When Brain Dead, Seek Pretty Pretty Pictures

My friend Tony takes pictures I like.

  • I saw the Waterstone’s building on Gower Street every day for four years, and until the day I left I never stopped noticing new light conditions and angles from which its beauty could surprise me. Tony’s photograph captures another of these surprises.
  • I also really like this one of the detergent aisle in Safeway – talk about finding magic in the mundane.
  • Finally, this abandoned deckchair on an empty Rhodes beach is just utterly gorgeous.

Every day at wordphoto.org, a new word is picked and people submit photos which that word inspired them to take. Recent words I’ve rather enjoyed have been bend, invasive and point.

And finally, I just want to say that I can’t imagine what I’d do with a digital Rolleiflex, especially since its current technical specifications aren’t very high, but good God it’s beautiful.

Football Isn’t Coming Home Just Yet And Neither, Sadly, Am I

The last time I watched a critically important England match, I was in a pub off Petticoat Lane crammed to the gills with people at 7.30 AM. We got tea and fried egg sandwiches from a caff round the corner, but of course much like all England matches since 1966, it wasn’t exactly destined to be the breakfast of champions. I had great fun nonetheless.

Either on that day or another close by, I tried to keep my jubilation discreet as South Korea beat Italy and Matteo and Emmanuelle collapsed in tortured disbelief onto the floor of the TV room. Leaving the hall shortly after to run an errand, a guy was jogging down Gower Street draped in the South Korean flag and I gave him a whoop and a thumbs up. He dashed across the road with a huge beam on his face and we exchanged a high-five.

In comparison, watching the match yesterday in my living room in the dead of night with only my Fairprice chicken cup noodles for company was rather less memorable. Remembering those halcyon¹ days and then looking at my life two years on is decidedly depressing.

¹ I realize I haven’t actually used the phrase “halcyon days” right, but I plead music wanker’s licence in support of the reference – I saw an Orbital gig the night England lost to Brazil.

There’ll Be A Load Of Compromisin’

Karaoke today was a riot of cheese. The boys were in fine falsetto form with several BeeGees songs – Tragedy was especially successful, they even managed the harmonies – and I went on a one-hit-wonder rampage with Superwoman (Karyn White), If Love Is Blind (Tiffany) and Don’t Cry Out Loud (Melissa Manchester) before caving in to my long-repressed yearning for Rhinestone Cowboy.

Chinese songs were, of course, attempted, but my largely stagnant Chinese music horizons rendered me incapable of singing more than the songs I always sing. K Ge Zhi Wang and Qi Zi were mostly ungarbled, but I didn’t fare quite so well on Ti Or Or. I am now trying to decide whether to embark on the almighty challenge of adding Faye Wong’s An Yong to my repertoire. Right now I think it’s one of the most gorgeous ballads I’ve ever heard (in any language) but it also sounds fiendishly difficult.

Halfway through karaoke, I found out that the moot coaches have chosen the speakers for an upcoming advocacy competition NUS is taking part in. I will have to pass the shipping law arguments I’ve spent the last four months perfecting to my teammate, take on a whole new set of issues, and be lead counsel. By Monday. Apparently this is because I am the strongest speaker. I hope the coaches realize their strongest speaker is now strongly tempted to spend the next three weeks curled up under a table in a fetal position.

Jokes aside, I’m honoured by the choice, because I certainly wouldn’t give such a shit-hard job to anyone I didn’t think had the balls and brains to take it on. But it’s possible updates here in the next couple of weeks might be a little thin on the ground, or at least overly link-based.

I want to meet Mick too

Meeting Mick is a Telegraph article featuring quotes from various people about Mick Jagger. These were some of my favourites:

Barbara Charone (ex-Stones press officer)

‘One evening several EMI executives came to the studio to meet the Stones and listen to their first album for EMI Europe. One resembled a bank manager while the other had perfected the record company corporate image of what is hip. Jagger played them a 50-minute version of a reggae song called ‘Jah Wonderful’, seriously insisting it was the album. “Actually,” Jagger comforted the bank manager-type, “we could cut it down to 45 minutes.”‘

Toby Young (author)

‘I “snogged” and later took out a girl who gently explained to me that she couldn’t really get involved with me because she was involved with another man, an extremely famous and virile man who had a bit of a reputation as a ladies’ man but whose friends had all told her that it was different with her, serious. She said he had “the sexual stamina of a 17-year-old boy.” Then to my shock it turned out that the third corner of this love triangle was Mick Jagger. Passed over for a grandfather – bit of a blow.’

Paul Robinson (insurance salesman)

‘I was a spectator at Trent Bridge and saw Mick in the bar and went up to him to try and get an autograph. I said, “Excuse me, Mr Jagger, but would you…” And he jumped to his feet and said, “…Have the next dance?” and proceeded to waltz me around the room.’

Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow

Benny’s made his first ever mixtape, and it’s good as can be expected from someone with such eclectic tastes and sheer passion for music. It may seem like there’s an unbridgeable chasm between Funkadelic’s spacey gospel chants of “Free your mind and your ass will follow! The kingdom of heaven is within!” and the twisted predatory blues of Velvet Underground’s Venus In Furs four songs later, but it flows just fine in the mix.

This is a link to the 128kbps, 54.1 MB file. If you prefer 192kbps quality, or fancy downloading the Madlib or Four Tet goodies Benny also makes available, they can all be found by clicking on “Aural Prostitution” here.

