Joys – Page 13 – syntaxfree

Photo Walk: Tanjong Pagar Plaza

I was depressed two Saturdays ago about my DJ classes ending, so I distracted myself from that by revisiting an older hobby – photography. The DJ school is near Tanjong Pagar Plaza, an old public housing building with lots of activity in its communal spaces on a Saturday afternoon, so I went on a little photography expedition there. I generally prefer blog entries with a few well-chosen photos rather than a slagheap of mediocre ones, but at the moment part of trying to get myself back into the photography habit is to be a bit less of a damn perfectionist. (Essentially, I accumulate photos, but procrastinate on processing them or printing them because I make the excuse that they’re still not quite good enough.) So here goes, a bunch of passable but not outstanding photos, which are hopefully still better than posting nothing!

This was taken hurriedly on the way to class so it doesn’t have the best composition, but I still like its odd collection of elements – outer shell of the disused Yan Kit Road swimming complex in the foreground, beautiful old shophouse in the bottom right and the towering half-constructed Pinnacle@Duxton blocks in the background.

The first two floors of Tanjong Pagar Plaza are a mix of little shops, some self-consciously modern and others which look as if they haven’t changed in twenty years.

I just totally loved that illustration on the sign.

The shops enclose a tiled quadrangle full of benches and greenery. Everyone’s down here on a Saturday afternoon, anxious crowds spilling out of the Singapore Pools betting outlet, cooks washing vegetables in huge plastic tubs, middle-aged men shooting the breeze, and one sweaty photographer trying to be as unobtrusive as she can.

In another country I might refrain from this photograph for fear of exploiting the image of a homeless person. But in Singapore, I’m pretty sure he just decided the shaded bench was cooler for napping than the inside of his flat.

Time for a quick poll! Which of the following two photos of the old men playing chess do you prefer, and why? I couldn’t decide, so asked my colleagues and got different, thoughtful answers about each photo. I’d be interested in hearing your views too.

This was a quick snap in very dim lighting so it’s not very sharp and could be better composed, but I processed and posted it to remind myself of what is possible with the Fuji F31fd’s amazing low light capability. If I were using my other camera (the Canon A650IS, also beloved but for different reasons), I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t even be usable.

I had fun taking these photos! Gotta do it more often.

Pop My Cherry (13 June, 2008, Hacienda)

I know I should’ve updated earlier about the popping of my DJ cherry last weekend, but somehow it really took a lot out of me, and in the days afterwards I just needed a break from having to concentrate so hard on music! (This is where Super Mario Galaxy, my apparently untiring Rome addiction, and midweek karaoke stepped in, hence blog silence.)

Anyway, it went better and worse than I’d hoped. Let’s do “worse” first – my equipment fears turned out well-founded, because I found myself really struggling to beat-match on the CDJs at the venue, and the cross-fader didn’t work. This basically means that I wasn’t able to transition smoothly between tracks by adjusting the beat of the incoming track to match the beat of the outgoing track, and I couldn’t scratch. I’d been prepared for this so I just did chop-mixing (abrupt but well-timed transitions) instead. It wasn’t too disappointing, really, because even if I wasn’t able to do the transitions I planned this time, all the work I put into thinking about them was still a very worthwhile exercise, and it leaves me with a useful set “template” I can still work with as I get better at this, and hopefully pull off properly in future.

The “better” is that I got some nice comments from people who were neither my friends nor married to me, I got a great opportunity to give this a first try in a public but very forgiving setting, and I even got 4 free drinks from the bar and a little cash! I’m really grateful to Cherry for giving me this chance, and I’m hoping that if/when I get a second shot, I’ll have progressed sufficiently to be able to show that I’ve left my smoothie criminal days far behind.

Here’s the tracklist, for anyone who’s interested. It’s not intended to fill a dancefloor, because Hacienda at 11 pm isn’t quite that sort of a setting. When I was coming up with it, I was thinking about how we used to sit in Cargo waiting for Xen night’s main acts to start, drinking and gorging ourselves on heavenly hot sloppy ketchup-and-mayo fries, and how although I was mostly engaged in the conversation and it was a little too early for dancing, the music being played was always good enough to steal some of my attention away. It’s a rather modest level to aim for in a DJ tracklist, maybe, but it seemed appropriate for the context and my skill level. I’ll save dancefloor bangers for when I can actually beat-match without screwing up!

