dsng.net - the daryl sng blog: November 2005

Thanksgiving

Thursday having been Thanksgiving in America, I should at least make one post in the midst of my work and recreation to give some thanks...

An interlude: some of my favourite songs involving thanking -

William DeVaughn, "Be Thankful For What You Got"
Sly and the Family Stone, "Thank You Falentime Be Mice Elf Again"
Dido, "Thank You"

Not very fond of Alanis Morrisette's "Thank You", in case that occurred to anyone. But yes, it's a nice troika of different reasons for gratitude: thanking for what one has; thanking for the rediscovery of self; and thanking because - well, because in the midst of a crazy day when the world is against you someone is an oasis of comfort. "Just to be with you is having the best day of my life."

Thus on to the main point, which is to say - thank you: God only knows what I'd be without you.

If on a Winter's Night a Traveller

Right. I leave for London in a couple of days, and then I'm off to Montreal, and after that I have army reservist commitments. So - what with work and spending time with the Girlfriend - this blog is likely to be on winter break till about a month's time. But you can leave suggestions on what to do in Montreal in the comments (yes, all comments get e-mailed to me).

Meanwhile, here's some entertainment to keep y'all occupied:

Irwin Shaw's short story "The Girls in Their Summer Dresses"
Shkspr as txt msg
Philip Pullman's point about the rise of a moral quality attributed to being rather than doing in this set of essays is good stuff.
Esquire magazine's "Things a Man Should Know".

Oh, and I was in the library today picking up a guide to Montreal, and I read the children's book Olive the Other Reindeer, about a dog named Olive who hears "Olive the other reindeer" in the Christmas song and becomes convinced she's a reindeer. Very endearing.

And what are reindeer games? Are they more like reindeer Monopoly, or more like reindeer Truth or Dare?

Linksfest: Stray thoughts over the week

Whenever you click publish in Blogger these days, it goes through google-analytics.com - what's up with that? I guess I'm not the only one who's noticed.
I'm annoyed that I bought the Pet Shop Boys' Behaviour album in America, and thus own a copy of Behavior.
Golden retriever gives birth to green retriever.
Hey, I learnt a new word: 'kinkajou'. Here's a nice kinkajou page.
Does J.T. LeRoy exist? And why is that a topic for WWD?

Being Boring

Since I used a quote from the Pet Shop Boys' "Being Boring" in my previous post, here's a still from Bruce Weber's video for the song, ripe with a sexuality that nicely contrasts with the bittersweet tone of the song, recalling the halycon days of pre-AIDS hedonism.

And, as an aide memoire to myself, the exact quote that inspired the song is this Zelda Fitzgerald one, from "Eulogy on the Flapper":

"She flirted because it was fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure, she covered her face with powder and paint because she didn't need it and she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring. She was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do" (link)

My image of Zelda Fitzgerald is somehow strongly shaped by "Clothes for a Summer Hotel", Tennessee Williams' last play, even if it was a critical failure. And random fact I've just learnt: The Legend of Zelda series of computer games is named for Zelda Fitzgerald. Cool.

Winter

"In my nineteen nineties
I never dreamt that I would get to be
The creature that I always meant to be"
- The Pet Shop Boys, "Being Boring"

Sometimes songs become seared in one's consciousness - yesterday my MP3 player brought up the one-two punch of Sister Hazel's "All For You" and the Wallflowers' "One Headlight", both of which are decent MOR songs admittedly but are embedded in my mind mostly for the fall of '97, specifically a driving trip up to Kittery, Maine from Boston, off to get my first-ever set of winter gear. All throughout, while we moved in and out of the range of various radio stations' transmitters, those two songs were unavoidable earworms, occupying every channel, burrowing insidiously into my mind. And even now listening to them calls up, in the manner of Proustian madeleines, the deep reds of autumn foliage, dipping my toes into the cold Atlantic Ocean, and the dim knowledge that all this preparation for the onset of the cold was part of the first steps towards something life-altering, being in America, four years of finding the person I was meant to be.

