Archive for November, 2001

April March / Sue Garner + Rick Brown

Recent arrivals from Django:

April March: Chrominance Decoder

Right now I find myself incapable of saying more about this album other than that it is incredibly boring. Nothing of the rambunctious tweeness that made Chick Habit such a romp. The liner notes are amusingly pretentious and say things like “So April is a child. But nothing is quite what it seems. Could it be that she really loved you, Mr Clever? And what, or who, does she think of when the end-credits dissolve from the TV screen and the murmur of radio parasites wraps her in electrical snow?”, but I can write nothing about the music, because each of the four times I have tried playing it, it fades into the background within minutes, and believe me, when you have a very bored Michelle ploughing through the Brussels Convention on Jurisdiction and the Enforcement of Judgments in Civil and Commercial Matters 1968 and longing for distraction, something has to be very boring indeed if it doesn’t distract. And this album is very boring. Please talk to me if you have heard this album and like it. I would like to stop being bored.

Sue Garner & Rick Brown: Still

Earlier this year I described them (inadequately) as “Sarah McLachlan’s voice singing with Ani DiFranco’s attitude accompanied by Sonic Youth remixed by Tortoise”, and I am unfortunately unable to come up with a better description, but they really do deserve better than my fumbling reductive comparisons. Different feels to the songs depending on who’s singing: her tones are as dulcet as anything the Lilith Fairies can warble, and his are as nondescript as most of indie-rock’s finest, but in every song you feel this is a band that likes the subtleties of sound – in a lot of the second track (I Like The Name Alice) the sound we hear with the most clarity and detail are the steely plucks of the guitar, with her voice farther away, and each note’s got a twang, a twist, an emphasis of its own that the other notes don’t have. A note of its own in the wider scheme of notes. This appeals to me. I’m a believer in the individuality of notes.

(Still eagerly awaiting Leaves Turn Inside You, which has yet to arrive.)

(Elsewhere in the convenient world of online music reviews, Pitchfork likes the new Silver Jews, Flak reviews the Piano Magic compilation, and I really wish I could rave about MJ’s latest as much as PopMatters does.)

(Did I mention Chrominance Decoder is boring?)

  November 30, 01 | Music Geekery | Closed

Googlers / Ktheory / Luke Visits

Not-so-burning but still infuriating question of the day: why, why, why do something like half my Google hits seem to come from people searching for Audrey Tautou’s mammaries? And why the hell am I first on the list?

In other news, I have nothing more disturbing to report from Luke’s latest visit to the UK than a phallic salad (large leek, effect enhanced by cherry tomatoes) and a violated wok. This is a good thing, considering that on previous visits he has perfumed my room with Spam and given Nazi salutes to oncoming cars on narrow one-lane roads in Scotland.

  November 26, 01 | Miscellany | Closed

Today

Today I have walked along a still-sleeping Brick Lane on a bagel mission, and had a leisurely breakfast in a room with a skylight, and jazz, and lovely company. I have ridden on the tube half-blind because I didn’t have my spectacles (this time with a cast-iron excuse for not making eye contact with the guy asking for change: it’s not that I was deliberately avoiding his gaze, I just couldn’t see his eyes to begin with), although once the train is moving the world outside isn’t any more of a blurred rush without specs than it is with them. I have walked home down Gower Street in a quiet riot of sun and blue and leaves, and scrunched through fallen yellow in the UCL compound. I have been rather happy.

  November 24, 01 | Londoner Forever | Closed

Early New Year’s Resolutions

Based on the events of the past few days:

