Blockhead.

All weekend I've been trying to write a document for work. A short document. Three lousy paragraphs. It's the end of the weekend, and let's just say I'm not crossing my final "t" yet. So much for that whole "oh, blogging will loosen all my mental muscles and help me with my writing in other areas" idea. Where's that loose muscle now, huh? Huh?!

Posted at 11:51 PM ||

 
Yes, I know that there are such things as male nurses. Still.

I was reading one of those macho, leering men's magazines, and found a quiz that will help you tell if you "married the right one." Question 6:

You have a regular and healthy sex life, but you've always felt that it could use a bit more spice. Your fantasy is to make love to her in a nurse's uniform. Do you:

A. Bring it up after a particularly good session of loving in the hopes that she's still high and very receptive. ["Ew. 'Receptive'?" --BL]
B. You tell her that your love life is getting boring and that you need something to get it going again.
C. Buy the uniform and command her to put it on. It is your conjugal right as a husband to demand the appropriate attire for all your lovemaking sessions.

Or, perhaps: "D. Realize you've got bigger problems, such as where to find some matching nurses' shoes for your huge-ass, tranny feet?"

Posted at 11:36 AM ||

 
My 80s mixtapes (3):
This bud's for you.

"Music Radio"
A: 1. Almost paradise, Mike Reno and Ann Wilson. 2. People are people, Depeche Mode. 3. Stuck on you, Lionel Richie. 4. 10-9-8, Face to Face. 5. If ever you're in my arms again, Peabo Bryson. 6. My ever changing moods, The Style Council. 7. When doves cry, Prince. 8. Susanna, The Art Company.
B: 1. Sister of mercy (remix), Thompson Twins. 2. Sad songs (say so much), Elton John. 3. Life on your own, Human League. 4. Now it's my turn, Berlin. 5. Back in the old country, Tom Robinson. 6. 80s romance, The Belle Stars. 7. Let's stay together, Tina Turner.

The year I turned fifteen, my parents left on a one-week vacation, and I had to fend for myself. Helpless, I would make myself a bowl of soup every day for lunch. The first time I did this, I overheated the Campbell's, and scalded my tongue so badly that I burned off every single one of my taste buds.

No, not really. That story is an absolute lie. I just can't think of how else to explain some of the crap that's on this tape. I taped "Almost paradise"? The love theme from Footloose? Footloose needed a love theme? As performed by a gruesome twosome of vocalists from Loverboy and Heart? How much hairspray did that recording session require? Also: Peabo Bryson?! Although more parents should name their kids "Peabo." And Lionel Frickin' Richie?! He's not even dancin' on the ceiling in this song.

Ah, bad taste. How lovely to find at least two kinds on this tape. There's the kind exemplified by all those MOR soft rock numbers, which I cannot bear to listen to today. Much better is the bad taste that just drips from The Art Company's "Susanna." That would be the so-naff-it's-good kind of bad taste (best consumed with irony, but just as good straight up). This was a novelty song by some group that has never been heard from since -- and indeed, barely heard of then. They were Dutch, I believe. And, indeed, why not be Dutch? I remember the song so well, and even playing the tape now I still can't resist singing along. How could you not? The reaction is encoded into the song, which sounds like it was -- but I believe isn't actually -- recorded in a pub, with at least tens of drunken people clapping and singing along. "Susanna! I'm crazy loving you!" "She says goodbye and I say...NOOOOOO!!!!" I so wish I could MP3 it for those of you who've never had it stuck in your head. You would hate me.

And yet, the tape has some moments of sheer and utter brilliance. One would be "Life on your own." I've always had a weakness for (1) narrative songs, and (2) songs with dramatic irony, in which the singer sounds like that's much more he or she isn't saying, but we can just about gather from between the lines. And here was a song with both; I had no chance. I loved this so much that I would, during particularly boring and slow classes, write out the entire lyric, from memory, in my notebook. To this day I still remember it. I also spent hours contemplating the meaning of the grammatical inconsistency: the singer is the one who's moved away, so why does the chorus see him singing about "you" wanting a "life on your own"? Will I ever know?

