riverrun

Just wanna give a shout out to my young hoodlums down yonder at the village green:

Oh, yeah, this bag? I bought this at the MoMA before you were old enough to watch The Hunger Games without adult supervision, so you can SUCK THAT, HOES.

how

I like to imagine the scene of my dying as the death of Rue in The Hunger Games. Of course the precocious die young. Don't peak when you're in high school.

I've been thinking about 

1) How modalities work within a text.

2) How retarded it is that I spent the entire weekend being sick.

3) This choral piece that deconstructs and reconstructs Purcell's Hear My Prayer O Lord and how singing   is such a cerebral experience.

4) That snake in China with the clawed hand.

5) How I browsed the Management section at the library ironically, and then thought to myself THESE BOOKS ARE FOR SQUARES but then realized that a majority of library users check out these books, and then I felt that life isn't really worth living because I am obviously a space cadet without grounded, feasible ambitions and an overly inflated sense of self.

6) The idea that cat paw pads look like beans.

7) I can't type properly because I took some salbutamol and my hands are shaking!

8) Chocolate is GREAT

9) Greatness is subjective

10) Subjective experiences are very Vogue

11) I buy too many magazines because I fantasize about placing them casually on the coffee table 

12) Organizations that produce coffee table books about themselves are very presumptuous

13) I spelt presumptuous wrongly at first. Thank God for spellcheck.

14) Grammar check does not exist because the computer companies want to appease language Nazis.

15) Because language Nazis don't run the world; they sit and gripe at the sidelines, and this is precisely my bleak future.

resembling

OK, so it's Saturday morning and I'm sick, and watching the pilot episode of HBO's Girls, and it's very rainy outside. I like the dialogue and the situations the characters get trapped in because it's very urban (they live in Greenpoint, Brooklyn) and quasi-literary (Hannah interned at Melville House and this is evidenced by the stacks of Tao Lin books displayed around the office) and also very cosmopolitan (Jessa flew from Greece to France — oh actually she did a week in Bali — and then to New York) and has very Judd Apatow humour, like if McSweeney's shorter fiction came to life, this would be it. 

The problem that most people have with the series is that it's a show about white people and their post-college, pre-employment problems. It doesn't depict the racial diversity in the location that it's set in, or the experiences of women across race, sexuality and socioeconomic class, despite the inherent claim in its title to a broad spectrum of experience. But it isn't so much the lack of representation that is the real issue — after all, sometimes some people just have friends of similar colour, duh. It's the misrepresentation of non-white individuals, or reliance on new urban stereotypes, that I have a bone to pick. For example, the other intern at the publishing house is Chinese/Korean and she is mocked for being good at Photoshop and her apparent insensitivity (she doesn't realize Hannah is leaving because she had just lost her internship). These two obvious traits about her, the only traits we can know about her, are played up for laughs. 

"Where are you going? Will you get me a lunar bar? And a smartwater and vitaminwater?"

And in another particularly striking moment, a nameless black man tells Hannah to smile more.

We are given the impression that he is one of those crazy folks you meet on the street. Still, he speaks one of the more meaningful lines in the episode, because, you know, Wisdom From The Gutter.

Thus, in Girls, the only Black man in New York is mentally unsound, and the only Asian girl is an insensitive nerd. That said, these are rather unfair points of critique based on the viewing of just the pilot episode, but if it's any indication of what is to come, then the series — no matter how brilliant its portrayal of an urban, coming-of-age experience in arguably the most expensive city in the world — started off on a racially dubious note.

even in cities

I had a terrible day at work,  despite being at home the whole day. 

Dear self, remember this: if you ever feel terrible about leaving this place on that long-awaited day in December, here's another reason not to. You have learnt that people are self-entitled monsters, and that sometimes not caring is also caring. Such is life, whatever.

