Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated is very hard to describe or do justice to but at least easy enough to excerpt.
Continue reading ‘All About The Jonathans II: Everything Is Illuminated (Jonathan Safran Foer)’
Archive for June, 2005
Not only is Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn funny, well-written, well-plotted and really quite touching for a crime novel, it is all these things consistently throughout the book.
Lionel Essrog, our protagonist, has Tourette’s syndrome. While he has come up with ways to disguise his offensive vocal outbursts, his “kissing phase” tic doesn’t exactly go down well in the Brooklyn school for orphan boys he attends. A misfit among misfits who spends most of his time in the school library, he is plucked along with a few other schoolmates to do grunt work for Frank Minna, a local small time crook with big time ambitions. Frank’s a foul-mouthed father figure of sorts and the boys see their work for him as the best thing they’ve got going. When Frank is set up and murdered one day, Lionel takes it upon himself to try and solve the murder, incessant tics and all.
It isn’t easy to explain the charm of this book, because it’s one of those you-had-to-be-there reads, and its many funny/poignant moments don’t lend themselves well to excerpting. I guess I found Lionel an extremely appealing protagonist, superficially at the mercy of his tics but able to transcend them, where it counted, through resilience and ingenuity. The people around him don’t really know much about his problem; to them he’s undeniably weird but over the years they’ve come to understand him well enough not to beat him up when he taps them six times on each shoulder or tells them to EAT ME FUCKFACE. Frank calls him Freakshow, and asks him to tell jokes because he gets a kick out of seeing how far Lionel can get through the joke without ticcing, but there’s a real fondness between Frank and Lionel which Lethem skilfully and unsentimentally depicts throughout the novel. It’s ultimately what keeps Lionel going in his efforts to solve the murder – the wish to do right by someone who did him right, and who he misses deeply.
Even if you’re totally unconvinced by anything I’ve written about Motherless Brooklyn, I’d recommend you try it anyway. It’s been quite a struggle to explain why exactly I thought it was so good, but I don’t want my failure to do you out of a really good read.
Friday night was one of those pleasant surprises the Internet throws my way from time to time. Tony, who runs the Betel Box backpacker hostel in Joo Chiat, organised a dinner outing to PeraMakan for a small bunch of Joo Chiat enthusiasts and well-wishers he had met over the Internet – Jaclyn, who is proud to call herself a Joo Chiat girl, Emilyn her colleague and erstwhile professional pedophile bait (it’s a long story and I probably shouldn’t write about it here), Victor the engineer who spends his free time observing, photographing and filming Chinese temple ceremonies for posterity, Su Yin, another traditional culture enthusiast, and finally, me and The Ayatollah Of Joo Chiat.
PeraMakan was pretty good, but there was a mildly awkward moment during the meal when someone asked me to name my favourite Katong/Joo Chiat eatery and I stage-whispered “Actually, I really like True Blue!”¹ across the table. Despite my lack of social graces, I really liked PeraMakan’s beef rendang, Penang plum sauce pork ribs and ikan chuan chuan, although my plebeian tongue found its MSG-free bakwan kepeting soup a little flavourless. I found its seafood otak a little drier than I would like, but still think it’s a jolly good idea and would try it again. To the general outrage of my family I’m not generally a big fan of ayam buah keluak, chap chye or nangka curry so these dishes didn’t particularly delight me, but I can’t say there was anything wrong with them either. And for quite a feast, we paid only $20 each.
After dinner we walked down Joo Chiat Road for kopitiam Vietnamese drip coffee, and Victor rendered me bug-eyed and fascinated (and also thoroughly endeared by his passion for the subject) with his tales of people going into trances in temple rituals .
Finally, we made our way to the Betel Box, which is a pretty damn awesome hostel for any tourist actually interested in immersing themselves in Singapore. It’s cheap but cheerful, cleaner than most other hostels I’ve stayed in, and Tony takes his guests on food walks, nature walks and cycling tours where all they have to pay is the cost of their food or bike rental.
It’s sad that Tony’s efforts to make a great backpacker hostel in a district so rich with local heritage tend to get hindered by Joo Chiat’s sleazier denizens and bureaucratic red tape. Joo Chiat Road’s lurid signs and equally lurid women are a far cry from Keong Saik Road’s oddly harmonious mix of brothels, boutique hotels and yuppie bars, and an even farther cry from its past. The thing to note here is that removing the sleaze from Joo Chiat wouldn’t be gentrifying it and removing “authentic flavour”, it would be restoring it to its original state as a quiet haven of traditional trades and culture, and making it easier for tourists to choose Joo Chiat as a place to stay and explore in Singapore rather than the tedium of Orchard.