Apparat – Holdon
Brian Eno & David Byrne – Regiment
Talib Kweli – Listen
TTC – Leguman
One Self – Trying To Speak
The Kleptones – Jazz
Clipse – Chinese New Year
Ice Cube – What They Hittin’ Foe
RJD2 – F.H.H.
Nine – Lyin’ King
Marco Polo feat. Kardinal Offishall – War
Spank Rock – Coke And Wet
Gangstagrass – Going Down
Notorious B.I.G. (Ratatat remix) – Party And Bullshit
Muddy Waters – Tom Cat
DJ Kentaro – Heard Yer Bird Moved In
Sway – Hype Boys
Prince – Gett Off

Maybe I Should Call Myself “DJ Smoothie Criminal”

People have been asking how the DJ classes are going, so I thought I should update everyone here. I’m six lessons in, with two left before I finish the Basic/Intermediate course. I’m still not very good with all the technical terminology of DJing but I think so far I’ve learnt beat-matching, mixing in and mixing out, scratching, drumming, fader tricks, and some basic beat-juggling.

What’s been the most interesting about the lessons is how I’ve had to think about music in new ways that are quite different from my previous classical-musician or avid-music-consumer frames of reference. My classical training means Koflow didn’t have to teach me how to count bars, and it’s probably given me a good ear for timing and complicated rhythms. However, grade 8 qualifications in violin and piano still ain’t worth shit when I’m doing the frantic mental juggle of counting bars in one song’s chorus while beat-matching the next song and deciding when and how to mix it in, or trying to coordinate my scratching hand with my fader hand. I still have frustrating muppety days when I’m like “I used to play modern classical music with multiple changing time signatures in an orchestra, but I can’t fucking figure out whether this song’s 4 beats are faster than that song’s 4 beats???!!” Such muppetry is best illustrated by the following exchange during one of my early lessons:

Me, trying out something Koflow just taught me: Why does my scratching sound so shit?
Koflow, patiently: Because you didn’t switch the turntable on.

As a consumer of music, I’ve always been looking for songs which are well put together as a whole, where all the song’s elements work to take you on that song’s journey from beginning to end. But to listen the way a turntablist does is to never dismiss a song just because it doesn’t appeal to you in its entirety, but instead to be constantly on the look out for elements you can isolate from that song and use creatively somewhere else. Any clubber and mixtape consumer already knows this, of course, but passively appreciating someone else’s creativity is totally different from having to actively engage with the music on your own.

Which brings me neatly on to the news that, as new as I am to this type of listening, and as dodgy as my newly-acquired DJ “skills” may be, my friend Cherry recently took advantage of my drunken high at a good drum’n’bass night, and persuaded me to take a slot in her regular all-girl amateur DJ night, Pop My Cherry. The event’s this Friday night at Hacienda (full details here), and my slot’s from 11 to 12.

I’m a bit bashful about encouraging people to come, because I’m not actually going to be doing much of what I’ve learnt in my classes. I could give a long-winded explanation of why I’ll essentially be doing my set on equipment I’m totally unfamiliar with and how things could go terribly wrong as a result, but I decided an easier way would be to just show you my phat home setup:

Yeah, so basically I have zero equipment to practice on at home. I’ve been meaning to get some, but it’ll be the most expensive purchase I’ve ever made in my life, so I’ve been dragging my feet. Anyway, I’ve decided that for my first attempt at public DJing I’ll just focus on not being too nervous and doing the best transitions I can between tracks, even if I don’t manage to beat-match or scratch. So do come if you’d like to – I’d love the support – but if you do, just be aware that you’ll be listening to a DJ whose only mixer is mostly used for smoothies.

Ghetto Rocket (Or, I’m Out For Cress-idents To Represent Me)

Sorry about the food-heaviness of some of these recent posts – work and learning WordPress have been kicking my ass, so it feels easier to slap on a picture of a salad here than write thoughtfully about my initial impressions of Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop – though when looking up the Amazon link to include in this post, I conveniently found that this review captures them quite well.

