Joys – Page 12 – syntaxfree

Fluffoshop

I’ve been going through some of my old digital photos lately, partly to clear more space (40GB was plenty in 2003 but doesn’t go far these days), and partly because it’s beyond ridiculous that I’ve hardly printed a single photo since going digital.

Also, I’m intending to test out a few photobook services and eventually pick one to do a wedding photobook with. It’s one thing to be a chilled non-Bridezilla and it’s another to be more than a year past your wedding and shamefacedly explaining to kind-hearted inquiring relatives that no, we don’t have an album to show them yet, yes, we could have ordered one from our photographer but no, we didn’t because we wanted to control costs and DIY it, and yes, it’s pretty lame when the end result of “controlling wedding album costs” = “no wedding album to speak of because we spent too much time sitting on our asses watching Dexter”.

Anyway! I decided to use old holiday photos to do the test photobooks because I thought I would be less likely to descend into a little pit of perfectionism with those. Of course, then I just happened to discover that ingenious people have found ways to use Curves with Photoshop Elements and install Photoshop actions to do all sorts of neat things which I can’t be bothered to do manually. (None of this is possible with the default setup of my antediluvian Photoshop Elements 2.0, though I’m fully prepared for some of you to gently inform me that this life-changing Photoshop Elements revelation is really the equivalent of celebrating the invention of vacuum cleaners because previously I would have had to suck dust into my mouth and spit it into the bin.)

So I’ve been tinkering away happily and experimenting with stuff beyond the simple Levels – Unsharp Mask – Save For Web workflow I used to stick to. Here’s a little dog I photographed in Chiang Mai but never showed you because my Chiang Mai entries didn’t go beyond day 2. He’s not the most accomplished and sophisticated example of what I now hope to achieve with my radly haxXoRed Elements, but he is the only example I found myself petting with my mouse cursor.

Simile

I lost the draft post for this in the server meltdown so the topic of discussion is obviously yesterday’s “news” by now, but I remembered the incident while listening to the radio today and decided to resurrect this conversational fragment anyway. I’m always amused by the strange things that move Alec to angry pithiness.

Me, reading the news: Henceforth, Beyonce’s new stage name shall be Sasha Fierce.
Alec: WHAT.
Me: It is designed to emphasise a fiercer musical direction.
Alec, looking genuinely aggrieved: She’s about as fierce as a Care Bear’s nipple!

Kansai: Day One (Miyajima)

Japan being Japan, we progressed incredibly efficiently, with excellent customer service every step of the way, from landing to baggage collection to sending our larger bags to our Kyoto hotel via the takuhaibin to collecting our Japan Rail pass to advance booking our train tickets to Takayama to sitting comfortably in the train to Hiroshima, watching the ticket inspector bow to the entire carriage before he started checking people’s tickets. I’ve decided it’s dangerous to go to Japan too often; when stuff is this effortless it makes you too soft to deal with the rest of Asia. Especially when you’re eying Laos for your next holiday (ulp).

After a quick 500Y udon lunch at a vending machine restaurant on the Hiroshima station platform, we hopped on another train to Miyajima-guchi, where we would take the ferry to Miyajima, our ultimate destination for the day. It is a sacred island to the Japanese, famous for the view of the Itsukushima Shrine’s torii (symbolic gate, it’s the red thing in the photo above) at high tide, AND IT HAS TAME DEER ROAMING THE STREETS. Of course, while planning our itinerary, I pretended to Alec that I was deeply interested in the religious and cultural aspects of the island.

NOW CHECK OUT THE DEER!

Deer under a tree!

Deer in the bicycle lot!

Deer scratching its neck!

MUMMY AND BABY DEER! (The fawn kept trying to suckle by sticking its nose in between its mother’s legs as it trotted along behind her, which slightly disturbed my happy Bambi reverie.)

You are probably wondering how Alec managed to keep his lunchtime udon in his stomach in the midst of all this cuteness. It was tough on him, definitely. Here (visible to Flickr friends) is a very bored Alec stuck between mummy deer, fawn, and two little dogs. Don’t ask about the bacterial umbrella.

Eventually, once I had grudgingly accepted that stuffing the fawn into my overnight bag would be unwise, we continued our walk to Momijiso, our ryokan. We didn’t stay in any ryokans on the Tokyo trip since Alec was travelling for work that time, so we were glad to finally get the opportunity with this trip. In the price bands given by Japanese Guesthouses (a very useful service that helps non-Japanese speakers book ryokan rooms), A being the most expensive and D the cheapest, Momijiso is a C. So our room “only” cost us 33,000Y per night. You can do the math here, just try not to scream.

