Right, so there’s my Japanese dismemberment movie out of the way for this lifetime. It’s a blessing we weren’t able to get tickets for this on Saturday night after stuffing ourselves at the Breeks buffet dinner, but watched it on Sunday afternoon instead with lunch well out of the way.
Out of all the stereotypical reasons why straight girls like going to gay clubs, the only one that Taboo (at Tanjong Pagar) didn’t epitomize on Saturday night was that they’re full of gorgeous men. I have to say I didn’t find the sight of an entire club full of skin-tight singleted sweaty men with meticulously gelled and almost universally spiky hair particularly pleasant. While I admit to the occasional beefcake weakness, the rumpled intellectual look tends to keep my knees most lastingly shaky. But hey, there was good music, no sleazy gropers, good company (Ida, Yen, Fay, the guys will remain unnamed) and no cover charge, and so I had a smashingly good time.
From a phone conversation with Ida:
Ida: I left most of my clothes in London so I have nothing to wear tonight.
Me: Borrow something from one of your sisters?
Ida: I can’t, my sisters don’t dress like sluts.
“Then, brothers, it came. Oh, bliss, bliss and heaven. I lay all nagoy to the ceiling, my gulliver on my rookers on the pillow, glazzies closed, rot open in bliss, slooshying the sluice of lovely sounds. Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets three-wise silverflamed, and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again crunched like candy thunder. Oh, it was wonder of wonders. And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now, came the violin solo above all the other strings, and those strings were like a cage of silk round my bed. Then flute and oboe bored, like worms of like platinum, into the thick thick toffee gold and silver.”
– A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
One of my all-time favourite passages about music, and certainly one of the most distinctive. The other day some words from it came to mind when I was listening to Sigur Ros, so I thought I’d put the whole passage up here for everyone else to love too.
Elsewhere in reading, I finished Monday’s library books and headed back for more yesterday: Norwegian Wood (Haruki Murakami), The Ghost Road (Pat Barker, the last book in the Regeneration trilogy), Art And Lies (Jeanette Winterson), The Child Garden (Geoff Ryman).
From Monday, The Eye In The Door was a worthy sequel to Regeneration, which says a lot given that I loved Regeneration. It moves away from Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen to focus on Billy Prior, who had initially intrigued me less than the former two because he was completely fictional, as opposed to being a war poet I entered the story already loving. The book’s success, for me, lies in two accomplishments: firstly, making me interested in Prior as an individual beyond morbid fascination with his war experiences, and secondly, the idea of divisions within the self in almost everything the book explores, from homosexuality to class conflicts to Prior’s psychological problems to Dr Rivers’ difficulties in treating Sassoon. Engaging stuff, and Pat Barker’s accessible writing style helps a great deal.
Loved The Passion. Loved the language, loved the imagery, loved the quirky humour, loved it, loved it, loved it. Not exactly a hard-hitting book of ideas, and not particularly insightful even with regard to its major theme (passion, unsurprisingly), but all the way through I felt caressed by words, and often, that’s all I need or want.
Clubbing at Eden yesterday with Ida, Rashidah, Addy, Jianyi and Billy. The club is a converted old-style Singaporean terrace house – narrow but long, you can cram lots of them on a street, but they extend back a long way, and many of them have skylights. I’ve always liked them. Anyway, lots of these houses have been converted into clubs and bars on Mohammed Sultan Road, which means that movement through these clubs tends to be extremely linear. From the front of the club to the back. From the back to the front. Not many lateral options.
So we’re all on the dancefloor, which is long and narrow like the rest of the club, and there’s an exceptionally vigorous guy dancing behind Rashid and me. Very closely. Jianyi chivalrously changes places with Rashid. Vigorous Too-Close Guy accepts this philosophically and moves on to me. Billy chivalrously changes places with me. Vigorous Too-Close Guy remains vigorous and too close behind Billy.
Billy’s eyes pop. The rest of us start to giggle.
So Billy decides he’s had enough, takes a “Still vigorous and too close? I’ll give you fucking vigorous and too close, you wanker” course of action, and starts gyrating madly in full camp mode, head thrown back in orgasmic joy, arms raised in limp-wristed exaltation, hips a sinuous maelstrom of bellydanceresque splendour, and the rest of us are cracking up, and in response to all this Vigorous Too-Close Guy is undeterred, whereupon Billy’s eyes pop again and the rest of us start to completely lose it, all sense of rhythm deserting us, all efforts at dancing replaced by spasmodic twitching as we hunched over aching stomachs, laughing, laughing, laughing, and I felt hysterical and helplessly silly and gloriously alive.
The weather’s been moody the past week with sulks and squalls every now and then, and on Saturday in the car on the way to Pasir Ris every drop of rain seemed to think it was a kamikaze pilot seeking final glorious death on the windscreen, but yesterday, yesterday it was breathtakingly sunny, and I got lured outdoors.
The Marine Parade library’s one of the best ways to enjoy a beautiful day – tall glass walls let the light in, but air-conditioning and frappucinos protect you from the heat. On a Monday afternoon you escape the Sunday crowds, but there are just enough people to give it a contented buzz, more than enough comfy chairs to go round, and no queue at the Starbuck’s. I was disciplined and kept my four book limit in mind when scouring the shelves, instead of the way I usually end up staggering around with over ten books, most of which I later have to discard sadly, and settled down happily for the next two hours or so.
Final choices: The Passion (Jeanette Winterson), The Eye In The Door (Pat Barker), and the Lonely Planet guide to Turkey. I still had Let’s Go Greece 2001 on my card from two weeks ago, so that made four.
