Favourite Posts – syntaxfree

Gyrating For Jesus: A Pow-Ka-Leow Guide To Sun Ho’s Greatest “Hits”

It’s easy to jump to conclusions about the guilt of the City Harvest Church (CHC) leaders, but I’m not going to do that here. Instead, I’ve decided to engage in the admittedly snarkastic exercise of listening to every English release by Sun Ho which I could find on Youtube, to see if the quality, content and success of her music could ever have justified the expenditure of S$23 million, authorized or not.

(For those unfamiliar with the backstory, City Harvest is a hugely rich megachurch in Singapore, founded by pastor Kong Hee and his wife Sun Ho (once described as a “music pastor”). Several of its leaders, including Kong Hee, have just been charged with committing criminal breaches of trust and falsifying accounts regarding the use of church funds. In particular, S$23 million worth of church funds was purportedly misused to fund the “Crossover Project”, an initiative started by Kong Hee and Sun Ho to use Sun’s secular music to reach out to non-Christians. Sun has been trying to launch a US-based secular music career since 2003.)

#1 Dance Hits Which You’d Never Remember Dancing To

Given that you can usually find almost anything ever committed to recordable media on Youtube on the basis that someone somewhere somehow thought it was significant enough to upload and share with the world, I was surprised to discover no trace there whatsoever of Sun’s debut American single, “Where Did Love Go”. For a song produced by David Foster which reached #1 on Billboard’s Hot Dance Club Play “Breakout” Chart in 2003, its “breakout” impact appears to have been short-lived. Sun’s management should address this problem by making it available on Youtube ASAP – it could, after all, rake in a few hundred accidental views from non-Christian lazy typists who were looking for the Supremes’ classic.

After this disappointing start, I was relieved to find some clues as to what Sun’s other “#1 dance hits” may have sounded like: one remix of “One With You”, two of “Without Love”, one use of “Gone” as backing track to an optimistically-titled montage of “international star Sun Ho” at US Fashion Week 2006, and three – wow, three! – remixes of Ends of the Earth.

There is little to be said about any of these songs. The tunes are forgettable, Sun’s vocals insipid, none of the songs have any discernable lyrical connections with Christian beliefs or morality beyond pedestrian references to love, and whether you like them or not will largely depend on your tastes in dance music and the abilities of the producer/remixer. One also wonders why anyone would see generic Eurodance as a good way of spreading the gospel in the US music industry in the first place. Perhaps the Crossover Project thought this is what gay clubbers like listening to.

Sadly, we’ve already reached the high point of Sun’s US chart success. But let us not waste any more time here. The low points yet to come are far more entertaining.

In God We Thrust: “China Wine” (2007)

“China Wine” was released in 2007, the same year that the misuse of funds allegedly began. I couldn’t possibly guess at how people with actual Caribbean music credibility like Wyclef Jean, Tony Matterhorn and Elephant Man were recruited to collaborate on the song, or why a famous MV director like Wayne Isham would have any interest in doing the video. I guess they must all have been big fans of Sun’s Eurodance work.

(It’s easier to appreciate the WTFness of this song if you’re already familiar with certain dancehall music references, so let me quickly explain that “wine” in the dancehall context doesn’t refer to the Blood of Christ but to gyration of the hips, and that the “dutty wine” is a well-known dance move where you whip your hair around while gyrating your hips.)

“In China,” Sun claims, “we luv da dutty wine so much dat we mix it with de China wine”. So basically, the song is about cross-cultural hip-gyrating. I’m not seeing a clear Christian connection there, but I’m sure I’ll figure it out if I think hard enough – oh hey, maybe this is how Jesus partied it up at the wedding in Cana! CANA WINE! CANA WINE!

dancing Jesus gif

Elsewhere in the song, Sun exhorts girls to “sing from the hoo-has”, Tony Matterhorn namedrops fashion designer Ed Hardy (Sun’s company is the exclusive distributor of Ed Hardy clothing in Singapore), and Elephant Man suggests that Sun’s gyratory skills (“so she do it fast, now she do it slow”) can make something dead grow. He is probably not referring to the Resurrection.

