Drum’N’Bass’N’Strings

Something dramatic was needed to break my obsessive aural dependency on the sound of Elliott Yamin’s voice, so I revisited Venetian Snares’ Rossz Csillag Allat Szuletett, which I’d been enjoying quite a lot before Elliott poured molten sex into my ears.

It isn’t easy to describe why this album’s fusion of (mostly) classical music with drill’n’bass works for me, because at first blush the concept sounds insufferable. The thing is, as drum’n’bass subgenres go, I like drill’n’bass because it has a certain drama and intensity that I find lacking in the jazzy stuff. On the other hand, classical music has lots of drama and intensity but lacks riddim.

Track 8’s sampling of Elgar’s cello concerto in E minor fascinates me. The sample of that famous bit of melody is cut off one note later than you expect it to be – one would have thought cutting the segment off on the D would make for the obvious easy loop but instead it’s left for one more note, which weirds up the time signature and the listener’s feel of the melody. Every time I listen to the track it always makes me feel a bit off-balance at the start, but then I descend into a geeky wanky happy place where I muse about whether I’d feel the same way if I didn’t already know the classical piece, and whether this use of the sample is deliberately intended to elicit this response in the listener, and then I look to the track title for any help but unfortunately it’s called “Szarmar Madar” so nothing gained there; meanwhile, there’s an opera singer throwin’ down high E’s and the chaotic beat’s just tearing shit up, and I start thinking tasteless thoughts about how even Jacqueline du Pre would dance to this except oh wait oops and I’m not even sure whether any of this is good or bad but I like the fact that the song is making me think it.

Zero G Funk

After months of good intentions thwarted by the forces of laziness, sleepiness, and car-lessness, we finally made our first visit to the Salvation Army thrift store at Bukit Timah and it won’t be the last.

I can’t show you pictures of the vintage sewing machine table Alec bought to put his computer on because it hasn’t been delivered yet, so just take my word for it that it’s incredibly charming.

I can, however, show you the record I bought for S$2.50.


Moon funk safari

Detail of front cover

Credits on the back cover

Intergalac-tic di-plo-ma-CY!

His Name Is Elliott Yamin

He wasn’t my favourite from the start, but how could he have been?

Until the top 24, the only real exposure he got was as a reluctant accessory to one of the Brittenum twins’ many debacles. Katherine got attention for having a mother who was a voice teacher. Ayla got attention for having a father who was a senator. Paris got attention for having a grandmother who was a famous singer (but, to be fair, also for the most spinetinglingly awesome audition I’ve ever seen on the show). Kellie got attention for having a father in jail and, later on, for defying every stereotype anyone had ever had about dumb rednecks by being even dumber than imaginable. But Elliott Yamin, diabetic and 90% deaf in one ear, apparently still wasn’t interesting enough to the American Idol producers to warrant any real exposure – at least, not until the Top 3 results show, when it was already too late.

And putting yourself into their shallow little heads, it was totally understandable. He’s got bad teeth, no titties, and is a nice, genuine guy, and of course none of that makes for good TV. Despite his lack of traditional good looks, he’s neither repulsively obese enough (Ruben Studdard) nor nerdy enough (Clay Aiken/Kevin Covais) to gain instant underdog sympathy – in fact, Taylor benefited much more from this right from the start, due to the grey hair and initial dismissal by Simon. Also, no all-consuming narcissism (Brenna). Also, no indication of serial killer tendencies (Scott Savol). What’s a nice guy with none of these trainwreck qualities got to do to get some attention?

Elliott’s answer to the question: Sing really really well all the time, including pulling off multiple fiendishly difficult songs with jaw-dropping ease. Sing songs you love, even if they’re not famous crowd-pleasers and the producers advise you against singing them. And do it all with warmth in your eyes, graciousness and humility, and a vocal tone that made me and many other women want to charge on stage and ravish him.

Well, his strategy obviously didn’t succeed in getting enough of America’s attention, but he certainly got mine.

