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I Summon Up The Power Of Banana Clan

I never thought I'd say this about a Heineken party but Wednesday night was the best clubbing I've had since returning from England (August 2003).

Koflow and a local beatboxer set a blistering pace from early on with an excellent set. I'd gone with fairly low expectations of Herbaliser, not having bothered to listen to anything by them since 2001, when I bought and was underwhelmed by Very Mercenary, but how wrong I was. They started with Witness, which I never got sick of despite its ubiquity, and did a well-paced, diverse and consistently danceable set. Not the best I've ever seen but pretty much on par with a good Xen night, and that's good enough for me. They also managed one of those rare "How did I not realize how great this was to dance to before??!" epiphanies for me with Get It Together, which never used to be one of my stand-out tracks on Ill Communication.

I loved the venue (Timberlux Centre) too. I've had great times at small beautiful Cocco Latte but miss having space to go a bit mental if the music so moves me. Cavernous converted-_________ venues encourage uninhibited and shambolic dancing, which is infinitely more fun than the self-conscious controlled dancing which is socially necessary in smaller spaces. Also, you don't even need good music in order to enjoy your uninhibited shambolic dancing. I still have fond memories of prancing around wildly with Nick and Vish at a freezing New Year's Eve outdoor party in Glasgow - to Azzido Da Bass.

It's amusing how many of the same strangers I keep seeing at the musical events I go to. "That Malay guy with prominent cheekbones was at RNDM," I said to Alec. "Yeah, that petite Indian girl was there too," he said. I don't recognise many Chinese faces except Joe's though, we generally all look same to me. I'd like to start talking to all the familiar faces at some point.

Pussy Cat Pussy Cat Where Have You Been?

The London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival starts today, and here's what you're missing if you're somewhere else:

• The Fall Of Communism As Seen In Gay Pornography
• How To Make Lesbian Porn: Instruction With Video Clips
• Annie Sprinkle's Amazing World Of Orgasm (featuring, among others, "a midwife who experienced orgasms through childbirth")

Teenage Hissyfit In A Public Station

The University of Pennsylvania has got Sonic Youth to headline its Spring Fling concert, with Cat Power opening, and get this - its students aren't happy about it.

"Who are they?" College freshman Elizabeth Jefferson asked. "I've never heard of them."

Wharton junior Lloyd Thomas said he feels "disappointed," especially considering what some other schools have performing this year.

For example, Snoop Dogg will be headlining Cornell's Slope Day concert and Ben Folds will be playing at Brown's Spring Weekend.

"I think we deserve a bigger name," Thomas said.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. I guess anyone who thinks Snoop Dogg or Ben Folds are "bigger names" than Sonic Youth really does deserve to get them. Hell, why not shoot for the moon and try for Ashlee Simpson?

Other selected quotes from students' comments posted in response to the articles:

"I am very disappointed at the choice of band. Yea, Sonic Youth was a precursor to the grunge-era but grunge died when Courtney shot Kurt. I understand SPEC is trying to be "different" but I guess they don't realize that although "bad" is different from "good", people won't respect that decision. I am not wasting $20 to see a washed-up grunge band that didn't even make a lasting impact. I compare them to Ace-of-Base, an afterthought, almost a novelty act."

"If they really wanted to get a good non hip-hop band what's wrong with Jimmy Eat World, Saves the Day, The Format, & Taking Back Sunday????"

"nirvana is very influential but just because they are, and sonic youth came out before them and they are relatively the same genre, you can't say that sonic youth is as influential as nirvana. that's blasphemy!"

Okay, I've decided. I'm laughing. Hysterically.

Yes, I know what you're all thinking. What a fucking snob. The thing is, I have no problem with people not knowing who Sonic Youth are. But I really do fart in the general direction of anyone who would whine about a band simply because they've never heard of them, or spend time broadcasting those whinings on the Internet when they could just type the band's name into Google (or, like, download some albums - what are they in college for if not to abuse broadband filesharing?) and work on reducing that ignorance. I must say, for a "washed-up" "grunge" "afterthought" with no "lasting impact", 712000 search results isn't bad. And I'm even sure that only 711990 of those results are from this blog.

Not Reading Literature Is The New Reading Literature

If I hadn't seen it on the front page of the Straits Times, I'd have dismissed the article (headline "Literature winner read only 3 novels in 2 years") about the Singaporean winner of the Angus Ross prize as a satire on the Singaporean education system. I was about to go into a rant about the unfuckingbelievableness of it all, and then found out that Nicholas had already done it for me, complete with characteristic acerbity and extracts of the article's most offending statements.

All I will add is that I dearly hope Ms Candice Wan Shu Ting was misquoted several times by the journalist who interviewed her. If she was, she has all my sympathies for being portrayed as an astoundingly arrogant teenager who deserves to be spanked hard with every book of the Western literary canon (just to start with). If she wasn't, if I ever meet her I don't think I'll be able to resist asking, ever so casually, "Read any good books lately?"

