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lucas with the lid off |
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Sunday, July 25, 2004 |
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had a good time this weekend. bummed around the whole of friday and sat ... also got my coloursplash prints.. I'm happy with what i've got! but i'm gonna get more so yea i'll upload them to my lomohome soon.
Anyways i'm sufficiently primed for another week of 2ntm ... bleah. Another weekend in camp. I think they've got a movie marathon lined up, so we'll see. Heh and last week one wednesday night in my bunk a few of us were engaged in a religious debate of epic proportions. You see i had with me ravi zacharias' the lotus and the cross. So one buddhist, one who was a member of the soka association (which more specifically practises Nichiren Daishonin Buddhism, an offshot of buddism) and myself attempted to sort out what ravi had said. Both were rather pissed that gautama had been shut out by jesus just like that in their imaginary conversation. No surprise, when you pit both greats together, in ravi's mind, only one can be right. Hey this book almost got banned in Singapore for putting down buddism. Anyway, i realised many a thing when it comes to religion and our generation. You see, i almost had them cornered into admitting that it was somewhat contradictory for one to believe that there was no "self", when you have to chant and cultivate "yourself". Then glaring differences arose between buddhism and soka, and it turned into a three-way threat. Like the fact that soka seems to include several taoist elements in its doctrines, and suggests that there are various levels of nirvana to attain. The buddhist smartly left the debate since he saw no point in arguing with him, and there was no end in sight to his circular arugment. He would later confide in me that he found Nichiren Daishonin to be a cult of somewhat. But i digress. So in the end the soka guy started innudating me with "testimonies" from his fellow believers.. like how after chanting for seven hours one guy somehow managed to get 4 As despite having written the wrong question number for his economics essay. He then started asking why i believed the Bible to be true and why Jesus was worth worshipping. I was going into josh mcdowell's method for defence of the bible, but he amandantly demanded miracles that i had experienced personally. I couldn't really give him any of the out-of-this-world knock-your-socks-off kind of miracle, and my personal testimony was by his standards rather unconvincing. By this time everyone else had gotten rather peeved with his faulty logic and incoherent demands. But i've come to realise one thing. today's disaffected youth possess a kind of spirituality and acknowledge it in principle. However they've demand signs and wonders else they will deny its power. It's as if seeing is believing now. They demand miracles and marvellous phenomena, like many in Jesus' and Paul's time did. And one more thing that was raised was this : Why do we have to believe in Jesus when i can try to improve myself? Why look to anyone else when you should try to better yourself first? I said this to him, but he didn't buy it : When you do realise it we are so pathetic we can't save ourselves. As much as we can deny it we need something above us to keep us in check. Moral values and conscience are keys, are lifelines that can save us. But whence do these come from? Do they just arise from within are hours of self-meditation? I believe there has to be a greater divine being that has written this into my heart. There has to be deity who has positied a moral framework. But i'm just scraping the surface. There is a neverending highend and highbrow debate going on, for we are entrenched in a world where anything goes, and i do believe as christians we are called to engage society and culture at large. But the heart of the matter stays the same. We must acknowlege that without any higher deity, that without God, no moral law can generally rule over us, and thus there is no way we can save us from ourselves. Posted by lucasho @ 7/25/2004 11:54:00 pm
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Tuesday, July 20, 2004 |
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well now i'm back. blogger's gone all new on me. anyways it's great to be at home after seven days away. I should be used to it by now. but no one ever does.
just finished my first roll of colorsplash lomo film. Had a few shots left, went around the house snapping at random... think i may have overexposed some shots. heh we'll see gonna get it developed soon. anyways during my lockdown in camp they got us to watch a cam quality screener of king arthur. damned boring show, really. Even keira knightly in a skimpy amazonian straw outfit can't save the show. Plus clive owen's once cool deboniar sheen that drove the bmw films is now dogged down by a shaggy grimness that he suddenly aquired. And after that i got my thumbs sore at winning eleven seven.. but all in all everything's just whizzing past me. Time, space, people, things, events. EI'm just standing by the pavement watching time speed past me on the autobahn of life. Like i've been stagnant for too long, drifting and crusing to nowhere. Hmm. Methinks i gotta geta grip before i turn two-zero. Lord, help me .... Posted by lucasho @ 7/20/2004 10:10:00 pm
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Wednesday, July 14, 2004 |
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spent sunday reading Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans in the guardroom at camp. That makes it two books in two weeks! Amazing. This is an unexpected surge... I'm returning to a beloved pastime that I thought I'd lost once enlisted.
