Immigration is a Four Letter Word

It undoubtedly is to every expatriate worker I've ever met in Indonesia, the overwhelming majority of whom are regular people whose only ambitions are to enjoy the experience of living in a foreign country and earn an honest salary. Some go home after a year, but many stay for much longer, marry Indonesian citizens and persevere in the face of a system that has been designed to ensnare people with red tape in one way or another. 

I am a long time resident of this country, indeed I am half-Indonesian, making my son three-quarters Indonesian, however, while these factors would seem like normal claims to automatic acceptance by a country's government in a reasonable world, the reality of our surroundings is quite different. My son is eligible for dual citizenship until he is aged eighteen after which point he must decide between East and West, and as far as I can tell, I'm eligible for eternal visa renewals. While Alex's dual citizenship papers are pending, he must also get renewals. The convolution of the way things have been set up means that companies - like my own - who are charged with sorting out papers for their employees ,outsource the work to third-party agents who have experience dealing with such matters, and presumably know how much grease to apply to which wheels.

One of V.S. Naipaul's travel books about India, An Area of Darkness, includes an unforgettable passage describing his efforts to retrieve some spirits which had been confiscated by customs and excise. I got the distinct impression that he went through with the exercise - which were enormously distressing - to find material for his book, either that or he is extremely fond of his drink. Not having the same gift for illustrative prose as Mr Naipaul, I won't go into all the details of my very recent travails with the Indonesian Immigrasi. While there has been less sweat and tears involved so far, what's at stake for me isn't a couple of bottles of hard stuff (although I felt like some during the immediate aftermath) but rather being able to continue living in the country I've called home for most of my adult life. In my case you could say the immigration were in fact playing by the rules, but the rules which they themselves created are so byzantine and, at times, utterly nonsensical, one hardly feels like vindicating them of any blame. 

My father, himself no stranger to the perils of the abovementioned bureaucracy,  has long argued that the best thing to do would be to open borders and allow people to move from one country to another as they pleased, as was the case as recently as the last century for much of the world. In principle, I believe this solution, as Utopian as it may seem, would solve a lot of problems. However, modern day forms of transportation and communication are space aged when compared to the equivalents used by our ancestors of the early 1900s. Nowadays the internet has made the world an increasingly transparent place to live, and long-haul air-travel is available to all but the poorest of the poor. Without the usual demands placed on visitors to have a reasonable purpose for an extended stay in a country, a likely eventuality is great armies of the downtrodden fleeing areas of widespread hardship to turn up on the doorsteps of perhaps...Costa Rica? I can also actively imagine a world without frontiers quickly making the members of the British National Party appear to be heroes in their midst, whose warnings should have been heeded long ago. As despite my own disinclination to live there, the allures of the UK for those hitherto residing in poorly governed states are still many and varied. On the same note, Singapore would probably just collapse into the sea under the weight of all the soul-weary dissidents of nations nearby controlled by malignant despots. 

But I digress, because this is not my lot. 

When not faced with the throes of immigration (at least once a year), I live a reasonably comfortable, lower middle-class existence in Indonesia. The weather and the people agree with me as do many other aspects of my life here. And I feel that I can tolerate other bureaucratic machines as being part and parcel of modern life. All the bits of paper that we must keep safely around the house to prove this, that, or the other. The endless forms that must be filled out, which often include a telephone number or an address being given to an office who can't feasibly have any good use for it. But the madness imposed when it comes to my simply being here confound me. I have a job with a respectable organization, and it is one that very few Indonesian citizens are able to do. I don't have a criminal record nor do I have any intention of starting one. I have already mentioned our ethnicity, but it seems worth reiterating: I am half-Indonesian and my son is three-quarters Indonesian. I have lived in Indonesian continuously for the last ten years, he has never lived anywhere else. Why must I jump through hoops once a year, with the constant fear of falling into a fire? Why can't it be a simple matter of filling in some forms and paying a listed fee?

Indonesia's revenue offices recently went through a great deal of reform, where they wisely decided to forgive all prior tax evasions, and start afresh (a policy popularized by Nelson Mandela, I believe). Despite the odd national scandal involving their employees since the start of their reforms, I believe they have a fair chance of ultimately gaining a full commitment from the public. Why? Because their design and implementation are based on commonsense. The process is fairly transparent, and great pains have been taken by officials with a socialization programme, which has included presentations to employees at private sector companies. Most people concerned know what to do, and how to do it. The same cannot be said of the immigration department at all. In fact, most people I know are divided as to even what type of visa they should be in possession of, and very few expats know how to get any kind of visa, instead relying on the previously mentioned intermediaries to get the job done. Much of the time, we have to go an Indonesian embassy in another country to get our visas. This means we have to visit Indonesian immigration officials in other countries so that we may continue residing in Indonesia itself, which I'm sure most people will agree is patently ridiculous.

As tax officials have been saying in their public service ads aimed at tax evaders: Apa kata dunia? or loosely translated: What would the rest of the world say?

I still worship at the Temple

The music of our youth is that which remains with us. Some time soon after the invention of radio, popular tunes found their way into our homes, and could be easily listened to repeatedly, allowing us to liken them to some kind of living entity with the ability to provide comfort or sorrow, or indeed, comfort us during our sorrow.