  • I will stop going for tutorials a week late.
  • I will stop going for aforesaid tutorials unprepared, although I realize this is ultimately of no consequence given that I am a week late.
  • I will bother to set my alarm clock(s) for Wednesday mornings, when I have to meet the priests to choose hymns for Sunday. I feel exceptionally rude keeping the clergy waiting and then turning up in pyjamas.
  • I will buy gloves I like instead of going gloveless and freezing due to reluctance to wear my murderer ones.
  • I will never buy Tesco’s vile soya milk again in attempts at health. Self-induced nausea cannot be healthy.
  • I will find music to listen to while studying that is neither so catchy that I end up singing along and bouncing off the walls (Dismemberment Plan) nor so soothing that it lulls me to sleep (Galaxie 500). Unfortunately I think this then means Matchbox 20 but they do say suffering is good for the soul.
  • I will teach myself to like healthy snacks like wheatgerm instead of guzzling Kettle Chips (salsa and mesquite flavour).
  • I will uninstall Dope Wars from my computer. I will also stop publicly discussing cocaine prices and the strategic necessity of procuring assault weapons for use against the police.
  • I will stop getting wound up about things that are ridiculously unimportant in the larger scheme of world hunger etc. as well as pretty damn trivial compared to the problems of some of the people around me.
  • I will spend less time writing lists of resolutions and more time actually carrying them out.
  November 22, 01 | Favourite Posts and Londoner Forever | Closed

Poem: After RM Rilke (Primo Levi)

Just like that, a week gone and nothing written here about it. Cue inevitable cliche (time, fly, fun, blah).

Get thee behind me, Real Life.

For now, have some Primo Levi, who I’ve been enjoying these days in rare moments of solitude:

After R.M. Rilke

Lord, it’s time; the wine is already fermenting.
The time has come to have a home,
Or to remain for a long time without one.
The time has come not to be alone,
Or else we will stay alone for a long time.
We will consume the hours over books,
Or in writing letters to distant places,
Long letters from our solitude.
And we will go back and forth through the streets,
Restless, while the leaves fall.

(You might also want to read Rilke’s Autumn Day, which the above poem was written in response to.)

  November 20, 01 | Words | Closed

Climbing Up The Walls

Currently playing, probably too loudly, on my speakers:

  • Our Lady Peace and Headswim albums (loans from Tay)
  • Hopelessly Devoted To You, a punk sampler (loan from Yoichi)
  • Who’s In The House? (answer: Jesus), by Father Brian featuring the Fun Loving Cardinals (loan from Alec, who swears almost convincingly that he “borrowed it from a friend”)

My neighbours are possibly feeling less than Christian love for me right now.

  November 16, 01 | Music Geekery | Closed

Amsterdam And Bruges, 2001

Any discussion of Amsterdam really must start with my priest, whose responses to my telling him where I was going ran the gamut from “You dirty slut!” to “Pull yourself together, girrl, and doan’t be goin’ to that city of sin!” (spelling irregularities my attempt to convey his channelling of our Irish housekeeper nun) to “Would you like to borrow a guidebook?”

In hindsight my mid-trip “Hi Mum, I’m in Amsterdam!” phonecall to my mother, who I’d forgotten to tell about my plans, was rather cruel, given that the answers I then gave to her anxious queries could hardly have brought maternal peace of mind eg. “Where are you staying?” “Hostel Kabul”; “Hostel Kabul? Is it safe? Is it full of drug addicts/sex tourists/generally unsavoury characters? Where is it?” “Oh, it’s in the heart of the red light district. It’s quite nice, really, don’t worry…” Sorry, Mum. I probably do this to you too often.

I wasn’t really lying about the hostel. Despite its roach problem (such as me opening my toiletries bag and finding a large roach perched on my toothpaste tube; said roach was given a 5 minute grace period to get the fuck out of there, after which it was unceremoniously hauled out with bare hands and savagely killed) and the fact that from the second night onwards I was the only girl in a 24 person dorm, and the fact that all the men in there with me seemed to be of the resonant snoring variety, despite all this, Hostel Kabul was actually quite all right compared to others I’ve been in. For example, water came out of the shower when you turned it on. This was a plus.

