Joys – Page 4 – syntaxfree

2011 Music: Song List

In keeping with my tradition of only managing to say anything about a year’s worth of music once the year in question is already over, here are my songs of note from 2011. As usual, a song doesn’t have to have been released as a single in order to get into this list, and I only feature a song in this list if it isn’t already from one of my favourite albums of the year.

In last year’s list I included some honourable mentions, which were songs that stood out to me but didn’t quite merit being described as my “best of” the year for various reasons. I like the idea so will continue it this year, with:

Look At Me Now (Chris Brown feat. Busta Rhymes and Lil’ Wayne): A lot of this song is a frustrating waste of a great beat, but Busta’s verse (starting 1.30) is one of those glorious virtuoso performances which you enjoy first for itself and then for the entertainment value of the million Youtube cover attempts it launched, such as Mac Lethal’s Cook With Me Now "pancakes” version.
I Will (Danny Brown): I don’t want to spoil it. Just listen to it. But not out loud unless you are in a rather permissive environment.
Edge Of Glory (Lady Gaga): There’s no way of explaining how I ended up following Lady Gaga’s career because I’m madly in love with her gay backup dancer without coming off as insane, is there? Perhaps in some other post. For present purposes, just believe me when I say I’m totally emotionally invested in the career of Mark Kanemura, former So You Think You Can Dance contestant, current Lady Gaga principal dancer, FOREVAH HOTTIE. He’s gone from “normal” backup dancer to someone Gaga obviously favours, and when she premiered the single on the American Idol finale featuring him prominently as the only dancer to appear and dance with her my heart nearly BURST WITH JOY, although I will admit that his lack of clothing might also have contributed to that feeling of imminent pulmonary failure. Every subsequent live performance of the song has also featured him dirty dancing with Gaga in various states of undress, which is why I have 19 Edge Of Glory performance videos saved on my hard drive. The earlier link is to the American Idol performance for sentimentality’s sake (skip to 2:40 to see Mark), but to get a better idea of why I am insane I recommend you watch this lovely compilation instead.

And now the songs proper:

Do It Like A Dude (Jessie J): If you commanded me to dissolve and reconstruct myself as a pop star, and gave me the requisite magical powers with which to do so, this would be my debut single and video. (I know the song is borderline 2010/2011 but I only heard it in 2011 and love it too much not to feature it here somewhere.)

Try To Sleep (Low): The album this came from felt like a retread of the most accessible bits of Low’s past work, which I found disappointing after the curveball of righteous electronic anger that was Drums And Guns (my favourite Low album, which would also have been featured here as my favourite album of 2007 if I’d ever got round to writing that list). But at least when a band like Low decides to do "accessible", they sometimes end up giving you the prettiest little bit of twinkly harmonized accessibility you could ever imagine.
The Other Shoe (Fucked Up): You don’t really expect an established hardcore punk band to decide all of a sudden to feature pretty girly harmonies in their songs, or for a song with chief lyrical takeaway of "DYING ON THE INSIDE! DYING ON THE INSIDE!" to be so damn catchy, but Fucked Up is kinda special that way. (The album this is from is hands-down the best guitar album of the year but it’s so intense that I can’t actually handle listening to it all in one go, so it won’t feature on my album list.)
Lose Yourself (Astro): Far and away the best contestant from the inaugural season of X-Factor USA, 15 year old rapper Astro first caught my attention with his ballsy audition but truly gained my admiration once the live rounds started by using each song he was supposed to "cover" as little more than a sonic template upon which to perform his own rap verses – essentially writing his own new material each week. America likes its reality show hamsters meek, humble and preferably with a sob story, so I suppose this swaggerific performance (my favourite of the whole season) explains why he didn’t make it as far as he deserved in the competition.
Love Out Of Lust (Lykke Li): I agonized over whether to feature this or the near-perfect Ronettes revivalism of Sadness Is A Blessing, but in the end my choice was emotional – Russ introduced Love Out Of Lust to me on our roadtrip through New England, I loved it immediately, and I love the memory of listening to it in the rental car, our little space of moody poignant beauty racing forward on a vast sunny American highway.
No Church In The Wild (Kanye West & Jay-Z): In the same strange way that last year’s Kanye album went from underwhelming me to blindsiding me as my favourite album of the year, I found this unremarkable until I suddenly found its propulsive beat and enigmatic lyrics utterly compelling. The production is reminiscent of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, especially in the use of the vocal samples, which is to say it is distinctive and unexpected in a way no one else is doing quite as well as Kanye.
A Thousand Years (Christina Perri): Yes, I seriously like this. No, I’m not into Twilight. What can I say, I enjoy West Coast Swinging to this song and find its lyrics rather romantic. I suppose I am a bit of a sap for this idea of love that makes the passage of time feel like an afterthought – I did start welling up on the bus the first time I heard Magnetic Fields’ It’s Only Time, which had a somewhat similar idea.
Skyscraper (Demi Lovato): Yes, I seriously like this. No, I haven’t lost my edge. Yes, I’ve totally lost my edge. Let’s move on.
Snowflake (Kate Bush): Kate took over a decade’s break from music to raise her son Bertie, and he duets with her here at age 13. It was worth the wait. Bertie’s lines are those of the titular snowflake falling from the sky, his unbroken voice taking on the high, pure notes we might have expected to hear issuing from his mother years ago. Meanwhile, Kate whispers and wheedles from the waiting earth: "The world is so loud / Keep falling / I’ll find you". Perhaps this sounds twee. It is not. It is bloody beautiful, and like nothing you would ever hear from anyone that wasn’t Kate Bush.
Marka (Dub Phizix and Skeptical feat. Strategy): This song is what you would get if you analyzed my brain and wrote an instruction manual for how to press every single one of my dance music buttons. Also, I rarely bother watching music videos but with this one I’m transfixed every time.

