China’s on-again-off-again relationship with Youtube continued its volatility last week. On Tuesday 24th of March, Youtube reported that it had been blocked in China and the video-sharing service was not restored until Friday 27th, only to become unavailable again today. World media has speculated that the Youtube shutdown was due to a posted video that purports to show Chinese police brutally beating Tibetans during the March 14th riots in Lhasa last year. The China Daily has quoted Foreign Ministry spokesman Qing Gang as claiming that the footage is doctored and is “misrepresentative”. Below, P has embedded the controversial video, but viewers may need to login to Youtube to view it.

It was originally uploaded by a group positioning itself as the Tibetan government in exile and their website can be reached here. The Chinese police can be seen savagely beating what seem to be already subdued protestors. There are other videos which can be seen in Quicktime format here  which purport to show the torture of a Tibetan man who was trying to stop a monk from being attacked (P doesn’t have Quicktime, so can’t view the videos).

The Chinese channel CCTV has responded with this news broadcast, which emphasizes the death and destruction caused by the rioters.

The Chinese government has had a long tradition of censoring out net content that it doesn’t like. The latest clever strike against such censorship has been the Song of the Grass Mud Horse (Cao Ni Ma), which is, you guessed it, circulating on Youtube (no wonder they keep blocking access). In a Disney-esque montage, a childrens’ choir sings about the happy Grass Mud Horses that live in the MaLe Desert and the menacing river crabs that come to devour their grass. Each phrase is a pun and most of the song is distinctly X-rated. Cao ni ma, ‘though written in characters as grass mud horse, sounds like the chinese phrase for F*** your mother and the Male Desert is a similar obscenity. The river crabs (he xie) sound like the chinese word for harmony which has often been used by the government as a synonym for censorship.

Below find the 2 (X-rated) videos (both have subtitles). Clever using puns to prevent censorship!

Spotted this on a news segment about their growing popularity as pets. Serama chickens are miniature chickens – the mature cocks are about the size of a 500ml mineral water bottle! They originate from Malaysia and are beginning to gain popularity in the US and UK as pets. Regular pageants are held in parts of Malaysia and a prize-winning Serama can fetch about US$3000!

The chickens are really tiny and weigh less than 500g. Here are a few more pics courtesy of the feathersite.com. Notice the characteristic puffed-up chest and soldier-straight posture. Lots more pics at the feathersite!

Below is a rather blurry video of a Serama judging in action.

From its beginnings as Singapore’s only university, NUS has never appeared to make a lot of effort to reach out to its alumni – probably largely due to generous government funding. Unlike often cash-starved US and UK universities, NUS has always seemed flush with funds – throwing up new buildings and facilities with gay abandon. P feels that she is in a position to judge due to her collection of various degrees from different institutes at various levels. She always felt closer to her London alma maters (was it the smaller class sizes?) than to NUS, where she often felt lost in a faceless crowd (some lectures had nearly 400 students).

Don’t get her wrong – P made some good friends at NUS and remains very close to one of her lecturers there (who is now back in the States) who was her first mentor and helped shape her graduate career. However, the school as a whole remained an abstraction rather than something close to her heart.

This is all set to change in this era of increasing corporatisation (or at least NUS’s version of the same).

The recently-completed Shaw Foundation Alumni House is intended to serve as a home for returning alumni. Given the tiny size of Singapore island, NUS alumni that have not migrated can probably give few excuses for not dropping by.

P particularly liked the Waterway, a gallery with leaping metal salmon over a trickling watercourse, meant to symbolise alumni returning to the home stream. (P often wonders how come people who use this analogy never quite seem to realise that the returning salmon die shortly after spawning – ah well). Seriously speaking, the building was very impressive, all marble-esque floors and twining spiral staircases and is home to an auditorium, a plethora of conference and seminar rooms and a massive courtyard filled with some strange sculptures.

