Travel Blip

Oh what the fucking fuck. Obviously my introductory post to my present travels has gone boom and the only way of getting it back will be to rewrite it. This will not happen, because I have better things to do in London than to rewrite my own blog posts.

To all the people who left comments, I’m really sorry – they’re gone. On Friday I read and replied generally to everyone and specifically to wulfe and pumpkineyes, but if you posted a comment after that then I’m afraid I missed it. However, I do know that the server issues causing the lost posts/comments are now resolved, so please don’t be put off from repeating your tips where relevant in my future posts about these travels. They won’t get lost again.

It’s nearly 4 am so I should sleep, but I hope to find some time in the next few days to write up my travel journals so far. As anyone who knows about me and London will expect, I’m having a wonderful time.

Braindump

Apologies to those hoping for more substantial content, this will just be a desperate catch-up list of quick notes on blogworthy things that I never found time to write properly about but don’t want to forget.

Books:

  • Dress Your Family In Corduroy And Denim (David Sedaris): Funnier, sadder, and generally more engaging than Barrel Fever.
  • A Burnt-Out Case (Graham Greene): Greene never disappoints. I don’t think this is an especially famous novel of his, but it is no less perceptive or original than any of his best. It also feels very elegantly structured – not usually something this O’level literature student is able to spot in a novel, but which seemed particularly outstanding in this one.
  • Maus: My Father Bleeds History (Art Spiegelman): Just Book I, I’ll read Book II as soon as the other borrowers in the library let me, and am aware that whatever commentary I attempt here is necessarily incomplete. Not sure if my feeling about the book is shared by others, but it seems to me that although it is ostensibly a fairly straightforward Holocaust story, the true heart of this book lies not in the story itself, but the fact and manner of its telling – by a protagonist to an author, from human speech into stylized illustration, and above all, by a father to a son.

Films:

  • The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy: Sorry for the blasphemy, but as someone who last read the books when I was 12, and therefore has no specific memory of them beyond an abstract aura of wittiness and a couple of ubiquitous email taglines, I found this thoroughly enjoyable.
  • Sideways: We didn’t rush to watch it in the cinema because it seemed like the sort of movie you could enjoy just as well on DVD, and it is. Despite its incredible acclaim I’m really struggling to come up with anything strongly positive to say about it. It felt like a slow car ride through pleasant but unremarkable countryside inhabited by people you care very little about. You don’t object to the journey, but you’d just as happily never take it again. Case in point: I can’t fault Paul Giamatti’s acting here, but despite playing a character far more likable than in his previous “loser” outing, something about American Splendor made me root for Harvey Pekar, and something about Sideways made me stop caring about Miles.
  • Downfall: The best film I have seen so far this year, and one of the top five of my life. Can you even imagine a similar film being made in Japan? [Very tangentially, the broader political/societal culture which gives fruition to films (among other manifestations) like this is one reason I think Germany is a great nation, and its disappointing contrast in Japan is one reason I have never been able to admire or embrace Japanese culture the way many of my peers seem to do.]

Events:

  • Poetic Licence: I love poetry on paper, but poetry readings much less, so I have to admit the only reason I went to this was that Yish had free tickets. Well, shame on me for my rock-bottom expectations, because this was one of the best poetry events I’ve ever been to. The team behind this should be very proud that they took on something quite ambitious – 46 poems to dramatize! – and did a pretty good job for most of them, finding and expressing the latent drama of the poems without compromising the primacy of their words. Yish gave an impromptu performance of Loud Poem to the cast afterwards, which was fun. The only part of the evening I didn’t enjoy was when Eleanor introduced me to Ivan Heng and, tongue-tied and star-struck, I stammered, “Hi…I’m a big fan…” AND NOTHING MORE.
  • Neil Gaiman in Singapore: My boobs came between me and Neil Gaiman on the Monday and Tuesday of his visit to Singapore (I’d had the surgery on Monday), but goddamit I wasn’t going to let them spoil my fun on Wednesday! (Yes, one can define queueing for 5 hours for two signatures as “fun” if the signatures in question are from Neil Gaiman.) By the time I got to the front, Neil was obviously pretty tired, so I didn’t get anything as elaborate as the Coraline rat I got the last time, but at least I got “Sweet dreams” on the last panel of The Sound Of Her Wings and eyes drawn in the skull on Neil’s “goodbye” message (just after the last page of The Wake). I mumbled something stupid about having had surgery two days before, but just having to come see him anyway. He stopped signing my book, and looked up at me. “And you’ve been waiting in this huge queue all this while?” “Um, yeah.” “You really shouldn’t have, but thank you so very much,” as he reached out and squeezed my hand. And just like that, five hours in line paled before thirty seconds of very genuine warmth from a man who, by the end of the night, had signed for a thousand people.

