The thrills and spills of being hip...

Pam & Tommy (2022)
Disney + (8-episode miniseries)

The joyfulness of youth does not last forever. Its spills and its thrills fade with time. All the hormonally charged freshness of young adulthood eventually loses its mojo. They say we want to immortalise all these as you only live one (YOLO). Time and tide wait for no one too. Hence, there is a pressing need to freeze everything you have to last a lifetime. Time is man's greatest foe; the race between man and time always sided time. 

This country, this world is no place for older men or women. It is all about youth, vibrancy and freedom. Even Nature sides the young. With wear and tear, the facial musculature of the old naturally sags, giving its wearer a perpetual frowning facies. In the words of Schaupenneur, the world is a miserable place, and Nature knows it. Senescence is grim. Hence, the lips curve downwards with age, opposite to how a smiling face of innocence appears.

Pamela Anderson, in her iconic role

Photography and later video were God-sent. These can permanently capture the joy and visualisation of assets long after the battle scars of Hard Knocks of Life knock them down. With the advent of recording devices at everyone's disposal, immortalising that notable, intimate, non-event or pornographic material has never been easier.

It is a trend for newlyweds to digitally commemorate the image of their supple young bodies. As part of their wedding photography shootout, they even include a pose in their most sexually enticing pose in their birthday suits. This, they would like to admire way after the scars of life take over their mortal bodies. 

Since everybody is doing it, the peer pressure to get a full monty representation of the shames of the Garden of Eden is ever compelling. So every average Jane does it, and nobody gives a second look. Not when the player is every young man's dream girl - the buxom Pamela Anderson who gained stardom appearing semi-naked every week on Baywatch and had appeared without a thread as Hugh Heffner's bunnies.

Pamela and her then-husband, the wild cocaine-snorting Motley Crew's drummer, Tommy Lee, found out the hard way when their intimate honeymoon sex tapes were stolen that the world is not kind. 

Even though they laugh with you and encourage you to do whacky things, when you get on the wrong side of the law, you are actually alone. The world judges you through their conservative lens even though you think the world has changed. No siree. The media is there to yank you out of any shred of dignity still left you. Everybody just takes you to the cleaners. You are left shivering in the cold while everyone prospers on your account while you salvage whatever self-respect that is. Court injunctions and proceedings are just farce. It does not lead to anything meaningful.

The lesson here is that youth and love are many splendoured things. The underdevelopment of the neocortex of the frontal lobe makes you do many things. But remember, many of these things have long-term effects and ruin the rest of your remaining life. It is OK to be young and free, but freedom comes with specific responsibilities. You do not want to be stuck, on tenterhooks, for the rest of your remaining life with its aftermath.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Shortcomings and trimmings...

Unless you have living in shell away from the evils of social media, you should be aware of the brouhaha of late of the cyber display of the advertisement publicizing '2014 Penang's International Nude Sports'. Let us leave the merits and appropriateness of flaunting one's modesty for others to judge to theologians and esteemed philosophers to argue it out. I was  particularly intrigued by some of the comments posted by supposedly learned members of the public. Some criticized not because of their brazen differing morality standards but rather because they were not impressed with what they saw. They commented that it is an embarrassment when they exhibit their seemingly unimpressive bodies, visually unappealing.
We, as a society, seem to have brain washed into believing that the human body is supposed to look like what is seen on the celluloid screens of Hollywood and Bollywood. Anything disproportionate to that standard is unacceptable. Period. Not fit to be recorded.
Welcome to the real world. Yes, the human body is not meant to be in perfect symmetry. Yes, it is meant to sag, have unsightly blemishes, cellulite, wrinkles and scars. Yes, life goes on after mastectomy, double mastectomy and disfigurement of birth defect or burns. Yes, they also come in various shades - white, pink, yellow ochre, shades of brown and ebony. There is no need to feel green or feel blue. Only the yellow will chicken out with reality.
For your information, most Hollywood stars have than one double - one for each part of close-up shots of their body part. A Malaysian had the dubious honour of having his calf used as 'leg double' of Brad Pitt's puny ones, unbefitting of the role of Achilles that he played in the 2004 movie, 'Troy'!

All the hype of going back to nature!

Naked and Afraid: S2E5 (Malaysia)

Purists are still jumping mad over this Discovery Channel reality TV show. The crew was given permission to do shooting in Malaysia but little did the authorities know that this survival show would be done with the contestants in their birthday suit using the unforgivingly harsh Malaysian tropical jungle as its backdrop. The conservatives are fuming mad because they do not want to be seen as condoning these type of exhibition of flesh. And they are still scratching their heads wondering how that one slipped through while the rest of the world does not give much thought this unstimulating show which I would not have bothered to view if not for the mania stirred by holier-than-thou vanguards of moral code of my society!
For all fairness, the necessity of the contestants to go full monty is purely an economic strategy (ka chinggg...). The donning of single drape to cover their modesty is not in any way going to alter their survival in the cruel tropical jungles.
In this episode, a couple, unknown to each other before the show, are left in the Belum Forest in Perak to spend 21 days in the virgin jungle without any external help. To set the mood for the danger the contestants were stepping into, the commentator introduced some of the deadly beasts found here. These include the venomous 100-step blue and red coral snake (that is how far the victim walks before his death), wild boars, tigers, disease carrying mozzies and insects, leeches and territorial monitor lizards.
Samatha Pearson, a 38 year old single mum of two and Fernando Cauldron, a 33 year old fire fighter were the guests in that episode. Each contestant was allowed a single item- Samantha chose fire starter and Fernando, a machete. A handheld camera was available for them to record themselves and a small filming crew with strict instructions not to intervene hover around them to record their daily activity.
After building a suspense, the rest of the show did not prove as interesting. It was raining all the first 6 days of their expedition. With limited resources and skills, they built a small shed with bamboo and leaves. Their sensitive areas were not bear for viewers to view as they were pixelated throughout, if you do not count the posterior bit.
Getting edible food was a challenge and Fernando almost died from wild mushroom consumption. Somehow, they survived the challenge and managed to swim out to the meeting point, hungry, weak, thin with their bodies mutilated by the elements of nature and losing 20 and 30lbs respectively.
Not worth the half an hour spending on this show.

‘Naked and Afraid’: How did it slip through?