Joys – Page 15 – syntaxfree

Words Of Mutilation

I’ve always pipe-dreamed about making some foray into freelance music writing, but I usually bring myself quickly back to reality by reminding myself that good music writing is damn difficult. I’m rarely satisfied with any of the writing I do here to begin with, and that’s already about music that stands out to me. So I worry that if I had to churn out something about music I was indifferent to, simply because I was getting paid to do it, the end product would be dismal.

I really hope the same reasons were at play for some of the bad writing I’m about to “showcase” – a rather bitchy thing to do, I know, but what are blogs for if not for occasionally venting the impotent fury that would bemuse and bore everyone else around you?

From Juice magazine, I’m not sure which edition (I photographed the offending text and threw away the rest), Pavan Shamdasani reviews a Pixies tribute album. Here’s the full text of the review:

“This is odd. There’s a considerable chance that you’ve never heard of The Pixies. They were never a mainstream band, and most of their popularity appeared years after their break-up, when Kurt Cobain admitted to ripping off their stop/start dynamics. So to put out a tribute album for a band that has no casualties, was never that celebrated and was still touring up till last year is a strange occurrence. And even stranger are the cover choices – a male emo singer extolling the pleasures of a big, black cock on “Gigantic”? A clubby remix of lovesick stalker-ballad “Hey”? A Mogwai noisefest on “Gouge Away”? A psychedelic journey through muffled vocals and drunken horns in “Where Is My Mind?” OK, maybe the last one makes sense, but still, this is by and large a terribly incompetent compilation that pays little tribute to what made The Pixies so special.”

There’s a considerable chance that you’ve never heard of The Pixies. Way to start off a review, dude – with a big dose of condescension for your readers!
…most of their popularity appeared… Popularity does not “appear” fully formed from Zeus’s head, it is “gained” or “garnered”.
So to put out a tribute album for a band that has no casualties, was never that celebrated and was still touring up till last year is a strange occurrence. Where do I even begin? 1) Ferry disasters have casualties. Bands do not. 2) A huge number of tribute albums are made for people who are live and kicking. Google this if you need proof. 3) It is either misleading or ignorant to describe a band who broke up acrimoniously in 1993 and didn’t reform until 2004 as “still touring up till last year”. 4) The act of putting out an album cannot be described as a strange “occurrence”. It may be a strange “move” or an odd “decision”, but it is not an “occurrence”.
And even stranger are the cover choices – a male emo singer extolling the pleasures of a big, black cock on “Gigantic”? Because male emo singers aren’t allowed to enjoy big black cocks, clearly.
A clubby remix of lovesick stalker-ballad “Hey”? A Mogwai noisefest on “Gouge Away”? A psychedelic journey through muffled vocals and drunken horns in “Where Is My Mind?” OK, maybe the last one makes sense, but still, this is by and large a terribly incompetent compilation that pays little tribute to what made The Pixies so special. What’s so self-evidently wrong with any of the cover choices described? Why do they pay little tribute to what made The Pixies so special? And given that the writer starts off the review by assuming most of his readers don’t even know the band, how on earth are they now supposed to understand this conclusion if he doesn’t throw them any frickin’ bone machines?

O RLY?

I have to return House of Meetings to the library today without having finished it, unfortunately (The Somnambulist got in the way), but before I do I just have to capture this rather intriguing line: “…even in their most intimate dealings the women, too, were worked on by socio-economic reality. In the post-war years, there were no non-swallowers in the Soviet Union. None.”

Bumbly Baubles

Just to show you I’m not full of shit with my resolution 1 of 2008, I took a bunch of photos of the jewellery I made towards the end of 07. I started out with my whole “making stuff” initiative by making marble magnets, which went pretty well (even got my colleagues hooked!) but they’re harder to photograph because of the surface reflections on the marbles.

I like jewellery making because at its elementary stages it needs very little artistic ability, just a finicky nature that makes you care about how neatly you are twisting your tiny bit of wire around your other tiny bit of wire. I’m not entirely adept at that yet, which is why I have taken the opposite approach to conventional product photography in the following photographs. Instead of focusing on showcasing the product by keeping backgrounds and other details simple so as not to distract from the exquisite workmanship of the jewellery artist and the evocative beauty of the sparkling stones, I have exploited various pretty things in my home in the hope of camouflaging my flawed work and cheap-ass beads.

First ones I made. Background appropriately shabby chic, emphasis on shabby.

Closeup

The toy cars are about 30 years old!

Woot, a set!

An absolute bitch to make.

My favourite photo, because I drank the wine afterwards.

