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The lyrics of an era since past dance their way across this moonlit sky to fall upon your ears and call you out from your concrete fortress. My heart cries in hope that your enslavement will soon end. That you would be released from the vices of a role you chose for yourself, which will only end in your destruction. May you become aware of the lie you’re deceiving yourself of. Your tears dried up long ago and the doors to your heart closed over. Hope is just a distant dream. A myth for children. Stark brutality is now the sole preserve of adulthood. That is where your thoughts pace, locked in an economic system, where every emotional transaction is tracked for it must be accounted for when reconciling your ego. No longer able to scream. No longer able to laugh. No longer able to express anything but your hatred upon others in an attempt to wall yourself in, even further. Yet eventually such stonewalling comes at the cost of any empire you are seeking to maintain when the unrighteous finally come in force to take you as their own. By then you shan’t know the narrow from the wide and no amount of residue, remains or refuse shall incline your stubborn hand to soften to the guidance of the only one who knows which way to turn to find the rest you so seek. Please see the heading of your course and acknowledge love before solid ground is but a memory of yesterday.

Everyone’s a theologian?

I’ve heard the comment bantered around often that everyone’s a theologian. I can often see the point that people are trying to make, that everyone has some thought about God, who he is or is not. Yet simply because you have such thoughts or operate in the belief of those, doesn’t really make you a theologian. Just as much as when I use maths to calculate my spending doesn’t make me a mathematician, since every man has an angle on God a doesn’t make them a theologian.

A theologian is someone for whom it’s part of their vocation to study God and his character. Every Christian is also called to pursue a greater knowledge of God but then clearly not everyone is called to be a scholar.

Now on the flipside I’ve seen preachers proclaim, “I’m not a theologian so…”. This is very disconcerting. I know it’s rooted in their attempt to reach out to the crowd and put themselves on the same level so they’re not considered as a distant scholar but it completely undermines the authority of their words. It’s basically like a school science teacher saying “I don’t know anything about physics, chem or biology so…” - their words are no more valuable than one’s own and they will proceed to express their opinion on scripture rather than proclaim it.

It would be better to say that everyone operates in theology in someway and that a few people, especially those in ministry, are called to pursue it in a greater way.

At Seattle Airport there’s a bunch of large decorative boulders strewn about the arrivals hall which have the above plaques around them.

Junk Mail

Thanks to the person who spammed my condo’s mailboxes with a questionable touring preacher’s event. It just ends up giving the Church a bad name. I couldn’t help seeing the irony of a trash can full of flyers entitled “Good News Singapore”. The word Gospel means a herald or good news but then I get the idea that what will be preached of at that event will be so far from what is spoken of in the bible that people putting it in the rubbish is quite fair.

Choice Fatigue

Now I recalled this picture I took when I saw Gizmodo’s post on Sony’s headphone range the other day. Whilst being a lot of headphones when you take into account that it included each of the colour combinations they came in it seems like a slightly more reasonable choice between <10 core types of headphone. Headphones are also quite a personal item so I can understand a bit more variation. Yet this range of domestic irons is just ridiculous.

There are 14 different kinds of iron at different prices, that would all look great next to your decade old iMac. These are all from one manufacturer, which just happens to be my former employer Philips but I’d be giving anyone a hard time for this. If that’s not product line over segmentation, I don’t know what is. This from the company with the slogan, ‘Sense and Simplicity’?

It’s clear that our current model of capitalism cannot be sustained. Society has been trained to expect so many options that they can’t even make a decision anymore.

Now whilst I used that headline to get your attention, I’m no more fearful of a homosexual as any hetrosexual person. Homo is greek for ’same’ - What I’m getting at is that I’m afraid of everything becoming the same.

On the topic of globalization and racial diversity the great philosopher Russell Peters says “the future will be beige”.

We’re already deep in what has become known, for lack of a better term, as the postmodern milieu of arts and culture where everything is a mashup or rendition of something existing in just a different style. My fear is that will become the norm and no one will aspire to something new without it being a cheap gimmick.

As much as I’ve enjoyed Baz Lurhmann’s films something about them deeply troubles me as they’ve really become the posterchild of new era of cinema, where the film that you make is merely just a series of riffs on previous cultural treasures. Moulin Rouge was no more than a mix tape of some of the most beloved songs of the last century set in the auspices of bohemian France. Or take another film that I greatly enjoyed of the last decade, The Matrix, which was very much just melding a series of concepts from many religions, with clear links to popular dystopian sci-fi (notably Ghost in the Shell) and threading them into a new story. (The prevalence of a dystopian future in much of our recent futurism will have to be a rant for a future post.) The films of the first half of last century that we now celebrate were not merely attempts to translate theatre to the screen but genuine efforts to utilize this new platform to communicate in the most engaging way.

