小流氓 & Sigmund Freud

In the very same weird fuck absurd vein as my earlier post featuring excerpts containing the hidden connections between Doraemon and Socialism, North Korean style, apparently, now we have theories about the connection between Freud and...小流氓, better known to all as the 龙虎门 (or even better known in the West as the failed movie adaptation Dragon Tiger Gate.). Do check out the full article. Here's an excerpt... 政治動盪與社會不安的七十年代，香港正在繼承著根深蒂固的傳統文化的同時，並在享受著西方文化帶來的衝擊與快感。那時候，西方文化對性和思想的解放猶如脫韁野馬，令香港掀起一陣春潮泛濫的電影文化，激流洶湧下，色情電影紛紛湧現。 當時社會充斥著這種不良風氣，令風化案上升。色魔橫行，單身女子不敢夜歸的社會現實，被黃玉郎借題發揮，改篇作飛天豹一段（即『小流氓』第六期『大戰飛天豹』）。在黃玉郎的設定下，飛天豹所用的武器是一柄削鐵如泥的寶劍。淫賊……寶劍……筆者似乎看見黃玉郎向佛洛依德微笑。對了，廣東人喜以劍比喻男性性器官，男性間以陽具互作比較俗稱「格劍」，所以黃玉郎在這種俗文化下潛移默化，就將劍設定為善於以性征服女性的飛天豹的武器。也許，當時黃玉郎並未看過佛洛伊德的著作，但這一段正好切合了佛洛伊德的「夢之解析」(Interpretation of Dreams)。 有說漫畫工業是漫畫家的夢工場，並盛載著每位作者的願望。佛洛依德：「夢是一種在現實中實現不了和受壓抑的願望的滿足。」他更大膽地認為這些實現不了和受壓抑的願望多半是和性有關的。比方說，他認為夢裏出現呈棒狀或凸出的東西都象徵男性性器官，凹陷的地方則象徵女性性器官，騎馬、攀山、開門等象徵性行為。所以，劍，對飛天豹來說，是一種性徵﹔削鐵如泥的寶劍，更是一種無堅不摧的性崇拜。這是飛天豹的慾望，亦是作者自我意識反射的彰顯。 自飛天豹陣亡後，寶劍落入王小虎手中。到了「龍虎門」時代，王小虎與金詩詩相戀，在一次決戰前夕，王小虎出征前將寶劍交給金詩詩傍身，可惜不幸地，金詩詩被玄難所擒，並將她污辱﹔事後，金詩詩悄悄地取出寶劍，向胸口自刺而亡。這一段，作者顯然是想帶出女性貞潔不二的聖願，同樣亦是作者渴望伴侶對感情忠貞的嚮往。引用佛洛依德的說法，劍是象徵男性性器官，凹陷的胸膛傷口是象徵女性性器官，自盡則代表性行為，這是反映她對被性侵犯後內心充滿懊悔及自責，亦暗喻她有盼望將初夜獻給最愛男人的遺願。 作者對女性有忠貞的要求，同樣認為她們應該崇拜男性性器官。王小虎母親媚娘，徐娘半老，風韻猶存。她在舊著「龍虎門」中有不少男伴，早有王伏虎，後有東方無懼、大羅仙，自她與王小虎重逢後，開始加入「龍虎門」與黑幫對抗，雖多次被歹角非禮、冒犯，但她終覓真愛，先後與劍痴及劍魔共墮愛河。為何媚娘總是喜歡用劍的男人？在黃玉郎的漫畫世界裡，劍和男性性器官是有間接掛勾。根據佛洛依德的說法，潛意識的活動中的主要內容被壓抑的願望並非是直接表達於夢中，而是通過扭曲變作為象徵的形式出現。劍是性器象徵物，讓媚娘先後戀上劍痴和劍魔，完全是作者壓抑渴望女性對男性性器官有一種莫名崇拜的心理反射。

Who Wants to Be Filthy F#&%ing Rich

In light of the real life's all-consuming "Final Crisis" and the heavily acclaimed film, "Slumdog Millionaire" that is all the rage these days, one can't help but brings to mind Rage Against The Machine's iconic music video in 2000, Sleep Now In The Fire. Directed by then relatively-unknown (pre-Bowling For Columbine) Michael Moore, the video interweaves scenes from a caricature of the then-popular TV game show "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire", aptly named, "Who Wants to Be Filthy F#&%ing Rich", with footage taken when the band played right in front of the New Year Stock Exchange with Michael Moore and cinematographer Welles Hackett in helm. The infamous performance resulted in the detainment of Moore (for an hour and slapped with threat for arrest) and the unprecedented impromptu lockdown of the NYSC's Doors for fear of crowd gathering. Oh, and there's a real cute quote by Gary Bauer (a Republican Politician doing their routine shit-stirring) at the end of the video, "a band called 'The Machine Rages On' - er - 'Rage Against the Machine', that band is anti-family and it's pro-terrorist"

This Friday The Thirteen...

