Infamous

Derren Brown is one of those guys. You know the type. Those guys who are always at the center of attention, who can get anyone to do whatever they want, the guys who are so effortlessly charismatic. The guys who you say don’t really matter to you, but for whom you actually harbor a secret, niggling jealousy. Those guys. 

The emotion felt when you consider the master mentalist and illusionist, however, is not quite jealousy. It’s more a mixture of amazement, fear and a healthy dose of disbelieving condescension as you struggle to comprehend just how far one man can go to provide a show. But all of that emotion comes later- for when you’re in the show, there’s no time for anything except open-mouthed confusion.

 

Outside the theater

 

I had the good fortune to go and see his latest show, ‘Infamous’ at the Palace Theater in London. It’s described on the poster as ‘a psychological roller-coaster’. That is, I suppose, a fairly accurate way of putting it. A more apt description, however, would be along the lines of ‘two hours that will make you question the laws of reality, the limits of human ability and the strength of your very psychology’. As he exhorted us multiple times during the performance not to reveal any of its details, I can’t really tell you any more about what happened, but suffice to say that when you finally are able to see this show on YouTube, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

I am permitted, on the other hand, to shower Derren in praise regarding his flawless performance. Combining self-effacing humor with poignant tales about his childhood and how he struggled to come to terms with his sexuality (he’s gay), the general theme of the entire spectacle is focussed on his quest for notoriety (hence the title of the show) as a means of hiding the true Derren Brown away.

You can go to the show, as I did, and appreciate this deeper story, the thread of narration that weaves itself throughout the show, or you can go and simply enjoy being in the same room as him. His jokes are told in an utterly deadpan manner, but at the same time, he’s entirely personable. He shares his excitement with you as he gets a frisbee up to the top circle for the first time, and you feel just as relieved as him when a particularly ridiculous trick works out.

To be entirely honest, I have no idea how Derren even begins to come up with ideas for his shows and how to go about achieving them. Be it careful neurolinguistic programming, bribery or just simply pure psychic ability, his tricks (if such a mundane term can even begin to describe what he achieves) are assured a reception of gasps, screams and laughter. Sometimes even at the same time. He’s a master of his art, a perfectionist and a craftsman, but at the same time, he is, above all else, completely superhuman.

If you ever get a chance to watch one of his shows, don’t hesitate. Take the opportunity. You’ll come out a changed person.

London!

If someone asked me to describe London, in a few sentences, it would probably be quite difficult. I’d probably say something along the lines of how it’s an eclectic mix of buildings, some veritably ancient, some new, but never the same as the one next to them. It’s a city that’s characterised not only by its buildings, but the flocks of people who scurry down Oxford street, ever purposeful, whether it be to to get to their office or to pick up a new handbag. But there’s something else about London, something ineffably charming in the experience of strolling through Hyde Park, a horse clopping around on one side and a double-decker bus whirring down the road on the other side.

I should point out that when I talk about London, it’s from the perspective of someone who’s lived in Singapore for almost all their life and thus is used to the quiet, understated efficiency that Singapore is so brilliant at providing. It’s one of those places that seems to believe that all buildings should be glass and steel and that any building over the age of 40 is a travesty to the world of architecture. It’s one of those cities that believes it serves you best if it stays out of your way and just lets you do whatever you want. Quite different then, from, London, which instead flaunts itself in front of you and doesn’t seem to give a damn whether or not you appreciate it.

That’s a rather controversial claim to make, so let me expand on it a bit.

I’m staying in a serviced apartment in Mayfair, right next to Oxford Street (which happens to be the busiest shopping street in Europe), and across from my apartment is a rather unusual set of buildings. Directly opposite me is a seemingly Victorian building with produced windows and ornate carvings, one of those buildings you’d feel are more at home in a Sherlock Holmes book. Instead, this building squats resolutely on the street and instead of containing a rather posh shop as you’d expect, is the home of a Starbucks, a newsagent and another café. Right next to this building is a shiny new glass-and steel building with absolutely no angles which takes the form of a flattened sphere. The contrast between these buildings is, to say the least, startling.

