Archive for July, 2002

Orchestra Nostalgia

On Sunday my uncle organized a big family lunch in honour of my graduation. This was sweet. One does wonder why he chose Geylang (brothel capital of Singapore) for this joyous occasion, but gift horse, mouth, blah.

The Singapore Youth Orchestra concert I attended later with mum was an evening of many flashbacks. Before I joined the orchestra at the age of 13 my mother used to take me to its concerts. I was so small I’d have to perch on the edge of my seat in the circle and peer over the balcony railing to see the players. On Sunday there were alumni violinists in the orchestra I hadn’t seen since I watched them as a child - I couldn’t recognize their faces, but I knew them by their playing styles.

Then I joined the orchestra, and was lazy and never practised and sight-read everything and was, accordingly, a crap first violinist. Neither this nor the fact that I found it socially deadening apart from the very few people I found interesting (and who hopefully know who they are) should be obscured by surges of nostalgia. But when I think back, I remember how it felt to be part of a swell of sound, and that really does outweigh the nitty gritty.

  July 31, 02 | Music Geekery | Closed
Tags: ,

Debating Nostalgia

On Saturday I felt old and retrospectively stupid.

The semi-final debates were on the motion This House Believes That The IMF and World Bank Have Done More Harm Than Good. If I had had to take this on, when I was 17, with an hour to prepare, I would have curled up in a fetal position in the corner and cried for my mother. The teams I judged took it on bravely and far more competently than I would have done 5 years ago, and while I was able, in judge mode, to make many criticisms of their efforts, that really doesn’t detract from the fact that they’d have kicked my 17-year-old ass to Washington (is that where the IMF and WB headquarters are?) and back.

The seven-generational Raffles Debaters party (affectionately christened the Gangbang by Jolene) afterwards had the magnificent cacophony you would expect from an event where you put a lot of debaters in a room but don’t actually have rules of debating in place to control all of them. Party games included obscene charades where people had to act out stuff like Octopussy and Dr Strangelove (the guy doing this mimed wanking a very big dick, and someone guessed it just from that. Go figure), Polar Bear (too complicated to explain, but I am told all the young people play it these days) and Dance Dance Revolution.

As I said, old and retrospectively stupid. But in a good way.

  July 31, 02 | Life History | Closed
Tags: , ,

Katong Convent Nostalgia

Another of those Real Life weekends, I’m afraid. I really must get my priorities in order.

The Katong Convent (my primary and secondary school) class reunion on Friday wasn’t as manic as others have been. Being unable to attend due to her being in Afghanistan volunteering, our form teacher was unable to offend the family at the next table by loudly recounting stories about her lesbian friends. Since Shoop wasn’t meeting her boyfriend afterwards, the class didn’t have the chance to charge headlong after her and hammer on the windows of the taxi demanding to meet him while she tried to explain, within, that she didn’t actually know any of these mad girls at all.

Debating and my other various pretensions draw me back to Rafflesian soil more often than to KC, but all the sappy reminiscing in the world would still be inadequate to convey what KC was, and still is to me. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about choices, and evaluating most of those I’ve made with the benefit of hindsight, I continue to be amazed at how few I regret, even the ones that were fairly risky at the time. I am glad I chose not to go into the Gifted stream (this would have meant leaving KC) or to a school higher up on the rankings. Both those forks in the road continued to generate their fair share of angst years after they’d been taken but these days I’ve been thinking Robert Frost was right.

  July 31, 02 | Life History | Closed
Tags: , , ,

The Eye

The Eye was billed as a horror film, and did indeed strike horror into the heart of Ken before it had even started when he found out it was in Chinese. Apart from that it wasn’t particularly scary, unlike Ring, which probably had most of Asia looking fearfully at wells, TVs and long-haired girls who walked funny for months. But I was pleasantly surprised at the appearance of Edmund Chen, whose rosy cheeks and chiseled jaw filled many a happy childhood Chinese soap opera afternoon. I remember sometimes looking at him so appreciatively I forgot to read the subtitles.

[Side note: I just found out that Channel 8 is re-running some of those old soap operas in celebration of some channel anniversary, and I so have to watch The One About Volleyball! (Not, of course, its actual name in Chinese, but anyone who watched Channel 8 in the late ’80s should remember it instantly)]

  July 29, 02 | Film | Closed

Minority Report

The rest of the day was given over to wandering from eatery to eatery, which tends to form the substantive bulk of my social activity over here, simply because most eateries are air-conditioned enough for conversation to be about something other than how hot we all are. From gourmet sandwiches at Olio Dome to char kuay teow at Kopitiam to cakes at Cafe Cartel to bubble tea and salty chicken at Quickly to meatball soup at the Marina Square food court in various group compositions (Me, Felice, Ken, for a spell, Jonathan, eventually just me and Ken). Conversational highlights of the afternoon included Ken calling me a slut (highly amusing if you know Ken) and the Who Would I Shag In This Shopping Centre? game. Also brief forays into schools of legal and political thought, but that doesn’t sell papers, dah-ling.