Out of the clusterfuck of nonsequiturs that make up this song, the biggest one may be why the hell a Singaporean is calling herself “Geisha” to sing a song about how much “we” in “China” love to dutty wine. Perhaps Sun hit her head after being slain in the Spirit one day and it affected her geographical knowledge.

They Call It Murrrrdaaaa[1. Apologies to Damian Marley and Ini Kamoze for associating them with this bilge.]: “Mr Bill” (2009)

It is baffling to think that anyone looking back at “China Wine” two years later could have regarded reggae as an ideal musical direction for Sun to continue in, but maybe Wyclef’s weed[2. c.f. Tony Matterhorn’s “China Wine” verse where he asks Wyclef to “passa blem”.] was just that good. “Mr Bill” is certainly more mellow than “China Wine” – except, of course, for some minor lyrical hostility involving Sun’s decidedly unmellow impulses to murder her cheating man.

Still rather confused about exactly where she is from in Asia, Sun aka “Geisha” begins the video by berating her man in Mandarin for lying to her. At times during the song, her attempts to deliver her lines with a ragga-tinged lilt are so inept that she might as well be speaking in tongues. And the less said about her dancing the better, except for letting you know that in or around the same time that this song came out, she was training with superfamous choreographer Marty Kudelka in her lavish Hollywood Hills home. Let’s add “groove” to the list of things that S$23 million still can’t buy, although it’s nice to know that Sun enjoyed 29,000 square feet (at US$20,000/month) worth of space to practice her flailing in.

Fakey Gaga: “Fancy Free” (2009)

Following the disappointing failure of “China Wine” and “Mr Bill” to get the world pelvic thrusting for Christ, Project Crossover must have come up with a new strategy for “Fancy Free” to make its mark in a 2009 pop music landscape dominated by Lady Gaga. But simply writing a knockoff Gaga song is for poor schmucks who don’t have S$23 million to spend. If you’re funded by Project Crossover, on the other hand, you can also get what looks like a pretty expensive video directed by a hot shot MV director who’s already done Gaga videos, and employ Gaga’s then-choreographer Laurieann Gibson, just to leave nothing to chance.

Pity about the inconvenient fact that Sun ain’t Gaga. After several years of trying to make it in the American music industry, there’s still nothing that distinguishes “Fancy Free” from a Paris Hilton vanity project, except that the Hiltons never promised their hotel guests that no Hilton revenues were used to fund Paris’s singing career.[3. ”In 2003, an individual alleged in the media that the charity was funding Sun Ho’s music career. However, this individual eventually issued a public apology and retracted his allegations. Facing media scrutiny, City Harvest issued press statements, as well as representations to its church members, that they had not funded Sun Ho’s career.” – Asiaone]

And if you were hoping that Christian messages in Sun’s music might finally have emerged by now, with “fancy free” possibly referring to some sort of detachment from material goods, you obviously need to bone up on your core megachurch doctrines. Sun wakes up “feeling like a millionaire”! Which is pretty easy if you’re either waking up in a LA mansion or a S$9.3m Sentosa Cove penthouse!

Cringeworthy hubris reaches its peak when Sun trills “Feels just like I’m on a shooting star / Made my wish to be a superstar”. It’s like saying you wish you could buy a Birkin when you can already afford to buy 2,300 of them, if you could only find a shop that respected you enough to sell them to you. Also, it appears that even long-ridiculed boy band tropes like rhyming “fire” with “desire” are too sophisticated for a song which rhymes “star” with……”star”.

