Fiction #202

Since the holidays started with bedridden nights spent watching Fargo, drinking a bottle of red wine by myself, and smoking a drawer of duty-free cigarettes, I had been yearning for a change. Couching was beginning to feel too lazy for anyone who was easily prone to boredom, so, naturally, I called up some old friends to enliven my free time.

These were friends whom I had shared a likeness for downing alcohol to knock out our senses, since we met five years ago. These were friends whom I'd dial on Fridays, Saturdays, and- in festive spirits- Public Holidays, even, since everybody else was now preoccupied with a work week.

And since we only go out after 11, I met Lisa and Jason on a familiar street, a rendezvous for our wild nights of self-abandonment, and hopped the bars like the musketeers we used to be.

The first taste of rum on the tongue, spiked with the fizz of Coca Cola, the stale, bitterness of gin, spiced up by a litter of mint leaves- cocktails can be as much a friend as those whom I share my drinks with: They can be toxic.

Midnight, between the next tall glass of Whiskey and another shot of Tequila, we doctored up quite a night. While I couldn't recall the exact conversation that swerved drunkenly from table-talk politics to personal conundrums, a memorable one went up like this:

Lisa: Tell us what's going on with your new person.

Jason: Him? Oh, he's sweet. I feel great, you know? It's been a long time since I could call someone without worrying about imposing.

Lisa: How long have you been seeing each other?

Jason: As of now- 6 months.

At this point, the music was so grating to the ears, I had to lean forward to catch the words falling out of their mouths.

Lisa: Well, I'm not a downer, but he's going to disappoint you, you know. Relationships.

Jason: I don't think it's fair for you to say that... You don't know him.

Lisa: I know. I'm only speaking from experience.

I interjected, with more common sense to know the difference between wanton cynicism and a string of bar slurs that'd lead to a fight. "I don't think it's fair too," I turned to Lisa with a lame smile. "You can't be too cynical about these things."

"But that's what I'm like, you know?" Lisa replied. "And people always end up disappointing you."

I felt dread roll back from the graves of regret. There and then, facing friends whom I've spent years of squabbles, banters, and- finally- fights with, I felt gas belch from my stomach. It wasn't the Tequila, but a familiar pang of guilt that caused the unease: Why was I here listening to this crap?

The last time I met my friends, we ended up by the gutter with the unpleasantries of exchanged insults, which wasn't uncommon for friends who drank so dangerously, so often together. We never spoke thereafter, until recently. So within a year, one'd think that the wisecracks would grow up wiser, and the Debbie Downers would start looking up for a change.

But nothing changed so much as did the menu of our drinks. Indeed, a year may have expanded our vocabulary of cocktails to order, but the same self-deprecating talks dredged out from one's cup hadn't. I was staring straight into Lisa, at a friend whom I loved so endearingly then, yet could not muster any empathy for today.

That said, while Lisa was sullen, it was clear we had to move onto something more jocular- to ease the tension. So I tried to laugh.

"A toast to 'new beginnings'," Lisa raised a glass. Then, I surrounded myself to the night, marooned under its spell- sex talk, gossip, mind-numbing affairs. Fun stuff, in brief, without the drama.

By two in the morning, we had hopped from one joint to another. I bumped into an old friend and grabbed onto him like a lifebuoy. It felt refreshing to catch up with someone I barely knew.

By three, the bar was closed. Lisa was out of sight. Jason was on his way home. And I was made responsible for the former's whereabouts. In one long swig, I swallowed my drink whole and felt vodka scratch against my throat like nails.

The crowd was spilling onto the sidewalks like alley cats. Old perverts were negotiating the bar corners, looking for a quick hookup with anyone too groggy to care who was toying their man parts- as long as he paid for cab. Weary bartenders were rejecting last minute orders from those too eager to stay, and everyone looked so stupid when the place stopped serving drinks. Everyone should have been on their way home, except me, who had to wait for Lisa to show up.

She reappeared, after an hour missed on all the hijinks she was supposed to have with her friends, only to confess an emotional call she attended to. "I'm such a mess. Do you think I'm a mess?" Lisa asked. I offered a "no"; I told her it was fruitless to look at things with a half-cup-empty-half-cup-full mentality; there was no cup, simply. If anyone wanted to be happy, he'd have to accept every other emotion that freewheeled with it.

Life's like that.

I hadn't seen Inside Out; though, if I did, I was confident of its takeaway to be of the same.

"But I have no control over my emotions," Lisa replied.

And then, a year later, I suddenly understood the sagely advice offered by professionals who worked emotionally laborious jobs. Nurses, doctors, therapists- I finally realised how independent they were of others' hysterics. One didn't have to feel with others to feel for them, I remembered.

"I just want us to go back to how we used to be. I want to fix things," Lisa sighed, without a clue that the present had no room for her past, and everybody's latter days could only be better off without it.

I, too, heaved a sigh of relief: I suddenly remembered I had Fargo to binge on at home.

Protect Me From What I Want

Bright lights, big city, and dangerous people. 

Desire is a dangerous thing because it scorns you, no matter how paltry it is you want. Like jealousy and envy (which are both fuelled by passions), you hex yourself when you desire; you're not you when you desire.

Think of the last thing you wanted so badly- to own, to possess- like a shiny, new toy that costs more than you could afford eating ramen noodles for the rest of your life, or someone whom you've only briefly loved, yet exoticized about tirelessly into thinking of spending your sunset years with.

And then, think of how you entertained yourself with ridiculous ideas to procure that desire. Because no matter how far-flung the idea, you yearn and daydream insufferably to calculate scintillating ways to get what you want.

Once, I strategised an elaborate bank heist to, you know, "get rich quick".

But where does desire spring from?

I can't speak for everyone- I'm not a poet- though the only viable clue as to why desire makes me a maniac for the things I cannot have is because I'm equal part coveting as I am disinclined to the things I want, for the fear of not having enough.

