Seeking Xen Calm

You know you’ve reached a low point in stress management when you wish it was time to start studying for the exams just so you could start eking out that simple existence of 2 am nights and 8 am mornings, and deeply boring but satisfyingly routine and sedentary days.

I refer to “low point” because I hate that existence, but it’s a hell of a lot better than this week’s frenetic staggering between exponentially increasing numbers of To Do List items – write research project (yo, if anyone’s an expert on the public international law aspects of Internet regulation, please talk to me), decipher Jeremy Bentham for jurisprudence dissertation, magically produce completely organized intervarsity debating tournament (this Friday and Saturday) out of arse…

But enough whinging. After writing a similar diatribe last Thursday I then allowed Russ to persuade me that I really needed to be at Cargo that night for our monthlyish Xen worship session, and although I then managed to miss 3 hours of lectures the next day and generally descend into self-hatred, it was well worth it just for the half hour of mind-boggling virtuosity that was Killa Kela’s mouth. There was also the unique cultural experience of being in a room full of white Brits who seemed to know every word of Roots Manuva’s Witness and joined in especially enthusiastically for the “cheese on toast” line, the sweat-soaked live exuberance of New Flesh (new album Understanding, currently stickered all over London), and DJ Vadim, endearingly Russian and generally loved by all.

Other causes for joy: long overdue ejection of dishwater-dull Darius from Pop Idol, which I, er, accidentally stumbled upon on a lazy Saturday evening in late December and have been, er, accidentally watching ever since. Grin. Go on then, pour forth your ridicule. I’M NOT ASHAMED! VOTE FOR WILL!

But moving on swiftly… :)

More glimmerings in the gloom include recent arrivals from Django (Sparklehorse: It’s A Wonderful Life, Marine Research: Sounds From The Gulf Stream, Sonic Youth: Goodbye 20th Century, stuff by Pavement, 20 Minute Loop and Silver Jews also on the way), a rather lovely boyfriend carrying pancake batter in a plastic jug on the tube in order to come over and cook me dinner, and actually understanding the maths in Cryptonomicon, which reassures me that two and a half years of law hasn’t cottonwooled my brain yet. Yet.

Moot Win/Pacha London/Dom Boots

Miscellaneous disjointed updates:

After spending more time and energy thinking about eyelash-tinting than mentally healthy, I’m pleased to report that we won Wednesday’s moot and are in the next round of the competition. Notable successes of the day included restraining ourselves from referring to Jennifer Lopez’s butt insurance while trying to argue that “Demi Massinger”, the model suing our beautician client, could bloody well have gone and insured her eyelashes if they were that important to her career. Also satisfactory was our efficient downing of Screaming Orgasms and peach margaritas in the 20 minutes we had in the pub before we had to catch the train back to London. A rather fulfilling day.

Don’t bother with Pacha London on a Friday night unless you want to see the tackiest chandelier ever, and pay nearly twice the price (£15!) for half the quality of music you can get in Turnmills. The crowd was friendly and unpretentious, though, which is always good. Even Martini Breath Guy who felt it was very very important to talk to me in order to promote the interaction of Western and Eastern cultures, and who simply couldn’t understand that my name was not Mya-Chung or Mi-Choo or something else vaguely Oriental sounding, was amusing for about ten minutes.

The dominatrix boots have received their first wearing. I managed to teeter quite successfully through the Egyptian and Greek sections of the British Museum, although staircases raised minor issues. Teething problems. I’ll whip these boots into shape soon enough.

Django is showing me love for the first time in a long while. Goodbye 20th Century (Sonic Youth) and Sounds From The Gulf Stream (Marine Research) are hopefully pootling their way across the Atlantic to me. Yay.

Christmas/New Year 2002

It’s been two weeks of unprecedents.

Unprecedented bicep pain from clinging on to the rope pull before I was good enough to go down chairlift-served slopes (just one day, thank God). Unprecedented cccccold on chair lifts at 4.30 pm, trying for one last run after the sun had gone down. Unprecedented amount of disgust at the gaudy ski suit I’d borrowed – didn’t feel like incurring expenses for an activity I wasn’t sure I’d like enough to do again, but now I wish I’d gone ahead and bought one, given the twin factors of that suit’s grossness and my reasonably high fun-levels while skiing. (Many thanks to Russ for yet another stint as personal communications assistant/general tech support to Michelledom in my absence.)

Unprecedented girliness: sharing a room with four girly girls, going mad shopping in Andorra la Veille, massive stripping session in said room with said girls after said shopping trip while gleefully showing each other our purchases and trying on other people’s.

Unprecedented loss of restraint at post-Christmas CD sales back in London. From Virgin: And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out (Yo La Tengo), Carboot Soul (Nightmares On Wax), Black Sunday (Cypress Hill), Suzuki (Tosca), USSR: Life From The Other Side (DJ Vadim). From HMV: Trompe Le Monde, Pixies At The BBC, Complete B-Sides (Pixies), Endtroducing (DJ Shadow), Things We Lost In The Fire (Low), Red House Painters’ self-titled, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (Kid Koala). I so have to return some of these for the sake of my financial sustainability.

