Clinging To Perspective

I’m back, vaguely unpacked, in the house my family moved to while I was away, sitting in my new room (the first time I’ve ever had a room to myself at home), typing this while my laptop receives broadband love vibes from the cable modem. We had barbecued stingray, chilli kangkong and crispy baby squid for dinner at my request. Recent events in my sister’s job have kept her working past 10 pm in the past few days, but she spent Sunday cleaning my room and preparing it for me to come home to. My mum is doing my laundry, and the “WELCOME HOME MICHY” banner they kept specially from last year is the first thing I see when I enter the room.

I can’t remember a more miserable 24 hours in my life than those I just went through, but I mustn’t forget that even in the gloom my blessings remain abundant.

Relocation

I can only give the following explanations and ask you, gentle reader, to forgive me.

I’ve spent the last week saying goodbye. Goodbye to Nick on Sunday, goodbye to John on Monday, to Ireland from Tuesday till today for a few snatched days with Alec, goodbye to other assorted dear friends and Fabric tonight, and Saturday and Sunday are the hardest goodbye of all, because everything I did in the past week finally hits, and I have to get to grips with the realities of packing, going to the airport, and leaving.

When I get back to Singapore on Monday, I’m going to have to study for exams starting on the 13th, combine this with another academic course that starts on the 11th, and try to stop missing London and everyone there.

I will try to blog, really I will. I love it, and feel something’s missing from my inner life when I don’t. But if real life gets in the way over the next month or so, updates may be sparse. Ineffable will also be moving to a new address soon, when my university computer account is terminated. I don’t know what that will be, or if it will even continue under the same name, but it will continue. Please bookmark temporarineffable to check if this one suddenly disappears, and when life is less ridiculously hectic I promise lots of messiness will be sorted out.

I’ll see you on the other side.

Go Get It They Got It

Reckless Records slashed 20% off everything (everything being already cheap second-hand CDs), and Benny called with the good news.

Queuing up to pay in the dance branch, I met Dave, who I hadn’t seen since our second year in university.

As we were chatting outside, along came Yoichi, who I’d told about the sale. We said hello, David and I parted ways, Yoichi went into the dance branch and I into the rock branch. Soon after this Benny turned up and went into the dance branch. Neither Benny nor Yoichi knew each other, but Yoichi overhead Benny on the phone to me.

Later all three of us were in the rock branch and I introduced Benny and Yoichi. It was one of those rare moments of my life when people I knew from completely different spheres somehow managed to all converge on one spot. The power of music, eh? Or geekdom, I suppose.

—

Purchases:

  • It’s All Happening Now (Lewis Parker, £7.19): BLOODY MARVELLOUS, probably the best UK hip-hop album I’ve ever heard, certainly one of the best hip-hop albums I’ve heard recently from anywhere.
  • Come Get It I Got It (David Holmes, £7.19)
  • Fantastic Damage (El-P, £7.19)
  • Ether Teeth (Fog, £4.80)

The Dream With The Lemon Cult

I went with a faceless friend to a flat. We were greeted by someone who was there to welcome us, but the other people who were meant to welcome us hadn’t arrived yet. The person served us lemon tea. It was very good lemon tea.

More people arrived, all dressed very well. They all knew each other. We didn’t really know anyone. They were all really friendly and welcoming, but in that way where you think, well, this is great, but I don’t know you at all, and I’m getting a bit tired of being so moon-facedly smiley, and actually, what on earth am I doing here at all?

I asked the first person we’d met why I was there. He looked a little surprised, but explained that they had invited us there to introduce us to worshipping the lemon. He showed us pictures and brochures about the lemon, and spoke earnestly of the need to worship it.

He asked if we’d like something to drink.

“The lemon tea you gave us earlier was pretty nice,” I said.

“Oh no,” he said, “that’s only meant to be drunk for special ceremonial purposes. That was part of your special welcome to our community.”

We left shortly after. Everyone was still very nice and friendly as they waved goodbye. I woke up craving lemon tea.

Etre Et Avoir / Whale Rider

After a fairly long dry spell there are finally some movies out worth watching.

Etre Et Avoir is ridiculously, wonderfully sweet, probably the best thing I’ve seen this year since City of God, and certainly the best film I’ve ever seen about the teaching profession. You know how you can be fairly cynical, and rather wary of the ubiquitious attempts of various segments of the media industry to use sappy moments, pretty flowers, soaring Enya music, fuzzy animals, and cute kids to manipulate you into some particular emotion, but sometimes a moment just gets you with its overwhelming adorability and you catch yourself in an unreserved “AWWWWWWWW!”? Etre Et Avoir is two hours worth of those moments, mostly involving cute kids and a lovely, lovely teacher who we couldn’t believe could possibly be single (as he appeared to be), given that he was intelligent, sensitive, good-looking, and actually a real person rather than some perfect teacher a scriptwriter made up. Unless you detest being reduced to a puddle of utterly endeared goo, and are unwilling to have your faith in the nobility of discovering and realizing vocation reawakened, watch this – and bring a teacher you love with you.