London, it seems, is one of those cities which is full of clichés. Whether it be one of those bookstores with a café included or a roadside bistro serving full english breakfasts first thing in the morning, one need only look for the address of whatever  the cliché may be. But calling them clichés is a bit unfair, because that implies that they’re overused to the point of becoming meaningless. While elsewhere, a bookstore with a café may be seen as overdoing things or a bit desparate, in London, the same thing seems quaint. While elsewhere, a roadside bistro seems nothing to write home about somewhere else, in London, it feels as though it’s amongst the most important of dining experiences. Something about the city makes every small thing, every red telephone booth seem as important as Buckingham palace.

It’s not all the buildings, though.Even just by walking through Hyde Park, whether it be strolling along the edge of one of the many gardens or crossing the brilliant blue Serpentine river (which ironically, is actually a lake), just seeing what others do there gives you an idea of just how diverse a city London is. People sit there for picnics, to paint the landscape or just to lie in the grass, but you also spot rather more esoteric activities like people playing tennis with frisbees instead of rackets, wrestling with their dogs or (my personal favorite) unicycling. That’s not even including speaker’s corner, which I haven’t visited this trip, but seems to be a fascinating notion.

So yes, London is different to Singapore. Just a bit. It’s impossible for me to say whether I prefer it to Singapore, but it’s an awesome city. That’s for sure.

Abracadabra

So a few days ago, I watched this movie called Now You See Me. It’s basically about this group of magicians who steal from the rich and give to the poor. It’s not really a rehash of Robin Hood because the plot is far more convoluted and nuanced than that, but all the same, it’s interesting to see this because when I think of magicians, I rarely think of bank robberies.

Which brings to mind an extremely important question. What exactly do I think of when I think of magicians? Seeing as you’re obviously desperate to know the answer to this question, I shall deign to answer it.

One of the magicians in the movie describes magic as ‘targeted deception’. It’s an interesting description, but I don’t think it’s the whole truth because to be honest, most deception is targeted. So let’s try and break it down a bit. We’ve all experienced that momentary sensation of awe when a magician does something that can’t be explained immediately. At the same time, though, we don’t believe that he’s really made a rabbit appear out of a hat or cut someone in half, so we know we’re being deceived. It’s kind of as though we enjoy being deceived, like we revel in our lack of understanding. Now, speaking as someone who generally doesn’t enjoy not understanding how something works, it comes as a bit of a surprise to me that I absolutely  love watching magic tricks. Whenever I see a magic trick that’s more spectacular than usual, I try my very best to figure out how it’s done, but only twice in my life have I ever actually managed to do it.

Regardless of this apparent contradiction, I think I know why I do enjoy these tricks anyway. It’s because even though I don’t understand how they work, I know that somehow, there is a trick involved, and that if I spent enough time and effort, I probably would be able to figure it out. It’s because even though I am being deceived, it’s an accessible deception. It’s because at the end of the day, whether it be a card trick or sawing someone in half, I’d be able to do it as well. So when I see magic, it’s not only to be amazed, but to know that these miraculous feats can be performed by everyone.

There’s a reason magic is so prevalent in popular culture. It’s made its way into movies, plays, books, and there are magazines dedicated to magic. It’s miraculous yet understandable, an equaliser but also a divider, but above all else, it’s accessible deception.

Fun Science

You’ve probably heard of Graphene. If not, it’s basically a sheet of Carbon one atom thick which, well, does everything you can think of  and more. Here’s just a few of the things it does:

• It allows incredibly fast data transfer speeds, almost 1 terabit/second
• It may be able to be used in phone batteries which charge in 5 seconds.
• It can clump together radioactive waste, facilitating its disposal much more efficiently.
• It can be used to make filters so that sea water from literally anywhere is drinkable.
• It can be used to create touchscreens which are incredibly thin and never break
• A single sheet of graphene can produce headphones that are as high quality as a pair of sennheisers
• It could be used to create bionic conductors which can reconnect neurons and so people with spinal injuries will be able to use their limbs again
• It can repair itself itself when broken.
• It can form a gel, aerographene, which is less dense than air

And that’s just a small taster of its many uses.