Having said this, while walking all the way up Joo Chiat Road on the way home after midnight, past bars redolent with alcohol and cheap perfume, “massage parlours” with girls pressed up against their glass walls, and many prospective “couples”, I never felt unsafe or even worried about taking my digital camera out to photograph this rather random collection of junk. I guess that’s Uniquely Singapore for you.
Retro port-a-loo?
¹ A rival restaurant, which serves Peranakan food fit for the gods.
In my imagination, the jokey outtakes from Batman Begins would feature Christian Bale hamming up that typical actor’s query: “What’s my motivation??”
As Michael Chabon makes clear in The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay, his literary homage to comic books, the key to a great comic superhero isn’t the costume, the name or even the powers, but the why – why does he do what he does in the way that he does it? Come up with an answer which is more interesting than the vagaries of “fighting crime” and “upholding justice”, and you might just create a legend.
In Batman Begins, director Christopher Nolan explores “the why” and gives us what all the other Batman movies couldn’t, or wouldn’t. Apart from weirdness in the start where Bruce Wayne is apparently young and restless in a country full of Asiatics who all speak English like David Carradine, an annoying Michael Caine as Alfred whose accent wobbles Thatcher-like between posh and decidedly un, and the fact that I personally find Christian Bale bloody ugly and wish he’d keep his bat mask on all the time, I think Nolan succeeds spectacularly. In these dark cultural days for UCL alumni when Coldplay rule album charts, it’s nice to have a fellow alumnus actually doing something you’re proud to be associated with, albeit incredibly indirectly. (Ricky Gervais, Antony Gormley and Gandhi, I’m totally proud of y’all too!)
So, “Batman” is cobbled together from Bruce Wayne’s childhood fears, residual guilt from his parents’ deaths, advice from mysterious mentor Henri Ducard to “become what you fear most”, his view that Gotham’s criminals need to fear a symbol rather than just a man, and finally, the relative ease of making good bat-shaped ninja stars as compared to, say, wombat-shaped ones. Wombatman’s ninja stars would suck, though I guess he’d probably sell more Happy Meals. I’d buy a Wombatman Happy Meal.
But I digress. At the risk of sounding a bit high-school film class, I’ll say I think the theme of fear is well developed and explored in this film, and at the risk of sounding like a pretentious fuck I’ll also say I liked the modern allegory of the ploy to destroy Gotham by creating artificial and irrational fear in its populace. Cillian Murphy is great as Scarecrow, and the trippy sequences where he induces terror and dons his mask look soooo Dave McKean. Also, he’s dead sexy, and can lock me up and play scary mask games with me any time.
Although I’m only tangentially familiar with the Batman/DC Comics universe (through the bits of it that appear in Sandman), one thing which stood out for me was how much Batman Begins felt like reading a good graphic novel – meticulously intelligent, plot-driven yet dense with interesting ideas, and visually transporting. All in all, it is a stunning example of how once in a while, movie adaptations don’t end up raping their comic book originals in the ass.
[Preface: This is a fake flame. Fake because the author of the target post has since clarified what he meant, and I therefore bear him no hard feelings. But I'll post this anyway because sometimes flaming is fun! (Right, singaporeslut? :P) He is, of course, totally welcome to fake-flame me right back.]
This makes me laugh. Brandon decided that because I (and a friend of his) like the Mitre Hotel, and because he doesn’t like the look of it (he’s never actually been there), this is a manifestation of “overreaching on the part of Singapore’s fashionably non-conforming youth.” Because “y’all don’t have to hang out in a shithole just cuz you’re sick of Zouk, yo.”
He discusses the issue with his friend.
They feel we fashionably non-conforming youth “duno whats cool”. (My thoughts: No one ever called me fashionable before! YAY!)
They wonder, “are they trying to rebel against the cleanliness of singapore?” (My thoughts: Dude, I’m Singaporean. Rebellion against anything whatsoever is not in my genes.)
His friend vows, “if someone brought me there i’ll kill him/her.” (My thoughts: No need. The roof might collapse and do it for you.)
And finally, “fuck them la. what they know. just sit down at void deck with 4-5 80 yr old uncles spewing stories in hokkien. everywhere oso got lor.” (My thoughts: Can! But got problem. Old uncle tells moving story in Hokkien about how he survived the war by eating cockroach exoskeletons, taught his kids to read with kacang puteh newspaper sheets, and now they are all President’s Scholars and so incredibly virtuous that none of them have even broken bond. Old uncle looks at me expectantly, waiting for me to respond. Speechless with admiration, I fumble for words, since like many young Singaporeans, although I can understand dialects all right, when called upon to speak them the right words don’t come to mind. Finally, I desperately splutter the Hokkien words I am most familiar with – “Uncle…KA NI NA BU CHAO CHEE BYE!”)
