le reunion

When I did A-level history, we had a class or two about the French reunion policy, about the reestablishment of the vassal states’ French-ness so as to buttress the French state’s glory.

But I can’t remember the rest of it, and it wouldn’t make a very good story either. All rise and fall, ascendance and gradual decline and stagnation type of thing. Typical historical example.

So anyway, it’s Chinese New Year weekend.

And I’m planning on my own not-so-little reunion dinner feast with friends on Saturday. No steamboat because some of the people coming are vegetarians (damn them!), so it’s going to be a dinner of at least 5 different dishes as I attempt to do my best Chinese-style cooking.

So far, I’ve already bought 4 packs of dumpling and wanton skins, water chestnuts, bamboo shoots, dried mushrooms, towgay, straw mushrooms, chye sim, plum sauce, and wood ear. And I’m not done yet! I still have to buy mince pork, chicken, more vegetables and truckloads of tofu.

I’ve been thinking about how I’m going to coordinate all this cooking and all this shopping, and I’m seriously completely amazed at how my grandmother has been doing it for the past few decades. I mean, for our reunion dinner she cooks for about 25 or so people, and on chor yat itself she prepares enough food for about 50. That is some amazing logistics, I tell ya.

But I’m excited, even though I can foresee a whole day in the kitchen chopping, slicing, stirring, boiling, dicing, mincing, mixing, frying.

I just hope everyone turns up on time and that there’s enough food to go round.

this revolution will not be televised

FOR a small island state eager to take its place among the most successful nations in the free world of practising democracies, one would have expected to see a steady increase in political freedom, an ascending line from its virtual non-existence in the rough early years of brute survival, to the emergence of incomplete but distinct forms in a still evolving ethos, to an end point of full functioning in a mature society.

But there has been no such clear path. Instead, we see only a thin ragged line, rather like a small weakly meandering stream that sometimes disappears into the ground.

This sputtering along of the political process is in sharp contrast to the smooth steep trajectories of other areas of development, notably in the economic area, where growth can only be described in breathless superlatives; and even in those areas where the Government has been traditionally conservative, for instance, education and the arts.
Hence while the winds of change are sweeping everywhere, while the clarion call to be creative, to think outside the box, is heard everywhere, the political domain remains a backwater, with every sign of drying up altogether.

- Catherine Lim, Managing Political Dissent, Straits Times 20th January 2006

Apart from being an author, Catherine Lim has also been one of the most outspoken critics of the present government in Singapore to be published in the national press. And for that, I salute her. It’s not often you read such eloquent articles, and especially not when one is talking about the government.

However, although her article speaks of Singaporeans being too comfortable and too fearful as reasons for their continued silence, I would suggest that those are not all the reasons.

Having been thinking for a while about the Singaporean society’s collective morality, I came to certain conclusions as to why it languishes in the era of 1950s post-war colonialism. These conclusions seem also to apply to the lack of a viable channel for dissenting voices to be heard.

The first is that although Singapore is a democracy, it is a socialist democratic state. This is far from the democratic ideal in the minds of most people, who are actually really thinking about liberal democracy. So, rather than a hands-off approach, allowing persons rights to develop their own freedoms through social and political means, the socialist democratic state is ‘’[willing] to restrict the political and legal rights of the individual in favour of a perceived social good’.

Secondly, the ‘early years of brute survival’ mentioned by Catherine Lim is, I imagine, referring to the years following Singapore’s independence from British rule. These early years of strict political control and absolute intolerance of dissent coincided with several extremely important socio-political developments in the already-developed states of that time: the hippie movement, and the feminist movement.

These movements were large scale demonstrations by large numbers of people, supported by intellectuals and politicians. They were also extremely powerful in their promotion of rights and freedoms and individualistic thinking. Apart from some tangential references like the Beatles and other musical groups, the movements and their accompanying ethos completely passed the Singaporean society by.