Money buys happiness

"Protect Me From What I Want" is but one of conceptual artist Jenny Holzer's many famous artworks-as-writings, a series of "truisms" of which the Brooklyn artist has turned to language as her medium. I chanced upon them in the library. Her words, like digestible soundbites, were cutting. They were a visceral performance, without so much as to conjure horrific imagery than to nail a cold truth at the hearts of many- she knows what makes a person tick in the middle of the night.

And this truism, the urge to crave, the protection one needs from what he or she pines for, can only be explained by what it means to not desire. Because, you wouldn't have wanted anything if you were already, always satisfied.

For instance, I may want thousands of million of dollars today, yet I wouldn't know what to do with them tomorrow. Complete with the amount of luxury I could buy, I'd still be more curious as to know what should- no, ought to come later. Is it, then, crazy to think that anyone who lives a corruptibly rich life must be very boring? No. Not really.

Desire, then, is dangerous because the question of "what's next?" makes it such a locomotive to always want, want, want. You're only motivated by the discomfort of remaining stationary; you're only as satisfied as the last breath you draw; curiosity is the passionate hand of desire.

Thus, perhaps, this is why Jenny Holzer's LED messages are so wickedly charming, yet unpretentious in its language to me. Beside Ms. Holzer's other powerful writings- "Lack of Charisma Can Be Fatal" and "Expiring for Love Is Beautiful but Stupid"- "Protect Me From What I Want" wields a dispassionate eye over people's starkest self-interests. The medium Ms. Holzer chose- like those of advertising- aren't of a persuasive art; rather, they're a mere mirror of people's anxieties.

As a phrase, it is a neat summation of why I do not choose to desire. I just do.

Of course, only I know this much is true.

On Thought Catalog

Imagine any day when you're unsuspecting of falling from, say, a ladder or a pole whilst fetching something as trivial, yet delicately dangerous from a standpoint high above ground, as a luggage.

You could count the number of people you'd call, should you be alone and fall and break your bones from impact then such that you're also covered in a sheet of your own blood as you writhe and howl in excruciating pain: None. You'd call the bloody ambulance like any normal person would.

16 Lessons Learnt

I was never big on New Year's Eve until I saw fireworks flourish bright explosions in the sky. It was a moving sight. 

And until I celebrated with other merry thousands by the bay this year, the past has always been forgettable: The tradition of sending one year off while ringing in the new in its crowd-shoving atmosphere happens less than I sloshing shots by the bar with few strangers under dim, low ceilings- where the booming can only be heard at a distance, but I, completely blind to its cause. For this last, I was in the clear to enjoy its standstill moment, absorbing sights, sounds, smells- everything.

Naturally, I also made a list of the hits and misses and regrets of 2015, and what better things to expect thereafter. Without further ado:

1) 2015 was a like a flex of a muscle so hard, I broke a hamstring- I'll take things slower this year.

2) There are 14, 000 things to be happy about that's listed in a compact book for sale at Kinokuniya. 

3) You can put an egg in a microwave and make a great supper.

4) Pasteurized eggs come from "free range" chickens, which means they're uncaged and free to hang, making them healthy and their produce more delicious.

5) Though, I make chicken-feed for the work I do.

6) "Farm-fresh" eggs is marketese; it doesn't mean anything- like "the greatest", "the best", "the richest".

7) Relationships are not concepts; they're as free-range as chickens roam.

8) Politics make men strange bedfellows.

9) What doesn't kill you will give you a stroke.

10) Who knew pitching a campaign could be so EXHAUSTING and REWARDING (at the same time)?

11) And writing an entire training manual under the snap of a week- with the amount of research and planning- is my proudest work so far shared with bright, industrious team members.

12) I can't garden to save my life. In fact, I almost killed all of my mother's favourite plants when she was away on a holiday.

13) Some people are so dim to speak with, any talk further and I'd have to water them.

14) Judge less, accept more.

15) People overcompensate for their bad habits with niceties. If you have a knack for arriving an hour late, don't apologise- just buy the other person lunch.


16) Long distance Skype calls are the most poignant tools of communication- what's connecting you and the recipient is a thin, glossy computer screen and a strong Wifi. And as near of a portrait the other person seems to be, he'll always be as far away as history. Little wonder, long distance relationships never work out.

Force or no Force, The Force Awakens Will Still be a Hit.

It doesn't matter whether you liked the new Star Wars movie. A resounding unanimity from fans, critics, and celebrities has extolled The Force Awakens "the best Star Wars movie ever made" or "this is how you make a Star Wars movie", or something spoiler-free along the lines of "amazing" and "out of this world". 

In other words, your opinion doesn't matter. And neither should mine.

I'm not usually one who speaks in absolutes. That is, I don't jump at every opportunity to hate on something. (Even if that thing was as bad as Attack of the Clones.)

But the new Star Wars movie was forgettable. There, I said it. 

Decades after the blockbuster went on a sabbatical and returned with a new main man- J.J. Abrams- to direct its sequel, everybody cheered. The franchise was becoming stale after a brisk trade, slapping every Star Wars-related sticker on souvenirs- from coffee mugs to t-shirts to sneakers, you name it. 

So when J.J. Abrams released its teaser trailer earlier this year, it felt timely for a reboot. It was an opportunistic return of the galaxy's most beloved characters, rewarded by newer faces that promised more diversity beyond its premise- the old movies saw a male-dominated cast but only one Princess Leia. Plus, Abrams wasn't unfamiliar with science-fiction; he revived Star Trek.

And he gave what fans wanted with Star Wars. He stirred up a greater sense of nostalgia in the people than they could imagine feeling for a space opera- the interplanetary systems, the exoticised alien races, the sizzling of lightsabers. One critic confessed to crying, once its opening sequence snailed up the screen. ("Luke has vanished!")