The other great moment on this tape is "80s romance." The Belle Stars, who were on the Stiff label, are remembered, if they're remembered at all, for their version of "Iko Iko" (especially when it was used, years later, in Rain Man), or perhaps for "Sign of the times." But I am most enamored of this track, even though I see clearly that it's practically a carbon copy of "Sign of the times." (I was thrilled to get this off the radio, and just as excited to find the 12" in the cutout bin not too long after. One day this will be the song that'll spur me into digitizing my records. Nope. Can't find it for download.) The song is a kiss-off to an errant lover, and includes lines like "You always come but you never stay," which would earn a "you go girls!" if I could only pull it off.

Also notable: the version of "My ever changing moods" is a lovely piano-only mix, while "Sister of mercy" is in its rare 7" version. Another story song, that, and one about a crazed woman who snaps and goes homicidal. Is it me, or was this a trend -- what with The Pretenders' "Thin Line Between Love and Hate" -- for a brief moment in 1984? Oh, and I totally taped "Back in the old country" because I had heard that Tom Robinson was openly gay. That was the only reason, because the song is pretty atrocious. If you're going to do a jaunty sing-a-long number, you should just do "Susanna." Susanna! I'm crazy loving you!!

Here's where I say goodbye, and you, you say "NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!"

Posted at 11:51 PM ||

 
I've got the "you don't know the half of it, dearie" blues.

One solution. Not mine.

Running late this morning, I nevertheless took a minute out to mentally congratulate myself for getting my shit together last night: ironing my shirt, gathering the files I needed for work, picking out the right CD for my discman. But when I actually tried to pull on the shirt, I realized that I had ironed exactly half of it.

I feel like I'm very close to being in an Oliver Sacks book.

Posted at 11:08 AM ||

 
An evening with Benson.

Beardsley has a new boyfriend, which is why I've only seen him once in the past few months. I'd need many extra limbs to count the number of times formerly-single friends disappeared the moment a new beau arrived on the scene, so I'm not even very bothered by that.

Over the weekend, Beardsley asked me out for drinks, so that I could meet the new man. Since my Saturday nights are no longer pledged to a group of hot soldiers, I said, sure. Turns out I really should have just transferred my affections to Adam Baldwin and Firefly instead.

I don't want you to get the wrong idea: the new boyfriend, who I'll call Spinner, was fine. No, wait, I'm sorry. When I said I don't want you to "get the wrong idea," I really mean that I don't want you to get the right idea. The right idea being that I didn't like Spinner much, I judge, and I judge after one brief meeting. And who am I to judge? Openly? But this is not the entry about men who date self-obsessed men who say "like" all the time; I'm going to need more claw-sharpening time for that. No, the evening was a wash because conversation was just so fluffy and boring. I'm all for the occasional useless, mentally-unchallenging night out, but…

There was another man with us, a guy who I'll call, taking my cue from his attire, Tankie. If this seems like a name that could apply to many of the other men in the joint, well, then you see my point. Encouraged by Spinner and Beardsley, Tankie spent all evening fixating on people walking through the doors of the bar, and announcing who he knew and didn't. When he did recognize someone, off he would go to "say hello" before returning to our table to pretend to be overwhelmed by how popular he is. Well, it was tragic, but probably not in the way he thought. At one point he enumerated his homies for us: "See, my volleyball friends are over there; and then those are my chillout buddies; and of course, how embarrassing, there're men here that I'm dating and men I used to date!!!"

First of all, do people really designate a group of friends as "chillout buddies"? Unless that's a drug reference, it makes no sense to me. How tense are you with your other friends, anyway? Second, you're not the town crier, nor the butler. There's no need to announce everyone who walks through the bar, and especially no need to tell us how they're related to you. You are not actually the center of the universe. Third, just…shut up. You tire me. I get it. You get around. You're head cheerleader. You're prom queen. You're princess of the rodeo. And there are a few other choice words for you.

Yes, meanwhile the choice words for me are "huge crank."

Posted at 6:49 PM ||

 
Please, write your congressman.

Hi. I'm Heather, and I'm the guest blogger today. Brittle considers me his favorite dog in the whole world. Can you blame him? I'm adorable. I live with my dad in a city on the east coast of America, so I don't get to see uncle Brittle very often. But I send pictures.

I'm writing today to encourage you to join me in my campaign. As you can see from the picture, I've a sweater on, and I'm not happy about it. It's a hardcore sweater, with four sleeves and everything. It was given to me by an aunt. She means well. And it has been a cold winter -- I would know, because I have to take my dumps outdoors.

