King Rat (China Mieville)

I decided it was about time I read some China Mieville (although he’s a notable writer in his own right, I must admit the main draw for me was that he’s said the Borribles trilogy is one of his biggest influences) so I went looking in the library shelves. I know Perdido Street Station is his most celebrated work, but when I read the blurb on the back of King Rat it was clear I had to start with that instead:

Something is stirring in London’s dark, stamping out its territory in brickdust and blood. Something has murdered Saul’s father, and left Saul to pay for the crime.

But a shadow from the urban waste breaks into his prison cell and leads him to freedom. A shadow called King Rat.

In the night-land behind London’s facade, in sewers and slums and rotting dead spaces, Saul must learn his true nature.

Grotesque murders rock the city like a curse. Mysterious forces prepare for a showdown. With Drum and Bass pounding the backstreets, Saul confronts his bizarre inheritance – in the badlands of South London, in the heart of darkness, at the gathering of the Junglist Massive.

Like the DJ says: ‘Time for the Badman.‘

Potentially a bit naff, I know (who capitalizes dance music genre names like that? It’s like a Winnie the Pooh book), but how can I resist? I’m hoping it’ll be like Neverwhere…with riddim.

Longest 12 Hours Ever

We watched the 11.35 pm screening of Sweeney Todd last night. My appreciation of the second half of the movie was somewhat affected by a little hungry voice in my head going “pie pie pie pie want pie want pie pie pie pie want want want” continuously. This morning, Alec was running errands nearby and phoned me once he was done to ask what he could buy me for lunch. There was only one answer.

Gorilla Marketing

Ads like this really make me miss watching TV in the UK. Gorilla and Phil Collins’ In The Air Tonight have a moment, and very tangentially, Cadbury tries to sell some chocolates. (Via Mayee.)

Must Not Moon Yasukuni

Japan has never been high on my list of places to travel to, mostly because nothing I’ve ever seen or heard about it has ever really appealed to me. Everything I’ve seen of its cities in the movies looks dystopic and ugly and makes me want to hide in a corner, and the bizarro Japanese quirks that seem to fascinate the rest of the world usually just annoy me. I also have a larger political problem with Japan’s shifty stance on its wartime atrocities, which is probably the main reason my feelings about Japan have always been decidedly chilly.

And yet, I am going to Tokyo next week. Never underestimate the ability of a free hotel stay to triumph over my principles!

Alec’s there on work, so I’ll be exploring on my own the vast majority of our time there. If anyone has tips about how a non-Japanese speaker with a decent but not excellent sense of direction can best enjoy exploring Tokyo (and nearby places like Nikko, Kamakura or Hakone) alone in the depths of winter, please share. I’ve done a fair bit of reading up, but I’d be especially interested in hearing about any particular places, activities or meals that people found especially memorable, or anything that people would not recommend. So far, my plan A is to do totally cool edgy shit, transcending language and cultural barriers and finding a new enlightened understanding of this nation I have so long disdained. My plan B is to spend 7 days in Daiso, which would also be bliss.

Words Of Mutilation

I’ve always pipe-dreamed about making some foray into freelance music writing, but I usually bring myself quickly back to reality by reminding myself that good music writing is damn difficult. I’m rarely satisfied with any of the writing I do here to begin with, and that’s already about music that stands out to me. So I worry that if I had to churn out something about music I was indifferent to, simply because I was getting paid to do it, the end product would be dismal.

I really hope the same reasons were at play for some of the bad writing I’m about to “showcase” – a rather bitchy thing to do, I know, but what are blogs for if not for occasionally venting the impotent fury that would bemuse and bore everyone else around you?