Mosaic Festival Vs Grey’s Anatomy Soundtrack…FIGHT!

I guess it was too much to hope that 2008’s Mosaic festival would be as unbelievably awesome for me as 2007’s. The indie acts coming mostly make pretty indie music for pretty indie kids, which is not a bad thing in itself, but everything I’ve heard by them is also pretty uninspired. I loved and still like MÃºm’s Yesterday Was Dramatic – Today Is OK but the tweeness of Finally We Are No One and Summer Make Good means that those albums really haven’t stood the test of time for me. I also found them quite dull live, and in hindsight it’s quite amazing that when I saw them in 2004, Animal Collective (who far outshone them, and I wish it was them coming here instead) was merely their opening band.

I’ll probably end up going to a bunch of gigs anyway since I’m always so desperate for them here, but much will depend on ticket prices, which are usually quite high. At times like this I’m especially thankful for The Necessary Stage’s Singapore Fringe Festival, which has offered adventurous and unpatronising music events for the past few years at great prices. We just got our $15 tickets for the Colleen / Sylvain Chauveau / Hauschka triplebill at the Esplanade Recital Studio – I mean, seriously. Seriously!

Brideshead Revisited: Test Your Word Power!

Soon after starting Brideshead Revisited I decided to keep track of the number of words I encountered within it that I didn’t know. This throwback exercise was inspired firstly by the dismay of finding that within the first two pages of the book I had come across two words I wasn’t quite sure of, and secondly by my first attempt at playing Free Rice where I stagnated at level 46 and got tooth-gnashingly annoyed.

I was embarrassed to realize in the course of this exercise that although I had encountered some words a number of times before, I still didn’t quite know what they meant, perhaps because the context they had been used in at the time had been enough for me to follow what was written, or I simply didn’t bother to look them up. Funnily enough, having learned this bunch of words from Brideshead Revisited, I played Free Rice again today and easily got to level 49. I guess our primary school teachers really did know what they were talking about!

Just for fun, I’ll start by listing the words on their own so you can check how many of them you know off the bat. After the list, continue reading for a little more context to the words and links to dictionary definitions.

verismilitude
panegyric
jejune
sacerdotal
lapidary
muniment
suborn
glaucous
manumission
crapulous

Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh)

Alec recently enjoyed Brideshead Revisited so I read it too in a fit of foppery. Waugh’s prose was masterful but I thought the book’s comic moments were far more successfully realized than its theme (described by Waugh in his foreword as “the operation of divine grace” on the book’s main characters).

The Catholics in this book struggle with the outward moral strictures of being Catholic but are indifferent to the internal. We aren’t privy to any thoughtful exploration of their faiths, just an inexplicable attachment to following some rules (eg. not divorcing your husband even though you have a loveless marriage and have fallen in love with someone else) but not others (eg. not cheating on your husband in the first place). I honestly don’t understand why they continue to feel any residual attachment to Catholicism when they have long ceased to practise it; it feels more like an explanation of the power of superstition rather than divine grace. I guess Graham Greene has just spoiled me in this regard, because I really think Waugh’s attempts here don’t hold a candle to anything Greene has accomplished in a similar vein.

But in case anyone reading the previous paragraph has immediately decided that Brideshead Revisited doesn’t sound like their kind of book, let me discourage you from that – it has many inimitably funny moments and it always feels wonderfully luxurious after I overdose on modern fiction to plunge into the vintage elan of a writer like Waugh. Here’s a passage I enjoyed – Anthony Blanche, my favourite character in the book because he’s just totally fabulous, describes the fumbling attempts of some fellow students at Oxford to dunk him in a fountain (due to his excessive fabulousness):

About six of them came into my room, the rest stood mouthing outside. My dear, they looked too extraordinary. They had been having one of their ridiculous club dinners, and they were all wearing coloured tail-coats – a sort of livery. “My dears,” I said to them, “you look like a lot of most disorderly footmen.” Then one of them, rather a juicy little piece, accused me of unnatural vices. “My dear,” I said, “I may be inverted but I am not insatiable. Come back when you are alone.” Then they began to blaspheme in a very shocking manner, and suddenly I, too, began to be annoyed. “Really,” I thought, “when I think of all the hullabaloo there was when I was seventeen, and the Duc de Vincennes (old Armand, of course, not Philippe) challenged me to a duel for an affair of the heart, and very much more than the heart, I assure you, with the duchess (Stefanie, of course, not old Poppy) – now, to submit to impertinence from these pimply, tipsy virgins…” Well, I gave up the light, bantering tone and let myself be just a little offensive.