So there you have it, the real reason I go to the Mitre Hotel: I’m not welcome anywhere else.
Over the past months I have discovered that if I begin playing Immer when I get on the bus to work, the track that heralds my eventual arrival at Collyer Quay, powers me up and across the Change Alley bridge with its motley crew of dejected 70s-frontage shops (”For Rent”, Dinky Di House Of Russian Goods, Intimo), and eases me apologetically into my desk at work is the Superpitcher remix of Carsten Jost’s You Don’t Need A Weatherman with its febrile synth walls, pondskater beats, and birdsong. (Yes, birdsong.)
I think it’s a more positive way to start the work day than Satan.
So I decided I felt like throwing a party, and because I love dumb innuendo, I used my upcoming call to the Bar as an excuse for calling my party “Barely Legal”.
I wrote up an invite and emailed it to my friends. So far, a nice number of positive responses have been coming in, you know, the usual “Sounds cool, I’ll see you Sat then” type of email. And then my friend’s Italian boyfriend sent this:
“Uhm, still have some trouble with the law in italy over some public drunkness and indecent behaviour charges….how about consultation in exchange for some excellent duty-free smirnoff?”
And then Kelly replied with this:
“funny. pat’s in some legal trouble with the fashion police in US for his hair too. no wonder you guys are stuck over here.
alec, so what’s your true story? why are you here? what are you running away from? it’s truth time.”
And my weirdo boyfriend replied, to all my friends, some of whom have never met him, with this:
Kelly, I returned to Ireland in 93′ and found only deprivation and poverty awaiting me. The blight had returned to haunt the land and all around was the smell of marsh mellows rotting in the diseased ground. Without marsh mellows there’d be no lucky charms to feed the young ones. The leprechauns had packed up their pots of gold and forsaken us all. A great sorrow engulfed the land, made all the worse by the awful lamentations of Sinead O’Connor’s latest album “I was genitally mutilated for old Ireland”.
After just a fortnight at home, I’d already sold the clothes on my back for a few precious bowls of luck charms. I wandered around the house, buck naked and freezing, worrying day and night what I could do to feed the family. It was my mother who pointed out the only feasible solution.
“A young fellow like you, with a big lad on you, should be a gay porn star. ‘Twould be putting your willy to some good use, not like your father who does nothing but annoy me with his.”
I moved to Ballynabollix, home of Ireland’s burgeoning, alternative porn industry and became an overnight sensation. Using only what God gave me, I landed my first major role in “Jesus, Mary and Joeseph!!”. A spate of other movies followed, including such ground breaking works as “Jaysus, you could plough drills for potatoes with that thing!”, “Orgy in Ballingory” and “Feck off Bono, Larry Mullen is mine.”
My ego inflated faster than my money maker and decadence set in. I started to listen to Enya, taking Bob Geldof seriously and eating only the pink marsh mallow bits in my lucky charms. I was drinking and doing drugs and then one morning,…..Oh Jesus, it hurts just thinking back on it,….one morning I woke up and there was Michael Flatley in the bed beside me. I’ve been impotent as a Catholic Cardinal ever since.
Living with my condition has been hard. To save myself from further shame, I decided to emigrate. I looked at international birth rate statistics and surveys of sexual activity. I reasoned that if my condition could not be cured I could at least live amongst similarly afflicted individuals. Singapore has been a God send.”
If I start getting “Um…actually, I’m not free any more, I have to, uh, wash my laundry’s hair” responses, someone’s head will roll. And I don’t mean the one on top of his neck.
Via Policyblender, the BBC is apparently compiling a “lexicon of teen speak” (Brit teen speak, that is). Out of the rather long list of teen phrases provided, I was only familiar with:
- buff
- buzzing
- feds
- fo sho
- jack
- lush
- off the hook
- owned/pwned
- random
- roll with
- sick
- slap up
- vexed (only because its teenspeak meaning seems to be the same as its usual meaning)
- wagwaan (only because I listen to dancehall, I wouldn’t have a clue otherwise)
- wicked
- your mum
I was not, however, aware that the new word for “minger” is “munter”, nor did I know that to “unass” is to “relinquish or surrender control of an object or person; to leave”.
So would a fine young English gentleman these days therefore say “I unassed my beyatch ‘cos she was a right munter”? I don’t know. I feel adrift. Come July when I return to London to roll with my So Squalid Crew in the mean streets of Fitzrovia, I fear I will no longer have their respeck.