However, I HATE this and all sweaters. You think my dad doesn't know that? He puts the sweater on me when he's had a long day and there's nothing on TV. Because he knows I get all spastic when I have it on. I can't help it -- it feels like a straitjacket, and freaks me out. I go stiff. If I were a cow this would be the moment to tip me over. Instead, my dad picks me up and tosses me around like a football. And he laughs his head off. It's highly humiliating. I didn't evolve from monkeys for this.

To recap: dogwear is the evil invention of squirrels, and should never be allowed to exist. So, please. Help stamp out dog sweaters.

["Oh, cry me a river. It's not like you have fruit on your head." -- Anonymous Kitty]

Posted at 1:17 AM ||

 
Lost and found in translation.

I've spent the past few days thinking how awesome it would be if I walked around with my very own subtitles. To have my every word translated -- into what I haven't quite decided, but I am leaning towards some obscure language -- by a little line of text (or, given how much I yap, several huge blocks of words) that freely floats below my chin would be most excellent.

If nothing else, there will be the potential for comedy gold. Many of the English programmes on TV here add in Chinese subtitles; since I understand both languages, I often enjoy idly reading along. And I laugh. It's not that the translations are flat-out wrong, but subtitlers often have trouble, understandably, with idiomatic expressions. Some recent favorites include:

(1) a dazed woman in a film announces that she has gulped down quaaludes, while the subtitle notes, all stone-faced, that she has "taken some medicine";

(2) a team of two reality-show contestants who are "dating" get slapped with a clinical label which says that they "have an appointment";

(3) a participant on Discovery's Body Challenge tells another that he will "kick [her] ass," while the subtitle demures that one will beat the other's buttocks.

But I specifically started thinking about employing my own subtitles after watching, a few days ago, the Japanese-Thai film Last Life in the Universe, which uses them to great effect.

The film, set in Thailand, details a budding relationship between a Japanese man and a Thai woman; he speaks some Thai and she speaks some Japanese, so sometimes they just opt to communicate in the limited English they know. I like the film quite a lot. It's marvellously shot (by Christopher Doyle, who often works with Wong Kar-Wai), and has a kind of beautiful stillness that works really well with -- in that it almost negates, or balances -- the surreal and bizarre tone of the plot. And the performances are uniformly fantastic and moving.

Anyway, subtitles therefore play an important part in the film (I have to believe that they were done by the filmmakers, and not some captioning company). There were several moments when the female lead is clearly making fun of the man, so she slips into a scathing snippet of Thai that she knows he wouldn't understand. Likewise, he says several things too complicated for anything but a Japanese that she couldn't comprehend. On such occasions, the movie withholds subtitles, neatly alternating us between the characters, and perhaps also putting us into something like a space between them.

But also, I love the film and its subtitles for widening my vocabulary. At one point the woman teases the man by saying that he "must masturbate a lot." Surprisingly, I have no idea what the literal Chinese expression is -- and I never did find out, because the subtitles opted for the delightfully euphemistic "you must spend a lot of time shooting your handgun." It's even funnier in the Chinese -- where it's somehow more literally hand/gun -- but I guess you'll have to take my word for it.

In other news, I've been listening to Rufus Wainwright's cover of "The origin of love," from a tribute album to Hedwig and the Angry Inch. I love Rufus, I love the song; it seems like a match made in heaven and I practically had an orgasm when I heard about its existence. So I'm sad to report that the track sounds hastily-done and just...bad. I hope you mourn with me.

Posted at 6:48 PM ||

 
My 80s mixtapes (2):
The British are coming, the British are coming!

"Britian's [sic] Best"
A: 1. Young at heart, The Bluebells. 2. Absolute, Scritti Politti. 3. Yippee yi yay, Dee C. Lee. 4. The ghost in you, Psychedelic Furs. 5. Talking loud and clear, OMD. 6. Thin line between love and hate, The Pretenders. 7. Heaven knows I'm miserable now, The Smiths.
B: 1. Breakin'…there's no stopping us, Ollie and Jerry. 2. I won't let the sun go down on me, Nik Kershaw. 3. Two up two down, Haircut One Hundred. 4. One better day, Madness. 5. Farewell my summer love, Michael Jackson.

(If you have no idea why I'm blogging about a bunch of songs, this explains it.)

You really know you have an 80s musical relic when there's a song about breakdancing, eh? That, and when it also includes a track by Michael Jackson back when he was black.