Give Us This Day Our Daily Beer

Outside the Joo Chiat KTV lounge where Alec was turning tricks last weekend, this humble altar moved us deeply and reminded us of the profound insights we can gain from other religions. We are seriously considering incorporating certain elements of this beautiful offering into our own worship.

Give that god a Tiger!

Happy Easter, everyone!

The Ayatollah Of Joo Chiat

Many of my friends have been asking how Alec's job-seeking has been going. I am pleased to announce that on Sunday, he was given his first job in Singapore. It was in a KTV¹ lounge in Joo Chiat².

A friend of a friend needed a Caucasian for a TV commercial she was shooting (it's only for a competition, not for normal TV), and since Joo Chiat is right up our alley, he agreed to help out.

The ad was for an expat magazine, and it focused on helping expats fit into Singapore culture. Alec's role was to walk down the corridor, enter the KTV room and greet his Singaporean friends enthusiastically, after which they would all sing a Hokkien song with great gusto. During rehearsals, initial ideas of teaching Alec the whole song were hastily reassessed in favour of teaching Alec one line. But he took this line very seriously. Neither of us know what it meant, but by God he brought tears to my eyes.

He got paid a small token, but I'm pretty sure the neighbourhood hookers enjoy a more attractive remuneration package. This means I need to work on pimping him out a bit better, especially since he finally got his employment eligibility visa on Monday. After collecting it, he checked to see that everything was in order. It was, mostly, except for the bit where his nationality was "Iranian". The mistake's fixed now, but I'm still calling him Ayatollah for the rest of this week.

¹ May have once been used in an attempt to make karaoke look hip and trendy, but is now just a synonym for karaoke.
² A neighbourhood near where I live, with a burgeoning sex industry.

Everybody In The Club Get RNDM

The Attic at Mox is a thoroughly endearing venue, but I can't come up with any trendy designspeaky reasons as to why. In fact, I have a feeling that what endears the place to me is its almost meticulous lack of trendy design. There are random lights from Mox, random rows of airplane seats along a wall, random stage at one end, random DJ booth on the other, bar with random selection of alcoholic beverages, and lots of randomly dressed indie types. In other words, it was the perfect place for RNDM.

Astreal's set was marred by problems with their amps, which meant that some songs were played with only two out of three guitars. I still enjoyed it, but it meant less crashing guitar noise, which is never a good thing.

I had been looking forward to finally seeing the much-hyped Tiramisu, but ended up a little disappointed. Apart from the undeniable showmanship of their frontman, there was little I found distinctive or interesting about their songs. Sort of a mix between Built To Spill and Hefner, but without any of what I like about either band. I'd still watch them again, though. Rizman Putra's eyeballs fascinate me.

After Tiramisu I suggested we take a break for dinner, whereupon Ida suggested we eat the surprise birthday cake she had brought me. :)

I didn't manage to see many of the later bands on the schedule, for the unusual reason (unusual for me, anyway) that I got caught up socializing. Downstairs in Mox with my childhood fags, upstairs in the attic telling Tessa how much I miss the life she's living now, here a random, there a random, everywhere a random.

We'd originally intended to leave at midnight for Grandmaster Flash at Zouk, but then Poptart started spinning and there was no way I was going to leave while Sonic Youth's 100% was playing. As one song led to another, I decided that there was no point leaving somewhere where I was having such a great time for somewhere which almost inevitably enrages me.

Indie club nights aren't any cooler than 80s nights; they're all about jumping around haphazardly to songs which were staples of your youth, and screaming "I AM THE RESURRECTION AND I AM THE LIFE!" along with everyone else. Actual dancing is an afterthought, and actual good dancing is virtually impossible. Not that any of this is really relevant while you're going apeshit to Idioteque. I had a blast.

Zouk Off

The most positive emotion I can usually summon up for Zouk is extreme indifference, but that changed on Friday night, which was one of the worst clubbing experiences of my life. (Not the worst. I reserve that rare honour for the Limelight on Shaftesbury Avenue in London. If you've been there, you'll understand, if you haven't, don't.)

I have never seen a gig get as technically fucked up as the Chicks On Speed gig did. The moment they started it was obvious there was something wrong with the sound. Their vocals were getting drowned by their music even though they were virtually shouting. Throughout the gig, they kept begging the sound people to turn up the vocals, to no avail.

The gig was interrupted numerous times by assorted technical failures. Each time this happened, the club's DJ would start playing music while the problems were being resolved. Fair enough, but the group shouldn't have had to scream repeatedly to him (on their too-soft mikes, now getting drowned out by the DJ's music) to stop every time they were ready to resume.

