10 years ago, I was a college freshman. I responded to an ad for band members. I wrote that I played piano, I played anything, had perfect pitch, had good hearing. I suppose saying stuff like that is a bit like going on a personals page and saying that you are 36-24-36. It does not guarantee that you are the perfect girlfriend, but people will sit up and take notice.
One Saturday, at the beginning of the month, I responded to a few advertisements for people who were looking for keyboardists. Until now, I am still dealing with the responses. There have been around 8 interested parties, I’m following up with around 4. That’s probably too many for me to handle. But until I meet up with a dead end on all these leads, I won’t need to look for advertisements.
When was it possible for me to do this? I think, as early as beginning 2007, around the time when Shingot was dragging me out to salsa lessons. After a while, I quit, and turned to long distance running instead. 2 half marathons and 1 marathon later, I quit. Just wanted a finisher’s medal. Finally I’m doing something that I always wanted to do since I was a teenager. How did I not know that it was so easy for me to find people to jam with? The opportunity cost is unconscionable.
The only difference between then and now is that since the beginning of 2007, I have written 20-30 songs, ever since I found out how cakewalk could let me record down my stuff.
OK, I have actually played keyboards for around 4 hours today. But not really played, because a lot of it was just gawking at people going around doing their own stuff.
First jamming session was with the band I tried out with last week. I’m still going to follow that leader because I want to see what he can teach me, and I’m also in the company of 3 guys who are even more talented than myself. But I was a little irritated that the leader’s conception of “chim” music was funky time signatures. Not that I should complain, since my last incarnation was named after a funky time signature (it is 7/8 in Spanish).
We ran through 1 or 2 of the leader’s compositions. He brought a laptop, and played his stuff. On one hand his stuff is not too bad even though he’s not as good a composer as I am (I’m not going to brag about this to him anyway, I’m perfectly happy being a sideman for now.) There was a truce between the drummer and the leader, and whereas there were some arguments about who was right or wrong during the 7/8 section he was perfectly OK to go drum along. The way that they played off each other was quite great, and I was just happy to play under the radar.
Later on, he said, I have 15 originals, and we will be playing with them. He intends to gig. And if I can still keep up with them after that, you guys might just find yourselves in a nightclub listening to the 4 of us entertaining you for the evening. He was even talking about performing at jazz festivals overseas. God, no, pls help me…
The leader is also a devout Muslim, and was undergoing voluntary fasting. He was explaining to me that it had to do with some birthday of some prophet or something. How he reconciles this with naming one of his compositions, “Withdr awal Techn ique”, I don’t really understand it.
There were 4 hours between the 2 jamming sessions. Time for a nap, and then dinner.
The second jamming session I had was a tryout for a post-rock band. A lot of bands will tell you which age group they are in in advertisements, so they don’t have generational problems. This was – take away me, and the average age of those people I played with today is around 10 years younger than me.
But they played post rock, and I liked that. In fact, it was such an obscure genre, that I was surprised that Singaporeans were doing this. I also like the fact that now, 10 years later, is when people are starting to catch up to the stuff I was listening to 10 years ago.
I was initially enthusiastic about this, because my point of contact was with a chick 10 years my junior. I got to the studio, and then found myself talking to a young 21 year old drummer. Then I found out that everybody else in the band was male. Well, no problem I guess. But surely less fun than being the only male member of an all-girl’s band. Her name was Kim, and I wonder if important indie bands have bass players named Kim. (Kim Deal from the Pixies, Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth.)
This gig didn’t go down very well. I sense they are unsure about adding a keyboardist to the line-up. Post rock doesn’t have a lot of keyboardist, and the stuff they played didn’t really feature keyboards. Also you could tell things from the length of time it took for any 1 of them to respond to me (1 week). But I always believe that there is an extra room in any band for a musical genius like myself. The band was putting together a composition. I didn’t know what to write because I wasn’t used to writing post-rock.
Some of them had a few smokes after the session. It’s a hazard in this line that you will come across more than your fair share of smokers. I asked if this was the only post-rock band in Singapore. They said that the genre was gaining strength in Singapore, even though it’s always been a marginal scene. One of the guitarists was a stand-in for the regular, and he was in a progressive rock band with Kim as well.
The drummer sounded like he was having a great time bashing his sticks out in the original. He asked if he was going to far, but we all felt it was fine. I talked to him about post-rock, and he told me that he hated the term. Music is music, etc. But that’s what we’re doing in the band, right? Post rock is what we’ve been doing. But we should be free to spearhead in other directions, of course.
Sample conversation in the band. "So, uh, how long you been playing keyboards?" "Since before you were born."
Seems like both the bands have much in common. Both have Malays and Chinese. With 1 exception, the Malays play the guitars and drums, the Chinese play the keyboards and bass. Both have capable guitarists and drummers. Both have members living all over the island, in Woodlands, Bukit Batok, Pasir Ris, Tampines, Thompson Rd.
I have 2 more engagements. One of them is with a former frontwoman of an all girl band who released 1 or 2 albums in the 1990s. She’s thinking of a comeback. We talked over the phone, and she sent me a demo. It’s scary, completely different from what I like. But I just have to do some arrangement for her. It will be a plus if we get our stuff recorded.
Another one is a guy who’s trying to get a band together, and he claims to have written pop songs. That’s the vehicle I have to show my compositions. But how will I balance that against what I’m doing for the other 2? Well, at least I know that I would have freed up a lot of time I used to spend on books. It’s a lot of time.
There are a few immediate tasks to do following the belated start of my music career. 1 – learn how to play jazz on the piano. 2 – learn more about how to use the synthesizer, at least make the demos more professional sounding. 3- learn a rock instrument. What will it be, the bass? The drums?
Well, guys, you know that I don’t really go out and enjoy myself for the heck of it. Everything is work. Even my hobbies are work. They aren’t even hobbies, since if you were to consider that a lot of these things are on my “things to do before you die” list, then it is work. It’s something that has to be done. Even my reading was all on the “things to do” list.
Monday, 28 December 2009
Saturday, 26 December 2009
Teapot part 1
Teapot
When she joined our office I hardly took notice of her. But she was already quite distinctive looking: short, stout (for want of a better word) but with a flowing lock of hair all the way down to her waist. I still remember being squeezed with her at the back of a car on the way to the company recreation centre.
After a few fire drills, I found myself unable to keep my eyes off her. She was hardly somebody who you would call beautiful at first sight, but she had a way of growing on you. I liked that she looked so unusual – I’m usually drawn to people who dare to be different.
It probably was discomforting for her, she noticed me. I tried to chat her up, and emailed her. The initial attempts at conversation were stilted, and it was not easy to find stuff to talk about, we didn’t know that many people in common.
One Valentine’s day, I decided to be cheeky and send her a Valentine in the form of a poem. I can’t really remember much of what happened after that. She thought it was funny. I didn’t expect anything else to come out of it, other than it planting a seed in her head.
A few months passed, and soon Shingot was about to get married. At around the same time, she was transferred to another building. Shingot knew I was after her, so he invited her to his wedding (I was there too of course) and then arranged to have her sat at my table. When she asked him if there was anyone to pick her up, he forwarded the email to me. I don’t know what turn the conversation was taking, but she said that she was happy to eat anything that had meat in it, even human meat. I wrote right back to me: “you can eat my meat anytime baby.” According to LC, she choked on a drink when she wrote that.
Thereafter began our first date. At Shingot’s wedding, in full view of a lot of people from the office. She dressed in a red dress which looked really good (she said that wasn’t her best dress but I don’t believe it 100%). I brought out my new red shirt. It was a coincidence. But we did look a lot like a real couple that night, except that she barely reached up to my shoulder.
We talked for a bit, but I can’t remember much about the conversation. She laughed at my inability to concentrate on more than one thing at a time, but I was a novice driver, and nervous. We found that we were both music lovers (but that meant not that much, because we listened to totally different kinds of music.) She was being animated and telling me about how much she loved this or that music when it played. She had decent taste. But she thought that the Sly Stone I had on the car player was crazy music and preferred to listen to her 933. I remember her raving about Jay Chou’s “secret”. She sang in a choir. It was an OK date, neither fantastic nor disastrous.
At the end of the evening, she took pictures of us. I don’t know why, but probably to remember one time when she went out with a guy 1 foot taller than she was. We passed by some of her colleagues, who asked her if she wanted a ride. She said that she was going to her aunt’s place in Geylang to spend the weekend. I said that I stayed in Bedok, and I was going to send her home because it was on the way. She spoke the truth; I lied. But later on she told me she thought the white lie was quick thinking.
We had a follow up date a week later. It was just me and a colleague and her, we played tennis. I remember that she brought a very cute back pack. We laughed and played tennis. I didn’t have the car that day because I didn’t have the pass to drive in. After the games, though, she took a long shower. I, customarily didn’t bathe. Ghost offered to drive us to dinner after the game, but she asked to be taken home instead. I was upset at that, but later on it occurred to me that she was probably disgusted.
She did ask me for help on a few things, and we did exchange some more SMSs. I asked her out one more time for dinner, but she made an excuse at the last minute. Thus ended the first phase of my attempts to win her over.
There was some banter, and she did tell me that she liked some of my funny comments at work.
1 year later I showed her photos of my trip to the US. She liked some of the funny pictures. Also claimed to know immediately that the other chick in my photos was my sister. Then she sent me a photo of herself. Sounded like a good sign, but I never followed up on that. I didn’t think that I was ready yet.
(to be continued)
When she joined our office I hardly took notice of her. But she was already quite distinctive looking: short, stout (for want of a better word) but with a flowing lock of hair all the way down to her waist. I still remember being squeezed with her at the back of a car on the way to the company recreation centre.
After a few fire drills, I found myself unable to keep my eyes off her. She was hardly somebody who you would call beautiful at first sight, but she had a way of growing on you. I liked that she looked so unusual – I’m usually drawn to people who dare to be different.
It probably was discomforting for her, she noticed me. I tried to chat her up, and emailed her. The initial attempts at conversation were stilted, and it was not easy to find stuff to talk about, we didn’t know that many people in common.
One Valentine’s day, I decided to be cheeky and send her a Valentine in the form of a poem. I can’t really remember much of what happened after that. She thought it was funny. I didn’t expect anything else to come out of it, other than it planting a seed in her head.
A few months passed, and soon Shingot was about to get married. At around the same time, she was transferred to another building. Shingot knew I was after her, so he invited her to his wedding (I was there too of course) and then arranged to have her sat at my table. When she asked him if there was anyone to pick her up, he forwarded the email to me. I don’t know what turn the conversation was taking, but she said that she was happy to eat anything that had meat in it, even human meat. I wrote right back to me: “you can eat my meat anytime baby.” According to LC, she choked on a drink when she wrote that.
Thereafter began our first date. At Shingot’s wedding, in full view of a lot of people from the office. She dressed in a red dress which looked really good (she said that wasn’t her best dress but I don’t believe it 100%). I brought out my new red shirt. It was a coincidence. But we did look a lot like a real couple that night, except that she barely reached up to my shoulder.
We talked for a bit, but I can’t remember much about the conversation. She laughed at my inability to concentrate on more than one thing at a time, but I was a novice driver, and nervous. We found that we were both music lovers (but that meant not that much, because we listened to totally different kinds of music.) She was being animated and telling me about how much she loved this or that music when it played. She had decent taste. But she thought that the Sly Stone I had on the car player was crazy music and preferred to listen to her 933. I remember her raving about Jay Chou’s “secret”. She sang in a choir. It was an OK date, neither fantastic nor disastrous.
At the end of the evening, she took pictures of us. I don’t know why, but probably to remember one time when she went out with a guy 1 foot taller than she was. We passed by some of her colleagues, who asked her if she wanted a ride. She said that she was going to her aunt’s place in Geylang to spend the weekend. I said that I stayed in Bedok, and I was going to send her home because it was on the way. She spoke the truth; I lied. But later on she told me she thought the white lie was quick thinking.
We had a follow up date a week later. It was just me and a colleague and her, we played tennis. I remember that she brought a very cute back pack. We laughed and played tennis. I didn’t have the car that day because I didn’t have the pass to drive in. After the games, though, she took a long shower. I, customarily didn’t bathe. Ghost offered to drive us to dinner after the game, but she asked to be taken home instead. I was upset at that, but later on it occurred to me that she was probably disgusted.
She did ask me for help on a few things, and we did exchange some more SMSs. I asked her out one more time for dinner, but she made an excuse at the last minute. Thus ended the first phase of my attempts to win her over.
There was some banter, and she did tell me that she liked some of my funny comments at work.
1 year later I showed her photos of my trip to the US. She liked some of the funny pictures. Also claimed to know immediately that the other chick in my photos was my sister. Then she sent me a photo of herself. Sounded like a good sign, but I never followed up on that. I didn’t think that I was ready yet.
(to be continued)
Wednesday, 23 December 2009
Saturday, 19 December 2009
Cleaning up
Blog entries are harder to write this time around. It used to be more fun when I was just whiling time away. I never had to wonder what I was doing - just head out with a sackful of books, and then a trip to nowhere, a few hours in a cafe. Used to be so easy. How did I not realise that my decision making abilities were being impaired by this extremely predictable routine?
I could just read a book, and think about it. It's so much more fun thinking about other peoples' lives. You never have to make a difficult decision about them.
Last week I bought a book. Well I am supposed to have already given up books but this is no ordinary book, this was Eric Hobsbawm’s “Age of Capital” at less than $10. So I had to have it. It’s like, you may have given up sex, but if one day, some hot Japanese AV soft porn star / Korean race queen turns up at your door with only a towel, are you not going to make an exception?
As an aside, some of you are going to laugh, but a few nights ago I committed the cardinal sin. I surfed porn, and forgot to turn of the computer before turning in. Actually I was so tired that I thought, "I'm going to take a 5 mins nap". I woke up the next morning, and my father was already there. So he saw everything. He saw everything but said nothing. Ah well.
I got a gift from the gift exchange (conducted by the whole building, not the department). I only took part because it was a chance to get rid of one of the 200 books that need to get out of my room in order for me to have some decent living space. In exchange I got a picture frame. I said, "great! All I need to do is get a girlfriend, and I'll have a complete set."
This is not a good festive season for me. For the last 2 years, I had thrown caution to the wind, telling myself, "screw it all, I'm going to leave (current workplace) any time soon and I'm going to think about the future". Well the future hasn't happened yet, even though my days of stalling upon it are over. I am a great procrastinator but I have a limit - 1 year? 6 months? And then after that I will get off my ass and do something. But what the fuck is it going to be?
I remember something that Winston Churchill sarcastically said about the Americans: "you can always trust the Americans to do the right thing - after they have exhausted every other possibility". Am I like that as well?
And this festive season hasn't been very good for me. When at the office I'm rushing out work because I'm also clearing 1 day of leave every week. When I'm on leave, I can't do much other then sleep. I'm tired much of the time. I don't know why, maybe I'm just tired (I'm down with flu.) This is the time of the year you're most susceptible to the flu, and also the time of the year it's the most difficult to recover from it, because every where you go there's always a draft blowing.
I’ve cleaned up my desk. I’m working on my room as well. I suppose that cleaning up was long overdue. For too long I have turned up at work and looked around, and there’s a fog of despondency hanging over my cubicle because there’re papers everywhere.
I suppose this is part of the cycle of life. For every birth, there is a death. In stochastic processes, there is a birth and death process. In computer science, we call garbage collection. This concept is also prevalent in eastern mythology (in fact one of the computer science courses I attended at the uni used the yin-yang symbol as its logo.) The hindus have their god of creation, and another one for destruction. It's all supposed to be all neutral, nothing is better than the other, all part of life. (As opposed to the Christian view where birth is a good thing and death an extremely terrible thing.)
So I'll go through all the papers piled on my desks, the one at home and the one in the office. I'll sift through all that email that I have not filed away for years. (My home account. I normally am quite good about my office mail.) I'll read and throw away bills. Balance my accounts. Sell away my books. Give away my old clothes. My home was renovated while I was in the states - I had an almost empty room when I started work. I'm still wondering how on earth it got entirely filled up with junk over just a couple of years.
All the old files with useless stuff - I'm going to throw them out. I suppose all of this is a start - do something mindless for a while that actually makes my life better. Do it when the weather is cold enough that I won't automatically get drenched in sweat just by standing in my room for 5 minutes. Do it before Chinese New Year.
And then after that, on to the more difficult questions - how do I convince members of the opposite sex that I am not a boring person, how do I convince people that I'm a great songwriter, a great scientist, etc etc etc.
I could just read a book, and think about it. It's so much more fun thinking about other peoples' lives. You never have to make a difficult decision about them.
Last week I bought a book. Well I am supposed to have already given up books but this is no ordinary book, this was Eric Hobsbawm’s “Age of Capital” at less than $10. So I had to have it. It’s like, you may have given up sex, but if one day, some hot Japanese AV soft porn star / Korean race queen turns up at your door with only a towel, are you not going to make an exception?
As an aside, some of you are going to laugh, but a few nights ago I committed the cardinal sin. I surfed porn, and forgot to turn of the computer before turning in. Actually I was so tired that I thought, "I'm going to take a 5 mins nap". I woke up the next morning, and my father was already there. So he saw everything. He saw everything but said nothing. Ah well.
