Whoo! Whoo! It’s The Sound Of Da…Disappointment

An open letter to DJ Jazzy Jeff:

This is the second time you’ve done this to me. For the second time, I’ve gone to see you DJ at Zouk and you’ve taunted me cruelly with only the opening of KRS-One’s Sound Of Da Police but none of the verses.

The first time, I tried to tell myself it was the cool way to do DJ sets – drop some obviously famous beats so that the crowd will go wild with recognition, but then switch to something else more obscure fairly fast so you don’t look like you’re just playing a The Best Hip-Hop Album In The World, Evah! compilation. And to a certain extent, this often works for me quite well. I no longer feel the need to “Jump around! Jump around! Jump up jump up and get down! Jump! Jump! Jump! etc.” but I’m still happy enough to dance to the first verse.

The problem, and of course this is totally subjective, is that what applies to Jump Around doesn’t apply to Sound Of Da Police, okay? Hearing the intro is simply not enough. I demand KRS-One’s righteous bellow of “STAND CLEAR! Don man a-talk, you can’t stand where I stand you can’t walk where I walk. WATCH OUT! We run New York, police man come we bust him out of the park!”, I long to be in a club full of people gabbling that meld from “oberseer” to “officer” in the second verse, and as he ends the third verse with “My grandfather had to deal with the cops, my great-grandfather dealt with the cops, and then my great great great great…” hell yeah I want to join in and complete the line by yelling “WHEN IT’S GONNA STOP??!”

[The fact that I am an affluent yellow girl whose only real encounter with the police ever was making a report when I lost my wallet as a teenager, and that they were really rather nice at the time, should not negate my right to profess undying love for this song. Or even to shout along in simulated rage.]

So please, Jazzy. If I ever see you play again, give us the whole song. You already played your part in inflicting Will Smith on the world, thereby depriving mainstream radio for years of any hip-hop worth listening to. Are you willing to shoulder the blame for this further cruelty?

Don’t Think Of A Blue Elephant (Tangents Inspired By Love Actually)

A conversation yesterday:
Ken: So, Michelle, how’ve you been doing?
Me: Well, I’ve been having problems resettling into Singapore, and I’ve been missing London a lot.
Ken: Then whatever you do, don’t watch Love Actually.
Me: I’m watching it tomorrow.
Ken: Then watch it with someone you fancy. It’s a great date movie.
Me: I’m watching it with my mum.

Not the most promising prelude to Love Actually then.

Every time I go to the movies with my mum, I always manage to forget that apart from being witty and quirky, British romantic comedies are also fairly crude, or at least more so than their sanitized American counterparts. So there I am in the first two minutes of Love Actually, sitting in a cinema next to my mum as aging rock star Billy Mack gets the words to a song wrong for the umpteenth time and bursts out in a stream of “Oh fuck wank shit arse…” And while she isn’t quite so Puritan as to stand up and walk out or anything like that, she’d probably find it rather strange if I gave into my sudden impulse to sigh in happiness at the sound of those English terms I miss so much. “Wank”. “Arse”. And later in the film, “bollocks”.

Ken was right. The sight of London on the big screen almost physically knocked me back into my seat. The ice skating rink at Somerset House. Panoramas of the Thames. The Millennium Bridge. The Erotic Gherkin. Charing Cross Road. I could smell the winter air, feel the tug of my coat on my shoulders as I stuffed my gloved hands into its pockets, and hear the silence of London on Christmas Day.

The opening and closing scenes of the film make a big deal about how the arrival halls of Heathrow abound with love as people reunite. My first thought: my moments of highest emotion in Heathrow were always spent alone. Forget the arrival halls, every time my plane touched down on the Heathrow runway, I was already bursting with love. In the arrival halls, Russ would usually be there with a big hug and a strong arm for my bags, but the few times he wasn’t, I still walked through the airport, totally alone, giddy with happiness, straight onto the first bus for central London. When I left, forget what I went through in the departure hall saying goodbye to Russ and Alec – at least then I could cry freely. Sitting at the window of the plane as it accelerated and slanted skyward, surrounded by strangers, my face pressed against that tiny oval, and my body turned wholly away from everyone else so they didn’t see it shuddering as I tried to hold back sobs…well, let’s say that’s part of the London experience that wasn’t documented in this film. Unfortunately, it, too, came back to me vividly.