Anyways this is a deceptively simple tale. Like his other masterpiece, The Remains of The Day, the first-person narrator speaks from an inconstant flux of memories, and hides many truths from himself and the reader. Working from the framework of a 1930s detective yarn, Ishiguro manages, despite many contriviances and improbablities, to pull of a emotionally seething story while having his narrator being so emotionally detached and removed. I do believe this novel is about the interaction of cultures during the outbreak of WWII, about how unreliable memories can be, about the condescention of the West (more specifically the English) towards the far East, about how we hide truths from others and from ourselves. About how we wish to relive only certain parts of the past. The story sags a bit in the middle but does pick up at the very end. It's a flawed book, but still a masterpiece, a true character study. Read it only if you're stuck in camp on a sunday, like i was. But if taking on weekend duties allows me to catch up on my near-intermittable reading list, and gets me radio dedications on 98.7fm, then i don't actually mind at all. Yeah right. haha but thanx guys, i really do so much appreciate it even though i missed it .. :p But i've got more time this weekend ... stuck in camp again for 2ntm duties. blah. But i've brought in tsv and i wanna finish it, hey if you remember the story we can discuss it alright. Plus i think i'll bring in my jazz essentials cd so i've got something to chill out to. be back sooner than you can say "simplexityisanamalgamatedword". Posted by lucasho @ 7/14/2004 09:11:00 pm
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Tuesday, July 06, 2004 |
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Been thinking abt what weisong shared on sunday... still gotta sort my thoughts out abt it all. Till then I think you should listen to one person God chose to speak to our generation about the struggles of out desires and lust.
Posted by lucasho @ 7/06/2004 09:34:00 pm
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Sunday, July 04, 2004 |
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alright long one coming up .. got out friday afternoon and bummed around(yes i'm so good at that) till the late evening when i watched Capturing the Friedmans, which i had downloaded sometime back. It screened at this year's Singapore Film Fest but I hadmissed it. I guess it's so riveting and shocking for a couple of reasons. First, that it all really happened. Arnold and his family weren't some hollywood scriptwriter's whim. Could such a dysfunctional family, with a pedophilic patriach, an enraged matriach and their three equally quirky and unorthodox sons, actually exist? Second, is that this dysfunctionality led to them compulsively filming themselves, and this self-absorbed family breaks down on camera for all to see. It just makes for sensationalistic journalism and documentary - a father and son charged for child sexual abuse. Plus it all unravelled in the 80s, the era of religious fundamentalism, governmental distrust and suburban paranoia. Ultimately watching Capturing the Friedmans is a frustrating experience as there's no real conclusion or carthasis, and not enough hard evidence to prove that Arnold and Jesse actually did it. The epilouge has Jesse freed from jail, but it fails to provide any closure to the whole event, proffering little emotional comfort and pathos. Still it's good stuff to catch before Farenheit 9/11 arrives.
So Saturday was spent in camp with COS duty. But my one of my collegues had left a copy of the Da Vinci Code lying around. I picked it up, and for the first time in a long time, i actually finished a book cover to cover in a single day. In fact i've probably found it hard to sustain reading any book for any length of time since enlisting. So it felt good to finally read something, till the last page. But take it from me, this book simply sucks. Well. Firstly it undermines Christianity and Catholicism. And secondly it's not all that intelligent and intriguing. The codes and ciphers are quite a bit of fun, but nothing that would stimulate your grey matter. I've found books that were many times more intelligent. And such books cannot be finished in a day. It's only merit is in its pacing. You push yourself to finish it to discover how dan brown managed to weave fact and fiction coherently. However its sole merit is tainted halfway when you realise it's nothing new. You know, the chalice, the Holy Grail, the Merovigians, the Knights Templar, blah. It does lose steam about three-fifths of the way into the plot. So don't read this unless you're really bored like I was, being stuck in camp alone and all. If you do read it take it with a pinch of salt and understand that it's all just fiction. It might pique your interest and you could do more reading with regard to da vinci and codebreaking and secret societies, although i tell you there's nothing you can actually take away from it. So try to stay away from it despite all the hype. And today was cool. I just came back from spiderman 2. Had caught it with jotham, celine, spence, dan and kelwin. It's just the kind of flick to be watched in large groups of friends, with your brains at the door, and popcorn and cheese and nanchos in hand. The only really watchable stuff are the whambang cgi scenes of spidey and doc oct chasing each other thru new york, and any frame with kristen dunst in it. (Ok maybe the girls might like James Franco.) There's a rather flimsy link between John Worthing and Peter Parker since both grapple with double identities. But little else. Oh and i think stan lee appeared at leat twice. otherwise stuff i'd only catch when i'm with pals and have little else to do. Alright two movie reviews and one book review.. what more do you want? A quick soccer prediction. Greeks will triumph. See the greeks play really defensive ball. Once when the opponent has the ball you'll see all 11 greek players in their own half. They're all sprinters. They're impenetrable. Plus they have no big guns and they play, what, 30 club matches a year, unlike the portuguese who have big guns like ronaldo and figo who play over a seventy in a standard season. So they're not fatigued. Heh ok my little take on euro 2004. Let's just hope Grecce doesn't have an Achilles' heel. ok. back soon for more. Posted by lucasho @ 7/04/2004 09:25:00 pm
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