Then they began saying, “Get hold of him. Put him in Mercury.” Now as you know I have two sculptures by Brancusi and several pretty things and I did not want them to start getting rough, so I said, pacifically, “Dear sweet clodhoppers, if you knew anything of sexual psychology you would know that nothing could give me keener pleasure than to be manhandled by you meaty boys. It would be an ecstacy of the very naughtiest kind. So if any of you wishes to be my partner in joy come and seize me. If, on the other hand, you simply wish to satisfy some obscure and less easily classified libido and see me bath, come with me quietly, dear louts, to the fountain.

Do you know, they all looked a little foolish at that? I walked down with them and no one came within a yard of me. Then I got into the fountain and, you know, it was really most refreshing, so I sported there a little and struck some attitudes, until they turned about and walked sulkily home, and I heard Boy Mulcaster saying, “Anyway, we did put him in Mercury.” You know, Charles, that is just what they’ll be saying in thirty years’ time. When they’re all married to scraggy little women like hens and have cretinous porcine sons like themselves getting drunk at the same club dinner in the same coloured coats, they’ll still say, when my name is mentioned, “We put him in Mercury one night,” and their barnyard daughters will snigger and think their father was quite a dog in his day, and what a pity he’s grown so dull. Oh, la fatigue du Nord!

Wearable Wankery

A curmudgeonly post about the dull Mosaic Music Festival lineup for 2008 is forthcoming, so I thought I would pave the way for it by showcasing a few music tees I found funny recently.

Diesel Sweeties’ Elitism Diagram really skewers it. Threadless’ Music Snob shirt sold out in every size within days of its release, unsurprisingly, but girls can still enjoy some sale-price snobbery with I Listen To Bands That Don’t Even Exist Yet.

[Note: If you happen to buy the last tee through the above link, I get a little credit in my store account. It would make me very happy, but it’s up to you. :) ]

Im In Ur Ears, Blowin Ur Mind

My commute to and from work is an hour-long bus ride each way, and I’ve long been convinced that a core requirement of sanity maintenance under such conditions is being able to shut out TV Mobile at all times (except of course if it’s showing any of my reality shows, in which case I have to be right in front of it). When I first got my iPod I was very dissatisfied with the standard earbuds it came with because I needed to really turn the volume up in order to hear anything, and even then all subtlety would be drowned out by external sounds. After a while I decided there was only so much Knifehandchop and hardcore punk I could listen to, so I ventured into the world of Internet audiophile forums to research canalphones.

It was an alien galaxy. People spoke of transducers and woofers and tweeters and analysed their preferences in terms of bass, mid-range and treble tones, which could be thick or bright or transient or any of a dozen other adjectives which I had never thought of applying to music. And they routinely plonked down hundreds of dollars on brands I’d never heard of or seen in the local megastores. After a lot of research, during which I spent more time unglazing my eyes than understanding audio analysis, I settled on the Sony MDR-EX71s for around S$90, one of the more affordable choices I could find at the time. They impressed few experts but were very popular with plebs, and if there was one thing I’d learnt from my research it was that I was definitely an audiopleb.

I was pretty happy with them. They sealed out enough noise that I could listen appreciatively to a lot more music, though they still weren’t much good for stuff like Philip Glass, Nico Muhly or the quiet bits of quiet-loud-quiet type post-rock. Anyway, by allowing me to listen to my iPod at half the maximum volume and thus assuaging my fears that I wasn’t further exacerbating the hearing damage that years of very loud gigs and clubs had inflicted on my ears, they served their purpose perfectly well. Until last week, when after nearly three years of use, the right phone stopped working and defied all my attempts at resuscitation.

Full of trepidation, I ventured once more into woofer world and learnt from this rather epic hardwarezone forum thread that a shop called Jaben Network was a good place to go locally for affordable earphones and great service. I visited on Sunday and was served by a very nice guy called Gabriel. He urged me not to worry about online reviews, to choose based on personal taste, and to feel free to test all their canalphones before deciding.

Sitting down to start testing, I made a quick grab-bag playlist of a few songs I figured were kinda different. I didn’t know what I should be looking for or what I liked, but I hoped some preferences would magically materialize. And they did! In MIA’s Pull Up The People, I found I wasn’t looking for heavy bass, but rather a nice balance between the bass and the higher, spitting beats. In Low’s Belarus, I started to notice the distribution of sounds between my left and right ear, and the flat weightiness of the song’s only beats. In Brian Wilson’s Surf’s Up, I tried to evaluate how well the sounds seemed to occupy the inside of my head; in Ellen Allien & Apparat’s Turbo Dreams, how well the sounds made the inside of my head a massive warehouse full of people raving till dawn. And in Sonic Youth’s New Hampshire, how sensitive the phones were to the tiny high notes that accompany the opening drums.

