A · walking · study · in · demonology.

The following was taken from JYH’s blog:

Gym-going has all the basic lineaments of a religion. Its adherents are motivated by feelings of guilt, and the urge to atone for fleshly sins. Many visit their places of worship with a fanatical regularity. Once there, believers are led by sacerdotal instructors, who either goad them into mass ecstasy during aerobics classes, or preside over the confessional tête-à-tête of personal training. Each devotee has his own rituals, though most rely on the principles of self-mortification and delayed gratification. The extremist cult of body-building has become a mass movement.

What inspires the armies of devout body-worshippers? What is the point?

Today's young professionals are not the first people in history to devote so much time and cash to the cultivation of their bodies. The word “gymnasium” comes from the Greek word gumnos, meaning “naked”, which is how many ancient Greeks practised wrestling, boxing and running in their gymnasia (or palestra). Gymnasia were part of Plato's ideal city; the Romans inherited this corporeal preoccupation from the Greeks. Ancient gyms shared some features with their modern equivalents: for instance, well-heeled exercisers could engage the services of the classical version of personal trainers. There was a fair bit of ogling. But one essential difference was that one of the purposes of gym-attendance was to prepare young men for war; it was essential for the warrior classes in martial societies such as ancient Sparta.

Conventional religiosity motivated a 19th-century form of body-worship. Christianity had traditionally regarded the body as something of an embarrassment; but with the Victorian rise of “muscular Christianity”, looking after the body became a way of worshipping the creator. Christian gentlemen were obliged to attend to their muscles as well as to their minds. Exercise was also embraced to quell the unruliness of poor, urban youths, who were shepherded into boxing clubs. And it answered worries about the sturdiness of the national gene pool, which was required to generate enough able-bodied young men to govern an empire. So the cult of the body spilled out of public schools and into the slums.

Unfortunately, these precedents offer little insight into the motives of today's mostly civilian, often godless gym-goers. But there is one concomitant phenomenon that might supply an obvious explanation for the rise of the fitness religion: fat. The exercise boom has coincided with an epidemic bulge in waistlines in many rich countries. So perhaps gym-attendance can be explained as a logical consequence of gluttony—a prophylactic or remedy for fatness in particular, and a sensible way to stay healthy in general?

One problem with this neat explanation, as a visit to almost any gym will reveal, is that most gym-goers are already depressingly svelte. According to Mintel International, a British market-research firm, more people visit gyms to tone up than to lose weight. As one personal trainer confides, fat people are generally too self-conscious to subject themselves to comparison with the flabless forms of most gym users. Society, it seems, is becoming polarised between the fat and the fit.

The sweat and the stupor

Whatever they do to the body, gyms are certainly numbingly bad for your mind. This is not simply the partisan judgment of a self-vindicating slob. The biggest problem the fitness industry faces is retaining club members, who, when their original zeal wears off, get bored with all the lonely and repetitious rituals. To combat the threat of boredom, gyms have installed distracting televisions and (in the posher ones) Internet connections to entertain the Sisyphean toilers on bikes and rowing machines. Most chains have devised zany-sounding exercise classes to bedazzle flagging members.

Are the compensations of a pastime whose physical benefits are variable, and which is so dull that all manner of improbable hybrids and gimmicks have to be invented to keep people at it? Why do hordes of already-fit people devote so much of their time to such a boring and self-punitive pursuit? Most other forms of entertainment that have evolved with mass affluence—such as, say, the rise of foreign holidays—are more obviously enjoyable. Indeed, one standard critique of Anglo-American capitalism argues that, at a certain point, the puritanism that originally sustained it evaporated, to be replaced by a callow and self-indulgent hedonism; whereupon pleasure replaced graft as capitalism's ultimate good. What explains this masochistic anomaly?

Perhaps the answer lies in the access gyms offer to gaggles of lithe and scantily clad (if not entirely gumnos) strangers. Many gyms are indeed designed with plenty of glass and mirrors to facilitate mutual admiration. As Tris Reid-Smith—editor of the Pink Paper, a gay British weekly—says, there are some gyms that attract large numbers of “muscle Marys” or “gym bunnies”, as stereotypically muscle-bound gay men are known among their peers.

In some of these, gratification is not always exactly delayed. But the etiquette in most gyms, and the strict concentration on personal salvation that prevails, precludes much in the way of flirtation. Most of the admiration is of the narcissistic variety (it is the men, fitness instructors report, who are especially besotted by the mirrors).

