syntaxfree – Page 5 – the liminal edition

Bali: Lovely Lake Tamblingan

As I mentioned, I’m going to write about our trip to Bali more in terms of highlights than according to the sequence of our itinerary. On that basis there is only one place I could start: the beautiful, tranquil banks of Lake Tamblingan. It was not a place we had known to list on our desired itinerary, but a suggestion from our driver/guide Putu Arnawa as a place he personally liked. We had sought Putu out in the first place because he is a photographer, and by now I had enough of a sense of his aesthetic to trust his suggestions. I am so glad we did.

Bali In Brief

Most Singapore-dwelling yuppies have probably taken several trips to Bali by their early 30s, but we only visited it for the first time in late February. It’s not that we’d never wanted to go, but since the overriding impression we had (based on what other Singapore-dwelling yuppies seemed to talk about doing there, and post photos of on Facebook) was that it was primarily a beach place with some pretty ricefields here and there, we’d felt less urgency to visit it before other places on our Southeast Asian travel priority list. But once we’d seen Siem Reap, Hanoi, the Mekong Delta, Luang Prabang, Sabah and Sarawak (and I realize I failed to write about ANY of them here!), we finally decided to give Bali a try.

Our trip was a revelation of sorts. Perhaps because we were travelling at low season and completely avoided the southern part of the island apart from visiting Tanah Lot and Uluwatu, it felt about a tenth as touristy as I had expected it to be. Our driver/guide would warn us about persistent and annoying vendors at certain spots, and then they would be nothing like what we had encountered in Thailand or Cambodia. At more than a few temples we were the only visitors, and when we snorkelled straight off the beach in Amed into coral reefs several times more gorgeous than the crowded ones we had explored in Sabah, we had those to ourselves for at least half an hour as well.

The most memorable aspect of the trip, however, was the glimpse we got into the vibrancy of Balinese culture and how strongly committed the Balinese are to their community life. The ridiculous ease of our unplanned encounters with temple festivals, local dance performances and even a cremation procession (!) felt like nothing we had experienced before in our previous travels. While we have chanced upon local cultural events several times before, it always felt like a lucky coincidence that our tendency for indiscriminate wandering had just happened to present us with. In Bali, such encounters became so routine for us that talk of coincidences was no longer relevant – it felt like there simply was so much going on that you would need to be a particularly uninterested visitor in order to avoid witnessing something fascinating.

History suggests that expecting myself to do a full travelogue here is foolish, so I’ll try a different strategy of (a) writing about the places that moved me most first, regardless of where they were in the itinerary and (b) summarizing said itinerary for anyone who might possibly find it a useful framework for planning their own trip. I would honestly recommend every single thing mentioned below because we enjoyed our trip so thoroughly, but feel free to ask if you have any specific questions.

Day 1: Arrived late in Ubud, immediately stumbled upon temple festival a stone’s throw from our awesome hotel (Junjungan Ubud Hotel and Spa). Found ourselves standing on road next to paddy fields at midnight, watching costumed beasts process past us.

Day 2: Easy day laughing at stupid tourists in the Monkey Forest and looking around Ubud town streets, then borrowed bikes from hotel and cycled to Petulu village to see the white herons come in to roost. Cheap and fantastic dinner in Warung Pulau Kelapa.

Day 3: Day tour to Tegallalang, Tirta Empul, Mount Batur, Pura Ulan Danau Batur, Besakih and the Sideman Valley with our driver/guide Putu Arnawa, who we would highly recommend. Chalongnayan dance performances by night in Ubud town.

Day 4: Day tour to Gunung Kawi, Taman Ayun, Tanah Lot and Uluwatu with Putu’s associate Wayan, who we would also highly recommend.

Day 5: Transferred to Munduk, again with Putu Arnawa. On the way, we watched a cremation and visited Jatiluwih, Lake Beratan and its temple, the twin-lake viewpoint for Lake Buyan and Lake Tamblingan, a village on the banks of Lake Tamblingan (a trip highlight), and finally arrived at Munduk to spend the night in a converted rice granary (Puri Lumbung).

Day 6: Easy day in Munduk, doing a simple hike to a waterfall, exploring Munduk village, and enjoying the incredible views from the balcony of our cottage. Cheap and fantastic lunch at Aditya Homestay.

