“Fleeing Nuclear Holocaust” List

Apart from the fact that the writing at dooce.com is hilarious, other kicks I got from reading her site include the fact that at one point directly under her link to me she linked to “Sexual Healing” and “Pay-per-view consumption of porn in Provo”.

I’m too late to take part formally in her cruel exercise (If you were fleeing nuclear holocaust/a second term with G.W. Bush and could only take one mix tape with 12 songs on it and one book, which 12 songs and which book would they be?), but couldn’t resist giving it a try, belatedly.

But before I do: the problem I have with lists of this sort is never deciding how seriously I should take the criteria – if I were truly fleeing nuclear holocaust, I might just balk at taking Soundgarden’s Blow Up The Outside World along even if I absolutely loved it. This is a subset of a more general species of consideration – should the music reflect my probable need for spirit-boosting and optimism when in the process of fleeing nuclear holocaust or more George? Because a great deal of the music I love isn’t particularly happy-clappy, and who knows what effects it could have on my fragile sanity in such circumstances. Also, assuming these 12 songs are all I’m going to have to listen to, surely I’ll need variety rather than just my 12 favourite songs, so even though it sorely pains me to have only one Sonic Youth song in there, it’ll have to be that way for balance.

And after that long preliminary ramble, my 12 songs, list prone to frequent and irrational change, are:

‘Cross The Breeze (Sonic Youth)
AT&T (Pavement)
Manta Ray (Pixies)
Marine Machines (Amon Tobin)
Black Steel (Tricky)
Get Ur Freak On (Missy Elliot)
A Question Of Lust (Depeche Mode)
Sometimes When We Touch (Dan Hill)
Wednesday Morning 3 AM (Simon and Garfunkel)
They Can’t Take That Away From Me (sung by Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong)
Brahms’ 2nd symphony (just the 1st movement if I’m not allowed the whole thing)
One Day More (Les Miserables)

And my one book probably has to be Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, although I choose this sulkily because of all the others I have to leave behind.

When Angst Attacks!

(Been trying to post for the past few days, but Bloggerglitches kept getting in the way)

Last Wednesday and Sunday were meetings with people connected in one way or another with the hall I stayed in this year – dinner for Martin on Wednesday, barbecue in honour of Father John on Sunday, mildly enjoyable but forgettable occasions I went through feeling somewhat detached, as if I were floating above conversations, consciousness in one place watching body go through the motions of socializing.

Why is it so hard to connect with some people and so magically easy with others? The question is so trite it’s almost not worth answering. I lived with wonderful people this year, yet for most of them we were connected by little more than our common religion and a year’s worth of pleasantries. Some of this is admittedly my own fault – I spent the first half of the year too caught up in my life outside the hall to enjoy life inside it. When exams loomed and I had to stay home and study, I discovered a few with whom conversation managed to blossom, but then the year was almost over, and till now they know only the tiniest fraction of me, which is something I regret.

The problem was that there was the me who lived outside the hall and the me who lived in the hall, and the people who inhabited each sphere only ever saw scattered pieces of the picture. Trying to unite the spheres was never particularly successful either – I didn’t think most of my Catholic hallmates would be particularly interested in the details of my clubbing, or the latest gig I’d been to, or why I’d kicked ass in a debate, and I certainly kept a lot of the bitchiness which I indulged in out of the hall to myself when I was within it. Conversely, my outside friends, composed almost exclusively of steadfast atheists, weren’t particularly interested in how it was the most spiritual Easter of my life, although they would probably have applauded Alec, Chris and Enoch’s drinking shenanigans on Maundy Thursday night. And I talked to almost no one in or out of my hall about what I loved when I was alone, the books I read, the music I listened to, the strange workings of my head, because there simply is no one I know in the UK who I thought capable of understanding it all.

It’s not that I’m terribly dissatisfied with my social circles – a lot of the time they can be immensely fulfilling, but once in a while they seem overly compartmentalized.

