Sunday, March 29, 2009

Playbacks As Pretext


Flashbacks in full playbacks, before you drag and hit the sacks. Five tracks riddled with facts, less to detract, aim to retract. Not lacking in context, extracting knacks to win you back. You’re now a complete wreck, ransack your bags and whack the cracks. Order your last Big Macs, your sweet tic tacs, your frozen snacks. Do fifty jumping jacks, contact your ex and play pretext. Your life ain't no abstract; it’s just an act of mental pacts. So chillax, clear your wax and hear your soundtracks fade to black.




Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Nameless Title


You can’t be bothered, but you would never have guessed too that many smart people have spent a great amount of time and energy trying to figure out what a name is. Around the world in different languages, in academic fields of study like semiotics, linguistics, syntactics, semantics and pragmatics, scholars have taken the investigation to greater heights, engaging over competing discourses jabbed with paradoxical ramblings, all fascinating but getting nowhere near the truth. This I know because I am someone who loves to study characters by their names. No name is a silly name. Every name has an origin.


We know that Joe is a name just because, naturally, we know people whose name is Joe. Dick is a personal name as well as a slang name for you know what. Cox can be a derivation of something else to become a given name. Bobo is a unisex name. Misty is just an adjective until it becomes a name. Or a name of the song sung by the Japanese duo with a kinky group name. Charcoal is just an object until it becomes a drug name, a trade name or a common name of an element.


Jackson is a classic example of a first name and a last name mixed together to confuse people. According to a research, it is the 13th most common last name, where 0.31% of last names in the US are Jackson; think Michael Jackson and the entire Jackson 5, plus Janet Jackson, Latoya Jackson, Samuel L. Jackson, Curtis Jackson, Bobby Jackson, Dexter Jackson, Edwin Jackson, Jesse Jackson and all other Jacksons who are blacks, except Peter Jackson, who is white, and who is not American actually. Jackson is also a surname, and a cognomen, and patronymic (go and figure yourself). Jackson Jackson is a two men hip-hop group name from downunder that I never heard of until two minutes ago. In addition, Jackson is a family name or probably a maiden name. Otherwise we have Philips, which is primarily a last name before a brand name. Michael Dell is a normal name until it became a literal company name that sells reasonable prices laptops. Unless it’s prefixed with Greek or Latin roots, it will not be a synthesized name, like Oracle, or better still, Microsoft. Newton, which is basically a dead alchemist’s surname, became a symbol to denote a unit of force, and it can have a designation that is truly a personal name, except that we Singaporean’s recognize it as a street name or a station name. Add “Circus” to that and you’ll have a perfectly bizarre name for a greasy eatery where people spend time to pass time or get fat.


Nicknames, or hypocorisms, which are truly fake names, can be more significant than the original names. Moniker is a slangy nickname while epithets are usually unkind nicknames like Dickhead or Cokebloat or Kerenteng Bastard. Sobriquets are fancy name most profound in politics, or nicknames for people who wish they spoke French. Dubium names are names that are intended for a wicked game of hoax. Callnames are names of two or many separate entities formed into a word, very much similar to synthesized names, only not so formal. Pet names are never for your pets. Brangelina is a sensationalized portmanteau. But Pittolie is way way unique, only overly underused in media coverages.


Now, what is a christened name? What is not a christened name? Who actually christened a christened name? Elle, Ellie, Ellen, Ello, Hello, Hella, Hellen, Hena, Hyena, Hydra, Adrian, Elephant, Eliza, Emylia, Umbrella, Ella, Ella?


Pen names and stage names are pseudonyms used by talented people like Agatha Christie and Mary Westmacott, both of whom are the same author writing under nom de guerres. Lisa del Giocondo is the official name for Mona Lisa, and vice versa. If you are reluctant to release your true name under critical circumstances, create a bogus name for yourself. It is not a crime. But it can be your crime name for all its worth.


Dahlia Adams is a fictional name from the ghost of distant past. It could also be a character name. It could also be an alias of a real name. It is in fact a namegram of my legal, formal name that I share with a deceased artist. It is, however, not an appellative, but a cognomen of a genuinely spurious identity.


And then we have Madally Wurlpiz.


Madally Wurlpiz is not a name. It is 32% riddle, 18% oxygen and 50% enhanced symmetric encryption utilities that will be available on your system if you decide to grace my domain or invade my privacy, which ever you find coolest.


What’s in a name actually? Just alphabets arranged to form an appropriate beat of diphthongs or digraphs in a series of organized ligatures? No, a name is just a name, attached to someone or something or someplace. A name does not mean anything until you characterized it. Until you give it a life.


Maybe no one have told you this before, but yes, you do have a nice name.


Thoughts without faces ~ faces without souls ~ souls lay lifeless, nameless. Uphold and protect your stature.

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

How The Fluttering Ends





My bearing is going nuts / I am sequestering / Personal undertakings filling the pages and I am not afraid to burn them all / Speaking up is redundant unless you have a responsive audience / The trappings surged from beneath / 7 of my dreams freeze-framed at the most awkward moments / Feel free to fill freely for there is no fee / Streamline your contacts, trash unwanted beings / Conquering nothing, pushed to the brink, confronted by an archipelago of lies; you only have yourself to blame / With new intakes of fresh air, never look back / There is too much foreshadowing / I am entitled to conclude / Some stories are perpetuated by emotional contempt / Surrender to half-born ideas, otherwise leapfrog into vague territories / Sorrow – in which it is buried in the gun compartment / An evolution of a tragedy starts with your last sentence / Counterattack the blatant, nonsensical ramblings of idiots who speak what they can’t define / Selfdom went up by 2%, while the obsession in perfecting an art work plummet by 8%, and the desire to rescue the value of my insights stays very positive despite the current economic downtick / What breaks me, makes me / How the fluttering ends is beyond my command / Illustrate the illogical in ways that can get you fired, and mock the authoritarians like there’s no tomorrow / I Googled you; still no match found / Adjust the curves before you press print / My paraphernalia includes the memory of you, and they are imprinted in my will too / Go crazy on the social front / Smile with a metaphor / The colour-cast of my life is a bright sea green / Undulate and drop a trance, flow and create a dance, augment a single chance / Cry in an odeon and turn it into a cantata where no one would listen to / Refuse!