The Middle Years (2006-2009)

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

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

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

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

To remind myself what I caught - an incomplete listing: In theatres: Brokeback Mountain Syriana The New World Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man’s Chest Superman Returns The Lake House How Much Do You Love Me? Click An Inconvenient Truth The Break-Up Scoop The Prestige Casino Royale Charlotte’s Web

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

Happy New Year! Or - in the words of Unk - East side walk it out!

Grammatical peeve of the day from conversations overheard on the MRT: “fats” is plural if you’re referring to different kinds of fats - saturated, monounsaturated etc. “Fats” is not plural if you’re referring to the spare tyre around your stomach. (Non-grammatical peeve: quasi-anorexic women speaking about fat (or ‘fats’ - ugh) that don’t exist.)

In which I just put up all the random articles I’ve found interesting over the last few days: The Least Essential Albums of 2006. An article that taught me about Neil Hamburger.

Mario the stripper

A pity the Notes on a Scandal movie, which I had looked forward to, has been getting disappointing reviews. Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett, Richard Eyre as director, Patrick Marber as screenwriter - it all seems so promising, especially given how good the source material is (glad I chanced upon it in the library). Still will probably go see it - wonder how they dealt with the unreliable narrator, and of course reviews aren’t always right. Plus Dench is always marvellous to watch.

And… RIP James Brown. Thank you for “I Feel Good”, for the “Funky Drummer” break that spawned a million samples, for Live at the Apollo and countless other great musical moments… including “Soulful Christmas” which I had listened to earlier in the day before I heard the news.

Late to the party, probably, but I’ve discovered the joy of xkcd’s off-kilter geek humour Also: I love playpen balls. And the MC Hammer slide.

From the Jewish perspective… Happy Boxing Day!

Hey, I’ve gone with the Pogues, Sufjan, Run-DMC… I think I can indulge my love for this song without totally ruining my cred. Plus, what the hell, Sasha Frere-Jones likes it, so I’m not alone…

R.I.P. Kirsty McColl

Pachelbel Rant - Rob Paravonian goes off about the ubiquity of Pachelbel’s Canon in D. The bit near the end where he freaks out about how a million songs use the same chord progressions is awesome. In fact, what the hey - in the spirit of the season, here’s reindeer segueing from Pachelbel straight into “Basket Case”.

Sufjan’s voice has always been suited for Christmas songs…

Justin Timberlake is teaming up with Duran Duran. I suppose now that he’s done the Michael Jackson and Prince things, he’s on to following other 80s groups… Plus here’s Timberlake on SNL with very rude lyrics.

I love Slate’s the Explainer column, and this week’s collection of the questions the Explainer couldn’t answer is pretty funny. (Sample: “yea i have my own 620 gang and i dont know how to run it to make not look like a little bitch gang joke it is just me and my friend how do i run it?”) Personal ads from the London Review of Books. Literate, wry, self-deprecating. Saparmurat Niyazov, old-school dictator, passes away. The NY Times’ “Fantastically well-developed personality cult” barely scratches the surface - but then it seems hard to describe someone who created a statue of himself that rotated to face the sun. In case you ever needed to buy pantaloons. Or bloomers. The most disturbing part is that they offer “split crotch bloomers”.