Unprecedented amount of missing another person. Unprecedented amount of unhappiness I have caused another person. (Two different people.)

Unprecedented amount of time away from this site. Unprecedented amount of stuff I’ve wanted to write about during that time away now simmering in various headspaces while I try to muster the time and skill (skill more than time, it has to be said) to do it all justice.

I’ll keep trying. I hope you keep reading. Happy New Year.

Singapore’s Fault

Damn Singapore and its low CD prices. I’m spiralling out of control.

Tuesday:

  • Mahler’s 5th/Solti/Chicago Symphony Orchestra (S$14.90)
  • Stereo MCs: Connected (S$18.90)
  • Aimee Mann: Bachelor No. 2 (S$17.99)

Wednesday: I had a couple of hours to kill in between lunch and holiday planning with Yan Bin and dinner with Saffry, and think I actually managed remarkable restraint for such circumstances.

  • Brahms’ 4 symphonies, Tragic Overture and Variations/Sanderling/Dresden SO
    (S$21.99 for three CDs!!)
  • REM: Murmur (S$17.99. Just one of many shocking gaps in my CD collection which I’m gradually trying to fill)

Thursday: Thank God I had lindy-hopping at 7, or it might have been worse. Half an hour is all I should ever allow myself.

  • Cocteau Twins: Stars And Topsoil (S$19.90)
  • Adiemus: Best Of (S$13.90)

And it’s not over. Borders has all these at S$17.99, and I am sorely tempted:

  • Sebadoh: Harmacy, Bakesale (which one first?)
  • Red House Painters: it doesn’t have a title but the first track’s called Grace Cathedral Park
  • Fugazi: Red Medicine, End Hits, In On The Kill Taker (I don’t have any Fugazi albums, yes, more shocking gaps, I know.

Michelle Goes Shopping

It’s been two days of shameless self-indulgence, and I feel goooood. (Note: what follows, especially for Tuesday, is extremely frivolous and is basically Michelle Goes Shopping. I’ll save quantum physics for another day.)

* * *

Monday was four hours of surfing to make up for last week, bak chang for lunch and a lazy afternoon snuggled under blankets in air-conditioning with The Unbearable Lightness Of Being in hand, peppermint green tea nearby, and Amnesiac on the speakers.

Amnesiac was picked up on Saturday at Tower Records, Suntec City, after the CAP council had dispersed for home and much-needed rest. S$21.99 (divide by 2.5 to convert into pounds) for the limited edition version packaged in a book, and the book’s very Radiohead and very cool. The book’s reference number is F heit 451. Steal #1.

A quick note on the album: right now I like it so much I’m trying to force myself to listen to it no more than once a day, in fear of the Odelay! phenomenon. Amnesiac seems more immediate than Kid A, which could be a bad thing, because the longer I take to like music, the more I end up liking it eventually, and vice versa. We’ll see.

* * *

On Tuesday I woke up early to listen to Solid Steel, went out for lunch with Pei Ee (old and dear friend) at Suntec City, where we shopped, and I bought two cheap cheesy tops from the ultimate cheap cheesy Singaporean shopper’s paradise, This Fashion.

Shopping there is such a trip. You paw through crammed rack upon crammed rack of clothes, and finally you think you spy something that looks promising from what you can see of it. Appealing colour. Good pattern. You pull it out…and there’s a giant panda embroidered on the front. It’s fluorescent pink, and it proclaims “I aM nAtUrE bAmBoO gAl”. You reel back, crushed.

Despite such hazards to mental health, I pop in there from time to time because I sometimes find gems, or otherwise, I find extremely bizarre items of clothing that take my fancy.

Take what I call my Dadaist Japglish T-shirt for example. Written on it are the following words:
“Coning Witere
Greel Lomala hing
we know what fashion is…….
1999-2000
fovely millealum…….
KING TOMATO”

I love this shirt. You sort of know what they were trying to say, but not quite.

So anyway, there were two cheap cheesy tops (steals #2 and #3) at This Fashion, unsuccessful shoe-shopping, jeans (steal #4) at 30% off at Giordano (another cheap clothing mecca, as long as you don’t buy the T-shirts with GIORDANO emblazoned across the chest) and then we hit Marina Square for bubble tea and good conversation.

Final destination: CD Warehouse at Capitol Centre, for parallel-imported CD bargains, where 5 CDs were quickly clutched in my clammy hands before I exercised some admirable restraint and discarded Reveal, Miss E…So Addictive, 10 000 Hz Legend and a Nascente Best of Ladysmith Black Mambazo compilation, emerging only with Stereo MCs’ Deep Down And Dirty for S$16.99 (steal #5).

I’ll probably end up getting all of the above discards at some later date, but I just keep telling myself it’s not the absolute expenditure that counts, it’s the spreading out.

