syntaxfree – Page 48 – the liminal edition

Not Reading Literature Is The New Reading Literature

If I hadn’t seen it on the front page of the Straits Times, I’d have dismissed the article (headline “Literature winner read only 3 novels in 2 years”) about the Singaporean winner of the Angus Ross prize as a satire on the Singaporean education system. I was about to go into a rant about the unfuckingbelievableness of it all, and then found out that Nicholas had already done it for me, complete with characteristic acerbity and extracts of the article’s most offending statements.

All I will add is that I dearly hope Ms Candice Wan Shu Ting was misquoted several times by the journalist who interviewed her. If she was, she has all my sympathies for being portrayed as an astoundingly arrogant teenager who deserves to be spanked hard with every book of the Western literary canon (just to start with). If she wasn’t, if I ever meet her I don’t think I’ll be able to resist asking, ever so casually, “Read any good books lately?”

Give Us This Day Our Daily Beer

Outside the Joo Chiat KTV lounge where Alec was turning tricks last weekend, this humble altar moved us deeply and reminded us of the profound insights we can gain from other religions. We are seriously considering incorporating certain elements of this beautiful offering into our own worship.

Give that god a Tiger!

Happy Easter, everyone!

The Ayatollah Of Joo Chiat

Many of my friends have been asking how Alec’s job-seeking has been going. I am pleased to announce that on Sunday, he was given his first job in Singapore. It was in a KTV¹ lounge in Joo Chiat².

A friend of a friend needed a Caucasian for a TV commercial she was shooting (it’s only for a competition, not for normal TV), and since Joo Chiat is right up our alley, he agreed to help out.

The ad was for an expat magazine, and it focused on helping expats fit into Singapore culture. Alec’s role was to walk down the corridor, enter the KTV room and greet his Singaporean friends enthusiastically, after which they would all sing a Hokkien song with great gusto. During rehearsals, initial ideas of teaching Alec the whole song were hastily reassessed in favour of teaching Alec one line. But he took this line very seriously. Neither of us know what it meant, but by God he brought tears to my eyes.

He got paid a small token, but I’m pretty sure the neighbourhood hookers enjoy a more attractive remuneration package. This means I need to work on pimping him out a bit better, especially since he finally got his employment eligibility visa on Monday. After collecting it, he checked to see that everything was in order. It was, mostly, except for the bit where his nationality was “Iranian”. The mistake’s fixed now, but I’m still calling him Ayatollah for the rest of this week.

¹ May have once been used in an attempt to make karaoke look hip and trendy, but is now just a synonym for karaoke.
² A neighbourhood near where I live, with a burgeoning sex industry.

Everybody In The Club Get RNDM

The Attic at Mox is a thoroughly endearing venue, but I can’t come up with any trendy designspeaky reasons as to why. In fact, I have a feeling that what endears the place to me is its almost meticulous lack of trendy design. There are random lights from Mox, random rows of airplane seats along a wall, random stage at one end, random DJ booth on the other, bar with random selection of alcoholic beverages, and lots of randomly dressed indie types. In other words, it was the perfect place for RNDM.

Astreal’s set was marred by problems with their amps, which meant that some songs were played with only two out of three guitars. I still enjoyed it, but it meant less crashing guitar noise, which is never a good thing.

I had been looking forward to finally seeing the much-hyped Tiramisu, but ended up a little disappointed. Apart from the undeniable showmanship of their frontman, there was little I found distinctive or interesting about their songs. Sort of a mix between Built To Spill and Hefner, but without any of what I like about either band. I’d still watch them again, though. Rizman Putra’s eyeballs fascinate me.

After Tiramisu I suggested we take a break for dinner, whereupon Ida suggested we eat the surprise birthday cake she had brought me. :)

I didn’t manage to see many of the later bands on the schedule, for the unusual reason (unusual for me, anyway) that I got caught up socializing. Downstairs in Mox with my childhood fags, upstairs in the attic telling Tessa how much I miss the life she’s living now, here a random, there a random, everywhere a random.

We’d originally intended to leave at midnight for Grandmaster Flash at Zouk, but then Poptart started spinning and there was no way I was going to leave while Sonic Youth’s 100% was playing. As one song led to another, I decided that there was no point leaving somewhere where I was having such a great time for somewhere which almost inevitably enrages me.