Now, calling Star Wars a global phenomenon is a gross understatement. Like all powerful franchises, Star Wars has a life of its own. 

I imagine a tentacled beast besieging Hollywood, hanging in black space, roping in different directors to rewrite its screenplay sequels afters sequels (Rian Johnson will succeed J.J. Abrams in episode 8). Star Wars will live on forever.

So why rush a good story, right?

Does that explain, then, why The Force Awakens felt like a placeholder? Does that justify, after production companies shelled out billions of dollars to reboot a franchise only as to spot snippets of background narratives than to tell a story, all the enigma? 

Who is General Snoke? Why is he so large? Where did the First Order spring from? Why is Kylo Ren suffering from an Oedipus complex? Is the cross guard lightsaber a riff on Darth Maul's double-wielding lightsaber? How is Rey, a force-sensitive scavenger, any way related to Star Wars? Am I the only one who didn't find Finn funny? Mark Hamil, who played Luke Skywalker, why the long face?

Instead, The Force Awakens has asked for another year of your time- its sequel is slated for a 2017 release-, yet before the epic gets closer to the nub. 


While J.J. Abrams knows how to stage better fight scenes- the sinister crackling sound of a lightsaber cutting across the theatre- and dramatic explosions than the original saga's prequels, whose CGI-glut scenes had only the gloss but no impact, The Force Awakens was robbed of a crux that etches all good movies into people's mind: A proper, compelling story.

The Force Awakens was supposed to propel the saga forward- by uncovering lineages tracing back 30 years before this movie was set. 

But all it did to thicken the plot, for me, was to veil it from ever happening anytime soon, until episode 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13... zzz... Hey, this is just my opinion. 

The Sexiest Movie Never Made

Little matters whether Gaspar Noe's French drama "Love" (2015) is a porno-flick or a tasteful porno-flick. It isn't just about the sex in its 135 minutes, okay? But a dangerous menage a trois, unspooling creamily lit bodies into dance-like sculptures as they copulate and fall away like all doomed-to-fail relationships. Sorta.

I've never watched a Gaspar Noe movie for the same reason I've never heard about him. But a quick search dredged up numerous results of how, beside the underground director's previous films (i.e. Irreversible, Enter the Void), "Love" was bore, a letdown, a beautiful hazy dream that's also disappointingly softcore- for a movie that pronounced itself hardcore with 3D come-flying stunts by actor Karl Glusman's penis. Gaspar Noe is second to Lars Von Trier, after the latter got banned from Cannes for being a Nazi sympathizer. What both men have in common, however, is the titular "enfant terrible" title they share of in cinema. Misfits don't make blockbusters- they make artful underdog films like "Love", for fans.

Thusly, my virgin experience at Noe's titillating melodrama.

Within 30 minutes into the intimate space Noe staged,  I was stupefied, amused, empathetic, and- also- very bored. While not all at once, I was delighted by the unsuspecting intro of watching two people whacking each other off. There, naked, Murphy (Klusman) has a finger in his later-known girlfriend Electra (Aomi Muyock), who's returning the favor as she holds onto his penis like a crutch. But unlike the erotically charged Ang Lee breakthrough, "Lust, Caution", "Love" couldn't save itself from becoming a laughable morass, even after an hour into what out and out sex only the French can perform without making one feel molested just watching.

Of course, "Love" should have been a serious movie. The takeaway at the end is a tragedy of a couple's misguided trust in each other. Murphy plays a callous role in manhood's woes, and Electra is a stunning femme fatale with problems only enigmatic female characters possess (which isn't very much). Where they fortify their relationship, albeit the messes, is in the hot sex they often share. Until the threesome with their neighbor Omi (Klara Kristin), which led to the cheating, and a baby born out of wedlock, watching Murphy and Electra pre-break in flashbacks was like watching two foolhardy teenagers in love profess an eternity: A shallow, regrettable experience.

Why did I submit myself to a long, tepid movie laden with depressive monologues and full-frontal private parts sliding off the screen like a Gustave Courbet painting? For the art? If only, when all I felt in the merits lost- Benoit Debie has staged remarkable love scenes here, especially in the bordello glow of Murphy's bedroom- was a sense of restlessness. Who knew sex could be boring? Watching "Love" was like watching strangers getting it on in their Parisian apartments through a peephole. And without any depth, the characters quickly became flat and stale, when they should've been as deep and total as their thickets of pubic hair.

Yes, I definitely watched it for the sex. No shame.

Inside Tending to Your Organisation, a Training Guide For All CEOs

A Bountiful Harvest: Promoting Diversified Thinking

Tending to Your Organisation is a training manual for managerial positions and frontline workers alike. It aims to segue a company's cultural competency in its workplace.

Over the course of two months, every team in class was tasked to create a comprehensive manual that'd be graded for an Organizational Communication module. Albeit a school project, professionalism was expected from every work members of the class produced. The individual manuals- based on a list of relevant topics pertaining to the said module- would then be pitched to a class who'd play an imagined audience (i.e. HR managers, CEOs). Its totality would be assessed based on one's understanding on the subject matter.

My team's pick was Cultural Competency, a study in one's aptitude across a cross-cultural setting. By proffering skills to readers to hone their own competency, the challenge was to underscore the manual's objectives and benefits to prospective clients in a presentation.

Challenge:

It's too narrow to limit culture to a language or a skin colour, according to anyone with the common wisdom to know of different races, ethnicities, and genders. The view on culture encompasses a wider set of examples. Personal experiences, values, beliefs, attitudes- culture can be summed as a way of how people lived, in brief. It is a worldview.

The challenge then, was to present its competency as a benefit to our clients' interest. Anyone who cares enough must be informed and persuaded to the benefits of a healthy workplace culture.