I got a gift from the gift exchange (conducted by the whole building, not the department). I only took part because it was a chance to get rid of one of the 200 books that need to get out of my room in order for me to have some decent living space. In exchange I got a picture frame. I said, "great! All I need to do is get a girlfriend, and I'll have a complete set."
This is not a good festive season for me. For the last 2 years, I had thrown caution to the wind, telling myself, "screw it all, I'm going to leave (current workplace) any time soon and I'm going to think about the future". Well the future hasn't happened yet, even though my days of stalling upon it are over. I am a great procrastinator but I have a limit - 1 year? 6 months? And then after that I will get off my ass and do something. But what the fuck is it going to be?
I remember something that Winston Churchill sarcastically said about the Americans: "you can always trust the Americans to do the right thing - after they have exhausted every other possibility". Am I like that as well?
And this festive season hasn't been very good for me. When at the office I'm rushing out work because I'm also clearing 1 day of leave every week. When I'm on leave, I can't do much other then sleep. I'm tired much of the time. I don't know why, maybe I'm just tired (I'm down with flu.) This is the time of the year you're most susceptible to the flu, and also the time of the year it's the most difficult to recover from it, because every where you go there's always a draft blowing.
I’ve cleaned up my desk. I’m working on my room as well. I suppose that cleaning up was long overdue. For too long I have turned up at work and looked around, and there’s a fog of despondency hanging over my cubicle because there’re papers everywhere.
I suppose this is part of the cycle of life. For every birth, there is a death. In stochastic processes, there is a birth and death process. In computer science, we call garbage collection. This concept is also prevalent in eastern mythology (in fact one of the computer science courses I attended at the uni used the yin-yang symbol as its logo.) The hindus have their god of creation, and another one for destruction. It's all supposed to be all neutral, nothing is better than the other, all part of life. (As opposed to the Christian view where birth is a good thing and death an extremely terrible thing.)
So I'll go through all the papers piled on my desks, the one at home and the one in the office. I'll sift through all that email that I have not filed away for years. (My home account. I normally am quite good about my office mail.) I'll read and throw away bills. Balance my accounts. Sell away my books. Give away my old clothes. My home was renovated while I was in the states - I had an almost empty room when I started work. I'm still wondering how on earth it got entirely filled up with junk over just a couple of years.
All the old files with useless stuff - I'm going to throw them out. I suppose all of this is a start - do something mindless for a while that actually makes my life better. Do it when the weather is cold enough that I won't automatically get drenched in sweat just by standing in my room for 5 minutes. Do it before Chinese New Year.
And then after that, on to the more difficult questions - how do I convince members of the opposite sex that I am not a boring person, how do I convince people that I'm a great songwriter, a great scientist, etc etc etc.
Tryout - Fusion band
During my 2nd time going to the studio to practice my drums, I found the practicing to have some diminishing returns. Well, I was to find that the “You Can’t Hurry Love” / “Lust For Life” drum pattern was really easy and didn’t really involve the pedals. I found myself being able to do one or two fancy tricks, but still struggling to maintain a steady beat for more than 1 minute at a time. (Well if you have to drum for an 8 minute song then you’re screwed. No “Stairway To Heaven” for you.)
After it was over, the guy behind the counter came and told me that time’s up. Then to my surprise, he gave me an impromptu lesson. Turns out that he’s quite a nifty drummer himself. He taught me a few things:
1. First and last thing about drumming – learn to maintain a steady beat. Nothing much else matters. This is true. Moe Tucker is famous for not doing anything interesting with the drums other than holding a steady beat.
2. Practice with your pedals. You can do this anywhere. His mother used to ask him why he was tapping his feet under the dinner table.
3. Practice your trills with the snare drum. Once you got those basics right, then you can do all your fancy tricks with the other drums.
4. The centre of a cymbal sounds a bit like a cowbell when hit
5. This is not tennis where you have to keep a stiff wrist. Most of the flexibility from drum movements revolves around the wrist. (No wonder Max Weinberg kenna RSI when he was drumming for Bruce Springsteen.)
The other thing is, how do drummers practice in Singapore? The hardest thing when living in a country with no garages is to find a place for drummers to practice. Fortunately he said, just use your pillow. That’s great. So I have an inexpensive way of practicing the drums without blowing $13 per hour.
That week I went on www.soft.com.sg, which is one of the biggest musician’s forums in Singapore. I advertised myself as a keyboard player who has a grade 8 (this is true) who has perfect pitch (true) and who’s a nifty songwriter (also true). I also said that I have 20 years’ experience but that’s misleading – I learnt piano while young, did not very much, and just let 20 years elapse. I have been writing songs on and off for 20 years so I suppose you could count that.
I also looked up advertisements of people looking around for a keyboardist. There weren’t many around. I thought I had better learn how to play the drums or the bass, that way I could have a chance at being in a proper band.
The first tryout was with a guy who, I could tell, was rather proud of his guitar playing skills. He was also giving lessons to people, and I found out that he was a Berklee graduate. (I’m talking about the famous music school, not the famous Bay Area university.) I asked him what sort of stuff to expect to play. Then he gave me the name of 2 Chick Corea and 2 Charlie Parker pieces. I gagged. But I still went out and tried anyway, figuring out that if I screwed it all up (and I believed that I was going to screw it up) at least I took a shot at it.
When I entered the studio, at least it was a familiar area. It was the exact same studio where I twice went down to try out the drum kit. Seated at the drum kit was a portly Malay guy who admitted to having eaten 3 ice creams over the course of 1 afternoon. The guitarist who contacted me was an intense looking Malay, and the bassist was a skinny Chinese whose mannerisms reminded me of Honest Face (so I’ll call him Honest Face 2).
They started out with Chick Corea’s “Spain”. I wasn’t familiar with the chords, and I was desperately trying to keep up, splashing and sinking like a cat in water. The guitarist turned to me and said, “play a solo”, and I couldn’t play. In fact, no matter how much I like jazz, I can’t play it. At least not yet. The second piece was not much better. I was reduced to just playing chords and letting them jam on. Later on the guitarist made it easy for me and played stuff I knew, like “Superstition” and “Autumn Leaves”. Then the guitarist turned to me and said, “play me one of your songs”. I played them the song I wrote for teapot (Maybe I’ll blog about teapot soon) 1 week ago. I didn’t like everything they did to the song, but they caught on and jammed to it. I was a little amazed. Well it’s nice when you hear something you wrote played properly.
Then they moved on to the original compositions. Naturally they aren’t as good as mine, or at least they didn’t perform it properly. I can’t play well but I am after all a really good songwriter.
Incidently, the drummer here knows the nice dude behind the counter who gave me that impromptu drum instruction.
Later on, when we met for prata, I got to know the politics of the band better. The core of the band was the guitarist and the bass player. They knew each other for 10 years, and they were also part of an ensemble that both of them left at the same time. The guitarist was the nominal leader of the pair (and therefore this group). And he was the best musician among us, technically. But I had a premonition about his character when he posted a message on the message board, scolding another electric guitar teacher for undercharging and spoiling the market. Why be so nasty about this in public?
The guitarist was in full flow, gleefully documenting his exit from the Previous Ensemble. They had a simmering tensions with the leader of the group, who had given a radio interview earlier that day, in the afternoon. Then the guitarist complained that the rest of the band didn’t get paid their fair share, and that their previous frontman did not have much stage presence. Eventually, on that night, and in the same prata store where we set, the Previous Ensemble broke up.
After that, I remember that the guitarist talked a few things about jazz, probably assuming that I didn’t know that much about it. In a way, I didn’t know the theory but I have listened enough to have a feel for it. OK, I was willing to let him talk. He said some things that were useful (like how important it was to have a mentor, how important it was to keep on exploring and learning new things) and a lot of things that were not.
Like how he used to have a mentor who was the keyboardist of an R+B singer. Or like how he insinuated himself into a band so successfully that they fired the old guitarist and replaced the incumbent with him instead. Or like how a lot of people from Berklee can’t play very well, or like how he passed the audition to get his Berklee scholarship.
Throughout the whole conversation, the other two were comparatively quiet. It was only after the guitarist left that things started getting really interesting. The drummer was a session musician, and hired to play with them. He was a drumming teacher in real life. He started bitching about the guitar player, being too caught up with himself and his ego. The bass player, honest face 2, didn’t mind the guy that much, but he conceded that there were character defects. Then the drummer complained about the original piece that he wrote, said there was a weird time signature. I had to agree with that. I don’t mind listening to difficult pieces if there’s a soul in there, something worth listening to. What I can’t stand up for are technical difficulty for the sake of technical difficulty. In other words, musical masturbation. Well that guy was dangerously close to being a musical masturbator.
Drummer pointed out that this ensemble was dangerously close to being just a vehicle for guitarist’s superior skills. Which would be pretty annoying. I said that players in the band must think about the bigger picture, and they should think about how the whole band works, rather than just accompanying a virtuoso. We agreed on that much.
But then the drummer said something else I wasn’t sure I agreed with. He said that you had to connect with the audience and play what they want. I always believed in being 1 or 2 steps ahead of the audience. But maybe he was a professional musician and he always believed in that. Whereas me, I’m a person with adventurous tastes, and I go for just about anything except for heavy metal. I’m more of a pushing the boundaries kind of thing. I’m more for that “you follow your heart, and the audience follows you”. But in a way we both agreed that maybe the guitarist wasn’t always following his heart.
Apparently I had passed the audition, but I shudder to think what lies in wait for me. Maybe I did OK, and would do fine just being very unspectacular while he did all the soloing. In the event, Guitar player did ask for my contact thereafter.
All of a sudden, though, 2 more people whose ads I replied to showed up in my email inbox. One of them is a post-rock (think Tortoise, Mogwai) band and another one is a Britpop band. Both look interesting propositions, so I guess there are more tryouts ahead. I think I should remember one thing: I don't know where I came across this saying before, responding to band ads is not like ordering pizza, it's not like you send a private message on a forum, and suddenly a band appears before you for you to audition for. I suppose the band members all have to look at the responses and decide who to talk to.
I suppose I am making a bit of headway now.
You see, I have options. I can either hang around matchmaking web sites, and write to women one by one begging to have dates with them so that I can pay the bills at expensive restaurants, or I can become a rock star and have them line up in front of me for the opportunity to suck my dick. I'd very much prefer the latter.
After it was over, the guy behind the counter came and told me that time’s up. Then to my surprise, he gave me an impromptu lesson. Turns out that he’s quite a nifty drummer himself. He taught me a few things:
1. First and last thing about drumming – learn to maintain a steady beat. Nothing much else matters. This is true. Moe Tucker is famous for not doing anything interesting with the drums other than holding a steady beat.
2. Practice with your pedals. You can do this anywhere. His mother used to ask him why he was tapping his feet under the dinner table.
3. Practice your trills with the snare drum. Once you got those basics right, then you can do all your fancy tricks with the other drums.
4. The centre of a cymbal sounds a bit like a cowbell when hit
5. This is not tennis where you have to keep a stiff wrist. Most of the flexibility from drum movements revolves around the wrist. (No wonder Max Weinberg kenna RSI when he was drumming for Bruce Springsteen.)
The other thing is, how do drummers practice in Singapore? The hardest thing when living in a country with no garages is to find a place for drummers to practice. Fortunately he said, just use your pillow. That’s great. So I have an inexpensive way of practicing the drums without blowing $13 per hour.
That week I went on www.soft.com.sg, which is one of the biggest musician’s forums in Singapore. I advertised myself as a keyboard player who has a grade 8 (this is true) who has perfect pitch (true) and who’s a nifty songwriter (also true). I also said that I have 20 years’ experience but that’s misleading – I learnt piano while young, did not very much, and just let 20 years elapse. I have been writing songs on and off for 20 years so I suppose you could count that.
I also looked up advertisements of people looking around for a keyboardist. There weren’t many around. I thought I had better learn how to play the drums or the bass, that way I could have a chance at being in a proper band.
The first tryout was with a guy who, I could tell, was rather proud of his guitar playing skills. He was also giving lessons to people, and I found out that he was a Berklee graduate. (I’m talking about the famous music school, not the famous Bay Area university.) I asked him what sort of stuff to expect to play. Then he gave me the name of 2 Chick Corea and 2 Charlie Parker pieces. I gagged. But I still went out and tried anyway, figuring out that if I screwed it all up (and I believed that I was going to screw it up) at least I took a shot at it.
When I entered the studio, at least it was a familiar area. It was the exact same studio where I twice went down to try out the drum kit. Seated at the drum kit was a portly Malay guy who admitted to having eaten 3 ice creams over the course of 1 afternoon. The guitarist who contacted me was an intense looking Malay, and the bassist was a skinny Chinese whose mannerisms reminded me of Honest Face (so I’ll call him Honest Face 2).
They started out with Chick Corea’s “Spain”. I wasn’t familiar with the chords, and I was desperately trying to keep up, splashing and sinking like a cat in water. The guitarist turned to me and said, “play a solo”, and I couldn’t play. In fact, no matter how much I like jazz, I can’t play it. At least not yet. The second piece was not much better. I was reduced to just playing chords and letting them jam on. Later on the guitarist made it easy for me and played stuff I knew, like “Superstition” and “Autumn Leaves”. Then the guitarist turned to me and said, “play me one of your songs”. I played them the song I wrote for teapot (Maybe I’ll blog about teapot soon) 1 week ago. I didn’t like everything they did to the song, but they caught on and jammed to it. I was a little amazed. Well it’s nice when you hear something you wrote played properly.
Then they moved on to the original compositions. Naturally they aren’t as good as mine, or at least they didn’t perform it properly. I can’t play well but I am after all a really good songwriter.
Incidently, the drummer here knows the nice dude behind the counter who gave me that impromptu drum instruction.
Later on, when we met for prata, I got to know the politics of the band better. The core of the band was the guitarist and the bass player. They knew each other for 10 years, and they were also part of an ensemble that both of them left at the same time. The guitarist was the nominal leader of the pair (and therefore this group). And he was the best musician among us, technically. But I had a premonition about his character when he posted a message on the message board, scolding another electric guitar teacher for undercharging and spoiling the market. Why be so nasty about this in public?
The guitarist was in full flow, gleefully documenting his exit from the Previous Ensemble. They had a simmering tensions with the leader of the group, who had given a radio interview earlier that day, in the afternoon. Then the guitarist complained that the rest of the band didn’t get paid their fair share, and that their previous frontman did not have much stage presence. Eventually, on that night, and in the same prata store where we set, the Previous Ensemble broke up.
After that, I remember that the guitarist talked a few things about jazz, probably assuming that I didn’t know that much about it. In a way, I didn’t know the theory but I have listened enough to have a feel for it. OK, I was willing to let him talk. He said some things that were useful (like how important it was to have a mentor, how important it was to keep on exploring and learning new things) and a lot of things that were not.
Like how he used to have a mentor who was the keyboardist of an R+B singer. Or like how he insinuated himself into a band so successfully that they fired the old guitarist and replaced the incumbent with him instead. Or like how a lot of people from Berklee can’t play very well, or like how he passed the audition to get his Berklee scholarship.
Throughout the whole conversation, the other two were comparatively quiet. It was only after the guitarist left that things started getting really interesting. The drummer was a session musician, and hired to play with them. He was a drumming teacher in real life. He started bitching about the guitar player, being too caught up with himself and his ego. The bass player, honest face 2, didn’t mind the guy that much, but he conceded that there were character defects. Then the drummer complained about the original piece that he wrote, said there was a weird time signature. I had to agree with that. I don’t mind listening to difficult pieces if there’s a soul in there, something worth listening to. What I can’t stand up for are technical difficulty for the sake of technical difficulty. In other words, musical masturbation. Well that guy was dangerously close to being a musical masturbator.
Drummer pointed out that this ensemble was dangerously close to being just a vehicle for guitarist’s superior skills. Which would be pretty annoying. I said that players in the band must think about the bigger picture, and they should think about how the whole band works, rather than just accompanying a virtuoso. We agreed on that much.
But then the drummer said something else I wasn’t sure I agreed with. He said that you had to connect with the audience and play what they want. I always believed in being 1 or 2 steps ahead of the audience. But maybe he was a professional musician and he always believed in that. Whereas me, I’m a person with adventurous tastes, and I go for just about anything except for heavy metal. I’m more of a pushing the boundaries kind of thing. I’m more for that “you follow your heart, and the audience follows you”. But in a way we both agreed that maybe the guitarist wasn’t always following his heart.
Apparently I had passed the audition, but I shudder to think what lies in wait for me. Maybe I did OK, and would do fine just being very unspectacular while he did all the soloing. In the event, Guitar player did ask for my contact thereafter.
All of a sudden, though, 2 more people whose ads I replied to showed up in my email inbox. One of them is a post-rock (think Tortoise, Mogwai) band and another one is a Britpop band. Both look interesting propositions, so I guess there are more tryouts ahead. I think I should remember one thing: I don't know where I came across this saying before, responding to band ads is not like ordering pizza, it's not like you send a private message on a forum, and suddenly a band appears before you for you to audition for. I suppose the band members all have to look at the responses and decide who to talk to.