What fascinates me, however, isn’t just the fact that one material can do so many things. What fascinates me is the way that it was discovered. What basically happened was that two physicists used  a piece of tape to peel away individual layers of graphene from a piece of graphite. They were, essentially, just messing around and this resulted in the discovery of a revolutionary material. And it’s not even the first time this happened. A few years ago, they also managed to successfully levitate a frog. It actually looks really funny:

When I was a kid, I had this image of being a scientist that was, well, less than exciting. I thought it was all about carefully planned experiments based on long, well-defined processes and studies. But things like this show that there is room to just mess around and have a bit of fun. I actually really enjoy that sort of thing, just coming up with a crazy idea and going with it.

There’s just something very satisfying in knowing that even if you just do something that’s completely out of the blue, there’s a chance in succeeding and making something that’s really wonderful.

Did you try turning it on and off again?

So in case you’re not big on comics (no, this post isn’t about comics! I swear!), what DC did some time ago was basically completely start their entire comics universe again. They called this event the new 52 (named for the 52 new series that came out), and basically, the point was to start again with a clean slate so they could screw up the continuity again. Fun stuff.

There’s been a mixed reaction to this, but I personally think that it was a godsend because it gives me ample time to catch up on the series I enjoy reading without having to worry about catching up on the 700 issues of each series prior to the restart.

But convenience aside, there’s something very viscerally satisfying about restarting something completely. Whether it be movies, a book series or, well, comics, the process of simplifying a whole thread of events and distilling the essence of those events into one completely new avenue is something that has an effect beyond just allowing people to forget about the past. It allows people to start building up their own perceptions of how something is while keeping in the overall spirit of what that thing is meant to be.

And this applies not only to things we watch and read, but also to the way we approach our thinking.When you want to brush up on something, it helps sometimes to just start from scratch and restore all your knowledge. People make resolutions on the new year because it’s thought of as a clean slate. We reread series when we want to delve back into a literary world. Hell, restarting is even our first course of action when we’re trying to fix something. The concept of starting over has permeated itself so much into our social consciousness that it’s becoming our first course of action in even the smallest of situations.

It’s interesting. It’s such a simple concept that it doesn’t sound like something that should inspire such major adoption, but somehow, it’s become one of the most relied upon of our strategies whenever any problem faces us.

Goodbye.

 

A cartoonish matter

So because I’m awesome, I watched a few episodes of the Batman Animated series. It’s actually pretty good (Mark Hamill is awesome as the joker) and I’m enjoying it quite a lot.

But what surprised me the most about this cartoon is just how dark it is. Parts of it are actually on a level with the Dark Knight Trilogy. Though the cartoony graphics do indeed bely the subject matter, it’s actually pretty surprising to think that this is a show targeted at kids (and well, people like me). Now, take for example, this scene from a film called “Return of the Joker”. There’s a massive spoiler at the end, but take a look if you don’t care :

Fun stuff. Ok, it may not be on par with Bane’s demolition of Batman in TDKR, but it’s still a pretty grim scene. The series is actually full of these, and it’s kind of strange. It’s not like I’m of such a sensitive disposition that this will scar me for life, but it’s weird to think that these are shows I watched when I was 7 and didn’t think twice about them. I watched with gleeful satisfaction as the crap was beaten out of some poor henchman. Back then, I viewed the cartoons at their most simplistic as a battle between good and bad, and good always won. End of story. I didn’t appreciate the subtleties, the deep characterization that went on at the same time.

It’s not like Batman is the only child’s show like this, though. When it think about it, I’m astounded at how many innuendos, violent scenes and grim themes there are in children’s shows.

This is from Courage the Cowardly dog. Tell me you wouldn’t be freaked out if this showed up outside your house.

What’s interesting to me is that when you watch it as a kid, it’s really not that intense. You watch the show, and go about your daily life like nothing’s happened. I guess it makes sense though. When you’re at that age, you have no idea that what you’re watching is violent because you have no frame of reference with which to compare. So you watch the cartoon, and come out with no recollection of anything except the fact that good always beats evil.