Baybeats 2005: Day Three

As always, afternoon napping foiled my best-laid plans of getting to Baybeats in time for Serenaide, and I arrived only to hear the last 30 seconds of their last song.

The bands that followed – Zhen, The Marilyns and Kate Of Kale – were pretty dull and I started to long for my couch again, so I went to the Garlic Restaurant with emptysignifier in search of a strong pick-me-up.

Fortified and reeking (how awesome is the garlic ice-cream?), we then sallied forth for Death Of Cinema, which I enjoyed lots then and enjoy even more now that I’ve discovered they describe their sound as “post-cock”. Coincidentally, the same article reveals that they share my views on song-naming wankery:

Nick: I wouldn’t say we disregard genres. Rather, we’re very sensitive to the trappings of them, so you’re right about the stereotypes. For example, with the whole down-tempo and triphop thing, there’s just this very pretentious, pseudo-intellectual and extremely dated edge to it. Just look at the cover of any Winter Chill or Hed Kandi ‘chillout’ compilation, or the cover of Groove Armada’s Vertigo. Have you seen anything more dated or stuck?

The same thing is happening to post-rock too. Like what’s with 5-word smarty pants titles as ‘de rigeur’? The reason I mention these genres is that we ourselves are into this music and we can’t escape the influence anyway, so we learn to take what we can and make fun of it, and hopefully we end up less derivative.

For what it’s worth, as someone who’s spent a lot of my music-listening life hoping to sift the derivative from the influenced-but-innovative (and blogging incoherently about it), I don’t think Death Of Cinema sound derivative. Also, I want a “Post-Cock” T-shirt.

Between 8.30-9 we had a choice between watching Electrico and Lunarin. Several hundred people chose Electrico (who seem like nice people doing what they love but I’m not into their music) so I was glad there was plenty of space for Lunarin. I quite liked what I heard, but would like to hear an electric set to get a better feel of their sound.


Room to swing a post-cock in

I’m a bit at a loss for what to write about Concave Scream, except that they just seem to have hit on how to write songs that work as songs and work for their sound as a band. To me they sound melancholic yet uplifting, reminiscent yet timeless, and always larger than the sum of their influences. (God my music writing sucks.) The best gig I saw at Baybeats 2005. I left shortly after, because Copeland were boring me, and I wanted to end the night on a high note.

Baybeats 2005: Day Two

Given that we only had a wedding lunch to attend on Saturday, I’d originally thought we’d make it for the start of day 2 of Baybeats, but I’d forgotten this was Tamara and her family we were talking about, so great company and countless glasses of champagne got considerably in the way. It’s a special sort of joy leaving a wedding party knowing your dear friend is in wonderful hands. Congratulations, Mr and Mrs Pritchard!

* * *

My views of Surreal and Furniture haven’t changed since last year, so let’s leave it at that.

I Am David Sparkle was pleasant enough but didn’t post-rock my socks that much either. The problem well may be mine though, I think I’m the world’s most impatient quietLOUD type post-rock fan. I love walls of bonecrushing sound but get restless in the slow peaceful bits that build up to them. This is why my favourite local band is Astreal, they just skip the foreplay and go right to the orgasm, which then continues for at least five minutes.

