Wedding Violinist

My cousin decided to inextricably meld her future to the future of Singapore by getting married today, our National Day. I’d been roped in to start the mass off by inexpertly and rustily playing Jesu, Joy Of Man’s Desire on the violin, with another cousin on the organ and the groom himself on the flute.

I couldn’t hear how we sounded over the mikes. To my ears the squeaks as my bow crossed strings, and the occasional difficulty of keeping the flow of notes smooth while doing only three notes to a bow (to maximise volume) were fairly obvious, but my mother, who is admittedly not the most objective of critics but would probably have been listening more closely than anyone else, assured me that it sounded great, and even noticed my attempts at injecting subtle dynamics into what can otherwise be a rather monotonous piece. So I hopefully pulled off the proverbial achievement of fooling most of the people most of the time.

Other notable musical aspects of the mass were communion hymns by ever-reliable David Haas and Michael Joncas, who have individually managed to account for a fair number of musical highlights of my year in liturgical music. As I instructed my sister, perhaps a bit disturbingly, after the mass, if I die unexpectedly some time soon I want You Are Mine (David Haas) at my funeral, although I suppose they’d probably not want to sing the verse which ends with “Stand up, now walk, and live!” (Other hymns on that list: Be Not Afraid, and I Am The Bread Of Life. Those of you reading this who know me, tell my family if I die and they forget.)

From my seat in the choir I got a better view of proceedings than most in the congregation. I could see when the couple looked at each other, and when they were intent in prayer – it occurred to me that these aren’t necessarily separate in their focus and meaning. I can’t really pinpoint many of my goals in life but perhaps one of them is that unity of purpose.

Once Bitten

Southside Callbox’s Guide to Spotting the North American Rock Critic gives an invaluable guide to the world of popular music reviews, but be warned: nothing in this article will protect you from making unforgivably stupid mistakes like listening to the Pitchfork reviewer who gave This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours a 9.5. Learn from my pain, please.

Dramafest/Debate Finals/Scholarship Gathering/May

I’m really losing the battle to keep up with writing about everything I want to write about.

Raffles Junior College (I keep wanting to refer to this as RJ the way most of my peers do, but am aware that the world outside Singapore doesn’t converse in acronyms) Dramafest finals last Friday, the now annual pilgrimage (written about last year, and fundamentally the same in terms of group composition and general good feeling) to good food in Ghim Moh hawker centre, bad plays in LT1 and debauched supper in Holland Village. Tragically, the Hainanese chicken rice stall manned by the skinny balding moustachioed man seems to have closed down, but at least there was still Luan Qi Ba Zao (scroll down to NoBlogLove post#2). We suppered in Coffee Club, which was altogether too civilized a place for D’s (names initialized to protect the filthy) very excited shouts about Natalie Portman’s nipples. (Most quotes from the evening are unprintable at best, and potentially libellous at worst.)

Debate finals were on Saturday, where for the second year running I was the youngest and strangest-haired judge on the panel. I don’t think this adversely affected my ability to judge, given that I ended up comfortably in the middle of a majority decision, but it was something I was more than passingly aware of nonetheless. Having to travel to the other side of the island (stop laughing, people from big countries, it’s at least one and a half hours’ journey!) for a scholarship gathering afterwards was a bit of a bitch, but worth the trip in the end – I’m always pleasantly shocked by just how much I actually enjoy the company of these people. Working with them, if it happens, might actually be fun.

Monday’s romantic candlelight dinner with May at Chijmes started auspiciously with our agreed meeting point in the Mango store at Raffles City. Practical given that she was parking there, and also for the fact that if either of us was late, the other wouldn’t have to be bored while waiting. Impractical given that we ended up eating about two hours later than we’d originally planned on due to grappling with important shopping decisions, such as whether the unique colour of trousers was an acceptable tradeoff for their ass-ballooning potential.

Pet Shop Boys (Singapore Indoor Stadium, August 2002)

At some point I really must write about the Sonic Youth gig I went to in my last weeks in London but for now I will be content with swearing undying love for the Pet Shop Boys, who I saw on Monday.

Due to my brother’s obsession with them, they were the soundtrack to my childhood. Before I was snarling Who’s bad? into hairbrushes I was crooning I love yoooou, you pay my rent, though obviously not even remotely understanding what the song was about at the time. I learnt the meanings of “suburbia” and “left to my own devices” from the Pet Shop Boys dictionary before I ever came across them in books. I think a big reason why I like vocoders is because they make everyone sound like Neil Tennant.