Day 7: Transferred to Amed, again with Putu Arnawa. On the way, we visited one of the Gitgit waterfalls, Pura Beji, Lempuyang temple, and Tirta Gangga. In Amed, we stayed at Bayu Cottages.

Day 8: Easy day in Amed. Snorkelled first at Lipah Beach, then at the Japanese shipwreck at Banyuning, explored the village, enjoyable dinner at Sails.

Day 9: Drove through stunning views of the Karangasem Regency on the way to the airport, a perfect last glimpse of beauty before returning to Singapore.

Tropic Thunder Roasted Chickpeas

Although roasted chickpeas are a foodblogger staple by now (not that this is a food blog) and I always intended to give them a try, the imminent meltdown of our freezer – which had about two cans’ worth of frozen chickpeas in it, among other things – was what eventually forced my hand. There are plenty of recipes out there already but I wanted to write a little about what worked for me and what didn’t, because I have a hunch that getting a roasted chickpea crispy and keeping it that way is tougher in the wretched humidity of Singapore than in drier climes.

I started off by following the method outlined in this recipe, which differs from many others I saw in that it has you dry-roasting the chickpeas for the first twenty minutes rather than chucking the oil in with them right at the start. Also, it uses a slightly higher temperature than other recipes I’ve seen. As I said, my hunch is that these measures are helpful for Singapore’s humidity, so if you are trying this out in Singapore (or anywhere else where the air is similarly sodden) I suggest you bear them in mind. In light of this, and the torrential rain that was pouring down when I roasted my first batch, I shall call them Tropic Thunder Chickpeas.

Tropic Thunder Chickpeas

Ingredients

1 can chickpeas, drained, rinsed and patted dry with a paper towel
1 teaspoon olive oil
Your choice of seasoning. Here’s what I used, but just use your intuition and go by your own taste:

Batch 1: Soya sauce (about 1 teaspoon, possibly a little more) and dried chilli flakes (liberal sprinkling)
Batch 2: Jerk seasoning (about 1 tablespoon)
In future batches, I might try curry powder or garam masala. This honey-miso combination looks great too.

Method

See that source recipe uses Fahrenheit. Say “Convert 425 Fahrenheit to Celsius” into Google Search app. Obtain gibberish as response. Consider, given your unfortunate history with this app, that you may have been suffering from an undiagnosed speech defect all these years. Realize that constant construction noise in background which you have become inured to is probably confusing Google. Type in conversion query instead. Preheat oven to 220C.
Place chickpeas in one layer on baking tray. Roast for 10 minutes, then shake tray around (some will be sticking to it, fiddle as necessary with spoon to unstick them) and roast for another 10 minutes.
Pour chickpeas from baking tray into bowl comfortably sized for tossing oily chickpeas. Depending on shape of baking tray, avoid thinking your kitchen ninja skillz are sufficiently advanced that you will not spill any. If in doubt, fiddle as necessary with spoon to get them all safely in. Sprinkle with oil and your choice of seasoning, to taste. Toss to get them all nicely coated with flava.
Pour chickpeas back onto baking tray. Intend to follow source recipe’s instructions to continue roasting 5-15 minutes more at the same temperature. Instead, get distracted by trying to supervise freezer repairman (who arrived somewhere during step 2) in Mandarin. Realize eventually that chickpeas have been in there for nearly 20 minutes. Extract them hurriedly from oven, pop one into mouth, and realize they are perfect. Upon attempting batch 2 on a different day, follow original instructions and end up with less crispy chickpeas. Shake fists at tropical sky.
Allow chickpeas to cool, then store in glass jar which formerly held pasta sauce, and which you saved because you have become your mother. Refrigerate. Battle spiralling chickpea addiction over next few days, which is an important battle to wage, because at the end of the day they are still beans with beanly consequences, ahem ahem. Settle on portion control strategy of only eating one jar lid’s worth at a time. Resolve to buy bigger jars of pasta sauce in future.

Lastly, out of sympathy for long-suffering readers who just want a damn copy-and-pastable recipe, condense method as follows:

Preheat oven to 220C.
Roast chickpeas, in one layer on baking tray, for 10 minutes. Shake tray to dislodge any chickpeas sticking to it, then roast 10 minutes more.
Remove chickpeas from oven and transfer to bowl. Add oil and seasoning to taste, toss.
Transfer chickpeas back to baking tray, continue roasting at 220C until browned and crispy. In Singapore, in my oven, this was 20 minutes.
Allow to cool before storing in airtight container. Refrigerate.