Apart from this, the rest of our (me, Russ) little jaunt involved lots of walking (good) in cold and rain and wind (not so good) with little more than my regularly inverting umbrella (bloody annoying) as protection against this. There were of course the requisite visits to the Anne Frank house, Van Gogh museum, friendly neighbourhood brothels etc., also a day-trip to Bruges, also rambling along the canals, stumbling down narrow wind tunnel streets brandishing umbrellas like shields, Russ chasing his umbrella down one such street, me laughing like crazy until my umbrella promptly did another topsy-turvy, long-drawn-out dinners that left us the last people in the restaurant, celebrating the phenomenon that is the Michelle-Russ dynamic, me making a silent promise to myself and him that things will not change (at least not much) in the light of recent developments in my life, that we will not lose this.

Stereotypical souvenir shopping: Belgian chocolates for hall priests, nun and Mark (Mark got “Woodies”, I obviously chose something different for the clergy), Royal Delft blue and white pattern teacup for mum, advocaat for me and Avril. Considered an inflatable doll for Alec, decided this was possibly not the best gift to give a significant other/boyfriend/whatever, even if he did once send me a tape of a song called Pussy-Pussy-Cat.

All in all, an exceptionally good Reading Week, but I really am determined now to slog for a bit and put in some hours in the library until Christmas. I needed to do this, but now I need to do that.

  November 13, 01 | Travel | Closed

One Year

Ineffable [2008 annotation: that's the name of my old blog] is a year old today. Fancy that. :)

This probably calls for some attempt at taking stock, a State Of The Blog address of sorts, except that I have nothing particularly profound to say.

Reading over a year’s worth of posts, I do actually like most of what I’ve written here, and how I’ve written it. I don’t think my writing has changed very much, either in style or subject matter. I write about how I’ve spent my days, partly to give friends who read it an idea of how I’m doing, but more to remind myself what the hell I do with my time. I write about where I’ve been, what I’m reading, listening to, watching.

I write almost nothing about the things that affect me most deeply, or that evoke the strongest feelings: rage, hurt, infatuation. (None of these happen to me very often at all, actually, so you’re not missing much.) I prefer dealing with these privately, because rage and hurt are always at someone, and I feel a bit nasty airing dirty linen like that on a public site. Infatuation (probably the rarest of the three) gets only very carefully calculated and massively understated references because I am generally far too romantically clueless and shy to let the relevant person know about it, let alone the world. Depression gets only occasional mention, because my problems are infinitesimal in the wider scheme of things, and whinging is boring.

So what of me are you left with, gentle reader (assuming you don’t already know me in real life)? Perhaps very little. You don’t hear the Michellisms that pepper my speech, the accent that I don’t believe can be anything other than refined Singaporean but which people keep insisting is Caribbean; you don’t see me dolled up in girly pink, or attitudinal in leather and gelled hair, or slouching around the house in baggy indie-rock T-shirt and drawstring trousers; you don’t really have a sense of what sets me off giggling quietly to myself, or collapses me with hysterical laughter while people look on bemused; you haven’t looked me in the eye, or hugged me, or even handed me the salt.

You do, however, have a glimpse through a chink (no pun intended, ha ha) in the armour that not everyone who actually knows me gets. You read what I write about friendships I treasure that I’m sometimes too shy to say to the people involved in real life. You have the benefit of reading me edited for coherence and comprehension, rather than having to deal with my tendencies towards convoluted sentences, tangents, and habit of speaking in disclaimers. You get the expert tour of what I think is good and reasonably interesting about me, without having to wade through the rest of the mulch.

And what if you know me in real life as well as read this blog? Well hey, lucky you. :P

I don’t exactly have any big celebratory plans for this anniversary, but I thought it would be good to refer you to a smattering of posts I particularly like for one reason or another. (I’m going to Amsterdam from tomorrow till Saturday, so I also thought this might make up for not posting in the next few days.)

An essay weekend
A bookstore stole my day
The Lazarus glove
Generation surrenderist
Linkage jitters, reality bites, and the nonpersistence of memory
Don’t read Douglas Coupland on Valentine’s Day
The weekend my spring began
Birthday wishes
Commonwealth cynicism
Fire drill epiphany
Feeling low (and tangential)
Yo La Tengo!
Girl Narrowly Escapes Exam Disaster, Contemplates Bestiality
How not to make it in health advertising
Xtreme X-Files dissatisfaction
Giggling in church
Musings on conversational self-censorship
The first belly laugh of the summer
Michelle down. Michelle back up.