Let it not be said that I’m biased against all emo, I actually liked Brandtson quite a lot. They had nice songs with strong melodic hooks, and enough variety of chords and song structures that it didn’t sound like the same nice song repeated 8 times. Also, they do a pretty mean Cry Me A River. Mad strobe lighting during the chorus was a fun dramatic flourish but I wish they’d put a bit more death metal in the guitars.

* * *

At this point I have to mention my main frustration of the night: the stitches in my right boob are freaking cramping my style.

In normal circumstances I’d have left at this point to see Ice T in Zouk, but I was worried about getting pushed around or elbowed in the crowds there. I’d also have liked to go to Subvert’s 2nd birthday, but having to restrain myself from my usual vigorous drum’n’bass dancing would have been too frustrating.

So I stayed at Baybeats for Poptart and Twilight Action Girl’s DJ sets instead, but even within indie pop lies hardship. Witness my measured jumping during the “In LOVE, in FEAR, in HATE, in TEARS” bit of Sit Down, my restrained air guitar during Bullet With Butterfly Wings, and my wimpy gesticulating to Sabotage. Okay, I cracked a little when they played Here Comes Your Man, scampered down to the front and broke into a weird sway-hop-kick dance, but in general it could truly be said that despite all my rage, I was still just a rat in a cage.

* * *

Don’t these tiiiiimes fill your eeeeeeyes?

Baybeats 2005: Day One, Quick Notes

I arrived quite late from dinner and drinks with my former colleagues, so only saw Shamejoannshame and Nakedbreed.

The former was unremarkable instrumental post-rock which seemed to take overlong overdescriptive song-naming inspiration from A Silver Mount Zion. (Exhibit A: Shamejoannshame’s “I Heard You Singing A S Club 7 Song While You Were Super Wasted.” Exhibit B: A Silver Mount Zion’s “Sisters! Brothers! Small Boats Of Fire Are Falling From The Sky!”)

The latter was energetic pop-rock with catchy harmonies and occasional excursions into Joe Satriani guitar territory. Better than many similarly styled bands I’ve heard in Singapore – they deserve to do fairly well and probably will, given the accessibility of their sound.

Rainforest Music Festival 2005, Sarawak

The idea of going to the Rainforest Music Festival was first planted in my head by Joe raving about it, but it took someone with Louise’s energy to gather a group of 12 like-minded people and actually get us to Sarawak to attend it. I won’t be needing any further prompting to make my bookings for next year though.

Sarawak Sunset

 

(Click on photos for larger versions.)

THE FESTIVAL:


Tribal statue against surrounding mountains

The Sarawak Cultural Village is that very rare exception to the general rule that cultural villages are tacky. It’s beautifully situated, well-maintained, lovingly curated, and loads of fun.

 

Fay on the swing
Yes, the blurring is deliberate

We clambered up narrow bridges and staircases to longhouses elevated nearly three storeys in the air by stilts (no photographs could do them justice), cheered Fay on as she threw herself down from a height clinging on to a ring of bamboo (a traditional swing), and had a brief but precious ad hoc performance from one of the few remaining players of the Sarawak nose-flute.

 


Fish-traps to light the way

Unfortunately, we still never really got time to explore the Village properly, because we couldn’t manage to get there early enough before the concerts started at night, and once the concerts started it was hard to tear ourselves away from the great music. Even so, little details continued to make me happy. On my way to the toilet, I learned that traditional fish-traps make stunning lamps.

 

The venue for the night concerts was a huge field with naturally sloping sides, and the stages were set against backdrops of tall rainforest trees. A particularly nice touch was that there was no back wall to the stages, so you could see right through them to the greenery behind. I wish I could show you photos, but the lack of a tripod rendered all of them hopelessly blurry.