While waiting for the bus, I took a patriotic picture – the walkway in the public housing estate was festooned with flags in preparation for National Day, which is on 9 August. Lately our public housing estates have been looking more and more like condominiums, but the old building in this one does actually correspond with more typical ideas of “public housing”.
At my bus stop I decided it was still too pretty outside to go home, and walked to Katong Shopping Centre for black economy delights. If you’re Singaporean, you’ll know what I mean by this. If you’re not, let’s just say that in certain stores here they sell lots of flat shiny things with lots of other people’s intellectual/artistic property on them for very low prices. At least, that’s what I go there to buy. I daresay the middle-aged men in certain sections of the shops trying to conceal their salivation and callused right hands were after pleasures neither intellectual nor artistic.
I took the long way home, walking along the entrance to the expressway, and was conveniently informed that when I leave here for London on August 31, it’ll only take me 9 minutes to get to the airport. I love this home, but I still can’t wait to get back to that one.
An Equal Music is worth the read if you love classical music or are a classical musician, and even more so if, like me, you just happen to be a lapsed violinist/pianist living in London with a hankering for Vienna.
Having said that, I should clarify that you may not necessarily like the book after you’ve read it. You may, for example, get completely pissed off with the “classical musician psyche”, which I identified with occasionally, but more often than not was slightly stupefied by. This is possibly one of the many reasons why I gave up classical music for debating, where people are just as dysfunctional but at least a little more rational.
One thing I did understand completely in the book was the protagonist’s devotion to his violin, not merely as an exceptionally sweetly singing member of its class of string instrument, but as a unique entity in itself – the feel of it under his chin, the bounce of light off its varnish. The smoothness of its neck under the skin of his thumb as he goes from first to fourth position. Force me to choose between slashing my arm with a knife or slashing my violin and I will unhesitatingly and willingly make myself bleed. The fact that it lies long-neglected and lonely in its case as I write this makes no difference to what I’ve just said, although it does make me feel painfully guilty.
Galatea 2.2 was fascinating, but less of an easy read. Again, it dealt with ideas I personally like reading about, so if you tend to be drawn to variations on the Pygmalion myth, artificial intelligence, academia, the passions of reading and trials of writing, then this one’s very much worth a try. I actually found it far more moving than An Equal Music, and found its characters (even the computer) decidedly more multi-faceted. Oh, I should add – apart from all the things listed above, it’s also about where life and love seep into cracks between the compartments, and why that ultimately makes it so difficult to learn the human condition without living it yourself.
Agaetis Byrjun is everything I hoped it would be and more. It is gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh (brownie points for anyone who can identify the quote, which is from a book I’m rereading right now and loving even more than I ever did before). Thank you thank you thank you to Terry, who now joins Jeremy in my extremely short list of musical benefactors (people who give me albums which would be problematic or rather expensive to obtain otherwise).
Friday night was the finals of the RJC (Raffles Junior College, my old school) Dramafest, an inter-faculty drama competition where each faculty has to write and produce an original play. The Orgers of CAP’97 decided it would be a good occasion to attempt a reunion.
[Perhaps I should explain the Orgers. At the 1997 Creative Arts Programme, we were a bunch of RJC students who loved the writing aspect of the programme but also loved sitting around flinging innuendoes, insults and assorted bitches at each other for hours. We started off as “the RJ group”. Then “the Orgy group” due to our nightly tendency to congregate in large numbers in small rooms and sprawl on beds. Finally, we amalgamated the two and became the Orgers.
On the second-last day of the camp, each writing workshop group was given a pageworth of space in the daily camp publication to do whatever they wanted with. What we eventually came up with was so filthy on so many levels that the entire thing got heavily censored and most of it never got published.
What did make it to publication, I think, was one of our group efforts at bad poetry:
Tequila Sunrise
Weevils desire only their own death, after all
As screwdrivers roll to never-ending halts
The chair shakes; I am afraid.
The ticking stalks through the grass.
I, in the centre of this vortex,
grasp the fragile life-bird and sing.
Her feathers are notes of hard hatred
And her beak is made of desolation
Her scream blows me off myself
through the facade of my Taka face
The pen is in my hand
I run unabashedly to the mouth
of the double-barrelled shotgun
that awaits.
Some weeks later, we were at an open-mike poetry reading at the Substation, and decided on a whim to do Tequila Sunrise, intending to bring some comic relief to the session. So there we were, declaiming the lines, complete with interpretive dance, and the audience sat there completely straight-faced and took everything seriously.
I’m not sure if it was an indictment of our failure to produce truly abysmal poetry or the generally pretentious climate of poetry reading sessions at the time, but whatever it was, it was hilarious, if a little embarassing.]
Back to Dramafest finals. It was typical, I guess. The Arts faculty play had people yelling about censorship and repression (although I must say the dance culminating in crucifixion symbolism was new), and the Medicine faculty play was workmanlike and coherent, but ultimately far less interesting to me than the organized chaos of the Arts production.
Is it just me or does almost every play I’ve seen in my life feature a line somewhere that goes “No matter how much everything changes, everything is still…(meaningful pause)…the same”, or variations on it?
After that we descended on Holland Village in droves as Rafflesians tend to do after college events, spent an extremely long time walking around trying to find a place that could accomodate the unwieldy size of our group, and finally settled down for murtabak (a South Indian dish which involves very stretchy dough, onions, and minced meat, and it’s dee-lish), bubble tea and teh ahlia (ginger tea).
After supper we popped in at Tangos, where other friends were drinking, to try and find more people to share the post-midnight cab fare with, and ended up talking about labia and clitoria (a flower we had to study for GCE Biology which unsurprisingly bore a striking resemblance to a…) and other similarly debauched things for twenty minutes before I finally decided I probably had to start for home if I wanted to be fully awake to judge the national debate finals the next day.