Going:
Wanted to share that I got into two graduate programmes – the dual degree between Johns Hopkins’ School of International Studies & SOAS, as well as Sciences Po (Paris) & Columbia! I’ll be accepting the latter, and the thought of experiencing Paris and New York alike feels thoroughly surreal.
Watching:
The Whale was a difficult movie to power through, not for its lack of artfulness but because wow, it hits where it personally hurts for me. Scenes of self-destruction, tattered self-worth and lost self-love that unfold in a dingy apartment. For all of Aronofsky’s gratituous shots and the tendency towards stilted writing, it still filled me with a powerful emotion – a gut-wrenching form of empathy and regret. Moments that are infuriating feel deliberately so, rather than out of poor writing. These are deeply flawed characters, after all, and the false happy ending doubles down on this. An unsettling and penetrative film, and one I’ll have to think about a lot.
Reading
I first learnt about post-processual archaeology in a strange, squat library in Oxford. It had a confusing circular layout, the unusually glossy floor were a huge departure from other libraries, and the furniture reminded me a bit of my secondary school’s. “I don’t really want to visit the Sackler again”, I remember telling my college friend. It’s these libraries – pretty or otherwise – adorning venerable artistic and academic institutions that form just one small piece of Patrick Radden Keefe’s masterpiece of investigation, Empire of Pain, chronicling the Sackler family’s attainment and dogged defense of an obscene wealth built on the sales of the highly-addictive OxyContin.
In Keefe’s afterword, he writes that this book charts ‘a saga about three generations of a family dynasty and the ways in which it changed the world, a story about ambition, philanthropy, crime and impunity, the corruption of institutions, power, and greed.’Its narrative nonfiction works wonderfully here – the start is more biographical, perhaps due to sources, but functions well as a corporate history that does not lionise Purdue’s founders so much as it sets in motion the vast disparity between the public declarations of pharmaceutical drugs’ promise of salvation and the moneyed ambition that undercuts these ideals. It is this disparity that underpins the ruin central to the book.
First, the book lays bare how fundamental marketing – the creation of desire, facts be damned – is to pharmaceutical success. Second, facilitating these are collusive networks, in which a litany of cosied-up doctors, lawyers, salespeople, consultancies like McKinsey, and even connections to the FDA allow Purdue to continue selling an incredibly addictive opioid and perfect their strategy. The company’s own flimsy defense, that the drug crisis was borne out of errant users or rogue doctors, is thoroughly eviscerated here, in which records of market research, memos of sales tactics all reveal the company’s encouragement of overprescription, and the knowledge that wherever it expanded, so did addiction and damage.
The production of this book is even more impressive in light of the legal threats and moments of intimidation and stonewalling that Keefe, a New York Times staffer, faced in writing this. In spite of this, the book’s attention to detail is impeccable. Plenty of court documents, mountains of internal company records, and emails, supplement more than 200 interviews conducted or anonymous tipoffs. Some of the archival work takes a close look at documents that have not been analysed elsewhere, like the papers of Félix Martí-Ibáñez, a well-known doctor (just a peek at his Wikipedia article reveals his reputation as a renaissance man). The first third of the book reveals another side to him as an early accomplice of Purdue, where his professionalised distortion of the facts to create demand for drugs like Valium is prototypical of the company’s later tactics with opioids.
As the book moves closer to the present day, plenty more debates bring to light the complex nature of responsibility: failures of state agencies and the individuals that populate them, of the doctors, pharmacies, retailers. Against this, threads of activism or formal challenges arise, to varying degrees of success. Various federal prosecutors and state attorney-generals try to take the case to court, but are faced with the prospect of having the state become Purdue’s creditor as the positive outcome – in other words, becoming involved in the OxyContin business itself! Slightly more inspiring are the activists who more effectively expose and shame their patronage of the arts.
Yet, despite the Sacklers’ pariah status in art, academic spheres, the necromantic nature of their profits and self-enrichment reveals how inadequate current frameworks are for accountability and justice. Over the last decade, the overarching approach for dealing with the family has become bankruptcy law, something that the book reveals as a tool that is at best incomplete, and at worst creating perverse incentives. Just as past regimes of drug regulation, of prosecution in a politically-pliable system, of intellectual property, were poor forms of resolutions for justice. The Sackler family today’s wealth is tarnished, but still extant; and as Keefe noted just last year, ‘Oxford University never had an unkind word to say about the family, and made it clear that no plans were afoot to re-name the Sackler Library’. If a tarnished name is what remains at the end of this intergenerational, destructive saga, one wonders what more can be done.
A long time has passed between the 2021 Singapore Art Book Fair, where I first ordered Reverse Hallucinations in the Archipelago, and my completion of this book. It’s an eclectic, eye-opening collection of writing which takes as its starting point the curious, colonial wanderings of European naturalists in the 19th-century Malay archipelago. Charles Darwin, of course, figures heavily in here, but it is Alfred Russel Wallace’s figure that looms the largest, as a figure whose
What gives the book its title is a Foucauldian view of these figures whose practice of colonial science was “blurred by the recurrence of “reverse hallucinations”— an expression borrowed from William Gibson by way of Ricardo Dominguez—which occasion events of not seeing what is manifestly present.” (10, emphasis in original). These observers are blithely unaware of their own transformation of the natural landscape and the limitations of their positivist, one-dimensionalising technologies and methods of observation. (At least, that’s what I gather from the opening essay. The two editors, Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin, are good interlocutors in their interview-chapters but are prone to lapsing into that obfuscating use of critical theory – a great shame!)