Since I was very young I have been a packrat when it comes to the popular arts, and as a teenager I had hundreds of CDs and cassettes lying around my bedroom. I went through different phases when it came to genre, and for lack of a better word, I have ended up with 'eclectic' tastes in music. But some of those albums which were in heavy rotation during those desolate teenage years are the ones whose impact, for better or worse, I can't shake away. Unlike many of my high school contemporaries, I shied away from danceable music, and generally anything with lyrics whose shallowness felt foreign to me. Instead I veered toward the more angst-ridden sounds (which some would say were merely boring and depressing) of electrified rock.

I became interested in the surge of music emanating from a rainy city in America during the early '90s. Despite the forerunners among the bands from Seattle being quite different to one another stylistically speaking - Nirvana, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, Pearl Jam, Sonic Youth - they were all unfortunately lumped together as either 'grunge' or 'alternative' music. Seattle Invasion might have been more appropriate, although genres and sub-genres are restricting, especially if one is looking for discrete qualities in a band. 

One thing that the above kind of recognized movement does help to do is sell records, because it led abstract materialists such as myself to try and find all the associated albums. This was a bit more difficult during the pre-iTunes era, but given the difficulties involved, there was a greater deal of satisfaction to be found with each purchase, and it's also possibly true that greater attention was given to each CD bought; they were listened to many times over before a final verdict on their worth was pronounced.

Among the bands listed above, my favourites were Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. Mainly I was enamoured by their singers and their songwriting, not yet being in the habit of dissecting all the individual elements of a recording - it's a little sad that as we grow up we learn to stop taking our entertainment at face value, and have to puzzle over the deeper meaning. When I learned that members from both bands had collaborated on a project album, I knew I had to have it, especially after seeing a music video of one of the album's songs on MTV. The eponymous album was Temple of the Dog and the song was Hunger Strike:

I don't mind stealing bread

From the mouths of decadence

But I can't feed on the powerless

When my cups already overfilled

But it's on the table 

The fire's cooking

And they're farming babies

While slaves are working

Blood is on the table

Mouths are choking

I'm growing hungry

I can't pretend to claim that I know what the above lyric by Chris Cornell means, but when he and Eddie Vedder sang these words together it had a hypnotizing effect on me - then and now. Especially when Cornell wails in the kind of high pitched voice only found among male rock singers, I'm going hungry! I didn't know what it meant, but I knew it meant something. It was around this time that I had a wise English teacher who posited to us his theory that the reason conventional poetry wasn't popular among young people anymore was because we had poetry in our music. I think it's safe to assume that such a theory wouldn't sit well with serious students of poetry, but it is one that I find myself comfortable with, especially given my own frustrations when trying to immerse myself in the kind of verse that doesn't come with an unhappy man to belt it out in song form.

I acquired the Temple of the Dog CD (three times over the years as it happens, to replace lost copies), and discovered that I could listen to it start to finish, again and again, without my interest ever waning. I learned that it was a project for which Cornell was largely responsible, and it was meant to honor a fallen light of the Seattle music scene - Andrew Wood, of Mother Love Bone - who had died from a heroin overdose. This knowledge served to make the songs ever more poignant to my impressionable teenage self. The line-up of the album was:

Chris Cornell (Soundgarden, Audioslave) - vocals, guitar

Jeff Ament (Pearl Jam) - bass

Stone Gossard (Pearl Jam) - guitar

Mike McCready (Pearl Jam) - guitar

Matt Cameron (Soundgarden, Pearl Jam) - drums

Eddie Vedder (Pearl Jam) - vocals

The opening track, Say Hello 2 Heaven, states the theme of the album in painfully explicit terms:

Please, mother mercy

Take me from this place

And the long winded curses

I hear in my head

Words never listen

And teachers, oh, they never learn

Now I'm warm from the candle

Though I feel too cold to burn

He came from an island

But he died on the streets

And he hurt so bad like a soul breaking

But he never said nothing to me

So say hello to heaven

Words that now made more sense knowing the background story, and again Cornell's soaring voice seemed to touch the heavens themselves, especially on nights when company was in scant supply. McCready's guitar solo, with its Hendrix inspired progressions were a perfect complement. Our house was quite large and I had my own bedroom so I usually joined in with my own belting. I felt like a tortured rock star.

It wasn't all misery guts though. Song number two, Reach Down, involved an extended jam session of a kind not common in the mainstream music of the '90s, and more reminiscent of a live set by Cream. Also atypical of the popular music of the day was the allowed showcasing of the virtuoso drumming and bass playing of Cameron and Ament. Cameron's jazz infused beats and fills, and Ament's monster bass sound, using an arsenal of instruments perhaps only bested by the likes of Les Claypool, were not content with being relegated to the traditional role of a rock rhythm section. 

Another stand-out track, in an album without a moment of filler, is Times of Trouble:

When the spoon is hot and the needle's shot

Again telling us explicitly what was going through the mind of the lyricist, yet its chorus happily gets more ethereal:

I started singing, swinging you mother's sword

I know you're playing, sometimes the rules get hard  

I think it was this song which really drove home the ideal for me that my kind of 'poetry' was not easily deciphered, if at all. Perhaps all that matters are phonetics. I don't really know, and hate to dwell. 

In my twenties I went through a phase where I barely listened to music at all. For some reason most of the time it seemed like a chore to sit down and appreciate a whole album. While I was able to join in the timeless debate of good taste, and determine what I thought was good or bad, there was something preventing me from enjoying music as I did when I was a teenager. I think part of me just didn't want to be that adversely affected by song anymore, and become overly in touch with the tragedy that can be life. There were some exceptions, notably the complex jazz tapestries of Pat Metheny and the deeply grief-stricken voice of the never to be duplicated Billie Holiday. The latter's uniqueness is perhaps best exemplified by Diana Ross's portrayal of her in the very weak biopic, Lady Sings the Blues, and her misguided choice to sing Lady Day's songs herself.