Whether or not that’s reason enough to allow cartoons to be so dark is a rather more complicated thing, and I’m not too sure what the answer is. But it’s not like the sole purpose of the cartoon is to scar its viewers, and it uses the violence and stuff to make the plot. It’s mostly to entertain, so you have to remember that before you act like a snob and start condemning all the cartoons. Personally, I think it’s pretty cool.

And now, to remind you that the batman cartoons aren’t just a mishmash of dark violence, here’s the most ridiculous escape you’ll ever see. And yes, it is from the cartoon.

Copters!

So you may have realized that my inner child isn’t…exactly…that inside. In fact, it’s actually pretty exterior. I love doing things that are made for people half my age. Well, some things, anyway.

So yesterday, I gained possession of an RC helicopter. Unfortunately, my track record with these things isn’t too great. I’ve owned three of these. One bashed into a tree, one had it’s rotor snapped off, and the last mysteriously stopped working. I suspect it wasn’t natural causes. But I’m determined not to let the same thing happen to this one.

There’s something inherently mesmerising about having a RC vehicle. The fact that you can sit in one place and watch as the copter suspends itself or the car takes a tight turn around the corner or the boat throws up waves in your pool is something that just unlocks a rather primeval joy in you.

I was playing with the copter just now, and I was flying it in a rather crowded room. As I’m not entirely skilled at controlling it just yet, you can imagine the frequency with which I was crashing it into things. However, I didn’t just let it crash into the ground after it knocked into something, I just increased the throttle until it got back on its feet (figuratively, of course). Seeing the chopper sort of wobble around in the air until it became steady again was both very amusing to watch and at the same time quite an intense moment. It was intense because until it did right itself, I held my breath, hoping it wouldn’t come crashing down in a fiery-well, noisy, end.

Now, it’s not like I go around all day, counting the seconds until I can go home and play with the copter, but when I do finally get around to using it, it unlocks a rather strange feeling that everything else in the world has sort of faded away and everything is just focussed on making sure that helicopter does’t crash into anything.

It takes something special to do that.

Buckyballs!

So some time ago, I got this desk toy called ‘Bucky Balls’. It’s basically a set of 216 tiny neodymium magnets that you can craft into virtually any shape. Take a look:

They’re freaking awesome. I’ve made so many different shapes with them and It’s even fun to remake them. I’ve made hexagons, tubes, cylinders as well as rather more exotic structures which resemble dogs, the batman logo and at one very memorable point that I’ve since been unable to recreate, a spoon. It’s also moderately amusing to just clump into a ball and squeeze.

I think what I like the most about these things is the fact that they’re virtually infinitely reusable. It’s because there are no instructions for them, no one right way to use them. Instead, they just give you a string of 216 balls and let your creativity and imagination do whatever the hell they want to:

It’s the same with things like lego and minecraft. Because there’s no goal, no attainable objective, there’s nothing to constrain you from doing what you want and so you can capitalize on their full worth, even if you don’t have many ideas, just by fiddling around with them.

The point is, things are the most fun when you can do what you want with them. Except swallow them. Believe me, swallowing buckyballs wouldn’t be fun.

Ok, I’m out. I’m going to go play with my buckyballs now.

Angry birds IRL

Try and figure out what this is:

 

More likely than not, you’ll have no idea. Fair enough. I wasn’t expecting you to.

This is a rather strange piece of art. Each one of those small pieces of paper is a visualisation of the exact gestures it takes to succeed at a single level of Angry Birds. What the artist did was cover his device with a piece of tracing paper, put ink on his finger and then played the game.

Seems like a lot of work to do make something so seemingly simple, right? I thought so too, and actually, my first thought when I saw this was “Why would you possibly think of that?”. It seemed like a colossal waste of time to me.

But then I realized that what was special about this thought wasn’t the content, but rather that the artist had thought of it in the first place. I’m reasonably sure that most of you would have never thought of doing something like this, so the execution of the task is that much more special.

What I’m trying to say here is that things like this, or indeed Art in general is that you can’t really say whether it’s productive or not. The phrase “My 3 year old could have done that” actually makes the art so unique. Because so many people feel that their 3 year old could do something, they don’t bother to o it because it’s so beneath their required levels of imaginative stimulation. But there was that one guy, the artist, who didn’t let that bother him and instead fed right into that inspiration. So he made the art and came up with something really unique.

