The Early Years (2002-2005)

In Memoriam 15 April is the anniversary of the Hillsborough football disaster in 1989… I remember staying up late, a boy of 11, eager to check out who might meet Everton (well, assuming Everton would win) in the FA Cup final and just being horrified at the scenes being shown. The sad part is, while the disaster spurred the conversion of stadia to all-seaters, there still hasn’t been a full inquiry into the actual events of that day: check out the Hillsborough Justice Campaign.

Things inspired by the “yeah-yeah-yeah” refrain of “She Loves You”: the “ye-ye” nickname of Real Madrid’s 60s team; ye-ye music in France; and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ band name. Ah, the world-conquering genius of a seemingly simple phrase…

Just watched Punch-Drunk Love, which I found captivating - the weird flat quality of L.A. light seems to come through very nicely in the film. I really liked the moment where Barry (Adam Sandler) meets Lena (Emily Watson) in the Hawaii hotel and her leg just automatically lifts up - it’s the moment on the film poster. Why do women’s legs do that upon kissing? Answers on a postcard.

King Jeremy the Wicked ruled his world… Random thoughts: Tina Brown has a nice piece in the Times about the difference between George Bush and Tony Blair… why do even things shot for 4:3 sometimes look better in 16:9?… Train’s “Drops of Jupiter” may be catchy as hell, but the lyrics are nonsense - asking the woman to think of “the best soy latte [she’s] ever had”? Such new-age mumbo-jumbo…. just caught the great Weezer “Keep Fishin’” video, with the Muppets, and it got me to thinking: my favourite-ever videos: A-ha “Take On Me”, Blur “Coffee and TV”, Blind Melon “No Rain”, Smashing Pumpkins “1979”, Nirvana “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, Prodigy “Smack My Bitch Up”, REM “Everybody Hurts”, Bjork “All is Full of Love”, Chris Isaak “Baby Did a Bad Thing”, Eels “Novocaine for the Soul”, Fiona Apple “Criminal”, Fatboy Slim “The Rockafeller Skank”, Fatboy Slim “Weapon of Choice”, REM “Imitation of Life”, Weezer “Buddy Holly”, Beck “Loser”, Zero 7 “Destiny”, Jamiroquai “Virtual Insanity”, Kylie Minogue and Nick Cave “Where the Wild Roses Grow”, Chris Isaak “Wicked Game”, Nirvana “In Bloom”, Pearl Jam “Jeremy”… that was going to be a top 10 list before it took on a life of its own… best concert I’ve ever been to? No contest - Pearl Jam in Singapore, the Vitalogy tour…

Another day… just breathe This whole SARS thing - I blame the People’s Republic of China, for not responding to the epidemic early enough, for thinking that the WHO’s labeling of Guangdong as the source of the disease was somehow politically motivated, for being so concerned with face. Ugh. I think face is the most overrated characteristic: if everything negative makes you embarrassed, then maybe it’s time to think about growing a thicker skin. The truth shall set you free. Speaking of the truth, somewhere amid all the news about the war, Dubya has signed an executive order reclassifying loads of documents that were scheduled to be declassified… apparently war is a good time to hide other news.

You’re not bigger than this, not better, why can’t you learn? I’m not sure how long my ticker can take supporting Everton… nice to get a win under the belt, and one against Newcastle at that, but just once I’d like to see my team rout an opponent…

Pleasure at the Fairground Good Lord. Mick Hucknall in trying to be part of the House of Lords, seems to reveal himself to be against liberal democracy. Sadly, it’s all too easy to just dismiss “politicians”… a cheap rhetorical trick.

Happy together Farewell, Leslie Cheung. You always had the saddest eyes. So, Pestilence here in Singapore and War in Iraq. That’s half the Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding into the world already.

Cover versions I am looking for - anyone wants to trade? The Merrymakers, No More Lonely Nights Celia and the Mutations, Mony Mony Tom Petty, Leave Virginia Alone (okay, this is the original, insofar as he’s the songwriter - did he ever record his own version of this song?)

T-shirts! Get your Even Jesus Hates Creed T-shirts! Such a great slogan. Now if only people started making Hang Chad Kroeger Ts.

Does it seem like the British forces are doing quite well in a purely military sense? They seem to be getting the bad assignments (Basra, Umm Qasr), and lookie here, they got a general. Phonetic question: in Arabic is the sound represented in writing by “Q” really the aspirated [k] sound? I’m guessing it is.