Whale Rider involves a simple, touching story told extremely well, excellent actors, an appropriately evocative Lisa Gerrard soundtrack and lots of shots of whales. What’s not to like? If the last film about Maoris you saw was Once Were Warriors, rest assured that this one is considerably less harrowing, although it certainly does have its tearjerking moments. (And if you’re Singaporean, please try not to crack up when you learn the name of the ancient saviour of the tribe is Paikea. I’m sure it means something in the Maori language that isn’t juvenile delinquent.)

I’m also curious about Buffalo Soldiers, but probably only because the whole Saving Private Lynch myth tends to annoy me, and watching a film that does actually dare to portray the US military in a bad light would irrationally soothe that annoyance. Then again, I could spend my £5 worth of America disgust on a Noam Chomsky book instead, which would be a rather more cerebral form of protest.

Some Vice With Your Chicken Rice?

We cooked dinner on Wednesday night for various old friends at the hall. Alec made chicken rice, and I made Thai beef salad. A simple, fairly healthy, fairly nutritious meal combining the smooth mild flavour of chicken rice with the piquancy of the Thai beef salad.

If only such meal-planning and flavour-mixing decisions could be equally applied to after-dinner drinking with similarly enjoyable, innocuous consequences.

The available tipples, mostly what Alec and I had managed to accumulate and needed help in consuming, included wine, vodka, mead, Sheridan’s, whiskey, schnapps and absinthe. After consuming almost everything there the hall bar’s stocks of Bacardi Breezers, Smirnoff Ices and a bottle of Jack Daniels were also raided. In the course of the evening I consumed almost all of the above, as did most others present.

Suzy provided an extremely appropriate cocktail for this evening involving former residents of a Catholic hall. The Weeping Jesus involves absinthe, schnapps and grenadine. The green of the absinthe is the Garden of Gethsemane, and the red grenadine gets dribbled down the sides to represent Jesus’s tears of blood. The instructions on the absinthe bottle say you must always dilute it before drinking, given that it’s 68% alcohol by volume. I don’t think they really meant diluting it with schnapps though.

As I write this (it was written on Thursday) it’s 2.32 pm. As of an hour ago, Chris was still in bed. Alec has taken some Resolve, and is now just about capable of vacantly watching old episodes of Jeeves and Wooster. And I am listlessly trying to tear myself away from this random typing and back to civil liberties and the responses to terrorism.

Excerpts: Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)

I first read Jane Eyre when I was eight. I never thought I appreciated it on a level higher than that of a trashy romance novel, but rereading it this past week seems to suggest it may have influenced me in ways I wasn’t aware of at the time. In teenage years I developed (and still hold to) characteristics and views extraordinarily similar to hers, but I certainly never consciously sought to emulate her.

On the self:

“I can live alone, if self-respect and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give”…”Reason sits firm and holds the reins, and she will not let the feelings burst away and hurry her to wild chasms. The passions may rage furiously, like true heathens, as they are; and the desires may imagine all sorts of vain things: but judgment shall still have the last word in every argument, and the casting vote in every decision. Strong wind, earthquake-shock, and fire may pass by: but I shall follow the guiding of that still small voice which interprets the dictates of conscience.”

On hating how most of your fellow females talk to men:

“Surely she cannot truly like him, or not like him with true affection! If she did, she need not coin her smiles so lavishly, flash her glances so unremittingly, manufacture airs so elaborate, graces so multitudinous. It seems to me that she might, by merely sitting quietly at his side, saying little and looking less, get nigher his heart. I have seen in his face a far different expression from that which hardens it now while she is so vivaciously accosting him; but then it came of itself: it was not elicited by meretricious arts and calculated manoeuvres; and one had but to accept it – to answer what he asked without pretension, to address him when needful without grimace…”

On how to address the man you are completely in love with, after being separated from him for ages, and meeting again to find him blind, crippled and morose:

“Have you a pocket-comb about you, sir?”
“What for, Jane?”
“Just to comb out this shaggy black mane. I find you rather alarming, when I examine you close at hand: you talk of my being a fairy, but I am sure, you are more like a brownie.”
“Am I hideous, Jane?”
“Very, sir: you always were, you know.”

Jane rocks.

Yo La Tengo/Calexico (Somerset House, London, July 2003)

Monday was a brief respite from international trade law into indie music.