5 steals. I’m a happy kleptomaniac.

Yo La Tengo!

It’s wonderful having friends you can impose on. :)

I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One is finally on its way from Django, after months of unsuccessful attempts to snap it up before other people every time a second-hand copy became available. Many thanks to Russ, whose credit card and good nature came in very handy when I realized I hadn’t paid my credit card bill for a while, and couldn’t use it.

Roadside Haul

I will never walk past roadside CD stalls in disdain again. The Goodge Street one I mentioned a few days ago now has a devoted rummager. For the princely sum of £18, I now own:

  • A Grand Love Story (Kid Loco, £5)
  • Code 4109 (DJ Krush, £5)
  • Field Studies (Quasi, £4)
  • Breath From Another (Esthero, £4)

They were closing up, so all I had time to do was find the ones I’d seen the other day. There remain lots of tacky plastic baskets of uncategorized CDs marked “Pop Rock CDs £5 & Under!” for nosing through, and I can’t wait.

So You Wanna Fake Being An Indie Rock Expert is hilarious (and sometimes informative, blush) reading. (Thanks Jerm!)

I admit to owning and enjoying Sarah McLachlan albums, but this Onion article about Lilith Fair is a must-read, even if you’re not terribly interested in synchronized ovulation.

“I’ve never been around so many people who share my interest in women’s issues and social justice,” Jewel said. “It makes me want to ride my horse bareback through a forest stream.”

HMV + Roadside Stall + Django’s

Lots of things are bobbing around in the stew.

Yo La Tengo tickets have been bought, and groupie glee is building within me. Next major gig quest: Depeche Mode in October.

On the way back from the Stargreen outlet on Argyll Street, HMV just had too many racks of CDs with Various Percentages Off! to resist, so I zipped in and got Nick’s birthday present (Bent: Programmed To Love – I’d originally planned on Kruder & Dorfmeister’s The K & D Sessions but the idiot went and bought that for himself despite my strict instructions to check with me before buying any CDs), as well as This Films Crap Lets Slash The Seats (David Holmes, £5.99).

On the walk home, I passed a roadside CD stall on Goodge Street, and due to my physical inability to walk past potential music bargains, I had to stop there as well, and was astounded – A Grand Love Story (Kid Loco), Code 4109 (DJ Krush), Field Studies (Quasi), Fear Of Fours (Lamb) and Breath From Another (Esthero), all at £5 or less. I didn’t have enough (or any) cash with me at the time, but I’m going back today, and there will be spending.

Last stop on the way back was the computer room, where I checked my email, and found that Django had been kind. Doolittle (Pixies, $7.99) and The Fidelity Wars (Hefner, $8.99) are on their way to me from that wondrous land of affordable music that is the US. Although this sounds like a day of little restraint, I’d like to say that So…How’s Your Girl? (Handsome Boy Modeling School) was available for $9.99 but I controlled myself.

In other news, friend, future colleague and travel freak Yan Bin has come up with a detailed itinerary for what looks like a smashingly exhausting 18-day odyssey through Greece and Turkey, to be attempted in September. I just hope I don’t run into residential difficulties for the next academic year, so I can enjoy this trip as much as it deserves to be enjoyed without having to deal with the looming spectre of homelessness.

3 CDs & Some Wishful Gig-Thinking

More money spent at Django, hooray, alas, whatever!

Death Cab For Cutie: We Have The Facts And We’re Voting Yes
Starlight Mints: The Dream That Stuff Was Made Of
Kruder & Dorfmeister: The K & D Sessions

The first two are for me, and the third’s for Nick, who turns 21 on March 29, and I hope hope hope he doesn’t go and buy it for himself before then.

A scrounge through the latest Time Out in Budgens revealed more gigs I’d really like to go to but’ll probably end up missing, primarily for lack of company:

Sunny Day Real Estate, March 6
Low, March 22
Yo La Tengo, April 10
Stephen Malkmus, April 17
Sigur Ros, April 24

I may well do a repeat of my Flaming Lips/Built To Spill/Wheat/Smashing Pumpkins lone woman experience for Yo La Tengo and Stephen Malkmus, but it really isn’t much fun. Sigh. All I really want is some rich generous indie-rock loving friends with vast amounts of free time on their hands. And a pony.

HMV Got My Number

Argh. After buying 4 CDs at Borders on Tuesday, I suppose I can’t possibly justify buying three more at HMV with the 3 for £20 offer. Stuff I’m tempted by:

  • Outkast: Aquemini
  • Hefner: Fear Of God (although I’m not sure if I should get this or just wait till I can afford The Fidelity Wars.)
  • Spiritualized: Pure Phase or Lazer Guided Melodies
  • Red Snapper: Making Bones
  • Nick Drake: Way To Blue
  • David Holmes: This Film’s Crap Let’s Slash The Seats
  • Miles Davis: Kind Of Blue

As I said, argh.