I have since begun listening to music again on a daily basis, and have found that there is far too much out there which is good to listen to. Indeed, my tastes are still 'eclectic'. Long bus rides to work and back are best taken in the company of an MP3 player, although the roar of a bus's engine can sometimes mean that the more intricate riffing of Charlie Parker can become slightly muffled. However, I've never been able to recapture those wild emotions that welled up inside me when listening those sometimes angry, sometimes sad, musicians who put out albums when I was younger. Perhaps it is just as well, as there was definitely a form of sensory masochism being practiced, despite there also being the potential to concurrently heighten one's sensitivity to the world at large. So, it is with mixed feelings of relief and regret that I now listen to a touching song and linger on its beauty, rather than wallow in its pain.

Thickened Water

nWhile I was staying at my parent's home over the Idul Fitri holiday, my father and I engaged in the sort of armchair philosophy so typical of adults who have relatively few hardships directly affecting them. One comment made by my father captured my thoughts; likely because a similar train had already been lurking there for some time. He quoted someone (possibly a philosopher who actually had an office to work out of) who said something about life's best purpose being to reproduce. My father seemed to have some disdain for the notion that this is all there is and we had a brief debate on the subject, drinking tea, eating dates, my legs definitely being propped up on the furniture - they almost always are when I'm at home. My contention being that to nurture another human life, rather than to reproduce one, might possibly be the highest purpose there is. I have fewer than half the years my father has, but the advent of my son was a transformative episode in my life. Things being what they were, a great deal of his care giving was left to me. Our codependency has remained steadfast, and while I am happy for the odd break, it only takes a few days without him before my thoughts start to drift toward a strange pointlessness hanging in the air.

Mother and Child

My selection of new films to watch rarely has anything to do with being attracted to a certain type of story or genre, and usually has everything to do with the people involved in its production, most significantly directors, scriptwriters and actors. Last night I had the opportunity to sit down to the above title written and directed by Rodrigo Garcia and starring Annette Bening, Naomi Watts and a name only vaguely familiar to me; Kerry Washington. What had piqued my curiosity the most was Garcia's involvement, having sat with quiet fascination through the first season of HBO's In Treatment, an Israeli programme adapted for English speaking audiences by Garcia. The minimalist aspect of the show - each episode is simply the same psychoanalyst interviewing a different one of his patients - made its stealthy power all the more impressive, and I was surprised by how addictive it became.

The theme running through Mother and Child is adoption. I have a fixed opinion on this matter, that being that more people should adopt and that all the many expensive tools medical science now has at its disposal should only be considered after attempts to adopt have failed. And indeed, if a couple is not able to secure an adoption given the inexhaustible number of deserving cases out there, one wonders whether they are right for parenthood. However, I take it that in the developed world the terms of an adoption can be rigorous, so perhaps that last comment is unfair. Surprisingly, for myself, every adult whom I've ever broached the subject with has an opposing view to mine. This strong need to leave a genetic imprint lying around after you're gone, or have the family name carried on, is one whose reason escapes me. Nature versus nurture is something I'm not qualified to discuss, but I can't help think that the most important and rewarding part of child rearing is time spent together when you are able to impart your own flawed wisdom on another human being. Obviously I can't speak for all the women who say childbirth was the most joyous occasion of their lives, but any male friend I've spoken to, interested in starting a family, has also had this strange urge to create a miniature replica of himself. And such is the attitude of one of the male characters in the film in question.

What are the things we value the most in our increasingly global society? Knowledge, power, success, fame. Like precious metals, the more difficult something is to attain, the more we praise its worth, whereas to invest oneself in family has a mundane ring to it, despite the fact that there is almost always no small amount of hard work and sacrifice involved.

Two of the female leads in Mother and Child, as played by Bening and Watts, live lives that are defined by a single tragic act. Bening's character having given up Watts's for adoption at the age of fourteen. Neither women can live normal lives because of the mutual loss incurred. Neither of them have the ability to form lasting relationships, whereas Bening's character, now approaching middle age, is beginning to realize that hers is no way to live a life. Watts, on the other hand, is determined to be so independent as to be downright cruel to the innocent bystander who might attempt entry into her personal life. Maybe because they are both attractive and successful women, they are not short of men willing to take up the initially unrewarding challenge. Jimmy Smits plays one of Bening's coworkers who is remarkable in his kindness and patience towards her, and it would seem that he must have spotted something deeper lurking beneath her facade of anti-socialism to take such pains to learn more about her.

Washington is a mother desperately seeking to adopt, and one who deserves to be rewarded. This rich tableaux of characters as painted with dexterous elegance by Garcia also includes Samuel L. Jackson and Cherry Jones in pivotal roles. While this method of using a large number of characters whose lives overlap in one way or another can often be gimmicky, Garcia has managed to utilize every actor to good effect, and there doesn't appear to be a moment of wasted dialogue.

The film ostensibly has some of the hallmarks of a crowd-pleasing tearjerker, but it runs far deeper than that, observing the motives and ramifications of adoption. Instead of delivering easy answers, Garcia has stepped back a little from his characters to be non-judgmental; acknowledging them as regular people, warts and all. When the battered lives of all three women finally intersect, after much bitterness and false hope, what transpires is not a plot pay-off so to speak, although it may seem as though it steps outside the harsh reality which preceded it a little, possibly to offer a picture of what is possible when our societal boxes come in more adjustable sizes.

