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Showing posts from February, 2003

"Well Billy rapped all night about his suicide/How he kicked it in his head when he was 25"

Keef is coming to town - and I can't find anyone to go to the concert with me! Keef, incidentally, gives great interviews, as I learnt from reading one of him in Guitar World , and one in Rolling Stone : appropriately reverential of Stu's role as the fifth Stone, appropriately disparaging of Mick's solo efforts... Anyone know someone looking for a rhythm guitarist in her/his band? Likes the White Stripes, the Strokes, the Ramones - i.e. quick and dirty garage rock?

Would you burn out before the water fills your lungs?

Been inspired to try to update this blog more often (thus in keeping with the spirit of blogging) by my friend Weicong, who maintains a more regular blog of his own . "A blog of one's own" - very Virginia Woolf. Speaking of which, The Hours is scheduled to come to Singapore cinemas soon, and I really want to see if they adapted it well. On Wednesday I watched both Catch Me If You Can and The Quiet American , both of which I really enjoyed. The combination made me think about the quality of lighting: there's something about the light in Catch that seems very 60s - it's slightly yellow saturated is my guess? Was the light really different back then, or is it that our memories yellow just like photos? Or do our memories yellow because photos yellow? And Quiet American has the familiar (to me) oversaturated colours of the tropics - it's easy to see how that oversaturated quality of the daytime sun wearies people, makes them retreat into indolence. Or is it ...

True Stories of Apathy: a Life Spent Sitting

Wow - it's been a while since I posted. And I can't claim I did much in the interim, although my spankin' new electric guitar has been getting a workout and I ascended a Valkyrie in Nethack . Watched my first film in a cinema this year, Scorsese's Gangs of New York - a sprawl of a film, but what a sprawl. And early New York history fascinates me. Still, I'm not sure about the film's insistence on the idea that these were the hands that built America, as the U2 song on the soundtrack would have it - why do we need to glorify them anymore than what's already up there on celluloid? New York, perhaps America's most cosmopolitan city, can also be, and has always been, intensely parochial, and the film does a good job of depicting that. Why make these people out to be any greater than just who they were? Incidentally, it was really good seeing Luc Sante's name as historical consultant in the credits for Gangs - Low Life is the book that made me inter...