As for what I think about the Anglo-American war with Iraq, I remain agnostic. Or rather, torn. As Edward Lempinen’s piece in Salon.com puts quite lucidly, the fact is that anti-war protestors are not offering alternatives to the human rights violations committed by the Saddam regime. (George Orwell, ever quotable in such situations, writes that “the writings of younger intellectual pacificists… do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States”. “Notes on Nationalism” is a nice short piece that’s always worth a read.) I admit I remain completely suspicious of Dubya: I don’t believe at present in the al-Qaeda / Saddam links, and I’m not sure how much of the war is due to a need for disarmament, how much a desire to impose a democratic regime, and how much the cold calculus of capitalism. Even so, the fact is this war could have positive human rights consequences, intended or no.

In a fit of extreme geekiness, this log has been rewritten to perform a server-side include using PHP. So http://www.dsng.net/blog.php also works to get to this page. And, continuing my penchant for random links, here’s a snowdome that’s done like the Biblical plague of locusts.

So a friend of a friend of a friend had a spare ticket to see the Stones. A spare ticket worth $275 American. So I can now say that I have, indeed, seen the Rolling Stones, up close and personal. Charlie Watts was stoic as ever; Keef was dressed like a bag lady and used a purple guitar I’ve never seen him use during “Satisfaction”. It was good. A raunchy spectacle, which is just as it should be - animations of topless women, tornadoes of confetti, giant inflatable women that looked like they were, um, pleasuring themselves with the flagpoles they were carrying. What else to report? Most of the favourites got a run-through: Brown Sugar, Start Me Up, You Can’t Always Get What You Want, Sympathy For The Devil, Honky Tonk Woman, Street Fighting Man, Satisfaction. Would’ve Liked To Hear: The Last Time, Miss You, Salt Of The Earth, Angie, Paint It Black, 19th Nervous Breakdown, Sister Morphine. And would’ve liked more bass on the sound system. But all quibbles, all quibbles. I mean, when am I going to see a great 60s band ever again? (I’m not too keen to see the Who, even if I had the chance… With only Townshend and what’s-his-face it would seem more like a tribute band than anything.)

So my new Oscar conspiracy theory is that since everyone is so obsessed with making the thing come in on time, this year they decided to favour people who were likely to be no-shows: Roman Polanksi, Eminem, Miyazaki. Of course, the fact that all of those three were the best in their category might have a little to do with it too…

Like I said previously, perhaps one of the best things about the end of the dot-com (never ever “dot.com”, which is garish) dream will be the demise of the “@” sign as a substitute for the word “at”. Companies that used the @ always seemed a bit like a dad who talks about Michael Jackson (or Marilyn Manson?) in an effort to show he’s “with it” - trying too hard, and too behind the times. Farewell, and good riddance.

Had a lovely chat with my friend Jiaying yesterday about, amongst other topics, architecture and design in Singapore, and we were discussing the upcoming One North (I think it has some pretentiously punctuated version of its name, “one.north” or the like), which is a Zaha Hadid space, if I’m not wrong. We talked about the names of the One North buildings - e.g. there’s a “fusionopolis” where people can be “fusionairies”. Now, this murdering of the English language has got to stop already! Don’t people have instincts about what sounds aesthetically pleasing? It smacks a little of Trying Too Hard To Be With It. Especially when, of the big tech companies I can think of, not many have forced faux-trendy names - Sun? Oracle? Dell? All very pleasing to the ear. Even Yahoo!’s name is a literary reference. And it hasn’t escaped my attention that the ones with names that tried too hard - anything with an “@” sign (Excite@Home), an “e” + product (the unmissed eToys.com; eBay doesn’t sell bays, so it escapes this category), or a “Web” (WebTV, Webvan) - often failed. Maybe the names reflected a failure to treat tech like a real business, working in the real world?

Keef is coming to town - and I can’t find anyone to go to the concert with me! Keef, incidentally, gives great interviews, as I learnt from reading one of him in Guitar World, and one in Rolling Stone: appropriately reverential of Stu’s role as the fifth Stone, appropriately disparaging of Mick’s solo efforts…

Been inspired to try to update this blog more often (thus in keeping with the spirit of blogging) by my friend Weicong, who maintains a more regular blog of his own. “A blog of one’s own” - very Virginia Woolf. Speaking of which, The Hours is scheduled to come to Singapore cinemas soon, and I really want to see if they adapted it well.

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