  November 6, 01 | Blogging | Closed

Happy Snippets

Snippets from the weekend (no more than snippets, though. Tufts in the fur of the woolly mammoth of my current happiness. Some of the reasons I’m happy make me go a bit shy and fluttery, and I don’t feel like writing about them here):

After an extraordinarily taxing day, Thai food, Mercury Rev and charming company made for an extraordinarily pleasant Friday night. Even though I somehow managed to buy a Rev T-shirt that was shocking in its random ugliness (I blame the wine, and Alec for not stopping me), and even though I was the lucky one who got to sit next to Stupor Guy, whose travails on the astral plane manifested themselves in the inexorable downward drift of his upper body towards an increasingly cringing me, the gig still had its moments – nice renditions of The Dark Is Rising, Spiders and Flies, Hercules, Tonight It Shows and Goddess On A Hiway’s always fun. I do wish they’d played Endlessly and A Drop In Time though, and I don’t think they played anything from Boces or Yerself Is Steam, which was a little disappointing.

Their live sound is rougher round the edges than the pristine sound on the last two albums. Their album sound feels as if each component of a song (think Endlessly, for example) occupies a distinct musical space with clearly delineated boundaries, and exists quite happily there without really interacting with other elements of the song, even though they all complement each other very prettily when taken as a whole. Like a consomme. Live, it’s more of a stew, or perhaps a chunky soup, and I’m not sure how much I actually liked hearing the songs that way. For me, Deserter’s Songs and All Is Dream are the sound of late nights studying or reading in bed, just right for the spaces between the sounds of night drizzle and Gower Street white noise. Having said that, I do think gigs are meant to sound different from albums, so all this is more commentary than complaint.

Saturday was the President’s Cup, the only intervarsity tournament for novice debaters in the UK, and something Mark and I had been slaving over (well, kind of) for the past couple of weeks. Relentless perfectionist that I am, I’m still half convinced that every person who kept coming up to me and raving about how fantastic the tournament was, was either piss drunk or just being polite, but there does seem to be considerable consensus that it was a resounding success. Which makes me happy, although it could all have been so much better if not for a plethora of organizational failures that I know I made, and which I feel lucky for getting away with.

Special mention must be made of:

  • Mark, tournament convenor AKA My Bitch, who ran himself ragged during the day, supplied alcohol at night, and has generally been absolutely lovely to work with because of his ability to find hilarity in drudgery and give wonderful hugs when I’m not in the mood for hilarity.
  • Russ, who sacrified his Saturday to perform the extremely boring functions of a tournament drudge, because I really needed the help, and because he’s sweet like that. (Oops, he hates being called sweet. Oh well.)

After Saturday, Sunday was a day for nothingness. Woke up at noon. Practised the organ for evening mass. Spent the rest of the afternoon in bed with Seamus Heaney and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, falling in love all over again with the Olivia Tremor Control’s Dusk At Cubist Castle, munching Kettle Chips, breathing in chrysanthemum tea. Had fun at evening mass playing my calypso version of How Great Thou Art. Chocolate pancakes a la Mark for dinner. Subjected Alec to The Lost Children (stomach-turning song on the new Michael Jackson album, to be excoriated here in the very near future). Camp dancing extravaganza with Mark to New York City Boy (Pet Shop Boys), which might possibly have been quite inconsiderate to Stefan downstairs due to my very creaky floorboards. In retrospect, I suppose you could say it wasn’t actually a day of nothingness, except in the sense that it involved nothing that detracted from happy, happy, happy me.

(Are you tired of this yet?)

  November 6, 01 | Londoner Forever and Music Geekery | Closed

Incidental Hobbitness

I’ll write more tomorrow. But right now what needs to be said is that:

  • Friday was great
  • Saturday was great
  • Sunday was great
  • I haven’t been this happy for a long time
  • And incidentally, my hobbit name is Tigerlily Proudneck of Longbottom.
  November 5, 01 | Links | Closed
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