dsng.net - the daryl sng blog: June 2004

Blasts from the pasts

Oh, and since my posting may be somewhat intermittent for the next week, I thought I'd entertain y'alls by dragging out old stuff I've written back when this was a website, not a blog. So here's my list of greatest one-hit wonders, written back in 2001... will rack my brains for possible new additions to the list.

Got it just don't get it

Posting may slow in the next few days as I try to get my disorganised life in order... both the family home and the apartment under renovation, and my chores are piling up. But enough complaining: I should note that Baybeats looks interesting.

Was at Brix with the Girlfriend over the weekend where the excellent live band (Absence of Color) played "Hey Ya!", which is now stuck in my head. There are worse fates than having arguably the song of the year as your earworm. Well, one of two earworms, really: I keep hearing Outkast's "Roses" on the radio and that "roses really smell like poo-oo-oo" line keeps repeating in my mind.

WordFormation

Picture of a sign at Singapore's North-East Line. Just thinking about Bill Bryson's point in Mother Tongue that the mashing of two words together in brand names was very 1990s (WordPerfect, PowerBook etc.), just as "-o-rama" was very 1950s. Maybe the idea was to sound like you were such a busy person you even rushed through spaces. :) So how long before the name "HarbourFront" appears dated?

Which is as good as any to rail again against the use of the "@" sign to try to appear cool.

Quiz: 22 points in Scrabble

I'm in a quiz-taking mood... this one's results are hilarious, if sadly not that truthful...

D	Dreamy
A	Awesome
R	Rich
Y	Yummy
L	Luxurious

Name Acronym Generator
From Go-Quiz.com

Design flaw

Talk about being sensitive to criticism: designer dies for curtain comment.

No time to talk, just to link

Interesting Singaporean blog watch: Popagandhi - good music taste, coverage of topics from tech to GLBT issues. These blogs, they comfort me.

Set the gnomes free: Front de Libération des Nains de Jardins

The Nimbus 2000: good for adults too.

Song in my head: that "Lisa, it's your birthday" tune (officially "Lisa's Birthday Song") from the Simpsons episode with Michael Jackson. But I did hear "Hypnotize" on the radio today, which made me happy.

The Book Quiz

You're The Poisonwood Bible!
by Barbara Kingsolver

Deeply rooted in a religious background, you have since become both
isolated and schizophrenic. You were naively sure that your actions would help people, but of course they were resistant to your message and ultimately disaster ensued. Since you can see so many sides of the same issue, you are both wise beyond your years and tied to worthless perspectives. If you were a type of waffle, it would be Belgian.

Take the Book Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

Oxen of the Sun

[10pm, and my favourite chapter name in the schemata.] Good time it is to revive Ulysses for Dummies or to see BBC's Cheat's Guide to Joyce's Ulysses. Ah, reductio ad absurdum. But the Guardian's Bloomsday blog is really quite stimulating, and it was lovely that even Google did a Joyce tribute.

Nausikaa

[Bloomsday, 8pm - all entries written on my Palm in real time, and all posting times changed in the Ulysses entries to create some sense of Bloomsday] Unable to upload the photo as yet, but I passed by the Dubliner pub last night on the bus, so I thought I'd take a snapshot...

Edit: here's the pic

Cyclops

[7pm, between Cyclops and Nausikaa. Not from Barney Keirnan's tavern, but food-related, anyway.]

A shot of a receipt from Chatterbox restaurant, at the Mandarin Hotel. Took this photo because I love the way the phrase "NO CHOICE" is highlighted in red - stark, authoritarian, sums up the service quality found in a lot of Singapore, unfortunately. Very Soup Nazi: "NO SOUP FOR YOU!" Fortunately, Chatterbox itself has quite good service.

For a good Singapore food blog, try umami.

Wandering Rocks

[3pm, chapter 10] No Liffey here, but the Singapore river is to the west of this location. Hill Street Centre, car park exit. Trying to figure out what happened here. My guess: someone lost their license plate driving out of the carpark, and some kind soul took it and put it among the plants, in a prominent location. Will the owner of car SCP9668U please get your license plate back?

Scylla & Charybdis

[2pm, roughly, on Bloomsday; chapter 9, the Library chapter. Ulysses schemata available here.]

