Blasphemy

Earlier tonight, while watching Justin Timberlake: Down Home In Memphis on Starworld:

My mum: So who’s this?
Me: blah blah blah blah soooooo cute blah blah blah blah sooooo catchy blah blah blah blah fantastic dancer, look mum!
My mum: He looks like Gurmit Singh.

I have not the words.

[For non-Singaporeans: Gurmit Singh is a local TV personality, best known for an admittedly masterly comedy role as a dodgy building contractor sporting a mini-Afro perm, yellow rubber boots, and a large mole, best forgotten for an attempt at a talk show where he was probably trying to be Conan O’Brien but didn’t quite realize that only Conan O’Brien can be Conan O’Brien, and everyone else trying to be Conan O’Brien really just ends up as cringeworthy as Brooke Shields in Suddenly Susan. Suffice to say, he SO DOES NOT EVEN FAINTLY RESEMBLE JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE, OR VICE VERSA.]

Postcard

Hello folks. I’m perched on a stool at an Internet cafe in Hua Hin, Thailand. Alec arrived on Tuesday, and since then I haven’t had the time to write any entries, although quite a number are planned for when we get back to Singapore on Christmas Eve. In the meantime, we’ve been having lots of fun muddling along in classic Alec-Michelle style, despite the dismaying tendency of things to not exist or screw up every now and then, and my bitter resentment at having to pay farang prices for most things because of my choice of travelling companion.

But ignore my little gripes, which I enjoy making rather too much to really be serious about. I’d forgotten this is what it feels like to be blissfully happy. See you all soon.

Song Sifting

So I’m back from karaoke and wine with Ken, and for some reason the practice of picking discrete songs from a list rather than listening to entire albums has continued even now I’m home. Here are 5 songs. They probably don’t work particularly well in karaoke, but they sound bloody amazing on the speakers.

1) Black Steel (Tricky): I know trip-hop went out of fashion almost as soon as the term was coined, but there is still some trip-hop that is exquisitely, timelessly excellent, and Tricky’s Maxinquaye album epitomizes that. Black Steel is one of the very few covers I’ve ever heard that successfully reinvents the original and completely kicks its ass. Beats that sound like banging on the corrugated iron wall of a shanty town hut – hollow, desperate and rebellious. Martina Topley-Bird’s voice stalks through the wreckage like The Bride in Kill Bill, bloodied but resolute. Public Enemy, run for cover. This is the true hour of chaos.

2) Amongst The Books An Angel (Piano Magic): Piano Magic make a wide variety of weird electronic pop music. Not all of it is interesting or even listenable, but this is a pretty little track which deserves to be listened to on a good sound system. Laid-back beginning with acoustic guitar, fluttering reedy instrument, and earnest male vocals. Later on the backing instruments get more emphatic, more dense, and halfway everything breaks out into an Arabic warbling maelstrom. Randomly.

3) Just Be Simple (Songs: Ohia): No lie. It’s a simple song. Appealing melody, plaintive steel guitar, nice harmonies in the chorus, and full spotlight given to the lyrics. I particularly like “And everything you hated me for/ Honey, there was so much more.”

4) Break (Fugazi): I am wildly addicted to Fugazi riffs, and this has a great one. They played it as an encore when I saw them at the Forum in London, and at earsplitting volume, it sounded even better.

5) Dial: Revenge (Mogwai): If I ever wander on the astral plane, this will be my soundtrack. Acoustic guitar beginning (I’m such a sucker for that) and the guy from Super Furry Animals singing in Welsh. Then it builds to that lush cymbal (I didn’t think I’d ever be describing the sound of a cymbal that way but that really is the right word) that heralds the entrance of the orchestra and the music expands, a dim velvety universe enveloping everything. When it ends I don’t quite know where I am any more, but I have a hazy memory of being somewhere beautiful.

Don’t Think Of A Blue Elephant (Tangents Inspired By Love Actually)

A conversation yesterday:
Ken: So, Michelle, how’ve you been doing?
Me: Well, I’ve been having problems resettling into Singapore, and I’ve been missing London a lot.
Ken: Then whatever you do, don’t watch Love Actually.
Me: I’m watching it tomorrow.
Ken: Then watch it with someone you fancy. It’s a great date movie.
Me: I’m watching it with my mum.

Not the most promising prelude to Love Actually then.