Insight:

Cultural competency isn't a bottom line that reaps monetary benefits, once mastered- nobody can guarantee that. Neither is it a problem like workplace conflict, which can be nipped by changing one's methods at absolving conflicted interests. However, if its ambiguous non-referent idea had a strategic posture, it'd be that cultural competency is a value. And like all values, cultural competency cannot be trained. It has to be aspired in people.

By equipping CEOs with an education, the values would, thus, cascade downward to all members of an organization. The objective was to create an open, trusting, and inclusive workplace culture.

Execution:

The manual- which could take on any form of presentation- was marketed as a guidebook.

And like all natural practices, one's company culture needs tending. The guidebook rules out the dogmatic prescriptions of telling CEOs what they should do with their own companies. Instead, it coaches them throughout various organizational phases, from the start- at the importance of a better hiring process- to the tail- once an employee has settled within the company.

Thusly, its title and successive chapters:

Tending to Your Organisation: A Guide to Honing Your Cultural Competency

A Budding Organisation

From Friction to Fruition: Managing Conflict Effectively

My role as team leader and copywriter was not only to materialize all members' ideas into its content, but also to buttress our pitch with copy for the promotional ads. We avoided the cliches of an emotional appeal (that meant no poverty porn or any exploitative tactics at the expense of the minority). Rather, targeted at CEOs, we wanted a strong voice of reason to speak for itself.

As a first part of a trio of simplistic ads, this is a double page spread written, and presented formally, to promote the training guide:

Enlarge to read text

Next, with an interest directed to our audience, who're all CEOs and leaders in their own stride, my team I made two OOH ads. We wanted the headlines to be concise, yet promising to its reach, with a bare-bone layout and clear message:

Finally, the highest stakeholder for our audience (What do CEOs want?) is, in fact, their own intended audience whereby company growth relies upon those relationships; their customers:

Enlarge to read text

Cultural competency is an opportunity.

Results:

Tending to Your Organization has earned my team and I high points for the content and its presentation format. We too, leagued amongst the top three of presentations, voted by populist choice. Although we were eventually won out by peers with their leisurely pitches, my team and I believe a pitch doesn't share the same name as a sketch. We leaned our sales message- without the fat.

Tag (2015) Isn't The Movie You Think it is.

The vilification of women, the punishable aggression inflicted upon them, the voyeuristic lens that peeks at their panties every time a gale sweeps up schoolgirls' skirts- Tag (2015) should have been made in poor taste, considering Japanese auteur Sion Sono's vita of films dedicated to the sexploitation of women (Love Exposure, The Virgin Psychics).

But it wasn't. Instead, Tag became a vision of modern cinema and a compelling study in gender roles. All in its scant 90 minutes of surrealistic dream sequences that'd leave you bewildered, yet, strangely, wanting for more.

Set in small town Japan, the film's unusual happenings unravels with a thriller when two school buses (packed with laughing high schoolgirls looking as sunburst as an ad from Sovil Titus) gets sliced into half by a mysterious gust of wind. Saved by coincidence, the timid lone survivor, Mitsuko (played charmingly by Austrian-Japanese actress Reina Triendl), begins a race for her life from a series of attackers.

Part of Sono's third release of six films he scheduled for 2015,  Tag trails behind the teen-survival genre he's been made famous by. But where the plot thickens, as it veers away from the campy destruction of entire high school of females, is at the vein of the movie: an element of gender oppression.

As Mitsuko jumps from one paranormal encounter with bazuka-wielding teachers to another with a bovine bride, her idenity travels inter-dimensionally with her. From the ingenue she is, to the conflicted bride Keiko (Mariko Shinoda), to the marathoner Izumi (Erina Mano), the all-female cast prevalent in two-thirds of the movie- until we fall into the rabbit hole of a male-dominated dystopia toward the end- pounds at a tough fact of life often overlooked: its characters are running away from a rite of passage society has prescribed, from adolescence to adulthood.

That said, Tag subverts as it delights. The movie, adapted from Yusuke Yamada's 2001 novel, was initially premised upon the tag-you're-it idea, that anyone who shares a similar surname dies. But Sono was resolute to render his movie different from other adaptations. Cinematically, the movie pans across beautiful landscapes all shot by drones. The scenes are a vision as it softens the gore and breaks away from the offbeat pace Sono's built into the surrealistic movie he'd already paved from start. Despite the violence, the scenes still feel as soft as the film's recurring goose-down pillow.

Orchestrating the movie to sublime effect is also its film score. It matches the revealing scene when Mitsuko confronts the true enemy of her fictitious drama: men; particularly, men who fetishizes the Japanese schoolgirl culture enough to create the insufferable reality we find ourselves trapped in. And by the film's close, the music falls away into post-rock group Mono's beautiful soundtrack, a tireless melody of downtempo guitar and bass.

Perhaps, what's even stranger than fiction- a cinematic experience I reserve for astounding films- was the lump I swallowed at the back of my throat after a movie as cerebral, as violent, and as offsetting as Tag. While modern day directors strike the iron of feminism while it's hot topic to avert the male gaze, Sion Sono's awe-inspiring work brings it back in the most visceral, most grotesque, and most beautiful way possible. He wasn't turning away from a problem, he was staring right into its dispassionate, ugly face.

Below, its official trailer and (yes!) full movie.

Humanity's Last Straw For Apocalyptic Movies: Attack on Titan

There're apocalyptic movies, and there're post-apocalyptic movies. Remember World War Z? The former's zombie-infested planet Brad Pitt tried to save- adapted from the eponymous novel by Max Brooks? Faintly, I do. Like other viewers who paid money then to be convinced by the end of the world, I was more bored than entertained. That said, in 2015, manga-turned-blockbuster Attack on Titan comes second to snooze.