Green for Alastair

A few years ago my now octogenarian father, having long observed my all consuming interest in films old and new, asked that I seek out a film entitled Green for Danger. This was his most fondly remembered title starring Alastair Sim, a name at the time unfamiliar to me. Although, soon after looking up the film on Amazon, and Sim himself on Imdb, I realized that his was easily the most memorable dramatic turn in Alfred Hitchcock's Stage Fright - this in a Hitchcock film starring Marlene Dietrich. If I'm not mistaken, they share no screen time together in that title, and I found myself feeling impatient with Dietrich's trademark histrionics. Whether intentional or not, her character's hinting toward the plot's denouement, long before it happens, helped spoil the story for me.

I am very likely to get this story wrong, but my father's special interest in Sim is largely because the then very famous British actor was the rector of Edinburgh University while my father was a student there. At one point he delivered an address to the student body which was notable not only for its clarity, but also for Sim's ability to captivate an audience, holding them spellbound. I'm not sure my father even remembers the speech's content, he certainly doesn't mention it in the telling of the anecdote; its point being the lasting impact an orator can have when he makes proper use of his gift.

We watched Green for Danger together, and despite the Network DVD release which I acquired not having the best AV quality, we were both able to thoroughly enjoy it. On first viewing the film's manner of gently telling a murder mystery struck me as not having a modern day counterpart. The cinema of today has a tendency to alternate between serious depictions of violence which involve blood and guts splattered across a screen as well as not so serious depictions of violence which also involve blood and guts splattered across a screen. Since I first bought and watched this overlooked classic by Sidney Gilliat, it has also been released by the Criterion Collection. I haven't had the privilege of watching the latter version, but judging by the numerous superlative Criterion editions I have watched, it will be the one to best appreciate the nuances of dialogue in the film, especially as enunciated by Sim himself.

In the years that have passed since that first experience of watching one of Sim's films with prior expectations, and my eyes looking out for the man's on-screen presence, I've noticed him as the titular protagonist of Scrooge and the hilarious, corrupt bishop in The Ruling Class. I also went back to Green for Danger which cheered me up on a particularly gloomy day.

Which brings me to the present.

Yesterday I arrived home after several pleasant days in the restorative climate of my parent's home in Central Java. The journey home meant an exhausting six-hour train ride spent solely in the company of my wildly energetic six year-old son. We started out long before the break of dawn, and he only saw fit to grab about ten minutes of sleep during those six hours. As soon as we got home, he demanded that he be allowed to go out to play with the neighbour's children (four days away apparently being enough to make the heart grow much fonder). Their parent's kicked him out after about an hour which usually happens because they are children more prone to restfulness, and unlike young Alexander, are given to taking siestas. So we were left to entertain each other for a few more hours while he behaved in a way that could generously be described as 'lively'. Finally, at about the same time, both he and the sun began to fade, and to deal with my by now thoroughly knackered state, I turned to my own personal comfort food: the vintage comedy.

Among my voluminous supply of unwatched movies, calling out for attention, was The Green Man directed by Robert Day, and of course starring Mr Sim. Five minutes into the film, I was interrupted by a routine telephone call from my father, to inquire after our well-being. I happened to mention to him what I was engaged in, commenting that the film starred a very 'young Alastair Sim'. Therefore, I was surprised to learn from Imdb today that Green Man was actually produced in 1956 - around the middle of Sim's career. Despite the make-up that is inevitably employed, I largely attribute this kind of ability to youth or age one's self to acting.

The film itself could have easily been written off as a skillful, and very enjoyable, attempt to mimic the screwball comedies so popular in Hollywood during the '30s and '40s. My personal favourite being George Cukor's The Philadelphia Story starring Carey Grant, James Stewart and Katherine Hepburn.

However, Green Man visits places that were decidedly foreign to big studio Hollywood. Especially post-'30s when the Hays code began to censor segments of movies which it felt were leading American youth to moral bankruptcy. The plot of Green Man is thoroughly implausible and hardly worth reiterating - a standard feature of the screwball comedy. What sets it apart is its usage of morbidity as a humorous device. Not only does Sim play a terrorist in the film, but a dichotomy exists within the plot, whereby while more heroic leads are introduced later on, it is Sim who opens the proceedings, dominates much of the first half, and continues to receive importance equal to those of the non-villains for the duration. When Sim appears to get his just desserts close to the end, it seems to be a tacked on scene to appease the moralists in the audience. Indeed, this viewer (who has no love for bombings), would have been just as satisfied if the terrorist had been allowed to ride off into the sunset with his bombs, but that may have been a scene too far in 1956.

Based on my experience watching films from the '50s, the allowance of not just a villain, but also a remorseless assassin to have such a prominent, sympathetic role in a film makes Green Man exceptional. It seems unlikely that it would have been possible for such a work to receive financial backing or an enthusiastic public reaction had it not been for the inimitable charm of Alastair Sim. One indelible scene that had me laughing aloud, alone in the dark, was Sim's receipt of a distressing telephone call from his fiance. Despite being a scene of a telephone call, the dialogue was largely irrelevant as I focused my gaze on the assortment of facial tics which Sim managed to produce - with devastating comic timing.  He was most certainly a physical actor, and this was not just relegated to his face, as his lanky frame would come alive in its entirety when a scene demanded it. In today's films I miss physical comedy typical of silent giants such as Keaton and Chaplin. The modern director often has a hard time making it past facial movement, and it is becoming increasingly true that such faces must be beautiful without room left for faces that are just plain interesting. It's difficult to believe that the likes of Humphrey Bogart would be able to become the icon that he continues to be, were he to have started acting somewhere toward the end of the last millennium, never mind Sim's looks which were so readily poised for comic expressions, yet not liable to land him on the cover of a magazine aimed at screaming young girls.  

