East Coast Evening

Some time on Wednesday, or perhaps on Tuesday night, the haze rolled in from Sumatran forest fires, and the sky’s been a muted insubstantial blue ever since, which isn’t as bad as it sounds, because when it’s gloriously blue, it also tends to be gloriously hot, and I then get ingloriously sweaty.

Walking along East Coast Beach on Wednesday, on the way to dinner with Luke, Zakir and Walter, I passed an incomplete pier, where people were ignoring OB signposts, maybe because it’s nicer to dangle your feet over the edge without railings in the way.

We got dinner from the hawker centre and found a bench near the shore. Nasi goreng (Malay fried rice, red, spicy and scrumptious), apple pearl tea, sea breeze, quirky conversation and REM’s I’ve Been High playing somewhere in the back of my head. Nice.

253 (Geoff Ryman)

253 (via lukelog) is the Web edition of a novel I thumbed through in a bookstore a year or two ago, enjoyed, but then promptly forgot about, which is less an indictment of the work itself than of my Swiss-cheese memory.

Very brief description: it’s 253 people on a London Underground Bakerloo line train, each described in 253 words, each description hyperlinked to the others where relevant. The train will crash at Elephant And Castle.

It’d be interesting to take a print copy of the book on the Tube, read it conspicuously, then eyeball each passenger in the carriage in turn and scribble furiously in the margins. Then again, most people probably wouldn’t bat an eyelid. Far stranger things happen on the Tube, after all.

Tamade

And the saga of curiously named Singaporean places continues: dinner last night was at tamade (Chinese swear word if broken up into Ta Ma De), with Terry, at Robertson Quay. The waiters apparently scrupulously avoid explanations of the name; the one we asked said we’d have to ask the manager, but at any rate, he thinks it’s a mismatch, which I thought was the perfect answer showing himself as loyal employee but still down wit’ the Chinese hood.

The restaurant itself is sort of like a minimalist Wagamama (for the Londoners), and has great desserts. We had three. The stereotypically bitchy/luvvie gay waiter was a strange but entertaining touch.

Robertson Quay is lovely, and I wish I’d discovered it sooner. Lots of riverside eateries, but nothing with the garishness of Boat Quay, and all blessedly tranquil, just people and quiet coffeed conversations, beautiful asymmetric bridges which I wish I’d brought the digicam to photograph, and night-empty skyscrapers reflected in the dark shimmer of the river.

Mahler Newbie

Which Mahler symphony should a Mahler neophyte begin with? More specifically, which symphony should a neophyte with my music tastes begin with? The common recommendation seems to be to start with the fourth and avoid the sixth like the plague until you’re more settled in, but here the advice is to screw the naysayers and start with the sixth if you like 20th century music. The Beethoven table given matches favourite Beethoven symphonies to recommended Mahler starting points, and my favourite Beethoven, the fifth, is linked to the sixth as well.

Hmm. Advice?

Hymn

In church yesterday, while we were singing Let There Be Peace On Earth, a fighter plane passed overhead, emitting the sort of absolutely earth-shaking roar that reverberates in your sternum and the bones of your face and compels all life beneath the plane to stop during its passage because of the sheer impossibility of doing anything else while the air is pure noise.

So for about ten seconds, there was nothing but this uncompromising swell of sound, ravaging pristine church air while the mouths of the choirmembers doggedly continued forming the words Let There Be Peace On Earth, and I started giggling helplessly.

Rick Astley Rut / Regeneration (Pat Barker)

(NoBloggerLove post 3: Friday 6 July)

Conversational snippet, which proves that Wednesday night’s clubbing ordeal was, at least, not all for naught:

Friend: Michelle, I just feel like I’m in a rut.
Me: _____, things could be worse. At least you weren’t dancing to Rick Astley on the platform at Mambo Night, for example.
Friend: You have a point. I feel better now.

* * *

(NoBloggerLove post 4: Saturday 7 July)

Regeneration is one of those books that makes me want to slap myself on the head after finishing it.

There’s a kind of seething frustration, a sort of “I can’t believe I spent all these years not having read Regeneration” sense of annoyed wonder at this book that I’ve deprived myself the pleasure of over a significant period of time, either through ignorance or apathy.

It happens occasionally enough to be just about right – any more frequently, and I’d worry about my ignorance; any less frequently, and I might start to miss that exciting feeling of making a find. It last happened some time in January, I think, when I heard Paul Simon’s Graceland for the first time, and again, there was this feeling, this vexation, that the rest of the world had spent years listening to Graceland, and I’d stupidly missed out.

