Surely there’s some commentary buried in how the 2008 Golden Horse awards, which saw the disqualification of Kaneshiro Takeshi from a special prize recognising local talent, also had the cross-cultural dramedy Cape No. 7 sweeping six awards — first-time director Wei Te-Sheng took home that prize, The Outstanding Taiwanese Filmmaker of the Year. Kaneshiro was born to a Japanese father and a Taiwanese mother, raised in Taiwan, but is a Japanese citizen. Art has a way of conspiring with real life.

Cape No. 7 has more than a passing resemblance to Japanese films and dramas. It’s a paean to small town life; it has an ensemble of quirky characters; the central character rediscovers his purpose  in the countryside — these are all staples of Japanese drama. In fact, Cape reminds me of Udon, among many other things.

Van Fan plays an angsty rock  singer who returns from Taipei to his hometown,  frustrated that talent has not taken him where he thought he ought be. His break from music, however, is shortlived, as he’s soon recruited against his will into a local  talent show, organised by the town council and a Japanese promotional company. A perfunctory romance then proceeds between Van and the ethnic Japanese, ex-model show promoter, played by Tanaka Chie.

Watching multilingual movies where one understands all the languages being spoken is  a strange experience, and Cape was extremely weird: three tongues in all (Japanese, Mandarin, and the Minnan dialect), none of which is my first language.  Having local dialects/foreign languages work well in commercial films is a real rarity given strong temptations to make things more authentic/exotic than they really are. Director Wei should be proud of his achievement.

The loveable, oddball cast lends the movie considerable authenticity. Sticking in my mind are the 10 year old keyboardist Dada, who perpetually wears a 2nd-generation evangelical ennui as part of her demeanour; and of course, the female lead Tomoko, who’s alienated both by her profession and the coarse small-town Taiwan culture.

And no review of Cape can be complete without mention of the music. The Minnan folk tunes and Van Fan’s poppish theme songs accent the themes of Cape well, particularly Van’s South of the Border which, weirdly, has mainlandish rock lyrics set to an Okinawan melody. Cape also has one of the best music performances on film that I can recall. It’s a well-crafted third act to the time-honoured genre sequences of audition and rehearsal, and a well-filmed musical sequence in its own right. 

The only imperfection to this quirky, pleasant film is the unbelievable central romance, with a lead couple that has career  frustration but little else in common.  HM and myself were endlessly amused by the angst of Van’s lead character, the rebel without a discernable cause. Then there’s what is probably the most gratuitous roll in the hay of 2008, by the leads.  Some say these weaknesses were the result of edits made to fit the movie into 133 minutes, but who knows.

Everything that we experience, we experience through our eyes.

We have whole bodies, but we practically exist just in the front of our heads. We see ourselves in parts – our hands, our feet, only the front of our body, never our backs. And despite our supposed familiarity with our bodies, we don’t even know how we look like or how we move, apart from external implements, like mirrors. So we live and move and have our being.

It’s therefore surprising why no one has ever done something like Mirror’s Edge before. The first-person genre of games has been established for more than a good decade, but never have our virtual hands ever been used other than for holding weapons. This time – after all this time – we can palpably run, breathe, hear the wind in our ears. We hold our breath with every leap.

Looking across the starkly sunlit skyline, we almost remember a world we’ve all known at one time or other, before we decided to grow up and stick to the familiar and the streets. That world where walls do not necessarily surround us, but sometimes stands under us. A world where we move at dizzying heights, without actually taking on wings. It’s a freedom that’s ironically possible only in the most crowded and built-up of cities.

Even the game’s sparse population – the occasional policeman – are reminiscent of that experience of violation when we suddenly realise we’re not alone in our sanctuary. The fellow rooftop sojourner. A voyeur, through a distant window. Or that security guard we thought evaded when we sneaked across the lobby, left far behind on the ground floor.

Mirror’s Edge is almost a condemnation of the pedestrian – people who are familiar with the streets and shopfronts, yet alienated from those things that should be known to natives of the land – the alleys, the secret route, the rooftops – the stuff of urban life and its legends.

Mirror’s Edge not only does it make pick up the controller “just one more time”, it also makes me want to put it down, and change, and go for a run.

Mirror’s Edge is developed at EA Digital Illusions in Stockholm, Sweden. Currently retailing worldwide for the Playstation 3 and the Xbox 360.

Basically, all the youthful pastimes that my contemporaries cherished–Super Mario Brothers, Sonic the Hedgehog, Golden Axe, Altered Beast–have passed me by. The experience they think back so fondly upon–playing games on the television, that excitement doesn’t form a part of my memory at all. What I now use the machine for shocks my friends because it’s like a sacrilege. (You know, watching Youtube, that destroyer of TV ratings, on TV.)

When I bought the Playstation 3 three months ago and sat down in front the TV on the couch, the experience was quite a revelation. For the first time, what’s was on the TV screen wasn’t from TV station, but filtered from the Internet pipes through a router. It feels odd typing my particulars and credit card number, into my TV. Isn’t this something I should be doing sitting upright, at a desk, with a keyboard? Shouldn’t I be fiddling with a remote instead?

For the first time, my mother understands my fascination with the concept, in her own luddite fashion–something my relatively tech-savvy peers don’t understand. When I’m too engrossed in my game trying just one more level, my mom yells, “Can’t you pause that TV of yours and  come for dinner? Surely you can continue afterwards?” This time she’s actually right: I can.