Looking down Alastair Sim's filmography I find that all of his films which I have yet to watch are titles unfamiliar to me. This is regrettable, as a lack of notoriety generally means a lack of availability when it comes to home video and I am certain that each and every one of the films he did make are worth watching for his performance in them alone.

Unequal Violence

Last night I revisited Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, Volumes 1 and  2, more or less in one sitting. That is close to four hours of viewing pleasure, with very liberal helpings of martial arts scenes that have graphic outcomes. The films, as one entity, even merit a listing on Time Magazine's Top 10 Ridiculously Violent Movies, although the list failed to mention that the films are also heavily laced with Tarantino's idiosyncratic dialogue - a highlight of all of his movies. Volume 2 is so filled with long scenes of talking that I doubt it is universally loved by action fans. Granted, it was a cyber list, so each entry was given a mere paragraph of description, but while Time was able to point to the genres that inspired Kill Bill; kung-fu, '70s exploitation and spaghetti westerns, again it neglected to point out Tarantino's melding of influences into a singular vision, which easily rises above his muses in terms of sophistication. Although, the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone put him at least on par with Tarantino as a grand stager of exhibitionism.

Am I a lover of violence? The short answer would be no. If not, why did I put myself through films which are so violent as to turn up on a list honoring this quality, for a second time? The simple answer to that would be I'd read the list and remembered that a friend leaving the country had bequeathed to me a small cache of DVDs, amongst them being the ones in question. I'd also recently revisited The Matrix Trilogy and in those films had mostly admired the production design and the highly elaborate, science-fictionalized scenes of kung-fu. Everything else that lies in The Matrix is the subject for another blog post. The kung-fu  in both The Matrix and Kill Bill movies was choreographed by Chinese master Woo-ping Yuen, and yesterday being a public holiday, I also had time to sit down to his directorial effort from '93 - Iron Monkey, which is also filled with scenes of stylized martial arts. So it would seem that despite my brief disclaimer at the beginning of this paragraph, all evidence points to my having had something of a blood lust to satisfy during the last week or so. At no time did I recoil in horror when watching on screen characters get beaten to a bloody pulp. Kill Bill especially provided such treats as a woman getting her eyeball ripped out of its socket during one of its numerous, blood soaked, fighting contests. In fact I have to say that I enjoyed all of these films, and I would add that it's my contention that Kill Bill will become a bona fide classic when it is old enough to deserve such cachet.

But now I would like to go back in time a few years - I'm fairly certain it was 2004. The title on the tongues of many a cineaste was Gaspar Noé's Irreversible, also on the abovementioned Time list. This was violence of a completely different nature. That most attractive and talented Italian star Monica Belluci starred with her husband Vincent Cassel in a rape/revenge where the rape scene was reported to be unprecedentedly graphic and seven minutes in length. As if that weren't enough to get them flocking to the cinema in droves, everything happened backwards, so that you got the revenge before the rape. It just so happened that shortly after I'd been reading all about Irreversible and discussing it with a friend, Paraic (who, it has to be said, was a little keener on watching it than I was), I had to go to the Indonesian embassy in Singapore to get my work permit. Now if ever such a title were to make it to Jakarta's cinemas, the copious nudity would be truncated, thus rendering a trip to see it a pointless exercise. However, to my surprise, the Singaporean censor had seemed to have relaxed its puritanical mindset recently, and Irreversible was playing. Indeed, my friend Paul living in Singapore had been to see it and he 'recommended' going to watch it, providing ample warning of its brutality. As did all the signs up next to its posters at the cinema. As did even the man working the box office. I have to say, I was apprehensive about setting foot in the theatre at this stage, and it is likely that my 2010 self would just walk away and seek out reruns of The Cosby Show on television to watch instead. The main reason for going, I think, was that my 2004 self had a burning urge to compete with Paraic for cinematic experiences, and it would clearly be something to talk about when I got back to Java. I knew he wanted to see the movie, but would have close to zero chance of ever seeing it in a cinema.

So I watched the film.

Not only was it chronologically backwards, not only did it contain the most horrific episodes I have ever seen before or since, but it also made extensive, and possibly unique, use of 'queasy-cam'. I am highly susceptible to motion sickness, and the latter device has induced great waves of nausea within me during the viewing of far more innocuous titles. As if all of this weren't enough, Mr Noé's soundtrack choices made use of noises set at 28Hz (almost inaudible) with the express intention of making people feel sick. It was and continues to be the only time I have had to turn away during a trip to the cinema, because I couldn't stomach what was happening on screen. In short, the film was severely damaging to both my senses and sensibilities. For the rest of the day, I wandered around Orchard Road before going back to my hotel, waiting for Paul to finish work, feeling quite ill and disenchanted with it all, only thankful for the small blessing that Bill Cosby did indeed pop up on my hotel room's television, making life seem less harsh for approximately 20 minutes. When Paul was finally ready for a beer, we discussed the 97 minutes of soul wrenching I had endured earlier in the day.

Neither then nor now have I been able reach a definitive verdict as to Irreversible's place in the annals of cinema, and I have no desire for reevaluation. But it must be deemed to have achieved a certain measure of success, as it has done what any serious attempt at art should be able to do; it made people talk about it. Even now, six years later, its intentions as cinema still swirl around in my mind:

Backwards 

Reversing the series of events and letting us see the brutal act of revenge before witnessing the brutality it is avenging made both events seem equally unpalatable. The notion that 'he got what he deserved' never entered my mind.