Minority Report thankfully managed to exorcise me of my A.I. demons, in that it was a sci-fi movie with a lot more brain and subtlety, and a lot less saccharine cringeworthiness, although I still had to roll my eyes at the ending sequences.

But because I can never resist the urge to nitpick: they set up the loss of Anderton’s son as the driving force behind his belief in pre-crime (the why, so crucial in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which I’m enjoying immensely these days). Multiple statements are made about how pre-crime could have saved his son if it had only been set up 6 months earlier. But it can only detect murders, not rapes, not assaults, presumably not abductions, and his interrogation of Leo Crow later reveals that he doesn’t actually know if his son is still alive or dead. So pre-crime would have been useless if his son had merely been abducted and, say, ritually tortured. Also, the law student in me wonders how the system draws what can often be an exceedingly hazy line between murder and manslaughter, given that they seem to have dispensed with all relevance of actus reus (the act) and mens rea (the state of mind) as elements of a crime.

But I admit these are easy and not particularly penetrating criticisms to make, and they don’t detract from the fact that it’s a stunningly-made film with fairly good adherence to continuity (this is important to me. Other disgruntled X-Philes will understand) which didn’t bore me for a second - overall, well worth my seven fifty, which I don’t find myself able to say about most films I see.

Especially since I am about to leave the house to watch The Eye with Ken, a movie we are inexplicably determined to see despite everyone else giving us dire warnings to the contrary. We only settled for Minority Report yesterday because The Eye wasn’t showing where we were, and only after a long tussle between the pros and cons of travelling to Tampines to watch The Eye (pro: we’d watch The Eye; con: we’d watch The Eye).

  July 26, 02 | Film | Closed

Singapore Art Museum

I don’t know if I’d rate the Singapore Art Museum particularly highly if I were a foreigner, because it would be full of names I’d never heard of. Even visiting it as a Singaporean, most names apart from Chen Wen Hsi, Georgette Chen and Ng Eng Teng draw a blank with me. But I found myself enjoying the museum’s permanent collection more than the Rodin exhibition we’d primarily gone to see; perhaps I subconsciously prefer painting to sculpture, or modern over classical, or perhaps it was just the familiarity of paintings I’d seen before on previous visits to the museum - I don’t know. It’s three in the morning and stream-of-consciousness is about all I can manage.

I like this museum, always have. I like its retention of the simple beauty it must have had as a school, the spare elegance it still has as an art museum. Today the revelation hit me that my parents walked the same corridors I was walking down, in the days when it was St Joseph’s Institution and they were students there. They met and romanced here. It’s a beautiful place to be able to remember falling in love in, I think.

I was also struck by the thought that this awareness of a personal history can only happen for me in this country. As far as England is concerned, I didn’t exist before 1999.

  July 26, 02 | Singaporean Sometimes | Closed
Tags: , ,

Afternoon Of Poetry And Music

Saturday was Rafflesian, the morning spent judging quarter-final debates, the afternoon at the Creative Writing Club’s annual Afternoon of Poetry and Music, which I’ve attended for the past seven years or so.

APM had its usual mixed bag of poetry - some I didn’t get or didn’t like, some that could have been good if their authors hadn’t delivered them so badly, some I wished I was a good enough poet to have written, many I knew I would never be a good enough poet to write. Poems by young strangers and old friends. Lee Tzu Pheng’s beautiful and elegiac Falling Into Timelessness, which I must find and read many times more. Alfian Sa’at’s Autobiography, from that second collection I haven’t read nearly as many times as One Fierce Hour and really should sit down with soon. Musical performances which gave me varying degrees of enjoyment depending on the novelty of their repertoire and the skill of the performers. Handel’s The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba arranged for saxophone quartet, well worth watching. Ploddingly and badly played Pachelbel’s Canon, a real waste of time.

Crepes (quality good, quantity bad) at Raffles City (continuity unintended) with Terence, Yi-Sheng, Cheryl and Miss Ho. Wandering, talking, coffeeing later on, conversation that can’t really be alluded to because of the reasonably private nature of most of it, but I suppose the main point here is that I went home from the day happy and remembering why, according to the Myers-Briggs test, I am apparently an extrovert.

  July 22, 02 | Singaporean Sometimes | Closed

Food With Friends

So I finally decided to act like the social being anthropologists tell me I’m meant to be, and got a life.

