Swingin’ Out For The Weekend

I wish I’d found the time this week to tell you about watching Womb Raider at the olde curiosity shoppe that is the Yangtze Cinema, or muse about the tumbleweed silence that follows whenever I tell people that I enjoyed the sex scene in Brokeback Mountain and wish there had been more, but unfortunately I didn’t, and this weekend it’s SEAjam time again.

I will regrettably be much more inept at this one than I was at last year’s. I’m totally out of practice and unfit these days, which means that last year’s goal of dancing with Frankie Manning is pretty much off the cards this time. Being wholly outdanced by a 92-year-old man is fine, but I’d rather not have him carry me fainting off the dancefloor.

But anyway, I just wanted to say that I know this blog’s been rather meh lately, and I do intend to pick things up again once my work/life balance improves. Or rather, once I TAKE POSITIVE STEPS TO IMPROVE my work/life balance. I read my first ever self-help book recently, can you guess?

I Know That You Can Love Me When There’s No One Left To Blame

I was in the bus this morning, listening to M83’s Before The Dawn Heals Us for the first time in over a year, and all of a sudden I got it in my head that A Guitar And A Heart is rather like the ending half of November Rain.

Is this just a desperate abstraction thrown up by a mind that wants to be anywhere else than Monday morning, or do you think I actually have a point? This is driving me mad, I’ve listened to the M83 song 3 times at work already but it’ll be more than 12 hours before I can get home and dig out my old GNR best-of mixtape (which is TEH AWESOME by the way, no one better be hatin’), and in the meantime I can’t decide for sure.

Hanoi Ahoy

Regular readers of this site may be aware that I keep a fruitless and ultimately masochistic vigil over what’s happening in London. Normally, finding out that I could watch Calexico and Iron & Wine at the Forum if I were in London on 23 April would be a KNNBCCB moment.

But tonight I’m actually able to take it philosophically, because on 23 April I shall be returning from a trip to Hanoi with Alec, the only travel beyond Bintan and KL we’ll have done together since he moved here.¹ Needless to say I’m very much looking forward to it, and if you’ve got any Hanoi travel tips, do share!

And if you’re in London, GO AND WATCH CALEXICO AND IRON & WINE OR I’LL KICK YO’ ASS.

¹ This isn’t at all from want of trying or interest, it’s just that circumstances have conspired in the worst of ways in the past year to prevent us travelling for any decent length of time together. First I was doing my pupillage, which you can’t take leave from. Then I finished my pupillage but he’d just started a new job, so I went travelling in Europe alone. Then he was finally able to take leave but I’d just started my new job, so he went travelling in Europe alone. But from April onwards we should finally be able to start escaping Singapore on a regular basis, and thank God for that.

Mogwai Noise Snippet

From a Mogwai gig review at The Guardian:

Not enough is written about the sensual pleasure of being bathed in noise. There’s probably a good reason for this. Pretension is a constant danger. It’s hard enough to articulate what rock music actually sounds and feels like when there are lyrics to analyse and themes to play with. When – as in the case of Mogwai, a largely instrumental Glaswegian five-piece – there are few words, just sinuous guitar lines erupting into ear-splitting volume, the risk of ending up in Pseud’s Corner, waffling on about cathedrals of sound, is high.

But here goes. Being bathed in a wash of deafening guitar noise is lovely.

It really is that simple. Lovely. :)

Crispin Lover

“The crisp is a truly wonderful thing,” wrote Ralph Sharansky in the Idler. “It serves as the antithesis of real food.” (Quote from Guardian article below.)

I find health food freakery to be one of the most boring afflictions known to modern man, so the Guardian’s Great British Crisp Challenge delighted me.

“Recently, of course, parents have grown concerned by such disarming facts as: a single packet is three times as salty as sea water and contains half the recommended daily salt intake for a six-year-old; half the fat content is the evil saturated kind; the leading brand crisps all contain monosodium glutamate, among other enhancers; and there are 185 calories in a 34g packet. As a child you are not bothered by such information. You are more alarmed to find a witchy green crisp lurking in the shadowy depths of the packet, or too busy concentrating on sticking a Hula Hoop on every finger, or licking the foil wrapper for lingering salty-vinegariness, as it is technically known among playground aficionados.”

The actual results of the challenge are a little less fun to me than the buildup, though mostly because none of my personal favourites (Kettle Chips salsa & mesquite, Marks & Spencers spring onion, Walkers Sensations Thai sweet chilli) were contenders. Your mileage may vary.

