2009 Music Rundown I listened to more new music in 2009 than I had the previous year, but it’s still difficult to list much that I enjoyed enough to recommend to others. (Posterity note: The album I listened to more than any other in 2009 – The Bug’s London Zoo – would’ve been up there with Third and Rook as one of my favourites of 2008 if I’d actually managed to listen to it within that year.) But onwards to 2009. Or backwards, rather, given the tardiness of this post.  Albums: Warm Heart Of Africa (The Very Best): When raving about this album to Benny a few weeks ago the best explanation I could manage was to stammer “It’s like…African pop for people who like dubstep!” But I did this glorious album a disservice, because my description, apart from being clumsy (Pitchfork’s review broke it down somewhat better) is useless to anyone except music nerds. In truth, this is just one of the most effortlessly engaging albums I have heard in years (try Julia) and I honestly believe it’s an album for everyone, except people who don’t like joy. My favourite release of the year, IN A YEAR WITH A SONIC YOUTH RELEASE. If that’s not a recommendation from me, nothing is. The Eternal (Sonic Youth): I know, I’m just so full of surprises. OK, this isn’t quite as good as any of their other post-NYC Ghosts And Flowers albums  or Thurston’s lovely Trees Outside The Academy from 2007, but it still presses enough buttons for me.  Continues in the somewhat accessible vein of Rather Ripped, sometimes too much so (What We Know, Poison Arrow) but there are still plenty of examples of the band being melodic without losing themselves (Leaky Lifeboat, Antenna). Moderat (Moderat): I already enjoy each of the acts in this collaboration on their own, but I really hope they keep working together too. Apparat’s moody headphones universes get roughed up by Modeselektor’s dancefloor sensibilities (Slow Match), Modeselektor’s sonic freewheeling benefits from Apparat’s talent for creating and building atmosphere (Rusty Nails, Porc #1, Porc #2),  and I get a new favourite pre-clubbing album. (Well, it would be my favourite pre-clubbing album if I could actually be bothered to get off my ass and go clubbing.) Farm (Dinosaur Jr): Part of why I love this is definitely the nostalgic hold 80s/90s US indie rock will always have on me. But even when I try to shed that and pretend I’m assessing this album through fresh ears, I’m still struck by its effortless, unaffected ability to just bring on some good tunes and rock out. And like I said earlier, J Mascis’s guitar playing just makes me so damn happy. Dragonslayer (Sunset Rubdown): Every now and then an album comes along and reminds me that I can still like indie pop. Spencer Krug’s hiccupy David Bowie voice appeals to me much more than the usual reedy-voiced SNAG or alterna-ingenue vocal stylings that abound in this genre, and there’s something wonderfully full-bodied and spacey about the production that brings out the stateliness and drama of the songs really well. When I’ve had a bad day at work I just want to crawl into tracks like Silver Moons and Apollo and the Buffalo and Anna Anna Anna Oh! (yes, I know, execrable name but give it a chance) and let the bubbly reverby guitars bathe me like a jacuzzi. Us (Brother Ali): As much as I can often be easily contented with crass booty jamz, and equally easily bored with “worthy” hip hop, Ali’s lyrical achievements here are just too impressive to be missed. He’s not the most complex rhymer around but the sincerity and depth with which he’s able to take on subjects like the legacy of slavery (The Travelers), child sex abuse (Babygirl) and the experiences of new immigrants, children of divorce and closeted gay teens (Tight Rope) is incredible. Songs: Surgical Gloves (Raekwon): So much rhapsodizing has been done about Only Made 4 Cuban Linx Pt II that I feel the need to explain why it isn’t in my albums list. Honestly, I’ve been too distracted by reading on my commute to listen properly to the lyrics, so while I have enjoyed the production, I just haven’t engaged with the album as fully as I did with the albums which did make the list. This track, however, stood out to me from the first time I heard it.  Alchemist slices up a Styx sample to make it sound like a malfunctioning CD player, Raekwon spits lines like “We blow you out your peacoats”, and the end result is just slick. Heartless (Kris Allen, live version from Top 3 night on American Idol): It’s really hard to find this on Youtube because most of the clips there are either the studio version, or the audio-only live version. This canny, game-changing performance formed the basis of my shock epiphany that although it was undoubtedly cooler to support Adam Lambert, the person I really really wanted to win was Kris. Velvet (The Big Pink): This and the album it came from are great comfort listening for me, for times when I don’t feel like “working” to enjoy my music. There’s nothing gobsmackingly creative about this track, no new layers to discover each time you listen to it, but sometimes you just want a straightforward instantly accessible slab of moody bombastic feedback-drenched drama which gives you what you want and gives it to you now. Halo (Beyonce): You laugh? Wait till you hear how many other Ryan Tedder penned pop songs I also love madly (Apologize, Bleeding Love, Battlefield), then laugh. I’ve never been that keen on Beyonce – I don’t like watching her perform because there’s something I find a bit frantic about her dancing – but the vocal twists and turns she does here are really well executed. I fully intend to butcher this song in my next karaoke session, especially the “haloOOo” bits. Fostercare (Burial): This pipped King Midas Sound’s Meltdown very narrowly for status of my favourite track on the “new stuff” disc of 5 Years Of Hyperdub. If you already know Burial, this is more of what he does best. If you don’t, I’ll spare you my yammering about textures and sample manipulation and just urge you to experience this haunting, otherworldly trip for yourself. Global Enemies (Lynx & Kemo): OK I’m totally cheating because I know this came out in 2007, but ever since their barnstorming gig at Home in 2008 I’ve inexplicably failed to rave about them on this blog, and that can’t go on. This track was included on their 2009 debut album (which, unfortunately, I haven’t heard yet), so Imma sneak it in that way.  Kemo’s lyrics aren’t as intriguingly esoteric here as in Carnivale but his deadpan style suits the bleak prophecy of this track perfectly.   Keep The Streets Empty For Me (Fever Ray): Sometimes here on the equator rain comes suddenly and heavily in the pre-dawn hours, moving across the ground in sheets with the wind. For night owls like me these are magical times, when the world is cool and peaceful and mostly  mine. This is a song for the minutes just after that rain dies away, when the cascade of droplets from rain gutters and awnings slows but doesn’t stop, each tiny impact rippling the puddle where it lands, each rippling puddle part of a shimmering tableau that hardly anyone will see but me. Last note: No personal 2009 music summary of mine could possibly omit what happened on June 25th, 2009. I already wrote a fair bit in this blog about the joy Michael Jackson brought to my life, but reading over it again I’m struck by how much I still had to leave out. I’m not over his death. I know how this makes me look to people who are too sensible to be this affected by the death of someone who never knew they existed. And I also know how blessed I am that so far, I have not had to suffer the loss of someone truly close to me. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. But for now, there are times I still find myself ambushed by emotion that I thought I had exhausted the night of his memorial service, the night I cried all the tears I had not shed in that dry-eyed, numb week after his death. I still think of him randomly, like when one of my first thoughts after seeing Avatar was how it much he would have loved it in all its technologically groundbreaking, spectacularly beautiful, treehugging, militaristic, schmaltzy splendour. But this is a music post, and I did actually intend to end it with something related to Michael Jackson’s music rather than my emoness. One “silver lining” (if you could call it that) of his death was the rehearsal footage his fans got to see in the This Is It movie. I loved this because he usually wouldn’t let the world see anything until it had been meticulously engineered to run to uberperfection every time. I think this clip of The Way You Make Me Feel rehearsals gives a refreshingly raw glimpse of the person and artist I will never forget. Phuket Day Four: What Everyone Else Does On Phuket Simply because it would be nice to finish blogging one trip in totality for the first time since the inception of this blog, here is what we did on our last day in Phuket: nothing much, because this was the day we tried to do what everyone else does on Phuket. After a leisurely breakfast in our hotel we walked to Kata Noi beach, took windswept pictures, drank girly cocktails at the Katathani Resort’s beach bar, and had an indulgent and really rather decent Italian meal at Capannina restaurant before retiring to our hotel pool (and the day-long happy hour at the poolside bar) until our flight home. Quarantine (Eavan Boland) Perhaps I’m just mushy because my husband’s away on a business trip and I miss him, but I liked this poem. I am not exactly sure if Alec would warm my feet with his chest while we were both dying of starvation and cold (this would be asking a lot of anyone – my feet are blocks of ice even in normal air-conditioning), but he does go out in the mid-day sun on the weekends to buy me bubble tea and ayam penyet, which is also worth something. Symphony I was doing some clutter-clearing today and found this passage I saved from when I read Carson McCullers’ The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter some years back. The protagonist is listening to Beethoven’s 3rd symphony (the “Eroica”) at the time, but you don’t have to have heard it1 to let this passage take you back to the last time you listened to music that made you feel this way. She could not listen good enough to hear it all. The music boiled inside her. Which? To hang on to certain wonderful parts and think them over so that later she would not forget – or should she let go and listen to each part that came without thinking or trying to remember? Golly! The whole world was this music and she could not listen hard enough. Then at last the opening music came again, with all the different instruments bunched together for each note like a hard, tight fist that socked at her heart. And the first part was