While you can't fault the apocalyptic genre (2012, anyone?) even after a series of blockbuster flops, directors should know its feature isn't the easiest to make or adapt. On literature, readers lucidly dream up all the fantasy, the action and the pandemonium. Though, onscreen, only the filmmaker controls what viewers see.

Similarly, there isn't much to digest here, apart from the artfully created monsters known as "Titans". Released in August with a sequel following the world-saving manga-adapted movie this month, Attack on Titan centers around humanity's battle against flesh-eating giants. They're nightmarish colossal duds; though, unlike childhood fables, Titans don't break out into nursery rhymes. They groan, shriek, and cackle while masticating human limbs with blood splayed to great CGI-effect. But those were just the best bits.

Set in an imagined agricultural society in close-to-extinct Japan, the film departs from the manga's German heritage. Which isn't the only difference, nor is it a problem to anyone who hasn't read the manga. While its people are walled up in a fortress to protect themselves from the Titans, the real problem began when the entire town was wrecked to rubble. Onward, upended lives didn't matter in the face of terror. Only the action did to take down the obvious enemy.

Of course, Attack on Titan is a different movie from the tropes of zombie attacks and natural disasters; it's a monster blockbuster, like Godzilla. Hefty with actions sequences between Titan-killing scouts (formed by the film's main trio Eren, Armin, and Mikasa, who's played by model/actress Kiko Mizuhara) and the monsters, the gory action should have made up for the lack of emotional responses from its characters. However, apart from the repeated saying, "I want to kill Titans", nobody really knows why their saving their world.

By the end, humanity's shared values didn't really matter anyway because the takeaway message was clear: we're only as vulnerable as the cattle bred. Okay. And the "true enemy is the fence [that's keeping us in]". That those lives who lost families, houses, and entire villages didn't cost its own unique story arc as much as they were lunch to the Titans, this movie has also served up a sequel aimed to unravel all its plot holes. Perhaps, humanity's apocalyptic blockbuster should really be canned.

You're Not Too Smart For Your Own Good. You're Just Not Persuasive.

If Dale Carneige were still alive, he'd have been 127 years old. And the writer, lecturer, and self-help guru would still want you to know that you're not communicating unless you're doing it with empathy.

Don't get it confused with honesty, or a concern with your co-worker's affairs- that's gossip. Empathy is loftier than you think. Empathy is, according to Carnegie, a people skill that helps you level with others, put yourself in their shoes, and walk a mile in their Nike Fly Knit's, even.

"[It] is so simple, so obvious, that anyone ought to see the truth of it at a glance; yet 90 percent of the people on this earth ignore it 90 percent of the time," says the writer. Which is why, reading his book, How to Win Friends And Influence People, might actually benefit you its working title. You know, to actually have some friends and get people to your thinking.

First published in 1936, HTWFAIP is trawled with comprehensive tips and painstakingly detailed with insightful anecdotes. For a book that has survived reprints since, selling 15 million copies, in 31 languages worldwide, it is a determined, digestible guide. (Yes, that is a part of empathy. On the reader.) His job, a career that has helped Man self-actualize his potential, with tips from "getting people to like you" to winning them over to your ideas, is simple: It's not what you say, but how you say it. 

Today, his ideas has founded a namesake institute that carries itself onward with training programs, to say the least about inspiring top managements and populist tastes alike. Warren Buffet has a copy, shelved on his desk. Simon Pegg starred in the 2008 movie, titled How to Lose Friends And Alienate People, adapted from the parody memoir by Toby Young. The currency of Carnegie's 291 page-long book is a read so powerful it didn't so much endure history than to have future generations enjoy its core ideas enough to spread the word like gospel.

In a chapter where Carnegie analyzes a business letter from an ad-man flawed with self-importance, he offers this in return:

Who cares what your company desires? I am worried about my own problems. The bank is foreclosing the mortgage on my house, the bugs are destroying the hollyhocks, the stock market tumbled yesterday. I missed the eight-fifteen this morning, I wasn't invited to the Jones's dance last night, the doctor tells me I have high blood pressure and neuritis and dandruff. And then what happens? I come down to the office this morning worried, open my mail and here is some whippersnapper off in New York yapping about what his company wants. Bah! If he only realized what sort of impression his letter makes, he would get out of advertising business and start manufacturing sheep dip.

They don't say, but that's exactly how people feel every time you sit on their faces with the highfalutin "I"-mentality. It may be hard not to be an asshole, but people management is one topical interest that'd never pass up from judgement. You don't want to be that guy. 

And neither does Dale Carnegie. He doesn't want you to be "honest to a fault". No, he doesn't want you confusing pompous, condescending honesty with empathy. He wants you to get fixed up with the right manners, instantly. Your job then, reader, is to grab a copy.

Incestuous Thai Movie My Bromance Explores Boyhood Troubles.

Thai movies are tearjerkers. And when they're as controversial as a homosexual relationship between two adolescents, they're usually a home run for its sappy plot. In 2007, Love of Siam was a telling case of two boys, for instance. It was a boy-meets-boy premise buttressed with a coming-of-age story to conflict with the inevitable kith and kin confrontation.

Today, however, a coming of age genre demands more from the audience to believe that it's artistically honest, and not an exploitation of its problems. Tastefully, film makers must accept that, though, the taboo is always appealing, self-empowerment has become more bearable to watch than its characters' depreciation. My Bromance, a 2014 Thai romantic drama, has decided to shock with the latter, spinning the sappy genre on its head with incestuous overtones.

The 1 hour 58 minutes film, directed by Nitchapoom Chaianun, is set in Chiang Mai, Thailand. It begins with a hot-blooded, tempestuous Golf played by Teerapat Lohanan, a bully of a stepbrother to the softer, effeminate Bank, his film counterpart and star-of-the-moment Pongsatorn Sripinta, who's starred this year in another gay drama, titled Red Wine in The Dark Night. Like the latter's thriller, dabbling themes of homosexuality into the strange turned the film's kindred spirit of two brothers into a bizarre romance- kissing, hand-holding brotherly love, to say the least. Of course, nothing ends well with a drama thickened this much by ingenues' lust for love.

