http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Nuje_YCoM

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the scene where he throws the grenade into the vessel with the bombs? so star wars, where luke flies into the belly of the death star to deliver two proton torpedoes.

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the flying goggles are dried wings, aren't they?

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the story was so disciplined and well cast. michelle rodriguez? you know her "type", no need for additional elaboration

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someone should diagram the content of the movie. it was so neat.

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terminator and this. both use the proxy of an outsider to allow the viewer to reflect on the current situation with new eyes. "i seeee youuuu"

new year resolution:

Fail Spectacularly, be in uncomfortable new terrain.

... wants a usb interface integrated onto his person.

Voluntary Prisoners of the City (and you don't know it!)

in today's paper, "snakes are straying into urban areas as their habitats are cleared". global warming, loss of animal habitats, fear of flying, bombs galore. all of this is amazing fodder to get stuff realized. and in the midst of this, all my back-head commentary is muttering "our world is in peril..." followed by hollers of earth, wind, fire, water and heart. damn you captain planet.

but back to snakes (in a house, not on a plane): it makes me wonder - why have we kept so strict to the green heart? we have this strict division between nature and the city when the most interesting spaces in singapore are where nature meets the city. i'm thinking of Dempsey, Portsdown Road, Tiong Bahru as well and the like. the opposite is true too: the most boring places are the shopping malls, fully air conditioned with the same mixture of shops, all "same same but different", to borrow a phrase that is turning out to be surprisingly wise.

on the subject of shopping malls: it seems to have become the default response to the idea of a central meeting point. even outside my house there is a new behemoth, and before one goes in already one can expect boredom. an atrium scheme, where line-of-sights are politely choreographed to expose a maximum of advertisments and shops. expect a 7-11 or its equivalent, expect a bread-talk or its equivalent. etcetc.

don't get me wrong, im not being all "commodification and consumption culture is bad, we should all fart roses and burp out messages of love". all im saying, is that there should be alternatives. balance. what a pity when the publics imagination has been limited to "lets go shopping" (broadly put!) and other things like going to a park or the beach or some cultural venue is an event in itself! How can something so beautiful: cities and their promise of unexpected juxtapositions and excitement, that which could be used to free and liberate, be used to enslave instead? Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, now Voluntary Prisoners of the City but not unaware of it.

"if you don't know, just say you don't know. i just wanted to create". thank you sean, i love how you are so free.

to allow personal freedom

"do something pretty while you can"

whats the point of having a plan if the plan keeps god-damned changing!

in one word, "haphazard"

the dreaded question from family, friends and strangers alike goes "so what kind of architecture do you do", or in its permutations - "what kind of architecture does your school teach", leaves me at a loss for words.

What is it that I do? I'm not sure, and maybe it doesn't want to define it yet - by doing so, you leave out and deny all alternatives. And I'm not ready to commit to any singular definition yet.

So instead of what I do, maybe I should ask what've I've done. In as plain a langage as I can, the last year and a half was spent on the following:

travels:
1) road trip through california with family
2) internship in berlin
3) pilgimage to Holland
4) down and out in london
5) backpacking through mexico

design:
1) Solano Canyon housing project
2) Chungking Plaza environmental redesign
3) Bupyeong Skyscraper

interests:
1) LA photo project

projects:
1) NeuKoln parametric machine
2) South Korea urban research
3) Contemporary Domesticity research

this is depressing. i should go back and look closer.

the feeling that you're screaming into a vacuum or talking without a tongue. or is it just that you have nothing to say anymore?

and after jumping through all those hoops, you realize that end the end of it, no one changes. there is no personal carthasasis for any of them - the protagonist comes closest to the purest form of it, but everyone falls back into the lull the fictionalized narrative of their lives dictate.

the most majestic of them all. their flaws, one by one - giving up to fear, the other a submission of will. the other a lie and a cheat, the last a.

claiming mastery to anything denies the expansion of its possibities to anything outside of your grasp of it. a solidification and mummification of it. always keep exploring.

making something for an audience you don't know, which goes against the commercial instinct.

The residue of our history (a fiction) has been solidified into dogma. What a waste, because now the expansion of possibilities is paradoxically accompanied by a poverty of imagination.

the fiction of truths to directthe journey

liquid modernity, zygmunt bauman.