It was in the 300-seater auditorium that P found herself listening to a very enjoyable Jazz and Oldies concert, helmed by cultural medallion winner Iskander Ismail. The repertoire ran the gamut from Cole Porter to Rihanna (the ubiquitous Umbrella song), and there were some real standout performers. Law alumnus Rani Singam and Arts alumnus Karen Tan had already made the leap to professional performing (singing and acting respectively) so were rather expected to perform well. The madcap Karen ‘though, pulled off a great standup comedy routine before launching into a great rendition of Billy Joel’s You’re My Home (if only her fashion sense had been as good!). Notable among the undergraduate performers was Engineering student Shilli Yap who sang an Aretha Franklin medley with soul, a fantastic voice that never seemed to end and a great sense of rhythm. Tay Kexin as well did a nice job with the ubiquitous Umbrella – big voice for such a small girl.

The NUS Jazz band mostly supported the music pretty well, but they were dreadfully pedestrian about it and most important, really did not appear to be enjoying themselves. Their leader, Iskander, in contrast was going great guns throughout on the keyboard.

On the whole a very pleasant evening, almost unexpectedly so, for a free concert.

Leaving you with original footage of Aretha Franklin singing Chain of Fools.

Pretensions recently attended a Science in the Cafe event featuring a talk by Prof. Oussama Khatib from the School of Computer Science at Stanford University.

The affable Khatib took the opportunity to show off his haptic device which allowed users to move a virtual ball around the screen and “feel” the texture of a membrane by pushing the ball against and ultimately through it.

P also played with computerised textures, where you could run a cursor over simulated corrugated iron and “feel” the corrugations.

Prof. Khatib informed us that the seemingly frivolous tool had real applications in many fields, such as for remote surgery, where it would allow the surgeon to feel a virtual organ when cutting into it. Robots could also ease difficult surgery for example robotic catheter technology has been used to facilitate the insertion of a long catheter from the leg vein into the heart.

A Stanford spinoff company called Hansen Medical has a new robot called Sensei, which can treat atrial fibrillation, a common heart disorder, in a non-invasive fashion. The robot allows the stable positioning of wires and tubes into the heart, so as to deliver a precisely tuned pulse of energy to destroy the misfiring heart muscles.

The scientist then treated the audience to a video presentation that took P through several centuries of robotics, from the time of Leonardo da Vinci (who developed designs for a robot knight) onwards.  P was particularly impressed with the 18th century automatons that could play the organ semi-convincingly and even write (see video below, in french sorry)!

Obviously things have come a long way since then, but many of the basic challenges remain, such as:

• Sensing – how can the robot detect reality?
• Planning/Control – how does it plan its response?
• Human-Robot Interactions – the robot needs to be able to interact with humans safely but this tends to compromise performance
• Mechanisms/Actuation – how to actually make the robot move/respond

There have also been some interesting developments lately that might not be robots per se but draw directly on the technology, like this Japanese robotic exoskeleton (allows the wearer to lift heavy loads).

Pretensions finally got round to watching this year’s Academy Award winner Kate Winslet in “The Reader" a historical romance cum drama. She really enjoyed it and could see why Kate walked away with the statuette this year.

Directed by Stephen Daldry, The Reader is set in post-World War II Germany where we are first introduced to the protagonist, Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes), who we discover has an upcoming meeting with his daughter. A passing train leads to a flashback where Michael thinks back to his teenage years in 1958. At that time, he remembers coming down with scarlet fever and how a kind and attractive woman (Kate Winslet) comforts him and helps him home. Upon recovering, 15 year-old Michael (played quite convincingly by David Kross) becomes obsessed with the woman and tracks down her home, where he embarks on a tempestuous Mrs Robinson-nesque affair with a much older woman, Hanna Schmitz. Hanna enjoys being read to by Michael and often asks for excerpts from novels, such as Chekov’s The Lady with the Dog,  to be read to her before sex. Michael remains in love with Hanna throughout the summer, ignoring all girls his own age, but one day, after a quarrel, he comes to Hanna’s flat to find her gone.

The scene then shifts to a courtroom in 1966, where Michael, now in his ‘20s, is attending Heidelberg Law School. As part of a special class under Professor Rohl (Bruno Ganz), he attends a trial of 6 ex-SS officers who stand accused of the murder of 300 Jews by locking them in a burning church. He is stunned to see that Hanna is one of the defendants. The trial hinges on a handwritten report that was made by the women; Hanna claims that all 6 of them contributed to it, but the others accuse her of being the leader. In order to save herself from life imprisonment, Hanna must reveal a secret she has kept all her life; a secret that only Michael can guess. The rest of the movie revolves around the agony of decision and what came from those decisions.