Notably, Chaianun was careful not to steer this hefty genre into its one-dimensional circuit. The problems of family and self acceptance remains, but Golf and Bank's relationship turmoil was rooted in personal woes. A problematic Golf, whose father deprives him of attention, is tamed by a more patient, albeit fatherless Bank, who too, has a fair share of issues that mirrors the former's insecurities. As if by happenstance, the two finding each other could only point toward the larger theme of love. That it wasn't pre-mediated, the foolhardy idea of love was instantly felt.

Chaianun was also strategic to remove the film from the currency of technology to highlight his characters' naivety, underscoring the film's sexual blur between his characters. Golf was less of a keyboard warrior than a true hobbyist of plastic toy fixtures, as seen colouring his figurines throughout the film, only be reciprocated by Bank at the end. Moreover, its expression as a totemic symbol was also introduced in the film as an everlasting promise: Rings were exchanged to the seal the protagonists' romance, whether as siblings borne out of circumstance or star-crossed lovers doomed to fall apart. Everything, to wit, was done to strip the notion of love to its fleeting substance.

However, that's not to discount the movie of its pitfalls. With common-sense-defying narrative and poor characterization, My Bromance quickly became beguiling halfway. The denouement was flawed with an expected death, and complete with a lackluster voiceover at the end, which felt like a farce. The film, conflicted to what's been aimed as youth-quaking love, began to move toward the dramatic territories of adult tragedy. Calculate that with its cliches- self-sacrifice, loss, and total acceptance- My Bromance didn't survive a satisfying ending.

8 years after Love of Siam broke water works in theaters, Thai movies that have stuck to its tried-and-true formula of LGBT complexities still work, somehow. Made more by the fact that in 2015, when modern romantic films rush to encapsulate the digital age in its themes, watching a dissimilar movie only made its genre all the more nostalgic and refreshing.

Why Hedi Slimane is The Most Important Designer in Fashion Right Now.

Californian-based Parisian designer Hedi Slimane is having a fashion moment right now at Saint Laurent, a post he's helmed creative director since 2012. "He's a genius," said Betty Catroux, a confidante and muse to the late designer Yves Saint Laurent. Indeed, Slimane has, in a span of three years, rebooted the label, dropped its first name, courted controversy (though, unwittingly), and skyrocketed Saint Laurent's sales since it succeeded Stefano Pilati's romanticised embroidery of the label.

Stripped off of the high-fashion that designers before Slimane has struggled to restore into its company, Slimane's "genius" was to bring high street to the ideals of luxury. He has torn up and reassembled its parts again to resemble the wardrobe of a night-life streetwalker. Seasonally, Slimane's clothes were nothing of the glamour one'd wear, say, to Swan Lake, but an amalgamation of skinny jeans, army-surplus jackets and almost-air-tight mini skirts slit to the panties. All beside the girlish accessories he'd imagined for the new Saint Laurent girl- chokers, high-inch black stilettos and ripped stockings, Slimane's girl would rather jam to a Pearl Jam concert.

From commissioning runway music with his Los Angeles peers, to featuring Californian artists on his show invites, advertisers can agree Slimane's wizardry is marketing magic, grounded in collaboration. As for the clothes this season, Slimane riffed on the battered looks of festival goers with a musical reference. (Representative: Courtney Love).

Think Glastonbury and one'd flog to death about those Wellington boots he showed, alongside the slip dresses, which closed the show sans Love's tiara accessory- that the grunge rocker would don. In between, the show was not without the repetitive pieces of an everyday wardrobe, from sparkly dresses to perfecto leather jackets, and the netted tank tops that one can order, pronto, from NastyGal.

Crowning the girl with a tiara was also a deliberate choice. As the show opened under the haunting spell of musician John Dywer's soundtrack, an atmospheric number with repetitive beats that drummed on ad infinitum, models bowled down the catwalk from a black cube- a similar fashion to Larry Bell's featured cubic artwork this season. Their summer-of-love outfits, during which showed a collage of denim, furry shrugs, and immaculately tailored blazers, were accessorized with sparkle less on the feet than bijoux-ed on top of their heads, as if to scream, "f**k me, I'm famous," rung from the same rebellious bells of Courtney Love's kinder whore aesthetic. The prom queen this season is a champ of her own wardrobe, a point Slimane has been prodding when he first showed boots, instead of heels, oversized Nirvana-like plaid shirts, instead of dinner jackets, on his debut. It's no rocket science how easy these looks could be assimilated.

How has all that worked for a luxury business that prizes itself on the conceptual and operatic designs for close to a decade has less befuddled its audience than to scurry them to think alike; to reformulate their own strategies to follow suit. Slimane's influence is based on commerce and pure marketing, churning out easy-to-pair pieces that'd fit like a missing puzzle into his wearer's closet. You didn't know you wanted Wellington boots, and you didn't know they could be styled this or that way, until you watched a Saint Laurent presentation.

And his competitors are gradually etching on, with yet another old-house Courreges revitalising its codes this Paris Fashion week, with no complete looks but as to reintroduce variations of its famous jackets. Buyers would jump for joy, customers would find that easy to digest, and the appeal is right in line to fashion's new standard of purchase: See it, like it, wear it tomorrow.

Wieden + Kennedy's History of The Internet

When Kim Kardashian tried to balance a champagne glass on her a** for Paper Magazine in 2014, the "Internet broke", to say the least about going viral. However, it was less at the atrocity of the social media mogul- reigning in 46.2m followers since, among her peers- than at its admittance, that she has also come to define the Internet: total self-disclosure, partial-state-of-undress selfies, and depending how strong your WiFi connection is, a tool that has surveyed, governed, and changed our lives irrevocably.