I still have beautiful memories of late night essay-writing breaks in university – putting on some appropriately ear-destroying music, sipping my 8-sugars-a-can Coke and finally, biting into a crisp and savouring the explosion of ill-health in my system. As Jay Rayner, the Observer’s restaurant critic, so rightly commented in his rating of Walkers Salt & Shake, “Anyone who doesn’t want salt on their crisps is no friend of mine.”

2006 Just Started And We’re Already Below Par

Some people begin a new year by making resolutions, beginning diets, planning exercise regimes, or at the very least directing their energies to something vaguely useful.

We played minigolf.

Those of you familiar with my penchant for dumb kitsch will have no difficulties understanding why LilliPutt – “Funtastic Singapore in 18 Holes” held so much joyful potential for me.

Indeed, one need not even extend one’s imagination far beyond this blog’s last kitschfest to see why. My friends, I present to you: “uniquely Singapore” minigolf!


Shifu is watching…

Alec’s golf pro is a pretty intense guy, but he’s really devoted to coaching from the ground up.

 


Fore2 jiao4

My coach was nice and chilled though. Very Zen. I realize I’m breaking 2 terrible taboos here, standing with my head higher than the Buddha and my feet pointing towards him, but I couldn’t make the shot any other way! (Note to non-Mandarin speakers: the caption to the photo contains a pun so ghastly you’ll be glad you don’t get it.)

 


Fear my pink dimpled wrath!

This poor demon got a little short-changed when fearsome demonic powers were being handed out.

 


Fear my fucking flat-cap!

This guy has a bit of a demented Marcel Marceau vibe going on, and is final conclusive proof that flat-caps are pure evil in origin.

 

The other 17 holes featured an endearing mishmash of Singaporeana. Tiny mechanized trishaws, MRT trains and cable cars transporting your golf ball between the stages of a hole. Miniature versions of the Esplanade, Merlion, Suntec fountain, Boat Quay, Botanic Gardens gazebo, and in a slightly obvious attempt at self-glorification, the Big Splash building which houses Lilliputt.

But not everything was devoted to tourist attractions of Singapore! Some holes were devoted to venues which cater to ordinary Singaporeans and common pastimes.


Here oso got Crazy Horse¹leh.

For example, the Turf Club.

 


Some day we’ll win a SEA games medal…

And, uh, the ski resort. Hmmm.

 

Oh, I nearly forgot. There was, of course, some competitive element in this whole exercise, as our blissful relationship of mutual respect and passionate devotion is not entirely devoid of bitter rivalry and petulant oneupmanship. If I were to say it didn’t matter at all to me who won or lost, as long as we had fun, I’d be lying.


Na beh.²

Not My 2005 Albums List

So yeah, it’s been pretty quiet here lately while I’m working on that year-end album list. It’s always a bit of a struggle to write about music when your music writing sucks.

But I thought I might as well throw anyone who’s bored a couple of bones in the meantime, while I agonize obsessively over the internal ordering of my top 12. (Yes, 12.)

Here are a few albums which aren’t in there. I’m fully aware that lots of other people love these albums, but for various reasons I’m unable to buy into the hype myself. No attempt has been made in the writing to spare myself any flaming – feel free to enjoy yourself in the comments if you think I’m a grumpy jaded old hatah. :)