over. This music did not take a long time or a short time. It did not have anything to do with time going by at all. She sat with her arms held tight around her legs, biting her salty knee very hard. It might have been five minutes she listened or half the night. The second part was black-coloured – a slow march. Not sad, but like the whole world was dead and black and there was no use thinking back how it was before. One of those horn kind of instruments played a sad and silver tune. Then the music rose up angry and with excitement underneath. And finally the black march again. But maybe the last part of the symphony was the music she loved the best – glad and like the greatest people in the world running and springing up in a hard, free way. Wonderful music like this was the worst hurt there could be. The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen. The last time music made me feel like the whole world was a symphony and there wasn’t enough of me to listen was a few weeks ago, listening to Dinosaur Jr’s Farm and losing myself so happily in the guitar work2 that I almost forgot I was on my way to work on a Monday morning. When was yours? If you’d like to get to know the Eroica, good ol’ Youtube will let you travel back in time to watch the great Herbert von Karajan at work: Part 1, Part 2. ↩ There’s No Here isn’t actually a standout track in this (consistently good) album but it’s a punchy example of one of my favourite things about Dinosaur Jr – how J Mascis’s guitar is basically like the fourth member of the band. If you’re feeling a little more emo, let Said The People build to the solo at 3.05. ↩ Phuket Day 3: Beaches, Buddha and Bargainhunting While our experience of Phuket was generally very positive, perhaps due to visiting in very low season, one of its annoyances was still in full swing: the powerful transport cartel that rules Phuket’s Western shores, resists all attempts to improve the abysmal state of public transport in Phuket and charges an arm and a leg to take you anywhere. I’m aware true travelistas would throw caution to the wind and vroom glamorously around the island on a rented moped, but ever since I heard what a state coroner had to say about motorbike travel I’ve been nervous about it. So the next best alternative was to engage a driver, and after a bit of research we contacted Daj, who is very popular with Tripadvisor forum members. He picked us up at 10 a.m., and we headed south, passing Karon viewpoint on the way to the gorgeousness at the top of this post, Nai Harn beach.  I don’t know what it’s like in high season, but on this low season Sunday morning it was pretty idyllic.         It’s popular with families because of its little lagoon that stays calm even as monsoon season waves crash onto the main stretch of beach. (I experimented with adding a texture when processing the photo below. I like the end result, but would be interested in your opinions: evocative or naff?) This family parked right next to the sand and picnicked while their kids played in the shallows.       Once I’d managed to tear myself away from photographing Nai Harn beach, we drove on to Ya Noi viewpoint, which doesn’t photograph too badly itself. At Rawai fishing village, I nearly fell prey to a very persuasive hard-sell. I bet she’d have overcharged me too.             The tsunami caused less destruction to Rawai than the west coast of the island, but I still found the sight of the children playing in front of the tsunami hazard zone sign poignant. I was delighted when I realized they were not only playing zero-point1 – one of my favourite childhood games that I’d somehow forgotten ever playing until seeing them – but playing some of the exact same “stages” of the game that we did twenty years ago. While waiting to work up an appetite for lunch, we went to see the Big Buddha, already seen in distant evening silhouette in the previous post, and really damn freaking big when you’re up close. The statue is still under construction and surrounded by scaffolding, which makes for easy cheesy faux-spiritual photo captioning as follows. (I tried another texture experiment with the photo – again, opinions appreciated!) Ladder to enlightenment Wat Chalong doesn’t have the history or ornate decoration of other temples you can see in Thailand, but it does feel like it has a life as a local centre of worship beyond its tourist visitors, which is what I always hope to see in religious sites I visit.         For lunch, Daj drove us to Phong Phang Seafood at Palai bay. Upon walking in it was immediately obvious that this was the sort of place where all the guides take their tourists – it even had a separate room where all the guides were eating their own lunches – but the food turned out very decent. The “apple balsam leaves salad” (sounded interesting, but I still have no idea if that’s the correct name of the leaf or not) in the photo was the first dish we’d had in Phuket where we found the level of spice remotely challenging, so given our reasonably high tolerance for spice I’d say the restaurant hasn’t totally watered its food down for tourists. The ambience is pleasant too, sitting in breezy shade looking out at long-tail boats in the bay. I scampered a few metres down to the beach after lunch for this picture, which I quite like. After lunch we went to Khao Kad viewpoint at Cape Panwa (my photographs weren’t very good) and the monkey mangroves at Ko Sireh. It was rather depressing that visitors are not in the least bit discouraged from feeding the monkeys here (we didn’t), so I expect some of the monkeys just spend a lot of their day lounging by the river eating fruit that literally landed right at their feet.     In accordance with my strange tendency to be besotted with every kind of animal baby except the human baby, I squealed a bit at this. In conversation during the drive, Alec asked if Daj knew a good place to buy muay thai shin pads and most conveniently, it turned out that Daj has been doing muay thai since he was a child. He said that for good quality shin pads we could go to Jungceylon (snazzy tourist mall at Patong) but for cheaper stuff there was a place in Phuket Town that locals would usually go. I expressed the view that we should buy shin pads at a value commensurate with the quality of Alec’s muay thai skills, so we went to Phuket Town. The place the locals shop is called Supercheap, and is pretty fantastic. It’s in a dim, cavernous warehouse space bigger than any hypermart in Singapore, with an incredible range of choices for anything you could dream of buying. It’s difficult to capture in pictures and I didn’t wander too far from Alec and Daj while they were poring over the shin pads for fear of getting lost, but I saw electric guitars in the distance, multiple three-tiered shelves of children’s tricycles and more varieties of rice than I have ever seen in one place. Once the boys were done with their shopping (Alec got his shin pads, Daj got craft scissors for his daughter), Daj drove us to his friend’s muay thai gym to let Alec have a look at it, but unfortunately they don’t train on Sundays so nothing was going on when we got there. The last stop before dinner was the obligatory sunset at Laem Phromthep, and Daj had got his wife and daughter to meet him there. We didn’t find the crowds detracted from the experience, though perhaps it’s different in high season, but as scenery goes I was a little underwhelmed. Sunsets are always beautiful, but this spot probably isn’t so significantly more beautiful than other sunset views in Phuket as to justify the hassle of finding a parking lot. We ended the day in Rawai again for dinner, with fish grilled in salt, fried chicken with garlic and pepper, clear sour seafood soup, steamed rice and 2 Cokes for under 500 baht. The chicken was a disappointment (soggy) but the seafood dishes were unsurprisingly fresh and generously portioned. They initially brought us an insipid sweet’n’sour sauce with the fish so we asked for something spicier and got the proper Thai stuff. I always blame stuff like this on the white dude who goes around with me. Finally back at the hotel, we bid farewell to Daj. For anyone who comes across this post while researching a trip to Phuket, we found him professional, cheerful and responsive to our particular requests, such as going to Supercheap for the muay thai gear, and his English is fairly good. I’m sure that finding our own way around Phuket on rented transport would have been lots of fun in a different way, but we were happy with our day with him. I did a quick Google to see if I could rustle up a description of zero-point for non-Asian readers and found this bizarre video, apparently produced as some sort of outreach effort for the Youth Olympic Games Singapore’s hosting next year. The “fun” URL they’ve come up with for more of this stuff is “whyohgee.com.sg”. I think “doubleu-tee-eff.com.sg” might have been more appropriate. ↩ Iconic Photos Having just discovered the Iconic Photos blog (via kottke.org) and spent entirely too much time reading it tonight when I should be in bed, I might as well share it with you too. This is most definitely not the most iconic photo on the blog, but it’s the one I’m linking anyway. Podcast Picks Due to being old and busy and spending more of my home computer time processing photos these days than reading music reviews, I listen to things like NPR’s All Songs Considered podcast on my commute as a way of keeping up with new releases. A lot of the music they feature isn’t really to my taste, probably because I’m just not keen on the music taking the indie masses by storm these days – case in point: Bon Iver, plus my appetite for Animal Collective got satisfied several years ago and I’ve realized I just don’t like them enough to want to listen to each new album and nauseatingly named side project – and there’s nowhere enough hip-hop, dance or electronica either. Still, every now and then there’s an episode I really enjoy and keep on my iPod for repeat listens. I thought I’d share two of my favourites here for anyone who’s getting sick of looking at photos of Phuket. Thom Yorke’s guest DJ spot was a cool peek inside the music brain of a guy who, apart from making some of the best music of the last fifteen years, also has great taste. You can see his list of picks at the link, but it’s more fun to hear him ramble about them, including having to scan through albums on air while trying to pick the tracks he wants to feature, because he can’t remember tracks based on their names or numbers. I’m just like Thom Yorke! Who knew? I didn’t discover any music from this podcast that I didn’t already love, but his choices totally affirmed the impeccability of my own taste, which is even better. 