Goodness Bodacious Me

Good: A husband who comes to find you where you’re running errands so that he can have dinner with you before he goes out with his boys.

Bad: A husband who says this as you’re sitting down to dinner –

Alec: Your jeans are nice. I was checking out your ass from the back before I realized it was you.

Me: ……

Alec: That sounded way better in my head than when it came out from my mouth.

Yes, I realize my life is a Goodness Gracious Me skit. I would have responded with the customary "Check please!", except that we were in McDonalds.

2011 Music: Song List

In keeping with my tradition of only managing to say anything about a year’s worth of music once the year in question is already over, here are my songs of note from 2011. As usual, a song doesn’t have to have been released as a single in order to get into this list, and I only feature a song in this list if it isn’t already from one of my favourite albums of the year.

In last year’s list I included some honourable mentions, which were songs that stood out to me but didn’t quite merit being described as my “best of” the year for various reasons. I like the idea so will continue it this year, with:

Look At Me Now (Chris Brown feat. Busta Rhymes and Lil’ Wayne): A lot of this song is a frustrating waste of a great beat, but Busta’s verse (starting 1.30) is one of those glorious virtuoso performances which you enjoy first for itself and then for the entertainment value of the million Youtube cover attempts it launched, such as Mac Lethal’s Cook With Me Now "pancakes” version.
I Will (Danny Brown): I don’t want to spoil it. Just listen to it. But not out loud unless you are in a rather permissive environment.
Edge Of Glory (Lady Gaga): There’s no way of explaining how I ended up following Lady Gaga’s career because I’m madly in love with her gay backup dancer without coming off as insane, is there? Perhaps in some other post. For present purposes, just believe me when I say I’m totally emotionally invested in the career of Mark Kanemura, former So You Think You Can Dance contestant, current Lady Gaga principal dancer, FOREVAH HOTTIE. He’s gone from “normal” backup dancer to someone Gaga obviously favours, and when she premiered the single on the American Idol finale featuring him prominently as the only dancer to appear and dance with her my heart nearly BURST WITH JOY, although I will admit that his lack of clothing might also have contributed to that feeling of imminent pulmonary failure. Every subsequent live performance of the song has also featured him dirty dancing with Gaga in various states of undress, which is why I have 19 Edge Of Glory performance videos saved on my hard drive. The earlier link is to the American Idol performance for sentimentality’s sake (skip to 2:40 to see Mark), but to get a better idea of why I am insane I recommend you watch this lovely compilation instead.

And now the songs proper:

Do It Like A Dude (Jessie J): If you commanded me to dissolve and reconstruct myself as a pop star, and gave me the requisite magical powers with which to do so, this would be my debut single and video. (I know the song is borderline 2010/2011 but I only heard it in 2011 and love it too much not to feature it here somewhere.)