What Would... xxx Do?

xx = lance armstrong, rem koolhaas, dan eldon

"what is that?"

"icelandic porn."

What is the relationship of economic development and urbanization?

Urbanization creates a consumption based society to fuel capitalism. But in developing countries, the jump to developed is still understood as industrialization, which is understood to mature to tertiary and eventually a service based economy.

This myth now locks these countries in a position of subserviance to the already developed nations. What alternative model could there be?

Within this, what is the role of modernization? Modernization may be the only period with a collectively self-conscious definition of itself in its process, as opposed to other periods (e.g. feudalism, enlightenment etc, which were perhaps retroactively defined). Did this self-consciousness lead to its acceleration, and now where are we and where are we going

The Fiction of Wealth and its Equitable Distribution in a Global Capitalist Market

"The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere."

-Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

The Godfather

"...[Adam Smith] is concerned with promoting the wealth of the entire nation. And wealth, to Adam Smith, consists of the goods which all the people of society consume... We are in the modern world where the flow of goods and services consumed by everyone constitutes the ultimate aim and end of economic life." Ironically, this egalitarian ideal would only be achieved through rational self-interest- the Laws of the Market and the Invisible Hand which regulates it. However, the theoretical framework of this theory positions itself within the confines of two a-prioris:

First, the perfect flow of information, is crucial to the mechanism of the "Invisible Hand".

But this is rarely true in reality. For example, a copy of Alice in Wonderland sells at the local bookshop for $10. At the local bookshop, it sells for $5 more. Within a rationalized framework, purchase of the book from the local bookshop would the result of consumer ignorance of the alternative. Ceteris paribus, the latter bookshop thus creates the surplus value of $5 from this informational gap.

Second, the valuation of a good is determined by its capital inputs and the balance of its supply and demand, where the the actions of individuals are determined rationally.

But not all decisions made are rationally derived. Economic booms usually leads to bouts of exuberant spending. The recent building boom in Dubai is an example of the economy of excess mixed in with cultural attitudes, in this case, toward land as a store of capital.

Further adding to this is the role of design and marketing in the creation of extra value through qualitative means, which explains the difference in price between an i-pod and a generic mp3 player. This skews the quantitative evaluation of the value of a product.

The effects of this are twofold:

The breakdown of the Invisible Hand results in the inequitable accumulation of wealth from the imperfect flow of information. Perhaps the exploitation of this ignorance and the excessive creation of excess value through it led to the divorce of currency from the gold standard. The system of Fiat Money, now used by most countries, defined as "money that is intrinsically useless; is used only as a medium of exchange" reveals the divorce of the price of a good and its actual value", highlights this. The removal of a "value ceiling" for wealth provides the springboard for the unfettered proliferation of capital on a global scale.

The inflation of the production chain to include and emphasize design to differentiate essentially similar goods also skews the equitable redistribution of capital - when the same pie is shared by more people, those at the bottom rung get the least. An example of this is the Apple slogan- "designed in California", but made in China.

This increased complexity in the production of goods dilutes the trickle down effect of capital to those in the lower echelons of this cycle - the workers in China, in the case of this example.

Capitalism Gone Global

The emergence of the American transnational corporation and increased free trade allowed by the relaxation international trade barriers, evident in the 1993 NAFTA agreement, amongst others, has allowed the increased mobility of capital.

However, this increased mobility is deceiving. Instead of the equitable distribution of wealth on a global scale, it has resulted in capital being captured in a new cycle that is independent of a countries geography. For example, the main factory of Daewoo used to be in the city of Bupyeong, in-between Seoul and Incheon - it served as the economic catalyst for the prosperity of the city. The relationship between industry and its site of production is evident in the decay of cities such as Manchester and Detroit in conjunction with the industries that supported it.

Increased mobility with regards to sites of production has allowed this production to be decentralized in a mercenary-like fashion to the lowest bidders- which has resulted in a global weakening of the power of labour, which no longer holds any leverage in this new ecology. What results is a race to the bottom, where already poor countries compete with each other to provide even cheaper labour, often by offsetting the externalities to the environment and its people.