1 More recently, they did a round table discussion on the topic “Do Record Labels Matter?” It’s basically some music nerds chatting about this and picking songs to play which give a good flavour, as far as that’s possible, of some of the more celebrated indie labels around. I enjoyed it because I’m now squarely in that group of people who are old enough to remember a time when BigO magazine and Chua Joo Huat music store were the only way for me to discover and obtain access to the music I was interested in. And without the great breadth of music guides and reviews that are now available on the Internet, I would often pluck an album out of the badly lit Chua Joo Huat shelves and listen to it entirely on the basis that the artist was from the same label – usually Sub Pop or Matador, since albums from the smaller indie labels probably didn’t even get distributed in Singapore back then – as another artist I already liked. Apart from the topic being right up my alley, I particularly enjoyed the music selections. Again, they’re listed at the link up there and you can dip into to them individually if you want to skip the podcast. I liked all of them except for Don’t You Worry (Jim Noir on Barsuk, not surprising because I’m really not into most stuff on that label) and Tournament Of Hearts (The Weakerthans on Anti – well, that label’s roster of artists are simply too diverse to be lumped together in any meaningful way, but personally I would have gone with something by The Field to give a change in sound from the rest of the songs played in the podcast). They don’t manage to get through every significant label in the space of the show, obviously. They mention Dischord themselves as a big omission, and Warp and Rough Trade occur to me immediately as other pretty important labels that weren’t featured, but all in all it was a nice nerdy walk down lanes I haven’t spent enough time in lately. Sorry, I just realized I forgot to mention the Madvillain track as the exception. But since I am still probably the only person in the world who doesn’t like Madvillain, chances are he still has impeccable taste and I am just wrong. ↩ Phuket Day 2: Mandatory Minigolf Back from our sweaty day in Phuket Town we changed clothes and recharged a bit in our hotel before heading out for dinner. Kata and Karon dining options seemed much of a muchness, but since we hadn’t been to Karon yet we walked in that direction. The bars lining the road were totally dead on a Saturday night – each had one or two guests at most, and some only had a group of bored girls lounging around. We wondered if it was because it was still early, about 7.30 pm, and if things would liven up for them later. We’d had a late lunch, so we still weren’t very hungry by the time we’d arrived in Karon. Most adults would have had a drink in any of the struggling bars, but in our case we had already spotted the Dino Park minigolf. As regular readers may know, our penchant for minigolf coincides with our penchant for surreal kitschness and bitter, unsporting competition, so this was impossible to resist. When I was in primary school a dinosaur exhibition featuring animatronic dinosaurs came to the Singapore Science Centre, and bearing in mind that this was several years before the release of Jurassic Park, it was the most amazing thing to hit my young brain until I watched Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves and discovered Kevin Costner and hormones. Phuket’s Dino Park is kind of like being with those old-school dinosaurs again, except in a dramatically landscaped setting complete with rivers, high waterfalls, appropriate ambient sounds and a huge, spectacularly erupting volcano. This shit is hot!   The dinosaurs are life-sized, or at least close to it. I’m not enough of a long-neck connoisseur to be sure if their long-necks are Littlefoots specifically, but they definitely have a Cera, Petrie and Spike. (Youtube diversion: It’s crazy how familiar I am with every clip on Youtube from the first movie, it feels like as if I only watched it yesterday.) If you have a kid, I cannot imagine how they will not love this, but it would probably be less fun during the day due to the heat. By night though, it’s pretty amazing. If we HRRRAAAAARGH on, together...   We were so enthralled with the place that I even stopped caring who was winning or losing. Though to be honest, complexity of minigolf hole design is not one of this place’s strengths. For example, here are the obstacles you’ll encounter at the first hole. This shit is...shit. Still, for all the reasons I mentioned above, I loved it and would highly recommend it, unless you are too cool for minigolf, in which case I would wonder why you even read this decidedly uncool blog to begin with. And for 240 baht each, it was cheaper than our neighbourhood minigolf in Singapore, which has NO DINOSAURS, NO VOLCANO, NO DINO POO OBSTACLES. (Vitalic diversion: No guitars, no drugs, no leather either.) Phuket Day 2: Phuket Town Phuket Town doesn’t seem to be regarded as a must-see spot in Phuket, and if you’re already familiar with Straits-Chinese culture from, say, Penang, Malacca or Singapore, those are certainly better places to experience it than Phuket Town. But perhaps in the same way that some travelling Chinese gravitate towards foreign Chinatowns to see what “their” version of “us” is, this Peranakan and unofficial Peranakan (given that ang moh Alec probably knows more about Peranakan food and culture than the average Singaporean, I think he’s allowed that status) decided to check out if Phuket Town could compare to our beloved Katong and Joo Chiat. The short answer is that it can’t, but it was still more fun than sitting on a beach the whole day. My research had indicated that the Kata beach taxi cartels won’t accept less than 400 baht for that trip, so I smilingly insisted on that in the face of offers for 600 and 500 baht. We took the cab to the area around the Robinson’s store, where a 70s UFO building made me happy and a cardboard cutout child gave me the creeps. In the central touristy area of town, we stopped for a drink in China Inn, failed to see the Shrine of Serene Light (the travel agency next to it was being renovated and the path to the shrine was blocked by rubble) and took a gander down Soi Romanee, which was pretty but seemed devoid of life except for a few other tourists, a couple taking wedding pictures and this kid feeding pigeons. (Click on any photo in this post to see a larger version, by the way.)   (L) Soi Romanee retro; (R) Pedalcar planter on Thalang Road   With our tweeness quota fully satisfied for the day, we walked to Natural Restaurant for a late lunch. It’s a bit of a walk from the historical streets but the famously wacky decor is worth the visit, and while I’m normally wary of places with voluminous photo menus, the simple, delicious lunch we had there was one of our best meals in Phuket: winged bean salad (it’s hard to find winged beans in Singapore so I was really happy about this), fried catfish with chilli, steamed rice, beer for him, lemongrass juice for me, less than 500 baht in total. I highly recommend it, except that you may want to avoid menu item number 163. Fishtanks at Natural Restaurant   We wandered around a bit more after lunch, not really looking for sights but enjoying the low-key feel of this part of Phuket where nary a souvenir stall or travel agency had set up shop. Snapshots from the back streets   By about five, constant sweatiness had finally worn us down and the streets of Phuket Town had gone very quiet. Although we had been besieged by “Taxi?” requests earlier in the afternoon, there were none to be found now and we had to walk back to the touristy bit and ask a travel agency to call us one. Later the same night we would discover the awesomest minigolf experience known to man but I’ll save that for another post, and end this here with one of the views through the windscreen on the way back to Kata. Road-level view of the Big Buddha at sundown Phuket Day 1: Kayaks And Caves We’re not beach people so we’d never bothered with Phuket before, but it seemed like an easy trip to throw together since I needed to use up a little leave, and its low season flight and accommodation prices were very appealing. As it turns out we had a great time, which was a nice reminder for us that sometimes the road most travelled is still good fun, and not every holiday needs to be about Meaningful Cultural Experiences. On our first day there we booked ourselves on the Hong By Starlight sea-kayaking day tour, which is pricy but so universally raved about by every source of travel information known to man that we thought we should give it a shot. Also the tour doesn’t start till noon, which makes it totally my kind of tour. We were picked up at our hotel in a minibus and driven to the east side of the island where we boarded the boat that would take us out to the sea caves and had a simple but extraordinarily tasty lunch of fried kuay teow, spring rolls and fresh fruit. Soon after lunch, it was time to hit the water. The tour’s focus is on the sea caves east of Phuket. These are created by the percolation of rainwater through limestone karsts, which results in the formation of “secret” lagoons enclosed by rock on all sides but open to the sky. There’s a good diagram here which explains things better.   Many of these caves can only be accessed by paddling through tunnels when tidal conditions are right, but even then, sections of the tunnels are still pitch dark, and sometimes so low and narrow that everyone has to lie prone in the kayak in order to get through without cutting themselves to ribbons on cave walls studded with razor-sharp oyster shells.   I read that previous sentence over after writing it and thought I was maybe exaggerating a little too much, but then I read this article by John Gray, the founder of the tour company we used, and realized I wasn’t. Still, it’s a credit to the skill of our guide, Kop, that I honestly never felt in a moment’s danger. We emerged from the tunnel into the hong, as it’s called in Thailand (in Thai hong means “room” or “chamber”), which totally felt all magical and tranquil and shit.   The walls of the lagoon are pretty high (that little thing in the bottom left is a kayak) and covered in lush vegetation. I like this picture but it still doesn’t quite capture the atmosphere of paddling amongst mangrove trees through the calm waters of the hong’s lagoon, surrounded on all sides by craggy, dramatic rock-faces giving way eventually to sky.   We visited two more hongs over the course of the afternoon, each with its own particular characteristics. Sometimes the cavity in the karst would house two or more lagoons connected by a narrow channel little wider than a kayak.   