Lastly, the Cold War that persisted between the Western Democracies and the Communist Bloc helped to develop political freedom and liberal rights in the Western Democracies as a reaction toward the heavy-handed quashing of dissent in the Communist Bloc. By demonstrating their lack of fear of dissent, the Western Democracies attempted to one-up the Communist Bloc and in turn gain favour with the world at large.

Singapore, however, stayed largely aloof from the ideological issue, choosing to emphasise its capitalist free markets first, and its draconian laws against supposed commie anti-government interlopers second. This meant that the outside world saw in Singapore what they wanted to see - a friend of Western-style democracy – but neglected to look beyond that to discover the oppressive political environment which continues today, albeit in a slightly diluted form. As such, political freedom was sacrificed for economic progress, because anyone that was thought to even slightly disagree was liable to be branded a communist and sent to prison without trial.

These factors contributed to the lack of awareness amongst Singaporeans of alternative methods of governance, and even less support for them. They also created a society where one is not made aware of the rights one has, but is highly aware of the consequences of transgressing the governments’ rule. And it has also created a society whereby one can speak vehemently about being anti-government, but only whilst drinking Guinness Stout at the coffeeshop or whilst driving a taxicab.

Also, because the government has had such efficient and effective policies regarding the economy, a large proportion of Singaporeans, especially those that grew up in the post-colonial years, feel indebted to the government for their current success. And because economic comfort breeds passivity, there is no motivation for change, nor is there desire to actively pursue one’s rights or freedoms which one did not realize one was entitled to anyway.

Resultantly, not only has there never been a culture of speaking up in the modern state, many Singaporeans either feel grateful to the government, or have been brought up to be grateful by their parents, because anything else would be biting the hand that feeds you.

This lack of a public political forum is non-threatening to the Singaporean society, but only as long as the government in power has only the welfare of its citizens at heart, is uncorrupt, substantially and procedurally fair, a follower of the rule of law, and not given to abuse of power – in other words, perfect.

Anything less would require an active dissenting sector to be the voice of those who are lacking it, to create opportunities for feedback and dialogue, and to allow social and political progression.

No government is perfect, and it is only through dissent can a government look outside its own self-constructed box to view things from another perspective. Without dissent, there can be no improvements. Without dissent, there is no check or balance. Without dissent, there is no liberty.

get rich, or die trying

i used to have a magazine cut-out of a korean-american boy, looking all-american in chinos, t-shirt and cap, being quoted as saying

'i am afraid of not being successful'.

and i agreed with Mr Cut-Out Korean then, and i agree with him still now.

it's not failure that's a problem. failure is good, failure is spectacular and hyperbole. failure is the bang, not the whimper. you can bounce back from failure. failure is the extreme which there is no other choice but up.

mediocrity, on the other hand, is that indescribable chill that runs down the back of my spine. it is boring. it is stagnant. it is arachnophobia where the tarantulas are merely furry animification of my darkest nightmare - of being merely mediocre. it's a black hole that absorbs everything around it, a vortex of empty invisibility.

where else can one go when one is mediocre? it's 'good enough'. it's not failure in any sense, but it sure ain't success either. and yet, it is the no man's land of achievement, and this land is vast and plain. one may travel their whole life in this land of mediocrity and never reach the ends of this sierra of plainness. and although one may have many companions in this journey, one is always alone in their individually personalised mediocrity.

and so it is, with this fear in me, that i scale doggedly up the mountain that is a career, with a bright red flag in hand ready to stake my claim and base camps at convenient intervals to restore regroup and reinvigorate.

because, at the end of the day, i'd like to be able to swan in and out of my job without fear of my financial bearings. i'd like to be able to decide where and when and how. i'd like to call the shots, as they say, and not worry about my next mortgage repayment.

and because i don't want to find myself in my forties hoping my boss will give out bonuses at the end of the year because i could really do with some extra cash.

checks, tartan or gingham?

perhaps all this house-moving is getting to my head.

in my history list of sites visited in the past few days, all i see is martha stewart, digs magazine and BBC Gardening.

all this domesticity is beginning to scare me.

i mean, how am i supposed to find the time to make new slipcovers when i'm supposed to be out in the garden pruning back the rose bushes or repainting my walls in some visually-arresting colour to make my room seem more interesting?