I suppose I am making a bit of headway now.
You see, I have options. I can either hang around matchmaking web sites, and write to women one by one begging to have dates with them so that I can pay the bills at expensive restaurants, or I can become a rock star and have them line up in front of me for the opportunity to suck my dick. I'd very much prefer the latter.
Monday, 14 December 2009
Kennedy Brothers
This is one of the most famous pictures of Barack Obama, immortalised into a poster. But why did this poster look so familiar when I first saw it? Did it remind me of anybody?
Interesting, eh?
The last of the Kennedy brothers has died. Let’s look at the other Kennedys.
Joseph Kennedy, the father
He was always an ambitious person, who wanted his sons to succeed in politics. He himself was the US ambassador to the UK until just before WWII, although he made the fatal mistake of supporting Adolf Hitler.
Joe Kennedy Jr
He was the star of the family since he was young. Always more hardworking and driven by his brothers. He was the family’s best hope to become the president of the United States. Unfortunately during WWII, he was shot down and he died.
John F Kennedy
He was a very charismatic character. Even though he was an indifferent student at Harvard, and he didn’t pass many bills when he was a congressman or senator, there was no doubting that he was very intelligent and hungry for knowledge. He ran for president against Nixon, and won a very narrow victory. As with the victory of Bush 2 40 years later, it was achieved by some voting impropriety, although this wasn’t revealed until much later.
He had his flaws, as is revealed later: he was a serial womaniser, and he also had a whole list of health problems which suggested that even if he wasn’t shot, he would have died young. The fact that he was able to conceal these flaws from the public indicates that the US presidency is very different today from what it used to be like in the past.
But at that time he was a shining hope to millions. He lived in a moment where a lot of Americans were very idealistic about the future. A big generation of baby boomers were young people then, and they identified with the president.
His performance as a president was decidedly mixed: there are people who blamed him for the failure of his attempt to invade Cuba in the Bay of Pigs invasion. The USSR leader, Khrushchev thought he was a weakling and put up the Berlin wall. During the Cuban missile crisis, rash Soviet leaders lead the US and the USSR closer to World War III than any point before or since. But he managed to lead the US out of the crisis, and further moved to improve the relationship with the USSR.
Kennedy was known to have fought for the rights of black people, although it was Johnson who signed the Civil Rights act after the death of JFK.
It’s impossible to tell what he would have done with the Vietnam War. He was president when it could have gone any way. He promised to support the South Vietnam leader, but did not follow through enough on his promise, and the South Vietnam leader was murdered. As it turned out, Johnson, who took over for him, was instrumental in escalating the conflict into a full blown war. But some people suggest that if Kennedy had lived, he might have found some better way to deal with Vietnam.
His death is one of the great unsolved mysteries in the USA. The official explanation, that he was killed by a lone gunman operating alone, is not believed by most people. There were reports that people heard gunshots from a few different places. They caught the only gunman caught, Lee Harvey Ostwald, but soon after that, and live on national television a policeman, purportedly angry about JFK being killed, shot Lee Harvey Ostwald. They never got the chance to question Ostwald about his motives, or who, if anybody, set him up.
JFK had enemies. His brother, Robert Kennedy was the Attorney General, and a great enemy of the mafia. Even more so, since they actually enlisted the help of the mafia
There also exists great controversy about Kennedy about his attitude towards the Cold War, because there is no consensus about whether he is a hawk or a dove. There are some who said that Lee Harvey Ostwald was pro-Castro, and he was shooting JFK to pay back for the Bay of Pigs. There are others who said that JFK was making a tentative rapproachment with other countries in South America, and was planning to seek warmer ties with Castro. The CIA didn’t like that, and they got involved in a conspiracy to have JFK murdered.
The fact that there is no one convincing explanation for JFK’s murder left a sour taste in the mouths of a generation of Americans. They said that the 1960s began with a lot of hope, but for them the death of a leader they loved was the beginning of the disappointment of these hopes.
It was generally felt that Kennedy was still in the phase where he was learning how to become a good president. He did not have very clear objectives, but he had the political skill to overcome a lot of his opponents. But not a sniper’s bullet.
Robert F Kennedy
He was a very strange person. He had two sides, one of them was the angel, who was very idealistic about destroying the mafia. He was one of the toughest prosecutors around. But he was also very vengeful towards his enemies, and for some reason, one of his enemies was LBJ, the vice president and next president of the US.
I had just read the story of Bobby. There are plenty of people out there who believe that there was a conspiracy out there who murdered JFK, and in that book, Bobby was one of them. But he was going to keep quiet about his beliefs until he got elected president, and then he got all the power to do whatever he wanted to do.
He was close to being elected president. He more or less secured the nomination to be the Democratic Party’s candidate for president by the time he was murdered. If he ran against Nixon, he might have defeated him, instead of Nixon defeating Humphrey. A lot of things could have been different. Nixon was president because RFK died, and Johnson was president because JFK died. Both of them were responsible, more than anybody else, for the Vietnam war being what it was.
If you believe some accounts, he was reaching out to the communist countries. He wanted to make peace with Castro, and with the Soviet Union. After all, his brother had almost stumbled onto nuclear war with the Soviets. You just wonder if the world would have been very much different, and the cold war ended very differently, if he got to be president.
Ted Kennedy
Ted Kennedy, the one who died recently, was probably somebody they thought could become a president. But there was a scandal which put an end to all that: he drove somebody home late at night, while drunk, and killed her in a road accident.
Still, he managed to be a long-serving member of the Senate, and managed to make a big impact. There were even some people who proclaimed him to be the most important of the Kennedys. I don’t know about that.
Well, that’s the end of them brothers, I suppose. It’s been a great ride.
Sunday, 13 December 2009
Noughties
The noughties are over, but this is the first time I’ve come across an instance where there was so much apathy towards the end of the decade. I’m not old enough to remember the end of the 70s.
At the end of the 80s, there was a lot of excitement in the air, because the Berlin Wall had just fallen, and everybody felt that the world was never going to be the same again (they were right) but they just didn’t know how. Plenty of social theories about how the Western liberal democratic system had triumph, and how communism was on the ash heap of history, were bandied about.
At the end of the 90s, there was another mood of excitement. This time it was because it was the dawn of the internet age. (OK, it was 5 years after 1995, which was the year that most people had first heard of the internet.) The tech stock bubble was at its height – it would burst shortly after. We looked back at the end of a century, indeed the end of a millennium. Although nobody really talked very much about what the year 1000 was like.
Now? I saw an article from Time magazine, proclaiming the noughties to be one of the worst decades in recent memory. It probably is, from a western perspective. At the beginning of the decade, the US was the undisputed masters of the world. At the end, they are still the strongest country in the world, but it’s become inevitable that other countries will catch up. They’ve had 9/11, and then they blundered into Afghanistan and Iraq. Closer to home, they’ve had plenty of job losses and layoffs (these started in the 90s, but they continued on). China was either stealing everybody’s jobs or driving down the price of unskilled labour in the world. They had their Hurricane Katrina, and the trauma of seeing one of their most culturally significant cities become a third world disaster zone.
World wide, it was not a great place to be. We had the threat of terrorist attacks, although the threat is more overstated than real. I think you don’t really have to be worried about terrorist attacks unless you’re in the Middle East, the Indian sub-continent or Xinjiang. Most of the developed world is safe. (A few attacks on London, Madrid or even Moscow doesn’t change this.)
There were plenty of natural disasters. We had that Southeast Asian tsunami of 2004, which more or less wiped out Aceh. We had earthquakes in Sichuan and several in Indonesia.
We didn't have a lot of the financial crises that had taken place during the late 90s - Mexico, then Asia, then Russia, then Argentina then Brazil. But in 2008, we had one big blow-up, in the US and in Europe. That was serious.
Musically this was not a great decade. I had regarded 80s pop as a low point in music, and this is a decade which looks back favourably at 80s synth pop. There was the death of the album, courtesy of the MP3 / iPod revolution. I’m sure there’s some great stuff out there but it’s not getting out to the masses.
The fact that there were so many band reunions in the 00s just serves to show that a lot of older bands sensed that there was a vacuum to fill. A Guardian writer opined that he didn’t know what was more depressing, seeing the Pixies reform, and being a shadow of their former days (this is an exaggeration, but you probably understand that punk musicians are not at their best in their 40s and 50s), or seeing that they’re still better than all the new bands out there.
This hasn't been terrible for everybody. There are a lot of things happening in Asia - it was a pretty good time to be in Asia - rising standard of living and everything. But still...
The future? We more or less know the score. There's a combination of rising middle class, hungry for resources. Running out of food, running out of water, running out of oil. Climate change. Ecological disasters. Islands disappearing. Temperature's rising. Nuclear bombs in the hands of terrorists. Liberal democracy on the wane.
They've all talked about how they hoped that the next decade was going to be better - we'll see...
At the end of the 80s, there was a lot of excitement in the air, because the Berlin Wall had just fallen, and everybody felt that the world was never going to be the same again (they were right) but they just didn’t know how. Plenty of social theories about how the Western liberal democratic system had triumph, and how communism was on the ash heap of history, were bandied about.
At the end of the 90s, there was another mood of excitement. This time it was because it was the dawn of the internet age. (OK, it was 5 years after 1995, which was the year that most people had first heard of the internet.) The tech stock bubble was at its height – it would burst shortly after. We looked back at the end of a century, indeed the end of a millennium. Although nobody really talked very much about what the year 1000 was like.
Now? I saw an article from Time magazine, proclaiming the noughties to be one of the worst decades in recent memory. It probably is, from a western perspective. At the beginning of the decade, the US was the undisputed masters of the world. At the end, they are still the strongest country in the world, but it’s become inevitable that other countries will catch up. They’ve had 9/11, and then they blundered into Afghanistan and Iraq. Closer to home, they’ve had plenty of job losses and layoffs (these started in the 90s, but they continued on). China was either stealing everybody’s jobs or driving down the price of unskilled labour in the world. They had their Hurricane Katrina, and the trauma of seeing one of their most culturally significant cities become a third world disaster zone.
World wide, it was not a great place to be. We had the threat of terrorist attacks, although the threat is more overstated than real. I think you don’t really have to be worried about terrorist attacks unless you’re in the Middle East, the Indian sub-continent or Xinjiang. Most of the developed world is safe. (A few attacks on London, Madrid or even Moscow doesn’t change this.)
There were plenty of natural disasters. We had that Southeast Asian tsunami of 2004, which more or less wiped out Aceh. We had earthquakes in Sichuan and several in Indonesia.
We didn't have a lot of the financial crises that had taken place during the late 90s - Mexico, then Asia, then Russia, then Argentina then Brazil. But in 2008, we had one big blow-up, in the US and in Europe. That was serious.
Musically this was not a great decade. I had regarded 80s pop as a low point in music, and this is a decade which looks back favourably at 80s synth pop. There was the death of the album, courtesy of the MP3 / iPod revolution. I’m sure there’s some great stuff out there but it’s not getting out to the masses.
The fact that there were so many band reunions in the 00s just serves to show that a lot of older bands sensed that there was a vacuum to fill. A Guardian writer opined that he didn’t know what was more depressing, seeing the Pixies reform, and being a shadow of their former days (this is an exaggeration, but you probably understand that punk musicians are not at their best in their 40s and 50s), or seeing that they’re still better than all the new bands out there.
This hasn't been terrible for everybody. There are a lot of things happening in Asia - it was a pretty good time to be in Asia - rising standard of living and everything. But still...
The future? We more or less know the score. There's a combination of rising middle class, hungry for resources. Running out of food, running out of water, running out of oil. Climate change. Ecological disasters. Islands disappearing. Temperature's rising. Nuclear bombs in the hands of terrorists. Liberal democracy on the wane.
They've all talked about how they hoped that the next decade was going to be better - we'll see...
Procrastination
England is not famous for producing skilled footballers. But there was Matthew Le Tissier. He had no pace, but he was extremely skilled, strong, and scored many goals. He played for a club called Southampton who was always one of the weaker sides in the top flight of English football, yet he comfortably kept them in the Premier League year after year. Recently, their financial troubles has been one of the sad stories of English football.
In Southampton, during his time, he was regarded as God. He was the captain of the side. He scored spectacular goals. He took around 50 penalties over his career and only ever missed one. But invariably his name has the adjective “enigmatic”. You never knew whether he was going to be the man of the match, or whether he was going to fade away and be an anonymous watcher. No matter, for somebody of his caliber to be playing for one club, a minor one at that, for most of his career, was extremely rare.
In contrast, when he was a youngster, there was another young striker playing alongside him at Southampton. He was considerably less talented all round, but he had a very forceful personality, and he always gave his best no matter what. He moved to Blackburn where he won the league, and then to Newcastle, his hometown club, where he was their biggest player. He came closer than anybody before or since to winning the European championship on home soil in 1996. There were a few good years, where they qualified for the Champion’s league, even though they never actually won anything. He was Alan Shearer.
And while Alan Shearer was almost always in the England team, the same was not true of Matt Le Tissier. He only had less than 10 caps. There were coaches who tried to sign him away from Southampton, Glenn Hoddle for Chelsea and Terry Venables for Tottenham. But later on when both were England managers, neither gave Le Tissier many chances to wear the England shirt.
It probably is the case that both of them recognised that Le Tissier was a talented person, no more. He didn’t have the fire or the ambition. If he didn’t want to get to the next level, then he shouldn’t represent England either.
I was first called a procrastinator in primary school. I think back then my mother had great ambitions for me. At least, much more than she had for herself. Maybe I never got into the habit of liking what I did. But I took my time to do things, and never ever pounced into it whole heartedly. I suppose that was my nature.
The central issue of my life had already been articulated for me at a very young age, by a teacher: “it’s never about what you’re capable of. It’s about whether or not you’re ever going to use your gifts.”
I had always been an above average student when teachers had this opinion I could have been one of the best. But you never know, perhaps my talent was merely being able to appear intelligent. Some people look like owls although when you scratch under the surface they are pretty empty inside. I’m not one to trust anybody’s judgement completely.
I got things done, though. There were a few things, but they were things that weren’t competitive in nature. Creative endeavours, being the class clown, invention competitions. Stuff like that. There were wonderful things that happened during my school days, that were the result of daydreaming. I suppose I never told my parents what I really wanted to do, and after hearing them nag at me about why I never did A, in the end I could still show them B, C and D, which they never asked for. A classmate once said to me, “why are you bitching about how crappy your record is? You’ve still got a whole lot of things”. Yes, but no leadership positions, mind.
The Myers Briggs test indicator has this axis of whether you are a “perceiving” or a “judging” type. I was firmly in the perceiving area. I never liked simple explanations when the truth was more complex. I often got irritated when my boss told me to water down the story for an audience. I got annoyed when some people are always so sure of themselves, although I do notice something: first, they will be right a great number of the time, and second, when they are wrong people seem more willing to forgive them. But people like that, people who act on their first impulses, aren’t generally the creative types. The creative types are the ones who are willing to entertain crazy ideas and make them work, or are willing to wait and do nothing until the perfect idea or the perfect opportunity comes along.
I ended up taking on a job that I wasn’t 100% sure that I enjoyed. There were people who were always telling me that since Maths was my best subject, I should do something that was related to it, and this job had a lot of Maths. But somewhere I knew that it wasn’t true that Maths was my best subject: I was good at a whole lot of other things too, it was merely the first subject that I took to. It was horrifying to discover that perhaps I wasn’t going to enjoy it that much. But I didn’t do much to look elsewhere.
I “majored” in Maths at school. I think it was lazy thinking, after all it was the subject that I could do, that was very well respected. I could have done something more useful, or something that I liked more. But I got lazy or stubborn and didn’t want to change. I could have been a computer science major instead.
I couldn’t decide what I liked best either, so I just tried a bit of everything. It was very disorientating, even though I was sorda glad that I had a very varied education. Although sometimes I wondered whether I was putting in a lot of effort at trying to master a discipline that I would never see again in my life. Perhaps it could have been a bit more focused. Still it is very amusing when people point at me and say, “maths guy”.
Some people have judged me and said that I’m a wanderer, a drifter. It’s not entirely false. But it’s a little unfair when they always think that this is a weakness rather than a strength. Eventually, I learnt: you can only do one thing at a time. So at any one time, you should decide what you’re going to do, give it your best, concentrate, and do well so that even though you never have to do it again, there will be no regrets.
I could have gone around and immersed myself in American culture instead of holing myself up in books. But I just felt that books had more to teach you than popular culture, most of which was junk anyway. Unfortunately it’s popular culture, rather than books that makes it easier for you got earn friends.
There were always things that people were going to do in a lifetime: grow up, earn money, start a family, settle down. I have dithered at these things. Financial planning, learning to drive a car, getting your own house, these are things that I did late in life, later than many of my peers. There were things that stood in my way: building the perfect CD collection, downloading MP3s, watching movies, reading books. Especially reading books.