Indie club nights aren’t any cooler than 80s nights; they’re all about jumping around haphazardly to songs which were staples of your youth, and screaming “I AM THE RESURRECTION AND I AM THE LIFE!” along with everyone else. Actual dancing is an afterthought, and actual good dancing is virtually impossible. Not that any of this is really relevant while you’re going apeshit to Idioteque. I had a blast.

Zouk Off

The most positive emotion I can usually summon up for Zouk is extreme indifference, but that changed on Friday night, which was one of the worst clubbing experiences of my life. (Not the worst. I reserve that rare honour for the Limelight on Shaftesbury Avenue in London. If you’ve been there, you’ll understand, if you haven’t, don’t.)

I have never seen a gig get as technically fucked up as the Chicks On Speed gig did. The moment they started it was obvious there was something wrong with the sound. Their vocals were getting drowned by their music even though they were virtually shouting. Throughout the gig, they kept begging the sound people to turn up the vocals, to no avail.

The gig was interrupted numerous times by assorted technical failures. Each time this happened, the club’s DJ would start playing music while the problems were being resolved. Fair enough, but the group shouldn’t have had to scream repeatedly to him (on their too-soft mikes, now getting drowned out by the DJ’s music) to stop every time they were ready to resume.

After the show had drawn to a screeching halt for the second time, the audience had halved. This was unsurprising. Even the way they usually sound on record, Chicks On Speed are possibly too much for anyone with limited musical horizons to stomach. On a sound system that wasn’t able to handle them (unlike the Esplanade’s, where even Tortoise’s loudest, most discordant moments were completely bearable), they could only have sounded pleasant to people who regularly take pleasure in abrasive noise. Thankfully, a fair number of us were in attendance. We stayed and cheered them on, and they made the best they could out of a bad situation.

We headed to Phuture after this, and were joined by two friends of mine who had come along just to wish me a happy birthday. We started dancing, but rapidly became bored with the bland, unimaginative hip-hop that was being played. Phuture was less crowded than I ever remember it being on a Friday night. Perhaps people who know better have finally deserted it, now that places like Cocco Latte are going from strength to strength.

Bored, Alec and my two friends went to get drinks. At a bar that wasn’t in the least bit crowded, Alec was still waiting for his drink fifteen minutes later. My two friends weren’t doing well either. After inquiring about their drink orders, they were told that they hadn’t made any. Given that they had used up their drink coupons on these mythical orders, this was rather dismaying. While discussing this at length with the bar staff, my friends were assertive but never in the least bit disorderly or physically aggressive. Nevertheless, on his way to escort them out of the club, one of the security personnel shouldered me aside and trod heavily on my foot.

To cut a long tedious story short, it took them nearly an hour of wrangling with the management to get their drinks, after which time no one was in the mood to actually drink them, or stay in the club. Since the music in Phuture had continued to be achingly dull, leaving was no hardship.

It was almost amusing. Benny and Alec (on their first visit to Zouk) already knew my views on Zouk before we went there, but once we were in I didn’t actually have to say anything to try and convince them further. The experience spoke for itself.

Tortoise (17 March, Esplanade Concert Hall, Singapore)

I’m not even a Tortoise fan, but the gig was pretty damn awesome.

I’d gone in with some trepidation – I bought Millions Now Living Will Never Die some years back, didn’t like it and returned it, later bought TNT too, didn’t like it and returned it. I found the albums overly clinical and very unengaging. Every time I put an album on, hoping that better familiarity with the music would help me “get it”, it faded into the background for me within minutes. So I had plenty of doubts about how well that sound would fare in the Esplanade’s huge concert hall but decided to go anyway, based on the band’s immense stature in indiedom and the added appeal of the Observatory as opening band.

Right decision. The sound was full-bodied and assertive in a way it never sounded to me on record, and with the Esplanade’s amazing sound system, detail was never lost even at the music’s most cacophonous moments. I was incredibly impressed by their individual flair as musicians, as well as their tightness as a band, as was everyone else. Standing ovations and screaming brought them back for two substantial encores, and prompted a “Singapore is CRAYYYYZEE!” from one of them.

By the end of the gig I found myself filled with happiness at the sight of other audience members, clearly huge Tortoise fans, over the moon with how great it had been. Watching them I remembered myself at 16, standing in the World Trade Centre Harbour Pavilion delirious with joy that Sonic Youth had come to Singapore and I was there to see it. To this day I can hardly believe that even happened. Similarly, I would never have expected such a difficult-listening, left-of-centre band as Tortoise to be brought to Singapore to begin with; the fact is that the Esplanade not only brought them in but had the balls to put them in the country’s biggest, most state-of-the-art musical venue. It’s the stuff of dreams, and a real testament to the sort of artistic vision that drives the Esplanade. I should never have doubted them for a second.