and all that on top of going to school and doing my readings and attempting to write essays.

no wonder women are going to take 200 years to break the glass ceiling - we're more concerned with what type of glass it is, whether it lets enough light in, and how clean and shiny it is.

r - e - s - p - what?

y'know, sometimes some people just amaze me.

honestly.

and a lot of the time i don't even know why i bother. all i get is a metaphorical slap in the face without so much as a by your leave.

take a deep breath... hold... and relax

so much for 'being adult about it'. and so much for respect.

tchhhh

car-ride no. 93752

I’m sitting in the car, on the way back from East Sussex and it’s dark so I can’t read. We’re singing songs, or bits and pieces of them, because the car stereo is fucked and it can’t play anything not even the radio.

Before we left you’d said, ‘you’re going to have to keep me entertained’.

So I’m curled up in my seat, watching the different shades of darkness and the red-orange-pink glow of lights in the distance. And I’m trying to remember a song. It starts with ‘if only’ but I can’t remember anything else. And I have a ghost of a tune running in my head, but when I try and catch it, it becomes another song.

And then I give up, and we start reciting bits of poems. You tell me a few lines of Robert Frost, and I tell you how much I dislike Blake. And then I tell you how I want to put chaos into 14 lines, and also how they have lied about time.

But most important of all, I told you about the vegetables and the birds, and about how words are for those with promises to keep.

save the photographers, pt 2

[this started out as a reply to Ivan's comment in the last post, but got much too wordy for the comment box, and has therefore come into its own as a post with more explanation and refinement of the ideas expressed previously.]

Although much of Singaporean legislation is inherited and/or copied wholesale from the UK, the cultural bias is not merely due to the inheritance of the UK's cultural reasons as well because the UK copyright provisions no longer differentiate photographs from other artistic works - they are artistic works full-stop. No exception, no ifs buts maybes or perhaps.

If Singaporean legislators thought that photography was a valid and valuable art form, they could very well have amended the legislation similarly so as to give the same protection to photographs as they do to artistic works in general.

And also note that the NAC and other arts-related governmental bodies or government-related organisations represent those in the 'traditional' arts such as painting, sculpting, drawing, but not photographers.

Photographers don't have any representation at those levels because photography is not seen by the most part of society as an art form, but a technical skill that can be picked up upon by anybody and everybody. Because, obviously anyone can pick up a camera and start taking photographs, but not everyone can buy watercolours and start painting. Like, give me a break.

But, really, what I take offence at is not the cultural bias, because that is a given - legislation generally lags behind social acceptance/recognition (e.g. the continuing illegality of homosexuality in Singapore). What is offensive is that it is the little person (i.e. the photographer) who has to burden him/herself with the responsibility of varying or negotiating a contract for service so as to gain more rights for him/herself.

Under UK legislation, the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 states in section 11(1) that

11.—(1) The author of a work is the first owner of any copyright in it, subject to the following provisions.

(2) Where a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work is made by an employee in the course of his employment, his employer is the first owner of any copyright in the work subject to any agreement to the contrary.

also, under S90(2),

an assignment or other transmission of copyright may be partial, that is, limited so as to apply—
(a) to one or more, but not all, of the things the copyright owner has the exclusive right to do.

There is therefore no other provision for works made under an agreement for valuable consideration, much less one specifically noting that the copyright in photographic works belongs to the person hiring the photographer for that particular job. The photographer is therefore the owner of his works and the copyright within his works unless he is an employee, and even then the rights are negotiable.

If there were similar legislation in Singapore, photographers acting as independent contractors would be in full ownership of their rights. This would enable them to give away/contract for less rights with those hiring them, but not leave them without any copyright as is possible under Singaporean legislation. The burden would then be on the other party to negotiate with the photographer for the permission to use his or her work in particular ways, rather than on the photographer to prevent it.

The funny thing is if, as I mentioned in the previous post, that more and more companies turn to foreign photographers to shoot their campaigns etc, those photographers would not only charge more for their services, but would also retain more rights than any Singaporean photographer is entitled to under the present legislation. But then again, it is because they are foreign and talented that we give them more concessions than locals, right?

