I Really Really Hate Birds And That Ernst Painting Has Always Freaked Me Out, But…

(The following passage is a fictional excerpt from an ornithological journal.)

“Is it possible, I wonder, to study a bird so closely, to observe and catalogue its peculiarities in such minute detail, that it becomes invisible? Is it possible that while fastidiously calibrating the span of its wings or the length of its tarsus, we somehow lose sight of its poetry? That in our pedestrian descriptions of a marbled or vermiculated plumage we forfeit a glimpse of living canvases, cascades of carefully toned browns and golds that would shame Kandinsky, misty explosions of colour to rival Monet? I believe that we do. I believe that in approaching our subject with the sensibilities of statisticians and dissectionists, we distance ourselves increasingly from the marvelous and spell-binding planet of imagination whose gravity drew us to our studies in the first place.

…

When we stare into the catatonic black bead of a Parakeet’s eye we must teach ourselves to glimpse the cold, alien madness that Max Ernst perceived when he chose to robe his naked brides in confections of scarlet feather and the transplanted monstrous heads of exotic birds. When some ocean-going Kite or Tern is captured in the sharp blue gaze of our Zeiss lenses, we must be able to see the stop motion flight of sepia gulls through the early kinetic photographs of Muybridge, beating white wings tracing a slow oscilloscope line through space and time.”

– Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

In Which I Explain It All

Some explaining is in order. I have made vague occasional references to feeling down over the past few months, but never really went into anything in detail apart from whining about missing London. This entry is mostly for people who know me and want a little more information, but those of you who rubberneck at road accidents are welcome to read it too.
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Not A Failure! Not A Failure!

I have been awarded the LLM (Masters in Law) with merit.

THANK YOU GOD!!!

And as if this good news isn’t enough, I have finally found the rare collaboration EP by Low & Spring Heel Jack on Soulseek and am downloading it this minute! Joy! Joy! Joy!

Over My Dead Body

I’m assuming the only reason London or the Scottish Highlands aren’t in this list of 50 Places To See Before You Die is that it’s a BBC site, so the voting emphasis is on places out of the UK.

Out of the 50, I’ve seen:
2. Great Barrier Reef
8. Sydney
18. Venice
27. Paris
35. Rome
37. Barcelona
39. Singapore (duh)

But all I can say is that the people who voted on this quiz seem to have different travel sensibilities from me. For one thing, call me a party-pooper, but I could so easily go the rest of my life without setting foot into Florida or Las Vegas.

I’m pretty astounded not a single place in Turkey made it onto this list – Istanbul? Cappadocia? Ephesus? And people would rather go to Florida than Jerusalem, which doesn’t even make the list? (Granted, you might die before you have time to see much of Jerusalem, but it’s an amazing place nonetheless.) In Europe I’d also rate Berlin more highly than Paris, Rome or Barcelona, but maybe that’s just me. (Russ? Views?) And I like Melbourne more than Sydney, but yet again, it’s not even on the list.

Lastly, I applaud the noble efforts of the Singapore Tourist Promotion Board, really I do, but who in their right mind would actually put Singapore as one of the 50 places you should see before you die??? More worth seeing than Bangkok? Marrakesh? Dubrovnik? St Petersburg? Don’t get me wrong, I think my country’s quite a fascinating place, and it’s certainly more interesting than the backpacker travel guides and Western media would have you believe, but one of the top 50 places to see before you die? Come on.

Insert Crude Obvious Punny Title Here

I was going to write about my steady progress at Chinese karaoke, but really, my trials and tribulations with Eason Chan’s The King Of Karaoke and Stephanie Sun’s Ti Or Or are simply far less amusing than the towering pinnacle of comedy that is the chee bai song. (Translation of “chee bai” here.)

I should clarify: that isn’t actually its name. It has a perfectly normal name in Chinese, which probably means something sappy and innocuous like Our Love Endures Through The Seasons or Without Your Love I May Be Heartbroken But At Least I Can Sing Really Sad Songs About My Loss And Look Suitably Vulnerable In The Video, but after last Sunday it is forever The Chee Bai Song to me.

This is how it goes. It’s simple but effective. They (Terry and pal) sing this sappy ballad with great feeling, but substitute “chee bai” at appropriate parts. So:

“Wo xian zai deng dai ni de hui lai” (I am waiting for your return) becomes
“Wo xian zai deng dai ni de chee bai” (I am waiting for your cunt).