Graphic to the extreme 

Meant that the violence truly was violence, utterly abhorrent, and therefore could not exist as entertainment. So is it art by default ?

Which brings me back to where we came in, with the other kind of violence in films that is both highly entertaining, and has also been lauded as art by respected authorities. The likes of Kill Bill, and possibly Tarantino's entire oeuvre should most definitely be kept from the eyes of young children, while adults such as myself  should be allowed to make our own informed choices, then label them as art if we see fit. But I do mean informed. My first viewing of Kill Bill Volume 1 was in a cinema in the company of a pregnant woman - who I don't think has ever forgiven me for the experience, and if we had been given better information about the explicitness it contained, she might have bowed out before buying her ticket. Just because fantasy violence is less disturbing (to some) than realistic violence, why shouldn't it come with the same kinds of spoken and written warnings that a film such as Irreversible did?

In the documentary about the Motion Picture Association of America and its capricious attitude toward censorship This Film is Not Yet Rated, the highly acclaimed director Darren Aronofsky (π, Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler) is memorable when he is interviewed and puts forward the theory that cartoonish violence is the kind to which access should be restricted whereas realistic violence should have fewer barriers in place to prevent its dispersion. I couldn't help but agree with him, up to a point.

I try my best to wait for my six year-old son to be out of our flat before I sit down to watch something that I know will have extended/explicit scenes of violence, and I don't see much difference between endless rounds of machine gun fire and empty-handed combat. My belief is that unrealistic violence as seen by a six year-old could contribute to an understanding that inflicted pain is inconsequential. But then to allow scenes of brutality to enter the flatscreen which I myself have trouble witnessing while he is around? While there is a certain logic to educating about violence by showing its consequences, there could also be such a thing as too much reality, too soon.

I have so far not been able to bring myself to put on Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom nor Lars von Trier's Antichrist, despite having huge admiration for these director's other works (most of those that I've seen are things of beauty, and all have been devoid of gore), and fully believing that their intention with the aforementioned titles was not to create infamous video nasties, despite many a renters probable desire to see something shocking.

Which is the real problem. The culprits are not the movies themselves, but rather the people who watch them. Pasolini was a fringe character; a homosexual Marxist in a time and place where these traits were most unacceptable, murdered in what was probably a sexual encounter with a stranger gone awry. During his shortened life he created some deeply introspective pieces of Italian cinema, including his direction of a superbly endearing Anna Magnani as the titular prostitute of Mamma Roma, and what is regarded by many as the superlative Christ biopic - The Gospel According to Matthew. Both of these titles are as arthouse as can be - and not the revisionist exploitation kind. Yet the film that Pasolini has been remembered the most for is the one that I can't seem to sum up the courage to slip into my DVD player: Salò. I find it difficult to believe that all the people who seek out this title do it because they're interested in the plight of Italian peasants under fascist rule - and it is well publicized that this is what Pasolini found the Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom analogous to. Instead, there is little doubt in my mind that the reason Salò is a relatively easy disc to buy at Jakarta's bootleg markets, next to clearly less nobly minded flights of horror fancy, is because of what it has in common with these other shockers, and not for what it doesn't.

Obviously we cannot regulate taste, and even if we could, we shouldn't. Therefore, we must regulate the media itself. Here I'm brought back to what Mr Aronofsky had to say on the subject. Why is it that cartoon violence is so easily accessible to our children? I don't mean the slapstick of Tom & Jerry, which is so far removed from any kind of reality that I find it highly unlikely to have any kind of damaging effect. But there are other more lifelike cartoons out there, aimed at primary school-aged children, where characters shoot guns at each other and engage in hand-to-hand combat. There are also plenty of feature films with stories obviously directed at small children, yet containing similar scenes of fantastical action.

There aren't easy answers to such questions, and I certainly don't have a point by point plan which I could offer to the people in charge. However, whenever I watch any kind of action on screen, I remind myself that pain exists, and that a violent death is one of my chief fears in life. I do believe that some of the titles I have mentioned above only serve to reinforce such values, though they are strictly not for young children. While the vast majority of Joe public may well be interested in perverse pleasure at the outset, I believe that same majority will glean a small amount of indelible revulsion to physical cruelty after watching it expertly and realistically rendered, then followed - or preceded - by its aftermath.

An Unsharpened Perspective of Traffic Congestion in Jakarta

aLocal media here in Jakarta has devoted much time in the last few weeks to a problem which the city administration has been focusing on. A problem which any sane person would have deduced long ago was the problem most worth spending time and resources on. It would seem that in recent years the ridiculous spike in the number of two-wheeled vehicles hitting the streets, thanks to increasingly friendly financing schemes, has allowed those who travel around in private automobiles to turn around and say, 'we've got to do something about all these motorbikes bottlenecking the roads'. It doesn't take an overly logical train of thought to reach the following conclusions: a) those who have benefited the most from motorcycle sales are those who are chauffeur driven around the city in luxury cars and b) private cars are still the worst problem out there; that they are slightly more attractive to look at and much safer doesn't alter the fact that the worst traffic jams are caused by endless lines of cars containing their driver alone.

From what I've read, the recent special brainstorming session to combat traffic congestion, involving various related government personnel, could be best described as how to expensively state the bloody obvious. As a daily user of the busway, and other forms of public transport available in the city, I feel vaguely qualified to state my own opinions on the issue. The internet is chock full of lists already, and they can be annoying, but I feel a list is a useful way of trying to articulate what will ultimately still be an unsharpened viewpoint.