Anyway I have this wicked craving for a double down, but I'm not so hot about fast food never being served as they appear, blown up in full colour, in advertisements. See also: just about every Big Mac I've eaten in my entire life. And I also had baked tempeh with soy sauce and agave nectar for dinner, so even my desire to eaten gluttonously and irresponsibly is left unfulfilled. Additional note to self: buy a new bag of quinoa. I've actually run out of quinoa! Dear self: that's impressive!

culture snobs on youtube, a.d. 2052

"Nikki_Austen_756?????? In my time, we listened to REAL MUSIC like Justin Bieber and Rihanna, not silly glitter-neo-victorian-jive music."

"This Nickelback cover sucks!"

"Thanks for the upload! My grandma used to play these SNSD songs on her dusty old iPod before bedtime. Now I play them to my children and adopted Fourth World children. R.I.P. gran"

"this is a PIANO. Learrn how to spell it,stupid."

"Im 8 and i love this song. i told my ex that i listen to classics like simple plan, justin bieber, usher, and he looked at me like i was sum werido and then he broek up with me." [top comment]

formal continuum

Has it come to this? That every unblemished, untattered issue of the Paris Review that I receive in the mail is tantamount to a minor miracle, ranked slightly below the Wedding at Cana? Living in Southeast Asia is THE PITS. Anyway I recall saying that the only redeeming thing about Singapore is the food. This is subject to constant revision, and sometimes while queuing up in the impossibly claustrophobic Junction 8 McDonalds for insipid chicken, one feels that there is nothing that can redeem Singapore, not even the Gongcha a floor above (and jaded looking staff whose combined ages would not exceed that of ageing rocker Mick Jagger), not even the weird "fast casual Italian" eatery next door.

However, a meal at Saveur last evening behooved me to reconsider my harsh and uncharitable judgement against an entire culture — it still sucks, just not as badly as I thought. The portions were on the small side, but pleasingly so: the pork belly on a bed of al-dente (this term is getting annoying BTW) lentils was the right size for its fattiness, as were the other dishes that my compatriots in gluttony ordered. The best part of the experience was paying about 20 (notice how I'm not using the dollar sign? it's something that hip menus don't use anymore because typographically, it's distracting) for a meal complete with starters and dessert. I'm getting the duck confit on the bed of mash the next time I visit. The only grouse I had was that the mains were all kind of... beige-white-flesh coloured. Of course, this was probably because I didn't get the boeuf bourguignon, or that gargouillou wasn't on the menu. I want to make a meal a Saveur a weekly event.

black circle

You know how in movies and teen dramas, the usually well-paced and impeccably-dressed protagonist occasionally wakes up on the wrong side of the bed, has several pratfalls, encounters terrible people, and ends up looking a little worse for wear? And how there will be a scene in which there will be a dramatic breakdown, and said character will be all, like, "I'm sorry, I'm just having a very bad day," and upon this specific utterance everything terrible vanishes? Is this still a thing?

This morning I stepped into the train and discovered that someone had puked quite explosively all over the train cabin. Fleeing into the next cabin, I had the misfortune to meet a poster child for birth control who wanted to alight whenever the train doors opened, and threw a tantrum whenever his parents held him back. I was surprised to discover he wasn't retarded, and more surprised that his parents didn't let him run out into the station to leave him there forever. 

Then I had to change trains, but not before finding myself standing in the same line as a curmudgeonly old hag — wearing black tights because her delusions had led her to mistake immaturity for youth and fashion forwardness — who decided to pick a fight with a meek-looking man trying his best to avoid her. She was bitching about the queue. It's like, SORRY you're having such a hard time with your menopause and everything, but if you need to bitch you should bitch about more worthwhile topics like violence against women in developing countries. She will die without the knowledge of true happiness.