After the show had drawn to a screeching halt for the second time, the audience had halved. This was unsurprising. Even the way they usually sound on record, Chicks On Speed are possibly too much for anyone with limited musical horizons to stomach. On a sound system that wasn't able to handle them (unlike the Esplanade's, where even Tortoise's loudest, most discordant moments were completely bearable), they could only have sounded pleasant to people who regularly take pleasure in abrasive noise. Thankfully, a fair number of us were in attendance. We stayed and cheered them on, and they made the best they could out of a bad situation.

We headed to Phuture after this, and were joined by two friends of mine who had come along just to wish me a happy birthday. We started dancing, but rapidly became bored with the bland, unimaginative hip-hop that was being played. Phuture was less crowded than I ever remember it being on a Friday night. Perhaps people who know better have finally deserted it, now that places like Cocco Latte are going from strength to strength.

Bored, Alec and my two friends went to get drinks. At a bar that wasn't in the least bit crowded, Alec was still waiting for his drink fifteen minutes later. My two friends weren't doing well either. After inquiring about their drink orders, they were told that they hadn't made any. Given that they had used up their drink coupons on these mythical orders, this was rather dismaying. While discussing this at length with the bar staff, my friends were assertive but never in the least bit disorderly or physically aggressive. Nevertheless, on his way to escort them out of the club, one of the security personnel shouldered me aside and trod heavily on my foot.

To cut a long tedious story short, it took them nearly an hour of wrangling with the management to get their drinks, after which time no one was in the mood to actually drink them, or stay in the club. Since the music in Phuture had continued to be achingly dull, leaving was no hardship.

It was almost amusing. Benny and Alec (on their first visit to Zouk) already knew my views on Zouk before we went there, but once we were in I didn't actually have to say anything to try and convince them further. The experience spoke for itself.

Tortoise (17 March, Esplanade Concert Hall, Singapore)

I'm not even a Tortoise fan, but the gig was pretty damn awesome.

I'd gone in with some trepidation - I bought Millions Now Living Will Never Die some years back, didn't like it and returned it, later bought TNT too, didn't like it and returned it. I found the albums overly clinical and very unengaging. Every time I put an album on, hoping that better familiarity with the music would help me "get it", it faded into the background for me within minutes. So I had plenty of doubts about how well that sound would fare in the Esplanade's huge concert hall but decided to go anyway, based on the band's immense stature in indiedom and the added appeal of the Observatory as opening band.

Right decision. The sound was full-bodied and assertive in a way it never sounded to me on record, and with the Esplanade's amazing sound system, detail was never lost even at the music's most cacophonous moments. I was incredibly impressed by their individual flair as musicians, as well as their tightness as a band, as was everyone else. Standing ovations and screaming brought them back for two substantial encores, and prompted a "Singapore is CRAYYYYZEE!" from one of them.

By the end of the gig I found myself filled with happiness at the sight of other audience members, clearly huge Tortoise fans, over the moon with how great it had been. Watching them I remembered myself at 16, standing in the World Trade Centre Harbour Pavilion delirious with joy that Sonic Youth had come to Singapore and I was there to see it. To this day I can hardly believe that even happened. Similarly, I would never have expected such a difficult-listening, left-of-centre band as Tortoise to be brought to Singapore to begin with; the fact is that the Esplanade not only brought them in but had the balls to put them in the country's biggest, most state-of-the-art musical venue. It's the stuff of dreams, and a real testament to the sort of artistic vision that drives the Esplanade. I should never have doubted them for a second.

I Love The Smell Of Name Maul In The Morning

Mauling #1:
Alec: So who's at Zouk on Friday night? Chicks In Chains, is it?
Me: Speed. Chicks On Speed.
Alec: Oh. Heh. Freudian slip, sorry.

Mauling #2:
Alec, pointing to the big screen in Raffles Place: Oh, it's that guy again. Michael something. Balloon. Bubble.
Me: Boo-blay. Michael Buble.
Alec: Oh.
Me: Why would anyone be called Michael Bubble?
Alec: I thought maybe it was a wacky stage name.

I live in fear as to what the man will maul next. One would think that for someone from a country where people have names like Caoilfhionn, he would be a bit better with simple English stuff.

Maybe I should tell him we're seeing "Flashmaster Grand" on Saturday, just as an experiment.

I'm Shorty, It's My Birthday

As I mentioned before, I'll be out and about this weekend following 50 Cent's command, which will be great after two spent in confinement. (To anyone who's just surfed over from Mr Miyagi, I'm not Zoe Tay, I just had chicken pox).

So if you happen to be at the Tortoise gig tonight, or watching Chicks On Speed tomorrow night at Zouk, or at Mox on Saturday for RNDM, or Zouk for Grandmaster Flash after that, come wish me happy birthday!

Perhaps you wonder how you'll recognise me, given that I don't have a picture of myself on this blog. Easy - just look out for a hot girl, funkily dressed and surrounded by adoring men. That's not me. But it might well be my friend Ida or my friend Kelly, so then you can ask them to point me out.