1. Forget about other forms of public transport and keep developing the busway

The busway obviously has plenty of friends, the fact that it is so popular is evidence enough. However, its detractors are many and varied. In such instances, I can't help but be suspicious of powerful individuals with agendas working behind the scenes to derail a public project for the greater good. One commonly voiced complaint that rallies much support is that the busway's dedicated lane means worse traffic in other lanes. Again, it doesn't require a very analytical mind to realize that this is a patently false argument. A quick glance at any backed-up queue of cars in Jakarta will show that most of the cars are occupied by one person, whereas the busway buses, including the articulated bendy buses, are rarely not filled to capacity. Citizens of Jakarta: get out of your cars and on to buses. Those members of the public who think a more agreeable alternative is a mass rapid underground train service, as has been scheduled for construction, don't seem to be wearing their thinking caps. If they are worried that traffic got bad when the busway lanes were under development, wait till they see what happens when an enormous network of tunnels is being built under the city.

In a city where infrastructure has crossed the minds of those in charge so late in the day, the busway is the only option that makes sense. So what if it pushes private motorists off the road? Isn't that part of the overall objective?

2. Tax them

I have met both motorcycle and automobile owners in Indonesia who consider themselves to be 'poor'. It is possible that such groups of people face cash flow problems, and it is also possible that they don't spend their Saturday nights eating swordfish soup, but in a country such as Indonesia, they don't quite fit my definition of 'poor'. If you are climbing the vehicle ownership ladder, you are upwardly mobile, albeit at times at a very gradual rate of ascent. I do know that every minimum wage earner I've ever encountered has a first priority of converting money earned into a motorcycle, and while it may seem like callously crushing the dreams of the underprivileged, it shouldn't be as easy as it is for minimum wage earners to get that dream off the ground. The figure most often quoted is IDR 500,000 to pay the down payment on a two-wheeler, which by today's exchange rate is just over US$55. It is also approximately half of the lowest legal monthly salary for Jakarta. While I don't believe motorbikes are the only problem, nor the biggest one, plaguing the city's roads, they need to be more heavily taxed, with that money going straight back into the coffers of the department of transportation. It's naive to imagine that the public officials in charge will then go on to use the funds to make visible improvements to public transportation in a seamless process, but the ideal has got to be in place before it can be realized.

People who drive cars should be dealt a more stinging blow to their wallet in the form of taxes. I don't know what it presently stands at, but whatever that figure is, it needs to be increased ten-fold.It should get more and more painful with each addition to a private fleet of automobiles. If someone can afford to own more than one car, they should be able to afford prohibitive taxes. If not, they need to be thinking about taking that money and investing it in a higher education fund for their children instead.

3. Teach them how to drive first

I have acquired two driver's licenses in Indonesia, so I can speak with personal experience when I say that it is easily done. All you need is enough money, pure and simple. At no point was I ever asked to go near a vehicle, let alone display my driving prowess. Nor was I ever asked to complete any kind of written test. If memory serves correctly, the most attention was paid to making sure I looked neat and tidy for my license photograph. Imagine how many motorists in Jakarta would be instantly removed from their wheels/handlebars if asked to submit to the kinds of rigorous testing procedures extant in the UK? Most of them. Extremely poor adherence to a highway code also means more congestion. Zigzagging especially, but also the idea that a traffic light is there to give a hazy reminder that this is in fact an intersection, and if traffic charges forward blindly from all directions, it will become gridlocked. So often do you see a picture on Jakarta's streets which could be placed under the word 'bottleneck' on Wikipedia. That is, a vast number of vehicles congested at a central point, with a wide open space on the road behind it.

This is one area where outside help is called for, as the people currently issuing licenses would fail to obtain one in any country where knowing the highway code is a prerequisite to getting behind a wheel. Perhaps the prospect of calling in foreign professionals to teach the local professionals how to do their jobs properly has issues of pride attached. Swallow it.

4. Stop charging peanuts for parking

In most parts of the city you can park a car for a flat fee of between IDR1,000-2,000. Even in better regulated carparks, this is somewhere near the hourly fee. Again, why are the very people who are causing all the traffic problems not being charged for it? The more expensive it gets to drive a car, the more people will be forced to think about carpooling, public transport, or simply just going for a walk if they get really bored.

5. Outlaw jalopies in all shapes and forms

It's no secret that many of the vehicles currently taking up space on the roads are hardly fit to be there, they are eyesores, deathtraps, and the worst polluters. The only way this can be resolved is by dealing severely with the worst offenders. Cars that are apparently better suited to act as fog machines at a discotheque should be immediately impounded, as should public buses which are such rust buckets, that it is only the rust which is still keeping the bodywork together.  Again, it may seem as though these are the people who can ill-afford to lose their means of transport/livelihood, but they have had ample warning. The first legislation put in place to regulate emissions emerged nearly a decade ago. The three-wheeled Bajaj with their two stroke engines are deadly polluters as built by their manufacturers, yet they can be neatly converted to gas powered engines. Why hasn't the administration made this easier with tax breaks and subsidies? The blue gas Bajaj, which have also had their interiors refitted to be more spacious and pleasant, are in too scant supply, while their filthy red antecedents are still a boon to many who need a relatively cheap means of traveling a short distance. 