There was this once, when I thought that I would go after a girl. We had 1 or 2 dates, nothing special. I decided to stop for a while while I did other things – I can’t remember the reason I gave myself for procrastinating, but it couldn’t be important because I can’t remember it now. Maybe I wanted to spend the weekends reading books instead of wracking my brains thinking about what to do for the next date? Maybe it was the marathon? But the marathon was 5 months ago. In any case, 6 months passed, a year, and suddenly I get some rumours that she’s going out with somebody else. There’s nothing to blame people for, only myself for being so spectacularly stupid. (Edit: you can read more about this episode when I get down to publishing an entry called “teapot”)
On one hand, it shouldn’t make any difference because, both before and after I wasn’t doing anything. On the other hand, I learnt about this when I was about to go look for her again. It’s very irritating and disruptive of my plans.
There are a lot of things that were fun when I was younger, but I outgrown them. I used to take a stack of books to an all night café on Saturday night and read the whole night, or at least as much as I could. Either that or I would go watch a football match at a coffeeshop and read a book at the same time. Some of the other patrons look at me, bemused. One of them even called me to the face, “our friend with the books” But to me it makes perfect sense to watch matches and read books because you can always have something to do when all the boring stuff is going on, which is 50% of the time.
It was good while it lasted. I’ve blogged about this before, you felt like because you were putting in that much effort, that you were doing something with your life. There are nice places in Singapore that are not overcrowded, even on weekends. You can pick up I-S magazines and there will be cafes in out of the way areas located where lots of wealthy angmohs stay. Some are expensive, some less so, but you will not get hordes of screaming kids and maids like in a suburban mall.
But I think gradually I was doing so much of it that it felt like overkill. In retrospect maybe I wasn’t really enjoying it but rather the placid stresslessness of doing nothing.
In the last few weeks, I had decided to stop my lazy, horizontal lifestyle. There were a few factors. Maybe it was a change of job scope which made me busier. Maybe it was my getting older and realising that time was running out. Maybe my first foray into dating in a long long time forced me to reconsider how I have to live my life so that my dreams for myself don’t remain just that – as dreams. Maybe I just needed to live out a whole era of procrastination in order to learn that it wasn’t really what I should be doing.
In Southampton, during his time, he was regarded as God. He was the captain of the side. He scored spectacular goals. He took around 50 penalties over his career and only ever missed one. But invariably his name has the adjective “enigmatic”. You never knew whether he was going to be the man of the match, or whether he was going to fade away and be an anonymous watcher. No matter, for somebody of his caliber to be playing for one club, a minor one at that, for most of his career, was extremely rare.
In contrast, when he was a youngster, there was another young striker playing alongside him at Southampton. He was considerably less talented all round, but he had a very forceful personality, and he always gave his best no matter what. He moved to Blackburn where he won the league, and then to Newcastle, his hometown club, where he was their biggest player. He came closer than anybody before or since to winning the European championship on home soil in 1996. There were a few good years, where they qualified for the Champion’s league, even though they never actually won anything. He was Alan Shearer.
And while Alan Shearer was almost always in the England team, the same was not true of Matt Le Tissier. He only had less than 10 caps. There were coaches who tried to sign him away from Southampton, Glenn Hoddle for Chelsea and Terry Venables for Tottenham. But later on when both were England managers, neither gave Le Tissier many chances to wear the England shirt.
It probably is the case that both of them recognised that Le Tissier was a talented person, no more. He didn’t have the fire or the ambition. If he didn’t want to get to the next level, then he shouldn’t represent England either.
I was first called a procrastinator in primary school. I think back then my mother had great ambitions for me. At least, much more than she had for herself. Maybe I never got into the habit of liking what I did. But I took my time to do things, and never ever pounced into it whole heartedly. I suppose that was my nature.
The central issue of my life had already been articulated for me at a very young age, by a teacher: “it’s never about what you’re capable of. It’s about whether or not you’re ever going to use your gifts.”
I had always been an above average student when teachers had this opinion I could have been one of the best. But you never know, perhaps my talent was merely being able to appear intelligent. Some people look like owls although when you scratch under the surface they are pretty empty inside. I’m not one to trust anybody’s judgement completely.
I got things done, though. There were a few things, but they were things that weren’t competitive in nature. Creative endeavours, being the class clown, invention competitions. Stuff like that. There were wonderful things that happened during my school days, that were the result of daydreaming. I suppose I never told my parents what I really wanted to do, and after hearing them nag at me about why I never did A, in the end I could still show them B, C and D, which they never asked for. A classmate once said to me, “why are you bitching about how crappy your record is? You’ve still got a whole lot of things”. Yes, but no leadership positions, mind.
The Myers Briggs test indicator has this axis of whether you are a “perceiving” or a “judging” type. I was firmly in the perceiving area. I never liked simple explanations when the truth was more complex. I often got irritated when my boss told me to water down the story for an audience. I got annoyed when some people are always so sure of themselves, although I do notice something: first, they will be right a great number of the time, and second, when they are wrong people seem more willing to forgive them. But people like that, people who act on their first impulses, aren’t generally the creative types. The creative types are the ones who are willing to entertain crazy ideas and make them work, or are willing to wait and do nothing until the perfect idea or the perfect opportunity comes along.
I ended up taking on a job that I wasn’t 100% sure that I enjoyed. There were people who were always telling me that since Maths was my best subject, I should do something that was related to it, and this job had a lot of Maths. But somewhere I knew that it wasn’t true that Maths was my best subject: I was good at a whole lot of other things too, it was merely the first subject that I took to. It was horrifying to discover that perhaps I wasn’t going to enjoy it that much. But I didn’t do much to look elsewhere.
I “majored” in Maths at school. I think it was lazy thinking, after all it was the subject that I could do, that was very well respected. I could have done something more useful, or something that I liked more. But I got lazy or stubborn and didn’t want to change. I could have been a computer science major instead.
I couldn’t decide what I liked best either, so I just tried a bit of everything. It was very disorientating, even though I was sorda glad that I had a very varied education. Although sometimes I wondered whether I was putting in a lot of effort at trying to master a discipline that I would never see again in my life. Perhaps it could have been a bit more focused. Still it is very amusing when people point at me and say, “maths guy”.
Some people have judged me and said that I’m a wanderer, a drifter. It’s not entirely false. But it’s a little unfair when they always think that this is a weakness rather than a strength. Eventually, I learnt: you can only do one thing at a time. So at any one time, you should decide what you’re going to do, give it your best, concentrate, and do well so that even though you never have to do it again, there will be no regrets.
I could have gone around and immersed myself in American culture instead of holing myself up in books. But I just felt that books had more to teach you than popular culture, most of which was junk anyway. Unfortunately it’s popular culture, rather than books that makes it easier for you got earn friends.
There were always things that people were going to do in a lifetime: grow up, earn money, start a family, settle down. I have dithered at these things. Financial planning, learning to drive a car, getting your own house, these are things that I did late in life, later than many of my peers. There were things that stood in my way: building the perfect CD collection, downloading MP3s, watching movies, reading books. Especially reading books.
There was this once, when I thought that I would go after a girl. We had 1 or 2 dates, nothing special. I decided to stop for a while while I did other things – I can’t remember the reason I gave myself for procrastinating, but it couldn’t be important because I can’t remember it now. Maybe I wanted to spend the weekends reading books instead of wracking my brains thinking about what to do for the next date? Maybe it was the marathon? But the marathon was 5 months ago. In any case, 6 months passed, a year, and suddenly I get some rumours that she’s going out with somebody else. There’s nothing to blame people for, only myself for being so spectacularly stupid. (Edit: you can read more about this episode when I get down to publishing an entry called “teapot”)
On one hand, it shouldn’t make any difference because, both before and after I wasn’t doing anything. On the other hand, I learnt about this when I was about to go look for her again. It’s very irritating and disruptive of my plans.
There are a lot of things that were fun when I was younger, but I outgrown them. I used to take a stack of books to an all night café on Saturday night and read the whole night, or at least as much as I could. Either that or I would go watch a football match at a coffeeshop and read a book at the same time. Some of the other patrons look at me, bemused. One of them even called me to the face, “our friend with the books” But to me it makes perfect sense to watch matches and read books because you can always have something to do when all the boring stuff is going on, which is 50% of the time.
It was good while it lasted. I’ve blogged about this before, you felt like because you were putting in that much effort, that you were doing something with your life. There are nice places in Singapore that are not overcrowded, even on weekends. You can pick up I-S magazines and there will be cafes in out of the way areas located where lots of wealthy angmohs stay. Some are expensive, some less so, but you will not get hordes of screaming kids and maids like in a suburban mall.
But I think gradually I was doing so much of it that it felt like overkill. In retrospect maybe I wasn’t really enjoying it but rather the placid stresslessness of doing nothing.
In the last few weeks, I had decided to stop my lazy, horizontal lifestyle. There were a few factors. Maybe it was a change of job scope which made me busier. Maybe it was my getting older and realising that time was running out. Maybe my first foray into dating in a long long time forced me to reconsider how I have to live my life so that my dreams for myself don’t remain just that – as dreams. Maybe I just needed to live out a whole era of procrastination in order to learn that it wasn’t really what I should be doing.
Wednesday, 9 December 2009
Drums
My sister, who once heard me tap my fingers idly, said that I should learn how to play the drums. I think that I'm finally going to take her up on that suggestion.
10 years ago, when visiting Disneyland, I bought a pair of drumsticks in Orlando hard rock cafe, fully expecting that I would use them one day. I didn't do it.
The student dorm that I was in for my first year in the U was next to a block whose theme was music. They had a jamming studio on the first floor. I had gone down there for a few jamming sessions and that was it. I played the keyboard. The ppl I was with were keen to continue but I decided that I didn't travel halfway around the world just to play some jams. (But if you asked me now what I travelled halfway around the world for, I'd have been hard-pressed to answer you. There's nothing tangible that I could point to.)
When we were young, we had it drummed into our heads that playing music was not a reputable past-time, even though it had already been a tradition in the West, that anyone could start a band, and it was a rite of passage, or at least an attempt at being entrepreneural.
I remember that in the early 90s, there were only a handful of alternative rock bands in Singapore, many of them were heavy metal / hardcore, and I wasn't interested in that at all. I hadn't noticed it very much over the last few years, but the band scene in Singapore had grown a lot. If nothing else, it made it very easy to go looking for band mates.
Any way, I don't think I can handle a guitar, so I would have to look for other people who are good at playing. I can do song writing. It's funny that many song writers out there don't play guitars. Paul McCartney was perfectly happy playing bass (although he played guitar in early versions of the Beatles). Sting played bass. Brian Wilson played bass. Antonio Carlos Jobim didn't play anything. Ian Brown played the tambourine. Stevie Wonder played everything other than the guitar. I'm happy to let other people handle the complicated instruments.
Anyway there are a lot of jamming studios in Singapore. Unfortunately the drums are not something that I would really want in my house right now, firstly because it takes up space, and secondly because it annoys the neighbours (even though I don't have neighbours that I'm afraid of pissing off.) So last weekend I went to a studio, and payed $13 for the privilege of bashing the drums for 1 hour. That is expensive. I wish I could find a cheaper place to practice. But it sure beats shelling up $7 for an expensive cup of coffee, and you have the privilege of doing nothing.
It went OK. At first, my pedalling was so weak, I couldn't even get the bass drum to give me a simple beat. Later, as it went on, I tried to figure out how to do some fancy stuff with the drums. Some of it came off well, others didn't. I was eavesdropping on the neighbours, and the drums sounded funkier than mine. Then there was the hi-hat on the left foot. What does a high hat do? I couldn't co-ordinate 2 hands and 1 leg at the same time, so how on earth was I going to play drums with all 4 limbs at the same time?
Anyway, drummers seem to be a rare commodity in Singapore, judging by the number of advertisements which ask for drummers. I think I really should learn the bass, because drummers are almost never the leaders in rock bands. They could lead jazz combos (think Art Blakey, Buddy Rich) but even then that's rare. OK, there's Lars Urlich from Metallica but that's about it. It's much easier to balance the bass with telling the rest of the band that they're going to play your song, how to play this riff, that riff, etc, how it all fits in together.
Well, that hour passed quite quickly, even though I was trying to be playing the whole time. Sometimes, though, you just have to give your legs a break. It's OK, at least I have 1 more hobby with which to pass my time, so that I can throw out some old hobbies I no longer need. (*cough* basketball *cough*).
So I went on one of Singapore's leading music forum, and advertised myself as a "keyboardist" and a songwriter. I got 3 or 4 replies. We'll see. If I have to play with ppl 10 years younger then so be it.
10 years ago, when visiting Disneyland, I bought a pair of drumsticks in Orlando hard rock cafe, fully expecting that I would use them one day. I didn't do it.
The student dorm that I was in for my first year in the U was next to a block whose theme was music. They had a jamming studio on the first floor. I had gone down there for a few jamming sessions and that was it. I played the keyboard. The ppl I was with were keen to continue but I decided that I didn't travel halfway around the world just to play some jams. (But if you asked me now what I travelled halfway around the world for, I'd have been hard-pressed to answer you. There's nothing tangible that I could point to.)
When we were young, we had it drummed into our heads that playing music was not a reputable past-time, even though it had already been a tradition in the West, that anyone could start a band, and it was a rite of passage, or at least an attempt at being entrepreneural.
I remember that in the early 90s, there were only a handful of alternative rock bands in Singapore, many of them were heavy metal / hardcore, and I wasn't interested in that at all. I hadn't noticed it very much over the last few years, but the band scene in Singapore had grown a lot. If nothing else, it made it very easy to go looking for band mates.
Any way, I don't think I can handle a guitar, so I would have to look for other people who are good at playing. I can do song writing. It's funny that many song writers out there don't play guitars. Paul McCartney was perfectly happy playing bass (although he played guitar in early versions of the Beatles). Sting played bass. Brian Wilson played bass. Antonio Carlos Jobim didn't play anything. Ian Brown played the tambourine. Stevie Wonder played everything other than the guitar. I'm happy to let other people handle the complicated instruments.
Anyway there are a lot of jamming studios in Singapore. Unfortunately the drums are not something that I would really want in my house right now, firstly because it takes up space, and secondly because it annoys the neighbours (even though I don't have neighbours that I'm afraid of pissing off.) So last weekend I went to a studio, and payed $13 for the privilege of bashing the drums for 1 hour. That is expensive. I wish I could find a cheaper place to practice. But it sure beats shelling up $7 for an expensive cup of coffee, and you have the privilege of doing nothing.
It went OK. At first, my pedalling was so weak, I couldn't even get the bass drum to give me a simple beat. Later, as it went on, I tried to figure out how to do some fancy stuff with the drums. Some of it came off well, others didn't. I was eavesdropping on the neighbours, and the drums sounded funkier than mine. Then there was the hi-hat on the left foot. What does a high hat do? I couldn't co-ordinate 2 hands and 1 leg at the same time, so how on earth was I going to play drums with all 4 limbs at the same time?
Anyway, drummers seem to be a rare commodity in Singapore, judging by the number of advertisements which ask for drummers. I think I really should learn the bass, because drummers are almost never the leaders in rock bands. They could lead jazz combos (think Art Blakey, Buddy Rich) but even then that's rare. OK, there's Lars Urlich from Metallica but that's about it. It's much easier to balance the bass with telling the rest of the band that they're going to play your song, how to play this riff, that riff, etc, how it all fits in together.
Well, that hour passed quite quickly, even though I was trying to be playing the whole time. Sometimes, though, you just have to give your legs a break. It's OK, at least I have 1 more hobby with which to pass my time, so that I can throw out some old hobbies I no longer need. (*cough* basketball *cough*).
So I went on one of Singapore's leading music forum, and advertised myself as a "keyboardist" and a songwriter. I got 3 or 4 replies. We'll see. If I have to play with ppl 10 years younger then so be it.
Saturday, 5 December 2009
4 places
In spite of my promising myself that I wouldn’t go back to a book warehouse sale, I still went anyway. And in a way I’m glad that I went for that sale. First, it was the Penguin book sale, which has the best books of all the warehouse sales. (Second is MPH, and third is a tie between Times and Borders). Second, a few things I saw on the way reminded me of a few things about the life I had been living over the last few years.
(digression start)
This is a digression, but I must tell the story of how I managed to get to that warehouse sale. I had originally intended that I would pop by at the office and get 1 or 2 emails sent out. But after a morning run I found myself sleeping again and only waking up at 5 in the afternoon. In the end, I decided to go get myself some dinner (1 bus trip) and then off to the Toa Payoh Library (1 more bus trip). Then I thought that it would be good to swing by the jamming studio I saw at Thompson Rd and check it out. (1 bus trip).
Here’s where it gets interesting. I was undecided whether or not to go to the office and in the end I decided against it. So I went to the warehouse sale, promising myself that I would only pick up 3 books. The easiest way, it seemed, was to take a bus to the east line, probably Eunos MRT, and take the MRT there. (Damn circle line still not open)
So I grabbed the first bus to McRitchie (1 bus trip). I crossed the road and grabbed a bus to Braddell (another bus trip). From Braddell I could take 59 or 93, even though 93 was preferred because it took me straight to Eunos. Eventually 59 came first, so I took it (another bus trip). I got off the 59 after it got off PIE, and then crossed the road to take a bus to Eunos (1 bus trip) but I overshot, and I had to take another bus back to Eunos (1 bus trip). I overshot again, and had to walk 1 bus stop’s length back to the MRT. But I also found myself near the junction of Joo Chiat Rd and Changi Rd. (One day I will blog about Joo Chiat but this is a historical landmark for me)
Then I took the MRT to the Expo. After the book sale, there was still time to go to the office (it was alright for me, I could dump my books there, no different from lugging them home direct), something that took 2 uses of my ezlink card, and after that back home (another 2 uses). All in all, I used the ez link card 13 times that day.