Food Styling Fail

I made this Lemon Tuna Avocado Snack for my lunch the other day, and when I had finished preparing it I decided to take a photo of it for fun. While I didn’t agonize over the plating (hungry!), I arranged the elements of the dish in what I thought was a visually pleasing manner, positioned the plate for the shot, got my camera, fiddled with the settings, looked through the lens to admire what I felt sure to be a quirky yet appetizing composition, and saw…

…an abstract rendering of the female reproductive system.

I put away the camera and ate my lunch.

P.S. This has happened before.

Video Killed The Lazy-Ass Lindy-Hopper

Although I rarely do any lindy hop these days because I want to concentrate on getting my West Coast Swing fundamentals right, I certainly don’t love lindy hop any less than I ever did. The robustness of the lindy hop connection (for non-dancers, I mean the feeling of physical connection between you and your partner) still feels like home to me, and there’s a raw explosive joy to lindy hop that I miss in the slickness and poise of WCS.

(That being said, learning WCS was certainly one of the best decisions I made in 2011. It took me right back to the high I felt when I first learned lindy hop and would leave each lesson with a big band beat in my heart, barely able to restrain myself from triple-stepping all the way home. I tell people that if you’ve never partner danced you can’t understand what you’re missing out on until you do it. But oddly enough, even though I had partner danced for several years before working life made me lazy, I still managed to forget just how much awesomeness it puts into your life until I started again.)

I am still far better at watching lindy hop videos on Youtube than actually getting off my ass and sweating through the dance, but here is where I come to the main reason for this post, which is to appropriate some of my favourite videos from Wandering and Pondering’s excellent roundup of 2011 lindy hop videos and share one particularly fantastic passage from his writeup. It is written in relation to this Skye and Frida performance, which is so deceptively simple that I could do all the moves in the routine (okay, probably only at one third of their speed). But my God, it’s how they do it that makes the routine soar.

You should read the whole section about this routine on Wandering and Pondering, but here’s the bit I liked best:

Here’s the thing, Skye & Frida know that you’re watching. They know that you expect them to do something amazing every other eight counts, but they’re over that. They’re going to swingout and Charleston and perfectly match the phrasing and feeling of the music with moves and their movements, and they’re going to do it not to impress you or to win first place. The reason why they look so relaxed and are having fun is because they are. They’re not hamming it up for the judges or even each other. They just enjoy each others’ company and express that best through dance.

Most people may not realize it, but this is what you’re looking for when you take all those lessons and try to figure out how to become a “good” dancer. Face it, not all of us are ever going to win a competition. No matter how many or how few people are in a given contest, there’s only going to be one winner. But you put all the time into it, so you can you can to turn to your partner and say, “Right here, in this moment, we are going to have the time of our lives.” And then be able say that with every damn dance you have with a straight face.