My own Bloomsday has been mundane: awoke late, hit with the sun in my eye eliding through the flimsy curtain; the procession of the day continues. I spent my lunch hour (Lestrygonians, chaper 8, 1pm) foraging for the dimensions of a queen-size bed, hence found myself wandering with my bandaged, bloody toe into Robinsons, a man in sandals. Joy of joys, to find a salesman in Singapore who's willing to help even when you say you just want information and you won't buy today. 60' x 75', and indeed the service at the store is every bit as good as the loyal customers would have it. Right now good puzzle would be cross Singapore without passing a sale.

Beforehand had searched in vain for Picket and Rail at Stamford House - gone, apparently, the space now occupied by paintings. Ah, to have a house of no furniture and all paintings: a life of pure art, pure pleasure, no functionality. Folly. Persist.

Telemachus

Let us honour the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday (16 June 1904). Ulysses is perhaps the greatest novel of all time; it certainly has my vote, swooping as it does from the personal to the metropolitan to the religious. And that final chapter is pure virtuosity.

In the spirit of celebration, I thought I'd quote from an essay I wrote on injuries and disabilities in Ulysses 4 years ago:

This is thus Joyce's account of Dublin. In 'mean scrupulousness' (the spirit with which he set out to write Dubliners, and which carries over to the descriptions of the streets in Ulysses), he populates the city with a cast comprising with numerous injuries and disabilities, visible or otherwise. But to filter out, or to be so distant that one does not even notice the state of the city is to ignore the true character of the Hibernian metropolis, for it is a city of families in trouble (the Dedalus and Dignam families) and of residents with psychological troubles, of which the injured and disabled are merely the most extreme expressions. Instead, empathy and the ability to incorporate these characters into an unblinkered view of Dublin is valorised, both in the novel’s characters and in the reader.

Which gets to the heart of one of the things I love most about Ulysses: its loving embrace of Dublin and its personalities, warts and all, unvarnished. Someday, I hope to read a similar celebration of Singapore (incidentally, can't seem to find a Bloomsday celebration here in Singapore - any Joyce fans want to tip me off to one, or start one with me?). Everyone here likes to say "oh, Singapore's so small", but Ireland hardly outnumbers us in population, and birthed not just Joyce, but also Yeats, Beckett, Heaney. It is my fervent hope that someday this green isle of Singapore too will produce titans of literature.

But I digress. Today, in memoriam, in honour, in praise, I shall raise a glass of Guinness. To Leo. To Molly. To Joyce. I said yes I will Yes.

Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 1914-1921

Death to the Danish

Ugh. I forgot to mention that when I went for a haircut recently, I heard the most terrible song EVER. An English version of Jacky Cheung's "Wen Bie", by Michael Learns to Rock, with attendant execrable lyrics. It was the first time I ever wished the hairdresser would wash the shampoo into my ears. Hell, having the shampoo in my eyes would have been less painful.

Edit: for those of you who don't know, Michael Learns to Rock are the wussiest Danes this side of Hamlet, and far less poetic.

Review: Japanese Story

(Warning: this review gives away spoilers on a turning point in the film. I'll put an appropriate warning just before the spoilers.)

Sometimes, someone flies in like a comet in your life, and the beauty of it is in the evanescence of the interaction. In Japanese Story, director Sue Brooks gives us a geologist named Sandy (Toni Collette), and a protagonist named Hiro (Gotaro Tsunashima). Their names may be obvious, but little else is about their characters: Tachibana Hiromitsu (to use his full name) is the straight-laced, buttoned-down product of Japanese cultural norms and stifling family business, while Sandy is the hard-as-nails geologist. No hearts on sleeves here. There's obviously more to the two main characters, of course. Collette does a wonderful job of depicting Sandy visibly softening as she gets into contact with Hiro. Collette's face, looking upon Hiro emerging from the water, is a wonder of multiple emotions: curiosity, aesthetic appreciation of his body, archness. And Hiro clearly has reserves - an offhand reference to a Mayan temple, for one - that are untapped (geology metaphor deliberate).

Sandy's supposed to show Hiro around and sell him some geological software in doing so, which makes for some standard, but funny, cross-cultural misunderstandings. This is the first time I've seen Toni Collette in an Australian movie since Muriel's Wedding (not sure if it was her first Aussie movie post-Muriel), but she was amazing in that and she brought redemption to what could otherwise have been a completely pitiable character in About a Boy. And so no surprises to find her physicality marks her powerful acting in this movie: at the start, she's visibly hard, her powerful shoulders taking the load of bearing this boy-man.