Try To Sleep (Low): The album this came from felt like a retread of the most accessible bits of Low’s past work, which I found disappointing after the curveball of righteous electronic anger that was Drums And Guns (my favourite Low album, which would also have been featured here as my favourite album of 2007 if I’d ever got round to writing that list). But at least when a band like Low decides to do "accessible", they sometimes end up giving you the prettiest little bit of twinkly harmonized accessibility you could ever imagine.
The Other Shoe (Fucked Up): You don’t really expect an established hardcore punk band to decide all of a sudden to feature pretty girly harmonies in their songs, or for a song with chief lyrical takeaway of "DYING ON THE INSIDE! DYING ON THE INSIDE!" to be so damn catchy, but Fucked Up is kinda special that way. (The album this is from is hands-down the best guitar album of the year but it’s so intense that I can’t actually handle listening to it all in one go, so it won’t feature on my album list.)
Lose Yourself (Astro): Far and away the best contestant from the inaugural season of X-Factor USA, 15 year old rapper Astro first caught my attention with his ballsy audition but truly gained my admiration once the live rounds started by using each song he was supposed to "cover" as little more than a sonic template upon which to perform his own rap verses – essentially writing his own new material each week. America likes its reality show hamsters meek, humble and preferably with a sob story, so I suppose this swaggerific performance (my favourite of the whole season) explains why he didn’t make it as far as he deserved in the competition.
Love Out Of Lust (Lykke Li): I agonized over whether to feature this or the near-perfect Ronettes revivalism of Sadness Is A Blessing, but in the end my choice was emotional – Russ introduced Love Out Of Lust to me on our roadtrip through New England, I loved it immediately, and I love the memory of listening to it in the rental car, our little space of moody poignant beauty racing forward on a vast sunny American highway.
No Church In The Wild (Kanye West & Jay-Z): In the same strange way that last year’s Kanye album went from underwhelming me to blindsiding me as my favourite album of the year, I found this unremarkable until I suddenly found its propulsive beat and enigmatic lyrics utterly compelling. The production is reminiscent of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, especially in the use of the vocal samples, which is to say it is distinctive and unexpected in a way no one else is doing quite as well as Kanye.
A Thousand Years (Christina Perri): Yes, I seriously like this. No, I’m not into Twilight. What can I say, I enjoy West Coast Swinging to this song and find its lyrics rather romantic. I suppose I am a bit of a sap for this idea of love that makes the passage of time feel like an afterthought – I did start welling up on the bus the first time I heard Magnetic Fields’ It’s Only Time, which had a somewhat similar idea.
Skyscraper (Demi Lovato): Yes, I seriously like this. No, I haven’t lost my edge. Yes, I’ve totally lost my edge. Let’s move on.
Snowflake (Kate Bush): Kate took over a decade’s break from music to raise her son Bertie, and he duets with her here at age 13. It was worth the wait. Bertie’s lines are those of the titular snowflake falling from the sky, his unbroken voice taking on the high, pure notes we might have expected to hear issuing from his mother years ago. Meanwhile, Kate whispers and wheedles from the waiting earth: "The world is so loud / Keep falling / I’ll find you". Perhaps this sounds twee. It is not. It is bloody beautiful, and like nothing you would ever hear from anyone that wasn’t Kate Bush.
Marka (Dub Phizix and Skeptical feat. Strategy): This song is what you would get if you analyzed my brain and wrote an instruction manual for how to press every single one of my dance music buttons. Also, I rarely bother watching music videos but with this one I’m transfixed every time.

Food Styling Fail

I made this Lemon Tuna Avocado Snack for my lunch the other day, and when I had finished preparing it I decided to take a photo of it for fun. While I didn’t agonize over the plating (hungry!), I arranged the elements of the dish in what I thought was a visually pleasing manner, positioned the plate for the shot, got my camera, fiddled with the settings, looked through the lens to admire what I felt sure to be a quirky yet appetizing composition, and saw…

…an abstract rendering of the female reproductive system.

I put away the camera and ate my lunch.

P.S. This has happened before.

Slightly Social Syntaxfree

Just a quick note to let you know about some minor tweaks I’ve made over here:

You can now follow @syntaxfreeblog on Twitter to get notified of new posts, or if you prefer email notifications you can subscribe to those instead. (As always, you can also subscribe in a reader, which is my own preferred way of keeping up with the blogs I read.)
If you find it a hassle to type in a name and email address to leave comments, you can now comment using your Twitter or Facebook identity. Bear in mind, though, that this is purely for your convenience – I personally still prefer to choose which name and email address I want to associate with comments I leave elsewhere.
If you are reading this on a smartphone, you are seeing this blog repackaged in a smartphone-friendly format. Yay!

Video Killed The Lazy-Ass Lindy-Hopper

Although I rarely do any lindy hop these days because I want to concentrate on getting my West Coast Swing fundamentals right, I certainly don’t love lindy hop any less than I ever did. The robustness of the lindy hop connection (for non-dancers, I mean the feeling of physical connection between you and your partner) still feels like home to me, and there’s a raw explosive joy to lindy hop that I miss in the slickness and poise of WCS.

(That being said, learning WCS was certainly one of the best decisions I made in 2011. It took me right back to the high I felt when I first learned lindy hop and would leave each lesson with a big band beat in my heart, barely able to restrain myself from triple-stepping all the way home. I tell people that if you’ve never partner danced you can’t understand what you’re missing out on until you do it. But oddly enough, even though I had partner danced for several years before working life made me lazy, I still managed to forget just how much awesomeness it puts into your life until I started again.)