Insert Cryptic Verbiage Here

This new ILM idea - Here, a thread featuring translations of song titles from their commonly known designation and into ACADEMESE, and then involving guess-work as to the original nomenclature in order to make a competition from this endeavor! - is really quite challenging! Here are some of my favourites. The first three are classic oldies, the fourth and fifth are recent pop hits, and the next three should be familiar to any (indie) music geek worth their salt.

1. Let r1 be defined as the quantification of an undefined locus' tendency to exist at a great distance from the Earth's center. Let r2 be defined as a similar quantification of a layer of refractive aberrations in the Earth's atmosphere, such that r1 > r2.

2. It is hereby demanded that you will be romantically exclusive with me and assume an infantile moniker.

3. Immense objects, in which every part is equally distant from one point within, in the state of a rapid, self-sustaining exothermic oxidation process.

4. I liken the entire material and physical manifestation of your organism to a fictional world inside another fiction, a meta-world as it were; in particular, one put forth by the amateur pornophotographer and mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson in the title of his most celebrated children's tome.

5. The question of investiture is moot.

6. The central figure of Western religious culture under unique ownership designated to an individual.

7. Urgently, such that the unstated presupposed occurence will actualize in mere seconds, minutes, hours, or similar temporal measurements which seem fractional (or perhaps even irrelevant) in comparison to normal tests of human patience. [I think this one is impossible unless you know that the artist is "My Sentimental Greeting Thoroughly Mauled"].

8. Darkly colored iron-based alloy in the moderate time segment of great generalized disorder.

9. At each and every point existing on the continuous surface of a man-made multi-level structure designed for outdoor surveillance, the name of which has also been adopted by a periodical first published in or around 1879 by a religious group or sect characterized, among other things, by its rejection of all Christian doctrine not believed to have originated in the Bible.

10. I hereby assert my entitlement to copyright and all related authorial rights, including (but not limited to) moral rights insofar as these are recognized by any and all applicable legal regimes, with regard to lyrical and musical arrangements composed by me which induce vocal utterances perceived to be melodic by those emitting them, such vocalizations being emitted by all matter existing on the planet Earth.

(Answers can be found behind the link to continue reading, but it's more fun if you give it at least a bit of a try before peeking!)

1. Somewhere Over The Rainbow
2. Be My Baby
3. Great Balls Of Fire
4. Your Body Is A Wonderland
5. In Da Club
6. Personal Jesus
7. Soon (Artist: My Bloody Valentine)
8. Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos
9. All Along The Watchtower
10. I Write The Songs That Make The Whole World Sing

Travels With My Aunt ( Graham Greene): Excerpts

Travels With My Aunt is the first of Graham Greene's "entertainments" I've read, and it's as wonderful as his serious novels. This book doesn't just have one good story, it has about fifty. The first excerpt here tickles my funny bone the same way Dan Rhodes's writing does, and the second is taken from a great story which I have unfortunately had to truncate, and which is much funnier in its completeness.

* * *

Tooley sat with me and drank one of her cokes. I asked her what her boyfriend's project was.

"He wants to do a series of enormous pictures of Heinz soups in fabulous colours, so a rich man could have a different soup in each room in his apartment - say fish soup in the bedroom, potato soup in the dining-room, leek soup in the drawing-room, like they used to have family portraits. There would be these fabulous colours, all fauve. And the cans would give a sort of unity - do you see what I mean? It would be kind of intimate - you wouldn't break the mood every time you changed rooms. Like you do now if you have de Stael in one room and a Rouault in another."

The memory of something I had seen in a Sunday supplement came back to me. I said, "Surely somebody once did paint a Heinz soup tin?"

"Not Heinz, Campbell's," Tooley said. "That was Andy Warhol. I said the same thing to Julian when he first told me of the project. 'Of course," I said, "Heinz and Campbell are not a bit the same shape. Heinz is sort of squat and Campbell's are long like English pillar-boxes.' I love your pillar-boxes. They are fabulous. But Julian said that wasn't the point. He said that there are certain subjects which belong to a certain period and culture. Like the Annunciation did. Botticelli wasn't put off because Piero della Francesca had done the same thing. He wasn't an imitator. And think of all the Nativities. Well, Julian says, we sort of belong to the soup age - only he didn't call it that. He said it was the Art of Techno-Structure. In a way, you see, the more people who paint soups the better. It creates a culture. One Nativity wouldn't have been any use at all. It wouldn't have been noticed."

I was badly out of my depth with Tooley in terms of culture and of human experience.