No one I know remembers ever seeing these programmes, but Vision On and Take Hart have an unusual place in my childhood. These were some of the first English television programmes that I regularly watched. That was when the Singapore Broadcasting Corporation imported shows from the UK, rather than America, for its English language children programming. That means I probably saw Vision On before I did Sesame Street.

I remember quite a few things, if not the shows themselves (until now, that is): the silly animated T-Rex, the claymation character Morph, created by the folks now known collectively as Aardman Studios; and the Gallery segment that featured some of the most amazing pieces of children’s art I’ve never seen in real life, set to music such as Left Bank Two and John William’s Cavatina.

Watching the above video from Take Hart brings back incredible memories. Of my fascination with Tony Hart’s skill with all sorts of materials; the fantasies of having my own art and crafts workshop, complete with an infinite supply of paper, paint and various materials; memories of wishing my father could teach me some of the cool things I knew he could do with art materials, but somehow never got around to.

I could be letting nostalgia get to my head, but Take Hart is a possible explanation for my experiences with art over the years. Such as the suspicion I often experience when walking in the galleries at SAM: I swear I’ve seen some of this before, under a more… juvenile context. It could also explain my dissatisfaction with art education all through my first ten years in school, after which I gave it up. It was never this good. It was just never this fun.

Then there’s certainly the novelty factor. The former Beach Road Camp has been open to the public much less often compared to the former government building. The Art Deco building and open areas has been able accommodate much larger installation pieces, viewable from multiple angles – such as Heman Chong’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

The pieces at South Beach comprise more social/historical commentary types of works than conceptual pieces. The former include The Farmer and the Helicopters (a video/installation reconstruction of Vietnamese civilians’ experiences with American Huey choppers), September Sweetness (a Buddhist stupa made of sugar), and four short films by Aktan Abdykalykov–the last piece I’ll refer to collectively as the “Living Room”, just because the organisers put the films on a TV and a sofa in the room. “Living Room” was a particularly memorable (despite that I don’t usually think much of video installations) – the weirdly domestic experience of sharing a couch with a stranger, in an abandoned room, watching foreign-language short films on TV, struck me as a delicious irony. It certainly didn’t hurt that the films were surprisingly well-directed (but my enjoyment had nothing to do with that – is that a commentary on the nature of contemporary art appreciation or what?)

I ought to mention there were also several requisite, extraordinarily craftless pieces, such Layla Juma Rashid’s Beauty and the Beast. Most people’s imagination are already rich enough to regularly see shapes in chewed gum and clouds. Putting a used Wrigley’s behind a perspex case, then telling people they need to look harder is really the height of condescension.

Despite its Great War setting, La France reads like some fable I can’t seem to recall from my childhood. Camille Robin (Sylvie Testud) is a wife of a soldier on the front who, after receiving a Dear Jane letter, decides to head for the trenches herself, dressed as a man. While wandering in the countryside, she meets with a group of French soldiers led by the Lieutenant (Pascal Greggory), who only lets her join them after she proves her willingness to die, not by the enemy’s fire, but by deadly tantrums of the female sort.

The film is full of subtle film tricks and odd symbolism–a luminous forest, German soldiers on horseback, disappearing tricks, Atlantis, and a seemingly unending journey where you are never told precisely where you are. And a third into the film, the movie firmly establishes its non-genericity by having its characters break into live song, and several times after that. The soldiers don’t sing songs (in the plural), but one song (or perhaps variations of the same song)–thus conveniently defying categorisation as a musical. And not just any war song, but a song apparently from the 1960′s, nonsensically about a blind girl and her lovers across Europe. To make sure we don’t miss the weirdness of it all, just as the heroine accepts the futility of her quest at the end, the journey turns out not to be so existential after all.

I suppose I should make some meaningful conclusion at this point and say the movie’s dreamy, or whimsical, or evocative, or magical, etc. But here’s some lyrics from the 80′s hit Break My Stride instead.

Last night I had the strangest dream
I sailed away to China
In a little row boat to find ya
And you said you had to get your laundry cleaned
Didn’t want no-one to hold you
What does that mean
And you said

Chorus

Ain’t nothin’ gonna to break my stride
Nobody’s gonna slow me down, oh-no
I got to keep on movin’
Ain’t nothin’ gonna break my stride
I’m running and I won’t touch ground
Oh-no, I got to keep on movin’
.
.
.

Sabores was simplicity in all aspects of design, from the typical flamenco stage layout to Baras’ pragmatic costume design – a nightgown, a cocktail dress that folds over the shoulder, and – perhaps the most striking of all – leather chaps with a black leotard. (One unrelated piece of logisticsreally really impressed me: the men’s sleeves were micced!)

The performance opened with a pantomime of stage preparations, the cast slowly setting up the tablao and rehearsing as if behind the curtain. This nicely framed the rest of the performance, which was really a series of distinct (and unconnected) solo and group dances in various palos, or styles.

Principal dancer Sara Baras’ dancing was more reminescent of a bailaor, favouring straight, rapid spins and intense footwork. In contrast with María Pagés, whose performance last year was full of interpretive choreographies and introspection, Baras was full of virtuosity and breathless footwork; her wide grins and “You da man!” finger-pointing clearly showed she relished pushing her limits. Adding to the excited atmosphere were guest dancers Luis Ortega and José Serrano, the latter’s repeated invitations for audience applause seeming to defy that broad distance between the Esplanade Theatre stage and the audience.

(Aside: For the encore, the musicians – untrained and unequipped for dance as usual – gamely hammed it up for a tangos number each. But singer Ángela Bautista actually managed a fancy zapateado, much to the surprise of the audience – he had flamenco shoes on! The sneaky bastard clearly came prepared.)