A Conclusion And Some Parting Insults

Pages more could be written to deconstruct the multiple levels of epic fail in Sun Ho’s US music career, but there’s only so much torture I can take and I’m pretty much already at the point of uttering “Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani?” So I will leave you with two last atrocities, and thank God for small mercies that they are only available in short preview clips. (Things seem to have gone suddenly quiet on the Sun music front just before the initial complaints against CHC surfaced in 2010.)

First up, ~~“Hollaback Girl” oh sorry I meant~~ “Cause A Ruckus” is Sun’s clubbing manifesto. Clad in shades and her “tight wifebeater”, she urges you to “leave your do’s and don’ts at home”. I was under the impression that the 10 Commandments are applicable everywhere, but what do I know, I’m not a pastor’s wife. Sun later contradicts herself with a command to “Do what I do,” which is rather alarming when followed by the tally of “one Tom, two Tom, three Tom, now four”. Which is a worse sin, fornication or bad pronunciation? But don’t worry, Sun, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, unless your US$100,000 media team[4. “In or around April 2009, a plan was conceptualised by Tan Ye Peng, Chew Eng Han, Serina Wee Gek Yin and Tan Shao Yuen Sharon to transfer monies amounting to $600,000 donated by Wahju Hanafi to the Charity’s Building Fund via a “refund” of Building Fund donations into the MPA to meet some funding needs of the Project, which included US$100,000 (S$128,000) to finance a media team from Singapore to publicise and write about Sun Ho’s music career in the United States.” – Asiaone.] uploads your gluttony to Youtube.

Like I said at the start of this post, I am not in a position to judge whether the channelling of S$23 million from CHC funds in support of Sun’s US music career was properly or improperly done. However, after suffering through what that S$23 million might have paid for, I’m inclined to state that even if every single CHC member wrote in their own blood that their tithes should be spent on Sun’s US music career, the question remains how anyone keeping track of this musical turd parade could possibly believe it to be pursuing or achieving the goals of Project Crossover. I have no answer for this question, but perhaps Sun does. Enjoy the last clip.

If you are interested in this issue, you may want to read my follow-up post: Kong Hee Kong Si Mi??! Towkay Jesus and the Calvin Klein Crucifixion.

Schizophrenia Is Taking Me Home

In typical music snob fashion, I disdain SPIN’s views on music unless they affirm my own. And in naming my two favourite members of my favourite band (i.e. Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo from Sonic Youth) as joint number 1s of their “100 Greatest Guitarists Of All Time” list, together with my favourite Sonic Youth album (which is not actually Daydream Nation) as the high water mark of their guitar work, and my favourite song on that album as their “Most Heroic Moment”…well, let’s just say the last time someone’s views coincided so much with my own, we were exchanging vows on our wedding day. (This is not to say that Alec’s views generally coincide with mine, because that would suggest he is more obsessed with Simon Cowell than is healthy. But I’d say we were pretty much in agreement on stuff like vows and shit on our wedding day.)

If you will bear with my fanwank a little longer, this is a nice opportunity to meander into a little story about seeing Thurston Moore (i.e. one half of the Greatest Guitarists Of All Time winners) live in London last year. I previously described the wonderful luck that allowed me to attend that gig at all. As always seems to happen to me in London, this was not the last serendipitous musical moment I was to enjoy there, and the extent to which this was all Sonic Youth related is kinda ridiculous.

Earlier in my trip I’d been to the fantastic Gerhard Richter exhibition at the Tate Modern. The only reason an art doofus like me even knew who Gerhard Richter was, of course, was that Sonic Youth had used one of his Candle paintings for the cover of Daydream Nation, and I’ve basically been longing for a print of that painting ever since the age of 14. So I went to the exhibition, loved it, and bought the print.

So far, so freakin’ awesome. There was just one problem. Given that I was frequently changing accommodation to crash on different friends’ couches, a 100 cm by 100 cm poster stored in a large protective tube was rather unwieldy to schlep around London with the rest of my luggage. While standing in crowded trains with this monstrous protuberance wedged between my legs to save space I couldn’t help but feel like some train perv with a massive boner, and after various instances of dropping or nearly dropping it while digging out Oyster card and suchlike, I did begin to question the wisdom of going through all this just for the sake of a poster of a giant fucking candle.