* * *

Mr Visconti was a good catholic, but he was very very anti-clerical, and yet in the end it was the priesthood which saved him. He went to a clerical store in Rome, when the Allies were coming close, and he paid a fortune to be fitted out like a monsignor even to the purple socks. He said that a friend of his had lost all his clothes in a bombing raid and they pretended to believe him. Then he went with a suitcase to the lavatory in the Excelsior Hotel, where we had given all those cocktail parties to the cardinals, and changed. He kept away from the reception-desk, but he was unwise enough to look in at the bar - the barman, he knew, was very old and short-sighted. Well, you know, in those days a lot of girls used to come to the bar to pick up German officers. One of the girls - I suppose it was the approach of the Allied troops that did it - was having a crise de conscience. She wouldn't go to her friend's bedroom, she regretted her lost purity, she would never sin again. The officer plied her with more and more cocktails, but with every drink she became more religious. Then she spied Mr Visconti, who was having a quick whisky in a shady corner. "Father," she cried to him, "hear my confession."

...

So off went Mr Visconti with the hysterical girl - he remembered just in time to put down his whisky. He had no choice, though he hadn't been to confession himself for thirty years and he had never learnt the priest's part. Luckily there was an air-conditioner in the room breathing heavily, and that obscured his whispers, and the girl was too much concerned with her role to pay much attention to his. She began right away; Mr Visconti had hardly time to sit on the bed, pushing aside a steel helmet and a bottle of schnapps, before she was getting down to details. He had wanted the whole thing finished as quickly as possible, but he told Mario that he couldn't help becoming a little interested now she had got started and wanting to know a bit more. After all he was a novice - though not in the ecclesiastical sense.

"How many times, my child?" That was a phrase he remembered very well from his adolescence.

"How can you ask that, Father? I've been at it all the time ever since the occupation. After all they were our allies, Father."

"Yes, yes, my child." I can just see him enjoying the chance he had of learning a thing or two, even though his life was in danger. Mr Visconti was a very lecherous man. He said, "Always the same thing, my child?"

She regarded him with astonishment. "Of course not, Father. Who on earth do you think I am?"

He looked at her kneeling in front of him and I am sure he longed to pinch her. Mr Visconti was always a great pincher. "Anything unnatural, my child?"

"What do you mean unnatural, Father?"

Mr Visconti explained.

"Surely that's not unnatural, Father?"

Then they had quite a discussion about what was natural and what wasn't, with Mr Visconti almost forgetting his danger in the excitement, until someone knocked on the door and Mr Visconti, vaguely sketching a cross in a lop-sided way, muttered what sounded through the noise of the air-conditioner like an absolution. The German officer came in in the middle of it and said, "Hurry up, Monsignor. I've got a more important customer for you."

It was the general's wife who had come down to the bar for a last dry Martini before escaping north and heard what was going on. She drained her Martini in one gulp and commanded the officer to arrange her confession. So there was Mr Visconti caught again. There was an awful row now in the Via Veneto as the tanks drove out of Rome. The general's wife had positively to shout at Mr Visconti. She had a rather masculine voice and Mr Visconti said it was like being on the parade ground. He nearly clicked his feet together in his purple socks when she bellowed at him, "Adultery. Three times."

And You Will Know Us By Our Nametags

Some of my favourite responses so far from the ILM thread Make A Band Name More Reasonable:

• Slayer (But Only When Negotiation Has Ceased To Be A Tenable Option)
• Aboveaveragedeth
• !!
• Death Cab For Anyone Who Needs A Ride
• Strained Relationships Scene
• A The
• Carter The Hesitant Kissing Gadget
• Jane's Character Flaw
• Optionalic
• LCD Couple Of Guys With Some Music Equipment
• ...And You Will Know Us By Our Nametags
• Warm Warm Warmth
• The Current Sound Of Basingstoke
• Groove Flotilla
• Queensbundestag
• The New Eroticists

• Soundmanslaughterer
• Meanwhile Back In A Russia That, In Marxist Political Theory, Would Be More Accurately Described As Socialist
• DJ Penumbra

A Very Long Engagement

In the first shot of this film, the camera moves slowly down a cross. The hand nailed to it is not connected to a body but ends abruptly in a severed arm, dangling and swaying in the wind. A grotesque wartime atrocity? No - it's the remains of a bombed chapel which is now in the no-man's-land between trenches. The woman weeping at the bottom of the cross only exists from the waist down. It's a powerful opening, and although you don't know it at the time, it prefigures much of what will happen in the film. The disfigurement of a hand. The suggestion of violent death, but the absence of a corpse. The hope for a resurrection.

I think it is unfairly flippant to describe this film as "Amelie goes to war", which I remember reading somewhere. Jeunet's penchant for the quirky side-story is admittedly still evident even in some of the "war bits" of this film, such as the running jokes on the "Bingo Crepuscule" trench's ludicrous name, the master thievery of the platoon cook, and one of the condemned men's pissing, singing death. When Tina Lombardi, the lover of another condemned man, embarks on a mission of vengeance, tracking down and killing those who sent her man to his death, her murders are more cabaret than carnage. But there is no vaudeville violence in the scenes of people with half their faces blown off, or of Manech spitting his buddy's entrails out of his mouth after a shell drops on them. (As an aside, I've never agreed with Truffaut's famous statement about there not being such thing as an anti-war movie. Maybe you have to be a man to understand it.)