I’ve heard that WOMAD gets more prestigious acts than this festival, but for some reason I enjoyed this much more than either of the WOMADs I’ve attended. Caution about my stitches meant I didn’t do the vigorous dancing I’d normally have engaged in, but I couldn’t help giving in twice – the Old Spice Boys (Australia) got me itching to swing, Petrona Martinez (Colombia) drove everyone wild with hot mama vocals and asstastic beats, and a capable and careful dance partner was available in the form of Louise’s tangomate Kris.


Topless kilt-clad beardy headbanging Poles

I’ve always loved men in kilts, so although I may have looked like I was dancing during the traditional Irish music performance by Shannon (Poland), it was really just the quivering of my loins. Lead vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Marcin Ruminski was looking hot on the big screen as I was eating grilled chicken in the (awesome) food area, so I made my way to the front few rows of the stage, and found Louise and Vivien there for exactly the same reason. I realize the hotness isn’t apparent from the photo – you really have to watch him perform to see it – but believe me, he transfixed all of us so much that his ZZ Top beard didn’t even matter any more. However, it wasn’t just him that made Shannon’s performance so bloody amazing. Individually, all the members of the band were excellent musicians and effervescent performers, and together they were incredibly tight and had great chemistry. And while I suppose a headbanging bodhran player is a bit of a gimmick, it’s still a pretty cool gimmick.

 

All in all, the festival was fabulous, so professionally organised that you’d think you were in Singapore, except, that is, for the friendly volunteers and service staff, the uninhibited exuberance of the crowd, the 6.50 RM pints of Heineken and the illicit rice wine sold in mineral water bottles for 5 RM, the dirt cheap but excellent food (grilled lobster for 9 RM) and the wonderfully cool non-humid weather. Roll on Rainforest Music Festival 2006. I’ll be there.

SIGHTSEEING:

Kuching city itself seemed rather unremarkable, though perhaps that may just have been due to my extreme sleep deprivation while we were there. Apart from strolling along the waterfront and through a pedestrianised street of Indian shops, I saw little else of it before exhaustion set in after lunch (we’d left Singapore at 4.30 AM, and I didn’t get any sleep before that) and I retreated to the hotel for a few hours of sleep before we headed to the festival.

Better rested the next day, we managed an earlyish start for a trip to the Fairy Cave and Wind Cave, about an hour’s drive from Kuching. I’m sure there are better caves in East Malaysia than these, but they were the most convenient to visit in the short time we had and more than enough to awe a city person like me.

Fairy Cave
Middle Earth? No, Malaysia.

The Fairy Cave was like something out of Tolkien. I felt like Bilbo in the Misty Mountains, about to be captured by goblins. Amazingly, I didn’t see any graffitti, not even a tiny “Kennysia wuz here”!

 

Fairy Cave detail
Stalactites and shrubbery

Details of one of the mouths of the Fairy Cave.

 

Wind Cave
Inside looking out

The Wind Cave was less transporting, but geologically more interesting, as the effects of water in hollowing out holes in the ceiling and sculpting river channels were more pronounced. As you’ll see if you view the large version of the photo, there was some graffitti this time.

 

Everybody Offer Centre shop sign
These Kuching people are so friendly!

As I do everywhere I go, I noticed some amusing shop signs as we were driving to the caves and wandering around Kuching city.

 

Mushroom King's Bridal Studio shop sign
If you’re marrying a “fun guy”…

I really don’t know what to make of this one. I cannot see how fungal growths or their non-democratically elected leader for that matter have any connection with romance. Surely this must be a shit-take? (I’d apologise for that last pun, except I’m not sorry.)

 

I’m so glad I was still able to go on this trip despite my operation, and I’m even more glad no harm came to me as a result of it. I’m also very grateful to my travel companions, who rallied round me, helped me carry my luggage, and looked out for me in crowds. I couldn’t have gone without that support.

All About The Jonathans I: Motherless Brooklyn (Jonathan Lethem)

Not only is Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn funny, well-written, well-plotted and really quite touching for a crime novel, it is all these things consistently throughout the book.