Now I know that there is “nothing new under the Sun”. Nor can one ever create something that is truly original but it’s my contention that globally we are referencing each other more recently and faster than ever before that we end up having a more common experience than ever before but without feeling the connection that comes with experiencing it together. As I’ve travelled around this planet I’ve been amazingly surprised as to how much kids have a common experience of life across many different cultures. I can quote the Simpsons as if it were some sacred text of global childhood. There’s a McDonalds, Subway and Sushi joint (ok of varying quality) in every mall and juncture. Greater commonality yet reduced unity through greater individuality.

All of this leads to grieve me as I consider the future of our youth and creativity. As I sit here in Asia which is fast becoming the contemporary experience of life, with masses of tall buildings and shopping malls to spare, children here have no understanding of what it means to toil over creation. Everything that is built around here is done so by aliens to their city who like the goods that fill the buildings they construct are shipped in and out. All that the young are left with is a bunch of predefined products that they can mix and match into a persona they can wear one day and then trade for another the next. Their music is merely a new take on something old and cut and polished in record time with no depth of understanding spent in it’s musical craft or lyrical texture. It seems so sad that tomorrows celebrated ‘masterpieces’ will not be done by someone who’s spent the time to master anything nor will it be more than a piece scribbled on a wall, to be photographed endlessly by passersby and recut into something else.

It’s not that we did it better when I was young because we were just beginning to do all of this then, what I long for is the love for craft to be re-established and the return of an appreciation for diversity that takes a long time to manufacture. I guess we may need to unplug ourselves from the global entertainment-centric village and listen to the the screams of a mother in childbirth, cries of babies, the withering breaths of a soon to pass elder and see the pain of this world with sober eyes to understand that we are but a flower that opens for but a moment, so we should pursue creation of something majestic in honour of that beyond our self. But then again, since when did someone ever know flowers don’t bloom year round anymore…

As I sit here in Singapore I’ve come to understand something drastically different about this culture to that of where I grew up.

I really think it comes from the lack of space. Here in Singapore, 80% of the population grows up in government housing - towers of 20+ floors akin to container stacks of apartments that come in a variety of sizes and layouts one could count on one hand. The fixtures and colours may vary but really everyone has a very common experience. The other 20% of Singaporeans live in either condo’s that are often gimmicky themed upgrades of HDB life, 2 storey terrace style attached houses or uber-expensive houses that are the thing of international design magazines. The latter may offer the most independent way of living but even then it’s unlikely that any of these forms of residence contain something that’s become so essential to suburban culture that it’s almost unpatriotic in such cultures to not have one.

What I’m talking about is a shed. For the uninitiated it’s a space apart from the dwelling that’s not just a place to store one’s car and other miscellaneous junk. It’s the womb of many ideas to grow from just a light above one’s head into a project that may just become a household name (Google?).

There’s something important about the rudimentary nature of it’s environment. The fact that it appears to be a dirty corner means it’s not any less loved by it’s owner. It’s a space which is safe to splatter, squirt, smash, hack and slave over many an object to craft it either back to life or into a new state that only one had ever conceived of. The shed is really the common man’s atelier.

Woe to any person who may attempt to alter another’s shed. It’s a crime against the essence of innovation and creativity.

Yet sheds are not without their cultural misdemeanours as in their function as a retreat from the organised homely world beyond their creaking, badly sealed doors they end up becoming a manner for a man to retreat from his role as husband and father, wasting hours tinkering over something he’ll unlikely ever understand or be able to repair to a state of use once more. Yet those without a shed often flee in a similar manner into their offices or bars after the sun has set on the real work of the day.

Thus I see that the lack of a wet-area or place where one can experiment in freedom with the objects to be found around us in Asia cripples a whole capability and restricts it to those of a certain financial standing to meddle with their parent’s business assets. It’s not to say that the young in Asia fail to find ways of playing with what is around them but their boredom doesn’t result in creativity, rather it’s toiled away jumping through hoops of either an education system or the latest computer game.

If there’s only ever one right answer to every problem then you’ll look at the world through a toilet roll. On the flipside the ridiculous answer of relativity - that every answer is right - fails under reality. Whilst those that are prepared to look for a new way upon timeless truths will soon find their niche to show us a new way.