I trawled Berwick Street with ever-patient Benny, sold about 10 CDs and justified buying more on the grounds that I’d probably have to pay expensive import prices for these in Singapore:

  • King Geedorah: Take Me To Your Leader
  • Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks: Pig Lib
  • Manitoba: Start Breaking My Heart

This was all a prelude to meeting Alec (and Benny’s friend Polly, as Yo La Tengo mad as me) for the Yo La Tengo/Calexico gig at Somerset House in the evening.

Yo La Tengo started off, which seemed strange given their relatively senior status in the indie pantheon. They played many songs off Summer Sun, which I haven’t listened to yet, a fun frantic screechy version of Cherry Chapstick, and Tom Courtenay, which I love madly, and which they didn’t play the first time I saw them live. They finished with Sun Ra’s Nuclear War and left the stage with its ending whispers of “Goodbye.” They displayed everything I loved about them the first time I saw them live, and given the same amount of time with them I feel certain I would have emerged in a similar state of gibbering. But that pleasure was denied me. The length of the set seemed distinctly that of an “opening band”, which is really a bit of a travesty given that the marketing of the gig never indicated that Calexico would be headlining, and Yo La Tengo relegated.

I guess it’s a credit to Calexico that they mostly managed to assuage my dissatisfaction with the length of the YLT set by putting on an excellent show. It seemed as if they livened up the Feast Of Wire songs a little for the performance, which worked fine for most of them, but disappointed me for Black Heart, where they opted for Bond movie music razzle-dazzle, glitz and glam and general high campness in the strings rather than the mournful, desert-on-the-darker-side-of-dusk feel it had (and I loved) on the album. It seemed as though they’d decided that the overriding tone of this gig would be a party, which isn’t necessarily a bad decision, especially when you have trumpets and frequently do that country-yodelly “Aiiiiyiyiyiyi!” thing at appropriate bits in the songs.

Leaving the gig, it occurred to me that I’d actually seen both these bands in the space of an April week a little over two years ago, Yo La Tengo headlining (as they SHOULD be, damn you Somerset House) on the Tuesday and Calexico opening for Stephen Malkmus on the Thursday. I saw both gigs with Marten, who was, at the time, the only person in my London circle of friends who had even heard of most of the bands I wanted to see (I had abundant clubbing companions, but only Marten for gigs). I remember coming back from the Malkmus gig and meeting Alec, about to get drunk, in the basement of our hall. Neither of us had the tiniest inkling of any future connection beyond mild recognition of each other’s photos in the hall yearbook.

How things change.

Wrong G-Word

Oh dear. You know you’re working too hard when out of the corner of your bored, roving eye you read the review excerpt on the back of your copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned as:

“A prose that has the tough delicacy of a gusset.”
– New York Review of Books

and you’re like “A gusset? Ewwwww!” and then you look closer and it was garnet, which makes much more sense.

Mullet Musings

Warning: frivolous. A growing hazard of this blog, dear reader, as my days are increasingly spent studying for Masters exams and desperately longing for respite from deep academic thinking.

My preferred hairstyle for myself is an evocative mix of militant feminism, anime punk and, for those who don’t like it, mental institution inmate who somehow got hold of some shears. Given that I was unfortunately born with horribly frizzy hair (I blame my mother for tainting my Oriental birthright of silky straight hair with her Eurasianness), this was somewhat difficult to accomplish before I decided at 19 that I would be ugly no more, straightened the lot of it, and chopped most of it off.

Further hair-related developments were helped by being in London, where Medusa herself could walk down the street and no one would bat an eyelid. I knew I had succeeded in my hair goals when after one particular haircut, I got eyeballed disapprovingly by a nun, approached by a chap who randomly saw me in Virgin Megastore to appear in visual projections for a club in Brighton, and got chatted up by an equal number of males and females the next time I went clubbing.

Since then, however, vanity has had to take a backseat to other demands on my time, and as fretted about recently, I’ve spent the last few months as a total minger as my last haircut, which featured radical fringe action, grew out into an increasingly curly mullet. Yesterday I decided something had to be done, and got it all straightened. Unfortunately, not being able to get it cut at the same time (Toni & Guy Academy does straightening and cutting at two different academies) means I must now live with a ramrod-straight mullet until I can get another appointment with the other academy for a cut.

And strangely, once ramrod-straight, the mullet doesn’t look like a mullet anymore, I just look like a stereotypically sweet demure Chinese girl with a stereotypically boring haircut, and I realize all those envious teenage years coveting the long silky straight hair of my pretty sweet Chinese girl friends were a complete waste of bitterness. This time next week, I aim to be shorn and spiky once again.