Lionel Essrog, our protagonist, has Tourette’s syndrome. While he has come up with ways to disguise his offensive vocal outbursts, his “kissing phase” tic doesn’t exactly go down well in the Brooklyn school for orphan boys he attends. A misfit among misfits who spends most of his time in the school library, he is plucked along with a few other schoolmates to do grunt work for Frank Minna, a local small time crook with big time ambitions. Frank’s a foul-mouthed father figure of sorts and the boys see their work for him as the best thing they’ve got going. When Frank is set up and murdered one day, Lionel takes it upon himself to try and solve the murder, incessant tics and all.

It isn’t easy to explain the charm of this book, because it’s one of those you-had-to-be-there reads, and its many funny/poignant moments don’t lend themselves well to excerpting. I guess I found Lionel an extremely appealing protagonist, superficially at the mercy of his tics but able to transcend them, where it counted, through resilience and ingenuity. The people around him don’t really know much about his problem; to them he’s undeniably weird but over the years they’ve come to understand him well enough not to beat him up when he taps them six times on each shoulder or tells them to EAT ME FUCKFACE. Frank calls him Freakshow, and asks him to tell jokes because he gets a kick out of seeing how far Lionel can get through the joke without ticcing, but there’s a real fondness between Frank and Lionel which Lethem skilfully and unsentimentally depicts throughout the novel. It’s ultimately what keeps Lionel going in his efforts to solve the murder – the wish to do right by someone who did him right, and who he misses deeply.

Even if you’re totally unconvinced by anything I’ve written about Motherless Brooklyn, I’d recommend you try it anyway. It’s been quite a struggle to explain why exactly I thought it was so good, but I don’t want my failure to do you out of a really good read.

Batman Begins: Fear And Loathing In Gotham City

In my imagination, the jokey outtakes from Batman Begins would feature Christian Bale hamming up that typical actor’s query: “What’s my motivation??”

As Michael Chabon makes clear in The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay, his literary homage to comic books, the key to a great comic superhero isn’t the costume, the name or even the powers, but the why – why does he do what he does in the way that he does it? Come up with an answer which is more interesting than the vagaries of “fighting crime” and “upholding justice”, and you might just create a legend.

In Batman Begins, director Christopher Nolan explores “the why” and gives us what all the other Batman movies couldn’t, or wouldn’t. Apart from weirdness in the start where Bruce Wayne is apparently young and restless in a country full of Asiatics who all speak English like David Carradine, an annoying Michael Caine as Alfred whose accent wobbles Thatcher-like between posh and decidedly un, and the fact that I personally find Christian Bale bloody ugly and wish he’d keep his bat mask on all the time, I think Nolan succeeds spectacularly. In these dark cultural days for UCL alumni when Coldplay rule album charts, it’s nice to have a fellow alumnus actually doing something you’re proud to be associated with, albeit incredibly indirectly. (Ricky Gervais, Antony Gormley and Gandhi, I’m totally proud of y’all too!)

So, “Batman” is cobbled together from Bruce Wayne’s childhood fears, residual guilt from his parents’ deaths, advice from mysterious mentor Henri Ducard to “become what you fear most”, his view that Gotham’s criminals need to fear a symbol rather than just a man, and finally, the relative ease of making good bat-shaped ninja stars as compared to, say, wombat-shaped ones. Wombatman’s ninja stars would suck, though I guess he’d probably sell more Happy Meals. I’d buy a Wombatman Happy Meal.

But I digress. At the risk of sounding a bit high-school film class, I’ll say I think the theme of fear is well developed and explored in this film, and at the risk of sounding like a pretentious fuck I’ll also say I liked the modern allegory of the ploy to destroy Gotham by creating artificial and irrational fear in its populace. Cillian Murphy is great as Scarecrow, and the trippy sequences where he induces terror and dons his mask look soooo Dave McKean. Also, he’s dead sexy, and can lock me up and play scary mask games with me any time.