I was bug-eyed, speechless and embarrassingly in the mood for love after Moody’s Mood For Love. Ready to enrol in teacher training college after Teach Me Tonight. Longing to go clubbing with him and dance like goofs after I Don’t Wanna Be. Wondering what it must be like for his girlfriend to watch her man, all dressed up and looking soooo hot, singing A Song For You to millions, and know she can get a private performance any time she wants. Exquisitely troubled after Trouble. And after I Believe It To My Soul? To put it very simply, a believer – that whether Elliott gets a record deal or not, sells millions of albums or not, he will be fine.

It takes a remarkable ability to keep things in perspective to pick a risky song like that, unfamiliar to many (myself included), knowing full well that it could seal your fate unfavourably in the competition but go for broke anyway because you love it and you know you’ll rock it. It was a great last song to be remembered by.

Please don’t disappear into obscurity, Elliott. I can’t bear the thought of never hearing you sing again. :(

White Meat Diet

Alec, ranting: Every day, I eat the same ta pao¹ local food as everyone else in the office, or I walk out to somewhere like Lau Pa Sat and eat whatever takes my fancy there. But then there’s ONE day, where I just HAPPEN to be eating McDonald’s in the office pantry, and everyone who comes in says “Oh, you don’t like local food?”

Me: But I thought you talk quite a lot about local food with them?

Alec: I do! But it’s like they refuse to believe! We went for a buffet and I didn’t eat wasabi with my sashimi and everyone’s first remark was “Oh, you can’t take spicy food?” GRAAARGH!

Me: Well, why don’t you explain that your girlfriend is local and you eat everything she eats?

Alec: Oh, that’ll be no use. They probably think you’re some SPG anyway.

Me: Haha, they’ll be all like “Oh, you eat cock?”

¹ Takeaway

Hanoi: Day Two

After a lazy morning and a little errand running for the next day’s trip to Ha Long Bay, we go to buy tickets for the water puppet show. The girl in the box office stares impassively at us as we stand about two feet away from her dull plastic window, trying to decide which show time to buy for. Having reached a decision, I step forward and open my mouth to ask for the tickets only to have said window abruptly shut in my face. A sign indicates the box office closes between noon and 12.45, and I guess the girl’s a real stickler for punctuality. If I were an uptight person this behaviour would annoy me but hell, I’m on holiday. We’ll go explore Hoan Kiem Lake and come back in 45.


Behind the counter

Truth be told, Ngoc Son Temple and the red “Sunbeam” bridge that leads to it are better appreciated from a distance. They look very picturesque when enveloped in the mist over the water, but once you actually get closer the temple’s fairly standard issue (except for the huge preserved tortoise carcass, that is) and won’t hold your attention long unless you’ve never seen a temple before. At the entrance to the bridge, I photograph a souvenir stall through its back door, and like the slightly different perspective it gives from the storefronts beautifully laid out for us tourists.

 


Is our children learning?

The banks of Hoan Kiem Lake seem as well-maintained as any park in Singapore. We stroll past a small series of modern art sculptures, a long line of propaganda posters, and scattered instances of furtive hand-holding and UST (for those of you who weren’t geeky enough to be active in the online X-Files communities of the 90s, that stands for Unresolved Sexual Tension) among young Vietnamese couples who should perhaps have been in school instead.

 


Eye of the tiger.

My usual penchant for bizarre statuary is amply sustained by this delightful white tiger on an ornamental wall near the entrance to Ngoc Son Temple. I want whatever mascara he’s got. Alec wants his ‘tache.

 


Proletariat and palm trees.

While we’re on the topic of statues, check out some Soviet Realism in the tropics!

 

Inspired by the spirit of revolution, our stomachs remind us it’s lunch time. And thanks to wuyuetian, I know just the place. Eating here probably breaks a couple of the food rules in the travel guide – all the raw vegetables look like they’ve been rinsed in tap water – but if you have to get food poisoning somewhere, you might as well get it from a meal as magnificent as this. (My stomach was fine, Alec’s was…rather more affected. Thank God for growing up in Southeast Asia, I guess.) Although I wasn’t too keen on the big stuffed spring rolls, the bun cha (grilled pork patties with rice noodles, to which you add herbs by the handful and ladle over delicious gravy that’s about 2 parts MSG and 1 part stock) is probably the best street food I’ve ever eaten. Our total bill, for huge unfinishable servings of pork patties, spring rolls, noodles, herbs, a Coke and a San Miguel, is 65,000D (S$6.50/a little over 2 pounds) – less than the price of a solitary San Miguel in most bars in Singapore. Thanks again, wuyuetian! I wouldn’t have had a clue about this place without your tip!