From this other Wandering and Pondering post in the same 2011 video roundup series, I also discovered the amazing Jamin Jackson, who apparently hasn’t been lindy-hopping for very long but is an absolute delight to watch. When he rules the lindy world in a few years time, I’m totally gonna claim cred for having begun stalking him on Youtube NOW.

I think his performance quality completely outshone Annie Trudeau’s here!

He is just as lovely in this Jack & Jill (for non-dancers, this means a routine improvised on the spot with a randomly assigned partner).

And from a third post in the same series, if this video of a father dancing with his tiny daughter in the Savoy Swing Jam 2011 Intergenerational Competition doesn’t put a sappy smile on your face, you are…apparently even less fond of children than I am, which is honestly rather shocking. 0_0

I’m not sure how funny this last video will be to you if you haven’t taken dance classes in the last few years and aren’t familiar with the whole practice of taking “recap videos” after each class. All I can say is that I’ve probably watched it about 20 times in 24 hours, and I crack up every damn time.

New Loves In Old Haunts

I didn’t quite go into detail here previously on the massive holiday I was planning, apart from the Thurston Moore squee, so I should state briefly for the record that I spent about 6 weeks from mid-October to early December trying to be young again across London, Montreal, New England, New York City and Berlin. A wise man would stake no money on the chances of me blogging about that in any comprehensive way, but I do usually manage the first few days! So here’s the first day I spent in London, and let’s hope I’ll get to a few more later on.

Grant Museum of Zoology, London: The Lovely Bones

I’ve long run out of humorous excuses for neglecting this blog, the pathetic truth being that I neglect it because I don’t think many people read it, which of course engenders a chicken-and-egg problem which is so totally first-world I’m ashamed to even be talking about it. So let me launch right into the good stuff, and by good, I mean good if you’re into skeletal remains and cute furry things entombed in glass formaldehyde coffins.

Anyone who understands London at all will know that you can live there for years and still only scratch its surface, unless you happen to be Peter Ackroyd, in which case I want to transplant your brain into mine. The Grant Museum of Zoology is a classic example of how I managed to live five minutes’ walk from an intimidatingly long walrus penis bone for four years and not know it. It’s one of UCL’s museums, small but very charming, and of course like almost every other museum in London, you can enjoy it for free – something I always appreciated about London, but even more so after I’d visited New York. I realize that as someone who used to enjoy taking spontaneous detours past the Rosetta Stone or Elgin Marbles on the way home from lectures or shopping, I have been extraordinarily spoilt, but that’s just what London does – it spoils you for anywhere else.

But I digress – onwards to the walrus schlong. (Actually, don’t get your expectations up too high, it’s not that big of a deal. Well, it’s big, but I shamelessly exploited it to sucker you into reading a post about a dusty little zoological museum.)

Here’s a thumbnail gallery to help with page loading time, and so that the full-size horrors of the Surinam Toad or the Jar of Moles aren’t plastered across the front page of this blog, but the full post follows under the thumbnails.[slickr-flickr type=”gallery” search=”sets” set=”72157628495925387″ flickr_link=”on” descriptions=”on” size=”m640″]

Ecstatic Peace!

Naturally, every time I plan a trip to London, before I even bother checking plane flights I check the gig calendar to see what I can plan my trip around. This year’s check revealed that Thurston Moore would be at ATP the weekend of 3/4 December, but I’m not extremely keen on attending this one because the rest of the lineup isn’t appealing enough to me to justify the expense. So I decided to bide my time and see if the acts I was most excited about from the lineup would announce separate gigs in London, as has often happened in the surrounding weeks of ATP.

After several weeks of waiting, nothing had happened, and I was getting antsy about getting the flights at a good price. So on Tuesday night I knuckled down and was just about to buy my flights, with my last day in London to be Friday, 2 December. Just before I confirmed payment, I realized that since I hope to impose myself on the hospitality of various London-based friends for accommodation, it would be a lot more convenient for any friend I’m staying with if I left on a Saturday rather than on a Friday, in terms of returning their keys and stuff like that. So I booked the flight for Saturday, 3 December instead, and opened Facebook for some idle “so, did anything interesting happen in the last 10 minutes?” surfing.

It turns out that in the last 10 minutes, Thurston Moore had announced a gig. On 2 December. At the Union Chapel, which is one of the few London music venues I’ve been trying to see gigs at for years with no success. In 2003, I chose to forgo seeing Low there so that Alec and I could get out of London on a Valentine’s Day weekend. While it was a wonderful weekend and totally worth it, I must admit the decision still haunts me. And every time I’ve returned to London since then, the timing just hasn’t been right to see someone I like perform there, let alone the linchpin of my favourite band.