... A news, with rhyming numbers. By the way, the tiny head at the right bottom corner happens to be the 15-year-old mother of the child. And for all the interested inspiring parents out there, feel free to check out the link to The Sun's (probably subconsciously cynical though) unintentionally humorous follow-up piece to the headline. Surely we can't count British's Prime Minister Gordon Brown as one of the inspiring, but boy is he interested already. "I think all of us would want to avoid teenage pregnancies."

R.I.P. Joshua Benjamin Jeyaretnam 1926 - 2008

"I get my strength from somewhere else, if you know what I mean," Joshua Benjamin Jeyaretnam said in an interview with AFP in 2006. "I refuse to conform to the world." Veteran Singapore opposition leader J.B. Jeyaretnam, who died Tuesday, waged a long and lonely campaign for greater political freedom in the tightly governed city-state. He was attempting a fresh political comeback when he succumbed to heart failure. The 82-year-old British-trained lawyer and former MP was the nemesis of Singapore's iron-fisted founding leader Lee Kuan Yew, 85, whose People's Action Party (PAP) will celebrate 50 uninterrupted years in power in 2009. "I haven't got very many more years," Jeyaretnam said in July at the launch of the new Reform Party, which was to be his vehicle for a comeback after years in the political wilderness. Will you miss the old man, who is always at your favourite neighbourhood MRT Station, selling books and touting "the truth"? It's the end of an era.

The Fuwa's Rejects

A peek into into Fuwa's creator, Han Meilin's sketchbook with all the rejects that failed to make the ranks of the Fuwas... Thank God (if there is one), there's only five, no, six of these creatures...

The Sixth Fuwa (Represented Crisis Not Sold Separately)

Just when you thought the highly touted Beijing 2008 had moved on, and that the Fuwas (mind you, i do like them very much), together with all its much-talked-about secret identity being the foreboder of crisis, will be behind us now.... Along came another crisis. For those unknown to the theories...a little refresher, courtesy of wikipedia. In the months leading up to the Olympics, coincidental similarities between the characters and several events became were noted on the internet blogs under titles such as "Curse of the fuwa". Some Chinese have taken to calling the characters "Wuwa" (witch dolls). Online criticism of the dolls has frequently been censored. 1) Beibei, a Chinese sturgeon of water/sea element, for the 2008 South China floods. 2) Jingjing, a panda, for the Sichuan earthquake. Sichuan is well known for its pandas. 3) Huanhuan, representing the Olympic flame, for the Summer Olympics torch relay protests. 4) Yingying, a Tibetan antelope, for the 2008 Tibetan unrest. 5) Nini, a swallow thought to be a kite, was blamed for the "kite city" of Weifang T195 train accident. Nini was also believed to be a locust, and associated with a locust plague that infested Inner Mongolia in June 2008. Done the math already? Five crisis, five Fuwas. The up side of this theory is, if it is indeed true, that means no more crisis for China anymore (well, at least till next year), the down side is, there's no down side, it's just a intentionally mean joke at best. Then came the 2008 Chinese milk scandal. Almost like some freak of nature's way to ensure that 2008 won't just be engraved on the general consciousness with just the Beijing Olympic. But we have run out of our ever-so-lovely Fuwas to pin the curse on, isn't it? Well, not quite so, I'm afraid. 2008 Summer Paralympics. I'm sure you remembered Fu Niu Lele (roughly meaning "Lucky Ox 'Happy'")? The association game is elementary from this point on.

It's That Time Of The Year Again, Jackass!!!