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What's interesting then is that global advertising agency Wieden + Kennedy has furthered this discourse. Appropriately, it has churned out a page-long response for the 20th Annual Webby Awards, as part of other 20 notable works, which include organizations like Tumblr, NASA, Google, and, even, creative agency Kinetic Singapore, whose influence has had a hand in shaping our future.

Instead of crowing about its benefits or embedding it with human stories that honour its genesis, Wieden + Kennedy has broached the topic in a free and interpretative way, by "objectively" putting the Internet in context with its enduring history. Noteworthy remarks, like sound bites from popular culture, are included as much as its impact to advertisers, a concern that has challenged marketers to rethink about ways to connect with its audiences.

Over the next 20 weeks, a host of ideas will start unfurling from various organisations in tandem with the theme, "The Internet Can't Be Stopped." It's almost retrospective to think that every company listed has touched our lives one way or another. What the Internet should then be to them will also be related in poster-sized prints.

Relevancy is what makes this campaign so inclusive and exciting to follow. "Self-destructing videos" points to Snapchat and "#FirstWorldProblems" is a quintessential millenial gripe. Let's just say the Internet has a long tedious background that will never see a clean slate.

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Still Banging, Miley Cyrus!

As with pop to shock, titillate, and- if you're Miley Cyrus- assault your musical senses, nothing measures up to the ex-Disney star's latest surprise album which was released during the MTV Video Music Awards on August 30. While we've witnessed Nicki Minaj's jungle-festooned performance which was later joined in concert with Taylor Swift that night, it was during a drag queen studded performance that Cyrus closed as host when a new single titled "Dooo It!" entailed an even pleasant surprise. Available online, Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz promises another side to the raunchy star.

On its own, the music is punchy, offbeat. It's stuff you'd play without risking musical nausea; it's an mix up of musical styles- from '80s pop to today's indie records- that has made plenty of swerves from the Bangerz star's latest dabble into crazy hip hop. Oozing 90 minutes of tracks drenched in psychedelia, Miley Cyrus & her Dead Petz is a heavy concoction of pop and nostalgia.

However, there's very little familiarity with the early twerking, tongue tying star. That means, beside the country music image she's shed since Bangerz came on, this record is anything but the oversexualized, or the "All American". The music is hazed with dreamy vocals, singing a wide-varying list of topics in styles inspired by her predecessors. (From the absurd- "Twinkle Song"- to the deeply emotional- "Karen Don't Be Sad", there are songs like "I Get Scared" that reminds one of an early Paul McCartney). Offset that with the Miley you know, a couple of songs about high-fun and drugs were also thrown in, brewing a bizarre 23 track-album, including a ballad about a dead blowfish, that should cure us from pop's oft-late cliches.

Has there ever been a time more appropriate for pop music to evolve? If today's idea of pop is Taylor Swift, Cyrus's new album would be a one-up. Rife with colour- explicitly depicted on the album cover- the music is fresh on its own without a pop album's formula of love, boys, and breakups. It's a project borne of Cyrus's artistic freedom, which she took to her discretion after Bangerz's success. Crediting an impressive collaboration with famous help, such as Wayne Coyne from The Flaming Lips, Los Angeles's indie rocker Ariel Pink, and record producer Mike Will Made It, the music has the muscle of a steady pop record that could be raucuous and cheeky, and yet, too, daring, pushing boundaries few pop stars do, by introducing a marginal taste that could only be classified as "indie" to mainstream listeners.

In the Ariel Pink track, "Tiger Dreams", listeners are greeted with heavy reverb, awash with fuzzy waves that'd sweep them off with mellow overtones. And as Cyrus begins to croon ("the first who holds servility is probably right..."), everything else becomes a fuzzy blur that elicits dreamy illegible phrases masked by the occasional Auto-tune. Meanwhile, as with pop's familiar territories, "Lighter" riffs on '80s synth beats in typical fashion of a love song, "What's going on in my mind, when/ We're together, everything is so sweet..."

As the 22-year-old star explained to the New York Times, "That's what I've got the luxury to do... I can just do what I want to do, and make the music I want to make." Would this, then, suggest yet another reinvention from Miley? Frankly, it's unlikely, to say nothing that the album was an off chance from her record contract with company RCA, who knew nothing about it. But consider this a non-commercial self from the chameleonic pop idol, who's really a cultural tour de force shaking things up right now.

Thanks Miley! Now I can't stop.

A Stock Photo Romance, Love is.

The One. An everlasting promise of finding the perfect Other that fortifies relationships into an unbreakable bond. Without its notion, we wouldn't have known pseudonyms like Big, or heard songs like "Bound 2", a 4 minute track dedicated to newly mother-to-be Kim Kardashian West. In fact, the One is but made up of two; two hopeful singles who believe that they were born into this world on a quest for marriage, deeply connected sex, and riding in coital position on a dirt bike.

Today, though, the definition might've skewed from the classics, and yet furthered online. Otherwise, how else do we explain the apps whose existence trolls our hope for a match that can only be made in URL? (Ashley Madison anyone?) In the face of technology, we know better that the One is out there, except, he or she is on an algorithm, making snap judgements about our profile pages.

Feeling insecure? Here, an early essay that highlights how love's experienced then, and now.

A basic couple in matchy plaid from Gap.