Visually too, you could rent Amelie on DVD and still enjoy it as much, but this film's huge sweeping sepia-drenched vistas of lighthouses and water and fields rippling in wind and lovely ornate market buildings look far better on the big screen than they could on a TV.

I'm always hard-pressed to really rave about Audrey Tautou for some reason, but she was certainly very competent here, and I was glad that there were very few of the "gamine moments" which got tiresome for me in Amelie. I was happy to see Marion Cotillard playing Tina Lombardi though, there's something I always find very charming about her when I see her in films. I wish Jeunet would adopt her as his muse instead of Tautou.

The film gets a little plodding in parts, and sometimes I found myself not really caring whether Mathilde ever finds Manech or not. I can't quite decide how damning a critique this is. In my view the success or failure of Mathilde's quest is less important than being able to enjoy the ride, which I did. Even when I was feeling fidgety, there was always something which made me want to keep going, be it a beautiful shot, a good line or an appealing musical phrase in the soundtrack.

The thing is, I can't help thinking that if Mathilde is so consumed by her quest for Manech, shouldn't I also be? Perhaps where this movie failed for me, much like Amelie actually, is that I didn't care enough about its protagonist to put any emotional investment in the outcome of the story. As such, I was able to sail through it wowed aesthetically but unaffected emotionally. I'm guessing Jeunet would be a little disappointed by that.

Bad Education

I thoroughly enjoyed this. It had much hotness - Gael Garcia Bernal smouldering in drag, Fele Martinez's auteur-with-eyeliner aura, and all the priests in their fitting black surplices! - and it spun a great yarn. Any attempt to summarise the hows and whys of this by anyone who isn't Almodovar will probably make the movie out to be little better than Wild Things with foreign film cred, so I won't try. Although I suppose it may annoy people who prefer their disbelief unsuspended, I think its surprises are artful and well-orchestrated, and don't cross that "Oh, COME ON!" line in the sands of credibility.

Kinsey

I seem to have enjoyed this film less than many other people have. Set-pieces depicting the dogmatic preacher father, sex-researcher garden parties where they all talked about sex, and the closeminded colleague determined to hinder Kinsey felt very contrived. I also found the graphic montages of maps and faces they used to evoke the researchers' interviews conducted across America rather pedestrian, though if they were (for some reason I am unaware of) trying to recreate the feel of a 70s documentary then I guess they succeeded.

Nevertheless, it was a good film in other respects - I thought Laura Linney was great, there was one seriously laugh-out-loud moment (I won't spoil it for you, you'll know it when it comes), and while it gave due recognition to the importance of Kinsey's work, it also didn't shy away from acknowledging that untrammelled sexual liberation can sometimes really fuck things up.

The Sea Inside

Apart from Javier Bardem's impressive performance, I found parts of this film a little heavy-handed.

A lawyer taking on Ramon Sampedro's case falls in love with his pro-euthanasia activist, and they have a baby. Cue juxtaposition of scenes of Ramon sad in bed with scenes of her furiously co-ordinating support for him even as she's wheeled into the delivery room - witness people who believe in euthanasia who also believe in the fullness of life!

A quadriplegic priest goes to Ramon's house to try and talk him out of seeking euthanasia, but they can't get the priest's wheelchair up the stairs, and of course, Ramon refuses to go downstairs. Cue scenes of piggish-looking priest in bulky wheelchair stuck halfway up the staircase while everyone huffs and puffs, and a hapless young priest having to run up and down the stairs carrying messages between the two men - witness how much trouble this piggish-looking priest puts everyone to just so he can live his life, and contrast this with Ramon's refusal to use a wheelchair or even leave his room!

However, it would be unfair to pretend I was completely unmoved by the film. Upon hearing from Ramon that he has finally found someone to assist him in his suicide, and is about to execute his plan, the activist pleads "Only do this because you are sure you want to, and not because you have spent years insisting that you will," and I experienced little pricking feelings at the backs of my eyes.

Later, Ramon is being loaded into the van that will bring him to a nearby town, where he has booked a hotel room to die in. Nothing specific has been said about this - on the surface, he has referred to it as a "holiday" - but as he says goodbye to his family for this "holiday", they know, and he knows they know.

Shall We Not Review Shall We Dance?

(An entry I half-wrote a while back and have now completed.)

I like to think that I possess enough maturity, intellect and aesthetic sensibilities to appreciate films that other people find challenging. I'm able to sit through films with slow-moving or even barely-existent plots, I'm not put off by films with content that may offend or anger, and I'm usually ready to let good acting from just one member of the cast save an otherwise unredeemable film experience.

But even by these standards, Shall We Dance was a real struggle. (Rimshot, please.)