OK, end of the digression.
At the sale, I ended up buying 10 books, a few of which were books I would have willingly bought at full price, or I would have, of my own accord, borrowed from the library to read, including “Hot, Flat and Crowded” by Thomas Friedman (well there’s a 2nd edition out now but I dun mind the first. There was “The Age of Turbulence” by Alan Greenspan that I read halfway. There was “Gang Leader For a Day”, about a gang leader who infiltrated a gang.
There were some books that I would have snapped up 1 or 2 years ago. There was a history book about the fateful decisions that shaped WWII. There was a book about the screwed up culture of some big Wall Street companies during the heydays. Another one, written by a German, about how his country was both the angel and the devil (esp around WWII). There was that book on the Iraq war by Thomas Ricks which talked about the “surge” strategy which pulled the US from the brink of defeat against Iraq. They even had that famous book by Doris Kearns Goodwin about how Lincoln managed to pull together a cabinet full of the brightest talent, even as these people were
But I could see very clearly – I have tonnes of history books right now. I don’t need to read any more history. I used to have a great thirst to know about the great events of the past, but now a lot of it seems like the same old stories over and over again. I used to look forward to endless hours idling in front of a book, but now I only see the vast expenditure of time, which I don’t really have a lot of. I used to believe that all this contributed to my development as a person, and while it once did, it’s over. The easy part is over.
Because there are 3 ways of learning things, either through people teaching them to you, or experiencing them for yourself, or through books. Of the 3, books is the easiest, and the one that you have the most control over. But you also need the other two. It reminded me of “Waterland” by Graham Swift. Why do you need to learn history? Does explaining the past change anything? Does it even ease the pain? At the best, it can guide you towards your future. At its worst, it will mislead you about your future. Hindsight is 20/20, so the apparent clarity with which history is interpreted can lull you into a complacency that everything will be perfect from now on, and that is perhaps the greatest illusion of all.
A friend mentioned that I read a lot of story books. I thought that sounded derisive, until I realised that there’s not much difference between my reading of fiction books, and reading some obscure history tome. It’s mindless indulgence.
I had a dream the other night, when I pulled a sandwich out of my ear. I didn’t know that my earholes were so large that you could fit all that stuff in. But the meaning is clear – I had been wilfully deaf. (In case you’re wondering, I did not eat that sandwich. That’s disgusting.)
This was the time of the year when they were giving out race packs at the expo. This time last year I had, after months of arduous training, run a marathon, and it was the culmination of 2 years’ worth of long distance running. After that, though, it was time to move on to my other targets in life. So 1 year after the marathon, it’s worthwhile to look back on how my other targets had been faring.
I had been reading a book by Jennifer Michael Hecht – I picked it up in Borders in San Fran, and it intrigued me – about how the meaning of happiness changed over the centuries. There was this insight about what exercise was all about – only in a society where the majority of people lead a sedentary lifestyle, will you ever come across such crazy ideas – physical exertion for its own sake, for the sake of self-fulfilment. Throughout history, physical exertion is all about labour. People worked like slaves, or they hunted. Exercise is such a crazy concept.
Well I felt real good about completing my marathon, but I couldn’t just do it year after year. When I went back to office, they were putting up barricades along the route (yah my office is near the route.)
So actually on that day I really passed by 4 of the places which are all associated with my post uni life: Expo (because that’s where I got most of my books), the marathon route, the office and Joo Chiat. I’ve blogged about 2 of them, I can’t blog about the office while I’m still there, so I guess some day I’ll blog about Joo Chiat.
(digression start)
This is a digression, but I must tell the story of how I managed to get to that warehouse sale. I had originally intended that I would pop by at the office and get 1 or 2 emails sent out. But after a morning run I found myself sleeping again and only waking up at 5 in the afternoon. In the end, I decided to go get myself some dinner (1 bus trip) and then off to the Toa Payoh Library (1 more bus trip). Then I thought that it would be good to swing by the jamming studio I saw at Thompson Rd and check it out. (1 bus trip).
Here’s where it gets interesting. I was undecided whether or not to go to the office and in the end I decided against it. So I went to the warehouse sale, promising myself that I would only pick up 3 books. The easiest way, it seemed, was to take a bus to the east line, probably Eunos MRT, and take the MRT there. (Damn circle line still not open)
So I grabbed the first bus to McRitchie (1 bus trip). I crossed the road and grabbed a bus to Braddell (another bus trip). From Braddell I could take 59 or 93, even though 93 was preferred because it took me straight to Eunos. Eventually 59 came first, so I took it (another bus trip). I got off the 59 after it got off PIE, and then crossed the road to take a bus to Eunos (1 bus trip) but I overshot, and I had to take another bus back to Eunos (1 bus trip). I overshot again, and had to walk 1 bus stop’s length back to the MRT. But I also found myself near the junction of Joo Chiat Rd and Changi Rd. (One day I will blog about Joo Chiat but this is a historical landmark for me)
Then I took the MRT to the Expo. After the book sale, there was still time to go to the office (it was alright for me, I could dump my books there, no different from lugging them home direct), something that took 2 uses of my ezlink card, and after that back home (another 2 uses). All in all, I used the ez link card 13 times that day.
OK, end of the digression.
At the sale, I ended up buying 10 books, a few of which were books I would have willingly bought at full price, or I would have, of my own accord, borrowed from the library to read, including “Hot, Flat and Crowded” by Thomas Friedman (well there’s a 2nd edition out now but I dun mind the first. There was “The Age of Turbulence” by Alan Greenspan that I read halfway. There was “Gang Leader For a Day”, about a gang leader who infiltrated a gang.
There were some books that I would have snapped up 1 or 2 years ago. There was a history book about the fateful decisions that shaped WWII. There was a book about the screwed up culture of some big Wall Street companies during the heydays. Another one, written by a German, about how his country was both the angel and the devil (esp around WWII). There was that book on the Iraq war by Thomas Ricks which talked about the “surge” strategy which pulled the US from the brink of defeat against Iraq. They even had that famous book by Doris Kearns Goodwin about how Lincoln managed to pull together a cabinet full of the brightest talent, even as these people were
But I could see very clearly – I have tonnes of history books right now. I don’t need to read any more history. I used to have a great thirst to know about the great events of the past, but now a lot of it seems like the same old stories over and over again. I used to look forward to endless hours idling in front of a book, but now I only see the vast expenditure of time, which I don’t really have a lot of. I used to believe that all this contributed to my development as a person, and while it once did, it’s over. The easy part is over.
Because there are 3 ways of learning things, either through people teaching them to you, or experiencing them for yourself, or through books. Of the 3, books is the easiest, and the one that you have the most control over. But you also need the other two. It reminded me of “Waterland” by Graham Swift. Why do you need to learn history? Does explaining the past change anything? Does it even ease the pain? At the best, it can guide you towards your future. At its worst, it will mislead you about your future. Hindsight is 20/20, so the apparent clarity with which history is interpreted can lull you into a complacency that everything will be perfect from now on, and that is perhaps the greatest illusion of all.
A friend mentioned that I read a lot of story books. I thought that sounded derisive, until I realised that there’s not much difference between my reading of fiction books, and reading some obscure history tome. It’s mindless indulgence.
I had a dream the other night, when I pulled a sandwich out of my ear. I didn’t know that my earholes were so large that you could fit all that stuff in. But the meaning is clear – I had been wilfully deaf. (In case you’re wondering, I did not eat that sandwich. That’s disgusting.)
This was the time of the year when they were giving out race packs at the expo. This time last year I had, after months of arduous training, run a marathon, and it was the culmination of 2 years’ worth of long distance running. After that, though, it was time to move on to my other targets in life. So 1 year after the marathon, it’s worthwhile to look back on how my other targets had been faring.
I had been reading a book by Jennifer Michael Hecht – I picked it up in Borders in San Fran, and it intrigued me – about how the meaning of happiness changed over the centuries. There was this insight about what exercise was all about – only in a society where the majority of people lead a sedentary lifestyle, will you ever come across such crazy ideas – physical exertion for its own sake, for the sake of self-fulfilment. Throughout history, physical exertion is all about labour. People worked like slaves, or they hunted. Exercise is such a crazy concept.
Well I felt real good about completing my marathon, but I couldn’t just do it year after year. When I went back to office, they were putting up barricades along the route (yah my office is near the route.)
So actually on that day I really passed by 4 of the places which are all associated with my post uni life: Expo (because that’s where I got most of my books), the marathon route, the office and Joo Chiat. I’ve blogged about 2 of them, I can’t blog about the office while I’m still there, so I guess some day I’ll blog about Joo Chiat.
Tuesday, 1 December 2009
Politics of Personals
I was looking through craigslist for personals. I don’t know if people respond to personals a lot, but there seems to be 2 or 3 every day.
There was this personal which I responded to it immediately. I didn’t copy and paste it and I regret that because it’s been taken down and I’ve belatedly realized that it was one of the best personals that I’ve read.
1. The title reads “for madmen only”.
Now, this conveys passion. The author is not somebody who’s too stupid to be a good lover. There’s this vague promise of something exciting. She demands an exciting person and she probably is an exciting person herself.
2. Allusions to “Steppenwolf” by Hesse.
She mentioned Hermine and Harry Haller. I googled it. It was about a jaded but sensitive middle aged man given a new lease of life after meeting a younger woman.
It reminded me of codfish. In one of our earlier conversations, she mentioned Hesse. Then Lolita was one of her favourite novels. That has always stuck me as being creepy. Why do women enjoy reading “Lolita”? Do some of them, deep inside relish the thought of themselves being 13 again and lusted over by an older pervert? She is clearly looking for an older man.
It’s not such a coincidence in hindsight, that another person would mention these two novels. But it’s creepy. In fact, if it was really codfish, I can imagine why it was taken down so soon after I sent her an email. But it doesn’t sound like codfish. But what do I know, it’s been more than 3 years since I last talked to her.
3. References to her looks.
She said that she was cute rather than beautiful. That is modesty. You don’t want to be bragging about your looks, even if you do look like Heidi Klum, but if you say that you are good looking, not that good looking, it conveys the perfect impression.
4. Stuff she likes to do.
“Buttermilk over chocolate. Books over movies. Loves sitting in cafes sketching and reading”
Appealing enough. But the very irritating thing is that she also wrote “preferably European”. That’s what you get on craigslist, a lot of SPG wannabes.
I was half expecting her to write back, until I realized that in these sort of personals, you probably only get 1 shot. Either she calls you immediately, and then she sets up something with you, or she doesn’t call. The alternative is that she writes back after a few weeks, in which case she’s blatantly telling you, “you were my second choice. The first didn’t work out”.
That was also when I realized that it was probably a really well written one, that would appeal to people. I like to think that she was being considerate to myself and whoever else wrote back within 1 day, to signal “position filled”.
I’m still learning the game of how to write personals. A book that I am reading right now, “The Political Brain” by Drew Westen, is not a book that comes across as being particularly relevant to dating and personals, but being a political candidate and trying to sell yourself to a potential mate is quite similar.
One of the main points made in the book is that voters think and vote with their hearts, not their brains. Campaigning to the people is a matter of winning their hearts first, and then their minds. They will trust their gut feelings about a party, then the candidate, before they rigorously and logically think through the specific policies that people are putting up. Political arguments should be framed in the form of a story. I had to tell a story that was compelling. I looked back at the email reply that I wrote to that personal and it sounded like a list of points, hardly something to inspire your passions.
What the original personal had was a story. You had this girl who’s a little crazy, a bit of a dreamer, looking for an older guy, just like that one in Steppenwolf. We could do AAA or BBB together. The guy would be experienced but jaded. The girl would still be full of life, and ready to inspire something wonderful in him. That was a story.
And, take note: the “I’m a slightly crazy artistic type” is something that appeals to certain demographics of guys as much as the magical combination of nice legs, nice tits and a sailor school uniform would appeal to others.
Or maybe I should relate the story that codfish sells (rather what I heard): I’m a slightly helpless damsel in distress, you can help me. I’m your student, I’ll listen to you, I’m willing to learn. I’m also extremely hot. I’m evolving into something even better and I’d like you to take that trip with me. For me, a very compelling story, and one that tempted me to take a chance, even though I knew it would be a disaster.
OK so far, but later on, the downside: She can be mean, she doesn’t have control over her life, not very useful, not very disciplined, spoilt, worst of all, unfaithful.
Anyway, that’s their story. What’s my story going to be like? I’m not an easy person to tell a story about. My English teacher once tried to tell a coherent narrative about me. I’m the typical maths geek. I shy away from people and I seek solace in my maths. It resonated. People look at this story and they recognise it immediately. It makes sense and it’s internally consistent. But it’s not true. As good as I was in maths at that point in time, it was not a hobby for me. I was just good at it. I never believed that it was that important, to the extent that 1 or 2 others in my office did. My hobby was music, not maths. I wasn’t aspiring to be a great mathematician, I was aspiring to be a playwright. This was true, regardless of how little I cared for her lit classes, and how sloppy my lit grades were.
What’s heartening, though, are the personals that you get on craigslist for men seeking women. They are crap. They are often variants on “I want somebody to fuck. Like, right now.” The translation: I am selfish, I am self centred. I don’t mention any emotional connection with you, but I have money to spend on you and I am advertising it.
When I looked at the reasons why I stayed single, for a while there I thought to myself, “I could have started this dating stuff a long time ago. It would have been possible 2 or 3 years ago.” I can’t remember why I held back. I wasn’t that shy anymore. But then my enthusiasm about anything varies a lot. I can be totally into something one day and a few hours, be totally bored.
There was a bit of premeditation on my part: Did I want my 30s to be something like, "gee, you've had your fun and it's going to be downhill from here, taking care of little brats and all that shit"? Or did I want it to be what my late 20s were supposed to be like, the days of wine and roses?
When I told myself that dating was a full package and it involved a lifestyle change, I guess I wasn’t giving myself excuses. It is true. When I’m treading water, when I’m living a eat / sleep / work / library lifestyle, even if I were to not find it boring I cannot expect other people to feel the same way. I need to get out of my comfort zone.
There were some things that I thought about doing to increase my chances, but somewhere in my head there is a self-censorship mechanism, which says, “forget about all the things you said, and put your head back up your backside where it belongs”. This is quite unfortunate.
If I remember correctly, I could have gone into music making. I could have had a more interesting life. I could have put my books away and not clung to them. I could have gone for meetings, gatherings. I could have gotten myself a new set of clothes, tried to be more good looking. I haven’t pulled out all the stops.
Actually this happens a lot: I would sometimes start calendar years thinking, “this year I’m finally going to (this this this, that that that) and a few days later, I start clinging on to the old routines again.
Well last few days I also tried to convince myself that women are beautiful, wondrous creatures, and to that length, I have been surfing massive amounts of soft porn. It’s really good that I found a way to download massive numbers of jpgs without having to click on every single picture: This is easy, so long as you know the URLs of every picture you’re going to download. Then you can just publish a blog entry with all the jpgs, and the browser will do all the hard work of downloading all the pictures for you. Save as a complete web page, and everything is done. (warning: after you download too much porn, it gets very very boring.)
There was this personal which I responded to it immediately. I didn’t copy and paste it and I regret that because it’s been taken down and I’ve belatedly realized that it was one of the best personals that I’ve read.
1. The title reads “for madmen only”.
Now, this conveys passion. The author is not somebody who’s too stupid to be a good lover. There’s this vague promise of something exciting. She demands an exciting person and she probably is an exciting person herself.
2. Allusions to “Steppenwolf” by Hesse.
She mentioned Hermine and Harry Haller. I googled it. It was about a jaded but sensitive middle aged man given a new lease of life after meeting a younger woman.
It reminded me of codfish. In one of our earlier conversations, she mentioned Hesse. Then Lolita was one of her favourite novels. That has always stuck me as being creepy. Why do women enjoy reading “Lolita”? Do some of them, deep inside relish the thought of themselves being 13 again and lusted over by an older pervert? She is clearly looking for an older man.
It’s not such a coincidence in hindsight, that another person would mention these two novels. But it’s creepy. In fact, if it was really codfish, I can imagine why it was taken down so soon after I sent her an email. But it doesn’t sound like codfish. But what do I know, it’s been more than 3 years since I last talked to her.
3. References to her looks.
She said that she was cute rather than beautiful. That is modesty. You don’t want to be bragging about your looks, even if you do look like Heidi Klum, but if you say that you are good looking, not that good looking, it conveys the perfect impression.
4. Stuff she likes to do.
“Buttermilk over chocolate. Books over movies. Loves sitting in cafes sketching and reading”
Appealing enough. But the very irritating thing is that she also wrote “preferably European”. That’s what you get on craigslist, a lot of SPG wannabes.