After which, I had to trudge down for choir practice, and that sucked for me because maybe I am not cut out for singing, and, speaking of cut, cut out my vocal cords already! They are no longer of any use to me. Give them away to someone who wants them, donate them to the Salvation Army, sell them to Damien Hirst so he may suspend them in a vat next to a shark and call it Art, I don't care. The ability to speak is the root of humanity's problems (I can't be bothered to substantiate this claim) and all I want to do is live in a cabin in a forest and perhaps die there, quietly, among the pines and the bulrushes, so that tawny owls may carry off my bones, scattering them throughout the woods while a Fleet Foxes song plays. It's all very Walden.

songs

I needed an excuse to add pictures to this text-driven blog, so:

(stolen from Angeline)

1. your reflection

2. colour

dispatches from quiet places

Two Departures and an Elegy

Adrienne Rich passed away last Thursday, and my maternal grandmother on Friday. Is the only connection between the two people one of death and mortality? After some thought, I think my emotional relationships with them are rather similar. With Adrienne Rich, I never quite knew how to approach her work. To me, reading Rich felt like an obligation that I had to undertake as a student. Her poetry was interesting insofar as they were rich in details to pad an essay with. In this light, I never experienced her work on an emotional, or even sensual, level. Only in her death did I discover her moving articulations of indignance and sorrow — a discovery that I now regret, having failed to appreciate the work of a living poet.

I felt the same way with my maternal grandmother: I only spoke to her as a matter of obligation, as a grandchild raised with a vastly different language and in a very different domestic environment. I never knew how to interact with her, and any effort to communicate would have led to dead-end conversations like Have you eaten? and — well I can't really recall anything more. So it is with some regret that I view her demise, vis a vis my own relationship with her. I wasn't really emotionally shaken when she passed away; only moved by other people's expression of that loss. But from my uncles' and aunts' (tearful) recollections of her selflessness, her strict pragmatism, and love, I could only imagine what the loss might have felt like from these secondhand encounters of my grandmother. 

Why elegy? After working on a mini essay about Susan Sontag that was also supposed to highlight my personhood (college applications are convinced that this is good for everyone), I decided that everything is an elegy, a kind of memento mori that speaks of an ineluctable transience that casts that shadow of mortality on the physical, and eventually the transcendental (Okay, iff ideas are drawn from the experience of materiality.) Speech about the dead is an elegy, the constraints of form and structure be damned. In fact, all speech is elegiac in some way — the proper nouns that we use now will become obsolete in the future, words will grow archaic, languages have no eternal shelf life, etc. etc. We are all going to die and everything is a testament to this.

Running and Eating, the Alternative Meaning of Life

I did some running recently. Okay, I ran 15 km with A on Sunday. The first 10 km did not hurt. The last five, however, made my thighs burn afterwards. (BTW is lactic acid real? Why have I not seen it before? Can I emulsify it with olive oil for a vinaigrette?) One thing I really appreciated was the organisers' thoughtfulness in preparing cold towels for all the runners at the finish line. It is approximately a zillion times more refreshing that the hot towel that SIA distributes on the plane, a pompous expression of "We're so smug about our awesome service that we still give you cattle-class losers a hot towel for your unspeakably agonising 22 hour flight in front of that teething baby." In conclusion, I am glad to have run 15 km with A because I definitely wouldn't have done it alone, not with that distance and with that reporting time. 

We also had brunch (but after some delay it turned into lunch) with MX and S at PS cafe, that pretentious place for people with deep pockets and zero ability to cook their own brunch, which might have cost at least three times less with 8 times more satisfaction. My statistics are very exact, because, well, science!! Maybe I'm just bitter, as bitter as the old frisée in the salad that sat and cried next to my food, but if you have OK food at prices meant for Above OK food, then at least make up for your weird logic with More Than OK service! Is that so hard? Apparently for the employees at this establishment, occasionally serving diners fancy tap water that have vegetables inside more than makes up for that deficit. (Relatedly, I would not mind being slapped if I was to be served food that's basically an orgasm on a plate at no cost other than the infliction of physical violence, maybe some verbal abuse.) 

Inspired by the first proper meal I had in days, I browsed a copy of The French Laundry cookbook at the library and realised that I haven't cooked in quite a while, and I miss all the magical (ok, I know science can explain it, whatever) and delicious transformations that take place. I really want to host a picnic dinner at the new river at Bishan Park, and there will proper tableware and cutlery! No biodegradable disposable plates made of cornstarch! No plastic forks that break when you try to eat your steak! No supermarket sushi in-lieu-of proper food! We will not sit on plastic bags! Self-actualisation! Yay!