But hey, the trip was meant to be a belated first wedding anniversary celebration, and for the most terrifyingly priced accommodation we’d ever been in, at least it came with a lovely view onto the park, a carp pond just outside our window, two meals and a delightful obasan.

After freshening up, we took the ropeway up Mount Misen. We didn’t have time to hike up to the highest summit, but the views were pretty nice from what we did manage. The promotional pamphlet for the mountain is quite amusing – it lists a few things as among the “seven wonders of Misen”, but then clarifies that you can’t see them because they’re dead. The Ryuto-no-sugi is “the great cedar from which mysterious lights on the sea can be seen”. It’s now dead. The Shigure-zakura is a cherry tree which, on a fine day, “alone remains wet – seemingly caught in a rain. Can’t see the tree now because it has been dead.”

Dinner (included in the price of the ryokan room) was a spread of delicious home cooking by the aforementioned obasan – tuna, salmon and sea bream sashimi, cold tofu, lotus root with jellyfish, shrimp in light vinegar, grilled lobster (I’m allergic to lobster, so Alec got my lobster and let me eat his sashimi), sea bream in miso sauce, beef with green peppers and bamboo shoots, and for dessert, Japanese-style cheesecake and some of those huge amazing Japanese grapes where the juice tastes like wine when you bite into them. Here’s yukata-clad me (visible to Flickr friends) with just some of what we ate.

Miyajima at night is a far cry from its touristy daytime. Everything closes – no restaurants or bars are open because any tourist on the island eats in their ryokan.

The streets are largely empty except for a handful of strolling ryokan guests and the island’s nocturnal animals. A deer chased Alec 20m down the street after he bought an ice cream, and we also saw a tanuki! On the banks of the river, in the path of a powerful spotlight, a huge exhibitionist spider had made itself a helluva crib.

I didn’t see the big deal about Miyajima’s famous torii when I read about it in the guidebooks or saw pictures online. But in real life, gazing in the Miyajima evening calm at the bright red illuminated torii, its reflection rippling across the dark waters, was the moment I really felt like our holiday had begun.

Carefree Cha Ca

We took a long break from cooking together because of Alec’s business trip and then our holiday, but it was fun getting back into it over the long weekend. I’d been considering making cha ca (Vietnamese style fish with dill and turmeric) for a while as a good way to trim our ridiculously verdant dill plant, but all the recipes I came across online seemed rather troublesome and I am a lazy cook.

But then I came across this simplified cha ca recipe in a library book (can’t remember the name, will check on my next visit and update this post accordingly), and although it may not satisfy a purist, it’s damn tasty.

1. Marinate 1 pound firm-fleshed fish fillets (the book suggested tilapia or catfish, Alec brought home lovely fresh red snapper from the wet market, so we used that), cut into 2-3 inch chunks, up to 1 day in advance, in:

2 tablespoons fish sauce (if you have Knife brand like us, consider going a bit easier on this or leaving out the salt below – we found the dish slightly too salty at the end)
1 tablespoon oil
1 tablespoon minced ginger
1 teaspoon turmeric
1/4 teaspoon salt

2. Okay, mealtime! The fish will cook really fast, so make the indispensable nuoc cham first. Put into grinding device (we only have an old school pestle and mortar, but presumably there are more new-fangled thingies to do this with):

1 tablespoon chopped garlic
2 tablespoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon chilli / chilli garlic sauce or 1 teaspoon chilli flakes

Bump and grind it like R Kelly at the junior prom. When it’s a paste, stir in:

3 tablespoons fish sauce
3 tablespoons water
2 tablespoons lime juice

3. Get these last few things in place before starting on the fish, because once you tip that out of the pan you’ll want to shove piping hot, fragrant chunks of it into your gaping maw, instantly.

Get some rice noodles cooking
Chop up 5 spring onions
Gather 2 cups coarsely chopped dill (checking first, if home-grown, for MOTHERFUCKING MEALYBUGS, RAAAARRRRGH!)
Gather 1 cup mint, coriander or Thai basil leaves

4. Right, we’re finally at the fish, but another reason I dawdled in getting here is because I don’t know anything about this bit – I generally leave Alec to handle any sweating over hot stoves. Anyway, the book said to heat 2 tablespoons of oil in a skillet on medium-high heat “until a piece of dill sizzles at once”. Put in fish for 2 minutes, turn, and give it another minute.