I was half expecting her to write back, until I realized that in these sort of personals, you probably only get 1 shot. Either she calls you immediately, and then she sets up something with you, or she doesn’t call. The alternative is that she writes back after a few weeks, in which case she’s blatantly telling you, “you were my second choice. The first didn’t work out”.
That was also when I realized that it was probably a really well written one, that would appeal to people. I like to think that she was being considerate to myself and whoever else wrote back within 1 day, to signal “position filled”.
I’m still learning the game of how to write personals. A book that I am reading right now, “The Political Brain” by Drew Westen, is not a book that comes across as being particularly relevant to dating and personals, but being a political candidate and trying to sell yourself to a potential mate is quite similar.
One of the main points made in the book is that voters think and vote with their hearts, not their brains. Campaigning to the people is a matter of winning their hearts first, and then their minds. They will trust their gut feelings about a party, then the candidate, before they rigorously and logically think through the specific policies that people are putting up. Political arguments should be framed in the form of a story. I had to tell a story that was compelling. I looked back at the email reply that I wrote to that personal and it sounded like a list of points, hardly something to inspire your passions.
What the original personal had was a story. You had this girl who’s a little crazy, a bit of a dreamer, looking for an older guy, just like that one in Steppenwolf. We could do AAA or BBB together. The guy would be experienced but jaded. The girl would still be full of life, and ready to inspire something wonderful in him. That was a story.
And, take note: the “I’m a slightly crazy artistic type” is something that appeals to certain demographics of guys as much as the magical combination of nice legs, nice tits and a sailor school uniform would appeal to others.
Or maybe I should relate the story that codfish sells (rather what I heard): I’m a slightly helpless damsel in distress, you can help me. I’m your student, I’ll listen to you, I’m willing to learn. I’m also extremely hot. I’m evolving into something even better and I’d like you to take that trip with me. For me, a very compelling story, and one that tempted me to take a chance, even though I knew it would be a disaster.
OK so far, but later on, the downside: She can be mean, she doesn’t have control over her life, not very useful, not very disciplined, spoilt, worst of all, unfaithful.
Anyway, that’s their story. What’s my story going to be like? I’m not an easy person to tell a story about. My English teacher once tried to tell a coherent narrative about me. I’m the typical maths geek. I shy away from people and I seek solace in my maths. It resonated. People look at this story and they recognise it immediately. It makes sense and it’s internally consistent. But it’s not true. As good as I was in maths at that point in time, it was not a hobby for me. I was just good at it. I never believed that it was that important, to the extent that 1 or 2 others in my office did. My hobby was music, not maths. I wasn’t aspiring to be a great mathematician, I was aspiring to be a playwright. This was true, regardless of how little I cared for her lit classes, and how sloppy my lit grades were.
What’s heartening, though, are the personals that you get on craigslist for men seeking women. They are crap. They are often variants on “I want somebody to fuck. Like, right now.” The translation: I am selfish, I am self centred. I don’t mention any emotional connection with you, but I have money to spend on you and I am advertising it.
When I looked at the reasons why I stayed single, for a while there I thought to myself, “I could have started this dating stuff a long time ago. It would have been possible 2 or 3 years ago.” I can’t remember why I held back. I wasn’t that shy anymore. But then my enthusiasm about anything varies a lot. I can be totally into something one day and a few hours, be totally bored.
There was a bit of premeditation on my part: Did I want my 30s to be something like, "gee, you've had your fun and it's going to be downhill from here, taking care of little brats and all that shit"? Or did I want it to be what my late 20s were supposed to be like, the days of wine and roses?
When I told myself that dating was a full package and it involved a lifestyle change, I guess I wasn’t giving myself excuses. It is true. When I’m treading water, when I’m living a eat / sleep / work / library lifestyle, even if I were to not find it boring I cannot expect other people to feel the same way. I need to get out of my comfort zone.
There were some things that I thought about doing to increase my chances, but somewhere in my head there is a self-censorship mechanism, which says, “forget about all the things you said, and put your head back up your backside where it belongs”. This is quite unfortunate.
If I remember correctly, I could have gone into music making. I could have had a more interesting life. I could have put my books away and not clung to them. I could have gone for meetings, gatherings. I could have gotten myself a new set of clothes, tried to be more good looking. I haven’t pulled out all the stops.
Actually this happens a lot: I would sometimes start calendar years thinking, “this year I’m finally going to (this this this, that that that) and a few days later, I start clinging on to the old routines again.
Well last few days I also tried to convince myself that women are beautiful, wondrous creatures, and to that length, I have been surfing massive amounts of soft porn. It’s really good that I found a way to download massive numbers of jpgs without having to click on every single picture: This is easy, so long as you know the URLs of every picture you’re going to download. Then you can just publish a blog entry with all the jpgs, and the browser will do all the hard work of downloading all the pictures for you. Save as a complete web page, and everything is done. (warning: after you download too much porn, it gets very very boring.)
Saturday, 28 November 2009
Relationships
http://tofreedomwithlove.blogspot.com
Well well well look at what we find when we’re snooping around on facebook. A former colleague putting up their blog for public consumption – only going to spell the URL because I dowan to link my blog to his blog. Last time Nat unwisely chose to link to my blog and he got outed. (OK maybe not unwisely because it doesn’t matter to him but still…)
On a (*cough cough* unrelated) note, I’m going to talk about what little I know about dealing with women.
What I want in a girl:
1. Intelligence.
2. Not lazy
3. Artistic
Notice that I didn’t mention physical attractiveness. It is not necessary. Any girl who is good enough in these 3 points, and is not physically deformed would be good enough. Remember what people say about “there aren’t any ugly women, only lazy women?” That’s what I mean.
4. Gets along well with girls.
Now this is important. There are a some women out there, especially the chiobus, who always claim they get along better with the guys. This is a red flag. Once somebody admits that, well you should count them out as your girlfriend. These women are trouble. Reason number 1: the main reason why they say they get along better with men than women is because men will give them a wider berth. Men think that they’re cute, and let them get away with a lot of bullshit. Women tend to hold other women to reasonable standards. Reason number 2: these women tend to have a lot of guy friends and it’s too easy for them to replace you. There is a natural mechanism which prevents your woman from having her way with other guys. Women tend to see such women as immoral and at the very least, there will be that “tut tut” of disapproval. Guys will also have that “tut tut” but it will be conflated with the natural thought “maybe I could get a piece of that ass for myself”.
The barometer for reasonable behaviour in a woman is other women.
5. Kindness.
I look at the women I’ve had crushes on (not many I can tell you, I can count them on 2 hands, maybe even 1) and for some reason they don’t really have much in common with each other.
OK, the basics for a relationship.
1. Is there a one and only girl who is the right one for you?
No. There are thousands, even millions of women out there with the right stuff. But you will only need one, and she will only be a right one for you after you’ve gotten to know each other well enough. This is one of the most common questions teenagers ask about relationships and the sooner this is answered, the better.
2. Why can’t women understand me, and see past the surface and get to the real me?
There are usually 2 reasons why women aren’t going to like the real you. First is that you are not expressing yourself well. It is possible to fix this: it is neither easy or hard. Second is that there is something wrong with the real you. Fixing this is hard. But it is worth it.
Another thing that could go wrong is that you may be looking for the wrong kind of women. Don’t go for women who are “out of your league”. A lot of the time, they aren’t worth it. Sensible people can get through life without being drop dead gorgeous. And conversely, if you are drop dead gorgeous, people will want to be with you for all the wrong reasons. If you’re not strong enough to deal with it then too bad for you. Being drop dead gorgeous is like a mild version of being famous. Everybody wants a piece of you.
3. What do women look for in a man?
I don’t know. I can’t answer that. But my guess is: strength, beauty and compatibility.
Physical strength is attractive for obvious reasons. Mental strength, more so. Women want a guy who takes care of her. There is power, which manifests itself as a more active form of strength. But there is also the inner strength, the tensile strengh, how to become calm when a storm is raging all around you, how you handle matters properly. How to not read some remarks wrongly and get upset when
Beauty - that would be aesthetics. The things that you do that appeal to her aesthetically. She might want you for a handsome face, or a sexy body. Or you're just very good at hitting her right spot. Or all sorts of irrational things that she might like in you, like the way that you walk, or your dress sense.
Compatibility is actually the beauty of the couple rather than the beauty of your individual self. You might be on the same wavelength, and she might just be a female version of you. Or you might be total opposites, and you just make up for what's lacking in each other. Your partnership may be a Vieira and Petit, or a Cole and Yorke.
But all that is theory. Practice is another thing.
Well well well look at what we find when we’re snooping around on facebook. A former colleague putting up their blog for public consumption – only going to spell the URL because I dowan to link my blog to his blog. Last time Nat unwisely chose to link to my blog and he got outed. (OK maybe not unwisely because it doesn’t matter to him but still…)
On a (*cough cough* unrelated) note, I’m going to talk about what little I know about dealing with women.
What I want in a girl:
1. Intelligence.
2. Not lazy
3. Artistic
Notice that I didn’t mention physical attractiveness. It is not necessary. Any girl who is good enough in these 3 points, and is not physically deformed would be good enough. Remember what people say about “there aren’t any ugly women, only lazy women?” That’s what I mean.
4. Gets along well with girls.
Now this is important. There are a some women out there, especially the chiobus, who always claim they get along better with the guys. This is a red flag. Once somebody admits that, well you should count them out as your girlfriend. These women are trouble. Reason number 1: the main reason why they say they get along better with men than women is because men will give them a wider berth. Men think that they’re cute, and let them get away with a lot of bullshit. Women tend to hold other women to reasonable standards. Reason number 2: these women tend to have a lot of guy friends and it’s too easy for them to replace you. There is a natural mechanism which prevents your woman from having her way with other guys. Women tend to see such women as immoral and at the very least, there will be that “tut tut” of disapproval. Guys will also have that “tut tut” but it will be conflated with the natural thought “maybe I could get a piece of that ass for myself”.
The barometer for reasonable behaviour in a woman is other women.
5. Kindness.
I look at the women I’ve had crushes on (not many I can tell you, I can count them on 2 hands, maybe even 1) and for some reason they don’t really have much in common with each other.
OK, the basics for a relationship.
1. Is there a one and only girl who is the right one for you?
No. There are thousands, even millions of women out there with the right stuff. But you will only need one, and she will only be a right one for you after you’ve gotten to know each other well enough. This is one of the most common questions teenagers ask about relationships and the sooner this is answered, the better.
2. Why can’t women understand me, and see past the surface and get to the real me?
There are usually 2 reasons why women aren’t going to like the real you. First is that you are not expressing yourself well. It is possible to fix this: it is neither easy or hard. Second is that there is something wrong with the real you. Fixing this is hard. But it is worth it.
Another thing that could go wrong is that you may be looking for the wrong kind of women. Don’t go for women who are “out of your league”. A lot of the time, they aren’t worth it. Sensible people can get through life without being drop dead gorgeous. And conversely, if you are drop dead gorgeous, people will want to be with you for all the wrong reasons. If you’re not strong enough to deal with it then too bad for you. Being drop dead gorgeous is like a mild version of being famous. Everybody wants a piece of you.
3. What do women look for in a man?
I don’t know. I can’t answer that. But my guess is: strength, beauty and compatibility.
Physical strength is attractive for obvious reasons. Mental strength, more so. Women want a guy who takes care of her. There is power, which manifests itself as a more active form of strength. But there is also the inner strength, the tensile strengh, how to become calm when a storm is raging all around you, how you handle matters properly. How to not read some remarks wrongly and get upset when
Beauty - that would be aesthetics. The things that you do that appeal to her aesthetically. She might want you for a handsome face, or a sexy body. Or you're just very good at hitting her right spot. Or all sorts of irrational things that she might like in you, like the way that you walk, or your dress sense.
Compatibility is actually the beauty of the couple rather than the beauty of your individual self. You might be on the same wavelength, and she might just be a female version of you. Or you might be total opposites, and you just make up for what's lacking in each other. Your partnership may be a Vieira and Petit, or a Cole and Yorke.
But all that is theory. Practice is another thing.
Monday, 23 November 2009
"Perfect Day"
It was near the end of my take-home exam. As usual, I only started work on it the 3rd day. But the proofs were more or less sketched out. Yet I, the inveterate procrastinator waited until I had to stay up all night on the 6th night, before I started writing everything down.
On the 6th night, I got home to find codfish online. We had a cyber relationship for a few months, but it was breaking down. For a while, she thought nothing of feeding my insecurities until one day, on Valentine’s day, I tore into her with every insult that I could think of. We made up after that, but things were never really the same.
Things came to a head that night. I can’t remember the exact details, but that night was the night that I knew, in no uncertain terms, that it was over. It was the first time I was heartbroken, and as some of you might know, the first time is the worst.
There was still the take-home exam to do. I was writing it up while curled up in my favourite bathtub. Soon it was dawn. I only slept for 2 hours, and the first class, where I had to hand up my take-home exam, I passed by in a zombie state.
For the second class, I had to make a presentation that covered the whole period. It started OK, then when I was halfway through the proof, I made a mistake, and the professor leapt upon it immediately. I got annoyed with him and answered back. My mind was blank, and he challenged me with a vindictiveness that I found quite unnerving in that mental state – heartbroken and sleep deprived. In the end, I discovered my own mistake, and recovered to finish the rest of my presentation. Some in the class were probably repulsed by the angry, bitter expression etched on my face. For most of them, however, it was just one more higher mathematics class, when you have long since lost the thread of the original argument. They stared ahead in blank boredom.
After the lesson was over, an acquaintance, to whom I hardly spoke to, but who had been my classmate for various courses, came to me, and said, “He’s a PhD. He’s qualified to take your argument apart like that.” I smiled weakly at him. If only he knew the rest of the story!
If people were to ask me, “what is the worst day of your uni days?” I would definitely tell them about that day. But you have to see it in a larger context. The breakup with codfish was inevitable. I even knew it was going to happen from day 1. We stayed friends for a few years after that. For the 2 maths courses, I got an A and an A-. In the larger picture, nothing I did on that day was truly damaging. Except maybe it was very bad for morale.
So why am I telling you this? Because I just went through a minor version of what happened on that day. There were some things I didn't know until the night, and that was when I figured out why ppl were suddenly so nice to me.
On the 6th night, I got home to find codfish online. We had a cyber relationship for a few months, but it was breaking down. For a while, she thought nothing of feeding my insecurities until one day, on Valentine’s day, I tore into her with every insult that I could think of. We made up after that, but things were never really the same.
Things came to a head that night. I can’t remember the exact details, but that night was the night that I knew, in no uncertain terms, that it was over. It was the first time I was heartbroken, and as some of you might know, the first time is the worst.
There was still the take-home exam to do. I was writing it up while curled up in my favourite bathtub. Soon it was dawn. I only slept for 2 hours, and the first class, where I had to hand up my take-home exam, I passed by in a zombie state.
For the second class, I had to make a presentation that covered the whole period. It started OK, then when I was halfway through the proof, I made a mistake, and the professor leapt upon it immediately. I got annoyed with him and answered back. My mind was blank, and he challenged me with a vindictiveness that I found quite unnerving in that mental state – heartbroken and sleep deprived. In the end, I discovered my own mistake, and recovered to finish the rest of my presentation. Some in the class were probably repulsed by the angry, bitter expression etched on my face. For most of them, however, it was just one more higher mathematics class, when you have long since lost the thread of the original argument. They stared ahead in blank boredom.
After the lesson was over, an acquaintance, to whom I hardly spoke to, but who had been my classmate for various courses, came to me, and said, “He’s a PhD. He’s qualified to take your argument apart like that.” I smiled weakly at him. If only he knew the rest of the story!
If people were to ask me, “what is the worst day of your uni days?” I would definitely tell them about that day. But you have to see it in a larger context. The breakup with codfish was inevitable. I even knew it was going to happen from day 1. We stayed friends for a few years after that. For the 2 maths courses, I got an A and an A-. In the larger picture, nothing I did on that day was truly damaging. Except maybe it was very bad for morale.
So why am I telling you this? Because I just went through a minor version of what happened on that day. There were some things I didn't know until the night, and that was when I figured out why ppl were suddenly so nice to me.
Sunday, 22 November 2009
When Harry Met Sally
If nothing else, this is a public service announcement: “When Harry Met Sally” is available on youtube.
I watched “When Harry Met Sally” for the third time, tonight. The first and second times were before 1992, and definitely way before I was experienced at this romantic thing yet. (In fact the 3rd time I’m not much more experienced than the first 2 times.)
It is the “Seinfeld” of romantic comedies. It’s less the story of Harry and Sally than it is a repository of wisdom on the mating rituals of human beings. Billy Crystal is the hardened, cynical comic and Meg Ryan is the cutesy little girl.
When I watch the movie, I start to realize that it has some kind of architecture to it that I didn’t appreciate when watching it while younger. Both had just endured sad ends to their previous relationships, and were looking to get hitched. They saw the ugly sides of each other, as friends. There were other misadventures, such as the times when they introduced their best friends to each other and set them up on a double date. Instead of hitting it off with each other’s best friends, the 2 best friends got hitched to each other. That was funny. Eventually though, a sympathy fuck leads to a crisis and a resolution. They get hitched up and their friendship becomes a romantic relationship.