I will not make cowardly attempts to maintain indie cred and pretend I only like PSB because of their kitsch appeal. I did not sit coolly back at Monday’s gig, quirking my lip occasionally at oh, the 80ness of it all. No, I pumped my fists in the air and jumped around crazily for the I love you bay-bee section of Where The Streets Have No Name, pointed west for Go West, screamed out ALL the lyrics to Left To My Own Devices and would generally have domino danced the night away if they’d gone on that long.

Yish and I had initially been quite dismayed at finding out, after we’d bought our tickets, that this tour wouldn’t involve Lycra-clad dancers and other high-campness. But seriously, completely discounting what I just described myself doing in the above paragraph, there’s so much more I love about the Pet Shop Boys than that. I think the aspect of songcraft that involves matching lyrics with music that’s right for them is deceptively simple, and rarely well achieved. I’ve written about this before but let me elaborate: enjoying some bands really is all about the music for me – I don’t know most of the lyrics to my indie rock albums because they’re much less relevant to my appreciation of those albums than, say, the sound of a warping wall of guitar. Pavement can (and does) sing whatever meaningless burblings they want and I’ll still like listening to them. But there are other bands where the lyrics, even if they’re unimpressive on paper, are somehow so enmeshed with the music in my consciousness, that without those words the song is not the song I love. And apart from the Silver Jews and Simon and Garfunkel, no one else seems to do that as well for me as the Pet Shop Boys.

I think I just lost a lot of musical credibility. With, like, everyone.

I Demand Cheaper Decadence

Forget one party rule, the fragility of civil liberties and the ridiculous distortions of the law of defamation to silence political opposition, the greatest travesty I can point to in Singapore today is that I just paid S$6.84 (something like £2.50!) for a HALF pint of Guinness (at Dubliners, which was nice, but certainly not like any of the pubs I went into in Ireland, in that it was spankingly new and comfortably empty and no one was drunk). How is Singapore going to succeed in its drive to recruit foreign talent if it is unwilling to fulfil the most basic needs of the decadent West?

Orchestra Nostalgia

On Sunday my uncle organized a big family lunch in honour of my graduation. This was sweet. One does wonder why he chose Geylang (brothel capital of Singapore) for this joyous occasion, but gift horse, mouth, blah.

The Singapore Youth Orchestra concert I attended later with mum was an evening of many flashbacks. Before I joined the orchestra at the age of 13 my mother used to take me to its concerts. I was so small I’d have to perch on the edge of my seat in the circle and peer over the balcony railing to see the players. On Sunday there were alumni violinists in the orchestra I hadn’t seen since I watched them as a child – I couldn’t recognize their faces, but I knew them by their playing styles.

Then I joined the orchestra, and was lazy and never practised and sight-read everything and was, accordingly, a crap first violinist. Neither this nor the fact that I found it socially deadening apart from the very few people I found interesting (and who hopefully know who they are) should be obscured by surges of nostalgia. But when I think back, I remember how it felt to be part of a swell of sound, and that really does outweigh the nitty gritty.

Debating Nostalgia

On Saturday I felt old and retrospectively stupid.

The semi-final debates were on the motion This House Believes That The IMF and World Bank Have Done More Harm Than Good. If I had had to take this on, when I was 17, with an hour to prepare, I would have curled up in a fetal position in the corner and cried for my mother. The teams I judged took it on bravely and far more competently than I would have done 5 years ago, and while I was able, in judge mode, to make many criticisms of their efforts, that really doesn’t detract from the fact that they’d have kicked my 17-year-old ass to Washington (is that where the IMF and WB headquarters are?) and back.

The seven-generational Raffles Debaters party (affectionately christened the Gangbang by Jolene) afterwards had the magnificent cacophony you would expect from an event where you put a lot of debaters in a room but don’t actually have rules of debating in place to control all of them. Party games included obscene charades where people had to act out stuff like Octopussy and Dr Strangelove (the guy doing this mimed wanking a very big dick, and someone guessed it just from that. Go figure), Polar Bear (too complicated to explain, but I am told all the young people play it these days) and Dance Dance Revolution.