To my surprise, after listening to three options (I didn’t want to listen to too many because I was worried that too many options would just confuse me) I found I had a clear favourite. I asked how much it was, was told it cost $45 (half the price of my old Sonys) and nearly fainted. Gabriel seemed genuinely pleased at my amazement and told me enthusiastically that my choice was a good one. I think they’re the Crossroads Mylarone Classics reviewed here. From my online research I was vaguely aware that this brand had a new model, the X3s, which everyone was clamouring after but which was in very short supply as a result. The geekdeal-seeker in me briefly considered whether to put myself on the waiting list for those, but I decided that I honestly didn’t think I was discerning enough to enjoy them like an audiophile would, and in the meantime I would rather not succumb to incandescent rage on public transport.

So I got the Crossroads Mylarone Classics, and as soon as I plugged them in on the bus back home I realized my world had been transformed. With the Sonys, listening at half volume would still yield fairly frequent intrusions of My Sassy Neighbour, but with the Crossroads I can now listen at a third of the volume instead and enjoy an existence mercifully free of Patricia Mok.

Just for fun, I added more songs to my initial “testing” playlist (mostly songs I already knew well which seemed like “headphones tracks”) and listened to them on my commutes this week. Espers’ Dead Queen is chillier, its vocals more ethereal. Andrew Bird’s A Nervous Tic Motion Of The Head sounds more intimate, like I’m sitting right next to him as he sings just for me. The crazy Japanese drum sounds in Asa Chang & Junray’s Hana now come from distinctly different places and I can imagine the drummer’s flying hands. Outkast’s B.O.B. used to feel dense; now it feels like there’s plenty of space for the ten million things it has going on. I’ve always loved that incredibly euphoric introduction to The Knife’s Silent Shout but now it’s like a catherine wheel in my head and there’s a serious risk of me bursting out on the bus with that frenetic pointy finger thing which really mashed people do to trance.

You get the picture. I could go on for ages, but some audiophile might come and point out that most of the improved sound I’m describing here is entirely psychological and that would be embarrassing. Anyway, this is just to say that if you see a girl on the bus listening to music with the most beatific smile on her face, don’t worry if I suddenly bust out some moves, I’m totally harmless.

Shiny Shiny

After losing my trusty little Ixus 430 in Cambodia last December, I spent 6 painful camera-less months waiting for Canon to release a version of the Powershot which had both a vari-angle LCD screen and O.I.S. before caving in to a good offer on the Fujifilm F31fd, which is an extremely good compact camera in other ways but has neither of those things. I felt I couldn’t wait any longer for the perfect camera to be released because I wanted enough time to get familiar with a new camera before bringing it on honeymoon in September, and I also knew June to September were going to be too crazy for me to keep monitoring camera release schedules.

And of course, now I’m back from honeymoon Canon has deigned to release the A650IS in Singapore. It looks like ass, but it’s exactly what I spent all this time waiting for. I’ve decided to spend the next three or four months agonizing over how to justify the extravagance of owning 2 digital cameras, at the end of which time the price will hopefully have dropped and I will then pounce. But you can feel free to start affirming or reproaching my future extravagance right now. (For what it’s worth, I use everything else until it dies. I still have a videoless 4th generation iPod, a 2003 Thinkpad, and a 64MB thumbdrive.)

Sounds Of Tweedness

Metafilter’s discussion of the Oink shutdown was going quite predictably until Pastabagel went delightfully classic-rock curmudgeon crazy. An excerpt:

Well, la-dee-da, I beg of thee a thousand pardons. I guess The Melancolics performing Ennui No. 4 at the fucking Knitting Factory on a Monday night is the ne plus ultra of music. The wave of the future is shoe-gaze or shoecore or whatever the fuck you call it. Poor baby has too much anxiety on stage to look at the audience, so he gazes at his shoes. Yeah, that’s so much better to watch than jumping off the monitors while playing your Strat with your teeth and then setting it on fire.

You know what your music sounds like? It sounds like tweed.

Dandy tweed music. That’s probably a band you like. The Dandy Tweeds. From Leeds.

A flaming double neck guitar salute to you, Mr/Ms Pastabagel! And just for that brilliant snark about Broken Social Scene (not excerpted, read the whole rant to get it in context), you can have the soul of my firstborn.