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Mosaic Festival Vs Grey's Anatomy Soundtrack...FIGHT!

I guess it was too much to hope that 2008's Mosaic festival would be as unbelievably awesome for me as 2007's. The indie acts coming mostly make pretty indie music for pretty indie kids, which is not a bad thing in itself, but everything I've heard by them is also pretty uninspired. I loved and still like Múm's Yesterday Was Dramatic - Today Is OK but the tweeness of Finally We Are No One and Summer Make Good means that those albums really haven't stood the test of time for me. I also found them quite dull live, and in hindsight it's quite amazing that when I saw them in 2004, Animal Collective (who far outshone them, and I wish it was them coming here instead) was merely their opening band.

I'll probably end up going to a bunch of gigs anyway since I'm always so desperate for them here, but much will depend on ticket prices, which are usually quite high. At times like this I'm especially thankful for The Necessary Stage's Singapore Fringe Festival, which has offered adventurous and unpatronising music events for the past few years at great prices. We just got our $15 tickets for the Colleen / Sylvain Chauveau / Hauschka triplebill at the Esplanade Recital Studio - I mean, seriously. Seriously!

Brideshead Revisited: Test Your Word Power!

Soon after starting Brideshead Revisited I decided to keep track of the number of words I encountered within it that I didn't know. This throwback exercise was inspired firstly by the dismay of finding that within the first two pages of the book I had come across two words I wasn't quite sure of, and secondly by my first attempt at playing Free Rice where I stagnated at level 46 and got tooth-gnashingly annoyed.

I was embarrassed to realize in the course of this exercise that although I had encountered some words a number of times before, I still didn't quite know what they meant, perhaps because the context they had been used in at the time had been enough for me to follow what was written, or I simply didn't bother to look them up. Funnily enough, having learned this bunch of words from Brideshead Revisited, I played Free Rice again today and easily got to level 49. I guess our primary school teachers really did know what they were talking about!

Just for fun, I'll start by listing the words on their own so you can check how many of them you know off the bat. After the list, continue reading for a little more context to the words and links to dictionary definitions.

1. verismilitude
2. panegyric
3. jejune
4. sacerdotal
5. lapidary
6. muniment
7. suborn
8. glaucous
9. manumission
10. crapulous

Now here they are within their context in the book, and with handy links to dictionary definitions for anyone who finds themselves in the same boat as I was:

1. verisimilitude: "I would not now introduce them into a novel which elsewhere aims at verisimilitude."
2. panegyric: "Much of this book therefore is a panegyric preached over an empty coffin."
3. jejune: "When at length I returned to my rooms and found them exactly as I had left them that morning, I detected a jejune air that had not irked me before."
4. sacerdotal: " 'Still, I suppose Julia must have her enjoyment the same as other young ladies, though what they always want to go to London for in the best of the summer and the gardens all out, I never have understood. Father Phipps was here on Thursday and I said exactly the same to him," she added as though she had thus acquired sacerdotal authority for her opinion."
5. lapidary: "It is remarkable how some people are able to put their opinions in lapidary form; your aunt had that gift."
6. muniment: "He was a great delver in muniment-rooms and had a sharp nose for the picturesque."
7. suborn: "I was no fool; I was old enough to know that an attempt had been made to suborn me and young enough to have found the experience agreeable."
8. glaucous: "The cream and hot butter mingled and overflowed, separating each glaucous bead of caviar from its fellows, capping it in white and gold."
9. manumission: "...I was a free man; she had given me my manumission in that brief, sly lapse of hers; my cuckold's horns made me lord of the forest."
10. crapulous: "Half a dozen youths were drinking and playing with the slot-machines; an older, natty, crapulous-looking man seemed to be in control..."

[Addendum 26th Dec: See also James Meek's spot-on and rather enjoyable exposition on this theme, From albedo to zugunruhe, which I just found.]

Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh)

Alec recently enjoyed Brideshead Revisited so I read it too in a fit of foppery. Waugh's prose was masterful but I thought the book's comic moments were far more successfully realized than its theme (described by Waugh in his foreword as "the operation of divine grace" on the book's main characters).

The Catholics in this book struggle with the outward moral strictures of being Catholic but are indifferent to the internal. We aren't privy to any thoughtful exploration of their faiths, just an inexplicable attachment to following some rules (eg. not divorcing your husband even though you have a loveless marriage and have fallen in love with someone else) but not others (eg. not cheating on your husband in the first place). I honestly don't understand why they continue to feel any residual attachment to Catholicism when they have long ceased to practise it; it feels more like an explanation of the power of superstition rather than divine grace. I guess Graham Greene has just spoiled me in this regard, because I really think Waugh's attempts here don't hold a candle to anything Greene has accomplished in a similar vein.