Changes in the structure of relationships outside the gym may be part of the explanation: the increased likelihood of divorce and separation may have persuaded attached people, unconsciously or otherwise, that they ought to stay in shape, just in case. Along with the growing demand for male-grooming products, gym attendance among men may also reflect the growing power of women in the singles market: more and more men are now afflicted by the same sort of bodily anxieties that women have endured for decades. (A contrary explanation is that the emasculation wrought by women's gains at work and home has driven some men to fall back on muscular notions of masculinity.) Perhaps, for both sexes, muscles have come to signify prosperity, just as a suntan used to be the mark of an agricultural labourer but now denotes wealth.

Explanations based on the potential rewards of swelling biceps and flat tummies assume that, at some level, gym-going is motivated by the rational pursuit of happiness. According to a more pessimistic view, going to the gym is not pleasurable (however indirectly) but pathological. The result is an “horrendous perfectionism” prevents people from enjoying the fruits of their affluence. Few will take this “horrendous perfectionism” to the same extreme as did Yukio Mishima, a celebrated Japanese novelist who, after building a splendidly buff torso from years of pumping iron, committed hara-kiri rather than grow old and ugly. But still, Mr James speculates that for every person who goes to the gym for a legitimate health reason, many more are engaging in low-grade attacks on their bodies, which, in most cases, are already absolutely fine. An extreme form of this can be found among bodybuilders, some of whom suffer from a pathological belief that they are puny. According to researchers in Melbourne, “muscle dysmorphia” (or “bigorexia”), as the delusion is known, often leads sufferers to exercise obsessively and gobble steroids.

There is some evidence to support the view that working out, and other forms of body-anxiety, may be sicknesses of affluence—driven by unreasonable and unachievable expectations about where the rowing machine can take you. One personal trainer confides that, whenever a client successfully hardens or tightens one targeted part of the body, he or she invariably moves on to the improvement of another part. Research suggests that twenty-somethings are more dissatisfied with their bodies than anybody else, when, in fact, they tend to be in the best condition. Anxieties about body-shape, epidemiologists in Canada have found, are most prevalent in affluent areas. On this analysis, going to the gym will only make things worse, condemning users to an endless and destructive cycle of perfectionism.

A slightly less depressing possibility is that the appeal of the gym cult lies in the structure of religion itself. Perhaps hedonism is losing its lustre, and the rich once again crave the shape and strictures, however masochistic, that orthodox religion once supplied. Like Christian salvation, the holy grails of gym-goers may be distant and unattainable, and the paths towards them painful, but the rules and routines that their pursuit involves seem to provide comfort to a new and growing breed of secular puritans.

In the end, gym-attendance, like most popular religions, probably has something to do with fear of death and the quest for immortality—as if a well-toned body could somehow stave off the day of judgment. Which, unfortunately, is just another way in which it is liable to lead to disappointment. Gyms may not actually be bad for most people who go to them; but, as a wise man once inquired about hard work, why take the risk?

(Souce: Adapted from The Economist, Dec 2002)

Now that I have slightly more time, I have decided to spend some time writing about my two separate trips to Bangkok and KL over the past 1 – 2 months.

One of the things I like about going to Bangkok is that I can catch up on all the gay magazines which are sold at the bookshops and news-stands over there, e.g. GT, Attitude, Out, The Advocate, Genre, Instinct.

(D actually subscribes to GT, so he used to pass me his copy every month, and thanks TJ, for lending me a number of your older issues of Out.)

Anyway, one of the articles that I read caught my attention.

This article describes how in the UK, skinny gay men wearing skinny clothes have replaced the muscle mary. (And when we are talking about skinny, we are talking about a waist line of 26” / 27 “ or less.)

The main reason for this change in aesthetic? Hedi Slimane.

For those who are not in the know, Hedi Slimane was hired as the chief designer for Dior Homme in 2000 and since then, has been said to define how men will look this decade. Not only is he unforgiving in the slim-cut of his clothes, he is also very particular about the models who wear his clothes. He was the one who started to cast young, skinny 16 – 18 year old boys who didn’t look like conventional models.

He is also associated with the indie music scene in the UK, like The Rakes and Franz Ferdinand. In fact, he was the one who recruited Pete Doherty (the lead singer of the The Libertines and Kate Moss’ squeeze) to model his clothes.