I can only talk about poetry and literature with Creative Arts Programme friends. I can only talk about debating within my respective debating circles in Singapore and the UK. Scattered friends share my passion for music, but only in generality; once we get down to specifics the compartmentalization begins again – only Marten will go with me to indie rock concerts, only Russ will go with me to hip-hop clubs, Jeremy loves both but is in the US, the people who like popular music can’t talk about classical, the classical musicians know little of popular music.

It’s also not that I feel totally alone in the world. I’ve been blessed with a few friends who share a number of my interests, or perhaps they share none but ultimately they understand me nonetheless. They know who they are. I guess I just wish there were more.

At its core, stripped of the nuances and accoutrements my psyche tries to sneak in, there’s a longing, sometimes unnerving in its intensity, to scream: I am so much more than this that you see and presume, than the limited dimensionality which is all most people ever manage to grasp of me. Or all they’re ever interested in grasping, anyway.

And I guess, on the rare occasions that being alone ceases to be a source of succour and bliss, it is the age-old longing for just one person who thinks this odyssey is worth the effort.

Store-Naming Genius

From E|a:
“I once had plans to open a store called “The Ottoman Empire” which exclusively sold ottomans.”

Grammar Geekhood

I never quite realized just how much of a grammar geek I am till I discovered The Vocabula Review, and almost every article and feature seemed to strike a chord with me, and I don’t mean a namby-pamby rock-a-bye-baby softly strummed mandolin chord, I mean a full-on aural assault cock-rock volume 11 power chord.

From The Like Virus (David Grambs):

“The kids and more and more adults seem locked in a kind of cawing hyperpresent tense. Many have strangely unresonant, throat-blocked, or glottal voices and use “up-talk,” the tendency to end all sentences in a rising, questioning inflection.”

YES!! YES!! Oh, he feels my pain!! I am beset by violent and irrational urges whenever I hear many varieties of the American accent, this one in particular.

Other features that elicited similarly orgasmic (if you ignore the “Oh, he feels my pain” bit. I’m not kinky that way.) screams of agreement from me were Grumbling About Grammar, On Dimwitticisms and Clues To Concise Writing.

(Having said all this, it would be hypocritical not to admit that I commit a fair number of grammatical crimes myself. I have problems with semi-colons. I overuse “basically” and “ostensibly”. I often wilfully adopt non-standard methods of writing and sentence construction, and much of the content of this blog will testify to this.)

GEP Guys, Tennis, Blockbusters

The last couple of days have been refreshingly different in small but worthwhile ways.

Friday: dinner at Newton hawker centre (where I haven’t been for years), with, er, seven guys (which I also don’t do too often. I usually stick to about four or five), followed by the immensely entertaining Rush Hour 2 (as cosmopolitan as I like to think of myself as being, I still enjoy watching a yellow man kicking white butt), and intermittent discussions about the sociological ramifications of the GEP. (Gifted Education Programme. All seven guys were from it. I got in but chose not to go. Obviously there was lots of room for discussion.)

Monday: night tennis fun with Ken. Despite my stint on my primary school mini-tennis team (downsized racquets, oversized spongy balls) and Ken’s recent buff sportiness, our tennis hour could perhaps be accurately described as a breathtaking showcase of incompetence, as much of our cross-court repartee acknowledged.

Ken: Okay, let’s set a goal for ourselves! Let’s try for a rally of five!
I serve into the net.
Ken: Okay, one! Let’s go for one!

Me, serving: Right, let’s focus on control!
Ken swings the racquet but misses the ball completely.
Me: Right, let’s also focus on aim!

Today: excursion with Luke and Yuping to Darkest Singapore to watch Moulin Rouge at Causeway Point (I admit that in a country with a total landspace of 640 square kilometres, nothing is very far, but Causeway Point is as far northwest as you can go in Singapore without having to visit Malaysia), because it was the only cinema left in Singapore that was still showing the movie.