So winter has always been a time of hope in my mind, oddly enough, given that actually I quite hate being in the cold and my ears always feel like falling off. And hope springs (or winters) eternal: it will be winter again for me soon, as I head for London and Montreal on work and pleasure (which unfortunately means, dear readers, that this blog is likely to be on a slight hiatus from next week till around Christmas). Eight years since my first winter. Sometimes I look back and it seems like yesterday; other times I am utterly bewildered by how far I have come. Eight years on, I don't have the answers in life - far from it, the questions I have have multiplied to reflect all of life's glorious complexity - but I have faith in myself and I have hope in the world, and I think that's a pretty good way to go forth.

Luck be a lady

A bag of books (what US students will know as the M-bag) that I had sent from the US 4 years ago when I was leaving arrived in Singapore recently. What a long, strange trip it must have been.

And that - as well as something I read - reminded me of the concept of luck, and specifically of the Luck Project, led by Richard Wiseman over in the UK. What's interesting about the project for me at least is that his findings square with my feelings on the subject, which is to say that a lot of whether one perceives oneself as 'lucky' depends not on what actually happens to you, but on how you perceive and receive the thousands of events that occur daily to you, and how you tell the narrative of your life (which links to Martin Seligman's work on learned optimism, perhaps).

I think about Lou Gehrig, and his famous words as he gave the speech confronting his ALS, or the disease that now bears his name: "I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth." Which was a great choice of phrases: he didn't say he was the happiest man in the world: he said 'luckiest'. A disease that was destroying his body and still Gehrig thought himself lucky, and why not? 60 000 people were there, Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day, all clearly filled with compassion and fan-style adoration...

So luck, I feel - and the research seems to show - is in a way completely self-fulfilling: if you expect luck, often it will turn up. Not necessarily in the way one expects - hey, lottery numbers don't just fall out from the sky - but it seems to be a learnable trait.

Which isn't to say that I don't believe in Larger Forces or destiny. There are just some things in life that boggle the mind. But I think of Larger Forces to be something like the old joke about the guy who asks God, "God, I've prayed every day for a lottery win for 20 years. Why haven't I won a single thing?" and God responds, in a booming voice, "Albert - meet me halfway - buy a ticket!" Great things can happen, but you have to do your part, in my opinion.

As for myself? Well, my Chinese name means "get luck" (and yes, it's rare to have a verb in a Chinese name) and I suppose I consider myself lucky (knock on wood): yes, there've been some pretty awful experiences in my life, some of which I wouldn't even tell my closest friends. And you know, I suppose through another lens things like my mother being on dialysis, or having to relearn how to use my right hand through what in retrospect was pretty frustrating therapy weren't the greatest. But as of now I like to think of myself one of the luckiest people around.

Books galore

The National Library here in Singapore is allowing people to borrow 8 books instead of the usual 4 for the holiday season - so I'm knee deep in reading. Currently going through New Yorker critic Anthony Lane's collection of film and other essays Nobody's Perfect, which has some interesting thoughts on Buster Keaton as the all-American vs what he sees as Chaplin's English obsession with class... I don't know, though, I don't think I would ever prefer Keaton to Chaplin, but maybe that's just me.

Goats help boy with ADHD

There's something of sheer joy in this photo of a boy trampolining with a goat.

Writing - The Fiction Blog

It's NaNoWriMo, which signed up for last year in an abortive attempt to get some writing off the ground... I'm not really going to be able to discipline myself to write a novel in a month, or even a short story, particularly given that I'm going to be travelling for almost 3 weeks near the end of November.

So I thought I'd just put up occasional snippets and paragraphs that I've written, and maybe one day I'll sit down and develop them into something fuller. So... here's the naked emperor bestrides the void deck, my fiction blog.

Fifty Things to Eat Before You Die

Was sent the BBC's list of 50 things to eat before you die - seems like not that new a list, but anyway it was fun to look through it (even some choices were really boring - I love pizza and burgers, but they seem so ubiquitous that to put them on a "things to eat before you die" list seems odd)... so, italicising what I haven't had, it looks like 46 down, 4 to go...