I Love The Smell Of Name Maul In The Morning

Mauling #1:
Alec: So who’s at Zouk on Friday night? Chicks In Chains, is it?
Me: Speed. Chicks On Speed.
Alec: Oh. Heh. Freudian slip, sorry.

Mauling #2:
Alec, pointing to the big screen in Raffles Place: Oh, it’s that guy again. Michael something. Balloon. Bubble.
Me: Boo-blay. Michael Buble.
Alec: Oh.
Me: Why would anyone be called Michael Bubble?
Alec: I thought maybe it was a wacky stage name.

I live in fear as to what the man will maul next. One would think that for someone from a country where people have names like Caoilfhionn, he would be a bit better with simple English stuff.

Maybe I should tell him we’re seeing “Flashmaster Grand” on Saturday, just as an experiment.

I’m Shorty, It’s My Birthday

As I mentioned before, I’ll be out and about this weekend following 50 Cent’s command, which will be great after two spent in confinement. (To anyone who’s just surfed over from Mr Miyagi, I’m not Zoe Tay, I just had chicken pox).

So if you happen to be at the Tortoise gig tonight, or watching Chicks On Speed tomorrow night at Zouk, or at Mox on Saturday for RNDM, or Zouk for Grandmaster Flash after that, come wish me happy birthday!

Perhaps you wonder how you’ll recognise me, given that I don’t have a picture of myself on this blog. Easy – just look out for a hot girl, funkily dressed and surrounded by adoring men. That’s not me. But it might well be my friend Ida or my friend Kelly, so then you can ask them to point me out.

Insert Cryptic Verbiage Here

This new ILM idea – Here, a thread featuring translations of song titles from their commonly known designation and into ACADEMESE, and then involving guess-work as to the original nomenclature in order to make a competition from this endeavor! – is really quite challenging! Here are some of my favourites. The first three are classic oldies, the fourth and fifth are recent pop hits, and the next three should be familiar to any (indie) music geek worth their salt.

Let r1 be defined as the quantification of an undefined locus’ tendency to exist at a great distance from the Earth’s center. Let r2 be defined as a similar quantification of a layer of refractive aberrations in the Earth’s atmosphere, such that r1 > r2.
It is hereby demanded that you will be romantically exclusive with me and assume an infantile moniker.
Immense objects, in which every part is equally distant from one point within, in the state of a rapid, self-sustaining exothermic oxidation process.
I liken the entire material and physical manifestation of your organism to a fictional world inside another fiction, a meta-world as it were; in particular, one put forth by the amateur pornophotographer and mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson in the title of his most celebrated children’s tome.
The question of investiture is moot.
The central figure of Western religious culture under unique ownership designated to an individual.
Urgently, such that the unstated presupposed occurence will actualize in mere seconds, minutes, hours, or similar temporal measurements which seem fractional (or perhaps even irrelevant) in comparison to normal tests of human patience. [I think this one is impossible unless you know that the artist is “My Sentimental Greeting Thoroughly Mauled”].
Darkly colored iron-based alloy in the moderate time segment of great generalized disorder.

My rather average attempts. I wasn’t so good at academese, so for the second one I tried legalese. The first is a classic covered by everybody, the second is one of the cheesiest songs ever.

At each and every point existing on the continuous surface of a man-made multi-level structure designed for outdoor surveillance, the name of which has also been adopted by a periodical first published in or around 1879 by a religious group or sect characterized, among other things, by its rejection of all Christian doctrine not believed to have originated in the Bible.
I hereby assert my entitlement to copyright and all related authorial rights, including (but not limited to) moral rights insofar as these are recognized by any and all applicable legal regimes, with regard to lyrical and musical arrangements composed by me which induce vocal utterances perceived to be melodic by those emitting them, such vocalizations being emitted by all matter existing on the planet Earth.

(Answers can be found behind the link to continue reading, but it’s more fun if you give it at least a bit of a try before peeking!)
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Travels With My Aunt ( Graham Greene): Excerpts

Travels With My Aunt is the first of Graham Greene’s “entertainments” I’ve read, and it’s as wonderful as his serious novels. This book doesn’t just have one good story, it has about fifty. The first excerpt here tickles my funny bone the same way Dan Rhodes’s writing does, and the second is taken from a great story which I have unfortunately had to truncate, and which is much funnier in its completeness.
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