So I sat through this film, filled with scenes of the place I love, sounds of the accents I love, jokes in the humour I love. I didn’t even feel the slightest desire to rearrange Andrew Lincoln’s annoying fishlipped face the way I normally do. Conversely, my usual lust for Colin Firth was wholly overwhelmed by longing just to be walking the same London streets. (Don’t think I don’t realize how crazy this sounds, how mawkishly sentimental, how downright “unpatriotic”. I know.)

And all the time I sensed a creeping dread that at some point, this film had to end. When it did, with those scenes of the Heathrow arrival hall again, and the opening notes of God Only Knows, something triggered a perspective switch, and then only the most rigid control was keeping me from bursting into tears. Because in one week’s time, in the Changi Airport arrival hall, that will be me. That will be Alec. God only knows what I’d do without you. God only knows what I did to deserve you. I have lost London, but I still have so much.

Two Years

When Alec was in South Africa recently, he sent me a postcard.

I quote:

“I’m afraid that, in characteristic fashion, I’ve managed to make an ass of things. When I first saw this stamp I thought it was a particularly ugly bird.”

The rare South African soreconihr bird

Today marks two years with Mr Ass. I still don’t understand how he continues to make me laugh, or endear me so much, or love me warts and all. I still don’t understand how I ever got so lucky.

Thanks For The Memories

I guess there’s just no pleasing some people.

For weeks I griped and complained about the fact that my boxes hadn’t arrived from England yet. And now they’re here, I wish they weren’t.

I never thought I would be quoting lyrics from The Tennessee Waltz in this blog, but while I was unpacking, one particular line kept playing in my head, louder and more insistently than the Fugazi on the speakers. Going flagrantly against the optimistic conclusion I forced myself to draw here in a previous entry, that line was: “Now I know just how much I have lost.”

I always intended, apart from living a proper goodbye to London (which I think I did), to sit down and write something about it, but in the pressures surrounding my departure I never got time to. Call it solipsism or exhibitionism if you will, but somehow it feels inadequate just sitting here alone with my memories, I want to tell everybody about what this city, these people, this time, meant to me.

Typical Michellian Disclaimer: What follows may not mean a great deal to people who either don’t know me or don’t know London, but if you’ve ever been madly in love with any other city, that’s all you’ll need to understand. And of course I don’t think London or England are perfect, and of course there are serious problems with them which I was just lucky enough to never really encounter personally, and of course there are things I like and respect about Singapore. It’s just that on balance I swing West rather than East. My attempts at translating jumbled ecstatic memories into dry electronic scribblings may therefore give but a rippled reflection of reality, either through my inadequacies with prose or my tendency towards sentimentality, but here is my goodbye. I pray it wasn’t a farewell.
Read More “Thanks For The Memories”

Junior Senior Whatever

What the hell does it matter that Junior is straight and Senior is gay, and why does it seem impossible to read anything ever written about the band without this fact mentioned? Is it meant to be special in some way that a gay person and a straight person are friends, and work together? For all I care, Junior could be the president of Hitler Youth and Senior could be a one-legged homosexual Jewish gypsy, and this still wouldn’t be enough to compensate for the fact that their music is shit.

Unhappily Distracted

When you are one week away from dissertation deadline, and are so worried about being wastefully distracted from your finely-honed dissertation production routine that you have taken the dramatic step of packing up laptop, books, photocopied articles and a couple days’ worth clothing and hefting it all to Alec’s hopefully distraction-free flat, you don’t expect to find yourself having read two entire non-dissertation material books in two days at the end of it all.

Given that the last author you mentioned reading on this site was Salman Rushdie, it is even less expected that these two books will both have been written by Tony Hawks. Let me explain.

On Monday I wanted something to read over breakfast, and surveyed Alec’s bookcase. I should say, for the sake of fairness, that it does contain many fine volumes brimming with literary merit, but I don’t like that over breakfast when I am trying to write a dissertation, which is why I decided The Vision Of Dante (1894 edition, respect!), and Baudelaire, The Complete Verse would have to wait. Here were some of my other options:

  • Classic Irish Whisky, Jim Murray. Too basic. After all, I am an authority on Classic Irish Whisky Breath and have no need for such entry-level efforts.
  • The Catechism Of The Catholic Church. Perhaps some other time.
  • The Story Of Lucy Gault, William Trevor. I would have read this, but after Two Lives recently felt like struggling my way through a literary quicksand of depression and tragedy, I need a little time before my next foray into William Trevor world.
  • Playing The Moldovans At Tennis, Tony Hawks

Well, there you go then. It was riveting. I confessed my daytime exploits to Alec who found this highly amusing given my usual literary pretension.