1 Fresh fish
2 Lobster
3 Steak
4 Thai food
5 Chinese food
6 Ice cream
7 Pizza
8 Crab
9 Curry
10 Prawns
11 Moreton Bay Bugs
12 Clam chowder
13 Barbecues
14 Pancakes
15 Pasta
16 Mussels
17 Cheesecake
18 Lamb
19 Cream tea
20 Alligator
21 Oysters
22 Kangaroo
23 Chocolate
24 Sandwiches
25 Greek food
26 Burgers
27 Mexican food
28 Squid
29 American diner breakfast - one of my great favourites
30 Salmon
31 Venison
32 Guinea pig
33 Shark - unfortunately - I won't touch it again, ever
34 Sushi
35 Paella
36 Barramundi
37 Reindeer
38 Kebab
39 Scallops
40 Australian meat pie
41 Mango
42 Durian fruit
43 Octopus
44 Ribs
45 Roast beef
46 Tapas
47 Jerk chicken/pork - although, interestingly, never with the Jamaican relatives
48 Haggis
49 Caviar
50 Cornish pasty

Set List for Sunday's Gig

Well - it's tough to do a set list through the haze of memory, but digging through my records I can roughly recall what I did or didn't play at Sunday's gig. So here's the setlist.

The life as Photoshopped

I remember being intrigued by the Wired story about Friends Beyond the Wall, the company that Photoshops pictures so that prison inmates can look like they have spent time with their loved ones. Which I can see - it must make it easier for their loved ones to have a photo they can display on their office desk, for instance. But then in doing a Google Image Search, I found Famous Friends, which basically lets you pretend you've hung out with celebrities, which I thought was a bit ridiculous:

Just imagine that look on your father's face on Fathers Day when he see himself in the England 1966 world cup team photograph next to his heroes. This is just one example of a gift money shouldn't be able to buy.

Actually, I could see a dad going, "#$@%, I hung out with Hurst and Stiles and I can't even remember it? Good Lord, I'm going senile!"

Ages of Love

So, two items about celebrities made me think about love and aging: first, there's an extensive "Woody Allen at 70" interview in the upcoming Vanity Fair, parts of which are discussed in this BBC News article.

"All the crap they tell you about... getting joy and having a kind of wisdom in your golden years - it's all tripe," said Allen, who turns 70 on 1 December.

"I've gained no insight, no mellowing. I would make the same mistakes again."

Actually, Woody has always seemed prematurely old to me, so why would he do anything differently, right? But it's a good line. Anyway, Woody does talk about his relationship with Soon-Yi, which creeped me out at the time (well, about as much as news about celebs who one has zero personal connection with can skeeze anyone out) - even beyond the whole dating-the-stepdaughter-of-your-partner thing, 35 years is a huge age difference. I mean, if I were to date someone 35 years younger than me, I would have to start by arranging for her would-be parents to meet...

Come to think of it, 35 years wasn't even the age gap between Isaac (played by Allen) and Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) in Manhattan, and that was already meant to be a creepy age gap: "She's 17. I'm 42 and she's 17. I'm older than her father, can you believe that? I'm dating a girl, wherein, I can beat up her father."

But the relationship has, to its credit, lasted 8 years - an eternity in pairings involving celebrities - and that to me seems like love. Even if he is quoted as saying his relationship has "a more paternal feeling to it", a comment which brought a bit of the skeezy feeling back.

Meanwhile, in the New York Post, columnist Andrea Peyser notes approvingly about Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles visiting the US: "Buckingham Palace has traded in its resident high drama, depression and bulimia for laugh lines, liver spots and middle-age spread." (Technically, that should be Clarence House instead of Buckingham Palace, I think, given that we're talking about Charles, but I suppose that doesn't havethe same zing.) Hey - the drama of Di may sell copies of People magazine (Lord knows I've read countless issues with her on the cover, even post-1997), and Camilla will never dance with Travolta in the White House, but there does seem to be something about the quiet comfort of the royal couple.

Which is to say, one comes back to Tracy's indelible line in Manhattan, filled with wisdom beyond her years: "Not everybody gets corrupted. You have to have a little faith in people."

Edit: my lousy math - man, so Woody and Soon-Yi are even greater apart in years than Isaac and Tracy.