The movie? Nice eye candy. Reasonable ear candy. Liked their cover of Roxanne. John Leguizamo’s always a treat to watch. But it left me completely unmoved at the end, so I’m wondering why so many people kept telling me how much they cried. I guess the fact that I feel absolutely no need to spew copious amounts of words in either praise or censure of it probably says the most of all, and something tells me this is actually the worst possible reaction a director like Baz Luhrman could have. It was worth the money, effort and time, but I like it the least out of the three Baz Luhrman films I’ve seen. (I liked Strictly Ballroom best, followed closely by Romeo and Juliet)

The Mercy Seat (Nick Cave)

The Mercy Seat is dizzyingly claustrophobic; no matter where you run, you keep running up against “And the mercy seat is waiting”, and a menacing wall of sound closes in, frenetic psycho strings, crashing piano, approaching terror in the drums, close your eyes and you see flashes of cold steel, the jagged violence of electricity, shadowed corridors that eventually close in and engulf you.

Poetry Readings Not Just For Ponces

So there’s the bunch of us poetry types, awkwardly situated in the Borders history section such that poor unassuming history types wandering around in search of The Fall Of Byzantine or whatever had unexpected encounters with Luke’s asshole musings or Yi-Sheng banging a book wildly against his head while shrieking:

Mary had a little lamb!
Do you like green eggs and ham!
I love you and you love me!
Frame thy fearful symmetry!
Let us go then, you and I!
Like a diamond in the sky!
EIEIEIO!
Happy birthday and hello!
(from A Loud Poem to be Read to a Very Obliging Audience, by Ng Yi-Sheng. One of my favourite poems by one of my favourite poets.)

I enjoy poetry readings. Even the ones that reek of pretension amuse rather than annoy me, and most of the readings I’ve been to in Singapore have generally been populated by people who go there for love of the craft rather than some self-pleasing agenda.

I remember John Agard and Grace Nichols in the Substation courtyard, infusing candle-lit night air with their fascinating rhythm. I recently described our backfired attempt at comedy during an open-mike session in the same place. There were all those readings at the National Library as well – Luke reading Climbing Mount Biang (I can’t remember how it went exactly, but it was something like “After climbing Biang/You realize that the only thing worse than going up Biang/Is going down Biang/Wah biang!”. The last two words are a Hokkien “exclamation”.), some Aussie guy singing a strummy thing he called Dolphin Song and the sound guy behind him cracking up because it was so laughably bad, and always at least one poem that managed to touch me.

AMG Gratitude

From somnolence.org, my newest daily read:
‘I do think that the AMG is a useful resource, despite the whole “Like This? Try That!” tool being a waste of time. For example: Like the Red House Painters? Want something “Colder, Firmer”? Try… Henry Rollins!’

Jokes aside, I agree. At Pitchfork, Mark Richard-San writes about pre-Internet record hunting, and how searching through record bins remains more appealing to him than downloading songs. I can see where he’s coming from, but my personal reaction to it is that for me, the Internet was a godsend. Growing up in Singapore, none of my friends shared my tastes in music. We have no alternative radio stations. We had only one local magazine that reviewed albums other than the latest Mariah Carey, and I remain a regular purchaser of BigO even though I now get most of what I need from the Net, simply because it fed my hunger for something different when I had nothing else, and I remain grateful.

Anyway, once I got Internet access, everything changed, and the AMG was one of the sites I used to spend hours trawling. I’ve written about this before and I don’t need to go into it again, but I guess my basic point is that for me, finding out about Neutral Milk Hotel and Amon Tobin and even the Smashing Pumpkins (before Mellon Collie) was the result of me spending hours on the Internet, because I simply had nowhere else to go to find what I wanted. And the AMG was, and remains, a big part of that, so thanks, AMG. I owe you.