If, like me, you like war poetry, especially Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and think the idea of being a fly on the wall in the hospital where they met and where Sassoon received “treatment” for his opposition to WWI is intriguing; if you enjoy subtle, intelligent writing somewhat in the vein of The Remains Of The Day, which is, in my opinion, a showcase of the art of saying just enough and no more, and if you haven’t read Regeneration (I don’t know about the other two books in the trilogy yet, but I’ll definitely get to them ASAP), then you might just be heading for a slap on the head.

Mrs Choa and the Airshow / Luan Qi Ba Zao

(NoBlogLove post #1: Tuesday 3 July, sometime in the morning, nostalgic)

I was all ready to dive into reading and not surface till Tuesday when I came back from the library yesterday, but then Luke called, and I went to the beach for dinner with him and Song Ching. The waterfront area’s changed quite drastically since last year – lots of new restaurants with a central alfresco promenade, but it was peaceful, and breezy, and I still got that old laid back East Coast vibe, which was good.

The only change I didn’t like was that they took away the Viking. It was one of those generic fairground rides you find around the world, a much less frilled version of Pirates Of The Caribbean, which had been there since as far back as I can remember. For a nine-year-old in 1989 Singapore (where proper fairground/theme park type rides didn’t exist apart from ferris wheels and carousels), living in the East, the Viking was pretty much the scariest ride around. I’d arrange my place in the queue so that I got a place in the highest deck, so as to maximise that thrilling stomachless moment right at the peak of the ship’s swing, when I’d wave my hands madly and stand up in my seat as far as the bar allowed so that it’d feel even more like I was falling down towards the people on the other side.

When I was fourteen, there was an airshow at the beach one day. It was a school day, but the principal had said that classes could go to the airshow (the beach is walking distance from the school) if accompanied by two teachers. Our form teacher that year was Mrs Choa, who was in her late fifties, crochety, horrendously pernickety about all things English, and generally not a high scorer on wannabecool fourteen-year-olds’ teacher wishlist.

We’d started the year hating her, but there’d been improvements along the way. She mentioned at a camp that she had no problems with single dating for girls our age, and gained a little street cred. We started to understand that her fussiness and mini-rants were because she expected high standards of everything from us, and from the world.

So we went to look for her, filled with hope and trepidation. She asked if we’d managed to find another teacher to make up the two teachers. We hadn’t – other teachers were already taking their own classes, or had been snapped up by other classes. She considered this fact silently for a moment. We stood there, already crestfallen.

I remember her waving airily to the principal as we trooped out of the gates.

After the airshow, other classes went straight back to school. I think it was time for her lesson on our timetable. Demanding fourteen-year-olds that we were, we decided to see if we could push our luck and asked if we could go to McDonalds. She said yes. Amidst fry-munching and Coke-slurping, we then asked if we could go on the Viking. Amazed when she said yes, we asked, wouldn’t she get in trouble?

Her answer: “If you’re going to get hanged for stealing a lamb, you might as well get hanged for stealing a sheep.”

That afternoon at the beach was a watershed (no pun intended) for the relationship between my class and Mrs Choa. After that we started realizing that the challenge was to do things so well as to satisfy even her. At the end of the year, more prefects were chosen from my class than from any other. We were runners-up in the swimming carnival, despite having only one trained swimmer in the class. We organized a schoolwide food’n’fun fair that raised $5000 for the school building fund. She remains the most influential and memorable teacher I’ve ever had.

All that was left of the Viking conquests, as far as a mob of laughing, screaming, blue-pinafored schoolgirls knew, was that aging fairground ride with peeling gilt paint. The conquest Mrs Choa made that day, and that year, lives on.

* * *
(NoBlogLove post #2: Thursday 5 July, in sheepish afternoon aftermath)

I haven’t quite figured out how I came to be dancing to I Should Be So Lucky on the platform at Zouk last night, but I’m sure grievous lapses in judgment were involved.

Temporary aberration. Temporary aberration.

In other news, I spent the two days before this debacle in a less embarassing fashion. Tuesday was another excursion with Pei Ee – we scoured Bedok for cheap shoes and she introduced me to the joys of the McFlurry with Oreos. Wednesday was lunch with Luke and Mrs Goh at a rather good Vietnamese noodle place in Holland Village, plus terrarium searching for her daughter’s science project, then beloved Ghim Moh hawker centre for Luan Qi Ba Zao, which deserves a little elucidation.

Luan Qi Ba Zao is the Ghim Moh hawker centre’s special creation for its numerous Rafflesian patrons (our college was across the road, and there’s nothing like a sugar’n’ice overload to make the heat, dust and undone tutorials of the day go away). Loosely translated, its name is a Chinese idiom which means “everything crazily everywhere” (er, very loosely translated), although in the stall’s English menu it is inexplicably referred to as Get Down. Go figure.