I'm not actually going to talk about Shall We Dance, though; unlike other movies which have failed to impress me, it's too forgettable even to bother excoriating. It's just that Pei Ee and I had a long tradition of watching dance movies together to maintain, and we wanted to ogle Richard Gere. I just hope Alec will some day find it in himself to forgive Pei Ee's husband for suggesting that we make it into a couples outing.

But anyway, the following entries will be scattered notes (not reviews per se, those require actual focus and knowledge) on some slightly better films I've watched in the last month or so, mostly just so I can remember I've watched them.

Ugliest T-Shirt In The Free World

Shao's comment to the last chicken pox post amused me because of the T-shirt I'm wearing at the moment in yet another attempt at chicken-related humour. I've tried to find a picture on the Web but it's so hideous that I guess no one sells it any more. Therefore, for posterity's sake I suddenly feel the need to capture its fugliness here.

Front fug

Back fug

No, I don't know what I was thinking either. It was one of my first dates with Alec, so I pretty much started our romantic life by horrifying him with my sense of style. All I can say in my defence is that we'd shared a bottle of wine for dinner and had had to drink it fairly quickly because the gig was starting soon. So, in a rush and high on the heady mix of alcohol and crush hormones, I made my biggest (I've made other mistakes, but at least they didn't involve paying £15 for a butt-ugly T-shirt) fashion faux pas ever.

I challenge any of you to beat that.

Amen, Double-Up A! Men!

If laughter really is the best medicine, I'll be poxless tomorrow. Baby Got Back goes Christian in this hilarious music video, Baby Got Book.

All together now: Ladies! (yeah!) Ladies! (yeah!) Do you wanna save people from Hades?

Like A Poussin With Its Head Cut Off

Okay, so after a couple of conflicting medical opinions, it now appears I probably do have chicken pox, although the antivirals I've been taking have rendered it incredibly wimpy - poussin pox, if you will. It looks like I'll have to miss work till the end of this week so that other people in my office don't end up doing the chicken dance too, but I really can't see these wimpy pox surviving the weekend. Alec is still considered infectious because of a lousy two (TWO?!) spots which haven't scabbed over yet, but I hope I'll be able to see him quite soon. My mum continues to show no signs of infection but she's not out of the woods yet.

So apart from occasionally channelling Lady Macbeth and whiling away the afternoons with a warm sleepy cat on my belly, I have no other real agenda for the coming week apart from deciding how I want to celebrate my birthday the week after.

Very pleasantly, my problem right now is choosing between an excess of options. The day itself is sorted because of the Tortoise gig at night. Surprisingly, even Zouk has a half-interesting lineup for that weekend, with Chicks On Speed on Friday and Grandmaster Flash on Saturday. And lastly, Tiramisu and Astreal (my new favourite local band, sorry Observatory, I'll still support you but walls of crashing sound with ethereal vocals by a hot girl playing an oversized turquoise guitar straight out of the Jetsons kinda push my buttons a bit more) will be playing at the first RNDM night at Mox, also on Saturday.

With so much to do, I'm reconsidering my original idea of just throwing a house party, simply because I don't see how I can fit one in.

Review + Excerpts: Vernon God Little (DBC Pierre)

Vernon God Little isn't a bad read at all, but I'd personally classify it as a borrow-don't-buy. I was extremely impressed by it, but as someone who reads purely for leisure (okay, and perhaps an occasional intellectual brownie point), I haven't the faintest desire to ever read it again. It would probably make a fairly good movie, but only if Tarantino directs.

DBC Pierre's prose is stingingly funny, but the plot is ultimately frustrating for the rational reader, which makes the suspense in the ending fall flat. The entire story is dependent on accepting that the protagonist, who sees the world through glasses so bitingly perceptive that they would best be described as gunmetal-tinted, is more inept at proving his innocence (of a schoolyard mass-murder) than an eight-year-old child would be. At times I was reminded of my exasperation while watching The Blair Witch Project, after which I seem to remember proclaiming "People that fucking stupid really just deserve to die!" a little too loud on the streets of London.

However, if you're going on holiday, or are sick in bed and need something rollicking(ish) and entertaining(ish) and which pokes merciless fun at fat small-town Americans, you could do much worse than Vernon God Little. Here are two vulgar passages from it to help you decide. If you don't like them, don't read the book.

* * *

"Man, remember the Great Thinker we heard about in class last week?" he asks.

"The one that sounded like 'Manual Cunt'?"

"Yeah, who said nothing really happens unless you see it happen."

"All I remember is asking Naylor if he ever heard of a Manual Cunt, and him going, 'I only drive automatics'."

* * *

"You never heard of the paradigm shift? Example: you see a man with his hand up your granny's ass. What do you think?"

"Bastard."

"Right. Then you learn a deadly bug crawled up there, and the man has in fact put aside his disgust to save Granny. What do you think now?"

"Hero." You can tell he ain't met my nana.