Earworms

Music moments that won’t leave my head this week:

  • The rhythmic riffing that opens Fugazi’s Red Medicine (my first ever Fugazi album, but it definitely won’t be my last). Catchiest thing I’ve heard since Bye Bye Bye. :P
  • The eight note sequence in Ana (Bossanova, Pixies). You hear it for the first time about 30 seconds into the song, and it starts with four ascending notes. I have no idea how to write about it other than referring to the notes that make it up, and just listing the notes doesn’t come close to explaining the grip that little sequence has on me. The best I can do is to say that those last three notes seem to almost chime.
  • The trumpets in Wagner’s Tannhauser March. Simple, sunny, jubilant.
  • “Plaaaaacing fingers through the notches in your spine” (Two Headed Boy, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, Neutral Milk Hotel). This album is a universe of wonderful moments, but this one stands out this week, simply because I like the line, and it reminds me of a line from one of my favourite poems.

          And I am learning him, learning
    the journey of him, the journey of the
    cobbled spine and the contours of muscle,
    of tongue and lips and teeth, of the old scars and
    the steel-toed heart. His warmth winds around me
    and his voice binds me with a whispered word.
    I trace his veins to their fire source and
    dissolve into them, and find the shape of him
    in the heart of a flame.
          He is the poem I travel.
    — One Winged Angels, Koh Tsin Yen

I might see Yen later today if she goes to the poetry reading I’ll be at this afternoon – it’s to promote onewinged, an anthology of young Singaporean writing named after her poem. I’ll ask her if I can put the whole poem up here.

Loving Les Mis

I came home on Monday from dinner with Jiawen and was engaged in all-out nose-honking (I have been attacked by the snifflebug) while watching the Les Miserables 10th anniversary concert on TV. My mother came out for a midnight glass of water, and said “Goodness, dear, you’ve seen this, what, over ten times, and you still cry?”

I don’t still cry. It was just the sniffles. But Les Mis remains one of the great heart-wrenching loves of my life, and just right now there’s nothing I want to do more than reread the book (this resolve may have become somewhat weakened by the time I’m wading through the 20 pages about sewers, but we’ll see), rewatch the musical when I get back to London, and relisten to the soundtrack (all 3 CDs, and I know almost all of it by heart).

I know Les Mis isn’t exactly a high-brow pleasure – professing my love for Stephen Sondheim might be more musically astute. I don’t care. I’m not ashamed of the fact that for me it pushes all the right buttons and tugs all the right heartstrings. It’s the same way Beethoven’s 5th has its hand round my heart even if his 6th is the one my brain loves.

I love every note sung by Javert (my favourite character), and every subsequent return to the musical motif in which he first enters (“Now bring me Prisoner 24601”, during Look Down).

I love the blossoming of the harmony in At The End Of The Day at “Like the waves crash on the sand/Like a storm that’ll break any second”.

I love it when both Valjean and Javert hiss “Javert!” simultaneously during their first confrontation (Valjean: I am warning you Javert!/Javert: You know nothing of Javert!)

I love Mdm Thernadier. “Master of the ‘ouse/Isn’t worth me spit/Comforter, philosopher and lifelong shit!”

I love everything Enjolras sings. “One more day before the storm!” abruptly ends the saccharine love triangle passage in One Day More for the passionate idealism and brotherhood of the students, and from there the song unfurls in all its glory, and I’m goose-pimpled from beginning to end.

“They will come when we call.” “Damn their warnings, damn their lies/They will see the people rise.” They didn’t come, and the people didn’t rise, and the slow painful turn of the barricades after the final disastrous battle is always agonizing.

The anguish of Marius’s “Oh my friends, my friends, don’t ask me/What your sacrifice was for” (Empty Chairs at Empty Tables) gets me every time.

I love the entire passage in the epilogue where the spirits of Fantine and Eponine appear and sing with Valjean. “And remember the truth that once was spoken/To love another person is to see the face of God.”

And those closing strains die away, and the finale begins, a faint chorus of distant voices singing in unison, the orchestra silent. “Do you hear the people sing lost in the valley of the night? It is the music of a people who are climbing to the light.” In the next verse the orchestra gives a tentative bass, and then everything starts to gain in momentum and strength till the final jubilant “Tomorrow comes!”, and there’s a lump in my throat, and I’m shaking, and I clap, and clap, and clap.