dsng.net - the daryl sng blog: January 2007

Back in Singapore

Back in Singapore I slept an inordinate amount, and watched the Screen Actors Guild awards (quick thoughts: Mirren-Whitaker-Hudson seem like an unbeatable trio; how lovely to hear that rich Julie Andrews voice once more; British actors always seem to give better speeches).

On the other end of the film quality spectrum, here's how to sell an awful film in 12 easy steps.

Kay Ell

Off to KL for the weekend. Normal service will resume shortly.

My First YouTube: Rerun with Towel

Well, I finally got around to trying to upload videos onto YouTube. Here's my first one - my Cairn terrier Rerun playing with a towel, back from his puppy days.

More Singapore-based Nostalgia

I noticed this post on the first fast food restaurant in Singapore (A&W on Dunearn Road) and promptly sent it into Tomorrow, whereupon a nice nostalgic discussion broke out. One of my fond memories of childhood was meeting the A&W Root Bear at Big Splash. Shall have to dig the photos out.

I kind of wish now I'd taken a picture of the big sign next to the escalator at the old Orchard Cinema - it was the first escalator in Singapore, and they kept the sign that gave instructions on how to use the escalator - don't ride the escalator barefoot, etc.

The history of clubbing in Singapore

I chanced upon this story of Bullwinkle's in Bloomington closing, which led to this one of Velfarre in Tokyo closing. Which was an interesting coincidence since earlier today I was thinking about the clubs in Singapore that have come and gone and wondering if anyone's ever done any sort of history of them. Even just an oral history? I know there was the Zouk coffee-table book but besides that, will people's experiences of places such as Fire, Ridley's, and so on be remembered? (Couldn't seem to find anything on clubbing on Yesterday.sg, my usual source for Singapore-based nostalgia.)

I mean, take something as central to the Singapore clubbing scene as Mambo Jambo - naff as it can be, it's arguably something many clubbers were weaned on. The Wikipedia entry seems to suggest that the "retro" style arose strictly from Zouk days, but Adam Low was spinning long before Zouk existed, and I would imagine his set at Rumours had some of that same music before he brought it over to Zouk. Or was it truly original?

It used to be a circuit, back in my halcyon post-JC days. Zouk on Wednesdays, Venom in Pacific Plaza on Thursdays, Chaplin's at Holland Village on Friday's. That was back in the days when I was listening to so-called retro music (can music really be retro when I remember hearing it the first time it came out?) before I discovered house. And I discovered house music via those 15 minutes of house that would play at the end of Mambo nights - Armand van Helden's remix of Tori Amos' "Professional Widow" was a particular favourite then, as was Express of Sound's "Real Vibration (Want Love)".

I suppose I've been to many clubs since those days - just thinking of big superclubs alone, I've been to the Ministry of Sound in London, Crobar in Miami, Cream in Liverpool - all back before the dance music scene seemed to eat itself in the mid-2000s. But it would be nice to hear the story of clubbing in Singapore, something akin to Sheryl Garratt's Adventures in Wonderland. Any leads?

Worst Famous Comedian Ever

My impression of Joe Rogan improved tremendously when I chanced upon his dissing of Carlos Mencia. (Hey, we don't get much stand-up here: all I know of Rogan is him watching spiders crawl over others.) Mencia also gets dissed in the Beast's 50 Most Loathsome People in America list. How does Carlos Mencia get his own show when great comedies such as Arrested Development go off the air? Lord knows.

More xkcd fun

90s flowchart

More xkcd fun. Although to be persnickety "U Can't Touch This" came out in 1989.

Mark Leung and College Saga

First tme I ever saw a Mark Leung video was on Tomorrow... now I dare say "College Saga" is one of the most watched videos on Youtubemade by a Singaporean.

Le Grand Content - Free, Radicals

Wow - this surreal little short film blew me away. I love random free association and here the filmmakers call it "association chain massacre". Plus, it's poking fun at Powerpoint ("Le Grand Content examines the omnipresent PowerPoint-culture in search for its philosophical potential"), and that's always worth brownie points in my book. (Via Presentation Zen)

Fun With Anagrams

garden peek out

My Life in Music: the Meme

Inspired by brown, here's the soundtrack to my life as a movie... but first, the rules:

1. Open your library (iTunes, Winamp, Media Player, iPod, etc)
2. Put it on shuffle.
3. Press play.
4. For every question, type the song that's playing.
5. When you go to a new question, press the next button.
6. Don't lie

Opening Credits: "Family Affair (Remix)" by Mary J. Blige feat Jadakiss, Fabolous
Ah, an upbeat start to the day.