From Juice magazine, I’m not sure which edition (I photographed the offending text and threw away the rest), Pavan Shamdasani reviews a Pixies tribute album. Here’s the full text of the review:

“This is odd. There’s a considerable chance that you’ve never heard of The Pixies. They were never a mainstream band, and most of their popularity appeared years after their break-up, when Kurt Cobain admitted to ripping off their stop/start dynamics. So to put out a tribute album for a band that has no casualties, was never that celebrated and was still touring up till last year is a strange occurrence. And even stranger are the cover choices – a male emo singer extolling the pleasures of a big, black cock on “Gigantic”? A clubby remix of lovesick stalker-ballad “Hey”? A Mogwai noisefest on “Gouge Away”? A psychedelic journey through muffled vocals and drunken horns in “Where Is My Mind?” OK, maybe the last one makes sense, but still, this is by and large a terribly incompetent compilation that pays little tribute to what made The Pixies so special.”

  • There’s a considerable chance that you’ve never heard of The Pixies. Way to start off a review, dude – with a big dose of condescension for your readers!
  • …most of their popularity appeared… Popularity does not “appear” fully formed from Zeus’s head, it is “gained” or “garnered”.
  • So to put out a tribute album for a band that has no casualties, was never that celebrated and was still touring up till last year is a strange occurrence. Where do I even begin? 1) Ferry disasters have casualties. Bands do not. 2) A huge number of tribute albums are made for people who are live and kicking. Google this if you need proof. 3) It is either misleading or ignorant to describe a band who broke up acrimoniously in 1993 and didn’t reform until 2004 as “still touring up till last year”. 4) The act of putting out an album cannot be described as a strange “occurrence”. It may be a strange “move” or an odd “decision”, but it is not an “occurrence”.
  • And even stranger are the cover choices – a male emo singer extolling the pleasures of a big, black cock on “Gigantic”? Because male emo singers aren’t allowed to enjoy big black cocks, clearly.
  • A clubby remix of lovesick stalker-ballad “Hey”? A Mogwai noisefest on “Gouge Away”? A psychedelic journey through muffled vocals and drunken horns in “Where Is My Mind?” OK, maybe the last one makes sense, but still, this is by and large a terribly incompetent compilation that pays little tribute to what made The Pixies so special. What’s so self-evidently wrong with any of the cover choices described? Why do they pay little tribute to what made The Pixies so special? And given that the writer starts off the review by assuming most of his readers don’t even know the band, how on earth are they now supposed to understand this conclusion if he doesn’t throw them any frickin’ bone machines?

O RLY?

I have to return House of Meetings to the library today without having finished it, unfortunately (The Somnambulist got in the way), but before I do I just have to capture this rather intriguing line: “…even in their most intimate dealings the women, too, were worked on by socio-economic reality. In the post-war years, there were no non-swallowers in the Soviet Union. None.”

Bumbly Baubles

Just to show you I’m not full of shit with my resolution 1 of 2008, I took a bunch of photos of the jewellery I made towards the end of 07. I started out with my whole “making stuff” initiative by making marble magnets, which went pretty well (even got my colleagues hooked!) but they’re harder to photograph because of the surface reflections on the marbles.

I like jewellery making because at its elementary stages it needs very little artistic ability, just a finicky nature that makes you care about how neatly you are twisting your tiny bit of wire around your other tiny bit of wire. I’m not entirely adept at that yet, which is why I have taken the opposite approach to conventional product photography in the following photographs. Instead of focusing on showcasing the product by keeping backgrounds and other details simple so as not to distract from the exquisite workmanship of the jewellery artist and the evocative beauty of the sparkling stones, I have exploited various pretty things in my home in the hope of camouflaging my flawed work and cheap-ass beads.


First ones I made. Background appropriately shabby chic, emphasis on shabby.

Closeup

Closeup

The toy cars are about 30 years old!

Woot, a set!

An absolute bitch to make.

My favourite photo, because I drank the wine afterwards.

Pretty Good Year

My mother started 2008 in hospital with dengue fever, so until she was discharged yesterday I really didn’t have the mental wherewithal for any sort of goodbye 2007, hello 2008 blog entries. It was as much as I could do to monitor her condition, do what was necessary at work for a lotsamillion$ deal we signed yesterday, and fill the gaps in between with especially escapist TV.