A relief to see that I opted for a calmer title this time -- no delirious exclamation points! -- but what an embarrassing spelling error. (I remember that I recognized the mistake the minute I wrote it down, but still.) As that title indicates, however, this compilation is much more British (or Britsih); possibly I had discovered some Anglo chart show on the radio that was tape-able.

It's a good comp, and still pleases today. Many of the artists are well-known, but are here represented by slightly less famous numbers: OMD's unique-sounding "Talking loud and clear" (I even have an extended version here); Madness, whose "One better day" is great but atypically melancholic; and even the Psych Furs, because it's not, for once, "Pretty in pink."

That description doesn't quite apply to The Bluebells, who are not a household name, but start the tape off with their biggest UK hit (a #1 when it was re-released after being used in an ad). But while I quite like the band, I didn't, and still don't love "Young at heart." On a trip to London in the mid-90s, I even bought their Singles Collection (for £3.99 from HMV, the still-intact price sticker informs me -- score!). Once I got over my shocked disbelief that the band had enough singles or even songs to collect, that is (although at least they didn't call it "greatest hits" or a "best of" -- yeah, I'm talking to you, Johnny Hates Jazz). Interesting factoid I learned from the CD's credits: Elvis Costello produced several of their early singles.

Anyway, I don't like "Young at heart" because it's so determined to be Scottish and jaunty. Bananarama, whose Siobhan Fahey co-wrote the song, did their own much-better version, where they sing the title line in a less annoyingly-insistent way. But the Bluebells had other good songs: "Cath," "I'm falling," and "H.O.L.L.A.N.D.." (the last despite how it always makes me think of high school autograph or yearbooks).

Bluebells aside, since several artists are represented by their more obscure numbers, this means there are some rarities on here. One is "Yippee yi yay" by Dee C. Lee, who started off as the Style Council's backing singer. As you might expect from that song title, however, this is a rather nonsensical little ditty that's not a patch on her brilliant other singles, "Come hell or waters high" and "See the day," which I hope are on other tapes.

The other big rarity on here might be Haircut One Hundred's "Two up two down." The band is known, of course, but this song is not from their big album Pelican West. Does anyone remember this? I think it was the first single they put out after Nick Heyward left, and was probably the taster for their second album, the long out-of-print Paint and Paint. It would all go horribly wrong after...

Speaking of which, there's a joke to be made about seeing "I won't let the sun go down on me" in such close proximity to "Michael Jackson," but you can insert it yourself. Fish, barrel.

Posted at 11:09 PM ||

 
Show me the way.

There are ants in my kitchen. This is disturbing, because I was under the impression that there is no food there, and it bugs me that the ants apparently know better.

Posted at 8:34 PM ||

 
I don't even mind their trench feet.

I would be remiss if I didn't take a moment to mourn the end of what, for the past ten weeks, has been my standing Saturday night date with a group of easy men.

These men are not in fact easy, but that joke certainly was. I've been watching Band of Brothers, that Steven Spielberg-Tom Hanks (or "Spanks," as the funny recaps at TWoP call the team) produced mini-series about WWII as seen through the experiences of Easy Company of somethingsomething Regiment in the somethingsomething Division.

Yes, the TV station here just got around to screening the two-year old show; in its defense, perhaps it thinks that the subject of war is, you know, topical. A trailer produced for the very last installment took scenes from the episode, about the end of hostilities, and added a caption that said "No more…", before an intentionally-abrupt edit stopped the heart-warming music and took us to a black screen with a single sentence: "2003: Bush declares war on Iraq." Oooh, irony! That's actually quite barbed for our TV station, so I wasn't surprised when, a few days later, I saw the same trailer -- except this time, the last title card had been replaced by one simply listing the wars that had been fought since 1945, but this time ending with: "2003: Osama bin Laden." Cough.

Anyway, I've really enjoyed the series, even sans all the swearing, more than I thought I would. I wasn't expecting the series to be great because of Spanks's prior effort Saving Private Ryan. Its much-praised gritty realism aside, the movie didn't impress me much because I thought it set up an interesting ethical dilemma only to chicken out of it. The film purported to consider whether it was worthwhile sending a group of men to save the life of one Pvt. Ryan, but as cast and as played by Matt "My Hair Is So Shiny and Blonde" Damon, that one soldier is so pure, so all-American that the debate was rendered moot. The movie would have been so much more interesting to me had Pvt. Ryan turned out to be a complete raging asshole. With a weight problem. And bad teeth.