I am still far better at watching lindy hop videos on Youtube than actually getting off my ass and sweating through the dance, but here is where I come to the main reason for this post, which is to appropriate some of my favourite videos from Wandering and Pondering’s excellent roundup of 2011 lindy hop videos and share one particularly fantastic passage from his writeup. It is written in relation to this Skye and Frida performance, which is so deceptively simple that I could do all the moves in the routine (okay, probably only at one third of their speed). But my God, it’s how they do it that makes the routine soar.

You should read the whole section about this routine on Wandering and Pondering, but here’s the bit I liked best:

Here’s the thing, Skye & Frida know that you’re watching. They know that you expect them to do something amazing every other eight counts, but they’re over that. They’re going to swingout and Charleston and perfectly match the phrasing and feeling of the music with moves and their movements, and they’re going to do it not to impress you or to win first place. The reason why they look so relaxed and are having fun is because they are. They’re not hamming it up for the judges or even each other. They just enjoy each others’ company and express that best through dance.

Most people may not realize it, but this is what you’re looking for when you take all those lessons and try to figure out how to become a “good” dancer. Face it, not all of us are ever going to win a competition. No matter how many or how few people are in a given contest, there’s only going to be one winner. But you put all the time into it, so you can you can to turn to your partner and say, “Right here, in this moment, we are going to have the time of our lives.” And then be able say that with every damn dance you have with a straight face.

From this other Wandering and Pondering post in the same 2011 video roundup series, I also discovered the amazing Jamin Jackson, who apparently hasn’t been lindy-hopping for very long but is an absolute delight to watch. When he rules the lindy world in a few years time, I’m totally gonna claim cred for having begun stalking him on Youtube NOW.

I think his performance quality completely outshone Annie Trudeau’s here!

He is just as lovely in this Jack & Jill (for non-dancers, this means a routine improvised on the spot with a randomly assigned partner).

And from a third post in the same series, if this video of a father dancing with his tiny daughter in the Savoy Swing Jam 2011 Intergenerational Competition doesn’t put a sappy smile on your face, you are…apparently even less fond of children than I am, which is honestly rather shocking. 0_0

I’m not sure how funny this last video will be to you if you haven’t taken dance classes in the last few years and aren’t familiar with the whole practice of taking “recap videos” after each class. All I can say is that I’ve probably watched it about 20 times in 24 hours, and I crack up every damn time.

New Loves In Old Haunts

I didn’t quite go into detail here previously on the massive holiday I was planning, apart from the Thurston Moore squee, so I should state briefly for the record that I spent about 6 weeks from mid-October to early December trying to be young again across London, Montreal, New England, New York City and Berlin. A wise man would stake no money on the chances of me blogging about that in any comprehensive way, but I do usually manage the first few days! So here’s the first day I spent in London, and let’s hope I’ll get to a few more later on.

Grant Museum of Zoology, London: The Lovely Bones

I’ve long run out of humorous excuses for neglecting this blog, the pathetic truth being that I neglect it because I don’t think many people read it, which of course engenders a chicken-and-egg problem which is so totally first-world I’m ashamed to even be talking about it. So let me launch right into the good stuff, and by good, I mean good if you’re into skeletal remains and cute furry things entombed in glass formaldehyde coffins.

Anyone who understands London at all will know that you can live there for years and still only scratch its surface, unless you happen to be Peter Ackroyd, in which case I want to transplant your brain into mine. The Grant Museum of Zoology is a classic example of how I managed to live five minutes’ walk from an intimidatingly long walrus penis bone for four years and not know it. It’s one of UCL’s museums, small but very charming, and of course like almost every other museum in London, you can enjoy it for free – something I always appreciated about London, but even more so after I’d visited New York. I realize that as someone who used to enjoy taking spontaneous detours past the Rosetta Stone or Elgin Marbles on the way home from lectures or shopping, I have been extraordinarily spoilt, but that’s just what London does – it spoils you for anywhere else.

But I digress – onwards to the walrus schlong. (Actually, don’t get your expectations up too high, it’s not that big of a deal. Well, it’s big, but I shamelessly exploited it to sucker you into reading a post about a dusty little zoological museum.)

Here’s a thumbnail gallery to help with page loading time, and so that the full-size horrors of the Surinam Toad or the Jar of Moles aren’t plastered across the front page of this blog, but the full post follows under the thumbnails.[slickr-flickr type=”gallery” search=”sets” set=”72157628495925387″ flickr_link=”on” descriptions=”on” size=”m640″]