syntaxfree – Page 6 – the liminal edition

Ecstatic Peace!

Naturally, every time I plan a trip to London, before I even bother checking plane flights I check the gig calendar to see what I can plan my trip around. This year’s check revealed that Thurston Moore would be at ATP the weekend of 3/4 December, but I’m not extremely keen on attending this one because the rest of the lineup isn’t appealing enough to me to justify the expense. So I decided to bide my time and see if the acts I was most excited about from the lineup would announce separate gigs in London, as has often happened in the surrounding weeks of ATP.

After several weeks of waiting, nothing had happened, and I was getting antsy about getting the flights at a good price. So on Tuesday night I knuckled down and was just about to buy my flights, with my last day in London to be Friday, 2 December. Just before I confirmed payment, I realized that since I hope to impose myself on the hospitality of various London-based friends for accommodation, it would be a lot more convenient for any friend I’m staying with if I left on a Saturday rather than on a Friday, in terms of returning their keys and stuff like that. So I booked the flight for Saturday, 3 December instead, and opened Facebook for some idle “so, did anything interesting happen in the last 10 minutes?” surfing.

It turns out that in the last 10 minutes, Thurston Moore had announced a gig. On 2 December. At the Union Chapel, which is one of the few London music venues I’ve been trying to see gigs at for years with no success. In 2003, I chose to forgo seeing Low there so that Alec and I could get out of London on a Valentine’s Day weekend. While it was a wonderful weekend and totally worth it, I must admit the decision still haunts me. And every time I’ve returned to London since then, the timing just hasn’t been right to see someone I like perform there, let alone the linchpin of my favourite band.

So this long story is basically why, on Tuesday night at about 8 p.m., I ran around my home screaming, near tears from happiness, and wondering how I would survive until the tickets went on sale.

They went on sale at 5 p.m. (Singapore time) today. I got one.

And now, if you’ll excuse me from this excursion into INDIE SQUEE, I have to watch X-Factor USA. :D

Bokehkeh

One of the most addictive things about my Sony Nex-3 is using it with old manual focus lenses which you can buy for fairly low prices on ebay. My latest acquisition is a Minolta MC Rokkor-PF 58/1.4. It’s the fastest lens I have, and while I’m sure I need to practice a bit more to get the hang of using such shallow depth of field, the learning process has been kinda dreamy.

Free

Although I have generally failed, over the last few years at least, to write about important events in my life here, I couldn’t let this one pass without mentioning it. The scholarship bond that has been hanging over my head since the age of 19 has finally been discharged. While I certainly benefited from it in many ways, it also affected my life in ways I would have preferred to avoid – such as requiring me to leave my life in London and return to Singapore after university, and compelling Alec to move his own life over here in order for us to be in the same country. Things have worked out okay for us, thankfully. So as much as I do wonder what might have been, I need only look to my wonderful marriage, secure finances, comfortable lifestyle and close friendships to know and appreciate what is.

Still…it feels helluva good to finally have a say in what I think I am worth, rather than having to accept someone else’s determination. And so it was that, with gratitude but also some sadness, I resigned my position upon completion of my bond, and am now free to decide how exactly to spend the rest of my life living off Alec.

Kidding.

But yes, I’m taking a few months off from gainful employment to think about where I want to go from here. It’s terrifying! The lower-level stuff is easy – I want to pull up my DJing/photography/dancing socks, invest my savings better than I have done thus far, tidy up our home, shed a few pounds, support my mother as she cares for my increasingly frail grandmother, and do some travelling. But stepping aside from to-do-listable items and thinking about what I really want still leaves me without an answer. Who knew the Spice Girls asked life’s toughest questions?

While I try to figure out all that, I’ll leave you with the latest salvo fired in the Alec vs Russ wars. This surprise delivery arrived today:

Alec was out when the flowers arrived, but of course I couldn’t resist calling him to tell him about them. We had this conversation when he got home:

Me: Come see my huge bouquet of flowers from Russ!