I like caves, can you tell?                 Before dinner, each guide helped their kayak pair to make a krathong. Each krathong’s design depends on the idiosyncrasies of its guide – Kop’s featured carrot slices and flower buds which he artfully snipped to look like birds in flight. The last activity of the day would be returning to one of the hongs we’d visited earlier to release our krathongs – or at least, let them float for a while, and then take them back rather than litter the landscape with them. The hong was pitch dark by night, except for flickering light from the candles on the krathongs and the occasional iridescence of the bioluminescent plankton in the water (which sparkles when agitated). On the way back to the mainland, the guides initiated a series of the sort of silly but fun puzzle games that rally groups of strangers round a table. I’ve always found boat rides at night a bit depressing, something about the fluorescent light and the tiredness of the body after an active day out, and this made things better. In general, this tour is highly regarded for good reason. It is professionally and efficiently run without being impersonal – while there are quite a number of people on the boat, you get the same guide assigned to your kayak the whole day, and the guides are a really likable, jovial bunch who try to make sure everyone has a good time. The strong emphasis on safety and environmental consciousness is heartening, as is the decent food. I’d describe myself as a mid-range traveller at most and this tour is a bit of a splurge at 3950 baht per person, but I also like to reward businesses in the tourism industry who do things with a sense of responsibility to the place they are trying to showcase. So to the good people at John Gray’s Sea Canoe company, this krathong’s for you. Phuket Day 1: Kayaks And Caves We’re not beach people so we’d never bothered with Phuket before, but it seemed like an easy trip to throw together since I needed to use up a little leave, and its low season flight and accommodation prices were very appealing. As it turns out we had a great time, which was a nice reminder for us that sometimes the road most travelled is still good fun, and not every holiday needs to be about Meaningful Cultural Experiences. On our first day there we booked ourselves on the Hong By Starlight sea-kayaking day tour, which is pricy but so universally raved about by every source of travel information known to man that we thought we should give it a shot. Also the tour doesn’t start till noon, which makes it totally my kind of tour. We were picked up at our hotel in a minibus and driven to the east side of the island where we boarded the boat that would take us out to the sea caves and had a simple but extraordinarily tasty lunch of fried kuay teow, spring rolls and fresh fruit. Soon after lunch, it was time to hit the water. The tour’s focus is on the sea caves east of Phuket. These are created by the percolation of rainwater through limestone karsts, which results in the formation of “secret” lagoons enclosed by rock on all sides but open to the sky. There’s a good diagram here which explains things better.   Many of these caves can only be accessed by paddling through tunnels when tidal conditions are right, but even then, sections of the tunnels are still pitch dark, and sometimes so low and narrow that everyone has to lie prone in the kayak in order to get through without cutting themselves to ribbons on cave walls studded with razor-sharp oyster shells.   I read that previous sentence over after writing it and thought I was maybe exaggerating a little too much, but then I read this article by John Gray, the founder of the tour company we used, and realized I wasn’t. Still, it’s a credit to the skill of our guide, Kop, that I honestly never felt in a moment’s danger. We emerged from the tunnel into the hong, as it’s called in Thailand (in Thai hong means “room” or “chamber”), which totally felt all magical and tranquil and shit.   The walls of the lagoon are pretty high (that little thing in the bottom left is a kayak) and covered in lush vegetation. I like this picture but it still doesn’t quite capture the atmosphere of paddling amongst mangrove trees through the calm waters of the hong’s lagoon, surrounded on all sides by craggy, dramatic rock-faces giving way eventually to sky.   We visited two more hongs over the course of the afternoon, each with its own particular characteristics. Sometimes the cavity in the karst would house two or more lagoons connected by a narrow channel little wider than a kayak.   I like caves, can you tell?                 Before dinner, each guide helped their kayak pair to make a krathong. Each krathong’s design depends on the idiosyncrasies of its guide – Kop’s featured carrot slices and flower buds which he artfully snipped to look like birds in flight. The last activity of the day would be returning to one of the hongs we’d visited earlier to release our krathongs – or at least, let them float for a while, and then take them back rather than litter the landscape with them. The hong was pitch dark by night, except for flickering light from the candles on the krathongs and the occasional iridescence of the bioluminescent plankton in the water (which sparkles when agitated). On the way back to the mainland, the guides initiated a series of the sort of silly but fun puzzle games that rally groups of strangers round a table. I’ve always found boat rides at night a bit depressing, something about the fluorescent light and the tiredness of the body after an active day out, and this made things better. In general, this tour is highly regarded for good reason. It is professionally and efficiently run without being impersonal – while there are quite a number of people on the boat, you get the same guide assigned to your kayak the whole day, and the guides are a really likable, jovial bunch who try to make sure everyone has a good time. The strong emphasis on safety and environmental consciousness is heartening, as is the decent food. I’d describe myself as a mid-range traveller at most and this tour is a bit of a splurge at 3950 baht per person, but I also like to reward businesses in the tourism industry who do things with a sense of responsibility to the place they are trying to showcase. So to the good people at John Gray’s Sea Canoe company, this krathong’s for you. Date Night We had a date night. It involved Burger King and Bruno, and so gave rise to numerous jibes from me that we suck at date night. On the way home, we had this conversation: Alec: I love Hungry Ghosts month. Yesterday when I was walking home with our ta pau 1, the guys at the bike shop were setting up their little altar outside. It had a bike wheel as its centrepiece. The boss was very strict with his employees, very particular about how he wanted the altar set up. Me: Well of course he was! If the ghosts think you don’t give a fuck then they’ll get fucking pissed off lah! Alec: Dear, I think maybe the Taoists would have a more sophisticated way of explaining thi… Me: No lah! I bet if you could just understand what the boss was telling his employees in Hokkien… Alec: He’d be saying “This altar looks like you pulled it out of your wife’s cunt”? Me: Your mother’s smelly cunt. 2 Alec: Oh yah, sorry. beat Alec: Okay, you’re right. We really suck at date night. Takeaway ↩ Explained in full Hokkien glory here. ↩ Date Night We had a date night. It involved Burger King and Bruno, and so gave rise to numerous jibes from me that we suck at date night. On the way home, we had this conversation: Alec: I love Hungry Ghosts month. Yesterday when I was walking home with our ta pau 1, the guys at the bike shop were setting up their little altar outside. It had a bike wheel as its centrepiece. The boss was very strict with his employees, very particular about how he wanted the altar set up. Me: Well of course he was! If the ghosts think you don’t give a fuck then they’ll get fucking pissed off lah! Alec: Dear, I think maybe the Taoists would have a more sophisticated way of explaining thi… Me: No lah! I bet if you could just understand what the boss was telling his employees in Hokkien… Alec: He’d be saying “This altar looks like you pulled it out of your wife’s cunt”? Me: Your mother’s smelly cunt. 2 Alec: Oh yah, sorry. beat Alec: Okay, you’re right. We really suck at date night. Takeaway ↩ Explained in full Hokkien glory here. ↩ Choirjoy I discovered the PS22 Chorus today through Copy, Right? and despite having to work on a Saturday night (after already working late every night this week) I now have a huge smile on my face. A little googling suggests I might be one of the last people to have heard of them – such is the fate of someone who doesn’t read Perez Hilton or follow Ashton Kutcher on Twitter, I guess – but on the off-chance that you haven’t either, I’d love to share them with you. This beautiful cover of Pictures Of You was the first thing I saw by them, and the reason I promptly went to Youtube to watch everything else I could find. It’s a little strange at first seeing these 5th graders sing with the sort of slightly cliched actions they must have seen in countless music videos, but you soon stop thinking about it and just enjoy their guilelessness. The arrangement is great too, with an a capella beginning which they handle very well and lovely accompaniment on the piano by their teacher, who is clearly the coolest music teacher ever. The next performance I really like is of one of my favourite Tori Amos songs  (their teacher is a huge Tori fan and has arranged many of her songs for them to sing), 1000 Oceans. It’s especially amazing that what you see in the video is after just two practices! I certainly don’t remember my primary school choir being ANYWHERE as impressive, though that could have been because I was in it. On the assumption that 1000 Oceans is less likely to be known to the readers of this blog than the other two songs in this post (yes, I do sometimes like chick singers, it’s not all guttural screaming and walls of feedback in my iPod), here’s Tori singing the original so you can compare. The studio version’s better than the live version I linked to, but it appears there’s been a Youtube crackdown on her studio versions. This might be one of those rare times when I like the cover as much as the original. I saved the best for last, not because it’s necessarily the best performance they’ve done but because, as happy as the other two performances make me, this is the one I’ve listened to repeatedly tonight while ploughing through contracts. I’ll Be Your Mirror has long been one of my favourite love songs and I wanted to put it on our wedding playlist, but took it out in the end because I didn’t think the subtleties of the