The Middle Years (2006-2009)

Aka: do they text or listen to podcasts in Cupertino? All right, having had my iPhone 3G for just over a month now, here’s what I have to report about it. One - it’s still addictive. I use everything on it - the iPod, Safari, GPS - and I use it all intensively. And the simple, pure joy of being able to take a call while I’m listening to my iPod without the rigmarole of taking out the earphones and fumbling for my phone alone makes it worthwhile. That, and calling up recipes while I’m at the supermarket, checking for when the next bus is arriving (thanks, iSinGeo), the ability to sync with Google Calendar so that I always have a means of figuring out where I’m supposed to be, looking up the historical background of Rome on Wikipanion while I’m watching Rome, checking the baseball scores while I’m out and about - it’s a marvel, and it looks good to boot.

Warren Buffett on the Charlie Rose show.

Just a quick set of links: Margaret Thatcher’s dotage The Wall Street Journal on the fall of the house of Lehman and how it created contagion Landmark Supreme Court decisions

So, a fuel hose is a weapon of Massa destruction? (rimshot)

Went to watch Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Now that the show has come out in Singapore, time to note Woody Allen’s “diary” of the shooting of the film. Always a fan of his writing. Review to come soon… but just some quick thoughts: Scarlett Johansson is a good muse for Woody, and it’s good that here she’s the free spirit - she was misused in Scoop and The Other Boleyn Girl, I think. Actually, everyone’s well-cast: Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Rebecca Hall. And while there’s no way that Allen knows the nuances of Barcelona enough to make this as much of a love letter to the city as Manhattan was to New York, it’s still a beautiful, swooning paean to the charms of Catalonia.

Got tickets to the F1 race at the last minute from someone who couldn’t be there (thanks!). To be honest, I wasn’t that enthused, but the mood when I got there was infectious. Great stuff - it was so much fun just walking around the Esplanade / Marina Square area. And surprisingly, not many logistical hassles - the bus ride home was fairly empty.

Also, caught my friend Sunny Chyun’s first ever exhibition, “I Need to Believe”, at the SG Private Banking gallery at the Alliance Francaise. I especially liked the use of T.S. Eliot references in her paintings’ titles, but maybe that’s my Prufrock obsession.

Watched Made of Honor last night, and it opened with a scene set in Halloween 1998, with Bill and Monica costumes. Which brought me back to college days. Add that to the ’90s setting of Definitely Maybe, and I guess that means the ’90s are fair game for nostalgia now. Gosh, that makes me feel old - I still think of the ’90s as yesterday, for the most part.

Oh, and I’m reading Fooled by Randomness right now and Taleb, writing in 2004, describes the way people are taken in by rare events of great magnitude using the example of… mortgaged-backed securitisation. Pretty impressive.

Michael Lewis, astute as always, has a short pithy commentary on the Lehman fallout. It’s a big deal because this is the day that American financiers, from the point of view of the Asians who sit on top of the world’s biggest pile of mobile capital, became a bad risk.

Randomly, two things I was reading mentioned the famous Sokal hoax - Stanley Fish’s blog and Fooled by Randomness (Taleb may have a great mind, but he needs a great web designer, although he does ask that people not write in with suggestions to improve his site). Still trying to make my mind up on it (see Simon Blackburn’s review, or the New York Review of Books exchange) 12 years later.

Okkervil River’s “Plus Ones” came into my iPod via the All Songs Considered podcast, and immediately ratcheted up Okkervil in my esteem. I own and listen to Black Sheep Boy, Don’t Fall In Love With Everyone You See, and Down the River of Golden Dreams, but nothing on any of those albums seemed as lyrically clever as “Plus Ones”, which takes as its central conceit the idea of adding one to various songs with numbers in their titles (“96 Tears”, “99 Luftballoons”, “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” etc.). Will Sheff also manages to throw in more than a few other references - “Dry Your Eyes”, “All Out of Love” (um, at least I’m guessing he meant to reference Air Supply), “What’s New Pussycat”, “Let’s Get Lost” etc.

The Atlantic has a fascinating article about beta blockers, and whether they should be used in sports that involve pressure, or to calm the nerves of, say, musicians and surgeons. Or, as the article asks, “Should we reward the shooter who can hit the target most accurately, or the one who can hit it most accurately under pressure in public?”

The iPhone is digital crack. Picked up my iPhone last Sunday when I received a surprise SMS from Singtel saying that I could pick it up earlier than my reservation… I actually had a reservation for Friday at 12 midnight, and went down, but decided that discretion, or at least sleep, was the better part of valour and went off at 2am, resigning myself to a late pickup and another long queue, but the Sunday-night (3rd day) queue was surprisingly short.

Usain Bolt - what an athlete. Just sheer dominance - I think the distance between Bolt and Thompson was greater than the distance between Thompson and the last finalist. And such fun - the tap on his chest, the dancing, the posing… I can’t wait for the Jamaica 4x100 team. Seeing as there’re no Singapore reps there, might as well support the country of my relatives.

Considering how long ago I joined Twitter, I’ve been really tardy about updating my blog to link in my status messages. But voila, up there, my current status. What I really need is not just microblogging, but a true way to integrate my stream of consciousness into Twitter when I want to. That’s one way to clear the mind out of all the detritus that accumulates therein.

Managed to finagle a solitary Death Cab for Cutie concert ticket, but I’m quite happy to go to concerts solo - a legacy, perhaps, of days where I reviewed concerts for the school paper. And it was worth it. To be honest, I was always a bigger Postal Service fan than a Death Cab one, if we’re looking at the Ben Gibbard oeuvre. But Death Cab are a surprisingly muscular band live than they sound on their albums (or it could be that, as Adrianna was telling me, Narrow Stairs, which I’ve not had a chance to listen to enough of, is a much different sounding album).

Once is a small, perfectly formed film about some very big themes. Most obviously, it is about the power of music to connect - after all, it is a film about an Irish busker meeting a Czech immigrant in Dublin, and them making (very beautiful) music together. But it is also about the possibility of a brief, intense connection reverberating throughout one’s life, something that is probably true for many people, but rarely depicted well in films - perhaps only the Before Sunrise / Before Sunset diptych do it properly.

One of my favourite entries from last week’s Singapore Garden Festival. Does seem very Irish. (The free shoulder massage at the Clarins booth alone made the entry fee totally worthwhile.)

I strongly recommend listening to the NPR recording of the Urban Verbs reunion. If only for the part in the middle where, 30 years later, Roddy Frantz (at least, I think it’s Frantz) still clearly is bitter about Tom Carson’s savage review of their album in Rolling Stone, and how that destroyed their career. It’s hard to believe any one media outlet would have such an impact these days in music. Even Pitchfork…