5. Chuck in dill and spring onions, another minute.

6. Devour noodles, fish and herbs with nuoc cham, in delicious messy frenzy.

7. Realize several hours later that there’s a turmeric-stained noodle in your hair.

8. Pretend you meant for that to happen.

Cover Versions

How shallow does it make me that I kinda wish the particular editions I had of the last two books I was reading (my reading is primarily done on public transport) had different covers?

The one I was reading before those two had a suitably pretentious cover, but unfortunately I must confess that I enjoyed it the least. (I’m glad I read it, albeit 20 years after first reading Jane Eyre, and it successfully achieves everything I expected it to achieve, but it took a little more commitment to get through than the others.)

Oh well, as unimpressive as those first two covers are for public reading, at least they’re not THIS! (Found via random surfing, more horror here)

What’s Your Favourite Scary Movie?

The unexpected consequence of watching The Exorcist at age 13 (and being utterly terrified by it) was that the experience somehow inoculated me against future horror movie misery, at least in the various horror movies I’ve had occasion to watch since then. I don’t actively seek them out and haven’t watched many of the classics like Suspiria or even The Shining, but at least I’ve been able to weather lesser stuff like teen slasher flicks or Asian horror movies quite unflappably. My blood pressure still spiked when Sadako made her awful, ungainly stagger out of the television screen in Ringu, and I still jumped when the sloth victim in Se7en moved, but at least none of that stayed with me afterwards.

Mildly emboldened by this, I have usually indulged my occasional inclinations to scare myself whenever they arise, spending hours reading about the Zodiac killer after watching Zodiac, and reading various Scariest Movie Scenes lists for pointers as to which scary movie to watch the next time I feel like watching a scary movie. But then I got married and moved out of my family’s home to an apartment where things frequently go bump in the night due to wind and neighbours, and where I live alone every time Alec goes on a business trip.

Such factors coalesced into a perfect storm of goose-bumps when, after Alec had left for yet another business trip mere hours after we returned from Kyoto, I made the mistake of getting caught up online reading reviews and discussion of The Orphanage (which I’d watched and loved on the flight) in our empty dark home, and ended up terrified of our navy blue, child-height laundry basket which I had earlier placed carelessly at the end of a corridor.

The problem is that, unable to admit from this experience that I am obviously still a total pussy, I haven’t been able to stop this self-sabotage. I’m sorely tempted to finally watch The Shining and read Naomi’s Room and The Haunting of Hill House, and some say Exorcist 3 is hugely underrated and a worthy successor to the first film. But these are really all very bad ideas. I don’t even know why I’m writing this post other than to link back to in future, when I’m frantically typing my last ever blog post while Alec chops down the door with an axe.

Tokyo: Day Two

In usual EPIC FAIL style, apart from never completing any travel blog series of entries I’ve started (or never even starting any at all, for Sarawak, Siem Reap and last year’s UK/Ireland) and wholly failing to write anything here about the awesomeness of my last three birthdays, my wedding or my honeymoon, I just realized while packing for tomorrow’s trip to Japan (to Kansai region and the Takayama festival this time), that for our February trip to Tokyo, I only managed to capture a few hours on the day we arrived!

So in a comically pathetic attempt to improve this record, I now present: DAY TWO of Tokyo!

We were lucky enough to be able to meet up with the closest thing we had to a local expert, our old hallmate Hsien Li, who was in Tokyo for a one year research stint.

After morning mass at the Franciscan Cultural Centre near Roppongi, she took us to Gonpachi, which, depending on who you believe, was either an actual filming location for the teahouse in Kill Bill or merely Tarantino’s inspiration.

Happily ensconced in our booth, we caught up with Hsien Li over nice inexpensive food (Frommer’s is so right when it says that from the outside you expect this place to be much more exclusive than it is) and lots of ocha.

Sated, we hopped on a bus to Shibuya, which is exactly what one expects it to be like from TV, and walked through it to Yoyogi Park. I tried out my A650IS’s swivel screen at a flea market we passed along the way.

The Sunday atmosphere at Yoyogi Park was great, with lots of bands strategically spaced out along the pathways, tinny-amp-sound-projection-length apart, some clearly dressing and performing to be noticed, others earnestly performing boy-band J-pop.

Tokyo’s rockabilly boys and girls were also out in force, and we joined their crowd of very entertained onlookers for quite some time.

Encircled by our gawking, they danced completely without self-consciousness, sometimes interacting with each other as they struck poses and whooped when a new favourite song started playing, sometimes absorbed in their own personal enjoyment of the music. It was pretty delightful to watch.

These rockabillies sure don’t do things by halves.