We made this Tamasin Day-Lewis recipe for pear and blue cheese salad because we happened to have most of the ingredients for it.

We’ve adopted watercress as our poor-man’s-rocket, since it’s a fraction of the price of rocket but still has the peppery kick. Cheese is very pricy here so we try not to go mad with it, but Alec saw the Cashel blue cheese in Jones the Grocer a few weeks back when we made our first visit to Dempsey Road in about two years, and couldn’t resist. YUPPIE. If you try this, you should note that the sesame seeds make the whole dish, so count them as essential. It’s not the best food photo, but I liked the texture of the seeds and watercress against the pear glistening with olive oil, dribbles of balsamic vinegar and its own juice.

Last night, I made Martha Stewart curried apple and potato soup, which was delicious though not particularly photogenic. It went really well with a simple avocado and watercress salad, and 2 slices of kneadyguy bread.

And now, just to keep things here slightly more street than ending a post with Martha Stewart, here’s an excerpt from Can’t Stop Won’t Stop. It’s not perfect but I found it quite evocative, and more successful than some of Chang’s other ambitious attempts to set context and mood:

It was 1977.

Bob Marley was in a foreign studio, recovering from an assassin’s ambush and singing: “Many more will have to suffer. Many more will have to die. Don’t ask me why.” Bantu Stephen Biko was shackled, naked and comatose in the back of a South African police Land Rover. The Baader-Meinhof gang lay in suicide pools in a German prison. The Khmer Rouge filled their killing fields. The Weather Underground and the Young Lords Party crawled toward the final stages of violent implosion. In London, as in New York City, capitalism’s crisis left entire blocks and buildings abandoned, and the sudden appearance of pierced, mohawked, leather-jacketed punks on Kings Road set off paroxysms of hysteria. History behaved as if reset to year zero.

In the Bronx, Herc’s time was passing. But the new culture that had arisen around him had captured the imagination of a new breed of youths in the Bronx. Herc had stripped down and let go of everything, save the most powerful basic elements – the rhythm, the motion, the voice, the name. In doing so, he summoned up a spirit that had been there at Congo Square and in Harlem and on Wareika Hill. The new culture seemed to whirl backward and forward – a loop of history, history as loop – calling and responding, leaping, spinning, renewing.

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.

Is A Pity

Aw, hell naw. If I’d only known about Lambchop’s wonderful cover of Sisters Of Mercy’s This Corrosion before our wedding, it would totally have gone on the playlist. Don’t get me wrong, I loved ending the night dancing to Nina Simone with Alec, but words like “Gimme the ring, kissed and toll’d” would’ve been a fun counterpoint to soppy stuff like “I bless the day I found you”, even as wonderfully true as the latter may be. Future brides-to-be, don’t pass up the opportunity I missed!

(Based on what I wrote a while back about what I like and don’t like in cover versions, this song goes straight into the Complete Re-Imagining, OMG Awesome! category. Another direct entry is Grizzly Bear’s cover of He Hit Me It Felt Like A Kiss.)

(Endearing extra: The This Corrosion cover can be found on the bonus disc for Lambchop’s album Is A Woman. The bonus disc is called Is A Bonus.)

Whatever Colours You Have In Your Mind

Via J-Walk, I enjoyed this summary of what goes on during Bob Dylan’s radio show.

Here are all the topics on which he’s given out Useful Tips:

How to Hang Dry Wall
What to Pack When You’re Traveling
How to Walk Like A Runway Model
How to Give Yourself Dreadlocks

Here are some quotes. Almost all are very endearing, it was tough to pick just a few:

“The distinctive voice of Aaron Neville. A lot of people think we sing the same.”
Re: Tex William’s Brother Drop Dead – “Some people die too soon. Others, you’re kind of hoping. Tex Williams has a song for such a situation.”
Re: Howlin’ Wolf – “This next song is entirely without flaw and meets all the supreme standards of excellence.”
“The harmonica is the world’s best-selling musical instrument. You’re welcome.” (I’ve never met anyone else who agrees with me on this, but I’m not ashamed to say it – I love the sound of the harmonica! And it’s pretty much because of Bob Dylan.)
“A giraffe can go a long time without water. But he wants to see a menu right away.”