Some of the conversations have been classics. I didn’t know that the term “high maintenance” was popularized by this movie. The concept of the “transitional” relation. Most importantly, given the centrality of the platonic relationship between Harry and Sally, the big question – can a man find a woman attractive and still be platonic friends with her?
Very talky romantic movies have reminded me of Rohmer, who is a favourite of mine, as I have watched more than 10 of his movies. This is different from Rohmer, because in Rohmer films everybody is an unreliable narrator. The people in this movie are extremely canny and intelligent, and always speak the truth. The reason why this film is a classic is because there is so much wisdom in these conversations.
A lot of the earlier reviewers missed out on this aspect, rightly criticizing the relationship between Harry and Sally for being artificial and not convincing. Harry and Sally are at their most compelling when they are friends, telling each other stories about their own misadventures at love. There is almost a lifetime’s worth of good lines about romantic relationships. This is not a great movie about a romantic relationship. It is a great movie about people talking about the interesting things that happen during courtship.
In fact, think about the other movies that have been made about romantic relationships by either Nora Ephron or Rob Reiner. “Sleepless in Seattle”, “You Got Mail”
According to wikipedia, the biggest flaw in the movie is that Sally is merely cute and does not have much of a character, other than her obsessive compulsiveness, and her giving extremely exacting instructions when ordering food. The orgasm scene came about when the scriptwriter realized that Harry had been doing most of the talking, and they needed Sally to tell at least one interesting story.
If you were to ask me, I would say that this is really a movie about friendship, not romance. This movie paints romantic relationships in such a bad light that you wonder why people bother at all. The guy just wants to have sex. He doesn’t want to hold the girl in the morning any more than they have to. A man and a woman cannot have a platonic relationship because in the end he wants to have sex. Harry’s pursuit of Sally early in the movie is somewhat distasteful because he’s so upfront about wanting to have sex with her. Sally, when you take away her cuteness, is quite one-dimensional. Women fake orgasms with men. Considering that this movie was written by a woman it’s surprising that the man is the more fleshed-out character in the movie.
What is more touching is the meaningful relationships that friends have with each other, how they talk through their problems. What was happening in the end, when Harry was going to win back Sally? First and foremost, he was trying to salvage a friendship that was placed in great jeopardy by one night of fucking.
Also, movies like these tend to illustrate one great principle: that the best talky romantic movies come from either France or New York City.
I watched “When Harry Met Sally” for the third time, tonight. The first and second times were before 1992, and definitely way before I was experienced at this romantic thing yet. (In fact the 3rd time I’m not much more experienced than the first 2 times.)
It is the “Seinfeld” of romantic comedies. It’s less the story of Harry and Sally than it is a repository of wisdom on the mating rituals of human beings. Billy Crystal is the hardened, cynical comic and Meg Ryan is the cutesy little girl.
When I watch the movie, I start to realize that it has some kind of architecture to it that I didn’t appreciate when watching it while younger. Both had just endured sad ends to their previous relationships, and were looking to get hitched. They saw the ugly sides of each other, as friends. There were other misadventures, such as the times when they introduced their best friends to each other and set them up on a double date. Instead of hitting it off with each other’s best friends, the 2 best friends got hitched to each other. That was funny. Eventually though, a sympathy fuck leads to a crisis and a resolution. They get hitched up and their friendship becomes a romantic relationship.
Some of the conversations have been classics. I didn’t know that the term “high maintenance” was popularized by this movie. The concept of the “transitional” relation. Most importantly, given the centrality of the platonic relationship between Harry and Sally, the big question – can a man find a woman attractive and still be platonic friends with her?
Very talky romantic movies have reminded me of Rohmer, who is a favourite of mine, as I have watched more than 10 of his movies. This is different from Rohmer, because in Rohmer films everybody is an unreliable narrator. The people in this movie are extremely canny and intelligent, and always speak the truth. The reason why this film is a classic is because there is so much wisdom in these conversations.
A lot of the earlier reviewers missed out on this aspect, rightly criticizing the relationship between Harry and Sally for being artificial and not convincing. Harry and Sally are at their most compelling when they are friends, telling each other stories about their own misadventures at love. There is almost a lifetime’s worth of good lines about romantic relationships. This is not a great movie about a romantic relationship. It is a great movie about people talking about the interesting things that happen during courtship.
In fact, think about the other movies that have been made about romantic relationships by either Nora Ephron or Rob Reiner. “Sleepless in Seattle”, “You Got Mail”
According to wikipedia, the biggest flaw in the movie is that Sally is merely cute and does not have much of a character, other than her obsessive compulsiveness, and her giving extremely exacting instructions when ordering food. The orgasm scene came about when the scriptwriter realized that Harry had been doing most of the talking, and they needed Sally to tell at least one interesting story.
If you were to ask me, I would say that this is really a movie about friendship, not romance. This movie paints romantic relationships in such a bad light that you wonder why people bother at all. The guy just wants to have sex. He doesn’t want to hold the girl in the morning any more than they have to. A man and a woman cannot have a platonic relationship because in the end he wants to have sex. Harry’s pursuit of Sally early in the movie is somewhat distasteful because he’s so upfront about wanting to have sex with her. Sally, when you take away her cuteness, is quite one-dimensional. Women fake orgasms with men. Considering that this movie was written by a woman it’s surprising that the man is the more fleshed-out character in the movie.
What is more touching is the meaningful relationships that friends have with each other, how they talk through their problems. What was happening in the end, when Harry was going to win back Sally? First and foremost, he was trying to salvage a friendship that was placed in great jeopardy by one night of fucking.
Also, movies like these tend to illustrate one great principle: that the best talky romantic movies come from either France or New York City.
Saturday, 14 November 2009
Why Numbernine is Single
A lot of guys were asking me why I didn’t have a girlfriend. It’s high time you guys got a straight answer.
Reason #1: the last time I tried to have a girlfriend, it didn’t turn out that badly. She was hot. A lot of people were after her. Some said she was out of my league. But I managed to get her to pay attention to me, a person she hitherto hardly knew, and who was staying 12 time zones away, and I held her attention for 3-4 months. She could have anybody she wanted, and we both knew it. What happened?
I’m not calling myself a Casanova. But the conclusion is that “I’m not that bad at this, aren’t I?” So it was complacency. That I could start again when I was older, and it wouldn’t be that much of a problem.
But those of you on this blog who have been following the saga of 7-8 and water girl will recall that some ladies are immune to my charms. That sucked, although I found out much later that she felt that we were incompatible – and she was right.
Reason #2: I’m picky. It is not that I have to have the hottest member of the species for my member. It’s something like, if I were to say, I want to find the female version of numbernine. Hello, guys, have you ever seen the female version of numbernine? Have you seen anybody else who is remotely like me? I have to settle for a close enough approximation.
Personality is also very important. If somebody has got the body, but not the personality, I would ask her for a few nude pictures, and go off somewhere to jerk off. It's just not worth putting up with a bad person just because she looks great. It'd be great if you could show off a trophy girlfriend to all your friends but I don't have a lot of friends.
Reason #3: The last one ended badly. To be sure, I knew it was going to end. I knew it wouldn't last. But I wasn't prepared for the 4 months of depression I went through, having to juggle that with a busy study schedule, running my own household. I wondered if I had given up too much to a cyber-relationship and passing up great opportunities that you only got in a good uni. It's difficult to say if I regretted it, because you cannot discount how, when it was good, it was damn good. The highs were high and the lows were low. I needed some peace.
Reason #4: my sister and my cousins. My sister has been living overseas for 10 years. She's a hardy person, almost a masochist. But I get struck by how she goes from guy to guy around once every year. I never wanted to be like that. Breaking a relationship is just like dislocating your shoulder. If you do it too often, it will keep on popping out at inopportune moments. I never want that until I'm ready. This is a minor reason.
But reason #5 is the most important: I didn't make space for another person in my life. I seldom organised my life around more than 1 person, and that would be the biggest change for me. Accomodating somebody else in my life.
I had an ex-colleague who took it upon himself to push me towards getting a chick. I appreciated that but it's like that gym instructor who tells you 5 more sets when you're ready to give up. I called him mofo, or "manager of fucking operations". He used to tell me, don't be shy. Well if you've read this far, it was never about shyness. It's always about what happens after the first few dates, and you are about to embark on an adventure together. And then what?
I had never believed that I was going to be single forever. But I always wondered if I was old enough. I thought, I'll wait until I'm 30, and it should be easier. And in some sense I'd be right. But it will never be like it was in your 20s when you are really carefree. I thought, it would be just like it was the last time, I was wrong.
And sadly, there's no such thing as bad sex when you're in your 20s. But it doesn't get better after that. And if you didn't take advantage of that, that's unfortunate.
Reason #1: the last time I tried to have a girlfriend, it didn’t turn out that badly. She was hot. A lot of people were after her. Some said she was out of my league. But I managed to get her to pay attention to me, a person she hitherto hardly knew, and who was staying 12 time zones away, and I held her attention for 3-4 months. She could have anybody she wanted, and we both knew it. What happened?
I’m not calling myself a Casanova. But the conclusion is that “I’m not that bad at this, aren’t I?” So it was complacency. That I could start again when I was older, and it wouldn’t be that much of a problem.
But those of you on this blog who have been following the saga of 7-8 and water girl will recall that some ladies are immune to my charms. That sucked, although I found out much later that she felt that we were incompatible – and she was right.
Reason #2: I’m picky. It is not that I have to have the hottest member of the species for my member. It’s something like, if I were to say, I want to find the female version of numbernine. Hello, guys, have you ever seen the female version of numbernine? Have you seen anybody else who is remotely like me? I have to settle for a close enough approximation.
Personality is also very important. If somebody has got the body, but not the personality, I would ask her for a few nude pictures, and go off somewhere to jerk off. It's just not worth putting up with a bad person just because she looks great. It'd be great if you could show off a trophy girlfriend to all your friends but I don't have a lot of friends.
Reason #3: The last one ended badly. To be sure, I knew it was going to end. I knew it wouldn't last. But I wasn't prepared for the 4 months of depression I went through, having to juggle that with a busy study schedule, running my own household. I wondered if I had given up too much to a cyber-relationship and passing up great opportunities that you only got in a good uni. It's difficult to say if I regretted it, because you cannot discount how, when it was good, it was damn good. The highs were high and the lows were low. I needed some peace.
Reason #4: my sister and my cousins. My sister has been living overseas for 10 years. She's a hardy person, almost a masochist. But I get struck by how she goes from guy to guy around once every year. I never wanted to be like that. Breaking a relationship is just like dislocating your shoulder. If you do it too often, it will keep on popping out at inopportune moments. I never want that until I'm ready. This is a minor reason.
But reason #5 is the most important: I didn't make space for another person in my life. I seldom organised my life around more than 1 person, and that would be the biggest change for me. Accomodating somebody else in my life.
I had an ex-colleague who took it upon himself to push me towards getting a chick. I appreciated that but it's like that gym instructor who tells you 5 more sets when you're ready to give up. I called him mofo, or "manager of fucking operations". He used to tell me, don't be shy. Well if you've read this far, it was never about shyness. It's always about what happens after the first few dates, and you are about to embark on an adventure together. And then what?
I had never believed that I was going to be single forever. But I always wondered if I was old enough. I thought, I'll wait until I'm 30, and it should be easier. And in some sense I'd be right. But it will never be like it was in your 20s when you are really carefree. I thought, it would be just like it was the last time, I was wrong.
And sadly, there's no such thing as bad sex when you're in your 20s. But it doesn't get better after that. And if you didn't take advantage of that, that's unfortunate.
Punk
I think a lot has been written about punk. What does it mean? Why is it a movement? I’m not a good anthropologist, but punk is obviously something that I identify with. The punk movement became fashionable in Britain, and some parts of the USA in the late 70s, which was coincidently the time when I was born.
The fact that it exists means that the potential for it has always been there. There are always young people around, and some of them will always be rebellious. But probably it would not have been a worldwide movement until the 60s. That was the time when a privileged generation, the baby boomers was growing up in the West, and for the first time a large enough group of people actually had time on their hands to express rebellious attitudes towards society without being thrown into prison.
In 1968 there was a spontaneous wave of student rebellions all over the world. Many unis in the states had riots or had buildings taken over by students, including the one I went to. There were student protests in Mexico, and it ended up with the students getting fired upon. In Paris, where it ended up with Charles De Gaulle being forced out of power. In Prague, and the Russians ended up having to send in the tanks.
It was bizarre. I don’t really know what they were fighting about, but they were probably like young people everywhere, they thought that the older generation were corrupt and too conservative. They were going to build a better and more idealistic world. Sounds familiar isn’t it? They were protesting the Vietnam War. There were a lot of communist sympathisers. Ho Chih Minh, Mao, Castro and Che Guevara were their heroes.
I supposed that was one of the high points of radical leftist politics, because from the 1970s onwards, America slowly became a more and more conservative place, until you had the age of the Reagans and the Bushes.
Anyway, the way I knew about the punk movement was through music. In the beginning there were a few bands who wrote the blueprint of what punk was about. There was the Velvet Underground, who took a lot of minimalist ideas from modern classical music, and fused it with rock music. They used to be more influential than popular. Now they’re influential and popular. There were bands like the MC5 and the Stooges. They played a very abrasive and loud form of rock music, but it was stripped down and simplified. Iggy Pop is still alive and kicking today, even though Dave Alexander and Ron Asheton are not. He is as indestructible as a cartoon character. A heroin habit did not kill him. The propensity to slash himself over and over on stage did not kill him. Rolling around on broken glass in performances did not kill him. You probably wouldn’t know it by looking at him but he topped his high school.
Thereafter, there was a scene in New York, where bands like Blondie, Television, the Talking Heads (David Byrne performed in Singapore recently), the Ramones and the Patti Smith group developed a more arty form of punk. Punk music briefly became popular in 1977, through the music of the bands Sex Pistols and the Clash. Wire. There was a band in Australia called the Saints. Suddenly everybody was forming a band.
Inevitably (because punks are by nature very self destructive) the punk movement burned out. But even though it faded away from the scene, there were a lot of bands that carried on the tradition. There were Sonic Youth, REM and Husker Du, who were very heavily influenced by punk, and would very heavily influence generations of bands that followed them. There were Black Flag, Minor Threat and the Germs, who would be more faithful to the bare, stark angry ravings of the Sex Pistols.
More crucially, punk mutated into New Wave. The simplicity of punk music inspired many to do likewise: you had Duran Duran, Joy Division and U2. It wasn’t around anymore but it had a huge influence on 80s pop.
Suddenly, in the 90s, it took over the world. Around the time I started following music in a big way, a band called Nirvana took over the number 1 spot on the albums chart from Michael Jackson. For a few years after that, many bands which had toiled in the underground movement start putting out albums on major labels. Thus, you had Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Mother Love Bone, Screaming Trees following in its wake. The Smashing Pumpkins. Radiohead. Stuff like that.
After that, numbernine grew up and switched to listening to Jazz, and has not concerned himself with matters of the punk world anymore.
Anyway, what characterises punk music? What’s it all about? In 1977, the first time it became popular, it was a rebellion against the idea of a rock star. The rock stars had become fat and lazy. They were too rich and flaunted their wealth too ostentatiously. Their music went down in quality, and their concerts dragged on for too long. So when punk music came along, it was a rude blast of fresh air.
Punk is anger and rebellion. It is simplicity. It is about revolution, railing against whatever happens to be the current system. Punks like to think of themselves as straightforward and true to their ideas, although sometimes I think they’re just confused. They despise folks who carry themselves in a courtly and aristocratic manner. Those people sometimes have to say things they don’t really mean in order to avoid giving offence. Punks dispense with such formalities. Punks are like guerillas, and they live in an austere environment. Punk is the confused teenage years. Punk is about sex, not love, although one punk love song that comes to mind is “Ever Fallen In Love With Someone You Shouldn’t Have” by the Buzzcocks. Even then it is important to note: punks seldom get the girl.
On the good side, they are energetic, and they signal change. When you hear one of the greatest punk bands, the Clash, you will be amazed at how simple and effective their early music is. They can write simple songs like the Beatles, although the Beatles never took their music to such extremes. Later on, Clash would throw all sorts of influences into their music, even though the main thrust was still punk.
I always thought that good punk music is very methodical and disciplined. You are forced to finish saying everything under 3 minutes, and you are only allowed to use 3 chords. (If you are Wire, then you are only allowed to use 1 chord, and your songs are shorter than 1 minute.) And if, in spite of all these self imposed constraints, you can still come up with something worthy, good for you.
On the bad side, they are lazy, good for nothing, irresponsible and blame “society” for the plight they are in. It is no surprise that they came up in a bad economic environment, as the UK found itself in the last few years before Thatcher took over. Bad punk music is repetitive, uninspired and mediocre. They get drunk and take drugs. Punk is about being defeated by the system. Note that the Clash chose to cover “I Fought the Law and the Law Won”.