"There you go, a paradigm shift. The action doesn't change - the information you use to judge it does. You were ready to crucify the guy because you didn't have the facts. Now you want to shake his hand."

"I don't think so."

"I meant figuratively, asshole."

The Sky Hasn't Fallen Just Yet

This isn't much of an update, but here goes anyway.

On Saturday evening, I noticed an outbreak of spots I didn't remember having on Friday. For most people in my situation this would be clear evidence of chicken pox, but for someone like me who has lived my whole life with eczema (except for those four blessed alabaster years in England; now I think about it, I really should have given in to Alec's miniskirt requests while they were still a viable option), it could just be a exceptionally bad skin day.

The efforts of myself and my family to determine whether I had chicken pox or not were quite amusing. The problem was that although I certainly had some red bumps, they didn't look like those classic pictures of chicken pox pustules, they just looked like little pimples or mosquito bites. Or eczema. Hence statements like this from my mum: "It was easy to tell with Alec because he's normally so unblemished, but with you..."

I went to the doctor this morning, and he didn't know either. The antivirals I started taking on Thursday may have contributed to this, since they may have considerably lessened the severity of the disesase. I have to go see him again tomorrow, so he can see if the spots have developed at all.

So essentially, here's the situation: it now looks like I may have caught chicken pox from the same source as Alec, except maybe my immune system just held out longer against it. (If you are a doctor and about to correct me on this, please refrain. One of my only sources of pleasure these past few days has been teasing him about being a WEAKLING.) (He is, by the way, doing great and on the mend. If he wasn't, I wouldn't be teasing him. I'm a mean girlfriend to have, but I'm not that mean.)

If I do have chicken pox now, the good news is that my birthday plans won't get screwed up, but the much worse news is that my mum has now been exposed to two different cases of chicken pox in the past few days. This worries me dreadfully, although she seems fairly chilled about it.

If I go back to the doctor tomorrow and he isn't convinced it's chicken pox, then I will have wasted 2 days' absence from work which I will have to make up for at the end of my pupillage, thereby cutting short my trip to England. I will also still not be in the clear as regards possible infection from Alec last week, and neither will my mum. I will also end up never really knowing whether I had chicken pox or not, which kind of sucks given the amount of stress it's caused me so far.

For now, I guess all I can do is try to enjoy the unexpected free time. I've already cleaned my entire room and read two books. I'll also try and catch up on all the blogging and surfing I haven't had time to do lately. And drive my mum crazy by incessantly asking if she's okay.

I Don't Feel Like Chicken Pox Tonight

I suppose a fall had to come some time.

Alec has come down very unexpectedly with the chicken pox, and the two people he spends the most time with in my family - my mum and I - are the ones who haven't had it yet.

Yesterday my mum and I went on a frustrating trek to get post-exposure treatment for ourselves, where all but one of the doctors we went to weren't aware that there was even such a thing as post-exposure prophylaxis for chicken-pox. (We knew this because my uncle used to work at the Communicable Disease Centre.)

Finally, in a clinic near work I found a doctor who was aware that vaccination could be used, but wasn't sure about antiviral medication. I gave him the relevant materials which my uncle had emailed us, and after studying them he decided that the best treatment for me would be antivirals, although for someone with my level and time of exposure to the virus there's no guarantee anything will work. Meanwhile, my uncle had decided that the best treatment for my mum would be vaccination. And then they found out that aborted foetuses are used in the vaccine, so she now refuses to take it, and will just wait and see if she gets the disease.

I'm worried about Alec, who is alone in his flat with no one around to check on him, and cut off from his job-seeking because he doesn't have Internet access. I don't want my mum to get chicken pox because she's 62 and I'm worried about complications (which can be pretty bad for adults). I don't want to get chicken pox because for the first time in a while I was actually planning to not have a shitty birthday this year, and now the uncertainty of it all means I can't really plan anything until it will possibly be too late to plan anything. Also, any disruption in my pupillage may fuck up my trip to England in June and attendance at Tamara's wedding. Also, there is the trifling matter of the entire swing dance camp Alec may have infected over the weekend, including two pregnant women and a 91-year-old. It's possible they're already immune, but he called the studio to warn them anyway.

Obviously there are bigger problems in the world than these, but that doesn't make them any more fun to deal with right now. Which is why I could only manage a wry laugh when I found a new link to my site from sockparade this morning, with this commentary:

Supergirl.
Found by a pal when looking for Ayn Rand quotes. She doesn't refer to herself as Supergirl or anything, that's just what we called her until we knew her name was Michelle. She's been to more countries and done more great things in her life than I could even think up. She has a ridiculously huge knowledge base of good music and good reads which makes anyone a cool cat in my book. Why do people from Singapore have such interesting lives? She doesn't write as consistenly as Dooce but read this and you'll be hooked.

I'm extremely flattered by the kind words, but I can't say I'm feeling that super right now. :(