Although I’m only tangentially familiar with the Batman/DC Comics universe (through the bits of it that appear in Sandman), one thing which stood out for me was how much Batman Begins felt like reading a good graphic novel – meticulously intelligent, plot-driven yet dense with interesting ideas, and visually transporting. All in all, it is a stunning example of how once in a while, movie adaptations don’t end up raping their comic book originals in the ass.

Barely Legal Party People

I’d always been quite pessimistic about throwing parties because I felt my friends were a little too disparate to be able to mix properly, and half of them would spend the party thoroughly hating the other half. Thankfully, I don’t think that happened on Saturday, when over 30 people turned up for my Barely Legal party over the course of the night.

Some came alone but ended up staying much longer than they originally intended, because they were enjoying themselves. Some of my oldest friends talked happily to people I’d only just met when they turned up at my door. Some people I’d never have expected to hit it off told me later how well they’d gotten along.

Despite explicitly stating in the invite that people only had to bring their own drinks, so many bottles of wine and hard liquor were left (even after the drinking) that the flat is now stocked with more alcohol than we can possibly drink by ourselves. The solution to this problem, clearly, is more parties.

The next party location of the evening was DXO, where Kid Koala blew my already sky-high expectations out of the water. It wasn’t just turntable wizardry or amazing musicality that made his set so wonderful, it was also the obvious joy he took in every note of the records he was playing, yelling “FIAH FIAH BOMB!” right along with MIA, rapping along with everything, getting the crowd to clap rhythms during a transition, dropping Weird Science (!!!) and generally being incredibly endearing.

My favourite Kid Koala tracks aren’t his more typically Ninja Tune style ones like Emperor’s Main Course, so I’m glad he only did a little bit of that one. What I really love is where he takes something you think you know, and then shows you the vast universe you never knew it contained. Drunk Trumpet is the obvious example here, and let me tell you, however cool you thought it sounded on record, it’s a million times cooler live when you see how much he’s lovin’ the groove.

What I really want to write about, though, is what he did with Moon River, because it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard in a club. I’m not familiar with DJing techniques so I can’t give that sort of a description of what he did with it, but essentially it looked like he was quivering the record for tiny distances and at high speed. It didn’t sound like scratching at all but some hallucinogenic tremolo, like the way you see the air shimmer and swim just above the ground on a blazing hot day. It was incredibly evocative, and I will never forget it.

I’ve always been a bit nonplussed when people cite DXO’s lack of crowds as a downside to the place, because to me it’s a total plus. How is it a bad thing to have the opportunity to watch Kid Koala DJ from the empty platform only metres away from him? How is it a bad thing to be able to see every tiny move of a master turntablist close-up because you don’t have to jostle with other people in the stupid narrow space of Phuture? (So yeah, if you were at DXO on Saturday, that lone girl on the platform for the second half of his set was me.)

After the set he came down and stood in the crowd to watch the next DJ, so of course Jeremy and I had to go over to talk to him. I wanted to tell him that watching him was a musical – not just clubbing – treat. I wanted to tell him that those five minutes of Moon River alone had entranced me more than an entire DJ Shadow gig. (Anyone seen Shadow’s Live! In Tune And On Time DVD? Pretty cool, huh? Well, I was at that gig, and I’d give it all up for what I saw at DXO on Saturday.) I wanted to say all this, but out of fear of raving incoherently, all I did was thank him for coming, and tell him I’d been waiting years to see him. (But if you ever read this, Kid Koala, now you know.)

We had originally planned on continuing to Zouk for James Zabiela after Kid Koala’s set, but this plan got thwarted firstly by the next DJ being pretty good (first time I’ve heard Lady Sovereign played in any club here!), secondly by pretty blah reports coming from our girl in Zouk, and thirdly and most emphatically by beef kway teow and prata in Geylang.

An awesome night.