So this long story is basically why, on Tuesday night at about 8 p.m., I ran around my home screaming, near tears from happiness, and wondering how I would survive until the tickets went on sale.

They went on sale at 5 p.m. (Singapore time) today. I got one.

And now, if you’ll excuse me from this excursion into INDIE SQUEE, I have to watch X-Factor USA. :D

Bokehkeh

One of the most addictive things about my Sony Nex-3 is using it with old manual focus lenses which you can buy for fairly low prices on ebay. My latest acquisition is a Minolta MC Rokkor-PF 58/1.4. It’s the fastest lens I have, and while I’m sure I need to practice a bit more to get the hang of using such shallow depth of field, the learning process has been kinda dreamy.

Singapore Snapshots (Eunos, Geylang)

While I procrastinate on writing about our rather awesome orangutan odyssey in Sabah, I thought I might as well share some photos I took a while back during various explorations of Eunos and Geylang and never ended up posting. There’s nothing in these photos quite as exciting as trekking through leech-infested Bornean jungles, but I like them because they are souvenirs from sleepy weekend afternoons spent walking around quiet neighbourhoods near our home, doing nothing exciting but happy nonetheless.

A bird shop in Eunos:

We ventured deep into the Eunos warehouse district in search of dining chairs to match a $100 dining table we scored off Craigslist. Although we did end up buying conventional chairs, for a moment the idea of dining horses was rather tempting:

You can pay $8 (or more, not sure what the price is now since I haven’t gone there in a while) for Penang assam laksa at Penang Kitchen on Tanjong Katong Road, or you can go two or three bus stops down the road to the food court at the top of City Plaza and enjoy this one, just as good, for $3:

Anthony Bourdain listed Sin Huat as one of his 13 Places To Eat Before You Die, but he probably didn’t mean from splinters:

I am rather fond of roadside altars. Not sure why. It might be bundled up in that somewhat trite tendency of modern yuppie Singaporeans to celebrate the preservation of traditional practices they have no intention of really perpetuating themselves.

Durians. What to say about durians? I’m actually fairly indifferent to durians, although I do like photographing them. I still think Andrew Zimmern is a fucking wuss though.

Podcast Pick: Brian Eno

Here’s another in the occasional series of podcasts I’d like to remember having listened to: Brian Eno as guest DJ at NPR’s All Songs Considered. These guest DJ podcasts can be a bit hit-or-miss for me, in that they can often function as proof positive that some musicians are far better at making interesting music than interesting conversation. Brian Eno, however, has that rare quality of being able to give a thoughtful and distinctive answer to a question without rambling, trying to impress, or being boring.

You have to listen to the podcast to fully appreciate the following Interesting Things Said By Brian Eno in the context of the conversation, but I’m just writing them down here for my own recollection of the bits I enjoyed:

He grew up in Suffolk listening to the doo-wop, southern gospel and R&B which was popular in local coffee bars serving the two large American airbases nearby, and didn’t realize until years later that everyone who’d made his favourite music was black.
In response to host Bob Boilen’s observation (probably articulating what every podcast listener was also thinking) that doo-wop, southern gospel and R&B more or less sound like polar opposites of Brian Eno’s own work: “What you choose to do isn’t necessarily the same as what energizes you in the first place – you do what you can.”
He is a member of an amateur a capella group formed on the firm promise that they will never record and they will never perform.
Describing his voice as sounding like “a pencil” as opposed to a “brush full of wonderful colour”.
His daughter introduced Portishead’s The Rip to him, first playing it while they were in her car. He insisted they just keep driving around so he could listen to it again and again.[1. Michelle’s Made-Up Rule For Life: any time The Rip is brought up, the Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood cover must be linked to.]

Turntable Instrumentalist

My turntable shifu DJ Koflow has a music video out of him skateboarding and scratching through the central business district of Singapore. Local hip-hop musicians really have to hustle to get much acknowledgement or recognition over here so I’m pimping the video here just because.

To be honest though (and I said this to him already), I’d prefer to see more of him doing his thang and less of Allan Wu’s face. Here’s a video I took at a free gig he did back in March at the Esplanade. More scratching, less Allan Wu = WIN.