After reading all this I instantly wanted to listen to him, but unfortunately all my Dylan albums are still back in my old room at my family’s place. I haven’t moved my CD collection over yet because, well, there’s no shelf over here capable of accommodating it. Perhaps a trip to IKEA this weekend…

Occasional Foodiness

We do a fair bit of cooking but I haven’t bothered to write much about it here since cooking is hardly a novelty to either of us. For the same reason, I have hardly any photos of the stuff we’ve cooked so far, because taking a photograph of my food before eating it would just never occur to me. But since my sister was crouching over our baked fish, snapping away like the keen food photographer she’s become, I thought I’d try my hand at it too, and am quite happy with the result.

It’s fish baked Greek style with dill, tomatoes and potatoes, from a Nigel Slater recipe. We used kurau (threadfin) steaks, and the dill is from our makeshift balcony herb garden. It’s a pretty great recipe because you hardly have to do anything – you chuck potatoes, onions and garlic in a baking tray with olive oil, bake for 10 minutes (180C), add the fish on top and surround it with tomatoes, season with herbs, lemon juice, salt and pepper, bake for 35 minutes more and it comes out perfect.

Apart from that, we also made chicken piccata and roasted aubergine, tomato and chickpea soup, and much credit for the delicious success of those dishes goes to the reliability of Elise’s recipes. My mum made braised cabbage with wholegrain mustard, which went very well with everything else, and I whipped up apple, pear and banana smoothies for dessert. It was probably the easiest, cheapest, least stressful, most universally successful dinner party we’ve ever done. And contrary to Alec’s yuppie parody, I can assure you that all ingredients (except the chickpeas, weirdly, we needed Cold Storage for those) can be purchased in NTUC Marine Parade.

Intervizzle

I have never had much patience for people who dismiss hip-hop as being only about gangstas, bitches and hos, or people who like poetry (especially slam poetry) but don’t extend the same regard or respect to rap. It smacks of ignorance and laziness, like someone picking up A Clockwork Orange and concluding it sucks within the first few pages because they don’t get all the weird language about droogs and devotchkas.

Snoop Dogg has always been a problem for my campaign, not least when I was still in London, listening to Still Dre in my room in the Catholic hall and the elderly nun who ran the place knocked on the door to discuss something with me – during a perfectly timed lull in the conversation while I was standing in the doorway talking to her, my speakers loudly proclaimed “It’s the motherfuckin’ D O double G / Snoop Dogg, mothaFUCKAS!!!” Still, despite myself I rather enjoyed this interview (Emma Forrest) in The Guardian. Excerpt:

I have worn scuffed Converse, boy jeans and a T-shirt to this interview because I didn’t want Snoop to look at me sexually. And yet I find myself asking the next question, when the publicist pops her head in to say “two more minutes”. I stare at him, staring at himself and it comes out like Tourette’s.

“What would be my market value, if you were still pimping?”

Snoop looks up, with interest, for the very first time. He looks at my face, my hair. He appears to do a sum in his head.

“Stand up real quick, let me see.”

And I do.

“Oh! You built nice! You built like a black girl! You been sitting on a fortune. You need the right person to represent you, get the connection. You could be in the $4,000 range.”

Snoop was right. Us Jews do have all the money. All the time I had been wondering where mine was, when it was right behind me.

I Put My Thing Down Flip It And Reverse It

Apart from the awesome Velbon travel tripod, Alec also gave me private DJ lessons with DJ Koflow for Christmas. (We aren’t normally this lavish, but for our first Christmas as husband and wife we decided to spoil each other a bit. Also we hadn’t given each other any birthday presents that year.)

It’s taken me a while to find time for the lessons but they’re finally set up, and I meet Koflow for my first private lesson this Saturday afternoon. Am a bit nervous, and acutely aware that my inability to keep up with new music over the last few years has hit my hip-hop listening especially hard.

Still, I’m very excited – despite years of enjoying and clubbing to great dance music, I’ve remained largely ignorant about the mechanics of DJing and now I finally get the chance to learn me some skillz! You know, like when Ice says “Check out the hook while my DJ revolves it”? Soon that could be me, baby.