So how did I resolve this problem? The same way I resolve most of my problems in London: I imposed on Russ. Which is how, just after dropping the huge poster off at his workplace (for him to hold on to until I was leaving London), I was wandering around Shoreditch with no particular agenda other than to indulge in one of my I-love-East-London reveries, and suddenly this materialized in my rose-tinted, Lomofied, heavily vignetted sights.

(ATP, for anyone who isn’t a music nerd, is a music festival I love, firstly because its lineups are far more interesting to me than those for more famous festivals like Glasto or Coachella, and secondly because attending it doesn’t require you to sleep in a tent. Sonic Youth are pretty regular features at ATP festivals, as are many other favourite artists of mine. So basically a shop like this, to me, is like Famous Amos to the Cookie Monster.)

I must have looked like the dramatic lemur upon spotting the sign, and then the OMG cat while exploring the shop. While I was very restrained in my shopping – lugging around a poster of a giant fucking candle can have this effect – I also noticed a poster on the wall advertising the Thurston Moore gig I would be attending on 2 December. And because I am a huge sap, I really really wanted that gig poster as a souvenir of both the first instance of serendipity I linked to earlier, and this second instance of just chancing upon my dream music nerd shop in the course of an errand involving a Sonic Youth poster. (Still with me? When the going gets tough, just imagine how much more stupefyingly boring this would be if I were telling it to you face-to-face!)

Gig posters like that are usually for advertising purposes and not for sale, so I shyly asked, feeling really awkward about the weirdness of my request, whether it might be at all possible for me to buy a copy of the poster. Most commendably, instead of calling psychiatric social services to come pick up this stammering, bug-eyed Stan, the kind shop attendant shrugged her shoulders, smiled, and said, “Just take it off the wall, you can have it.”

Cue embarrassing gushing in the vein of “OMG, you don’t know what this means to me and you just totally made my day!”, me lovingly removing the poster from the wall, rolling it up and holding it with more care than I held my degree scroll, and then me bouncing happily down Rivington Street while calling Russ on the phone and explaining that, um, I needed to meet him again to pass him another ~~burden~~ poster.

The story ends, predictably yet happily, with me seeing Thurston at the Union Chapel. The gig was everything I had hoped it would be.

Months later, the story I’ve dragged you through here remains one of the most treasured memories of my 1.5 month holiday. I don’t know if my convoluted tale strikes a chord with anyone other than me, and the poster I snagged from the ATP Pop-Up Shop isn’t really much to look at. But as an instant, soul-elevating reminder of a moment when multiple things that take up a fair bit of my heartspace (Sonic Youth, ATP, London and the awesome things that happen to me there) magically converged to make me the happiest or at least most mawkishly sentimental girl in East London, nothing holds a giant fucking candle to it.

Mario

Hi, I’m Mario.

Much like Uncle Orlando, I was found in Michelle’s family’s driveway. It’s tough sometimes to photograph me well because I insist on moving rapidly around a dimly lit kitchen.

Even when someone’s trying to cuddle me, I get all squirmy because the world is awesome and I want to explore it!

Nonetheless, I think it’s clear that I’m adorable.

I am very small.

I’m also very hungry. I keep trying to eat the food lying around for the three other Uncle Cats, but I’m really too young for that right now.

The big boys’ water dish is also too high for me. What shall I do?

Kitten milk in a syringe! I can totally handle this! Om nom nom.

I miss my mom. :( But I guess I could get used to cuddles from someone else.

Michelle’s family is taking good care of me because I need so much help right now. But with Uncles Orlando, Dinky and Winky, and Aunty Casey, they’ve already got four house cats. Together with Paddy, Mickey, Molly and MC who live outside, that’s eight cats they’re already supporting. Will someone kind, loving and responsible please adopt me? I really like napping on a warm human instead of in the drain.