So, there are several ways to change the situation. Professional photographers could a professional body to represent them and protect their rights, with accreditation and referencing systems. Or, they could use written standard form contracts which state exactly which rights are given up, for what purposes and for how long.

Or, they could work outside of Singapore and be very established there (case in point: Clang) - go to Europe, they have moral rights on top of copyright - and thus get greater protection, and could also come back to Singapore and charge higher prices whilst retaining more rights because they have overseas experience, and because they are basically the prodigal children returning into the fold and you'd give them anything they wanted to as to prevent another escape.

There's no point whining about the sad state of photography in Singapore unless someone's going to do something about it. And if the photographers in Singapore could look at the wider picture rather than be concerned solely with their own rice-bowls (of course it's important, but other things matter too), perhaps some joint effort would result in great leaps and bounds in copyright protection for photographers and their works.

If they don't save themselves, who will?

save the photographers

When a law student studying intellectual property and her photographer best friend get together, what else would be discussed except copyright protection and the lack thereof in Singapore.

Copyright is infamous for being culturally biased, and in the context of photography, the genre has only been accepted recently as an ‘artistic work’ – which is defined as ‘a painting, sculpture, drawing, engraving or photograph’ (S7(1) Copyright Act).

However, artistic work or not, the statutory regime seems to treat photography as a second-class genre of an artistic work, with different sections dealing separately with artistic work and photography especially when it comes to authorship and owning of copyright.

S30(5) of the Copyright Act states that

where —
(a) a person makes, for valuable consideration, an agreement with another person for the taking of a photograph, the painting or drawing of a portrait or the making of an engraving by the other person; and
(b) the work is made in pursuance of the agreement,
the first-mentioned person shall be entitled to any copyright subsisting in the work by virtue of this Part, except that if the work is required for any particular purpose, that purpose shall be communicated to that other person and that other person shall be entitled to restrain the doing, otherwise than for that particular purpose, of any act comprised in the copyright in the work.

which in simple English means that if a photographer is hired as an independent contractor to carry out a photographic shoot for someone (or some company), that someone (or some company) automatically owns the copyright to the photographers work.

It’s automatic. No questions asked, no need to argue about it. The photographer loses his rights to any photograph taken in return for payment swiftly and immediately.

Seeing as most photographers, in general and in particular, work on the basis of independent hire and contracting, the Copyright Act sure doesn’t give a lot of protection at all to the photographers in Singapore, does it?

Oh sure, S30(3) allows for

The operation of subsection (4), (5) or (6) in relation to copyright in a particular work may be excluded or modified by agreement.

but seriously, how many photographers in Singapore know about this? And how many of them will make use of this? From my observations, many of them are so happy to get a job that considerations of copyright protection only occur later, when they’ve signed their rights away.

Worst of all, because the copyright automatically rests with the person hiring the photographer, the burden thus lies upon the photographer him/herself to modify or exclude the operation of S30(5). Which then gives rise to the issues of how many of them know exactly which rights need to be protected for their best interests, and how many of them are able to bargain with the other party?

Many regard photography as an unmeritorious and purely technical, and it is this perception that results in the downgrading of the photographers right to protect his or her photographic works as seen above. And because many photographers act as independent contractors, they lack the bargaining power that would enable them to negotiate for better deals or better rights. This lack of bargaining power places photographers in a worse position than plumbers.

The best friend was asked to do a shoot for a well-known fashion line which required at least a few days pre- and post- work on top of the shoot itself for $2,000 - which includes transport, equipment hire/rental, studio rental etc etc etc. Out of that sum, he probably only really gets $500? I mean, if you need a plumber to fix your pipes, you’re not exactly going to bargain with the plumber and cut his fees in half or more, are you?

The situation is further exacerbated by the lack of a overall body or an association of photographers which acts on behalf of the photographers in Singapore to educate them of their rights and how to protect them.