Waking Up: "Cindy Tells Me" by Brian Eno, from Here Come the Warm Jets

First Day At School: "Here Comes the Sun" by Nina Simone
The opening is the delicate tinkle of the piano - and then Simone wraps her voice around Harrison's great tune. Have to say I prefer the Beatles' original. But so far there's a nice progression to the musical choices...

Falling In Love: "Strange Fruit" by Billie Holliday
... which promptly ends here. Good Lord. "Strange Fruit" is a great, great song (hell, I watched a whole documentary about it), but lynching tunes are not romantic ones.

Fight song: "Concrete and Clay" by Jurassic 5
Apparently my idea of fighting is an old school battle. Or maybe a break-off. "A gangbanger from the streets taught me how to break / In South Central L.A., ay yo, can you relate"

Breaking Up: "Danger (Been So Long)" by Mystikal feat. Nivea
Heh, an appropriate title finally. I have to say, I'm so tired of thug-love songs, all tough-guy-rapper and then girly chorus (Ja Rule, I'm looking at you), but this song still sounds fresh.

Prom: "Cocaine Blues" by Hank Williams III, from Risin' Outlaw
I really like all 3 generations of Hank Williamses. Even Bocephus. But yeah, my prom wasn't anywhere near as exciting as the tales in this tune. But happier.

Life's OK: "Goodbye (live)" by Steve Earle and Emmylou Harris
This is only a "life's OK" tune in the most bitterly ironic of senses, since it's all about regret. But it's a beautiful song. (If you click on the link, it goes to a video of Earle and Harris singing this in concert. And Daniel Lanois in it.)

Mental breakdown: "What Would I Do (Live at the Living Room)" by Norah Jones
"Don't deceive me / Please don't leave me / What would I do / Without you / To see me through". Despondency and dependency, my modes of madness.

Driving: "Wild Horses" by the Sundays
Mmm. Horsepower. One of my favourite takes on the Stones classic.

Flashback: "Banquet (Phones Disco Edit)" by Bloc Party
Back to the 70s with that disco sound!

Getting Back Together: "Who Will Save Your Soul?" by Jewel
Yes, I have Jewel songs on my iTunes.

Wedding: "Go Your Own Way" by the Decemberists and Death Cab For Cutie
A cover of the Fleetwood Mac tune. An awesome performance (and 'twas awesome live, by all accounts). But a terrible, terrible song title for a wedding.

Birth of Child: "Devil With a Blue Dress On / Good Golly Miss Molly" by Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels
And the inappropriate song choices get worse! Either that or I better start renting the Omen and Rosemary's Baby.

Final Battle: "Sock it to 'em Soul Brother" by Bill Moss
Not bad. Ah the Capsoul sound. Apparently my final battle involves some sort of social activism. And in the style of a blaxploitation flick. Cool.

Death Scene: "Shattered Dreams" by Johnny Hates Jazz
Wow, bitter words for a death song. And the 80s retro part of my collection sneaks in. This song always reminds me of the place I bought my Johnny Hates Jazz cassette back when I was in primary school - the record store at the basement of Peninsula Plaza. I think it was a Supreme Records, but I'm not sure. I also bought such instant classics (he uses the word sarcastically, he hastens to add) as the debut Martika album. And possibly one of those "cover version" cassettes that they used to sell - does anyone remember them? Compilations of the latest songs, sung by some anonymous singer (or so they claimed), so all the songs were listed in the following way: "Soldier of Love - Made Popular By Donny Osmond".

Funeral Song:"Janie's Got a Gun", by Aerosmith, from Pump
Man - this sounds like a baadasssss song for a funeral.

End Credits: "Entertain", by Sleater-Kinney, from the Woods
Nice - some aggro to end. But I conclude that iTunes predicts weird, weird things in store for me. Or has a wicked sense of irony.