~~If you think you can give little Mario a good home, please contact me!~~ I’m glad to say that we’ve found Mario a well cat-proofed home with new owners who share my family’s zeal for feeding and neutering strays. He’ll even have a friend to play with! Thank you so much to everyone who expressed interest and passed on the message.

Samuel L. Batson

The chittering noise from my living room sounded rather different from the usual spectrum of lizard sounds that you get used to in the tropics. I walked out of my study in the direction of the noise, looked around, grabbed the curtains and jiggled them, and then I saw it.

We looked at each other unblinkingly for a moment. Then I calmly walked away, telephoned Alec (who had gone into the office to do some work) and said that he needed to come home and help me wrangle a bat.

I wasn’t particularly scared of it, but I figured it would be better to have both of us around in case the bat-wrangling went horribly wrong and someone needed to get to hospital for a rabies jab. Also, we were due to go out to a friend’s house for the evening and I didn’t want to give Samuel L. Batson free rein of the house while we were gone. So I closed off the rest of the house, opened the balcony door in the hope that the wind and light might make Batrick Swayze’s position somewhat untenable, sat down in the living room to keep my eye on Guano Reeves while waiting for Alec to get back, and busied myself thinking up some more names for Keira Nightly.

I got so absorbed in this task that I looked up at some point and Barack Obatma was gone! I wish I could have been more welcoming and let Batti LaBelle hang round till it got dark enough to fly away comfortably, but the high resolution of my camera screen had alerted me to the INCREDIBLY DISGUSTING ticks infesting Batalie Portman, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to give them the opportunity to explore my home.

So long, Oprah Wingfrey! Let’s never hang out again.

Alec’s Gig Commentaries

Aside from the music I attend gigs for, part of the fun of attending gigs is dragging Alec to them and either enjoying his whiny comments or marvelling at the ability he has developed to fall asleep, often standing up, in decidedly harsh sonic environments. I should have kept a record of these over the years, in hindsight, but tonight’s Blonde Redhead gig is as good a place as any to start, and I do remember some bits from the past. It helps if you’re familiar with the bands in question.

Alec Gig Commentary #1, shortly after the start of the Blonde Redhead gig. It is possible that Alec is not enjoying Kazu’s rather unique style of singing.

Alec, plaintively: Will anyone else sing apart from her?
Me: Yeah, the guy sings too, didn’t you hear him sing a bit in the first song?
Alec: You call that singing???

Alec Gig Commentary #2, during Beach House’s set at the Laneway Festival: After several years of shit like this, punk was born.

Alec Gig Commentary #3, after standing in mud and torrential rain for several hours at the Laneway Festival: Why didn’t I just marry a girl who was into spa weekends?

Alec Gig Commentary #4, standing on the Home Club dancefloor surrounded by people going wild for Tokimonsta’s set: Zzzzzz…

Alec Gig Commentary #5, standing in the front row during Einsturzende Neubauten’s set at All Tomorrow’s Parties 2007: I’m awake, I’m awake…zzzzzzz…

Alec Gig Commentary #6, after Battles: Best nap ever.

GASPP

Two friends of mine (with two other people I don’t know) edited GASPP: a Gay Anthology of Singapore Poetry and Prose, so I thought I’d pimp it here. Proceeds from its sale go to the Counselling and Care Centre, a non-governmental, non-profit agency offering psychological counselling services and training for mental health and social services professionals, so that’s nice.

Okay, you got me. I’m all for supporting good causes, but actually the real reason I mentioned this here is to show you the best autograph I have got in a book since Neil Gaiman drew me a rat:

Taken with a phonecam, terrible milk shake pun honestly unintended at the time of the photo but totally intended now.