Velvet Underground and Nico suited a wedding dinner particularly well. If only I’d known about this version back then. Choirjoy I discovered the PS22 Chorus today through Copy, Right? and despite having to work on a Saturday night (after already working late every night this week) I now have a huge smile on my face. A little googling suggests I might be one of the last people to have heard of them – such is the fate of someone who doesn’t read Perez Hilton or follow Ashton Kutcher on Twitter, I guess – but on the off-chance that you haven’t either, I’d love to share them with you. This beautiful cover of Pictures Of You was the first thing I saw by them, and the reason I promptly went to Youtube to watch everything else I could find. It’s a little strange at first seeing these 5th graders sing with the sort of slightly cliched actions they must have seen in countless music videos, but you soon stop thinking about it and just enjoy their guilelessness. The arrangement is great too, with an a capella beginning which they handle very well and lovely accompaniment on the piano by their teacher, who is clearly the coolest music teacher ever. The next performance I really like is of one of my favourite Tori Amos songs  (their teacher is a huge Tori fan and has arranged many of her songs for them to sing), 1000 Oceans. It’s especially amazing that what you see in the video is after just two practices! I certainly don’t remember my primary school choir being ANYWHERE as impressive, though that could have been because I was in it. On the assumption that 1000 Oceans is less likely to be known to the readers of this blog than the other two songs in this post (yes, I do sometimes like chick singers, it’s not all guttural screaming and walls of feedback in my iPod), here’s Tori singing the original so you can compare. The studio version’s better than the live version I linked to, but it appears there’s been a Youtube crackdown on her studio versions. This might be one of those rare times when I like the cover as much as the original. I saved the best for last, not because it’s necessarily the best performance they’ve done but because, as happy as the other two performances make me, this is the one I’ve listened to repeatedly tonight while ploughing through contracts. I’ll Be Your Mirror has long been one of my favourite love songs and I wanted to put it on our wedding playlist, but took it out in the end because I didn’t think the subtleties of the Velvet Underground and Nico suited a wedding dinner particularly well. If only I’d known about this version back then. Canon Falls Fired From The Canon is a list of ten allegedly classic books which contributors to online literary journal The Second Pass suggest you refrain from reading. I enjoyed reading the list, partly because I like snark but more because I think their reasons against reading each book, whether or not I agree, are thoughtfully yet succinctly expressed. Out of the list, I have read: White Noise (Don Delillo): THANK YOU JESUS. You know that thing about judging other people based on their literary/musical tastes? I rarely do that since I adore plenty of people with tastes I detest, but after reading this book I remember thinking that I could probably never be on the same wavelength as someone who loved it, and their writeup is spot on as to why. One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez): I disagree. The book does feel as if it takes ages to get through, but Garcia Marquez books usually give me some of the most immersive and atmospheric reading experiences I’ve had, so I don’t like to rush through them anyway. I’m hardly an expert in the genre of magical realism and perhaps it is, as they assert, “now thoroughly clapped out”, but out of the various other magical realist books I’ve read, none has delighted me and sustained my reading attention as much as One Hundred Years of Solitude. The Road (Cormac McCarthy): I gave this five stars in my 2008 reading rundown, so clearly I disagree. They may be right that it pales in comparison to Cormac McCarthy’s other books (I haven’t read any others yet, so don’t know) but as compared to the larger literary universe it more than holds its own. The Rainbow (D.H. Lawrence): Read this while I was supposed to be studying for first year law exams. I found it interesting enough at the time, perhaps because the alternative was reading about property law, but now I can’t remember anything about it at all. On The Road (Jack Kerouac): Yes, most of this was tedious for me. I dimly recall one bit of writing I liked, something about being in a jazz club. The Corrections (Jonathan Franzen): I liked some of the writing, as I commented at the time, but their criticisms are fair too. It felt laboured and inconsistent. Canon Falls Fired From The Canon is a list of ten allegedly classic books which contributors to online literary journal The Second Pass suggest you refrain from reading. I enjoyed reading the list, partly because I like snark but more because I think their reasons against reading each book, whether or not I agree, are thoughtfully yet succinctly expressed. Out of the list, I have read: White Noise (Don Delillo): THANK YOU JESUS. You know that thing about judging other people based on their literary/musical tastes? I rarely do that since I adore plenty of people with tastes I detest, but after reading this book I remember thinking that I could probably never be on the same wavelength as someone who loved it, and their writeup is spot on as to why. One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez): I disagree. The book does feel as if it takes ages to get through, but Garcia Marquez books usually give me some of the most immersive and atmospheric reading experiences I’ve had, so I don’t like to rush through them anyway. I’m hardly an expert in the genre of magical realism and perhaps it is, as they assert, “now thoroughly clapped out”, but out of the various other magical realist books I’ve read, none has delighted me and sustained my reading attention as much as One Hundred Years of Solitude. The Road (Cormac McCarthy): I gave this five stars in my 2008 reading rundown, so clearly I disagree. They may be right that it pales in comparison to Cormac McCarthy’s other books (I haven’t read any others yet, so don’t know) but as compared to the larger literary universe it more than holds its own. The Rainbow (D.H. Lawrence): Read this while I was supposed to be studying for first year law exams. I found it interesting enough at the time, perhaps because the alternative was reading about property law, but now I can’t remember anything about it at all. On The Road (Jack Kerouac): Yes, most of this was tedious for me. I dimly recall one bit of writing I liked, something about being in a jazz club. The Corrections (Jonathan Franzen): I liked some of the writing, as I commented at the time, but their criticisms are fair too. It felt laboured and inconsistent. Chek Jawa At Long Last I’ve wanted to walk the Chek Jawa intertidal wetlands at Pulau Ubin ever since I returned to Singapore after university, and after about six years I finally managed it. This was back in June, but first I was slow about processing the photos, and then Michael Jackson died. A little background for anyone reading this who isn’t from Singapore: when nature enthusiasts discovered that the government planned to reclaim this area, they conducted a biodiversity survey, submitted a report to the government, and petitioned against the reclamation. They were partially successful – the government agreed to defer its plans until 2012, but after that Chek Jawa’s fate remains unknown. In the meantime, the National Parks Board has had to balance huge public interest in the area against the necessity to preserve the fragile ecosystem. An elevated boardwalk takes you through the wetlands without letting you trample them into oblivion, but if you want to actually set foot on them you have to register for a guided walking tour. These are only available on a handful of dates per quarter, due to the need for suitable tide levels and times and of course in order to control visitor impact, and are so wildly popular that places are snapped up almost as soon as the tour dates are released. Boardwalk and viewing tower After trying and failing to get on these tours since 2003, I was delighted when my company got a block booking and organized an employee outing. I’d missed the opportunity to join a previous employee outing because all available places were taken as soon as the email advertising it was sent out, but this time they sent out the email quite late on a Friday evening and I was one of the few poor sods still at work. Score, kind of! So here are some pictures of what I waited 6 years to see. I’m a little drained from all the Michael Jackson posts – they’re not easy for me to write – and tonight I enjoyed a change of scene. The puddled ground of the sandbar shimmered in the morning sun.   Fiddler crabs scurried back and forth on the sand.   Tinier crabs clambered in and out of little assembled sandball piles, their homes. These are dotted everywhere and it’s almost impossible to avoid stepping on one every now and then. Sorry, crabs. :(   Our guide showed us: A hermit crab which matched its home The ghostly moulted shell of a flower crab A flamboyant rock starfish And its disco underbelly A suggestively ribbed sea cucumber A glistening, jade-green carpet anemone Please, Powers That Be, let things remain as they are in this beautiful part of Singapore. And just for once, let civilization advance no further. Chek Jawa At Long Last I’ve wanted to walk the Chek Jawa intertidal wetlands at Pulau Ubin ever since I returned to Singapore after university, and after about six years I finally managed it. This was back in June, but first I was slow about processing the photos, and then Michael Jackson died. A little background for anyone reading this who isn’t from Singapore: when nature enthusiasts discovered that the government planned to reclaim this area, they conducted a biodiversity survey, submitted a report to the government, and petitioned against the reclamation. They were partially successful – the government agreed to defer its plans until 2012, but after that Chek Jawa’s fate remains unknown. In the meantime, the National Parks Board has had to balance huge public interest in the area against the necessity to preserve the fragile ecosystem. An elevated boardwalk takes you through the wetlands without letting you trample them into oblivion, but if you want to actually set foot on them you have to register for a guided walking tour. These are only available on a handful of dates per quarter, due to the need for suitable tide levels and times and of course in order to control visitor impact, and are so wildly popular that places are snapped up almost as soon as the tour dates are released. Boardwalk and viewing tower After trying and failing to get on these tours since 2003, I was delighted when my company got a block booking and organized an employee outing. I’d missed the opportunity to join a previous employee outing because all available places were taken as soon as the email advertising it was sent out, but this time they sent out the email quite late on a Friday evening and I was one of the few poor sods still at work. Score, kind of! So here are some pictures of what I waited 6 years to see. I’m a little drained from all the Michael Jackson posts – they’re not easy for me to write – and tonight I enjoyed a change of scene. The puddled ground of the sandbar shimmered in the morning sun.   