Like, the funniest thing, ever?

Malmsteen fans telling Dragonforce fans they know nothing about music.

Go youtube!

adam

Northern Exposure is the Pixies of TV comedy - it may not be as quick or as loud as any of the newer stuff, but they sure as fuck don't make shows like that anymore. There are few characters I've known more endearing than the neurotic physician Joel Fleischmann.

adam

Three Essays

Below you will find three short essays. The first one is titled 

'Poetry and the sordid state of humanity'

I wish I could write, I really do. It has never been my strong suit, and I struggled greatly with the difficulty during my junior college years, of writing essays that were clear and argumentative. I do love a good argumentative piece. I read the Economist and Time exclusively for those, and I find a well-argued essay a wonderful thing like a perfectly cut diamond, cutting swathes of sparkling light through the fog of ignorance and grinding away the detritus of imprecision and indecision, pausing only to scoff as I gleefully mix my metaphors. In the same way, nothing stimulates my academic pleasure centres like a well-argued debate, although there are none to be had in Singapore. I just don't seem to be able to do them myself, and whenever I write what I feel to be a cogent argument I come back a week later to re-read it and find it floppy, imprecise, and downright shameful oftentimes. I can't say for sure if this is some deficiency or merely lack of practice, but it frustrates me greatly for I am convinced that I have ideas but not the words to express them, and if this proves to be mere delusion then all is lost, I am nothing. 

Poetry is another monster altogether. I started this in sec 2 under dubious circumstances, and like argumentative writing, I'm afraid that the current assessment is that I've never been very good at it at all. My opinion of my literary skill fluctuates often. I've re-read my oeuvre (If it even deserves the term) several times and never been able to come up with a stable opinion on the load of rubbish that it is, and finally I've decided that if it's not going to convince me then it must be tosh. But I used to, and often still enjoy writing poetry. 

It used to be free verse, because I felt it was, well, freer, but quickly you realise that if the form isn't going to force you to think you end up not thinking at all and writing the same load of claptrap about frogs and whatnot. It's not intelligent at all, unless you happen to be a paragon of brilliance like Walt Whitman. So I turned to verse, which at least gets to pretend it's clever by rhyming, and have been writing rhym-ey little things ever since. 

As for subject matter, anything goes really but there are a few topics which particularly interest me, most of which being the sordid state of humanity. I wrote :

your garden gate has never been

so green and so unseen

at eight we learn to dance and sing

at nine all bad boys will grow wings

It's about a boyish dream to get out on the road and live a vagabond's life, but it's manifestly silly. The truth is, everything we've ever dreamed about is a construction built out of our insecurities, and will fall apart. 

This is, of course, only my opinion, and you needn't go home and shoot yourself just because I told you so. 

adam

Music, life, and atheism

Music started for me in the string ensemble back in Raffles Institution. My friends whose artistic taste I trust tell me we played crap music half the time and played good music crappily the other half, but it opened my ears. I loved it all, the mozart, the atonal stuff by Bartok, even that funny little christmas piece that Rayner assures me is totally silly. I would not say I have a 'passion' for music - firstly, I hate that word and the way every upstart student who wants to edge his way into university uses the word to describe how vibrant he/she is, and secondly, it's not a passion but more of a chemical dependence. A bit like heroin - I'm not proud of it at all. It's not a noble pursuit, unless you're into classical music in which case it only occasionally is, it isn't high art and most of the time it isn't vastly intellectually stimulating. I just... like it, out of some kind of bloody-minded hatred for all human beings. 

Music interests me (that is exactly the word! interests. Thoroughly noncommital) as a signifier or symbol of human community. It's an artifact of culture as well as a commentary - but mostly an artifact. Most rockers couldn't tell a sociology textbook from The Lord of the Rings - especially King Crimson, who think The Lord of the Rings IS a sociology textbook, well nuts to them, they sucked anyway. I like to make music because I think it's thoroughly good fun, and it infuriates the passionate people when I tell them it's thoroughly good fun because they think it should be something great and profound, when in reality it's just some blokes making funny noises. Yet, although it is never conceptually profound, its effects can be profound. Anger, sadness, destruction, occasionally happiness - these probably aren't intrinsic to music but are auxiliary emotions. These interest me. Nobody ever wrote a good song thinking 'this is going to be a sad one', they just thought 'this sounds good' and the sadness came as a by-product of their thoroughly sordid state of existence. 

There are only two musicians I have ever come close to taking seriously (and this doesn't include classical music because I hardly know enough) - Jimi Hendrix and John Coltrane. Pete Townshend wrote on Rolling Stone of Hendrix that he felt phony listening to him, and he felt that all The Who had were silly little songs compared to Hendrix's 'real music'. Coltrane nobody needs to emphasise - he was amongst all other musicians and men, a prophet and a preacher in his own inimitable language - out of him probably emanated the only true spirituality any musician has had to offer, the others being cleverly deceptive or deluded fakes. If you were to claim that music has a spiritual quality, I might be able to see it in these two. In everybody else - I highly doubt it. It's all in good fun, though, and I love it just fine. 

adam

The Angst of Army Life

As Wang put it to me the other day, the first five minutes of your army life, if you're anything at all like me, will be spent ricocheting from the headiness of superiority to the hollow realisation that you're stuck in this place for two years. Two years might pass quickly, if you know how to have fun. They can also turn into a neverending hell. I've been in here for almost 6 months, and they have for the most part been hell, and I genuinely hope that things improve for the next one and a half years or there is going to be trouble. 