On Tuesday I wanted something to read over breakfast, and surveyed the bookcase again. Here were further options:

  • Les Miserables (Volume Two). No volume one. Go figure.
  • On The Genealogy Of Morals, Nietzsche. A gift from me, I must confess. He read it politely. I owe me no such politeness.
  • The Ultimate Pipe Book, Richard Carleton Hacker. See entry for Classic Irish Whisky.
  • Round Ireland With A Fridge, Tony Hawks.

So Alec calls at lunch and asks solicitously how I’m doing with the dissertation. “Well,” I venture with quavering, self-hating voice, “Tony’s just left Ennistymon, they wanted to take the fridge scuba-diving but thought better of it in the end.”

Richard II, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre London, 2003

Theatre at the Globe is not self-evidently a transcendental experience.

If you’re budget-conscious like us, you take the £5 tickets in the pit, where you get the best view in the place but have to stand for three hours. If it rains, you can’t use your umbrella, and if you don’t have some other waterproof covering you buy the theatre-issue plastic poncho which is extremely unglamorous and makes you very unpopular with the people around you due to the rustly noises you make while trying to wrestle it on. You then stand completely motionless in your cling-wrap prison until you can buy some overpriced tea in a paper cup at the intermission to clasp in your hands in the hope that it will warm your cold-stiffened body.

You are watching an all-male, all-authentic-practices production of Richard II. All the costumes look ridiculous. The men dressed up as women still look like men dressed up as women, despite the feminine mannerisms they take on. You miss the famous speech about England because you are wrestling with your poncho.

You should be miserable, but you’re not. The parting kisses between Richard and his Queen are heart-wrenchingly tender, and you’re transported beyond the cross-dressing, make-up and Adam’s apples to the simple acceptance that this is a man and woman in love. You have finally seen the great Mark Rylance, and are not disappointed by his subtle, many-textured Richard. Time and time again you are struck by the enduring power of Shakespeare’s words and wit today, and the ability of the cast to communicate this to us despite their lack of microphones and the occasional overhead helicopter.

As the company performs an ending dance, you vaguely note as you clap your hands sore that, again, they look ridiculous to your modern eye. None of it matters. In the midst of your euphoria, you are gripped by a sudden sadness, the same one that recurs every time you feel that surge of love for this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England: you are leaving soon.

Newcastle: Fun Amidst Shittiness

[I didn’t go to Newcastle to enjoy myself. I went because John said he needed me. The fact that we ended up having a good two days is what I’m going to concentrate on writing about, despite the sad circumstances surrounding my visit. So a lot will necessarily be left out.]

On my first day in Newcastle we walked through Jesmond (which, in John’s words, is like a bit of Hampstead that wandered out of London and got very lost), Georgian Grainger Town, down the elegant curved Grey Street to the Quayside with all its lovely bridges especially the Millennium Bridge that opens and closes like an eyelid to let ships through, and lounged in chairs like big embracing egg-whites in the very cool Stereo bar. John was getting concerned – I was thinking Newcastle was lovely, despite his strenuous efforts to persuade me to the contrary.

So the next day he took me to see the Gateshead multi-storey car park. I was suitably cowed by this, but then we went to the fabulous Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (lots of pictures of it here), and watched life-size plaster casts of people being worked on for Antony Gormley’s new work Domain Field, and saw the Cobra exhibition described as too good for the North, and before long there I was going on again about how I would go back to London and become a Newcastle crusader.

Right then, said John, we’re going to Hebburn. We walked out of the Metro and gazed upon an industrial wasteland. Down the road was “Upper Crust”, an optimistically-named sandwich shop. Next to it was Jeanette’s Hair Design & Greeting Cards, where I hope Jeanette was aware of a synergy between the two products that eluded me. In the town centre we got Saveloy Dips, which were basically sausages, pease pudding and stuffing, in a bun. Apparently this Northern specialty is getting harder to find in shops, so I guess I was just lucky to be with someone who knew where to go. On the door of the town library, a poster proclaimed “The Internet has arrived!”