Without giving away too much, Pretensions found the plot tender and painful. Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes both give excellent portrayals of people who must live with shameful secrets, especially the one of their illicit love. So much is said, but even more lies in the weighted glances exchanged by the two, the aversion of the eyes, a reaching out that finds no reciprocation.

Kate Winslet plays Hanna as she ages from confident 36-year old to a grey, beaten 66. She is always believable and one admires her easy belief that the truth is self-evident and must be told, while she continues to hide her many secrets. P could not always like Hanna, because of her matter-of-fact admittance of murder, but could admire her as a strong woman who would not hide behind others.

This is definitely a weepy on the scale of The English Patient, but thoroughly recommended to those who enjoy masterly character sketches with a historical gloss.

  Pretensions went to the opera last night and found it an unexpectedly titillating experience. Previews of the Singapore Lyric Opera’s premiere of Jacques Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffman had suggested that it was to be an avant-garde production; very edgy for conservative Singapore. P was pleased to say she was not disappointed in terms of visual spectacle and set design even ‘though the vocals were somewhat uneven.

  For those not familiar with its ludicrous 19th century plot, the French opera focuses on the titular Hoffman,  a poet with attendant muse (Nicklausse – sung affectingly by Korean mezzo Choo Hi-Myung) who has fallen in love with a prima donna, Stella. French tenor Luca Lombardo sang Hoffman with great warmth and charm and was an audience favourite on the night P was there.

Hoffman moons over Stella in the local tavern telling those around him 3 stories of being unlucky in love. He is unaware that the evil Councillor Lindorf, played by Korean bass Song Kee Chang in Dracula getup (the first of many roles) intends to win Stella for himself.

Hoffman’s first love is Olympia, a mechanical doll (he is unaware of this courtesy of some special spectacles) created by the mad scientist Spalanzani (Philippino tenor Lemuel de la Cruz)and his collaborator, Coppelius (Song Kee Chang again in fine form). Pretensions found the set for this act to be the real star, featuring the decapitated head of a toy doll centrestage, looming ominously against a velvet curtain. The entry of Olympia is achieved by rotating the head round a half-circle, revealing a shiny interior of foil wherein rested reed-thin China soprano Zhao Yunhong, dressed in a black bodysuit (that revealed every bone in her anorexic body), a couple of long necklaces and a tin-foil skirt.

Her disturbingly mechanical hip-thrusting walk led into the famous doll song and was soon made even more macabre by Olympia’s sliding provocatively up and down the thighs of the male members of the chorus. Speaking of the chorus, they were dressed to match Spalanzani and Olympia and made their entrance wearing dark glasses and carrying silver canes. Perhaps it was meant to be a caustic statement about the blindness of society? P isn’t sure she quite got it.

Sadly, Zhao Yunhong’s voice was not quite up to the demands placed on it, particularly in the middle which sounded dark and hollow and was frequently out-of-tune. Her top coloratura sounded far more brilliant, tho’ sometimes the sound was too pushed for P’s liking.

Anyway, the act ends when Coppelius destroys Olympia in fury when he is cheated of payment by Spalanzani. After the struggle, Hoffman ends up clutching a silver skeleton and realises that he has been taken in.

Here’s the (G-rated) doll song performed by famous Korean soprano Sumi Jo.

This leads to a far more lyrical act 2 where Hoffman is reunited with his ex-lover Antonia, a young opera singer who suffers from a malady which makes it death for her to sing too much. Lyric soprano Nancy Yuen sings Antonia with crystalline delicacy and her diminutive size makes her ideal for the role as the frail Antonia. After Antonia is chastised by her father (baritone William Lim) for singing, the evil Dr Miracle (Song Kee Chang in his most dramatic role of the night) makes an entrance and claims he can heal Antonia’s illness with his potions. Hoffman overhears and convinces Antonia to give up her musical career and become his wife. However, when he leaves, Dr Miracle returns and summons up the spirit of Antonia’s departed mother, persuading her to sing and thus kill herself.