In the army, your brain shuts off - any NSF who's had a smidgen of an education will tell you this, and for the most part it's true. Sunday afternoons are dreadful with the futility of having to go back to camp. But by tuesday you hardly feel anything at all, there's no more 'oh, this place is a shithole' - rather, just a sort of anaesthetised haze where you run about and do your thing without quite thinking about it. Well, that's not so bad, you might say. Jolly Good Fun and all that - well it isn't. The real agony comes the following sunday afternoon, when you realise just how miserable you've been but your misery-centres in your brain have become overworked by tuesday and don't produce enough misery-chemical to do the place justice. During the week, you also become quite stupid, at times, although personally I excel at technical knowledge, you forget the day of the week and what time it is and whether you've just had breakfast or lunch although since it was sausages it was probably breakfast, dreadful isn't it well yes it is. So - your brain shuts off but not for long enough to have any real comforting effect, more like the creeping horror of losing your mind as you inch toward the age of 75, only I'm 19. 

The other thing is the tiredness, the physical tiredness. Now any army worth its salt will work its trainees hard, sure. Ours does. In fact, I would go as far to say that maybe some people deserve the jolly good whacking they get and it certainly gets them in shape. I'm all for the fitness stuff. In my experience though, there never quite is enough recovery time for me, and as any course progresses I get more and more tired to the point where I sometimes report in on sunday night -already- tired from the previous week and not having had enough rest over the weekend - this is not good. As if the slow degradation of your mind isn't enough horror, the slow degradation of the body compounds this triple-time and makes you seriously worry for your health. Not that, in the throes of lactic-acid poisoning, my body is really the first of my concerns. Army also breeds a certain self-destructiveness amongst the trainees, out of desperation or sheer bloodymindedness I don't know which, but more people take up smoking in the army than anywhere else i'm certain, and if we get a choice whether to down that can of likely carcinogenic Red Bull or just go the SOC alone with half a litre of water, the Red Bull is the choice anyone would make. 

Often I've come back from a gruelling route march feeling physically sick from fatigue, refusing food and almost vomiting if there was anything left to vomit. It took me a week to recover from my 32k, during which I often had problems standing up. 

So - yes, this IS a soldier's life and as far as soldiering goes it's probably necessary. But, I don't like it and I'm seriously concerned about my body and my health and I don't think it's fair to put so many people through it if the consequences are like that. At least put some real thought into the postings, Jesus. 

adam

After listening to Get Behind Me Satan, the only drummer I will settle for is Meg White. Heavier than Dave Grohl, almost - she is one of the few people who plays the drums as an instrument rather than obligatory background rhythm noise. 

adam

Go to msn.com - click on music - find the bottom left corner - click on 'consumer guide' - read. 

Robert Christgau knows his music, alright - although I must say Jaguar Love actually sounds like a man getting mauled to death by a large cat. Loud and angry enough for me.

adam

Back on the weekend, which is slow, sad and mournful and often punctuated with bursts of electric happiness.

I've two days off - monday, and tuesday, which makes this a long one, which leaves me more time for my music, my reading, and my self-loathing.

In a burst of such self-loathing I bought Persuasion and vowed to finish reading it, come fire, flood, or trench-digging, and this time I pulled through on the herculean feat of bashing through the 250 pages of 18th century language with the equivalent of a literary parang. Of course there's no reviewing Austen : it was as brilliant as it should have been, et cetera - I do appreciate Anne Elliot as a bit ( I think - don't crucify me, Cambridge! ) more of a mature character, a bit more vindictive and a bit more long-suffering than naive Elizabeth. The book WAS published posthumously, so I guess that would indicate it was written later.

I need a new book now. Does anyone have any suggestions?

And Now For Something Completely Different!

Radiohead! Took a re-listen to In Rainbows and despite what Christgau says (Ha! I flaunt my independent thinking) I say it's a pretty damned fine album. They really crammed the electronic effects into OK Computer like a 5-year old who can't stop playing with his christmas toys, until the squeaky noises and the digital auto-wah started spurting out of your ears and drove you quite crazy (although it was good, heady stuff nonetheless). On Rainbows we have some interesting lyrical choices, overall a more controlled use of squeaky noises, and most importantly, without which there would be no review or no album or indeed no music at all, a few bloody good songs. The chords on Jigsaw Falling Into Place bring tears to my eyes, no irony intended and when thom yorke sings in his annoyingly incomparable voice NOT JUST ONCE, NOT JUST TWICE he in fact touches that vibrating core of angst that sits at the centre of rock and roll, just for a moment. There is no shtick here, despite the electronica: just rocking music, beautiful notes, and the fact that even despite their prog-gy leanings they never sacrifice the melody for the effect.


adam

If there's one thing I've learned, it's that the one thing man wants is the society of his peers.

SISPEC

SISPEC - a screaming nightmare that I wake up from every Friday if i'm lucky, broken, sweaty and dirty - On sunday, i'm forced at gunpoint at ten thirty to go back to sleep, kicking and screaming as it were and then finally falling asleep from exhaustion.

adam