  • Wolf Parade – Apologies To The Queen Mary: It’s not that this is a bad album – Dear Sons And Daughters Of Hungry Ghosts only narrowly missed the cut for my 2004 Songs To Thank MP3 Blogs For list, and You Are A Runner And I Am My Father’s Son is pretty good – but it simply doesn’t inflame me with enough passion to warrant a ranking on my list. Even though it’s objectively quite pleasant, I’d be hard-pressed to summon up much enthusiasm for it in a review without having to fake it. It might be something about music with the “Isaac Brock touch” that everyone else likes but I don’t – I’ve never been a Modest Mouse fan and I never understood the acclaim for The Moon And Antarctica either. Apologies To The Queen Mary is better than that album, but I still don’t feel any desire to listen to it very often, and when I do it fades into the background quite quickly.
  • Bloc Party – Silent Alarm: I bought this on the strength of She’s Hearing Voices (another close contender in my 2004 MP3 Blogs song list) but I now think that track was deceptively innovative. The first half of the album just sounds like reheated 90s Britpop and the second half a mishmash of various post-punk influences which move neither my heart, my head nor my feet. There are 2 exceptions – Price Of Gas and Luno have a touch of frenetic beautiful chaos to them – but 3 good songs isn’t what I normally buy albums to hear.
  • Magic Numbers – Magic Numbers: After a couple of listens my only abiding impression is of a lot of tweeness and winsome crooning and easy but utterly forgettable melodies. I think I’d probably have liked this when I was 16 or 17 but I guess my tastes must have moved on since then.
  • Antony And The Johnsons – I Am A Bird Now: I might well be totally alone here but this one really does absolutely nothing for me. How can something so overblown and overdramatic be so deathly dull?
  • Serena Maneesh – Serena Maneesh: I can’t disagree with the reviewers who say this is strongly influenced by MBV’s Isn’t Anything. Serena Maneesh’s self-titled does indeed remind me of that album except, that is, for one small but rather substantial difference – I don’t fall asleep after the first song of Isn’t Anything.
  • Isolee – Wearemonster: I know the omission of this (especially when you soon see which other dance music albums I did include!) is a huge admission of dance music plebness, but I just haven’t listened to it an atmosphere conducive to appreciating it yet. What I gather from the reviews is that this album’s all about the details, and I guess those must be eluding me when I listen to it on my commute. I’m not writing this album off yet – it’s very much loved by people whose taste and genre knowledge I hold in high esteem – but until I take the time to listen to it in a better context than an iPod on a bus, I just don’t think I’ll be able to see the light.

Okay, flame away! :)

A List Of Lists I Did And Didn’t Do And Will Hopefully Do

Last year I attempted year-end lists for the first time, with only partial success.

I managed Top 5 Singles Of Shamelessness, 9 Songs To Thank MP3 Blogs For, and my top 5 films, but my Six Songs I Really Liked In 2004 But Which Weren’t On Albums In My Albums List (Forthcoming, Seriously!) For Said Year And Which I Haven’t Already Written About list only appeared in May (no, I did NOT spend all those months just typing out that title) and although I wrote a substantial amount of my Top 10 Albums list I never finished it.

This year things are looking tough. I could perhaps manage the Singles Of Shamelessness, but I’m really hard-pressed to pick anything worthy of inhabiting the same list as Incomplete. Mp3 blogs tend to get sidelined by having to spend hours on an office computer. And lastly, new releases probably made up only about 40% of the music I was listening to, sometimes from lack of access and other times from getting stuck in, say, Emmylou Harris’s Wrecking Ball and not leaving for weeks.

Well, this is what I’m going to try this time: I’m going to start from the albums list, which I left till the end last year because it was the hardest and therefore remained IN-COM-PLEEEEETE…and frankly, I don’t know if I can even manage anything else, so we’ll leave it at that!

So there’s lots of music geekery coming up, folks. I bet you never thought of a time you’d miss a photo of a cock and balls sculpted in facial moisturizer, but there you go.

Subway Stars / KLPHQ / Furniture (Substation, 27 Nov 2005)

I arrived from Resfest too late to see the first band, Life Without Dreams. Subway Stars were up next. Here is the blurb describing Subway Stars:

“Drawing influences from Radiohead, Muse, Coldplay, Travis and Silverchair, The Subway Stars aims to instill a raw sense of emotion towards their listeners, instigating the fact that there is an escape from everyone’s sadness and despair.”

I think the blurb speaks for itself. And indeed, the performance did help Jacob find escape from his sadness and despair – by leaving the venue for a beer break. Let’s move on, shall we?

Next up, KLPHQ. In the online review I’ve read of the gig, and other comments people have made to me in conversation, everyone seems to be under the impression that KLPHQ “almost” stole the show from Furniture. Dude, when it comes to stealing shows KLPHQ were that gig’s Bonnie and Clyde. If you ask me, the show left the stage with KLPHQ, got smuggled across the Causeway and squirrelled away in a Swiss bank account.

But before I can try to describe what impressed me about KLPHQ, I need to first do a ranty prelude about what does not impress me in live post-rock.

I’m always wary of bands who descend into extended jams which go nowhere but simply rely on the usual quiet-loud dichotomies to elicit a response. It’s lazy and derivative and not particularly interesting to listen to unless you’re stoned, in which case the sound of a dripping tap might fascinate you equally. Frankly, rather than suffering through post-rock-by-numbers most fans of long instrumentals with hugely contrasting dynamics would find themselves much better off with some Mahler. But despite this, indie kids will still stand around blissing out to turgid 20-minute dronefests when they would never countenance the same sort of dreck from mainstream US college “jam bands” like Phish or DMB.