The iPhone isn't a full smartphone yet

TreoCentral has an interesting conversation about the iPhone (or whatever it ends up being called) that leads to the following conclusion:

Michael Ducker: You getting an iPhone?
Dieter Bohn: Obviously. You?
Michael Ducker: Obviously. Keeping your Treo, though?
Dieter Bohn: Looks that way, yep. I'm no businessman, but I need productivity on the go.

The iPhone isn't going to address the main bugbears of power users - quick data entry, ability to read/edit Office documents, replaceable battery for battery life. Thus far, it looks like a phone maybe for the work culture of Silicon Valley. And that, I suppose, is the crux of the matter at the moment. Steve Jobs may have compared the iPhone to the Blackberry Pearl and the Palm Treo at his keynote speech, but it really seems to be creating its own category of new high-end phones - it's a high-end phone for those who want the high end in mobile multimedia and web browsing, which isn't quite the same as a high-end phone for power warriors. More like it takes what SonyEricsson's been doing with the Walkmen phones and brings it to another level altogether. (Although I presume someone might make a keyboard that connects to the iPod dock connector.)

And there's no implied criticism in that. Apple's been great at creating new high ends (the iPod blew away what we knew about MP3 players), and new categories to market to that you didn't know existed, and frankly the design leaves one cooing. And if I can send SMSs at any decent speed on that touchscreen keyboard I'll take one, please.

Incidentally, I hope it's got a flight mode! One of the annoyances of convergence is that my primary MP3 player these days is my K750i phone, which means no inflight music.

Last Day at Scotts Picnic - 28 Dec 2006

Happened to be down in the rain to eat at the last day at Scotts Picnic. Okay, we didn't know it was the last day until we got there - but it turns out we witnessed the end of Singapore's first air-conditioned food court. Half the stalls were gone, including my favourite, the North Indian one (where I ate my first-ever naan!). The cleaner even spent some time talking to me, telling me how it was her last day on the job.

Thoughts on the iPhone

The iPhone looks good - how could it not? It looks drool-inducingly good. And as a widescreen iPod it probably sounds magnificent. But David Pogue's writeup on the thing only furthers the question that I have: how fast can you go on something that doesn't have a nice tactile keyboard response?

Typing is difficult. The letter keys are just pictures on the glass screen, so of course there’s no tactile feedback.

Software helps a lot. You can afford to make a lot of typos as you muddle through a word, because the software analyzes which keys you *might* have meant and figures out the word you wanted. Its best guess appears just under what you’ve typed; if it’s correct, you tap the Space bar to accept it and continue. I typed a couple of e-mail messages with lots of typos but eventually 100 percent accuracy, thanks to this auto-correct feature. (My testing didn’t involve proper names, however.)

Bottom line: Heavy BlackBerry addicts may not want to jump ship just yet.

At the moment, I'm guessing I'd be able to do predictive text faster than use a touchscreen to SMS, but I'm hoping to be proven wrong... Reading through Macworld's coverage of Jobs' speech, I was kind of surprised by this bit:

"We want to reinvent the phone," he reiterated. "What's the killer app? The killer app is making calls! It's amazing how hard it is to make calls on phones. We want you to use contacts like never before."

Is it really hard to make calls on phones? Even on my Sony Ericsson K750i, which annoyingly doesn't let you search through contacts beyond the first letter, I can't say making calls was hard. Now if they'd managed to integrate Skype and made international calls free - I mean, it's smart enough to switch from a cellphone data network to Wi-Fi, surely it could do VoIP?

The Internet browser looks amazing in that small space though. Everything will hinge on how good that Multitouch interface is...

Popagandhi has more love for the phone

Linksfest: Academic Considerations

Man, the new version of Blogger (which I can't switch to, apparently, because I have "too many entries") might be up, but old Blogger was down for a while... so here's slightly delayed links.

Was the fall of the Tang Dynasty caused in part by changes in climate? Yang Guifei gets all the blame, but a new study considers the impact of prolonged droughts.
John Campbell and Ed Glaeser (my former professor, for full disclosure) did a recruitment video for the Harvard Economics Department that was less than successful. So naturally it spurred parodies. (via Leiter Reports)
You really don't need all that many skin care products. Or so say dermatologists.
The secret cities of the Soviet Union.
Wesley Autrey's subway rescue has to be one of the coolest stories of 2007, even if the year is only a few days old.
My box in a box. In response to Timberlake.
The Simpsons as anime characters.