As with all high-fashion moments, the affordable watered-down versions have started to appear in high-end shops, like Topshop, River Island, and FCUK. And this is the look that 16 – 19 year old gay guys have now, what with the skinny jeans craze and all. In fact, they have started an XXS size for Topman t-shirts.

And even though many older gay men – who have the money to buy the narrow designs that Slimane has produced – are not able to ideally fit into them, why are so many of them willing to adopt this new size zero? Well, mainly because the people who can fit into them effortlessly belong to the sub-section of the gay community which is constantly fawned over – the young gay men out there.

And especially in the UK, the visibility of this sub-section of the gay community has risen, due in part to the ease which many of them come out at an earlier age.  This is happening in Singapore as well, where a  Saturday night in Play is like being in a hawker centre near a secondary school / junior college around 2 in the afternoon - everyone around you is so, so much younger. And as usual, when demographics shift, so too does marketing and niche targeting. After all, while many gay men in their late 20s and in their 30s are too cynical to immediately buy in to a new trend (they have postcards left over when chequered shirts and moustaches were all the rage), young gay men, the ones who are experiencing the first taste of gay abandon, are all too willing to buy in to the newest trends and fads. 

In fact, the attitude of gay young men has helped to perpetuate this skinny-is-beautiful notion. The fuck-you attitude that the young set have towards the older generation is encapsulated by clothes which the older generation have difficulty wearing, but which the young ones have no problem. It is no wonder then that small is the new big.

Why was I struck by this article? Well, before I left for Bangkok, S2 mentioned that I had the archetypal body of a Hedi Slimane model. I do have a size 27” waistline, and for all my time spent at the gym, I am pretty lean.

Well, at least I don’t only eat baby food – which is what Hedi Slimane does as he doesn’t like to chew. (No, seriously.)

I should mention this whenever I get bitched about being a difficult person to eat with.

Current Location:	Work
Current Mood:	busy
Current Music:	Music from Kylie X

I know I haven’t been blogging for the longest of time.  

On my end, I have been busy with a series of projects. But now that I have submitted two overdue articles to MY and JT, I feel gloriously free - so free that I decided to head down to Toast to take a long lunch-break today. Ostensibly, it was to proofread the final article that I was going to submit later in the afternoon, but I also wanted to get a book that K and I read about while in KL.

But I was weak – and bought three other books. How could I resist when two of them are by authors that I really like? The books in order of ‘I can’t wait to read them’ -

Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods

Sara Bongiorni’s A Year Without “Made In China” (This was the one that K and I read about in the IHT while gorging on the buffet breakfast in KL.)

David Leavitt’s The Indian Clerk

Renaissance Singapore, edited by Kenneth Paul Tan

Anyway, I did tell myself that after spending most of my free time writing / editing /proofreading the damn articles during these past few weeks, I will spend most of my waking hour catching up on all the reading that I have been deprived of.

But I will only start with The Stone Gods once I have finished my current book – J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year.  Having read parts of Disgrace, I must say that I am not a fan of his writing. But what started me on his latest was the postmodern structure of this novel. It interweaves a variety of stories and ideas - the non-fiction essays of an old writer (entitled Strong Opinions), and the developing sexual attraction that this writer has for a neighbour, a young woman whom he asks to help transcribe his handwritten essays. This is told from the perspectives of the writer, the woman and the woman’s boyfriend. What gives the reading experience such an intellectual buzz is that these different parts are all written in one page. My mind constantly shifts between fiction and non-fiction, between the essays in Strong Opinions and the events that have shaped the writing of the essay (though the link can be at times pretty tenuous). I have been told that the plot will get quite exciting once the boyfriend starts to take an interest in the essays that his girlfriend is transcribing.  It’s quite Pale Fire, but the essays are so much more readable than Pale Fire’s narrative poem, and I don’t have to constantly flip to the back of the book to read the end notes.

On a random note, how do you respond to people who remark that you like to read ? In my mind, I just think – my god, you don’t?

Yet on another random note, I am spending too much time Facebooking – it is terribly addictive. (At least I am not dreaming of Facebooking, unlike hardcore YM.) Though when I MSN, I enjoy referring myself in the third person, much to the irritation of Dennis Boy.  Interestingly, I have been chatted up on Facebook. Oh well, maybe Facebook really is the new Fridae.  