Ah, but lulled into a different world, enduring the intensity of the outback landscape, the two slowly fall for each other. Under that searing desert sun, what are cultural differences, after all? There's a transporting quality to certain landscapes: it's similar to the way the intensity of the Mexican sun makes a mockery of age differences in Japón (the Mexican film I watched at last year's Singapore Film Festival). Actually, Japanese Story made me think a lot about Japón. Superficially, both feature Japan in their titles; more pertinently, both feature wide expanses of uninhabited space and that overpowering sun with its shimmering mirages and the joy and madness therein. Maybe it's because the condition's so alien to someone who's most used to city life and who was shocked at the amount of empty space in Massachusetts (gives you an idea how cramped Singapore is) but filmic depictions of vast expanses of alien landscape (like the Joshua Tree National Park in twentyninepalms) and the quality of sunlight on sand (see
Y Tu Mama Tambien) have a tendency to scorch my mind. The endless outback in Japanese Story creates a kind of hypnosis, and Ian Baker's nifty camera work in depicting it makes it easy to see how both parties crumble and fall for each other.

That leads to an initial sex scene both awkward and tender, and constantly remarked upon in other reviews: Sandy puts on Hiro's trousers, climbs on him and the two make love. What does wearing the trousers mean? That the only way past the impasse of their cultures is for her to slip into his clothing? That the only way past his initial sexism is to literally wear the pants in the coupling? That she needs clothing initially because she fears intimacy? All of the above?

But then, the film also suggests, perhaps we cannot know all there is to know about a person. The scene where Sandy screams at her mother for presuming to know what the Japanese are like spoke to something in me: people - both Asians and non-Asians - like to say "well, Asians are like that". But all we can say, really, is generally people of a certain nationality might behave in certain ways. How much can we say or know about an individual? Easy enough to pigeonhole Hiro, but this is a man who hid the existence of his family; a man who has poetry in him; a man who was boorish; a man who hates karaoke - in other words, an individual.

*** (spoiler ahead) ***

Events in the film take a sudden turn halfway through, with the death of Hiro. The scene where the couple's stuck SUV gets out of the bog and Hiromitsu jumps up and down in celebration is pure unbridled joy, and I was genuinely affected thinking about it later on, at the moment of Hiro's death. Which leads to the central question in thinking about the film: what to make of Hiro's sudden death? When he died I thought of the abrupt ending of the Mill on the Floss, with pages upon pages of aching emotions and turmoil ended by a sudden flood. (I also thought of the abrupt death by spontaneous combustion in Bleak House, but we'll leave that aside.) There's a stark sense of sadness at Hiro's loss of life just at the moment that he's found himself, but the ending makes the death somehow redemptive. In a way, death enabled Hiro to avoid the natural, inevitable closing of his now-open heart.

In the end, there's a lot on the value of things left unsaid: Hiro's wife, coming to Australia to claim the body, looks through the photos of Sandy and Hiro, and passes Hiro's note on to her. Perhaps Sandy and Hiro, affectionate as they are, could not really have bridged the language gap in the long run. Perhaps aspects about each other would've driven the other mad. Perhaps. But there was a joy in the transience itself: he came into her life, and she came into his, a sparkling moment, all the sadder for being abruptly cut short.

Badger!

Badger Flash animations slay me! There's football badgers and my (and the Girlfriend's) favourite, Bananaphone.

Georgia on My Mind

RIP Ray Charles.

I wanna rock with you (all night)

Also, the Girlfriend has given me permission to mention her in this blog, as long as she isn't named. Yay! We checked out the almost brand spankin' new hip-hop night at Cocco Latte last weekend, at the Gallery Hotel. Until midnight the warm-up DJ was playing mostly old school rap - I (train-)spotted tunes by Kurtis Blow (the classic "The Breaks"), KRS-One, Biz Markie. There was even some old-school funk (Charles Wright's "Express Yourself") and R&B (Michael Jackson's "Rock With You"), plus the uncategorisable Michael Viner's Incredible Bongo Band's "Apache", which is such a great song. Not her scene, unfortunately, and she wasn't going to wait around till the dance floor filled out with more conventional tunes, so we left early. But we'll be back.

Everybody move to the back of the bus

Is there any more wonderful sight on a Singapore bus than the "Maintenance in Progress" sticker on those danged TV Mobile TVs? They blare random programmes regardless of whether passengers want to watch, they skip annoyingly, they show Chinese shows without subtitles thus alienating minority populations. Peace and quiet, ah.