In the park, we read graffitti. John likes to keep himself informed on what’s been going down in the neighbourhood. Apparently Tino went to jail and got off with a lad. And I started feeling nervous about the Hebburn Hash Heads, a ubiquitious and most certainly menacing collective which left their mark everywhere. We climbed a hill, and I said “Nice hill.” “Oh, it used to be a slag heap,” John said. Bede’s Well was once revered as a source of miraculous cures. On Tuesday it was a trough in the ground clogged with beercans. One suspects the Bede’s Well Guest House nearby in Jarrow has been having permanent low season for a while.

In the corner store, a nice old lady gave John a big hug and said how sorry she was to hear about his mother. While making him a sandwich she chatted to me, asking me where I was from and little pleasantries like that. In hindsight I’d agree that she did say “And you’re going back” as more of a pointed comment than friendly question, but I didn’t pick up on it until we left and John mentioned that this nice old lady once told him how she thought the National Front was damn right.

In John’s house, we told his sister and her boyfriend about everything I’d seen. She pointed out that I hadn’t seen the River Don yet, and when all 3 of them burst out laughing I knew we were on to something. We got in the car and drove there past morose young men and angry teenage girls, all in tracksuits. The River Don didn’t reflect the sky the way water usually does. We walked along it, breathing in its bouquet of sewage and decay, and stopped on a bridge that led to some boarded-up derelict warehouses. “I wonder what’s in the River Don today,” John said cheerfully, and we peered over. There was a cooker, a microwave, and a shopping trolley.

The “Gym Membership”

Consider this a watershed: I attended my first ever fitness class yesterday.

My recollections of school PE classes are never particularly bad, except that I hated running. In Katong Convent, the perhaps prosaic exercise of training for the 2.4 km run portion of the physical fitness test was enhanced by the fact that we didn’t run around a track, but along the roads surrounding the school, and Cikgu R (Cikgu is Malay for “teacher”) had a habit of cycling along behind us shouting threats that she’d sit on us if we stopped running. This was no laughing matter. She was huge. Raffles Junior College PE was less idiosyncratic, and had the additional benefits of a rock wall, and sometimes a good view of the male sportspeople of the school training on the rugby pitch encircled by the running track as I panted by longing for death.

But institutionalized exercise aside, the idea of voluntarily subjecting myself to pain and perspiration has never been appealing, not at least until I came to London and discovered that in the context of a drum’n’bass club there is a strange satisfaction you can get from the suffering. And after a while here, I started to miss swimming, which I did do a lot in Singapore (much less sweat involved, or at least it all washes off in the water).

So the next step was the gym membership, which till now I can only refer to in conversation as “gym membership”, with my tone of voice incorporating the inverted commas. After a couple of swims, my pathological Singaporean need for value-for-money started to assert itself. Insidiously, it whispered suggestions of trying out a fitness class or two. After all, they were free with the membership. My vanity also started reminding me that frequent swimming screws my hair up, but I needed to visit the gym more than 5 times a month to break even on the membership fee.

This is why I found myself in yesterday’s women-only Legs, Bums and Tums class, lying on my back with my legs in the air with a rolled-up gym mat between my knees as the instructress ran around the room exhorting us to “SQUEEZE!!!” while a rap song with the insistent refrain of “I got sex on my mind, yeah I got sex on my mind” pounded in the background.

It was pretty good. I think I’ll go back.

Sex And Lucia

Sex And Lucia involved more fucking with my mind than with Lucia, which is saying a lot considering the amount of action she gets in the film. Given that films at the Bloomsbury Theatre only cost £2.50, I can certainly say I got a lot of bang for my buck.

But let me not be overly narrow in describing the artistic vision of this movie. It is definitely about more than Lucia fucking Lorenzo, Lorenzo fucking Lucia, Carlos fucking Elena occasionally, Carlos’s enormous penis, Antonio fucking Belen’s mum the porn star, Belen fucking herself with her mum’s dildo while watching her mum’s porn films…

There really is more to it than that, it’s just that after today’s mind-numbing hours of IT copyright law and comparative discrimination law, lecturer voices straining over deadened air in lethargic lecture theatres, page after page of paragraph after paragraph of refined civilised Times New Roman espousing refined civilised legal principles in the refined civilised library, I really just want to write FUCKING.