Current Location:	Home
Current Mood:	bouncy
Current Music:	Leo Ku

I bought this book - called 'I Knew I Was'  - for D as a Christmas gift last year. Basically the editors asked gay Americans for the following personal stories - when they knew they were gay, when their parents knew they were gay, when everyone else knew, and the occasional coming-out story. Some of the stories are hilarious, some poignant, others bittersweet and funny at the same time.

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Some of the ones that I really liked:

1971, Abilene Texas , Stephan Orr

My father was tossing a football with my brothers in the front yard. Seeing me sitting alone on the steps, my mother took my dad aside. “Dub,” she said, calling my dad by his nickname, ‘I think Steve is feeling a little left out. Why don’t you ask him if he would like to play too?’

So my dad walked over. ‘Wanna throw the football some?’ he asked.

‘I’d really rather go pick flowers,’ I replied.

And we did.

My father, a former football coach, spent the rest of the afternoon picking flowers with me in a nearby field.

Archie Gatlin

When I was six, my mother said to me, ‘Wait right here, I think I have something you’d be interested in.’ She went into the other room and came back with a pink feather boa.

1967, Jeff Judd

I was lying on the floor of the living room, watching an episode of the Tarzan series. I kept sliding closer to the TV, sort of looking under it, trying to see under Tarzan’s loincloth. Seven years old, go figure.

Michael Frank

When I was ten, I would put on my mother’s leather evening gloves – they came all the way up to my elbows. I would sing ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ into the mirror. One day, my mother walked in and caught me mid-song – I tried to cover, screaming out, ‘To the Bat Cave, Robin!’

1965, Kate Nielsen

I was sitting next to my mother, munching on popcorn, watching ‘The Sound of Music’, and I wondered in my little five-year old brain if it was wrong to want to be Christopher Plummer, aka Captain von Trapp. It was the only way, as a girl, that I could imagine being able to be with the beautiful Julie Andrews. I made my mother take me back to see the move several times that summer, which she was more than happy to do as she just assumed it was because I wanted to be a nun – not that I wanted to be with a nun.

Eric Marshal

I heard this story from my sister, years after it actually happened. At the time, I was fifteen years old. My father was in the middle of his weekly poker game with his buddies. The game got very heated and an argument broke out between my father and a friend of his. After one taunt too many, my dad lost his cool and shouted at his friend, “At least my wife’s not fat and ugly.” To which his friend replied, ”Yeah, well at least my son’s not a faggot.”

Kevin Willliamson

The FISHERMAN, fifty-one, sits in his recliner in front of his television, flipping the remote, the volume blaring. Across the room, on the couch, sits his SON, twenty-seven: anxious, something on his mind. After several false starts and what seems like an eternity, the son speaks:

SON (quietly): Dad, I’m gay.

The fisherman hits the mute on the remote. The room goes silent. A long agonising moment. For the son, the world has stopped. He stares at his father, waiting for a response. Anything – the silence is maddening.

FISHERMAN:    I figured it was that.

His son is confused.

SON: You figured what was that? 

More silence.

FISHERMAN: Why we never talk.

Both men sit there, staring at the muted television.

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While the stories do resonate with me, there is a certain level of disconnect in terms of the alien cultural references that abound in these stories. Perhaps what we need are similar local stories . So here is mine.

On Sunday afternoons, SBC would screen these Chinese movies on Channel 8. My parents would usually be out, leaving me and my sis at home to watch TV.

There was one Sunday afternoon, when I was around 10 years old, when the movie was Moon, Stars, Sun (月亮星星太陽). The movie stars Maggie Cheung, Cherie Chung and Dodo Cheng as bar hostesses / prostitutes, trying desperately to eke out a better life for themselves.

I remember being so caught up in the tragic stories of these women, that until this day, one of the scenes from the movie still plays in my mind.  It is near the end of the movie. Maggie Cheung sits at a restaurant and thinks that one of her patrons will marry her. In this way, she can gain some level of respectability. She is filled with hope, optimism, courage.

But then she realises in the course of the dinner that her patron never had the intention of tying the knot with her. She is now consumed with anger, dejection, despair. She is overwhelmed by a sense of helplessness, yet she refuses to break down. She tries to impose some normalcy in the act of eating, but fails to do so and in a moment of anger and frustration, she flings her chopsticks away. She is imperious with rage. Her look is one of scorn and pity - but you are not sure whether they are directed at the patron or at herself.