Labels: links

Pirates of the Caribbean III and Singapore

Pirates of the Caribbean III - At World's End

When my Jamaican cousins visited last year, they showed me their pics of the Caribbean and of the beautiful scenery of the islands, including where Pirates of the Caribbean I and II were shot. So one wonders where the "Singapore" scenes in Pirates III (with Chow Yun-Fat as Sao Feng, the "Pirate Lord of Singapore") were really shot...

This will be much more of an Asian influence and taking place in Singapore. Chow Yun-Fat will be an old friend of Johnny Depp. (Gore Verbinski, on Pirates III - admittedly this entire interview sounds like it was translated somehow, since even "Mousehunt" gets renamed "Mouse Trap")

Of course, there's historical inaccuracy in calling a place "Singapore" even before this place got that name (I presume Pirates is set around the 18th century, pre-Raffles). But hey, it was nice even just hearing the Depp reference to Singapore in the first movie, let alone setting entire scenes in a fictionalised version of this country.

I presume Singapore will be a rough-and-ready pirate haven in the film, which would make an interesting change from the super-efficient squeaky-clean image. (And not necessarily very far off from Singapore's early days, as a visit to the superbly renovated National Museum reminded me. Or are they going to show Jack Sparrow getting fined for spitting?) And if even the boorish portrayal of Kazakhstan in Borat can boost people wanting to know more about the country, I'm not going to complain about the depiction of this fair island.

The Queen

I remember when I first heard that Princess Diana had died: I was on a flight from Singapore to the US, about to begin college, and sometime during the flight a cryptic piece of news came onto the Singapore Airlines news screen: "Princess Di hurt in car accident in Paris". In those days you couldn't get much more than a little snippet of news, so you only had a sense that something vaguely terrible had happened. Even after landing in San Francisco, there wasn't much more word: as I recall, the headlines of the papers at the newsstand were of the previous day's, before the crash; it was only in landing in transit in Pennsylvania, coming upon a bank of newspaper boxes, that it was clear that what had happened was a major event the whole world over.

In Stephen Frears' The Queen, the royal family is similarly removed from the impact of the death of Diana. Helen Mirren as the titular character (and titular head of state) gives a superb, justifiably lauded performance of a woman caught between her sense of appropriate duty and a country whose values have shifted around her.

This may be The Queen, but the ghost of Princess Di (or, an "ex-HRH" as Prince Philip (James Cromwell) so bluntly puts it) haunts the palace. And in her death what was once celebrated as stoicism became seen as cold remove; Queen Elizabeth II's certainty that the British public would shun public expressions of grief was undercut by waves upon waves of flowers outside Buckingham Palace, by footage of grown men crying, by news headlines effectively questioning

Frears' film, a sober reflection on the events of one crazed week in 1997, doesn't show us anything new about most of the principal characters involved (well, unless your view of the royals comes strictly from Hello magazine): Prince Philip still comes across as a blowhard toff, Alistair Campbell as a brilliant but smug speechwriter. Perhaps the only new aspect of character that comes across is Charles as the first royal to grasp the significance of Diana's death to the public, and his worry about being targeted - or even shot - by an angry public.

But we are not here for revelation, but illustration. And what this film sharly illustrates is the development of the relationship between the Queen and the "modernising" government of Tony Blair (Michael Sheen). Blair starts off awkward, gawky, but quickly gains ascendancy and surefootedness as he responds to the death of Diana in politically savvy manner (his "People's Princess" speech was surely one of his rhetorical high points), and soon Blair finds himself in the role of advising the Queen, rather than the other way around. For all her instinctive disdain for Blair's upstart ways, the Queen grows to realise the quality of his advice; Blair on his part develops a surprising fealty to the Queen (to the republican Cherie Blair's teasing amusement).

Sheen does a pitch-perfect Tony Blair, down to the sound of his voice, although an outburst at Alistair Campbell in support of the Queen comes across as over the top, and overly tells the audience what is apparent from the rest of the film. It is perhaps the only false note in the film.