Date Night

We had a date night. It involved Burger King and Bruno, and so gave rise to numerous jibes from me that we suck at date night. On the way home, we had this conversation:

Alec: I love Hungry Ghosts month. Yesterday when I was walking home with our ta pau [1. Takeaway], the guys at the bike shop were setting up their little altar outside. It had a bike wheel as its centrepiece. The boss was very strict with his employees, very particular about how he wanted the altar set up.

Me: Well of course he was! If the ghosts think you don’t give a fuck then they’ll get fucking pissed off lah!

Alec: Dear, I think maybe the Taoists would have a more sophisticated way of explaining thi…

Me: No lah! I bet if you could just understand what the boss was telling his employees in Hokkien…

Alec: He’d be saying “This altar looks like you pulled it out of your wife’s cunt”?

Me: Your mother’s smelly cunt. [2. Explained in full Hokkien glory here.]

Alec: Oh yah, sorry.

beat

Alec: Okay, you’re right. We really suck at date night.

Possibly The Most Narcissistic Entry To Date!

(And in eight years of online exhibitionism, that’s saying something!) Yup, I did the Facebook meme, because why the hell not?

1. I lose any game of luck. Every visit I’ve ever made to horse or dog races, I’ve won nothing. The last time I got anything in a lucky draw was a scratch and win KFC towel when I was 7.

2. I dress like a grandmother. For my granny’s birthday, my mum suggested I buy her a new handbag, something simple with minimal compartments to confuse her with (she is 88). After some shopping I ended up buying her the same handbag I carry to work because it seemed the most suitable candidate. At Christmas, I bought her a blouse which turned out slightly too small for her. So I kept the blouse and have been wearing it myself.

3. I am really, really good at a 90s arcade game called Tumblepop. When I used to play it in arcades, sometimes people gathered round to watch me.

4. When I was a kid, we didn’t do any gourmet eating and the only Parmesan I knew was the powdered stuff in the green Kraft canister. My mental name for it (which I possibly also announced in front of other people from time to time) was “vomit cheese”.

5. I get why some people like affirming, self-esteem boosting mantras, but they are not right for me. I need to be constantly aware of where and how I suck, or else I will always be too lazy to improve.

6. I get irrationally annoyed when people ask me whether I’ve permed my hair, even if they have the best of intentions. Because WHY WOULD I PAY MONEY TO MAKE MY HAIR LOOK LIKE THIS???!!

7. I get irrationally upset when people do nice gestures, however small, which don’t get fully appreciated for whatever reason. Once, my Chinese tuition lesson got shifted two hours earlier in the day. I didn’t tell my mum, and she brought home some snacks for us to enjoy during the tuition session, except of course that by the time she arrived the lesson was over. It was totally inconsequential to her and the snacks just got eaten some other time instead, but I felt shattered and still remember it to this day.

8. Books and moving images have almost never made me cry, but music has brought me to tears countless times.

9. Oh wait! Actually, TV quite recently brought tears to my eyes. It was Yodsaenklai and his mom on The Contender: Asia.

10. I spend the work week suppressing almost every aspect of my personality, because it would not be well received in my work environment. I accept this as part of adult life, but also think I’ve withdrawn into myself as a result, and sometimes I struggle to bring the real me back to the surface even when I’m out of work with more like-minded people. I wish I were better at finding the balance.

11. I love watching lion dancing, especially the music that accompanies it. The rhythms of the crashes and bangs give me the same happy feeling that good drum’n’bass does.

12. My most hilariously undeserved life achievement to date is my Distinction in AO’level oral Mandarin. I got an Ungraded on the first try, which was fair. Then on the second try, the conversational topic was something damn easy like “How do you spend your spare time?” so I listed whatever hobbies I could actually name in Chinese (whether I actually did them or not), and tacked on the indispensable coda of BUT OF COURSE IT’S VERY IMPORTANT TO ALSO SET ASIDE TIME FOR MY FAMILY AND AGING PARENTS.