Photographers should band together and prevent the exploitation of their works. If all photographers, or a large proportion of them, were given standard form contracts that they could fill in or delete as required, and if all their dealings with others were based upon these standard form contracts, photographers would be able to gain more rights and protection for themselves. This standard form contract would then be recognized as the contract between a photographer and the person hiring his or her services, and would act to the benefit of both parties involved.

Without co-operation, photographers as individual actors will always be shortchanged and unable to exercise fully their rights and creators and authors of their works. Professional photographers will know better than give away all their rights except at premium prices, and Singapore will be left with a huge pool of amateur photographers who are desperate for any job, and will do them at cut-rate prices without reserving any of their rights at all. You get what you pay for, so cheapskate companies will get lousy photographers and lousy work, which then leads to the companies hiring foreign photographers for the job at higher prices (because they're foreign talent, y'know?), and less jobs for local photographers, thus making them more desperate thus perpetuating a never-ending vicious cycle.

if the situation does end up that way, alarm bells should ring, and church bells should toll, for the death of Singaporean photography is nigh.

long live Singaporean photography, god save Singaporean photography.

house hunting is a chore

oh god i'm so tired of looking for places to live.

are ALL estate agents annoying as hell, and superduper totally type-A personalities? why do they all have screensavers of Jaguars and Mercedes SLKs? and why do they keep showing me totally shitty places when i'm so obvious at my dislike of the other 83837401 places that they've already shown me that are almost exactly the same as the one they're showing me? how many times must i curl my upper lip into a sneer and then re-compose myself to say in the politest tones ever that no, i don't think this place is right for me?

i think i'm just going to put in an offer for this one place that i viewed the other day. it's not perfect, but it's pretty good. i'll have to pay overlapping rent for the most part of February, but it's okay. it doesn't have a garden, but it's got a hugeass balcony so that makes up for it. it's not a nice pretty victorian conversion, but it's surrounded by them, so that's alright. it's not particularly near any nice parks, but it's got 2 squares minutes away from it with benches and everything, so that's rather nice.

and y'know, really, i just can't be bothered anymore.

the end is the beginning

between the last post and now, i have

• learnt to make crackling
• cooked boxing day dinner for 10
• using my new favourite kitchen toy, a mezzaluna
• tramped around in 6inches of pure white snow
• helped to make a snowman for the first time in my life
• spoken to my parents twice in a week (a record!)
• and also to every other member of my nuclear family for the first time in months
• apart from actual sleeping, spent the equivalent of 3 days lying in bed watching teevee or reading
• watched the whole of season 1 of M*A*S*H on dvd
• watched most of season 1 of Northern Exposure on videotape
• read 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle' by Haruki Murakami
• and also 'Snobs' by Julian Fellowes
• and am halfway through 'Anansi Boys' by Neil Gaiman
• played Murder Mystery on New Year's Eve
• following which learnt that red wine, brandy and cava are NOT a good mix
• but wintermelon, carrots, onions and split red lentils are brilliant together for soup, especially because my wisdom tooth is cutting my gums and the inside of my cheek
• smoked the last of my duty-free cigarettes
• etc etc etc

and so here are the things i ought to do in 2006

• graduate from university with sufficient enough honours
• completely remove gluten from my diet
• make more long distance calls
• have fun with the best friend when he moves to london in february
• introduce best friend to everyone
• move house/flat to somewhere in east london
• travel around england and wales more
• return to singapore sometime or other for a visit
• learn how to plant/garden in containers
• get to know more people, especially people i like
• stop smoking, or at least restrict it to social occasions
• make better use of my library membership
• learn how to negotiate with landlords and lettings agents
• cycle as much as possible
• be less critical and dismissive of my fellow humans
• oh, and of course single-handedly eradicate poverty and conflict, correct climate change, revoke all laws restricting freedom of information and speech and expression and/or only allow the narrowest interpretations of 'national interest' or 'national security', and become the first female prime minister of singapore - well, we can dream, can't we?

hope the last week has been as gluttonous and slothful and as filled with alcohol and bad behaviour as mine has been.

onwards ho!