The Thang Long Water Puppet Theatre show (photo at the top) is quite charming, although water puppetry doesn’t seem to focus as much on the subtleties of an individual puppet’s movement (please note I know nothing about puppetry and my only basis of comparison is what I saw at the start of Being John Malkovich) as on getting the puppets to do synchronised dances and formations together. There are also light-hearted skits about villagers chasing fish around by thwacking themselves into the water, villagers chasing cats around by thwacking themselves into the water, and villagers chasing each other around by thwacking themselves into the water. And, of course, they do the legend of Hoan Kiem Lake. All good fun.


Light burden

After the show we walk around the cathedral area and do a little shopping on Nha Tho. This is most definitely an expat zone, with Spanish restaurants and suchlike, and cool shops full of cool things that I can’t bring myself to afford. I buy a weird little buffalo lantern thingy at a poky little place at the end of the road where the prices are less scary. My family thinks it’s hilariously ugly.

 

Since we’ve had local street food for lunch, the natural contrast in a trip to Vietnam is fancy French food for dinner. The outside courtyard of Green Tangerine is beautiful, and so romantic that I almost forgive Alec for forgetting to bring our travel guide. Almost.

This is what we have for dinner, and yes, I’m such a sad person that I actually copied all of this from the menu:

Starters:

  • Crab remoulade with orange zests on a layer of fresh asparagus, served with scallops marinated in orange flower essence separated by a sesame lace (Alec)
  • Scallops marinated in lavender flower presented on a bruschetta pancake (Me)

Mains:

  • Beef cheek braised in red wine perfumed with raspberry vinegar, with small diced potatos and apples enhanced by dates (Alec)
  • Pork fillet rolled in blackcurrant and “ngo” herb served with stuffed bamboo shoots and small vegetables crusted with sesame (Me)

Desserts:

  • A sort of taster dish, with chocolate truffle, creme brulee, a grape stuffed with sorbet, kiwi paste in a pastry shell and probably something else we couldn’t identify (Alec)
  • Creme brulee in Calvados, served in an apple baked in red wine (Me)

Total bill: 53 USD. We leave a 100,000D tip because the service has been lovely, despite being fully aware that that alone is more than our entire lunch cost.

Perhaps you’re wondering why we don’t seem to have explored the Old Quarter much. We did, but it’s just so difficult to capture its incredible appeal in words and pictures. Hanoi feels like its constant influx of tourists have little effect on its real life and the Old Quarter epitomizes this.


Everything to everybody

Yes, souvenir shops and hotels and tourist eateries spring up everywhere, but Hang Dau is still thronged every night we walk through it with happy Vietnamese women, a street full of shoes reflected in their eyes, and their men patiently waiting on motorbikes parked four deep. Yes, I do often have to politely decline the “Salut! Photo?” offers of the ubiquitious girls carrying baskets of fruit at either end of their yoke, but for every one of those girls there’s a wizened old lady in a conical hat carrying anything from plasticware to prawns at the ends of her yoke, and we mean nothing to her.

 

On the same street where I decide against buying a conical hat because I think the price is too high and I’m not in the mood to bargain, other shops feel it’s still worth their while to continue in the trades they have spent their lives in. I sincerely hope they never let us change that.

Ellen, My…Er…Bellen

Ellen Allien’s set at Zouk last night was cruelly short, ending just before 4, and before I’d got the chance to storm the DJ console and ask her to marry me.

Her set didn’t feature as much fembot voiceovers as I would have liked but it was still intensely, braincrushingly good for the most part. And when, during a beer break, I finally heard that wondrous disembodied voice proclaim “You…make…me…go MAAAAAAAAGMA!” I shoved my beer into Alec’s hands, raced back to the dancefloor, and went apeshit. I think anyone who drinks beer in Singapore will understand that sacrificing the first five minutes in which beer is actually cold and not nauseatingly warm should be ample proof of my love. O Ellen! How many more warm beers I would have drunk just to explore unknown trrrashsssscapes with you a little longer!