Fiddler crabs scurried back and forth on the sand.   Tinier crabs clambered in and out of little assembled sandball piles, their homes. These are dotted everywhere and it’s almost impossible to avoid stepping on one every now and then. Sorry, crabs. :(   Our guide showed us: A hermit crab which matched its home The ghostly moulted shell of a flower crab A flamboyant rock starfish And its disco underbelly A suggestively ribbed sea cucumber A glistening, jade-green carpet anemone Please, Powers That Be, let things remain as they are in this beautiful part of Singapore. And just for once, let civilization advance no further. Remembering Michael Jackson (Part 4): Actually, A Total Freaking Dancing Machine (The title of the post, for anyone who’s just come in via Google, is a reference to the previous instalment of this series.) Michael Jackson was always very open and reverential about who influenced him as a dancer, and I think it’s only fair that any showcase of his dancing begins with one of his major inspirations. Here are two clips of them sharing the same stage, the second roughly twenty years after the first: Another influence I’m not sure many people know about is Marcel Marceau, and in this video of Michael dancing at home he incorporates a number of classic mime moves into his freestyling: What else went into Michael Jackson’s dancing? If you thought you noticed elements of tap in the infamous Black or White panther dance, you were right. I always wanted to see him do more tapping, but due to being born too late to watch the Jacksons TV series, I had to wait until someone uploaded this full-on fabulous number to Youtube: Of course, as James Brown pointed out in the first clip, Michael eventually transcended most of these influences in his own dancing’s blend of rippling smoothness with robotic precision. Like I said in the first post, what initially drew me to Michael Jackson was how he could transfix you even while dancing to very slow music. This compilation of various moves from his live performances of Stranger In Moscow during the HIStory tour is another example of how he could take a ballad and make it into a showstopping dance display: The last little-known highlight I’d like to feature is the 1997 music video, Ghosts. To be honest the video itself is extremely hokey and best explained as a “because I can” project where Michael indulged various silly escapist fantasies he was evidently fond of. The downside of this is that the plot is embarrassing – suspicious townspeople helmed by mean mayor gang up on weird new guy in town who lives alone in a creepy mansion and likes entertaining their kids, weird new guy challenges mayor to a scare-off at which point a bunch of Renaissance Fayre ghouls materialize and join weird new guy in spectacular dance, weird new guy eventually wins scare-off after “possessing” the mayor’s body and making him boogie down comically against his will, mayor vamooses leaving a mayor-shaped hole in a glass window, and all is well…OR IS IT??!! The upside is that Michael is obviously having the time of his life, playing the mayor as well as himself, and helming dance sequences far more challenging than the one in Thriller. You can watch the whole video if you want but don’t say I didn’t warn you about the hokeyness. I saved you some cringes by finding this version which just compiles all the dancing bits, including Michael’s rather excellent fatsuit-clad performance as the involuntarily funky old mayor: (As an interesting aside, watch from 4.00 onwards in this making-of video to see Michael talking to the camera while dressed in his mayor costume. I mention it because I have rarely ever seen him speak with as much comfort and ease as he shows here, and I can only guess it’s because of the costume. He always loved being in disguise, perhaps because it made him feel somewhat freer from the confines of being Michael Jackson.) Remembering Michael Jackson (Part 4): Actually, A Total Freaking Dancing Machine (The title of the post, for anyone who’s just come in via Google, is a reference to the previous instalment of this series.) Michael Jackson was always very open and reverential about who influenced him as a dancer, and I think it’s only fair that any showcase of his dancing begins with one of his major inspirations. Here are two clips of them sharing the same stage, the second roughly twenty years after the first: Another influence I’m not sure many people know about is Marcel Marceau, and in this video of Michael dancing at home he incorporates a number of classic mime moves into his freestyling: What else went into Michael Jackson’s dancing? If you thought you noticed elements of tap in the infamous Black or White panther dance, you were right. I always wanted to see him do more tapping, but due to being born too late to watch the Jacksons TV series, I had to wait until someone uploaded this full-on fabulous number to Youtube: Of course, as James Brown pointed out in the first clip, Michael eventually transcended most of these influences in his own dancing’s blend of rippling smoothness with robotic precision. Like I said in the first post, what initially drew me to Michael Jackson was how he could transfix you even while dancing to very slow music. This compilation of various moves from his live performances of Stranger In Moscow during the HIStory tour is another example of how he could take a ballad and make it into a showstopping dance display: The last little-known highlight I’d like to feature is the 1997 music video, Ghosts. To be honest the video itself is extremely hokey and best explained as a “because I can” project where Michael indulged various silly escapist fantasies he was evidently fond of. The downside of this is that the plot is embarrassing – suspicious townspeople helmed by mean mayor gang up on weird new guy in town who lives alone in a creepy mansion and likes entertaining their kids, weird new guy challenges mayor to a scare-off at which point a bunch of Renaissance Fayre ghouls materialize and join weird new guy in spectacular dance, weird new guy eventually wins scare-off after “possessing” the mayor’s body and making him boogie down comically against his will, mayor vamooses leaving a mayor-shaped hole in a glass window, and all is well…OR IS IT??!! The upside is that Michael is obviously having the time of his life, playing the mayor as well as himself, and helming dance sequences far more challenging than the one in Thriller. You can watch the whole video if you want but don’t say I didn’t warn you about the hokeyness. I saved you some cringes by finding this version which just compiles all the dancing bits, including Michael’s rather excellent fatsuit-clad performance as the involuntarily funky old mayor: (As an interesting aside, watch from 4.00 onwards in this making-of video to see Michael talking to the camera while dressed in his mayor costume. I mention it because I have rarely ever seen him speak with as much comfort and ease as he shows here, and I can only guess it’s because of the costume. He always loved being in disguise, perhaps because it made him feel somewhat freer from the confines of being Michael Jackson.) Remembering Michael Jackson (Part 3): Not Just A Dancing Machine If there’s one thing eight seasons of American Idol has taught me, it’s that you can have a great voice but if you don’t know how to connect with the song you’re singing, to be there in every note and emotion regardless of whether the song actually has personal resonance for you or not, then you’re no singer. Michael Jackson was certainly an astonishing child singer, which is why his cover of a Smokey Robinson song about a relationship gone sour, made before Michael even left grade school, remains more famous than any other version of that song sung by an adult. But while people justifiably rave about how he sang as a child, I also love what he brought to his songs as an adult. He didn’t necessarily have much more personal experience behind some of these songs than he’d had when he was eleven, I think, but he sang with more stylistic versatility. And as much as I enjoyed the staggering purity of his childhood voice, I also got tingly whenever his adult voice roughed things up.  But let’s start at the beginning for now, because if I start with some of the adult tingly songs this post will go in a whole other direction. From Michael’s childhood releases the average person probably knows I Want You Back and ABC best, but one of my favourite vocal performances by him at this age just before his voice broke is Got To Be There. I love the tenderness in the verses, and his power and control at “the moment I know she loves me” and “I need her sharing the world beside me”. Soon after this Michael’s voice started to break, he shot up in height, and he got terrible acne. Adolescence can be a tough time even for people who don’t have to live through it in front of the world, and he’s written about feeling as if people were disappointed when they met him in his teenage years to find that he wasn’t the button-cute little boy with a voice reaching the rafters any more. Everyone already knows Ben, so instead I’ll feature this sensitive, wistful performance of With A Child’s Heart, from a 1973 appearance on Soul Train. The slightly deeper voice didn’t actually deprive Michael of that much vocal range in the higher registers, as Don’t Stop Til’ You Get Enough shows, and every MJ impersonation ever done inevitably portrays him with a feminine voice. But he was equally capable of going low if a song called for it. Who Is It is a good example of this, and the a capella version demonstrates this even better than the album version. Until I heard the a capella version I had never noticed that in the first verse, for the lines “I gave her everything inside one heart could find” and “I gave her promises and secrets so untold”, his voice momentarily flits down by a fifth on the last words of those lines. For the musically inclined, I pitch that as somewhere around a low A (as in, the second A below middle C), which is more within baritone range than tenor. He reaches the same low A when he’s doing the bass part of the Who Is It beatboxing.    