As I said, old and retrospectively stupid. But in a good way.

Katong Convent Nostalgia

Another of those Real Life weekends, I’m afraid. I really must get my priorities in order.

The Katong Convent (my primary and secondary school) class reunion on Friday wasn’t as manic as others have been. Being unable to attend due to her being in Afghanistan volunteering, our form teacher was unable to offend the family at the next table by loudly recounting stories about her lesbian friends. Since Shoop wasn’t meeting her boyfriend afterwards, the class didn’t have the chance to charge headlong after her and hammer on the windows of the taxi demanding to meet him while she tried to explain, within, that she didn’t actually know any of these mad girls at all.

Debating and my other various pretensions draw me back to Rafflesian soil more often than to KC, but all the sappy reminiscing in the world would still be inadequate to convey what KC was, and still is to me. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about choices, and evaluating most of those I’ve made with the benefit of hindsight, I continue to be amazed at how few I regret, even the ones that were fairly risky at the time. I am glad I chose not to go into the Gifted stream (this would have meant leaving KC) or to a school higher up on the rankings. Both those forks in the road continued to generate their fair share of angst years after they’d been taken but these days I’ve been thinking Robert Frost was right.

The Eye

The Eye was billed as a horror film, and did indeed strike horror into the heart of Ken before it had even started when he found out it was in Chinese. Apart from that it wasn’t particularly scary, unlike Ring, which probably had most of Asia looking fearfully at wells, TVs and long-haired girls who walked funny for months. But I was pleasantly surprised at the appearance of Edmund Chen, whose rosy cheeks and chiseled jaw filled many a happy childhood Chinese soap opera afternoon. I remember sometimes looking at him so appreciatively I forgot to read the subtitles.

[Side note: I just found out that Channel 8 is re-running some of those old soap operas in celebration of some channel anniversary, and I so have to watch The One About Volleyball! (Not, of course, its actual name in Chinese, but anyone who watched Channel 8 in the late ’80s should remember it instantly)]

Minority Report

The rest of the day was given over to wandering from eatery to eatery, which tends to form the substantive bulk of my social activity over here, simply because most eateries are air-conditioned enough for conversation to be about something other than how hot we all are. From gourmet sandwiches at Olio Dome to char kuay teow at Kopitiam to cakes at Cafe Cartel to bubble tea and salty chicken at Quickly to meatball soup at the Marina Square food court in various group compositions (Me, Felice, Ken, for a spell, Jonathan, eventually just me and Ken). Conversational highlights of the afternoon included Ken calling me a slut (highly amusing if you know Ken) and the Who Would I Shag In This Shopping Centre? game. Also brief forays into schools of legal and political thought, but that doesn’t sell papers, dah-ling.

Minority Report thankfully managed to exorcise me of my A.I. demons, in that it was a sci-fi movie with a lot more brain and subtlety, and a lot less saccharine cringeworthiness, although I still had to roll my eyes at the ending sequences.

But because I can never resist the urge to nitpick: they set up the loss of Anderton’s son as the driving force behind his belief in pre-crime (the why, so crucial in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which I’m enjoying immensely these days). Multiple statements are made about how pre-crime could have saved his son if it had only been set up 6 months earlier. But it can only detect murders, not rapes, not assaults, presumably not abductions, and his interrogation of Leo Crow later reveals that he doesn’t actually know if his son is still alive or dead. So pre-crime would have been useless if his son had merely been abducted and, say, ritually tortured. Also, the law student in me wonders how the system draws what can often be an exceedingly hazy line between murder and manslaughter, given that they seem to have dispensed with all relevance of actus reus (the act) and mens rea (the state of mind) as elements of a crime.

But I admit these are easy and not particularly penetrating criticisms to make, and they don’t detract from the fact that it’s a stunningly-made film with fairly good adherence to continuity (this is important to me. Other disgruntled X-Philes will understand) which didn’t bore me for a second – overall, well worth my seven fifty, which I don’t find myself able to say about most films I see.

Especially since I am about to leave the house to watch The Eye with Ken, a movie we are inexplicably determined to see despite everyone else giving us dire warnings to the contrary. We only settled for Minority Report yesterday because The Eye wasn’t showing where we were, and only after a long tussle between the pros and cons of travelling to Tampines to watch The Eye (pro: we’d watch The Eye; con: we’d watch The Eye).