Once again, the set for this act was superlative. It began with Antonia sprawled across a checkerboard-pattern round dais surmounted by what seemed an ornate pipe. Later on in the act, Dr Miracle drags the “pipe” across to the dais to become a gramophone arm while the velvet curtain at the back of the stage pulls across to reveal the horn of the gramophone. Nancy Yuen sang beautifully for the most part, but the duet with Hoffman was marred by the occasional note that was just a tad too sharp or flat. The orchestra too did not seem to be in good form, playing a horribly noticeable bum chord at the beginning of the act.

Act 3 opened with a silhouette of Venice’s Towers and the chorus gathered in the middle to evoke the swaying of a gondola (the tail of the gondola added verisimilitude). Interestingly the chorus was cross-dressed during this act, with the women in black tops and tails and the men wearing black singlets under what can only be described as transparent hooped yashmacks made out of gauze. Yes, it was quite extraordinary!

Here’s a more prosaic setting of the opening Barcarolle by the Toulouse Opera.

In this act, Hoffman falls in love with the sexy courtesan Giuletta – mezzo Anna Koor in tight leather pants and high heel boots. However, she and her patron Captain Dapertutto (bass Song again) are only out to take what they can and Giuletta succeeds in conning Hoffman out of his reflection (yes, the plot is stupid). Anna Koor has a sultry mezzo voice and steals the stage as Giuletta, but her famous barcarolle got very very out-of-time. Still the trio with Hoffman and Dapertutto was one of the better moments of the evening.

Finally, we are returned to the tavern and the sight of Stella leaving on the arm of Councillor Lindorf. Then, Hoffman realises that the three women he has lost are all aspect of one, Stella, and that he is not to succeed in love. The muse has the last word as she comforts Hoffman that his suffering will feed his gift for poetry.

Overall a very pleasant evening, even though the vocals were a little iffy at times.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Only readers who have been in another universe for the past couple of months might have missed the Oscar triumph of Slumdog Millionaire. Nominated for a total of 10 Academy Awards, it scooped 8, including Best Picture and Best Director, not bad innings for an indie British flick that nearly went straight to DVD!

The movie is set in Dharavi, a slum in Mumbai, India, and the protagonist 18 year-old Jamal Malik (played by Dev Patel) is the titular slumdog made good – he has won 5 million rupees on the Indian version of “Who wants to be a Millionaire?”. Unfortunately, show host Prem Kumar (Bollywood star Anil Kapoor) refuses to believe that an underprivileged slumdog can come up with the answers honestly and has Jamal arrested and tortured by a police inspector (Irrfan Khan). The brutality of the interrogation takes Jamal in a reverie through the events of his childhood, which, though unbelievable coincidence, also provide the answers to the questions posed him on TV. Will Jamal be released? Will the lowly Chai-Wallah (tea-boy) finally get to win his childhood sweetheart, Latika (Freida Pinto)? Watch this movie and find out!

Pretensions really enjoyed this movie; the acting is superb, particular the young actors who play the youthful Jamal and Latika (Ayush Mahesh Khedeker and Rubina Ali) and Jamal’s tough-guy older brother Salim (Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail). It really draws you in into the textures, colours and smells of life in Dharavi. Certain scenes are immensely memorable; the filth generated by Jamal’s desperate measures to secure the autograph of his Bollywood idol (Amitabh Bachchan); the floating saffron of the clothes that Jamal’s mother lays out to dry by the river which then melds into the flames carried by the anti-muslim mobs; the first encounter with Latika where she, as a Hindu, is left to sit beneath a silver river of rain by the two Muslim youths.

Scenes of beauty shade rapidly into horror and back, and director Danny Boyle is a master at bringing out these contradictions inherent to today’s India. P particularly wants to mention the scenes that highlight the squalor of the beggars/guides in the shade of the immense majesty of architecture that is the Taj Mahal. Harsh light, sudden violence, immense beauty, these are the rich tropical colours that Boyle draws from his palette with an artist’s hand.

Life in the slums is full of difficult choices and viewers are shown this through Salim’s gradual drift into a life of crime, first when the three young friends are captured by the Fagin-like figure of Maman (Ankur Vikal). By not shying away from violence (he eventually shoots and kills Maman and rapes Latika), Salim eventually becomes lieutenant to a rival crimelord, Javed. However, Salim never forgets his brother and eventually redeems himself by helping to reunite the two lovers at great personal cost.