At the big chorus:
“Leng leng de bing yu zai lian shang hu luan de pai” (Cold cold icy rain haphazardly slaps my face) becomes
“Leng leng de chee bai zai lian shang hu luan de pai” (Cold cold icy cunt haphazardly slaps my face).

And so on. You kind of have to be there.

Mind you, their subversive approach to karaoke classics isn’t merely confined to the world of Chinese balladry. A rendition of Boyz II Men’s I’ll Make Love To You went something like “I’ll make love to you/Like you want me to/And I’ll hold you tight/Fuck you RIGHT FROM BEHIND I’ll make love to you etc.”

First belly-laughs in a long while, which probably says something less than flattering about me or my sense of humour.

Pop Quiz, Hot Shot

Level 1: Desuetude. Do you know what this means?

Level 2: I’ll give it to you in a sentence. “Whereas the degree in sociology and political economy that Pnin had obtained with some pomp at the University of Prague around 1925 had become by mid century a doctorate in desuetude, he was not altogether miscast as a teacher of Russian.” (Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov)

Still don’t know?
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Swahili Newcastle Porn Boobs

It strikes me that these two recent search requests leading to my site (not this one, Ineffable) are at different extremes of the obscurity spectrum.

If you’re from the UK, no prizes for guessing which one I think you can find easily enough without having to use an Internet search engine. Buy her a drink and they’re yours!

(And just like that, she insulted all of North English womanhood.)

I Love I Love Music

I think it’s only right given that I’m managing to waste vast swathes of time at a hitherto unimaginable level on the Internet rather than study for my impending exams, that I showcase a site that has been helping me do that.

The I Love Music blog is where I go to find people I’ve hardly ever managed to meet in real life (except Benny, Jeremy, Marten and Michael B, who are now either in different countries or just not particularly accessible) – who are as obsessive about music as me, with similar or far wider eclecticism, but also have a sense of humour and perspective and are not smug loser cocks.

From a thread on Missy Elliot’s Work It:

Imagine the child of Busta Rhymes and Missy Elliott.
— Dan Perry, September 6th, 2002.

a sexy fat guy with dreads in a megaman costume who can’t flow?
— Josh, September 6th, 2002.

Other threads of joy:
y’all ready for this?
Give me MEGA POP BALLADS and give me them NOW!
The Greatest One Line in Hip-Hop History
Did you really feel “welcomed” to the jungle by axl rose, or do you think that was sort of just insincere, halfhearted graciousness?

Two Years

When Alec was in South Africa recently, he sent me a postcard.

I quote:

“I’m afraid that, in characteristic fashion, I’ve managed to make an ass of things. When I first saw this stamp I thought it was a particularly ugly bird.”

The rare South African soreconihr bird

Today marks two years with Mr Ass. I still don’t understand how he continues to make me laugh, or endear me so much, or love me warts and all. I still don’t understand how I ever got so lucky.

Thanks For The Memories

I guess there’s just no pleasing some people.

For weeks I griped and complained about the fact that my boxes hadn’t arrived from England yet. And now they’re here, I wish they weren’t.

I never thought I would be quoting lyrics from The Tennessee Waltz in this blog, but while I was unpacking, one particular line kept playing in my head, louder and more insistently than the Fugazi on the speakers. Going flagrantly against the optimistic conclusion I forced myself to draw here in a previous entry, that line was: “Now I know just how much I have lost.”

I always intended, apart from living a proper goodbye to London (which I think I did), to sit down and write something about it, but in the pressures surrounding my departure I never got time to. Call it solipsism or exhibitionism if you will, but somehow it feels inadequate just sitting here alone with my memories, I want to tell everybody about what this city, these people, this time, meant to me.

Typical Michellian Disclaimer: What follows may not mean a great deal to people who either don’t know me or don’t know London, but if you’ve ever been madly in love with any other city, that’s all you’ll need to understand. And of course I don’t think London or England are perfect, and of course there are serious problems with them which I was just lucky enough to never really encounter personally, and of course there are things I like and respect about Singapore. It’s just that on balance I swing West rather than East. My attempts at translating jumbled ecstatic memories into dry electronic scribblings may therefore give but a rippled reflection of reality, either through my inadequacies with prose or my tendency towards sentimentality, but here is my goodbye. I pray it wasn’t a farewell.
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