But in case anyone reading the previous paragraph has immediately decided that Brideshead Revisited doesn't sound like their kind of book, let me discourage you from that - it has many inimitably funny moments and it always feels wonderfully luxurious after I overdose on modern fiction to plunge into the vintage elan of a writer like Waugh. Here's a passage I enjoyed - Anthony Blanche, my favourite character in the book because he's just totally fabulous, describes the fumbling attempts of some fellow students at Oxford to dunk him in a fountain (due to his excessive fabulousness):

About six of them came into my room, the rest stood mouthing outside. My dear, they looked too extraordinary. They had been having one of their ridiculous club dinners, and they were all wearing coloured tail-coats - a sort of livery. "My dears," I said to them, "you look like a lot of most disorderly footmen." Then one of them, rather a juicy little piece, accused me of unnatural vices. "My dear," I said, "I may be inverted but I am not insatiable. Come back when you are alone." Then they began to blaspheme in a very shocking manner, and suddenly I, too, began to be annoyed. "Really," I thought, "when I think of all the hullabaloo there was when I was seventeen, and the Duc de Vincennes (old Armand, of course, not Philippe) challenged me to a duel for an affair of the heart, and very much more than the heart, I assure you, with the duchess (Stefanie, of course, not old Poppy) - now, to submit to impertinence from these pimply, tipsy virgins..." Well, I gave up the light, bantering tone and let myself be just a little offensive.

Then they began saying, "Get hold of him. Put him in Mercury." Now as you know I have two sculptures by Brancusi and several pretty things and I did not want them to start getting rough, so I said, pacifically, "Dear sweet clodhoppers, if you knew anything of sexual psychology you would know that nothing could give me keener pleasure than to be manhandled by you meaty boys. It would be an ecstacy of the very naughtiest kind. So if any of you wishes to be my partner in joy come and seize me. If, on the other hand, you simply wish to satisfy some obscure and less easily classified libido and see me bath, come with me quietly, dear louts, to the fountain.

Do you know, they all looked a little foolish at that? I walked down with them and no one came within a yard of me. Then I got into the fountain and, you know, it was really most refreshing, so I sported there a little and struck some attitudes, until they turned about and walked sulkily home, and I heard Boy Mulcaster saying, "Anyway, we did put him in Mercury." You know, Charles, that is just what they'll be saying in thirty years' time. When they're all married to scraggy little women like hens and have cretinous porcine sons like themselves getting drunk at the same club dinner in the same coloured coats, they'll still say, when my name is mentioned, "We put him in Mercury one night," and their barnyard daughters will snigger and think their father was quite a dog in his day, and what a pity he's grown so dull. Oh, la fatigue du Nord!

Wearable Wankery

A curmudgeonly post about the dull Mosaic Music Festival lineup for 2008 is forthcoming, so I thought I would pave the way for it by showcasing a few music tees I found funny recently.

Diesel Sweeties' Elitism Diagram really skewers it. Threadless' Music Snob shirt sold out in every size within days of its release, unsurprisingly, but girls can still enjoy some sale-price snobbery with I Listen To Bands That Don't Even Exist Yet.

[Note: If you happen to buy the last tee through the above link, I get a little credit in my store account. It would make me very happy, but it's up to you. :) ]

One-Liners

I love the one sentence article summaries in the Guardian's RSS feed. Some examples from the last couple of days:

• Teacake mistake could cost Treasury: Confusion over status of dome of marshmallow on a biscuit swathed in milk chocolate could cost £3.5m
• Bush writes to Kim Jong Il: US president writes to Kim Jong il, who he once dismissed as a "pygmy"
• Wallinger takes Turner Prize: Judges praise "visceral intensity" of artist who once dressed as bear

Wholly Unfair

Christmas decorations are up in the common areas of our condo. I feel a little degraded by them.

Introducing Orlando

This is Orlando. Orlando appeared out of nowhere on my family's doorstep (it's weird, either someone left him there deliberately or he had an uncanny ability to wander to where he would be totally pampered) about two weeks ago, with a very skinny body and distended belly. Since then, my family has fattened him into healthier kitten proportions, cleaned, de-fleaed, de-wormed and toilet-trained him, and he's now in good condition to go to a loving home.

Update on 10 Dec 2007: Due to unforeseen circumstances of extreme cuteness, my family informed me over the weekend that my mother cannot bear to part with Orlando. As such, he is no longer up for adoption.

He's a plucky little guy and has formed a sweet wrestle/play relationship with one of our other house cats Dinky who is about three times his size. He's also incredibly friendly (the other three adult house cats aren't anywhere as friendly to strangers) and does the whole sitting on your lap purring until he falls asleep thing, which will never get old, never never never.

He's hard to photograph because if he sees the camera lens he runs right up and sticks his face in it, so I had to wait until he was distracted with something else.

If you read Cute Overload...

...I believe this qualifies as an "ENH!"

I can haz pawburger?

Num num num.

Pwease adopt me!

Please leave a comment or email "name of this blog" at gmail if you can help little Orlando out, or know someone else who can. I'm absolutely dying to keep him for myself, but the flat where I now live with Alec isn't very cat suitable.