Economies of Ether

Not only are sites of production increasingly mobile, but so are the factors of production. The shift in production toward services and the increased efficiencies communication across borders further exacerbates this.

The emergence of "global cities", cities involved in this international flow of capital, highlights the networked logic of these cities. Extending Marc Auge's idea of non-place, perhaps this is its opposite: a networked place, and that is why the various international business districts, from Singapore to London to Hong Kong, typologically resemble each other - they are in effect related because the flow of wealth is captured in a closed loop cycle with little overlap with the overall local economy and populous.

This creation of alternative economic cycles that are no longer spatially demarcated has created intense juxtapositions of wealth within these countries.

"High immigration has coincided with a widening income gap. Singapore’s Gini coefficient, a measure of inequality, rose from 0.444 in 2000 to 0.481 in 2008—higher than in China and America. The contrast between the glitzy downtown and the “heartlands” is glaring, and more damaging in tiny, dense Singapore than it would be in a big country, says Paulin Straughan of the National University of Singapore."

This non-spatial logic of capital short circuits or dampens the trickle down effect of capital which, by the logic of Adam Smith, would regulate itself -"the any starting point, the proving mechanism of the market first equalizes the returns to labour and capital in all different uses." [The Worldly Philosophers, page 61] The assumption is on the flow of capital being bound within its geographical boundaries, which would allow itself to eventually circulate to the general populous.

The rise of the Global Market detaches the flow of capital from this closed-loop cycle and captures it an alternative market cycle (e.g. the stock market, private equity, bonds and investments, forex, real estate) which is exclusionary to a larger segment of the populous because participation within it requires a minimum skill-set which the general population may not be equipped with due to unequal access to educational opportunities.

The result is a spatial collage of different wealth cycles: broadly put, the local and the global economic cycles.

State versus the Multinational Corporation - Who is David and Goliath?

What these factors lead to is it structurally locks countries into a parent-child relationship with the transnational corporation, an inversion of the post-World War 2 hierarchy.

Saskia Sassen positions these structural changes within categorical framework of authority, territory and rights as pertains to the state, the global economy and citizenship, respectively.

"... through their destabilizing effects, globalization and electronic networks are producing operational and rhetorical openings for the emergence of new types of political subjects and new spatialities for politics." This detaches the idea of the political from the state - described by her as "not only a deterritorializing of citizenship practices and identities... but also their partial denationalizing."

Extending the politicization of market practices, Slavoj Zizek poses the issue: "it is not should the state intervene, but what kind of state intervention is necessary." Perhaps the real question should be, where can the state intervene in a global environment?

Ironically, this position aligns itself to a purer form of capitalism different from the pro-national agendas afforded by the Bretton-Woods agreement during the 1970s. The recent economic meltdown resonates with the lack of Government intervention or power in this international economic landscape. That this occurred within an entirely fictional landscape of artificial value extends the absurdity of the situation.

So what is the role of the Government? One view restates their importance in an increasingly globalized context - policy divergence during the 1980s and 1990s between countries has lead to remarkably marked differences in outcomes in the nation's role in today global landscape. For example, the differences in regulatory reforms in Britain and Japan has shown that instead of abandoning control of the private sector behavior, both countries reorganized it.(David Vogel, 1995) Supporting this view in a more contemporary study is Daron Acemoglu- an MIT economist and winner of the 2005 Clark Medal- "... the reasons some nations succeed while others founder comes down to the soundness and transparency of their government institutions- the ability of a nation's citizens to own property, freely elect representation and live without fear or crime or graft."

However, through the lens of Sasika Sassen, is this state even a relevant player in such considerations, and to what extend can they affect such outcomes in the globalized landscape?

Perhaps the extreme of this is a reality akin to Neal Stephenson's 1992 cyperpunk novel Snow Crash - corporate franchise city states , a fully-instantiated laissez-faire society, and a virtual meta-society patronized by financial, social, and intellectual elites:

"When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music, movies, microcode (software), high-speed pizza delivery"

All that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned.

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References:

The Worldy Philosophers by Robert L. Heilbroner

Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages by Sasika Sassen

First as Tragedy, Then as Farce by Slavoj Zizek

Capitalism: A Very Short Introduction by James Fulcher

The Economist