Still, in almost all respects it was a better night out than DJ T and M.A.N.D.Y. had been the previous night, except that I’d like to suggest to the dude in the striped cap that 1) it would be good to find a dance style that doesn’t involve elbowing people in the boobs and not apologizing, 2) your goatee looks like pubic hair, and 3) wearing the SAME CAP to two sweaty smoky club nights in a row is kinda gross.

Since the night ended earlier than we’d expected, we channelled our mutual lust for Ellen into supper at Arab Street. Cheese-coated chillies and almond spice smoothies are great at any time of day but when consumed while reclining on the cushioned floor of Ambrosia at 5.30 a.m., they approach divinity.

Hanoi: Day One

The Budget Terminal is the spitting image of most modern European airports and quite unlike Changi terminals 1 or 2 in look and feel. I haven’t a clue why other budget airlines wouldn’t want to use it – they’ve said to the media that their passengers won’t want to walk on the tarmac in the open to the plane, but this smacks of extreme muppetry.

Upon arrival we take the Vietnam Airlines minibus to central Hanoi (32,000D each). During the journey, we promptly fall in love with Hanoi’s vitality and charm even on our very first glimpses of it. The traffic is chaotic by Singaporean standards of course, but with none of the hair’s breadth brinksmanship I remember about Istanbul. Dust-bathed fruit sellers stand hopefully on the highway shoulder; a passing truck zooms past, then pulls over and reverses 20 metres along the shoulder for some bananas. Later that night, as we walk in the Old Quarter, kids playing badminton at the side of the road dart into multi-directional traffic to retrieve stray shuttlecocks without a moment’s hesitation.

It’s already dark when we reach central Hanoi. (Our plane landed at 1820.) As expected we’re mobbed by motorcycle/taxi/cyclo drivers the minute we step out of the minibus, but fend them off and walk some distance down the road to get our bearings. It only takes about half an hour to walk from there to our hotel in the Old Quarter, and if we were more familiar with the route and weren’t dragging luggage it would have been even faster. It’s a lovely first meeting with Hanoi – all along the length of Hoan Kiem lake, and then into the Old Quarter to Hang Bac, where we check into the awesome Queen Hotel¹.

It’s late when we set out for dinner, so unfortunately Cha Ca La Vong isn’t taking any more new diners. We eat at the only other place still open along the same road (Golden something or other). It looks like a tourist trap, but surprises us with perfectly cooked crispy squid in dill sauce and tender, flavourful beef grilled in honey. Bottles of Hanoi bia wash everything down well. Bill: about 140,000D. Singapore feels a million miles away.

¹ Review: Queen Hotel
We could have gone for cheaper places than this, but we haven’t been on a proper holiday together in ages and had decided we deserved something just a tiny bit better than usual. For US$35 per night in this place, we got a room with attached bathroom, aircon, small balcony, TV with most cable channels, DVD player, free Internet (note that this doesn’t even mean you have to bring your laptop – they have a freaking computer in the room with unlimited Internet access for you to use!), buffet breakfast brought to your room every day, and silk covers on the bed. Great service and attention to detail in beautifying even the common areas suggest this is a well-managed place across the board. If there’s a better room deal in Hanoi, I’d love to hear about it.

Me Not Ready Love You Long Time Just Yet

An update on wonderful Vietnam is on the way, faster than a speeding bullet speeding motorcycle clapped-out but valiantly struggling made-in-China death trap of a moped with no side mirrors!

(Thanks for being so patient, everybody. But um, yeah, I still need a little more time.)

My Cream Guy

Boys, if you rushed out and bought the Sex Appeal cologne I wrote about recently but haven’t achieved the desired results yet, maybe you need to add this to your arsenal.

(Spotted at a cheapo toiletries store in Marine Parade.)

Morning Becomes Motorik

Okay, these days I try not to bore you all with my latest music purchase details as often as I used to (well, also I’ve been trying my best to cut down on my purchasing until I can sell off some stuff and clear the shelf space), but today I just have to share that after having Califone’s Heron King Blues and Neu!’s Neu! 75 on my Django notify list for two and three freaking YEARS respectively, I finally managed to snag them. For the princely sum of about S$15 each after postage and handling. Rock!