So the results of the Most Phallic Building In The World competition are out. Just thought you should all know.
Londoners will be pleased to know that our Gherkin got recognised too, as the Best Uncircumcised Building In The World. Makes you swell up with pride, doesn’t it?
When I imported my Blogger content into Movable Type, titles were automatically generated for all my posts from the first five words of each post. I didn’t realize the comic potential of this immediately, but while trying out my new search function I typed in “Alec” and was presented with an array of posts, including those with the following (mostly rather misleading) “titles”:
I’d initially been really excited
I’m less than satisfied with
Alec takes issue with my
Alec does strange things with
I got called a cunt
I admit it, I’m stuck
So there I was, suffering
And today it all ended
Tee hee. It’s almost poetic! (Am I the only one this amuses?) (For the benefit for any friends I haven’t talked to in a while who may start getting worried, don’t worry, we’re still very happily together.)
While doing other administrative exploration, I found this other title I rather like:
It’s a rare DJ that can transform an exhausted, ridiculously sleep-deprived Michelle in an overcrowded club full of Singaporeans into, well, a happy Michelle, so I guess DJ Jazzy Jeff (yes, Will’s friend in Fresh Prince of Bel-Air who kept going over to the house, annoying Mr Banks and getting physically thrown out) must be one of those DJs.
Before he came on, I was ready to kill. I was annoyed at overdressed people, yet annoyed at myself at the same time for giving in and dressing fractionally better than I would have for a London club (where you could walk in wearing a clown suit and the most anyone would say is “Love the baggy trousers, mate”). I was annoyed at the stupid level of crowding in Phuture, and at incredibly rude people who pushed past others way too violently, or literally just leaned on the people behind them to force them to give way. (Big Bald White Guy, this means you. You’re an asshole, and I just wish I’d elbowed you in your spine a lot harder than I did.)
In the crush of the crowds, I remembered how Russ always managed to protect me, dance behind me without ever hitting me, and look good dancing, all at the same time, and I remembered how far away Russ is now. I remembered Nick and Vish gangsta’ing it up on the empty dancefloor of a Glasgow student union bar, not caring how ridiculous they looked. I remembered trudging painfully up the Ramsay Hall stairs with Gareth in daylight, vowing futilely never to club again and knowing this scenario would repeat itself in the near and irresponsible future.
I felt constrained by the atmosphere of the club, very much a place where people go with people, and don’t tend to strike up random conversations with strangers, and again felt annoyed with myself at the same time for letting them affect me. Coincidentally, the only stranger who struck up a conversation with me the whole night was from England. Go figure. To be fair to the club, and my fellow Singaporeans, I was probably mostly just pissed off because it wasn’t London.
Then Jazzy Jeff came on, and all my acrimony melted away into happy flailing and perspiration. Great selection of material ranging from the obligatory to the obscure, pretty damn inspired treatment of well-known samples and recent hip-pop either through mixing or scratching, some moments of total weirdness like when he played Smells Like Teen Spirit, and always on the right side of the fine line between turntable mastery and turntable wankery. I must admit that his decision to tempt us with the intro of Sound Of Da Police but never actually give us the track frustrated me dreadfully, but maybe everyone else except me is tired of it.
I snapped back into perspective. I was with great company, friends no less dear to me than the ones I’ve left behind. I was witnessing one of the best live mix sets I’ve ever seen. I had a wonderful boyfriend to talk to on the phone when I got back later that night. In England I gained everything and lost nothing. I mustn’t forget to keep focusing on what I gained. I mustn’t forget that I have lost none of that just by having to be somewhere else for a few years.
Not since I played the organ at a memorial service in pajamas and slippers have I been so inappropriately dressed for an occasion.
The phone call came at 4.30 this afternoon. My sister’s colleague had two tickets to the Vladimir Ashkenazy/Min Lee concert tonight, and something had come up at the last minute preventing her from attending. I’d really wanted to go to this concert, but all the affordable tickets were sold out.
So far, so fantastic, but here’s the rub: they were complimentary tickets, designated “VVIP”. What’s wrong with that, you ask, sounds even better! The problem was that I was in university, had no time to go home and change before the concert, and was wearing trainers, jeans, and a raglan tee featuring a fluorescent green alien. Completely acceptable for the pleb seats, but not when you arrive and realize you are sitting in the same row as the Deputy Prime Minister.
We fished my leather jacket out of a bag of designated dry-cleaning in my mother’s car boot, and that mostly concealed the fluorescent alien, but next to people in silk shawls and cocktail dresses, I still kinda stood out. I tried to hold my head high and remind myself that I’d probably spent more hours actually playing in orchestras than most other people in those VVIP rows (including you, Mr Lee!), but then decided discretion was the better part of valour and spent most of the interval skulking behind a large staircase.
BUT! Whatever embarrassment I might have felt at other parts of the evening was more than compensated for by the rapture of the performances. I mean, Vladimir Ashkenazy. I saw Joshua Bell playing the Sibelius in London, but Ashkenazy is in a whole other league of classical music stardom. He played a Mozart piano concerto, conducting the orchestra at the same time from his seat at the grand piano, and from our VVIP seats we could see every flash of his fingers. The real joy for me was yet to come though. I’m not at all fond of Mozart, and therefore didn’t enjoy Ashkenazy’s performance as much as I could have (amazing though he was), but Min Lee was going to be playing the Bruch violin concerto, which I adore intensely.