So (rant over, thanks for staying with me) the reason KLPHQ impressed me and kept me engaged, and I do realize this is all totally subjective, is that nothing ever felt aimless or over-indulgent about their performance, and they sounded distinctive. The thing about the whole quiet-loud thing is that there are so many kinds of quiet, and so many kinds of loud, and so many ways to get there and move on, so when I hear something which sounds totally lifted from a song by some famous post-rock band it irks me. Thankfully, this never happened with KLPHQ. They were tight without sounding rehearsed, unhurried without becoming tedious, and fucking searing in all the right places. Never a dull moment.

I admit I was tired and hungry by the time Furniture came on which may have affected my enjoyment of their set, but it was the third time I’d seen them live and my opinion of them just hasn’t improved. Feel free to disagree if you were at the gig and think otherwise, perhaps it’s just me?

London 2005: V&A, Serpentine Gallery, Notting Hill

Day Six: Tuesday 9 August

 

V&A Museum architecture (detail)

In the V&A’s lovely John Madjewski courtyard, we start off lolling on a shady expanse of lawn, enjoying a delicious takeaway briyani lunch and the feel of grass between our toes. Russ rolls around on the ground taking photographs of me from various angles. He uses a balletic leg in the air to point in the direction he wants me to look, which does the trick of dissolving my usual self-conscious photo look with laughter.

 

V&A John Madjewski Courtyard

Kids are running in the fountain. (Click on the photo to see them, they’re rather small as kids tend to be.) As soon as we finish our lunch, we become the only adults in the fountain unaccompanied by children.

 

These two amuse me because of their reluctance to sit on the many available chairs. They leave little wet bumprints on the ground when they stand up to run back into the fountain.

 

The hugely endearing 70 Years of Penguin Design exhibition is the main reason for our visit, but while we’re there we also take a quick look at the RIBA Stirling prizewinners of the last decade. Apart from my beloved Gherkin, I also like Foster and Partners’ American Air Museum in Duxford, the winner for 1998.

From here it’s a nice walk to Hyde Park, where we eyeball this year’s huge flatpack armadillo

Summer Pavilion and visit Rirkrit Tiravanika’s Rirkritrospective in the Serpentine Gallery. (Methinks Mr Tiravanika and I share a similar sense of verbal humour.) Two of the installations here are mock-ups of the artist’s New York apartment, and gallery visitors are encouraged to make themselves at home. People are sitting chatting in the kitchen, lounging in front of the TV, scrawling on the clapboard floors and walls. Two selections:

Dear Rirkrit,

You need to stop living in these dumps. Find a nice girl & settle down, bring up some children, get a steady job in management.

Love, Dad.

And:

I read the use-by date on something in the fridge; it expired in July.

Dinner at the Windsor Castle involves paying rather dearly for its considerable charm – £8.50 for my salad, £1.50 for a small glass of shitty mixed cola – but it’s the only pub I’ve ever been to in England which still has all its sections intact. It’s fun watching everyone else having to bend almost double to cross from one section to the next when you hardly have to do so yourself.

We get to Being Boiled at the Notting Hill Arts Club while entry is still free. Dave and Jeremy join us later on. I enjoy happy hour not because of the drink promotions (the £2 Troy beer from Turkey is pretty awful) but because they’re playing good electrohouse. Nothing special in London of course, but truly music to my Singapore-deadened ears.

Dahlia, tonight’s live act, does Peaches-stylie riotgrrrl electrocabaret while wearing lingerie, fishnets and stilettos. I think I would have enjoyed it more if I’d found her sexy but her gyrations mostly remind me of muscly calisthenics and I later reduce Russ to helpless giggles on the dancefloor with my very own Dahlia imitation, featuring a piercing gaze, a lingering, beckoning, finger, and then manic hip-jerking. It works especially well to Tainted Love, but falls apart horribly once I try it with Vitalic.

On the long tube ride back to Wimbledon I suddenly remember it was National Day in Singapore today. I had totally forgotten. I can’t help being struck by the contrast – how easily and tracelessly Singapore slips away once I am here, and how two years after leaving London for Singapore I still ache for it every day.