Bart and Lisa Simpson are a little too different to be siblings, but in a way they represent two faces of youth culture. Bart is a punk, simple as that. Lisa is the idealistic activist. But there are similarities between the two. Deep within the spirit of punk, under that rebelliousness and love of freedom is an idealism that you can shape the world into your own image. After all, the other face of the coin of cynicism is idealism - in order to be that disappointed with the world, you probably had to have pretty high expectations of it in the first place. And lying deep under the idealism, is the realisation that left on its own, the world does not make itself a better place. Part of wanting to shake things up or turn a bad situation around is to stand and rebel against the status quo.
Punk is not for everybody. I have a cousin who’s fairly open minded about music, but he did not understand punk music. I suppose you need to have it in you to identify with the chaos and rage.
I have something of the punk in me, obviously. People are what they are - you can’t change them. If you put them in a school which is very obsessed with its own image and how it presents itself in public, people like me would spend hours plotting how to rebel against that. I spent 10 years being educated in classical music, but it never feels natural to me. Because classical music is the music of the aristocratic class, which I have no affinity for. I appreciate its intricacy and complexity, but I could not appreciate Mozart or Tchaikovsky or Haydn. Beethoven - he’s the nearest to a punk in those days. And I like modern classical music better because they were starting to do all that edgy, shrill, dissonant stuff.
For me to identify myself with many (not all) of these values, I think I have an innate predilection towards being rebellious. It’s OK, I guess. I have 2 halves sharing a tense co-existence with each other: one of them the rigorous geek. The other the punk rebel. Somebody has to be the bad egg. Somebody must have the chip on his shoulder to be critical. Somebody has to be the poison pen. We can’t all be sheep. A good scientist is also a rebel. Think about Noam Chomsky. Albert Einstein. Charles Darwin. OK, Chomsky is a nutcase when he’s not talking about Linguistics, but I still think his heart is in the right place. Everybody must have something to contribute to society. I contribute my middle finger.
I don’t really know why have these personality characteristics. So very unChinese of me. A lot of the more interesting fellars in all those old Chinese stories were the rebels, because if you were brought up in that kind of environment, and still ended up as a rebel, you really had to be crazy.
I’ve always seen my father as a boring accountant. But in the last 10 years he has gotten himself into a fair bit of activism, that has seen him get up the noses of some fairly important people. So I suppose I have had a lot more respect for him.
But it is not straight forward hero worship. He told me he just didn’t have it in him to be a brown noser. He couldn’t be a yes man for a long time. That would be true for me as well. There’s something to clarify - it’s not completely true that I have made the choice to be a rebel. Some things we do well, others we don’t do so well. To a large extent the role that you play in society is not yours to choose, it’s fate. Fate gives you a hand of cards and you just play them the best that you will. In a way, I have a very perverse respect for people who can control their gag reflex and suck up to people. In a way I almost think that they deserve their exalted place in society because it is their reward in a society which rewards that peculiar talent. Just as people think that it is unfair that great talent for being able to control a ball with your feet is so lucrative, it is inevitable that other useless talents are so well rewarded.
The fact that it exists means that the potential for it has always been there. There are always young people around, and some of them will always be rebellious. But probably it would not have been a worldwide movement until the 60s. That was the time when a privileged generation, the baby boomers was growing up in the West, and for the first time a large enough group of people actually had time on their hands to express rebellious attitudes towards society without being thrown into prison.
In 1968 there was a spontaneous wave of student rebellions all over the world. Many unis in the states had riots or had buildings taken over by students, including the one I went to. There were student protests in Mexico, and it ended up with the students getting fired upon. In Paris, where it ended up with Charles De Gaulle being forced out of power. In Prague, and the Russians ended up having to send in the tanks.
It was bizarre. I don’t really know what they were fighting about, but they were probably like young people everywhere, they thought that the older generation were corrupt and too conservative. They were going to build a better and more idealistic world. Sounds familiar isn’t it? They were protesting the Vietnam War. There were a lot of communist sympathisers. Ho Chih Minh, Mao, Castro and Che Guevara were their heroes.
I supposed that was one of the high points of radical leftist politics, because from the 1970s onwards, America slowly became a more and more conservative place, until you had the age of the Reagans and the Bushes.
Anyway, the way I knew about the punk movement was through music. In the beginning there were a few bands who wrote the blueprint of what punk was about. There was the Velvet Underground, who took a lot of minimalist ideas from modern classical music, and fused it with rock music. They used to be more influential than popular. Now they’re influential and popular. There were bands like the MC5 and the Stooges. They played a very abrasive and loud form of rock music, but it was stripped down and simplified. Iggy Pop is still alive and kicking today, even though Dave Alexander and Ron Asheton are not. He is as indestructible as a cartoon character. A heroin habit did not kill him. The propensity to slash himself over and over on stage did not kill him. Rolling around on broken glass in performances did not kill him. You probably wouldn’t know it by looking at him but he topped his high school.
Thereafter, there was a scene in New York, where bands like Blondie, Television, the Talking Heads (David Byrne performed in Singapore recently), the Ramones and the Patti Smith group developed a more arty form of punk. Punk music briefly became popular in 1977, through the music of the bands Sex Pistols and the Clash. Wire. There was a band in Australia called the Saints. Suddenly everybody was forming a band.
Inevitably (because punks are by nature very self destructive) the punk movement burned out. But even though it faded away from the scene, there were a lot of bands that carried on the tradition. There were Sonic Youth, REM and Husker Du, who were very heavily influenced by punk, and would very heavily influence generations of bands that followed them. There were Black Flag, Minor Threat and the Germs, who would be more faithful to the bare, stark angry ravings of the Sex Pistols.
More crucially, punk mutated into New Wave. The simplicity of punk music inspired many to do likewise: you had Duran Duran, Joy Division and U2. It wasn’t around anymore but it had a huge influence on 80s pop.
Suddenly, in the 90s, it took over the world. Around the time I started following music in a big way, a band called Nirvana took over the number 1 spot on the albums chart from Michael Jackson. For a few years after that, many bands which had toiled in the underground movement start putting out albums on major labels. Thus, you had Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Mother Love Bone, Screaming Trees following in its wake. The Smashing Pumpkins. Radiohead. Stuff like that.
After that, numbernine grew up and switched to listening to Jazz, and has not concerned himself with matters of the punk world anymore.
Anyway, what characterises punk music? What’s it all about? In 1977, the first time it became popular, it was a rebellion against the idea of a rock star. The rock stars had become fat and lazy. They were too rich and flaunted their wealth too ostentatiously. Their music went down in quality, and their concerts dragged on for too long. So when punk music came along, it was a rude blast of fresh air.
Punk is anger and rebellion. It is simplicity. It is about revolution, railing against whatever happens to be the current system. Punks like to think of themselves as straightforward and true to their ideas, although sometimes I think they’re just confused. They despise folks who carry themselves in a courtly and aristocratic manner. Those people sometimes have to say things they don’t really mean in order to avoid giving offence. Punks dispense with such formalities. Punks are like guerillas, and they live in an austere environment. Punk is the confused teenage years. Punk is about sex, not love, although one punk love song that comes to mind is “Ever Fallen In Love With Someone You Shouldn’t Have” by the Buzzcocks. Even then it is important to note: punks seldom get the girl.
On the good side, they are energetic, and they signal change. When you hear one of the greatest punk bands, the Clash, you will be amazed at how simple and effective their early music is. They can write simple songs like the Beatles, although the Beatles never took their music to such extremes. Later on, Clash would throw all sorts of influences into their music, even though the main thrust was still punk.
I always thought that good punk music is very methodical and disciplined. You are forced to finish saying everything under 3 minutes, and you are only allowed to use 3 chords. (If you are Wire, then you are only allowed to use 1 chord, and your songs are shorter than 1 minute.) And if, in spite of all these self imposed constraints, you can still come up with something worthy, good for you.
On the bad side, they are lazy, good for nothing, irresponsible and blame “society” for the plight they are in. It is no surprise that they came up in a bad economic environment, as the UK found itself in the last few years before Thatcher took over. Bad punk music is repetitive, uninspired and mediocre. They get drunk and take drugs. Punk is about being defeated by the system. Note that the Clash chose to cover “I Fought the Law and the Law Won”.
Bart and Lisa Simpson are a little too different to be siblings, but in a way they represent two faces of youth culture. Bart is a punk, simple as that. Lisa is the idealistic activist. But there are similarities between the two. Deep within the spirit of punk, under that rebelliousness and love of freedom is an idealism that you can shape the world into your own image. After all, the other face of the coin of cynicism is idealism - in order to be that disappointed with the world, you probably had to have pretty high expectations of it in the first place. And lying deep under the idealism, is the realisation that left on its own, the world does not make itself a better place. Part of wanting to shake things up or turn a bad situation around is to stand and rebel against the status quo.
Punk is not for everybody. I have a cousin who’s fairly open minded about music, but he did not understand punk music. I suppose you need to have it in you to identify with the chaos and rage.
I have something of the punk in me, obviously. People are what they are - you can’t change them. If you put them in a school which is very obsessed with its own image and how it presents itself in public, people like me would spend hours plotting how to rebel against that. I spent 10 years being educated in classical music, but it never feels natural to me. Because classical music is the music of the aristocratic class, which I have no affinity for. I appreciate its intricacy and complexity, but I could not appreciate Mozart or Tchaikovsky or Haydn. Beethoven - he’s the nearest to a punk in those days. And I like modern classical music better because they were starting to do all that edgy, shrill, dissonant stuff.
For me to identify myself with many (not all) of these values, I think I have an innate predilection towards being rebellious. It’s OK, I guess. I have 2 halves sharing a tense co-existence with each other: one of them the rigorous geek. The other the punk rebel. Somebody has to be the bad egg. Somebody must have the chip on his shoulder to be critical. Somebody has to be the poison pen. We can’t all be sheep. A good scientist is also a rebel. Think about Noam Chomsky. Albert Einstein. Charles Darwin. OK, Chomsky is a nutcase when he’s not talking about Linguistics, but I still think his heart is in the right place. Everybody must have something to contribute to society. I contribute my middle finger.
I don’t really know why have these personality characteristics. So very unChinese of me. A lot of the more interesting fellars in all those old Chinese stories were the rebels, because if you were brought up in that kind of environment, and still ended up as a rebel, you really had to be crazy.
I’ve always seen my father as a boring accountant. But in the last 10 years he has gotten himself into a fair bit of activism, that has seen him get up the noses of some fairly important people. So I suppose I have had a lot more respect for him.
But it is not straight forward hero worship. He told me he just didn’t have it in him to be a brown noser. He couldn’t be a yes man for a long time. That would be true for me as well. There’s something to clarify - it’s not completely true that I have made the choice to be a rebel. Some things we do well, others we don’t do so well. To a large extent the role that you play in society is not yours to choose, it’s fate. Fate gives you a hand of cards and you just play them the best that you will. In a way, I have a very perverse respect for people who can control their gag reflex and suck up to people. In a way I almost think that they deserve their exalted place in society because it is their reward in a society which rewards that peculiar talent. Just as people think that it is unfair that great talent for being able to control a ball with your feet is so lucrative, it is inevitable that other useless talents are so well rewarded.
Friday, 13 November 2009
I forgot myself
The other day I was at the library in a strange part of Singapore. I found a book that was found in only 2 branches of the NLB, both in equally obscure locations. It was a 600+ page book on the first few years of the Spanish empire. I was itching to read about that one day, so I borrowed that book. Similarly, I saw some other books in that branch that weren’t available in my usual nlb haunts, so I proceeded to get some of those books.
All in all, it was 1 long bus ride to another location diametrically across the central water catchment area from where I lived, then a few stops on a few other nlb branches, and then another long bus ride back. When I got home, I was at first happy about my new pile of books, until I remembered something:
Spending the rest of my life with my nose in a book is not a desired outcome for me.
Instead, I was supposed to do the things that responsible adults are supposed to do. Make money. Make love. Go out and meet people. Read about the world today, not just about books. At the very least, I'm not supposed to add new entries to my "to read" list.
All in all, it was 1 long bus ride to another location diametrically across the central water catchment area from where I lived, then a few stops on a few other nlb branches, and then another long bus ride back. When I got home, I was at first happy about my new pile of books, until I remembered something:
Spending the rest of my life with my nose in a book is not a desired outcome for me.
Instead, I was supposed to do the things that responsible adults are supposed to do. Make money. Make love. Go out and meet people. Read about the world today, not just about books. At the very least, I'm not supposed to add new entries to my "to read" list.
Thursday, 12 November 2009
Near Death Experience
I was coming back home late and quite sleepy. Just had tennis with some of my kakis. Was feeling quite sleepy, and then I went to surf the internet.
I turned on the computer, the main computer which my household uses. Its the second oldest computer in my house, and has been in service since 2003. Considering the amount of trash that we've built up on it, it's remarkable that it's working almost perfectly still. Of course it's not as well used as some of the computers at work, which run massive database queries every half an hour. We call them the comfort women of our department because they're always getting screwed.
2 years ago, my father bought an external hard drive. I don't really know if it's the traditional magnetic type or the flash type, which would make it an oversized thumb drive. Anyway he's always been telling me to back up the computer, back up his files, and I've always dithered. What if I didn't know how to use the hard drive?
Then today, it happened. I was just using the computer, and halfway through, the screen went blank. I tried to turn the computer back on, and somehow the monitor wouldn't receive the signal. Then I turned it off without shutting it down (which I know is bad for the computer but when there's no signal on the monitor there's no choice.)
After that, a few aborted attempts to turn the thing back on. The LED would just weakly light up, and nothing else happened.
Magically I was wide awake in an instant. I was like - shit. Something I told my old man I was going to do, and I didn't do it. I risked losing a shit load of data. (Actually I hadn't actually lost it. I would just send the computer down for servicing, and he would get it back with 95% probability.) The thought of causing him to lose all his work... He doesn't really know how to use a computer, and I'm always at his beck and call, there will be once or twice a week he would need something relatively simple to be done - some formatting with word, some cutting and pasting from a PDF file, some scanning. But for somebody who doesn't know how to use a computer, he's got an incredible shit load of data - how on earth did he manage to accumalate 4 gigs, none of it MP3s or videos? I was in full panic mode, trying to figure out how I was going to tell him - your stuff's gone because I kept on putting off saving the damn thing.
I knew the problem was with the power unit, so I was trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do with the thing. Could I kick the computer? I would if I could, but that would almost certainly crash the hard disk. What if I could kick one part of the computer?
I opened the panel, and located what I thought was the power unit. Or I guessed that was it, because it was next to the fan. Then I started tapping away at it with my finger. Then I turned the computer back on.
BY GOLLY, A MIRACLE - THE DAMN THING WORKED!
So without a moment's hesitation, I backed up all the files onto his hard drive. And the funny thing is, it only took me about 1 hour. I procrastinated for 2 years over something that eventually took me 1 hour! Folks, this is why I will never amount to anything in life.
I turned on the computer, the main computer which my household uses. Its the second oldest computer in my house, and has been in service since 2003. Considering the amount of trash that we've built up on it, it's remarkable that it's working almost perfectly still. Of course it's not as well used as some of the computers at work, which run massive database queries every half an hour. We call them the comfort women of our department because they're always getting screwed.
2 years ago, my father bought an external hard drive. I don't really know if it's the traditional magnetic type or the flash type, which would make it an oversized thumb drive. Anyway he's always been telling me to back up the computer, back up his files, and I've always dithered. What if I didn't know how to use the hard drive?
Then today, it happened. I was just using the computer, and halfway through, the screen went blank. I tried to turn the computer back on, and somehow the monitor wouldn't receive the signal. Then I turned it off without shutting it down (which I know is bad for the computer but when there's no signal on the monitor there's no choice.)
After that, a few aborted attempts to turn the thing back on. The LED would just weakly light up, and nothing else happened.
Magically I was wide awake in an instant. I was like - shit. Something I told my old man I was going to do, and I didn't do it. I risked losing a shit load of data. (Actually I hadn't actually lost it. I would just send the computer down for servicing, and he would get it back with 95% probability.) The thought of causing him to lose all his work... He doesn't really know how to use a computer, and I'm always at his beck and call, there will be once or twice a week he would need something relatively simple to be done - some formatting with word, some cutting and pasting from a PDF file, some scanning. But for somebody who doesn't know how to use a computer, he's got an incredible shit load of data - how on earth did he manage to accumalate 4 gigs, none of it MP3s or videos? I was in full panic mode, trying to figure out how I was going to tell him - your stuff's gone because I kept on putting off saving the damn thing.
I knew the problem was with the power unit, so I was trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do with the thing. Could I kick the computer? I would if I could, but that would almost certainly crash the hard disk. What if I could kick one part of the computer?
I opened the panel, and located what I thought was the power unit. Or I guessed that was it, because it was next to the fan. Then I started tapping away at it with my finger. Then I turned the computer back on.
BY GOLLY, A MIRACLE - THE DAMN THING WORKED!
So without a moment's hesitation, I backed up all the files onto his hard drive. And the funny thing is, it only took me about 1 hour. I procrastinated for 2 years over something that eventually took me 1 hour! Folks, this is why I will never amount to anything in life.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)