Friday lunch with Vikram at a Chinese in what I think is now called H20 Zone, where our suspicions that we’d been given a tourist menu (photos accompanying every menu item) were confirmed when we peeked in another menu (which they told us was for “drinks”) and found it photoless and about $2 cheaper across the board. So we ordered our crispy baby squid (another ticked item on the summer food list) and sambal brinjal conspicuously from the photoless menu, and were charged accordingly.

Dinner with the Twins and their parents involved more ticking of the food list once they’d discovered a list existed and insisted on getting me satay and a baby coconut in addition to my chicken rice. We drifted and lounged and chatted around the Raffles Town Club pool, probably well-raisined by the time we got out to do girly things like hair masques and steam-rooms. There was the pleasant feeling of lives that had moved on and developed almost wholly independently of each other but which could still be described out of more than politeness (because we wanted to), and responded to out of more than avoiding awkwardness (because the connections that power conversation were still there). They still refer to me as “hoggie”, short for hedgehog, because I am apparently “prickly but cute.” I would have suggested just “cactus” instead myself, but suppose old friends are allowed to do things like tell me I’m cute without being killed with blunt objects.

  July 22, 02 | Singaporean Sometimes | Closed
Tags: , ,

Packrat Blues

I decided to make a start on tidying things in readiness for the move to a new family house. It’s only scheduled to take place after I’ve returned to England, but I thought I’d do what I could now to reduce the amount of my junk my family will have to pack up.

I started with the lowest compartment of the cupboard - relics from childhood - and had to conclude after going through it all that I am a packrat of the highest order; the combined effect of the dual considerations of sentimental value and but-it-might-come-in-handy-some-day is that the eraser collection (I’m not kidding) can’t be thrown away despite the fact that I would have to write out the Encyclopedia Britannica in pencil and then rub it all out again in order to actually use all of it, the Sea Monkey pamphlet can’t be thrown away even though those little ripoffs are long dead, and Strawberry Shortcake (unfortunately naked) also has to stay, because you don’t throw away Strawberry Shortcake.

But some things had to go, and so I made painful choices.

Thrown: Generic toy cars
Kept: A MicroMachines tune-up station cleverly disguised as a can of motor-oil. A small, rather pathetic Transformer-wannabe truck that in its robot form strangely resembled Duke Nukem. Five metal replicas of commercial airlines. My neighbour Roy and I used to combine our collections of planes and have plane beauty contests. We’d trundle the planes down the length of the “runway”, they’d do a turn at the end and get trundled back, and we’d score them out of ten. My Korean Air plane won many times because it was this lovely sky-blue.

Thrown: Balls of knitting yarn
Kept: Squares of knitting which I knitted every time I learnt a new stitch; a practice scarf rendered unusable by an inexplicable foray into stocking stitch three-quarters of the way through it. An unfinished square was still mounted on the knitting needles. I tried to continue it. I could remember how to knit, but not how to purl.

Thrown: Whoopie cushion, with deep regret - its rubber had melted and stuck to the box and it was a pale shadow of the fart maelstrom it once was. I loved that whoopie cushion. Sigh.
Kept: Fake bloodied bandage with nail, calculator that squirts water when you press the keys, sweet tin with leaping snakes when opened, rubber centipede, two snakes (one rubber, one plastic), replica revolver which shoots a flag saying “BANG!!!” when you press the trigger.

  July 18, 02 | Favourite Posts | Closed

Book-A-Minute Odyssey

I wish I’d read the Book-A-Minute synopsis of Catcher In The Rye before I ploughed through the whole bloody thing all those years ago, because (I know I’ll probably tramp on lots of toes here) their synopsis is spot on and much less of a waste of time:

Angst angst angst swear curse swear crazy crazy angst swear curse, society sucks, and I’m a stupid jerk.

Other quality works well-showcased here are Animal Farm, Slaughterhouse Five and War And Peace.

In the SF/Fantasy section, I can also vouch for the worth of their synopses of Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World, The Great Hunt, The Dragon Reborn, and The Shadow Rising. Somewhere in the middle of book five I decided that four overly thick, repetitive books of intensely irritating characters with little or no redeeming qualities had been quite enough, and gave up in disgust - I therefore cannot comment on the accuracy of further synopses of the next, oh, ten million books in the series, but insofar as they ridicule it, they’re probably right.

I disagree with their David Eddings synopses because the Mallorean didn’t mirror the Belgariad. A more accurate approach would be to summarize the Belgariad and the Mallorean, then describe the Elenium and the Tamuli as “See the Belgariad and the Mallorean”. If you’ve never read David Eddings, this will have made absolutely no sense to you, but if you have, you will know exactly what I mean.

  July 16, 02 | Words | Closed

Syntaxfree At Flickr

Monthly Archives