In any case, it’s pretty obvious that getting married to Alec was the best thing that happened to me in 2007. He started 2008 by spending hours keeping my mum company in hospital (he’s starting a new job soon and had a few days free) and cooking me lovely dinners when I came home at night exhausted from stress. I will cut the mush because I’ve already given you enough of that before, but I am continually amazed at how I managed to luck out with this man.

I’m looking forward to the year ahead. I loved our wedding and it was totally worth all the planning hassle, but ironically one of the best things about finally being married is that we now have far more time and energy to devote to our individual hobbies, which of course also includes ridiculing each other about the lameness of said hobbies. Also reading, which is the perfect excuse to ignore each other entirely, and TV, which allows us to pretend we are spending quality time together when we actually are not. Marriage rocks, guys.

Every time I resolve in writing here to do something I inevitably fail to do so, but I think sharing these three things will be safe enough. I’ve already started on the first two, and the third is so wimpy that it is a cop-out from any actual brave resolution-making.

  1. Make more stuff with my imagination and hands:
    The Internet’s record of the crafting renaissance suggests that being inept and mediocre at this doesn’t discourage lots of other people. Inspiring!
  2. Become less financially clueless:
    Because continuing to let my life savings languish in a POSB savings account seems really, really, stupid.
  3. Exercise more than I did in 2007:
    This is easy, because I did fuck-all in 2007.

What are your resolutions, if any? (If they are actually worthwhile and will make me look pathetic, please don’t share them.)

Mosaic Festival Vs Grey’s Anatomy Soundtrack…FIGHT!

I guess it was too much to hope that 2008’s Mosaic festival would be as unbelievably awesome for me as 2007’s. The indie acts coming mostly make pretty indie music for pretty indie kids, which is not a bad thing in itself, but everything I’ve heard by them is also pretty uninspired. I loved and still like Múm’s Yesterday Was Dramatic – Today Is OK but the tweeness of Finally We Are No One and Summer Make Good means that those albums really haven’t stood the test of time for me. I also found them quite dull live, and in hindsight it’s quite amazing that when I saw them in 2004, Animal Collective (who far outshone them, and I wish it was them coming here instead) was merely their opening band.

I’ll probably end up going to a bunch of gigs anyway since I’m always so desperate for them here, but much will depend on ticket prices, which are usually quite high. At times like this I’m especially thankful for The Necessary Stage’s Singapore Fringe Festival, which has offered adventurous and unpatronising music events for the past few years at great prices. We just got our $15 tickets for the Colleen / Sylvain Chauveau / Hauschka triplebill at the Esplanade Recital Studio – I mean, seriously. Seriously!

Brideshead Revisited: Test Your Word Power!

Soon after starting Brideshead Revisited I decided to keep track of the number of words I encountered within it that I didn’t know. This throwback exercise was inspired firstly by the dismay of finding that within the first two pages of the book I had come across two words I wasn’t quite sure of, and secondly by my first attempt at playing Free Rice where I stagnated at level 46 and got tooth-gnashingly annoyed.

I was embarrassed to realize in the course of this exercise that although I had encountered some words a number of times before, I still didn’t quite know what they meant, perhaps because the context they had been used in at the time had been enough for me to follow what was written, or I simply didn’t bother to look them up. Funnily enough, having learned this bunch of words from Brideshead Revisited, I played Free Rice again today and easily got to level 49. I guess our primary school teachers really did know what they were talking about!

Just for fun, I’ll start by listing the words on their own so you can check how many of them you know off the bat. After the list, continue reading for a little more context to the words and links to dictionary definitions.

  1. verismilitude
  2. panegyric
  3. jejune
  4. sacerdotal
  5. lapidary
  6. muniment
  7. suborn
  8. glaucous
  9. manumission
  10. crapulous

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