13. To tolerate and/or fake enthusiasm (if it feels polite to do so) for babies/kids that don’t endear me, I pretend they are cats, because every cat endears me, even the ones which aren’t cute and behave badly.

14. I love temperate climates, including the darkest, shortest winter days.

15. I wish I knew which of my friends actually read my blog, not because I feel I am owed such attention, but because I don’t like the idea of boring people when we converse in person/email by recycling stuff I’ve written about there. I have other stuff to talk about, of course, but sometimes the blog stuff is fresher in my memory.

16. I eat unhealthily when I eat out, and quite healthily when I cook at home. This is because my top unhealthy loves (deep-fried stuff and rich creamy cheesy stuff) are more inconvenient/expensive to reproduce at home than simple vegetarian meals (which I often cook if I’m feeling too stingy to buy nice meat). I’m glad being cheap and lazy at least benefits me in one way.

17. I have never eaten yong tau fu in my life. It looks so totally unappetizing when other people eat it. [Edit: As a result of the rather entertaining comments that resulted from this list on Facebook, a friend has insisted that I allow her to introduce me to the joys of laksa yong tau fu, so I will be losing my yong tau fu virginity soon. This meme has CHANGED MY LIFE!!]

18. One of my happiest recent memories was when Alec threw me a surprise birthday party. I know it’s probably no big deal to other people but I’ve always had birthday angst and had secretly wanted one my whole life. It was a genuine surprise too!

19. My primary school collections included stamps, stickers, erasers, miniature metal airplane models, pencil lead (as in, if your colour pencil broke, I would ask you for the broken bit of lead and put it in my little container) and pencil sharpenings (a short-lived collection, the upkeep was messy). These days all my collections are digital, and include a Google Doc of dirty jokes.

20. I did a couple months of relief teaching in my old school to pass the time before university. For my last lesson with one of my classes, I was ahead of schedule with the lesson plan and had some spare time. So I told them dirty jokes. I acknowledge this was inappropriate.

21. Before the Internet, I used to listen to the American Top 40 every week and record each week’s list in an exercise book. I couldn’t imagine a day when I would not recognize any pop song on the radio within 10 seconds. That day has come, not because I stopped loving pop music, but because I started hating radio personalities.

22. In the early-mid 90s, there was a CD shop in Katong Shopping Centre which rented out CDs for $1 a day. They had a fairly good indie selection including Smashing Pumpkins, Sugar (can’t remember if they had Husker Du itself, but Sugar is what led me to Husker Du), Sonic Youth, Jesus And Mary Chain and the Velvet Underground, among others. I was shy at the time and barely exchanged words with the person working there (not sure if he was the owner), but if I could meet the owner today I would probably not stop thanking him/her for hours.

23. The chapel of Newman House student hall in London is a very special place to me. In a perfect world where expense and inconvenience to other people were no object, I would have wanted to get married there.

24. The day I left London to move back to Singapore was one of the most miserable days of my life and involved public sobbing at Heathrow.

25. I married my first boyfriend. Not a very 21st century thing to do, but when happiness is this easy, you hold on to it.

Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro)

I picked up Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go in the library simply because it was a nice handbag-friendly size for my commute, but if (like me) you’ve lost track of Ishiguro’s work since An Artist Of The Floating World or The Remains Of The Day, this one’s worth a read.

NLMG reminded me how wonderful Ishiguro is at illuminating the silences between people, the myriad things that may come to your mind during a conversation but which, for all sorts of reasons, you decide to leave unsaid. I don’t think I noticed this in his other books that I’ve read, but in NLMG he’s particularly adept at bringing this to life in the interactions between women, or at least it’s very true to my interactions with women anyway. I think he really skewers the things that can render even conversations between fairly close, caring and not particularly immature girl friends a mire of unvoiced resentments. Kathy is able to be annoyed with Ruth’s various facades and disingenuities, while understanding (and sometimes appreciating) why Ruth puts on the acts she does. Ruth is able to engage in genuine and close friendship with Kathy while she continues, through knowing inaction, to deny Kathy a precious and irreplaceable happiness. Tommy, the third major character in the book, is also quite accurately characterised (as far as my interactions with guys go, anyway) as being more straightforward, less calculative, not completely oblivious to all that’s going on between his two close girl friends but simply not wired to view things through the convoluted web of surface-vs-imputed-meanings that girl interactions have to be filtered through.