Hsien Li and Alec finally managed to tear me away from the rockabillies and we headed to the famous bridge where the Harajuku kids congregate. It’s an interesting experience being there, not quite like what I expected. I’d always assumed the sole motivation for dressing up like that and turning up there was to see, be seen, and pose for tourists, or else why not hang out with your friends somewhere more pleasant and spacious than the side of a bridge? But although they tolerate the crush of tourists jostling to photograph them, most of them are far more focused on their own little social groups and don’t play to the cameras at all.

Of course, I joined the throng of tourists too. This photo has garnered more views on Flickr than any other from my Tokyo set so far, probably because before a Flickr commenter informed me that the girl on the left was cosplaying the guitarist of Dir en grey, I just assumed the girls were gimps and tagged the photo accordingly.

Elsewhere along the bridge: a “Free Hugs” girl, a swarthy middle-aged man facing away from the pedestrians and into the road, blasting U2 on his boombox and screaming along in Engrish even though his voice was so hoarse it was nearly gone, another guy in his 20s/30s dancing wildly to music on his headphones which no one else could hear. Again, I know nothing about J-rock or cosplay iconography, so I have no idea who this girl on the right is. These living dead sure dress nattily though.

You’ve seen this one before, but I still love her so I have to include her here too.

It’s amazing how the tranquility of the Meiji shrine is only minutes’ walk away from the madness of Harajuku, in the middle of a forest. It was the first of many Japanese temples and shrines in muted green and weather-beaten wood that I soon realized I liked much better than their gaudy Chinese equivalents.

There was a wedding in process at the shrine. Although I’d initially thought none of my photos of the wedding procession would be any good because I was reluctant to charge forth and get too much in their faces, I somehow like how this one turned out, especially the beautiful expression on the bride’s face.

After this, we parted ways with Hsien Li, who had been a marvellous guide and incredibly tolerant of my incessant photo taking, and went to the Ukiyo-e Museum to try and understand what the big deal is about Japanese wood block paintings. Apart from the process of production, which clearly requires great skill and dedication, I unfortunately still find the aesthetic of the finished products rather unappealing.

Much walking, some gleeful cosmetics and toiletry buying for me, and a Maisen tonkatsu dinner later, we were ready to call it a night. But this first real day in Tokyo had done serious battering ram damage to the anti-Japan fortress I’d built in my prejudiced heart. The days that were to follow continued this assault. Oh and lastly, photoblogging a trip to Japan just wouldn’t be properly done without documenting some kawaii. We spotted this more than life-sized snow couple along Omote-sando. KAWAII!!!

Beau Selecta

Alec asked if he could bring me anything back from Ireland.

Sadly, my first request for my Holy Grail concealer (Almay’s Amazing Lasting) couldn’t be fulfilled, because the product’s been discontinued.

My second request was for vinyl records. Since finishing my lessons with Koflow, I’ve neither practised nor made any progress on researching a decks purchase. The latter because I’m still hung up about how it will be THE MOST EXPENSIVE THINGY I WILL EVAR HAVE BOUGHT, and the former because I feel bad about always having to borrow Koflow’s records every time I practise.

To facilitate Alec’s task, I sent him a list to work with. When he showed it to the record store guy, the record store guy gently explained that although the stuff on the list was really great and diverse, it was all over a year old and not in stock any more. (Yes, this stung.) So given that I couldn’t pull another list out of my arse at short notice, I took a huge leap of faith and said, “You know what, dear? You choose for me.”

I have not usually been the kindest judge of Alec’s taste in music and most other things, apart from his choice of a wife. If he likes music I think is good, I assume it must be because he has absorbed my impeccable taste. If he likes music I think is bad, I take this as evidence of his own actual paucity of taste. So this is a big moment for us, a mark of our maturity as a couple. Here is an example of our maturity:

Alec: Well, even if you don’t like the records I’ve bought, I like them so I’ll enjoy listening to them.
Me: Sure, you go ahead and have fun listening to them ON TURNTABLES WE DON’T HAVE! I WANT TURNTABLES BUY ME TURNTABLES PLEEEEEASE!

Alec returns on 28th September, and I await my records with trepidation. Best case scenario, they’re great practice material and stuff I can even bring along to play if I do any more public slots. Worst case scenario, the next time I do a public slot, it’s like that scene from Three Men And A Baby where they’re throwing a big party for cool people and when Tom Selleck goes to change the music he accidentally puts on Ernie singing Rubber Duckie instead and as every person in the place turns to look at him, bemused, he does this awkward non-committal little dance.