Every time I go to the movies with my mum, I always manage to forget that apart from being witty and quirky, British romantic comedies are also fairly crude, or at least more so than their sanitized American counterparts. So there I am in the first two minutes of Love Actually, sitting in a cinema next to my mum as aging rock star Billy Mack gets the words to a song wrong for the umpteenth time and bursts out in a stream of “Oh fuck wank shit arse…” And while she isn’t quite so Puritan as to stand up and walk out or anything like that, she’d probably find it rather strange if I gave into my sudden impulse to sigh in happiness at the sound of those English terms I miss so much. “Wank”. “Arse”. And later in the film, “bollocks”.

Ken was right. The sight of London on the big screen almost physically knocked me back into my seat. The ice skating rink at Somerset House. Panoramas of the Thames. The Millennium Bridge. The Erotic Gherkin. Charing Cross Road. I could smell the winter air, feel the tug of my coat on my shoulders as I stuffed my gloved hands into its pockets, and hear the silence of London on Christmas Day.

The opening and closing scenes of the film make a big deal about how the arrival halls of Heathrow abound with love as people reunite. My first thought: my moments of highest emotion in Heathrow were always spent alone. Forget the arrival halls, every time my plane touched down on the Heathrow runway, I was already bursting with love. In the arrival halls, Russ would usually be there with a big hug and a strong arm for my bags, but the few times he wasn’t, I still walked through the airport, totally alone, giddy with happiness, straight onto the first bus for central London. When I left, forget what I went through in the departure hall saying goodbye to Russ and Alec – at least then I could cry freely. Sitting at the window of the plane as it accelerated and slanted skyward, surrounded by strangers, my face pressed against that tiny oval, and my body turned wholly away from everyone else so they didn’t see it shuddering as I tried to hold back sobs…well, let’s say that’s part of the London experience that wasn’t documented in this film. Unfortunately, it, too, came back to me vividly.

So I sat through this film, filled with scenes of the place I love, sounds of the accents I love, jokes in the humour I love. I didn’t even feel the slightest desire to rearrange Andrew Lincoln’s annoying fishlipped face the way I normally do. Conversely, my usual lust for Colin Firth was wholly overwhelmed by longing just to be walking the same London streets. (Don’t think I don’t realize how crazy this sounds, how mawkishly sentimental, how downright “unpatriotic”. I know.)

And all the time I sensed a creeping dread that at some point, this film had to end. When it did, with those scenes of the Heathrow arrival hall again, and the opening notes of God Only Knows, something triggered a perspective switch, and then only the most rigid control was keeping me from bursting into tears. Because in one week’s time, in the Changi Airport arrival hall, that will be me. That will be Alec. God only knows what I’d do without you. God only knows what I did to deserve you. I have lost London, but I still have so much.

How Will I Live?

From The Onion: Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn’t Own A Television.

“Green has lived without television since 1989, when his then-girlfriend moved out and took her set with her. ‘When Claudia went, the TV went with her,’ Green said. ‘But instead of just going out and buying another one — which I certainly could have afforded, that wasn’t the issue — I decided to stand up to the glass teat.’

‘I’m not an elitist,’ Green said. ‘It’s just that I’d much rather sculpt or write in my journal or read Proust than sit there passively staring at some phosphorescent screen.’ “

I’m not normally a big TV watcher, but at exam time I undergo a bizarre metamorphosis. Nothing is too banal, nothing too dull, it’s all good as long as it continues to provide an excuse to sit slack-jawed on the couch instead of gritting my teeth at my desk over comparative financing mechanisms of international trade transactions.

Which is why, over my back-to-back exam periods of the past few months, I developed certain, shall we call them, attachments, which cruel reality now threatens to deprive me of.

The Bachelor 3 had me screaming abuse at bitchcat Kirsten, with her shiftygoogly eyes and infuriating tendency to speak only from the back of her throat, Survivor had me screaming abuse at Jon the vicious conniving shrimp with bad hair, and Am I Hot? had me screaming abuse at the judges every time they dismissed someone who floated my boat. I writhed on the couch cursing David E. Kelley to hell and back in a particular episode of Ally McBeal where he made it look as if Ally might dump sweet sexy plumber Jon Bon Jovi for Fred Durst’s evil twin (played by fat-faced Matthew Perry). Let’s not even go into my hours of MTV hoping for just one glimpse of Justin Timberlake.