Do you know what I mean, or does none of this strike a chord with you? I mean the insecurities and disingenuities of your girl friends which chronically and acutely infuriate you, yet because you figure that they wouldn’t be like this if they weren’t fragile, you decide to be the bigger person and not crush them by letting on that you see right through them. But because you’re not perfect yourself, you can’t totally let go of your annoyance either, and it ends up colouring your interactions with them anyway, anything from throwaway comments which indirectly target an insecurity, to deliberate obtuseness when they’re fishing for affirmation, to finally just limiting the quantity/method of your interactions. (I have girl friends who I like in person, but I don’t like how they come across on their blogs, or vice versa, and other girl friends who are lovely alone but put on facades in certain social settings, so I sometimes try to pick how and where I interact with them accordingly.) Perhaps the dispassionate observer might wonder why you don’t just cut off these dysfunctional relationships, but there’s the rub – underneath all this bullshit you still like these people, you know they have good hearts, and you want to believe others will ultimately give you, too, the dignity of the holistic analysis, rather than write you off for your own annoying faults. And so we hold on to these relationships, and everything left unsaid represents the good and bad we can’t let go of.

That was a bit of a tangent, wasn’t it? Anyway, the point is that the major strength of Never Let Me Go, for me, is how consummately Ishiguro gets all of the above. Another of its strengths is how elegantly he unfolds the story, but it’s a little tough to discuss this without introducing spoilers. If you pick this book up cold as I did without knowing much about it, I daresay you will be a little surprised initially at the opening chapter’s hints about the central premise of its plot, and you might even be dubious about whether it’s your sort of story – I was. But I soon found that this didn’t matter, and (with apologies for being so cryptic, really) the third major strength of the book is how he uses the first strength to illustrate how little it matters.

King Rat: Needs A Remix

Oh dear, my naffness premonition about King Rat turned out to be right. Check out these lines:

“Saul’s heart was beating like a Jungle bassline.” [This is after Saul had been running for ages. Fuck saving the metropolis, dude has some serious irregular heartbeat issues to worry about! You want to exaggerate like this, say his heart was beating like Moby’s Thousand, but a jungle bassline is just…medically wrong.]
“The rats and Saul left the relative safety of London’s nightlands and entered the warehouse, the frenzied jaws of Drum and Bass, the domain of smoke and strobe lights and Hardcore, the Piper’s lair, the heart of Darkness, deep in the Jungle.” [Again with the unnecessary capitalisations. Are we in Brixton or the Hundred Acre Wood?]
“The Drum and Bass felt as if it would lift the hatch out of the floor, off into the sky. It was unforgiving, a punishing assault of original Hardcore beats.” [It feels a bit off to use that usual MC patois of “original hardcore” in a description like this. Is it just me?]
“She pulled the record back, let it forward again a little, pulled it back, scratching playfully like an old school rapper, finally releasing her hand and switching off the first tune in a smooth movement, unleashing the new bassline.” [Scratching like a rapper? Also, reading about how someone DJs is like watching paint dry.]

Apart from the drum’n’bass cringeworthiness, some other things about the book’s plot seem a bit misconceived, sort of like what you might come up with if you went out to a massive jungle night with your mates back in the day, took a lot of E, brought everyone back to yours to come down on some spliffs, and while lounging wrecked on your plonk-stained student flat carpet, started brainstorming ideas for a book. For example (some spoilers to follow, but I think they’re so damn obvious long before they happen that there’s no harm giving them away now):
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