Another favourite a capella listen of mine is Dirty Diana, because I’ve always enjoyed the soft and hard edges of his voice in this song. I also really like it when he just goes gospel and lets things “get ugly”, in the words of my favourite American Idol contestant ever, Fantasia, a rather spectacular gospel singer herself. I want to feature Keep The Faith here, because it seems to be a relatively unknown and very underrated song. Listen not just for Michael’s vocals but also for the exuberant a capella throwdown between Michael and the choir (the awesome Andrae Crouch Singers, who also sang at his memorial service). And  if you haven’t recently watched the 1988 Grammy’s performance of Man In The Mirror, skip past the first half of it (which is lipsynced) and watch from 3.30 onwards to watch him absolutely throw himself into getting ugly, beautiful, high, low, everything. Remembering Michael Jackson (Part 3): Not Just A Dancing Machine If there’s one thing eight seasons of American Idol has taught me, it’s that you can have a great voice but if you don’t know how to connect with the song you’re singing, to be there in every note and emotion regardless of whether the song actually has personal resonance for you or not, then you’re no singer. Michael Jackson was certainly an astonishing child singer, which is why his cover of a Smokey Robinson song about a relationship gone sour, made before Michael even left grade school, remains more famous than any other version of that song sung by an adult. But while people justifiably rave about how he sang as a child, I also love what he brought to his songs as an adult. He didn’t necessarily have much more personal experience behind some of these songs than he’d had when he was eleven, I think, but he sang with more stylistic versatility. And as much as I enjoyed the staggering purity of his childhood voice, I also got tingly whenever his adult voice roughed things up.  But let’s start at the beginning for now, because if I start with some of the adult tingly songs this post will go in a whole other direction. From Michael’s childhood releases the average person probably knows I Want You Back and ABC best, but one of my favourite vocal performances by him at this age just before his voice broke is Got To Be There. I love the tenderness in the verses, and his power and control at “the moment I know she loves me” and “I need her sharing the world beside me”. Soon after this Michael’s voice started to break, he shot up in height, and he got terrible acne. Adolescence can be a tough time even for people who don’t have to live through it in front of the world, and he’s written about feeling as if people were disappointed when they met him in his teenage years to find that he wasn’t the button-cute little boy with a voice reaching the rafters any more. Everyone already knows Ben, so instead I’ll feature this sensitive, wistful performance of With A Child’s Heart, from a 1973 appearance on Soul Train. The slightly deeper voice didn’t actually deprive Michael of that much vocal range in the higher registers, as Don’t Stop Til’ You Get Enough shows, and every MJ impersonation ever done inevitably portrays him with a feminine voice. But he was equally capable of going low if a song called for it. Who Is It is a good example of this, and the a capella version demonstrates this even better than the album version. Until I heard the a capella version I had never noticed that in the first verse, for the lines “I gave her everything inside one heart could find” and “I gave her promises and secrets so untold”, his voice momentarily flits down by a fifth on the last words of those lines. For the musically inclined, I pitch that as somewhere around a low A (as in, the second A below middle C), which is more within baritone range than tenor. He reaches the same low A when he’s doing the bass part of the Who Is It beatboxing.    Another favourite a capella listen of mine is Dirty Diana, because I’ve always enjoyed the soft and hard edges of his voice in this song. I also really like it when he just goes gospel and lets things “get ugly”, in the words of my favourite American Idol contestant ever, Fantasia, a rather spectacular gospel singer herself. I want to feature Keep The Faith here, because it seems to be a relatively unknown and very underrated song. Listen not just for Michael’s vocals but also for the exuberant a capella throwdown between Michael and the choir (the awesome Andrae Crouch Singers, who also sang at his memorial service). And  if you haven’t recently watched the 1988 Grammy’s performance of Man In The Mirror, skip past the first half of it (which is lipsynced) and watch from 3.30 onwards to watch him absolutely throw himself into getting ugly, beautiful, high, low, everything. Remembering Michael Jackson (Part 2): Beatboxing and Songwriting Since Michael beatboxed us out of the previous post, we might as well continue on that note. I didn’t know what beatboxing was until Michael blew me away with it during his interview with Oprah Winfrey. There are more impressive beatboxers around, obviously, but for Michael, beatboxing wasn’t part of his performances, it was part of his composition process. He didn’t read or write music, so beatboxing into a tape recorder was his method of assembling the complex rhythms he heard in his head. Here’s a handy compilation of clips of Michael beatboxing (how much do I love Youtube?). Some are from interviews, and others are from depositions he gave in various lawsuits where other people had accused him of copyright infringement. As part of the depositions he’d describe exactly how he wrote the songs, playing back the demos from the time or demonstrating the beatboxing then and there. He won all the lawsuits. For anyone who’s interested in hearing more of the depositions, there are longer audio clips available (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) where he goes step by step through the demo of The Girl Is Mine and explains exactly what’s happening in each stage of the creative process. I find it utterly fascinating - you get to hear him imitating a Moog bass and singing melody lines for each other instrument he wants to use, singing bits that never made it into the album version, and I particularly like how he explains what the “bridge” of a song is: What a bridge is, is to take you from A to B…is to take you from the verse to another part. It is escapism from hearing the same mundane, trivial, ordinary thing that you’ve been hearing all the time ‘cause the ear gets tired of hearing the same sounds. So what a bridge does, it takes you away from all of that. Then when it finally comes back to what you were doing before, it’s stronger. It’s much stronger. Remembering Michael Jackson (Part 2): Beatboxing and Songwriting Since Michael beatboxed us out of the previous post, we might as well continue on that note. I didn’t know what beatboxing was until Michael blew me away with it during his interview with Oprah Winfrey. There are more impressive beatboxers around, obviously, but for Michael, beatboxing wasn’t part of his performances, it was part of his composition process. He didn’t read or write music, so beatboxing into a tape recorder was his method of assembling the complex rhythms he heard in his head. Here’s a handy compilation of clips of Michael beatboxing (how much do I love Youtube?). Some are from interviews, and others are from depositions he gave in various lawsuits where other people had accused him of copyright infringement. As part of the depositions he’d describe exactly how he wrote the songs, playing back the demos from the time or demonstrating the beatboxing then and there. He won all the lawsuits. For anyone who’s interested in hearing more of the depositions, there are longer audio clips available (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) where he goes step by step through the demo of The Girl Is Mine and explains exactly what’s happening in each stage of the creative process. I find it utterly fascinating – you get to hear him imitating a Moog bass and singing melody lines for each other instrument he wants to use, singing bits that never made it into the album version, and I particularly like how he explains what the “bridge” of a song is: What a bridge is, is to take you from A to B…is to take you from the verse to another part. It is escapism from hearing the same mundane, trivial, ordinary thing that you’ve been hearing all the time ‘cause the ear gets tired of hearing the same sounds. So what a bridge does, it takes you away from all of that. Then when it finally comes back to what you were doing before, it’s stronger. It’s much stronger. Remembering Michael Jackson (Part 1): Billie Jean After Motown 25 Heresy warning: the Motown 25 performance of Billie Jean is not my lover. It may have been the stuff of legend, but when I first watched it, I was totally underwhelmed. Because from the perspective of someone who was too young to have seen the Motown 25 performance and who only saw Michael perform it in 1992, by 1992 he’d got even better at it, and he’d added that extraordinary coda of sheer dance virtuosity which was the highlight of every concert.  (Trivia time: here’s the sort of perfectionist Michael Jackson was – despite the universal instantaneous acclaim for the iconic Motown 25 performance, including a congratulatory phone call from Fred freaking Astaire, Michael still wasn’t satisfied with how he’d done because one splitsecond of the performance wasn’t perfectly executed. Can you guess which bit? Answer’s at the bottom of the post.1 ) It’s hard to pick just one performance of Billie Jean to feature because every performance was a little different and he always changed up the coda a bit, but here’s one from the HIStory tour which I particularly like. (Bear in mind he was 38 at this point and the performance was in the middle of his exhausting 2 hour long live show.) He didn’t max out the moonwalk in the middle as much as he did in other performances but the coda (starts at 8.26) is one of the best I’ve seen, and I love how he beatboxes himself to the song’s last line. When he went up onto his toes after the moonwalk, he’d intended to freeze there a splitsecond longer than he did. You can see it in the Motown 25 video around 4.17. Now watch any performance of Billie Jean from the years that followed and you’ll see he never messed that part up ever again. ↩ Remembering Michael Jackson (Part 1): Billie Jean After Motown 25 Heresy warning: the Motown 25 performance of Billie Jean is not my lover. It may have been the stuff of legend, but when I first watched it, I was totally underwhelmed. Because from the perspective of someone who was too young to have seen the Motown 25 performance and who only saw Michael perform it in 1992, by 1992 he’d got even better at it, and he’d added that extraordinary coda of sheer dance virtuosity which was the highlight of every concert.  (Trivia time: here’s the sort of perfectionist Michael Jackson was – despite the universal instantaneous acclaim for the iconic Motown 25 performance, including a congratulatory phone call from Fred freaking Astaire, Michael still wasn’t satisfied with how he’d done because one splitsecond of the performance wasn’t perfectly executed. Can you guess which bit? Answer’s at the bottom of the post.1 ) It’s hard to pick just one performance of Billie Jean to feature because every performance was a little different and he always changed up the coda a bit, but here’s one from the HIStory tour which I particularly like. (Bear in mind he was 38 at this point and the performance was in the middle of his exhausting 2 hour long live show.) He didn’t max out the moonwalk in the middle as much as he did in other performances but the coda (starts at 8.26) is one of the best I’ve seen, and I love how he beatboxes himself to the song’s last line. When he went up onto his toes after the moonwalk, he’d intended to freeze there a splitsecond longer than he did. You can see it in the Motown 25 video around 4.17. Now watch any performance of Billie Jean from the years that followed and you’ll see he never messed that part up ever again. ↩ Remember The Time With apologies to anyone getting tired of Michael Jackson talk, I barely scratched the surface of what I wanted to say about him in my previous post, so there’s more to come. It’s mainly due to the surreal realization that I’ve never heard Michael Jackson spoken about with such respect, admiration and compassion in all the years I’ve been a MJ fan than I have these past few days after his death. I never used to try explaining to non-fans what I liked about him because I felt people were uninterested at best, and actively hostile to him at worst. Now the mass media is awash with tributes and while I understand why most tributes concentrate on the same obvious things like I Want You Back, Don’t Stop Til’ You Get Enough, the Thriller video and the Motown 25 performance of Billie Jean, these don’t actually match my own list of what I will remember him most fondly for. So, the next few posts will loosely represent a personal highlight list of sorts. Fans will already know them, but I’m hoping that anyone else who comes across these posts, perhaps newly interested in him since his death, will find something there to enjoy. Based on the title of this post I should end by embedding that funfest of a video, but I’m feeling pensive and this lovely song from 1975 matches my mood better. Remember The Time With apologies to anyone getting tired of Michael Jackson talk, I barely scratched the surface of what I wanted to say about him in my previous post, so there’s more to come. It’s mainly due to the surreal realization that I’ve never heard Michael Jackson spoken about with such respect, admiration and compassion in all the years I’ve been a MJ fan than I have these past few days after his death. I never used to try explaining to non-fans what I liked about him because I felt people were uninterested at best, and actively hostile to him at worst. Now the mass media is awash with tributes and while I understand why most tributes concentrate on the same obvious things like I Want You Back, Don’t Stop Til’ You Get Enough, the Thriller video and the Motown 25 performance of Billie Jean, these don’t actually match my own list of what I will remember him most fondly for. So, the next few posts will loosely represent a personal highlight list of sorts. Fans will already know them, but I’m hoping that anyone else who comes across these posts, perhaps newly interested in him since his death, will find something there to enjoy. Based on the title of this post I should end by embedding that funfest of a video, but I’m feeling pensive and this lovely song from 1975 matches my mood better. Only Human (Michael Jackson, 1958-2009) Believe it or not, I made it to 1991 without knowing much about Michael Jackson. My brother loved the Pet Shop Boys and Depeche Mode and my sister loved musicals, so those were what I learned to love, along with the classical violin and piano that I’d been playing from a young age. I knew who Michael Jackson was and could probably recognize Thriller, Beat It and Bad if they were playing over the shopping mall sound system, but compared to knowing most of the Pet Shop Boys discography by heart and having transcribed (together with my sister) most of the lyrics to Les Miserables by hand, that really wasn’t much. When I started listening to pop music a bit more on my own, I also started looking out for the music award shows Channel 5 would usually screen on public holidays. This was pretty much all I could get in those days before Singapore had cable TV, so I’d tape the award shows and watch them over and over until the next public holiday. This is how I saw the MTV 10th Anniversary show, which, incidentally, didn’t just introduce me to Michael Jackson, but also to a particular band fronted by a skinny guy wearing a beanie and singing plaintively about being in the spot, light, losing his religion. Michael opened the show with Black or White, which I knew but didn’t like (still hate it), and Will You Be There, which was new to me. As I went through my rewatching ritual over the next few weeks, the Will You Be There performance became the part of the show I watched the most repeatedly. At first I just liked it for its spectacular staging, with the backing choir on raised platforms all over the stage. Then I also started enjoying the song – I hated the soppy bit at the end, but really liked the verses and that gently propulsive beat. And finally, the man performing the song started to fascinate me. He’d been electric in the Black or White part of the performance, sure, but there was something special about him in the slower song. Until then I’d thought pop stars only danced to fast beats and I’d never seen someone move so rivetingly to what was essentially a ballad. It wasn’t even the big moves that hooked me, it was all the tiny ways in which he inhabited the music – the subtle pops of his shoulders even as the rest of him was ostensibly standing still 1 and the way he could make just taking three steps across the stage into something sinuous and hypnotic. 2 And while I know most people will not be able to understand this, I also found him very physically attractive. I don’t think I was at all aware that I was supposed to find him strange looking, because to me Michael Jackson had always looked like this. I thought his long hair was cool. I liked his piercing eyes and the way his smile lit up his whole face. I didn’t know he was black, but I didn’t know it was supposed to matter that he no longer looked that way. To this day, although I do find Thriller era Michael very handsome, I still love looking at Bad and Dangerous era Michael most of all. Fast-forward a year, and you have 12-year-old me in the nosebleed seats for the first of two dates he does in Singapore for the Dangerous tour. He postpones the second date because of a migraine, to the anguish of many fans who’ve flown in from all over South-east Asia to see him and can’t change their return tickets. I raid my angpow money, persuade my mother to drive me to where people are lining up to get refunds, and I walk up and down the line pleading until I score a 10th row ticket. Fast-forward 2 years from that, and in 1994 my family is among the early adopters who get Internet access at home. One of the first things I do online is to join a Michael Jackson mailing list. There aren’t any Singaporeans on the list when I join, but one year later I see an email from a Singaporean called Kelly, asking about the making of the Thriller video, and I promptly get in contact. I later also grow close to two other Singaporean fans, and the four of us spend many happy hours together, united first by Michael Jackson fanhood but soon also by firm friendship. There are eventually quite a lot of Singaporean members of the mailing list, and we even have a local MJ fan club and magazine, which I contribute some articles to.  Fast-forward 2 more years to 1996, and please don’t tell my mum the horrifyingly lewd things 16-year-old me screams to Michael from my place in the front row of his HIStory tour gig in Singapore. (I get this golden ticket because of one of the dear friends I’ve made from the mailing list.) Earlier that year I’ve already seen Sonic Youth live, the band that changes the way I listen to music forever, but seriously? Nothing ever really compares to front row at a Michael Jackson concert. And now, fast-forward 13 years to 2009, when I wake on the morning of Friday 26th June to two text messages on my phone from the friends I first met over a decade ago, both with awful news. I spend the day in a numb daze, comforted only by contact with those few people who understand how I feel, and an amazing outpouring of text messages, emails and calls from other friends who, whether or not they understand how I feel, understand enough to guess that their friend is really fucking miserable. There is so much more I haven’t written here, and it’s quite possible that the stuff I’ve left out of this post will lead someone to conclude I’m one of those blind fans who’d support Michael Jackson even if he were a child molester. (I wouldn’t, but based on everything I know about the allegations made against him, I don’t believe he ever was. And trust me, the number of other things I wanted to slap him silly for is probably longer than any list a non-fan could ever come up with.) I might write about all that stuff another day, but none of it was the reason for this post. This post is to capture where I find myself now, several days after his death, where the picture emerging is one of a deeply unhappy person too flawed and troubled to save himself from himself, surrounded by an entourage of handlers who could not or would not help either, a person whose artistry spoke to millions but left him, in the end, so totally alone. And I find myself back at the beginning, with the words I first heard him sing eighteen years ago. And I’ve never found a soppy song so bloody heartbreaking before. But they told me A man should be faithful And walk when not able And fight ’til the end But I’m only human Around 4.40 in the video ↩ Around 5.00 in the video ↩