But as I stagger out of exam haze and re-enter the world of the living, a small part of me feels an acute sense of loss. The Bachelor is over. Ally’s broken up with her plumber. Survivor continues, but self-respect demands that I actually leave the house on Friday nights. Similarly, the Am I Hot? finals are tonight (black guy who’s an English teacher! black guy who’s an English teacher!), but I’ll miss them because I’m having dinner with Pei Ee. Tomorrow I’m taking mum to see Love, Actually (Colin Firth! Colin Firth!), which means I have to miss Punk’d.

I’m not proud of this promenade of plebeianism, but Armchair Psychology 101 suggests that the first step towards regaining my intellectual cred is to come clean and document my fall. Meanwhile, ongoing attempts to wean myself off the glass teat include If on a winter’s night a traveller and The Brothers Karamazov (still not quite Proust, but they’ll do for now), half-written poems stuffed in drawers (don’t even bother with the obvious jokes, y’all) and, quite importantly, admitting to some of my friends for the first time in a while that I actually exist.

I Really Really Hate Birds And That Ernst Painting Has Always Freaked Me Out, But…

(The following passage is a fictional excerpt from an ornithological journal.)

“Is it possible, I wonder, to study a bird so closely, to observe and catalogue its peculiarities in such minute detail, that it becomes invisible? Is it possible that while fastidiously calibrating the span of its wings or the length of its tarsus, we somehow lose sight of its poetry? That in our pedestrian descriptions of a marbled or vermiculated plumage we forfeit a glimpse of living canvases, cascades of carefully toned browns and golds that would shame Kandinsky, misty explosions of colour to rival Monet? I believe that we do. I believe that in approaching our subject with the sensibilities of statisticians and dissectionists, we distance ourselves increasingly from the marvelous and spell-binding planet of imagination whose gravity drew us to our studies in the first place.

…

When we stare into the catatonic black bead of a Parakeet’s eye we must teach ourselves to glimpse the cold, alien madness that Max Ernst perceived when he chose to robe his naked brides in confections of scarlet feather and the transplanted monstrous heads of exotic birds. When some ocean-going Kite or Tern is captured in the sharp blue gaze of our Zeiss lenses, we must be able to see the stop motion flight of sepia gulls through the early kinetic photographs of Muybridge, beating white wings tracing a slow oscilloscope line through space and time.”

– Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

Not A Failure! Not A Failure!

I have been awarded the LLM (Masters in Law) with merit.

THANK YOU GOD!!!

And as if this good news isn’t enough, I have finally found the rare collaboration EP by Low & Spring Heel Jack on Soulseek and am downloading it this minute! Joy! Joy! Joy!

Over My Dead Body

I’m assuming the only reason London or the Scottish Highlands aren’t in this list of 50 Places To See Before You Die is that it’s a BBC site, so the voting emphasis is on places out of the UK.

Out of the 50, I’ve seen:
2. Great Barrier Reef
8. Sydney
18. Venice
27. Paris
35. Rome
37. Barcelona
39. Singapore (duh)

But all I can say is that the people who voted on this quiz seem to have different travel sensibilities from me. For one thing, call me a party-pooper, but I could so easily go the rest of my life without setting foot into Florida or Las Vegas.

I’m pretty astounded not a single place in Turkey made it onto this list – Istanbul? Cappadocia? Ephesus? And people would rather go to Florida than Jerusalem, which doesn’t even make the list? (Granted, you might die before you have time to see much of Jerusalem, but it’s an amazing place nonetheless.) In Europe I’d also rate Berlin more highly than Paris, Rome or Barcelona, but maybe that’s just me. (Russ? Views?) And I like Melbourne more than Sydney, but yet again, it’s not even on the list.

Lastly, I applaud the noble efforts of the Singapore Tourist Promotion Board, really I do, but who in their right mind would actually put Singapore as one of the 50 places you should see before you die??? More worth seeing than Bangkok? Marrakesh? Dubrovnik? St Petersburg? Don’t get me wrong, I think my country’s quite a fascinating place, and it’s certainly more interesting than the backpacker travel guides and Western media would have you believe, but one of the top 50 places to see before you die? Come on.

Pop Quiz, Hot Shot

Level 1: Desuetude. Do you know what this means?

Level 2: I’ll give it to you in a sentence. “Whereas the degree in sociology and political economy that Pnin had obtained with some pomp at the University of Prague around 1925 had become by mid century a doctorate in desuetude, he was not altogether miscast as a teacher of Russian.” (Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov)

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