At that moment, in some inexplicable way, I was able to relate to her.

I knew that I was different. In what way, to what extent, I wasn’t sure. But I knew somehow that I belonged to a group that would be as marginalised as her.

D says that this was the start of my love affair with movies that feature crying women.

Current Location:	Bed
Current Mood:	calm
Current Music:	Music from Kylie X

I know I haven’t been blogging for a while. Have been busy with a number of things, specifically with the Indignation forum, and I have started to help Oogachaga with a workshop that they are planning for 8 Sept. Plus I have recently promised DK that I would be his production manager for the upcoming performance he is doing with the National Museum. (And there’s this NIE article that D and I are writing, and another article I owe MY!)

Anyway, I just bought this Leo Ku album that I have wanted for a long time. I now have all of his albums, including his hard-to-find first album, when he had geeky hair and baggy clothes, very acceptable in the 80s. But the first Leo Ku album I bought was his most recent one, Human, based on a review in the Straits Times. And I have never looked back since, hooked by his baritone voice that is strangely tremulous in its tenor, and by melodies that are comforting in their strange familiarity. In fact, I have become quite a hardcore fan, quite unusual for a homeboy who used to listen (and still do actually) to alternative rock and hip-hop.

What is it about ballads sung in Cantonese that resonate with me so much? (Was talking to KW when I was sending him home after a meeting on Monday and found out that he also enjoyed listening to Cantionese songs, even though like me, he doesn’t understand a word of it.)

Well, it is precisely that I don’t understand what is being sung that makes these songs shimmer with possibilities. Each time I listen to a song, it takes on a slightly different meaning for me, as I imagine what the lyrics could be – or more specifically, what I want them to be. Imagine a signifier that has the potential to lead to different signifiers each time one tries to impose some kind of meaning on it, an imposition that is both futile yet meaningful in it its futility - that is what listening to Cantonese ballads is like for me. I imagine the lyrics are terribly poetic, filled with heartfelt profundity and pathos. And it is this reason that I can listen to the same track or album ad-nauseum. Even PS recognises some songs now, as it is my usual post-club soundtrack on my ipod as I give her a lift near home.

Of course the songs may be terribly cheesy, lyrics that would make be wince if I actually knew what they mean. My attempts to have one of my favourite songs explained to me (twice!) have failed. Both instances ended up with “well, it’s about a failed relationship”, and that "it's about about ‘love’, and ‘how things don’t work out in the end’. Sure! I could have grasped that through the melody and the way it is sung. But maybe I didn’t push them to further translate the songs as I didn’t want to lose the ambivalent nature of these songs, an ambivalence that draws me in each time I listen to them.

But on a bigger picture, perhaps why I am able to enjoy Cantonese and not English ballads is the fact that the mode of irony is pervasive in the Western context, such that sincerity and authenticity is constantly questioned. I find it very hard to enjoy ballads in English because of the postmodern paradigm that I tend to frame what I know and understand. It helps that the Chinese language and culture does not have such baggage that at times cripples the way one tries to engage with a text.  (Of course, some cultural analysts have claimed that the 9/11 attacks signalled an end to the age of irony,  but in an age or Paris Hilton, can anything be taken seriously?)

D and I have discussed what we think post-postmodern writing is like. For me, Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius captures the spirit of  this new age, where the very use of irony as a mode of writing to talk about something so tragic - the death of two parents from cancer - ironically allows a genuine sense of loss to shine through, startling in its intensity and depth. Eggers' book is one of my all time favourite books, and it is one of the few books where I'm excited by its clever postmodern tricks and yet humbled by its emotional honesty.

But I digress.

Why Cantonese? Why not say Hokkein? Perhaps it has to do with the sound of the language. Like Korean, when sung, there is this musicality inherent in the way the language sounds when sung. But when I hear people speak Cantonese, they sound terribly rude, as if everything was meant to be a barbed comment, or a throwaway bitchy rebuttal. Or could it be because these songs mark particular periods of my life when I was dating someone from Malaysia, and when I was seeing someone from Hong Kong? Or maybe it was the other way round, that I sought such guys out in my fixation for things Cantonese?

Oh well. Who can say?

Current Location:	Starbucks HSBC Bank
Current Mood:	awake
Current Music:	As I Lay Me Down by Sophie B Hawkins