Anyway, it’s a wild concoction of condensed milk, ice, fruit cocktail, peaches, longans and chunks of almond jelly, which may appear strange cupfellows (hence “everything crazily everywhere”) but work together wonderfully well once slurped.

Rafflesians first learn about Luan Qi Ba Zao in the orientation booklet the student council produces. On first reading about it, I asked Luke (former student council hack) if it was for real, or if it was just part of a cruel joke played on unsuspecting JC1s – I’m not quite sure how to explain this to non-Chinese speakers, but going up and asking for a Luan Qi Ba Zao if no such dish actually existed on the menu would be something like going to a NYC hotdog vendor and asking for a Whimmy Whammy Ding Dong Phlugelwhip.

Luke’s reply: It’s real, but if they tell you to try the Ta Ma De (it’s a Chinese swear phrase), think twice.

Luan-Zi-Ba-Zaoness was then mitigated by the structure and logic of debating, or rather, watching the new team debate, and then being hypercritical of their flaws in a rather merciless debrief.

Then full speed ahead to Orchard Road for dinner with assorted CAPers (alumni of the Creative Arts Programme) and thwarted Memento viewing attempt, finally ending up in the arcade, where my stagger into temporary aberration probably began with Dance Dance Revolution.

I should have realized at that point that I was inexorably destined for cheese.

Satisfying Saturation

Joy, I’m at that point where the amount of new music and new books I have to devour exceeds the amount of slack time I have in the day, such that every time I’m trying to choose what to listen to or read, there’s unexplored territory there for the taking. It’s a feeling of satisfying saturation.

After coffee on Sunday with Vikram, Walter, Ashraf and Gaurav, venturing into Borders started off as a diligent attempt to purchase Hart’s The Concept Of Law so that I could start (ha) on my jurisprudence summer assignment, but I came out instead with Painful (Yo La Tengo), Bossanova (Pixies), and No Other City, an anthology of Singaporean urban poems.

Today’s trip to the library yielded Life After God (Douglas Coupland), The Sportswriter (Richard Ford), Anil’s Ghost (Michael Ondaatje), Galapagos (Kurt Vonnegut), Underworld (Don DeLillo; I got through 80% of it before I had return it to the UCL library), and Regeneration (Pat Barker).

Street Photography Shyness

Strange: walking around Singapore with the digital camera, I see things I want to photograph, but feel shy about doing so, whereas I’d snap away without a second thought in London. I tried to pinpoint the source of this reticence, and kept hearing this little voice going “don’t look at me like that, I’m not a tourist, God forbid that I should be mistaken for a foreigner in my own country…”

I suppose this makes some sort of sense. In London I take it for granted that people see me as a foreigner, so walking around acting like a tourist changes nothing. The thing that puzzles me is that this Singapore shyness is extremely uncharacteristic – usually, if people are looking at me, the temptation is to mess further with their heads.

The sillliest thing of all, of course, is that this is what’s most likely to happen: Michelle plucks up courage, takes photo. Starts stewing in the juices of cultural discomfort, “aretheylookingatme? arepeoplelooking? what can I do to subtly show I’m not a foreigner but just someone walking around taking photos, DAMMIT, is that so strange?”. Average Singaporean walking by on the street gives her a casual glance, and forgets her the next nanosecond. His next thought is “Eh, where to makan tonight ah?” (Singlish translation: makan = eat, eh and ah = exclamations we add on beginnings and endings of sentences, just…because.)

This all means I should stop being silly and unMichellian.

WSDC Blip

Most of this afternoon was spent at ACJC (Anglo-Chinese Junior College) watching JC1 debaters find their feet and catching up with other old hacks. Our 2001 team to the World Schools Debating Championships is getting a national excellence award for coming in 3rd, roundly beating everyone else in speaker points, and having the top, fourth and sixth best speakers in the world. The success of previous national teams was apparently taken into account as well in the award, which means, I suppose, that I can think of a tiny bit of that award as mine. Which is nice.

Other than that, things are very much the same – the cab to ACJC still costs $9.70 (give or take 20 cents), there are a couple of really likeable J1 kids who I can see going far in the debating circuit because they’re smart, well-adjusted and in it with the right attitude, and then there are a few disgusting little squirts who might as well tattoo I Want To Be On The National Team on their arrogant little foreheads. It’s the same every year.

Whatever it is, I’m glad the debating bug nibbled today. I was beginning to miss it.