The TV Mobile slogan is "TV Mobile - It's Everywhere", which I find strangely non-positive sounding. You could say something is everywhere while loving it ("Oxygen - it's everywhere!") or while hating it ("Cockroaches - they're everywhere!").

More Singapore(an) blogs

Continuing my quest for interesting Singaporean blogs, here's John and Belle Have a Blog, which shuttles nicely between general commentary and pithy observations on Singapore. Plus, I gave it bonus points for being the only (other) Singapore blog I've found which also has Eschaton on its blogroll. :)

Singapore Idol vs Singaporean Idol

Someone wrote a letter to the Straits Times' forum page the other day asking why the show is called "Singapore Idol" here, not "Singaporean Idol", given that other incarnations are called "American Idol", "Australian Idol", and so on. This got me thinking: actually the fact that "Singapore" and "Singaporean" can both be used as adjectives to describe things from this island is actually a reflection of the fact that Singapore is a city-state. The adjective "Singaporean" can refer to things from either the country or city of Singapore, while "Singapore", used as an adjective, can refer to things from the city of Singapore. Consider: if there were a New York-only edition of American Idol, it would almost certainly be called "New York Idol", not "New Yorker Idol" (Who the New Yorker's idol is, of course, is a question for another debate.) The same principle applies to talking about sports: the Boston Red Sox play in the American League.

So in speaking about cities, one can often use just their name as adjectives, or use a distinct adjective. Question: if there were a Manchester-only edition of Pop Idol, would it be "Manchester Idol" or "Mancunian Idol"? Which means the choice of adjectival form is just a question of meter and then aesthetics. Personally, I feel "Singapore Idol" trips off the tongue more nicely than "Singaporean Idol".

Either way, the singing in the previews sounds awful.

V is very very extraordinary

Public art in Singapore. Here's the Robert Indiana sculpture outside the Glass House next to Park Mall. Cheers me up everytime I sight it from the bus. When I was 18 I climbed up into the tilted "O" of the sculpture... can't find the photos of that moment though.

Robert Indiana, of course, wasn't his real name - he was Robert Clark, and took the name of his home state. Somehow, Daryl Singapore doesn't have that artsy a ring to it.

Donald Rumsfeld, poet

FINDING SADDAM
By Donald Rumsfeld

the only way we ever
found him is
finally
somebody put
enough pressure on enough
people to find out that
somebody had an idea
where
somebody might know
somebody who might know
somebody who would know
where
he might have
been.

Adapted from Rumsfeld's speech on the USS Essex.

Quoth the crow, never more

Every morning, I take a little walk to work across the Elgin Bridge (built 1929, separates North Bridge Road and South Bridge Road, oldest crossing in Singapore probably given that there's been a bridge there since 1819). Gives me a great sense of this country's history as I look across the river on the bumboats to the old Hill Street Police Station. But the last two days have seen a more pedestrian (literally) complaint - this danged crow keeps flying straight into the back of my head as I walk to work! Apparently I'm not the only one affected - this old Indian man pointed to the crow after it hit me and started swearing at it. In fluent Hokkien, amazingly. Besides my worries about being hit on the head and aggravating my concussion, I actually find this whole situation quite amusing. Only in Singapore. Will try to get a photo of the Evil Head-Hunting Crow. But unlikely.

Meanwhile, I've been trying to find interesting Singapore blogs that aren't about weepy teenage angst. Currently I like: syntaxfree, particularly as her latest entry talks about the awesomeness of Ludacris' "Southern Hospitality". Throw dem bows...

Is there an age when people lose the need to listen to the urgent?

From one New Yorker rock critic to another: Sasha Frere-Jones fisks Nick Hornby. One: I adore Nick Hornby's books, and have autographed versions of High Fidelity and How to be Good. Two: having said that, his New York Times article (not available online anymore, but you get the text from SFJ's deconstruction) was the epitome of wetness. Somehow the ironic remove of High Fidelity - 30-something man who does nothing but listen to music writes about 30-something man who does nothing but listen to music, and both author and narrator can afford to be wry about their situation, and the author knows that at some level the situation is somewhat pathetic - got lost along the way, and Hornby became a non-ironic champion of that wistful faux-nostalgic musical point of view. Three: Hornby still retains the ability to write about how pop can make one feel - I love Christgau, but sometimes you need a refuge from the obscurantist - the problem is in the pop he chooses to get moved by...