The End Of The Affair (Graham Greene): Excerpts

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

* * *

Hatred seems to operate the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?

* * *

I felt that afternoon such complete trust when she said to me suddenly, without being questioned,”I’ve never loved anybody or anything as I do you.” It was as if, sitting there in the chair with a half-eaten sandwich in her hand, she was abandoning herself as completely as she had done, five minutes back, on the hardwood floor. We most of us hesitate to make so complete a statement – we remember and we foresee and we doubt. She had no doubts. The moment only mattered. Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space. What did time matter – all the past and the other men she may from time to time (there is that word again) have known, or all the future in which she might be making the same statement with the same sense of truth? When I replied that I loved her too in that way, I was the liar, not she, for I never lose the consciousness of time: to me the present is never here: it is always last year or next week.

She wasn’t lying even when she said,”Nobody else. Ever again.” There are contradictions in time, that’s all, that don’t exist on the mathematical point. She had so much more capacity for love than I had – I couldn’t bring down that curtain round the moment, I couldn’t forget and I couldn’t not fear. Even in the moment of love, I was like a police officer gathering evidence of a crime that hadn’t yet been committed, and when more than seven years later I opened Parkis’s letter the evidence was all there in my memory to add to my bitterness.

The Tiger Lillies, Esplanade Recital Studio, Singapore, 12 June 2004

In hindsight, I suppose the best way to persuade people to accompany me to the Tiger Lillies gig was probably not to tell them “This band is so incredibly weird that even I find it weird!” I’d been assuming people would jump at the opportunity to see something so bizarre, but instead they generally smiled politely and invented other plans. But not all was lost; after a brief argument with Ida about who would be weirder, this band or the singer from Uzbekistan performing earlier that night (Ida: But she’s from Uzbekistan, how more fringe can it get?), Ida relented and came along.

I might well be wrong about this, but I believe the first song of the gig was about going down on a diseased whore. This was just to ease us in gently. The band went on to regale us with songs fantasizing about crucifying Christ (Bang In The Nails), wanting a hamster up your rectum (Hamster), and sex with flies (Flies, natch). The lead singer does everything, by the way, in an operatic falsetto, because, well, because he can.

Towards the end of one of the songs, the drummer substituted his drumsticks for two huge inflated plastic mallets and started banging away at his drums with them. This got wilder and wilder until, bit by bit, the entire drum set was collapsing onto the floor under the fury of this onslaught. He then proceeded to play on this drum set, collapsed in disarray onto the floor, until the intermission many songs later.

During a song about suicide, the drummer climbed up onto his stool with a bottle of pills and tipped them all into his mouth. He then started spitting them out rhythmically onto his (reassembled) drum set, thus playing his drum part in the song.

From what I’ve said so far it would be fairly easy to dismiss this band as a one trick pony, but there was actually much more to the gig than its novelty/shock value. The jazz standard Autumn Leaves was delivered completely straight, and although it might be difficult to imagine how a man singing it in an operatic falsetto could still bring out all the longing and pathos of the song, this was certainly achieved.

The same could be said of their encore song, Alone With The Moon, which was, very simply, as lovely and evocative a ballad as I have ever heard anywhere else. Despite the debauched hijinks that took place earlier, I think this song will actually be my abiding memory of the gig – Martyn Jaques in his mime-style make-up, bowler hat, and shirt braces, under a cold smoky spotlight, singing a note so high and clean and true I could have lived in it forever.

I’ve seen a lot of gigs, but I can’t think of any other gig I’ve seen that delivered on so many levels – music, comedy, theatre, pure showmanship – and where the performers were so inimitably unique. Whoever in the Esplanade decided to risk bringing the Tiger Lillies to staid old Singapore, I salute you and thank you from the bottom of my deviant heart.

Cross-Cultural Potty-Mouthing 101

In conversation the other day, Alec described how one of his colleagues’ favourite jokes was to gradually wind him up by piling on more and more stressful tasks and demands until he’d finally lose it and let fly with a flurry of curses. For some strange visceral reason (given that his Irish accent is mostly so Anglicized that I can actually understand most of what he says these days), this swearing would occur in his broadest Irish brogue.

A phrase that featured often in these outbursts is one I wasn’t previously familiar with, but must now share with everyone. “I will a’me bollocks!” is apparently short for “I will, in my bollocks!” which is apparently short for “No, I won’t do this thing you are asking me to do!”

Such elegance and charm, these Irish colloquialisms. I think Alec will pick up Singlish/Hokkien more easily than I first expected.

(While searching the Talking Cock dictionary for the above definitions, I came across this glorious expression which I must confess to having never heard before. Am I just hanging out with the wrong people?)

Mother Of All Guilt Trips

Michelle: Okay, so I’m going out for dinner, and probably to a club after that. It’s my friend’s birthday, so I guess I’ll be back pretty late.
Mum: Do you know, I watched that Missing show on TV yesterday, and it was about this girl your age who left home for work one day and never came back!
Michelle: What do you want me to do, never go out?
Mum: I’m just saying, if anything ever happens to you, I will curl up and die.
Michelle: You have two other children lah.
Mum: Did I ever tell you about my friend? She had three daughters. Then one of them died. Then another one got some intestinal problem and died. A year later, my friend found a lump in her breast. But because she had no will to live on, she refused to do anything about it, and she died too.
Michelle, throwing hands in air: STOP IT MUM!!