Band of Brothers in contrast pretty much avoids all pretence of being interested in the ethics of war (there's some: when we see soldiers looting and exacting vengeance). By absolving itself of this responsibility, the mini-series frees itself to only concentrate, for the most part, on the manly bonds between the soldiers, which it does very well. It says a lot about Spielberg, of course.

So, yes, manly bonds. Enough with the insights into Spielberg. Let's talk about the hot men. You know, war is hell, but more hellish still is having to choose between the smoldering hunks that populated every foxhole in the show. So I won't.

Actually, I have to say that I've found myself more attracted to the characters than the actors. Wow. Maybe I'm deep. Although of course it's really the "characters" as played by some fine actors, which is good, since it would probably be a little creepy for me to walk around with crushes on real-life men I've never met. But then again that's never stopped me before. So I've been smitten, for instance, with the hilarious character of Harry Welsh, despite the fact that the actor who plays him -- Rick Warden -- is funny looking, with a gap-toothed smile and some seriously steel wool hair. And then there's soulful, stoic medic Eugene Roe, played by Shane Taylor. I never knew that a Cajun accent did things for me until this show. Whisper "traiteurs" in my ear again, Roe! I almost didn't enjoy seeing this dark side of myself. Damn you to hell, Hitler!

Posted at 11:10 PM ||

 
Crash goes love.

If you find yourself, during the dying minutes of Valentine's Day, sucking dry the last of a cosmopolitan and then dropping one of the cashew nuts you were eating, thereby prompting you to reach, while still sitting on your chair in front of the computer, for the nut that suddenly seems all-important but is just a little out of your grasp, which results in you falling out of your chair onto the floor, then you just might need to have a bit of a rethink.

Posted at 11:47 PM ||

 
Airtight defences.

Buying sushi, juice, and dishwashing liquid at the grocery store today, I had to listen to five or six piped-in Air Supply songs, which I soon began to think were somehow being sung subtly out of tune.

There are several things potentially wrong with that statement (hint: none of them have to do with the first part of it). One, you would imagine, is "listen to five or six Air Supply songs," which for most people is five or six too many. But maybe the thing that's really disturbing is that I know Air Supply songs well enough to be able to tell when they are -- subtly -- out of tune.

Since this is the week for embarassing musical confessions, I hereby admit that I sort of liked Air Supply when I was younger. I have a memory of myself sitting around, and I seem to be ... practising ... drawing ... the official Air Supply logo. I could claim that I had a huge interest in graphic design at that point, and so was as fascinated with the aesthetic quality of the logo as anything. And that would be sort of true.

I am all out of love.

I could claim that my interest in the band was borned of nationalist fervor, because at one point the group included a Zingerborean member. Rex Goh was allegedly the first man from this country to be "in an internationally successful pop group," and we were told to be awed by that. But he looked like a muppet, and was also only in the group for about three seconds. So that claim would be not true at all.

I could claim that, as a budding wordsmith, I liked the band because of the names of their frontmen. I mean, Russell Hitchcock, Graham Russell? Why, that's almost palindromic!

Ok, yeah, I've got nothing. I actually just liked the power ballads, even when they were penned by Jim "male-hysteria" Steinman. I was fourteen. What did I know? Though at least I can use the past tense. The group is actually still "going," apparently make their living doing nostalgia tours of Asia, and were here not too long ago. One of the secretaries at work has their CDs playing on her computer all the time. When she's not "working," of course.

Anyway, I'm now really curious about that CD that was being played in the store. I really want to know, don't know how to find out (google Air+Supply+Out+Of+Tune+CD?), and am afraid to find out. Were my ears just playing tricks on me? (I looked around, and none of my fellow shoppers seemed perturbed. Maybe God was testing me?) Or did the band recently re-record their hits and their engineer spited them by not cleaning up the vocals? It probably was this, although it didn't sound like a live CD. But maybe the audience was just making very little noise -- asleep, or dead.

In other less embarassing musical news -- although, who knows? Call me in twenty years -- I bought the new Dimitri from Paris In the House CD, and also the latest Hed Kandi compilation. The latter, Winter Chill, has been so delayed that it mentions last year in its subtitle, and it took forever to make it to our shops. Good grief. Winter is almost over here, you know.

Posted at 8:09 PM ||

 
Ticket-seller by day, performance artist by night.