I know people call art a medium for self expression and all that, and I can see where they come from, but I’m more interested in the process for coming up with self expression. Take, for example, the Angry Birds thing. Here’s what it’s all about:

[Angry Birds All Levels] comments on the rise of casual gaming, identity and our relationship with mobile devices. Consisting of 300 sheets of tracing paper and black ink, it’s a visualisation of every finger swipe needed to complete the popular mobile game of the same name. The gestures exist on a sheet of paper that’s the same size as the iPhone on which it was originally created. Angry Birds is part of a larger series that Roth has been working on over the last year called Multi-Touch Paintings. These compositions are created by performing simple routine tasks on multi-touch handheld computing devices [ranging from unlocking the device to checking Twitter] with inked fingers. The series is a comment on computing and identity, but also creates an archive of this moment in history where we have started to manipulate pixels directly through gestures that we were unfamiliar with just over 5 years ago. In the end, the viewer is presented with a black and white representation of the gestures that have been prescribed to us in the form of user interaction design.

Now, there are a lot of ways to do something like this, most of which would probably take a lot less time and effort than this. But when I looked at this, it brought an interesting contrast to mind. When I play the game, it seems like such a dynamic, involved process with so much to do. But when you look at this, you realize that all of that fun translates to physically dragging your fingers a few centimeters across a screen. Quite monotonous, actually.

Not everything can do that.

Retellings

So recently, I finished watching this TV series called ‘Sherlock’. It’s basically a retelling of some Sherlock Holmes stories in the present, so Sherlock gets to use microscopes and instead of writing books, Watson writes a blog. Which is interesting.

It’s a really good show. Benedict Cumberbatch is brilliant as Sherlock and Martin Freeman makes a damn good Watson as well. But more interestingly, I think that one of the primary reasons I enjoyed this show was that the modern age suits it perfectly.

The concept of retelling old stories from different perspectives or in different times is one that really appeals to me, and so I’m going to try and think of a few examples that would be successful. So here we go:

1. A retelling of any Batman story from the perspective of a joker: To me, the joker is without question the greatest villain in the history of literature. He is the yin to Batman’s yang, the antithesis of  everything Batman stands for and the singularly most insane character one could think of. Seeing a story through his viewpoint would shed a unequal fractured light on this titanic battle of good and evil.

2.The Lord of the Rings through the eyes of an antagonist: You’ve probably seen my many rants on how incredible the movies of the Lord of the Rings are. I’ve read the books as well, and while they were good, I much preferred the movies. But anyway, throughout the books, Tolkien resolutely sticks to the perspective of the members of the fellowship. It would be interesting to see how characters like Saruman and Gollum look at this story, since they both have two very different outlooks on the story. I’ve deliberately left Sauron off this list because he’s just a big tower for most of the books.

3. James Bond in medieval/Renaissance Europe: From all its portrayals in Literature and movies,  Europe in this period seemed a really cutthroat place. Diplomats had to tread very, very carefully. So it seems only natural to take the most famous spy in history and plop him into this period. Who knows, maybe he could overthrow an empire or two and still have time to…shall we say… get acquainted with a princess or two.

4. Julius Caesar in a 21st-century democracy: The ideals of having a leader who cares for the country instead of himself are especially relevant in modern society. And if an assassination were to occur, there would be plenty of other mediums of protest than just war and riots. There’d be petitions, economic sanctions, digital protests, and so on. A Julius Caesar set in this time would really be interesting in terms of the new socio-political themes introduced.

5. The hunger games in Ancient Sparta: There are two main themes which I  feel would be changed by this timeshift. Firstly, the concept of the Hunger Games being a punishment would no longer hold. In Sparta, competitions like this would be considered as honors. Children would probably train their entire lives for this and might have been disappointed by the fact that they weren’t selected. Secondly, there’s a huge amount of  technology involved in making the actual Hunger Games work. So if these hunger games were to lose all this technology, the modus operandi for the running of the games would be very different.

So those are some examples that I think would be pretty interesting. The idea of stories set in different contexts is a very interesting one and one that can be explored into a lot of depth.