I won’t recount exactly what each chapter does here, since this is a book that is delightful to discover. The approaches employed here are inventive and original lenses to understand colonial naturalist history and just how constitutive their myopic imaginations were of how we understand science itself. The Anthropocene, something else looming large and arguably thrown sharply in focus during this era of high imperialism, looms large here – never anxiously moralised, but as a means of thinking about the world that almost becomes self-evident through these discussions of oil palm plantations in Indonesia, banyan and teak wood’s significance in magic systems and the circulation alike, or a drilling project in Towuti. There is a particularly conceited interview with George Beccaloni, whose hagiographic treatment of Wallace leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth (particularly his dismissal of local contributions to discovery), but whose neologism (‘Do you think there is a way that the study of Wallace could contribute to the current discussion of the Anthropocene?’ “I’m not sure, but I think it should be called the Destructocene.”) still hammers home the rapid nature of transformation that has only intensified in the past century.
The book shines in two areas. Its thinking spills across boundaries of time and space, spanning colonial and post-independence, and probing the entirety of the the titular ‘archipelago’ (as well as its echoes into the metropole). Secondly, it is beautifully illustrated: full page spreads of colonial illustrations, fascinating cartography, contributors’ art projects adorn this, and hammer home the richness of inquiry when it jumps beyond the boundaries of stuffy text. Those interested in both this disciplinary diversity and subject matter will probably find the films of Riar Rizaldi extremely interesting – I have in mind Tellurian Drama (2021) (information and link to access here). Or why not delve straight into the source’s material? By sheer coincidence, my brother was gifted Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago (NUS Press’s annotated copy, more specifically). However we are to think of the region – and I really think approaches that critically reevaluate systems of classification, take entire oceans and archipelagos rather than nation-state boundaries, interrogate ethnographic knowledge are especially productive – this book is surely a worthwhile addition to this experience.
And while we’re on the topic of Malay worlds: this week, I visited Wardah Books twice. Their store has only gotten more beautiful and interesting since I last dropped by years ago. No purchases this time, but I was also delighted to learn of an adjoining bookstore accessible by their second storey, where N. (fellow book-person) bought a slim volume on Jawi across a random sample of old manuscripts. In true manuscript culture fashion, she has in turn produced her own translation of an old hikayat, which I have been slowly trawling for a month now – more on that in the future, perhaps!
Listening:
Attended two gigs this week. The first was the third edition of Big Duck’s open mic-ish series, B-4 – a full review forthcoming over at my sister site Serangoon Review. A happy evening punctuated by the immense news of my university offers rolling in, which in turn had to be celebrated with a gin and tonic (“I’m out of big cups, can I pour one shot in each of these?” barman asks apologetically at 830pm).
I’ve been looking forward to the second Interplanetary Criminal x Main Phase gig, which was every bit as magical and fun as I expected. Tuff Club in Oxley Road’s the sort of bar you’d imagine out of a cyberpunk film – smoke machine going off, CBD barely visible through the tinted glass as the soundsystem thumps. Managed a spot in front of the DJs again. Some nice dubs in addition to the usual Flowdan, Big H ones; a remix of Gorgon City’s Sidewindah (in turn a brilliant take on that classic Flirta D verse off Warp Speed). After the show, I asked Main Phase why he didn’t drop that hilarious Looney Tunes track from a precocious Enigma Dubz, something he plays in his Keep Hush set – and in turn got reminded by him of the use of cartoon hijinks in his track 100%. Anyway, plenty of electronic to last me for a month or so, although I’ll be at Haw Par Villa soon when Tropika brings down Manu Chao (accompanied by… Submerge? More drum and bass?) in two weeks.
Doing:
Attended Mynah Magazine’s launch party for its fourth and final issue. These affairs can feel like something beautiful is being strangled in their cradle, but I loved being able to discover various other magazines and artists at this event alongside picking up a copy of Mynah for the first time. Also got a shirt screen-printed with the dopey looking logo – ironing pending. Caught Steph Dogfoot with a rare performance of spoken word, which brought me back to JC days of hearing the occasional SingLit poem performed in my block’s stuffy auditorium. No comment on the exact colour of these associations, unfortunately.
Eating:
The Ramadan Bazaar at Kampong Glam feels nice. In contrast to my experience of Geylang Serai, this one’s not too chaotic, and nicely spaced out with a mix of different stalls. My cursory count of Ramly stalls: 4 (not that any Ramly burgers are Singapore are authentic, as the food authority’s import regulations have unfortunately demanded). Had the pasar malam classic of takoyaki, the not-so-orthodox tacos from Burria, and the incredibly concoction of bandung and espresso. I’m going to see if the canteen auntie is game for the last one in the future.
Meanwhile, Enjoy Eating House is shutting down their Jalan Besar outlet. It is a crying shame because I love their modern Singaporean (the portmanteau mod-Sin is coming to my head, but it probably doesn’t apply here) take on zi char. This feels like a season for celebration, so swung by with N. (fellow Ivy League enjoyer) for the essentials – fish soup, the pork bee hoon, and new-to-me dish of their ngoh hiang. Will be missed, but the Stevens outlet, with its funky art deco, will remain around.
Soon to be endangered, in my books at least, is Maju Camp’s maggi goreng. The next time you hear from this blog – I am a free man!
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