Alec: NO, I DON’T WANT TO ADMIRE YOUR RUSSANTHEMUMS!

Singapore Snapshots (Eunos, Geylang)

While I procrastinate on writing about our rather awesome orangutan odyssey in Sabah, I thought I might as well share some photos I took a while back during various explorations of Eunos and Geylang and never ended up posting. There’s nothing in these photos quite as exciting as trekking through leech-infested Bornean jungles, but I like them because they are souvenirs from sleepy weekend afternoons spent walking around quiet neighbourhoods near our home, doing nothing exciting but happy nonetheless.

A bird shop in Eunos:

We ventured deep into the Eunos warehouse district in search of dining chairs to match a $100 dining table we scored off Craigslist. Although we did end up buying conventional chairs, for a moment the idea of dining horses was rather tempting:

You can pay $8 (or more, not sure what the price is now since I haven’t gone there in a while) for Penang assam laksa at Penang Kitchen on Tanjong Katong Road, or you can go two or three bus stops down the road to the food court at the top of City Plaza and enjoy this one, just as good, for $3:

Anthony Bourdain listed Sin Huat as one of his 13 Places To Eat Before You Die, but he probably didn’t mean from splinters:

I am rather fond of roadside altars. Not sure why. It might be bundled up in that somewhat trite tendency of modern yuppie Singaporeans to celebrate the preservation of traditional practices they have no intention of really perpetuating themselves.

Durians. What to say about durians? I’m actually fairly indifferent to durians, although I do like photographing them. I still think Andrew Zimmern is a fucking wuss though.

Podcast Pick: Brian Eno

Here’s another in the occasional series of podcasts I’d like to remember having listened to: Brian Eno as guest DJ at NPR’s All Songs Considered. These guest DJ podcasts can be a bit hit-or-miss for me, in that they can often function as proof positive that some musicians are far better at making interesting music than interesting conversation. Brian Eno, however, has that rare quality of being able to give a thoughtful and distinctive answer to a question without rambling, trying to impress, or being boring.

You have to listen to the podcast to fully appreciate the following Interesting Things Said By Brian Eno in the context of the conversation, but I’m just writing them down here for my own recollection of the bits I enjoyed:

He grew up in Suffolk listening to the doo-wop, southern gospel and R&B which was popular in local coffee bars serving the two large American airbases nearby, and didn’t realize until years later that everyone who’d made his favourite music was black.
In response to host Bob Boilen’s observation (probably articulating what every podcast listener was also thinking) that doo-wop, southern gospel and R&B more or less sound like polar opposites of Brian Eno’s own work: “What you choose to do isn’t necessarily the same as what energizes you in the first place – you do what you can.”
He is a member of an amateur a capella group formed on the firm promise that they will never record and they will never perform.
Describing his voice as sounding like “a pencil” as opposed to a “brush full of wonderful colour”.
His daughter introduced Portishead’s The Rip to him, first playing it while they were in her car. He insisted they just keep driving around so he could listen to it again and again.[1. Michelle’s Made-Up Rule For Life: any time The Rip is brought up, the Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood cover must be linked to.]

Turntable Instrumentalist

My turntable shifu DJ Koflow has a music video out of him skateboarding and scratching through the central business district of Singapore. Local hip-hop musicians really have to hustle to get much acknowledgement or recognition over here so I’m pimping the video here just because.

To be honest though (and I said this to him already), I’d prefer to see more of him doing his thang and less of Allan Wu’s face. Here’s a video I took at a free gig he did back in March at the Esplanade. More scratching, less Allan Wu = WIN.

Weeknd Music For Rainy Workdays

If you can’t be snuggled up in bed gazing at the water droplets on the window and enjoying alternate whiffs of rain-fresh air and your blanket, you have to hope at least for a little personal space on public transport (I got a seat today!) and some music that simultaneously captures the pathos of the situation and takes you away from it. For all the rainy mornings after the best nights of your life, when you still have to drag yourself out of bed and go to work, The Weeknd made this album (downloadable for free at their website!) for you, the bereft but surviving. It’s so gonna turn up on TV series soundtracks.