In the end, this is a film about commoners as much as royalty: about the leader of the Commons teaching royalty how to act; about the significant role of the commoners who advise the Queen behind the scenes (and in that regard give far better advice on the British public's mood than either Philip or the Queen Mum, both who come across as clinging on to outmoded ideas of the British public); and about the importance of the British public not just to the politicians, but also to the legitimacy of the Queen's existence. And in Mirren's finely nuanced portrait of the Queen, we see a woman more keenly aware of that last point than the rabid tabloid headlines of 1997 would have had us believe.

Song of 2006 - Gnarls in Charge

Oh yeah, year-end lists. Too busy to make 'em, so I'll just go - I first heard Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" near the end of 2005 (via Stereogum or some such site?), but it was without a doubt my song of 2006 - both in the original, and in covers (best Nelly Furtado song of the year, past the teasing "Promiscuous" and "Maneater")...

Goodbye Rosie, the Queen of Corona

Two songs ran through my head today. Got up with KT Tunstall's "Suddenly I See" running through my head - a relic, one expects, from watching the guilty pleasure that is "So You Think You Can Dance" on Monday. (Yes, I know, I could troll the Net for spoilers, but hell, I'll let the show unfold on my own time.) "Everything around her is a silver pool of light" is a lyric that's wormed its way into my unconscious, and in any case I'm pleased with any exposure Tunstall got in 2006, given how good "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree" was. And "Suddenly I See" comes on as a song of empowerment, with all its chords building up into epiphany.

That was my song about bursting into the future.

The other tune in my head was Paul Simon's "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard" - the jangle of that opening guitar alone puts a smile to my face. And it evokes a lot of New York memories for me, for some reason: the heat of New York in the summer, Latin festivals (and sugar cane) in Corona Park, Tompkins Square Park.

"I wanted you to show me a copy of the guidebook you wrote", said my friend visiting from New York at a party last week. "So much has changed - half the places you wrote about are gone". And so we reminisced about the "good ol' days" - late 1990s, really, but I suppose even nostalgia can be accelerated. We talked about catching burlesques in Galapagos in Williamsburg, back in the days when the hipsters had only just made their first forays into the place, back before condos, when North Sixth Street seemed half derelict and where I picked up an ancient copy of Fowler's. And we spoke of what was still there and what had left in the East Village, now apparently the site of the discreet charms of the bourgeoisie: Frank, Decibel, Veselka, Veniero (still there); the Second Avenue Deli, now closed for over a year, and countless bars that didn't make it.

Another old friend contacted me today - we had spent countless college hours discussing film, and, come to think of it, when he was in NY we had explored Queens, walking through Jackson Heights and Corona Park. More reason for nostalgia, I guess.

Sometimes I feel that there are all these versions of myself: the person I was in 2001, writing about New York; the person I am now; the person I'm about to become in 2007. And how should I move forward without losing the best of my past? (And how should I presume? says the T.S. Eliot fan in me - thou shalt not be grandiose.) Ah, new years - they always seem to put you at the rim of history and on the cusp of the future at the same time.

Movies Watched in 2006

To remind myself what I caught - an incomplete listing:

In theatres:
Brokeback Mountain
Syriana
The New World
Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man's Chest
Superman Returns
The Lake House
How Much Do You Love Me?
Click
An Inconvenient Truth
The Break-Up
Scoop
The Prestige
Casino Royale
Charlotte's Web

On a plane:
Casanova
The Ice Harvest
My Super Ex-Girlfriend
John Tucker Must Die
You, Me, and Dupree
The Devil Wears Prada

On video:
Eros
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
The Aristocrats
The Squid and the Whale
Babe: Pig in the City

Where I fit in the blogosphere

This is an old one, but I was looking at this interactive map of the blogosphere (inspired by discovering an old Harvard Business Review piece on social networks during my spring-cleaning) and I realised why it was so hard to find dsng.net in the map. I'd been looking among the crowd of Singaporean blogs (Xiaxue, Cowboy Caleb etc.) at the bottom right corner, but it turns out the software lumped me somewhere a bit further afield - I'm a little light-blue dot south-west of the big agglomeration. So I guess that's my place in this nabe.