6. Enforce laws for more than a month at a time

Herein I believe, lies the real key to cleaning up the mess that are the roads as used by Jakarta's motorists. Time and again, laws get passed, and time and again after a brief burst of activity where people are ticketed for infractions, laws are forgotten and we are left with streets that more closely resemble scenes from a science fiction dystopia than the capital city of a country whose economy has been going from strength to strength in recent years. The recent 'sterilizing' of the busway lanes is a case in point. While many offenders were punished for invading the busway's space at the start of this month, during the last week, most of them seem to have crept back into the lanes, in plain view of uniformed policemen. It seems as though there are set lists of violations to watch out for during one month, which don't necessarily carry on into the next month. As though traffic ordinances were of a temporal nature. In recent memory, motorcyclists have been asked to make sure they wear proper headgear, yet at the same time, children riding pillion bareheaded go unchecked. Clearly there is something wrong with the attitude toward highway code enforcement, and as with a better method of testing for licenses, outside help seems like the only answer.

The New Loneliness

This is my first foray into the blogosphere - a term with a curiously unpleasing ring to it. With that in mind, a few words of introduction. I live in one of the most densely populated corners of the earth, I'm half British/half Indonesian, I watch a great many films and episodic television and similar amounts of music. Also; I'm a single father of one with a full-time job, trying to better myself through study. The study part leaves little time for the reading of books, although I used to do quite a lot of that too.

The purpose of this blog is to turn what goes through my head during hours of bus rides into something with actual purpose. I have a strong desire to write about film, largely in the hope that I may provide a take that I don't find in the articles of professional critics, although I hold nothing but reverence for the many well-known writers on film whose articles I consume on a daily basis. What I don't want is for this to be a 'now playing' set of recommendations, as apart from anything else, my own tastes simply wouldn't allow for it. Instead, I would like to be able to write about anything, perhaps not only cinema, that invoked a desire to get busy with a keyboard. And if that something is film, it could easily be in relation to a title from the '20s or onwards.

Solitary Man and The Yellow Handkerchief

In the last two days, I was surprised to watch two recent films which I enjoyed. Not only because they were both very well made, which they were, but also because they contained an element which I've found wanting of late: surprise. It's a difficult thing; to surprise the seasoned moviegoer, and let it be said unequivocally that I have watched far more movies than is healthy during my relatively short time on earth. Frankly, it's not something I get from watching the horror or thriller genres very often, and indeed, I'm more likely to be taken off guard by the actions of a character in a drama, often because something good has happened. Negative actions tend to translate well as drama, which may be why we've seen the same unpleasant scenarios expertly played out far too often. When a character conveys a greater sense of his or her worth to an audience, it is most likely thanks to intricate mapping on the part of a screenwriter, or emotional restraint by a director.  To such craftsmen who choose to deliver slow enjoyment to our senses, rather than a quick fix tonic, we should be grateful.

A common strand that was to be found connecting the two titles in the above heading was their underlying theme of loneliness, and their respective handling of it was both admirable and yes, surprising. In Solitary Man, Michael Douglas and Danny Devito both handle their roles by evoking sympathy in ways that I'm fairly certain I hadn't seen from either of them before, and I have seen most of their major performances in feature films. This is made stranger by the fact that they are essentially playing versions of themselves; two college friends who were great confidantes in their formative years. The difference here is that Douglas's character went off and got his face on the cover of Forbes, while Devito's (who has much less screen time) was content to stay in his hometown and inherit/manage the family restaurant. They reunite because Douglas has begun to crash and burn, epitomizing that too much is never enough. Because of his increasingly reckless behaviour, he finds himself eventually working at Devito's eatery - and not in a management position. As a plot synopsis it all sounds simplistic, riches to rags to all kinds of wetness. However, what co-directors Brian Koppelman and David Levien manage to do, using a script also written by Koppelman, is deal with this subject matter maturely, in a way that is not wholly realistic, but does contain important overlaps with the realities of life. Their final accomplishments are to gain real poignancy from the title toward the end, and to provide an ending not typical of films starring Michael Douglas and Danny Devito.

Just before I sat down to type, I watched The Yellow Handkerchief, a film starring that most difficult to pin down actor - William Hurt. He is one of the few people who can be watched just for the sake of watching his acting, and in most of his films, you often get the sense that he is the film, and everything else is just props and scenery (not really fair to the rest of the cast and crew, but, you get the picture). Again, here is an actor with a rich and vast resume, who appears to have created an entirely new character. The accent, the facial expressions, the physical movement. I wouldn't fault someone less familiar with Hurt for failing to recognize him from another film. In Yellow Handkerchief, he is reunited with his co-star from David Cronenberg's modern classic, A History of Violence, Maria Bello, although their story is a subplot to the main event. To give away much more about the relationships among the characters would be spoiling things, but this is essentially a road movie where Hurt is one kind of societal loner who finds himself thrown together with two others played by Kristen Stewart, of Twilight fame, and Eddie Redmayne. These three share a journey together, and while Hurt has much knowledge to pass on to them - thanks to his seniority - they end up repaying him in kind. This last item seems to be what has provided fodder to the films detractors, complaining of formulaicness. Admittedly, formula is depended on at certain stages, but I found the film to be so much more about the interrelationships among the three who share a journey: one old, two young, that most of the formula went largely unfelt. They are apart from one another not only in years, but also in that they are very different people. It could be that they eventually bond because of their differences, and these moments are played out gracefully by director Udayan Prasad, who manages to make them by far the most interesting parts of the film, not least because this type of slow character development is so scarce among most new releases. Characters developing in ways that we can truly identify with is something that always surprises me more than a giant insect managing to devour half the cast.