The Dancing Sky (National Museum of Singapore Night Festival)

The National Museum has cottoned on to the truth I have always known – that crowded outdoor events during the heat of the Singapore day are invariably miserable sweat-sodden affairs – and organized a rather delightful Night Festival instead. Here are some photos from The Dancing Sky, last weekend’s performance art spectacular by Italy’s Studio Festi. I haven’t a clue what any of it meant but it sure was pretty. I was in a rather bad position for photos and other people’s photos on Flickr are much much better, but I’m still happy enough with what my darling F31fd managed handheld.

The first half of the performance used the museum building as backdrop. There was a huge flying sailship and a grand piano that soared through the air complete with dancer on its lid, but unfortunately my photos of those weren’t very good.

The second half was set in the Singapore Management University garden, and it started with the projection of images onto a screen of water in the centre of the garden, like so:

After this, performers appeared on platforms dotted around the perimeter of the garden. A good place to watch all these performers was the centre bit where the water screen had been earlier, so that’s where I stood to watch this girl dancing:

Shortly after I took the above picture, the water screen came on again without warning, so I spent the rest of the event looking like an extremely low standard entry into a wet T-shirt contest.

Reading Notes (Whores, Virgins, Epileptics, Psychotics)

I’ve had a run of great reading lately, and thought I’d share. As is usual for all my commute books, all of these are notable for their ability to keep a very sleepy Michelle awake on the way to work and all but the graphic novel come in handbag-friendly sizes.

Memories Of My Melancholy Whores (Gabriel Garcia Marquez): I’ve read 100 Years Of Solitude and Love In The Time Of Cholera twice each, and with each reread I was amused to find that I’d remembered so little of the plot that it was almost like reading a whole new book. This isn’t a diss, it’s more that his books are so dense with atmosphere and observation that I find myself just living from moment to moment, thoroughly immersed, until I reach the end and wake up from a beautiful, fragrant dream which then fades away as quickly as dreams always do. I think this is the reason some people find it difficult to get through his books, because sometimes you’re just not in the right mental mood for that sort of commitment. Anyway, Whores has a lot of what is wonderful about his writing within a much shorter and more accessible package (assuming you don’t find stories about a 90 year old man engaging a 14 year old prostitute to be inherently inaccessible, that is) so I recommend it to Garcia Marquez fans and newbies alike.

On Chesil Beach (Ian McEwan): I routinely read any new Ian McEwan book, but due to various dissatisfactions I’ve felt with his other books, he’s always been an admired-but-not-favourite writer for me. He’s amazing at taking an incident (usually narrated in vivid, heart-in-mouth detail) and building on it, fleshing out causes and consequences and the inner lives of the people involved with incredible depth and perspicacity, but in my view something else often lets him down – pacing for Black Dogs and Saturday, plot for Enduring Love and Atonement, and just too much obviousness for Amsterdam. I’m undecided on how believable I find the “incident” here – a disastrous wedding night for the virginal protagonists – but its awkward, cringeworthy moments, and how McEwan uses them to elaborate on the lives of Edward and Florence, their love and its sad aftermath, are masterfully done, like a perfect distillation of his best abilities unmarred by any of his previous failings. My favourite McEwan book yet.

Epileptic (David B.): I don’t always get graphic novels, in that I often find the writing decent but don’t feel the drawings have added much to my appreciation of the whole. (Blankets, Jimmy Corrigan, I’m looking at you.) Epileptic is different. The plot is interesting on its own – the author’s brother develops epilepsy in childhood, and his family life becomes dominated by his parents’ efforts to find a cure and the increasingly disruptive manifestations of his brother’s illness – but it’s the complex, surreal drawings which make this extraordinary, and elevate it to my personal graphic novel pantheon formerly inhabited only by Sandman and Watchmen. I can’t describe the richness of artistry that unfolds in these small black-and-white pictures in a way that you can appreciate without experiencing the book for yourself, it would be like trying to describe Guernica to someone who’s never seen a Picasso painting. Just read it.

Stuart: A Life Backwards (Alexander Masters): Masters was working for a homeless charity (not for altruistic reasons, because it paid well) when its directors got convicted for permitting the trafficking of drugs on the premises, even though they had made concerted efforts to prevent this and the same problem afflicted almost any other homeless charity facility. In the course of the campaign against their convictions, Masters met alcoholic, polydrug-addicted, violently psychotic, frequently suicidal Stuart, who was also actually quite a success story of rehabilitation, relatively speaking. The book is the story of Stuart’s life and of the friendship between the two very different men. It’s funny, illuminating, and really sad, and I think it will interest anyone who has ever given a moment’s thought to the problem of homelessness.