Wobbly wriggling while withering in the ever-as-efficient-as-it-is-goddamn-overloaded morning train to whore myself yet again, I find myself incapable of wiping that silly smirk off my face when I saw this ad. Wondering what time of the year had delighted this merry family of three generations gathering in front of the X-Box 360? Wonder no more. Ahhh, the delights of drunk driving, are just one of the many vices that you can indulge in Grand Theft Auto IV, a fact made famous by a stark-raving organization with a strangely appropriately named acronym, MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Fake Crystal Skulls

Less than three months after the Quai Branly Museum in Paris discovered that a crystal skull once proclaimed as a mystical Aztec masterpiece was a fake, it is now the turn of the British Museum and the Smithsonian Institution to find they were victims of skull-duggery. Scientists from those two prestigious institutions on Wednesday said their crystal skulls were cut, honed and polished by tools of the industrial age, not by Mesoamerican craftsmen of yore. "The skulls under consideration are not pre-Columbian. They must surely be regarded as of relatively modern manufacture," they say. "Each skull was probably worked not more than a decade before it was first offered for sale." The skulls became star exhibits in all three museums long before the Indiana Jones movie, "The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," hit the movie screens this year. The superstitious deemed them part of a collection of 12 skulls, endowed with healing or mystical powers, that dated back to the ancient culture of Central America. Reuniting all 12 skulls, together with a putative 13th, would conjure up a massive power that would prevent the Earth from tipping over on December 21 2012, the "doomsday" in the Mayan calendar, according to one fable. Legend-lovers had a bad day on April 18 when the Quai Branly said it had found grooves and perforations in its 11-centimetre-high quartz skull revealing the use of "jewellery burrs and other modern tools."

Super Cop-Killer

Gaze into the eyes of the Super Cop-Killer!!! Another officer stabbed in a knife attack at a police station in Shanghai has died, raising the death toll to six. The Shanghai Public Security Bureau says the officer died in hospital late Tuesday, several hours after the attack. Police say an unemployed 28-year-old man stormed the police station and started attacking officers with a knife. Five officers died at the scene and four others, along with a guard, were injured in the attack. The official Xinhua news agency reported that the attacker, only identified by his surname Yang, was carrying a knife, a hammer, a mask, aerosol spray and homemade explosives. Police are still investigating his motive. Yang, who is from Beijing, initially told police he was seeking revenge after officers at the station in Shanghai's Zhabei district investigated him last year for allegedly stealing bicycles. When he reached the gate of the police station, he lobbed eight Molotov cocktails at the entrance, injuring a security guard who tried to stop him. Yang made his way into the building, stabbing four officers he caught by surprise in the guard room. He then forced his way through to the 10th, 11th, and 21st floors of the building, wounding another five officers. He was finally captured by a team of special police on the 21st floor.

Spain The Pain

"Football is a simple game; 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans win." - one of England's most profilic striker in history, Gary Lineker. Eat yer heart out, Germany.

A Monk In Akihabara

A Japanese monk making prayers at a makeshift altar in the midst of downtown Akihabara one week after the Akihabara massacre 秋葉原通り魔事件, Akihabara Tōrima Jiken.

H Is For Hypocrite/Hypocritical

Some excerpt from 林奕华's article on the leading Hong Kong paper, Ming Pao. Thought-provoking commentaries on the increasingly notorious tabloid news of the year, with pointers listed in an alphabetical order. H is for Hypocrite/Hypocritical 「虛偽」兩隻字在報章頭條上被放大，首先使人深思的，倒不是被它們指控的當事人（阿嬌）有幾表裏不一、言不由衷，而是兩隻字被看到的背景，以及從中引伸出來的定義。 如果我們都能明白，及實事求是地接受一份報章可以在新聞版道貌岸然，在風月版卻是「大滾友」，那麼，要求一個廿六七歲的女藝人徹頭徹尾是童話中的仙子或公主，便是選擇性地提出指控。因為，藝人明顯是娛樂工業一部份，「童話」的存在是補償現實中不能達成的美夢，只有兒童（天真）或思想不成熟的人（幼稚）才會相信看似童話人物的藝人是活在現實世界中的卡通人物。 為什麼有些人可以一邊如此世故，同時又如此無知？抑或，無知不過是一種偽裝，為的是開脫自己的鋤弱扶強？以譴責阿嬌「虛偽」為例，只要認識問題的本質，任何人都知道她的「虛偽」只是服膺虛偽的娛樂制度，甚至是媒體制度——「她」的「純情」，難道不是由這些制度按照市場需求而塑造？大眾渴望她永遠保持貞潔，但在渴望背後又隱藏着對她的性幻想——何嘗不是出於充滿吊詭和抑壓的慾望？ 不去反思自己的矛盾，偏去怪罪一個平日盡量替大眾「圓夢」，卻因一次意外而打碎集體幻想的藝人「虛偽」，請問是誰的不誠實和說一套做一套對社會造成更大的誤導和影響？ 即便阿嬌真是「虛偽」，她「口不對心」的理由已是人所共知，但在這時候還以道德之名搖旗吶喊要她「全盤交代」者，目的卻是希望消費過程中更多細節（甚至謀利），那就更是典型賊喊捉賊，真的很虛偽。