This morning I basically just put the whole album on and stared moodily out of the bus window at the drenched world beyond, but if you prefer your emo moments to be song-length only, then I highly recommend:

The Morning: The morning after R. Kelly’s Ignition.[1. And speaking of Ignition, if you haven’t already read this classic ILM thread where John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats goes completely nuts about the song, you really should.]
Wicked Games: Would have belonged on Kanye’s 808s And Heartbreak if Kanye could actually sing as well as The Weeknd’s vocalist. Trust me, you have never heard the words “Let me see that ass” sung with such anguish.

Sowing His Wild Kedongdongs

Backstory: We visited my grandmother a week or two ago. She has lived in the same house since World War II, a bungalow surrounded by lush garden which my green-thumbed uncle spends most of his time looking after, when he isn’t fishing. There was a pile of fruits on the table from their kedongdong tree. My grandmother urged Alec to try one. He loved it within one bite, later spent a good deal of time out in the garden with my uncle looking at the tree, and my grandmother happily pressed him to take a couple more fruits home.

This isn’t exactly a laugh-out-loud Alecdote, but I’m sharing it just so people understand what I have to go through. Some women get laugh lines when they get old. The wrinkles on my face will be somewhat more complex.

Me, looking at pile of kedongdongs on kitchen counter: Why haven’t you eaten these up yet?

Alec: I’m going to plant them!

Me: You what??! Where, in our balcony? They’ll take like five years to bear fruit!

Alec: You people always say I should plant stakes in this country, right?

Me: ……

Alec: Are they really called kedonkadonks?

Saturday Lunch

I rarely post much here about the cooking we do at home because I tend to think food blogging is all about the photos, and most of our cooking is done on week nights when I don’t have nice outdoor light to photograph the food in. But Saturday was a nice lazy day with nothing on the agenda except the Tiger Lillies gig later that night, and I was in one of the happy hazes I still get into about how much I love cooking with my husband, so I put that happiness on a plate and took pictures of it.

We have cooked this puttanesca many times by now. It’s delicious, and can be thrown together from stuff in our pantry without needing to go out and buy anything fresh.

When I trawl the Internet for recipes I usually ignore anything that looks too fiddly, and would definitely have ignored this minted orange, fennel and red onion salad recipe too. So it’s good that it was Alec who found the recipe, decided he had the necessary knife skills to take it on without using a special slicing device, and didn’t consult me at all.

So we made this simple yet sophisticated, flavourful, healthy, elegant lunch. And then we put our plates on the coffee table, sat on the floor, and ate it while watching The Hangover.

The Old Kallang Airport

The Singapore Biennale is one of those things that can, for a day or two at least, make me feel unequivocally happy about living in Singapore. I usually find a fairly good proportion of the art engaging (though I am admittedly quite a pleb), but what I enjoy most is how each Biennale takes one old, hitherto forgotten building from Singapore’s past and re-opens it for the display of art, often commissioning very cool site-specific installations which make the most out of the particular building’s unique features. I took lots of photographs of the Tanglin Camp barracks at the first Biennale and the old Beach Road Camp buildings at the second Biennale, but in usual fashion I never got round to writing any blog entries and they languished in my hard drive. However, after all these years of failure, I have finally managed to do something for this third Biennale!

The photos in this post are purely of this Biennale’s re-opened building, the Old Kallang Airport. While I have lots of photos of the particular works of art I enjoyed, there’s a certain joy to be had simply from walking around the building which is completely separate from the art you’re ostensibly there to see, and I want to focus on that first. Here’s a thumbnail gallery for anyone who prefers that, but you can also continue reading to get all the photos on one page.

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