If you haven’t already seen this movie, watch it as soon as you can – you won’t regret it!

Below find a remixed version of the dance scene from the movie “Jai-Ho”!!

3-hour-long Australia stars Hugh Jackman who hosted the 2009 Oscars, but that’s about all the logical connection between the 2 films (aside from the fact that I watched them in a single sitting). Directed by Baz Luhrmann, who also directed 2001’s Moulin Rouge, the film struggles towards greatness but never really achieves it.

The two leads, Jackman (as the Drover) and Nicole Kidman (Lady Sarah Ashley) try their best and some scenes are enjoyable in themselves (the two have great chemistry and are very picturesque), but the whole movie never quite gels. Told from the viewpoint of Nullah (Brandon Walters), a young half-caste aboriginal boy, Luhrmann tried to capture a Dreamtime feeling to his epic, but only succeeds in making it feel distanced and episodic. To be honest, P kept thinking that the film was winding down to a finish, when something else would happen and then it would drag on another half-hour.

The plot is basically the early life of Nullah – it begins when Lady Sarah Ashley, a snooty English aristocrat travels to Darwin to force her husband to sell his failing cattle station at Faraway Downs. Lord Ashley sends the Drover, one of his best men to bring Sarah to the Station, but she arrives only to find Lord Ashley dead, apparently killed by aboriginal savages. Nullah lives on the station and manages to tell Sarah the truth, her husband was killed by trusted cattleman, Neil Fletcher (David Wenham) who is in collusion with neighbouring cattle baron Lesley “King” Carney, to create a cattle monopoly in the Northern Territory.

Sarah decides to work with Nullah, the Drover and a motley bunch of misfits to drive the Faraway Downs cattle through the Never Never desert to Darwin for sale to the military, a dangerous venture that requires all Nullah’s songs and his links to his grandfather, Magic Man King George (David Gulpilil). Much later ensues, including the WWII Japanese attack on Darwin and several seeming-deaths on the parts of most of the main characters. P also liked the lost generation subtheme to the film which showed how aborigines were forcibly assimilated into western culture.

Characterisation is very broad-brush but all the actors did their best with the cartoony stereotypes they were handed. Jackman is the liberal ocker – an outback hick who supports racial equality; Kidman plays the snooty english aristocrat who is won over by Jackman’s rough charms; Wenham is a bit of a pantomime villain but manages to make his role sympathetic at times.

The burnt umber of the sere landscape in the Northern Territory and the unexpected clarity of its night sky is a wonderful setting for a Dreamtime story, but Luhrmann should really have taken a set of shears to his film – what might have been a magical story at a shorter length turns into a dreary trudge at 3 hours and we, like Nullah, end the film longing to go walkabout.

Rent this on DVD when it becomes available – that way you can pause it and fill up on popcorn whenever necessary. Trailer below.

Spotted this in the local paper that ran a feature on Singaporean animation companies. Animax Asia, a regional cable channel that screens Japanese anime like Initial D etc is producing a 1 hour original animated movie called LaMB. Proudly pan-asian in origin, LaMB features an award-winning script by a Filipino, is produced by Singapore companies Peach Blossom Media and Imaginary Friends Studios and features costumes designed by Cantonese fashionista Vivienne Tam. OK, the music is by Simple Plan and the Click Five, but you can’t have everything, can you? ;-)

LaMB has tapped a US$6 million fund from the Singapore Economic Development Board and SPE-Networls-Asia Joint Production fund.

The film is based on a screenplay entitled Laminated Woman: To the Sand Planet Cerra by Carmelo S. J. Juinio, a Filipino entrant of the 2007 Animax Award competition. It is set in a dystopian future where criminals are sealed in “laminated suits” and used as slave labour. Dr Jack Griswold, who works on the prison planet Cerra, meets a female prisoner, Eve, and begins to question the cruelty of the system, but can he discover the secret that she hides?

LaMB will only be out on March 24th but web manga and mobile episodes are already available at the LaMB site here. The trailer may be viewed below.

• Meet the Man behind the Laminated Woman
• $6 million for RP animated movie