[One of my small claims to violin fame is that once, I was, technically, “competition” for Min Lee. To be rather more accurate, we took part in the same round of the National Music Competition. I must have been about 10 or 11, she must have been about 8. Obviously, she kicked everyone’s asses roundly and won the competition, but for one small moment in time I was technically in the same league. I emphasize “technically” here. ]
There’s a certain feeling that overwhelms me when I’m watching a performance of a particular classical music piece I love; the almost violent beating of the heart in the opening notes, the surge of what can only be described as euphoria when the music builds to a climax, the teetering on the brink of tears at the sheer wonder of the beauty human civilization can create when it wants to. That feeling enveloped me tonight, both during the pure unadulterated jubilance of the final movement of the Bruch, and later, when the orchestra played Elgar’s Enigma Variations.
Every time I renew my long-lapsed relationship with classical music I am reminded that its power is at its most elemental and intense when it is unadulterated by our modern attempts at “updating” its sound. (William Orbit, I suppose I can’t fault you for trying, but, er, please don’t try any more.) Vanessa Mae can do her violin version of the Toccatta and Fugue to dance beats and yes, it sounds energetic and is perhaps more likely to succeed with the MTV generation, but all I want is to sit in an empty church and listen to its cascading fury unleashed by an organist who doesn’t know I’m there. Rob D can sample the Enigma Variations for the beginning of Clubbed To Death, and everyone will love it because it was in The Matrix and all, but sit in a concert hall listening as the Nimrod variation rolls out its exquisite expanse of sound, and you don’t need flashy bullet-time cinematography to understand that all you really want is to live in this moment forever.
I listened to these in surround sound today, and it was divine. I really must start carrying my Discman around again.
Today at The Writer’s Almanac:
I want to write you
a love poem as headlong
as our creek
after thaw
– from love poem (Linda Pastan)
I went looking for more, found this and thought it very apt:
And the words are so familiar,
so strangely new, words
you almost wrote yourself, if only
– from A New Poet (Linda Pastan)
Very nice. I’ve added her Selected Poems to my wishlist.
I was going to a movie with Luke, and we were trying to decide what to watch.
Me: Okay, I’ve done a little checking and I have two preferences. Swimming Pool or The Magdalene Sisters. Swimming Pool is described as an erotic thriller set in France, and features two female protagonists and a lot of nudity. The Magdalene Sisters is about these unwed pregnant girls in 50s Ireland who get hauled into nunneries and abused by nuns.
Luke: The one in France.
So Swimming Pool it was, and it was certainly worth watching. Excellent acting, interesting storyline with a novel twist at the end, and lots of tits and ass. Just what we all need on a Saturday night. I’m going to see the mean nuns tomorrow though.
Purple America isn’t a book I’d read again, but it was worth reading once.
I have a strange fascination with books about small town suburban America with its picket fences and depressing diners and general air of stagnation, but when I actually read them I always realize it takes a gifted writer to prevent the dead air and dull humdrumness he describes from taking over. Don DeLillo succeeds at times in Underworld, but even his considerable skills weren’t enough to prevent White Noise from becoming one of those books I finished just for the sake of finishing.
Rick Moody writes well enough to save Purple America from the same fate as White Noise. There isn’t a lot in the book that lends itself well to excerpting, but here’s one passage.
“…Hex Raitliffe prays the Great American prayer, the American psalm, the prayer of infants, though to whom he prays is unclear – Anglican New Testament God of the church of his parents? Interdenominational and mostly secular god of his liberal arts education? More likely, as with his fellow Americans, he supplicates now to a provisionally devised personal deity, made up on the spot, reasonably all-powerful, completely generous, adapted from Hollywood and rock and roll and moonlight on water. He prays to this God, with burnt offering, G-g-get me out of this, get me out of this one fix, I’ll do anything.”
Unfortunately, although the last few chapters are among the best, there’s a fair amount of dreck in the middle which I skimmed over, and the biggest downfall of the book for me was that it never quite lived up to the promise of its incredible first chapter, which is somewhat in the same vein as the beginning of Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius, except it expresses the same amount of unsentimental heartbreak a lot more concisely and unconventionally.
You can read the beginning of AHWOSG here, but unfortunately I can’t find online excerpts for Purple America. Go into a bookstore and read the first chapter. Seriously. It’s one of those passages I come across every now and then in books which painfully reminds me that I can’t write for shit. As I said, it’s just a pity the rest of the book doesn’t maintain that exceptional quality.
We walked out for dinner to the Yin Yang Palace which serves rather wonderful Chinese restaurant-quality food at coffeeshop prices. We had steamed tilapia in spicy nonya sauce, chilli kangkong, ma po tofu (in lots of chilli oil) and herbal mutton soup. Additional small dishes of chilli also came with the food. The herbal mutton soup was the only non-spicy dish. My dad dunked his mutton in the chilli before eating it.
The most recent Breezeblock show starts with Midnight In A Perfect World, and goes on to feature a bloody amazing white label track by Knifehandchop and a live mix by Kieran Hebden.
Django’s got 10% off all used CDs and 15% of all new CDs, plus free shipping worldwide for over US$25 worth of new CDs. I ordered:
Thank God for the Internet. There is only so long I can subsist on MTV and shitty local radio.