In Old English, love was, though, still is, ascribing to a beloved noun. It is connotative of a friendliness that weaves the word with a feeling of warmth, affection, and joy, to say nothing of its added expression by the 15th century, when love became a verb, as in, to make love, to have sex (Love, n.d.). Granted, the word love has been around longer than generations before my own, like infinitesimal beings dotting the planet with our right to feel it, act upon it, and behave as we are in it. We are such hopeful people when it comes to love that to think of a world without one would be a catastrophe. Like our unsolicited issues of Cosmopolitan or our churches, sex columnists and clergymen would all but run out of a job in one fell swoop if love never exists for a day. Love is grand, in brief, and simplistically, “a strong feeling of affection”(Love, 2015). However, compared with history, which has compounded love's earliest of meanings into a wide-varying list of phrases, such as "love letters", being a "love fool, or to "love thy neighbour", modern love has witnessed an overhaul in its definition. To say that love is unchanged is false, regardless of the wise men that have made its notion lapidary. While it is still a feeling derivative of joy, today, love is defined today by technology, expressed as a swipe on apps, and synonymous to engaging in casual debauchery, whereby loving your neighbor is as literal making him your bedfellow, hooked up from an app that measures his or her online radius.

It all started with Facebook. Like with any meeting place by happenstance, the cliché of its idiomatic phrase, "love at first sight" has moved its venture. Having dated once on the Internet, instead of finding love by the cinematic tropes of bookstore corners and coffee shops, my ex-partner and I took off after befriending each other on the social media channel. We dated briefly online, exchanged flirtatious virtual letters by dropping them off into each other’s inboxes, and declared our statuses- thanks to Facebook’s innovative (and invasive) labeling function, “single”, “married”, or “in a relationship”- before moving on like any real-world couple. Love, in brief, was not bound by physical places. Gone were the days of brushing shoulders and locking each other’s gazes in public spaces; today, you lock down on each other's Facebook profiles and update your marital status, pronto.

A tired web of romance's three-way-trap.

However, unlike the epics, as with Romeo and Juliet, Anthony and Cleopatra, and Tristan and Isolde, who share a common tragedy, modern love ends with the tragedy of iPhone apps. If the mishap then were to be in the unparalleled expectations of love, apps today would have to be the bar that keeps lowering our standards. Post-Facebook, when apps that took over our mobile phones seem to work in tandem with the buzzing Internet age, acting upon love, or simply, asking a person out on a date, is predetermined by its lazy swipe. For example, in one game-changing dating app, Tinder, users specifically log on as single hopefuls looking for love. The app has boasted that, within seconds and a measured radius, a prospective partner is just a swipe away: If you like what you see, you take a right swipe; and if you don’t, you move left. Should you get a match, you are too, prompted to “keep playing”; thus, to keep your options open has already been decided for you (Brodwin, 2015). Further complicating this notion of love by captitalising it into a lucrative business, Time writer, Samantha Grossman (2015), reported that users could now link another of their photo-sharing profile, Instagram, into their Tinder pages, so that they may progressively “attract a quality mate”. They include almost-nudes, surreptitious pictures of inanimate objects, wholesome traveling photos, or even a Lamborghini. Tried and true, I took on the dating app, once, after carefully selecting my avatar. Unlike Facebook, where offline dating is still considered traditional if you used it as a platform to kick-start your relationship, Tinder is the future that skids love into the gutters. While the average human being forms an impression in five seconds, I could trim mine to two, and then one, after deep sighs heaved at how profiles barreling down the home screen do not appeal immediately. What is to be made of a profile image is often judged too quickly by thumbnails, swipes after swipes. The sweet gesture of love today is not a measure to decide if there is any chemistry between two hopefuls, but a way to debate if one user profile is more worthy of your time beside the next. This is reductive to the early notion of love, that its romantic feelings could be groomed with time. Unlikely to be formed by the spontaneity apps have boasted with the advent of matchmaking sites, time is a luxury modern love cannot afford. In other words, love has become the fuel to our ire of instant gratification. We are, while foolhardy suckers for love, becoming more flustered at faster results and faster broadband speed that would only decline our chances of finding any love at all.

"We love Love!"

Most recently with apps, I have been reading into love as an excuse for something else. By the stretch of my imagination, I have never thought of love to be purely physical. Throw in erotic fiction Fifty Shades of Grey and one would call bluff on love. “Love is really just sex!” as my eighteen-year-old cousin adequately summed it, one day. He thought that the erotic saga, written by EL James, was reflective of our times. To him, sexuality is a discourse we need not shy away from, as an expression to make love to someone whom we desire. To me, sexuality is more than just to love freely, but also a rendezvous with our dating apps. As with the term, “the love that dare not speak its name” (Love, 2015), alluding to the homosexual trial of author Oscar Wilde in the eighteenth century, love’s offence is not in its name, today; rather, it is in its usernames that people hide behind on dating apps that exploit guilt-free sex. Like any “couple”, I have seen friends marry up nicely with one another on these apps, meet up for dinners like a date, and oft-travel abroad together. If there were a catch, it would be that dating apps have made monogamy a hidebound idea. As with those who sleep around freely, parties could see anyone else they fancied, throughout the open relationship. There were no ground rules, as love was free, and in the main of love’s name, it was equivalent to risqué behavior. In contrast to Tinder, these “dating” apps belie, because wholesome headshots are replaced with salacious photos of one, taunting to be privately messaged off the grid of its interface. Though, some profile messages still read “Looking for LTR (Long Term Relationship)” they are but baiting when users ask later if one would like to “make love”. Has love, thus, been blurred so deeply that it is indistinguishable from casual, wanton sex, to say nothing of how openly accessible these apps are to anyone?

Today, love makes as much sense as the evolving state of the Internet and its applications. We are still using it, learning to advance it, and hoping to improve lives with it. Yet, that love could be found, forged, and fallen out of on its platform is defined by all the instances evidenced in my encounters: Love is a meeting place where romance ought to blossom, and it helps with an internet connection; however, it is also a filtering tool where we can carefully sieve out those we suspect of never loving; alas, it is an excuse for exploiting one’s sexuality. As befuddling, romantic, and enigmatic as love was in its early definition, love has leaped on with technology. Like its modern age, are we not still figuring it out what it truly means to ourselves?

Bound 2.