Here's the latest in the series of my movie-going reviews.

Me: The 7:30 showing of Lost in Translation, please.
Ticket-seller: Huh?

I don't make this stuff up.

(As for the movie itself: like many people, I did wish that the movie had more narrative shape, though I can see how the episodic nature lent itself to the film and its themes. [Which is also to say that I think Sofia Coppola made an interesting movie, but I'm not convinced she's necessarily a great filmmaker yet.] But that penultimate scene, in which Bill Murray allows a million emotions to flit across his face as he poses for the photograph while looking off to the side for Charlotte, and then his unheard, final whisper into her ear, are really quite wonderful.)

Posted at 6:32 PM ||

 
My 80s mixtapes (1):
In which my subconscious breaks some news to me.

"Chart Action! Best of the World"
A: 1. Only when you leave, Spandau Ballet. 2. Eyes without a face, Billy Idol. 3. I feel like Buddy Holly, Alvin Stardust. 4. Dance hall days, Wang Chung. 5. Romancing the stone, Eddy Grant. 6. Dancing in the dark, Bruce Springsteen. 7. A fine, fine day, Tony Carey.
B: 1. Time after time, Cyndi Lauper. 2. Magic, The Cars. 3. The Lebanon, Human League. 4. Smalltown boy, Bronski Beat. 5. Infatuation, Rod Stewart. 6. Boys do fall in love, Robin Gibb.

So, here we go, with the very first tape I ever made. Unsurprisingly, the enterprise is a work in progress -- the sleeve is nothing more than neat handwriting on the provided cover, and the title is just a wee bit too excited and exaggerated (the best! of the world!!)

But music-wise, it's not a bad start. "Only when you leave" is still ace -- I'm especially partial to that bit in the middle when everything slows down, even though Tony Hadley is simply singing the first verse again (although: "laying in the afterglow"? Really?). "Eyes without a face" remains a classic, of course, and probably taught me my first French -- useful, too: "I'll have the fromage, and some les yeux sans visage." Sure, the Wang Chung-Eddy Grant stretch is horrifying (though at least it's not "Everybody Wang Chung tonight" and "Electric avenue," ack), but I'm not too ashamed about the inclusion of Bruce: in this context the song, with its bouncy synth line, sounds more new wave than rock. Meanwhile, "The Lebanon" still has the best bassline ever -- I'm kind of surprised that no one has sampled it for a dance track yet.

Alvin Stardust is a bit of a lost classic: a perfect statement about the potency of cheap music. But the real lost song on here, which I had actually forgotten about, is "A fine, fine day," though it came rushing back when I played the tape. I can sort of see why I liked it -- it has a good hook that compels sing-a-longage, even if back then I could never make out the second line of the chorus. Somehow I thought it was "it's a fine, fine day/for average union," which of course makes no sense, but we didn't have shoes or google in the 80s, and that's what mushmouth seems to be singing. Hell, I still hear it that way.

Though I was unclear on the exact lyric of "A fine, fine day," I either knew or sort of thought that it was very homoerotic: a loner of a man blows out of prison and into town, the singer is completely obsessed with him, and implores him, with a melodramatic rock ballad, never to leave again? Although, Tony, man, he's your uncle.

Actually, in hindsight the whole tape is kind of gay, from Bruce's born-in-the-US-ass to Tony Carey having a hard-on for his uncle. And while the track order on this and other tapes was entirely fortuitous, dictated merely by what came on the radio next, I have to believe that, even at fifteen, my subconscious was constructing some sort of narrative arc for me: Smalltown boys develop infatuations and do fall in love! Of course, everything else I was doing at that point was fully conscious.

What makes this subtext more hilarious is that I can see that I had originally recorded a seventh song on side B, but for some reason -- it was of poor quality, probably -- I must have taped over it. On the cover, I can just about make out what the song was: Nik Kershaw's "Dancing girls." And what did I tape over it, even though it went surreptitiously undocumented on the cover? Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Two tribes." Heh.

Posted at 11:41 PM ||

 
My 80s mixtapes: Radio ga ga.

It all began in 1983 or 84, when I won a couple of prizes in a competition, although, typically, I didn't even place first. Nevertheless, readers, it transformed my life.

Back in those simpler days, there was a singing competition on TV, called Talentime. As part of that they ran a contest that invited the adoring, enraptured homeviewers to predict -- not vote for, because this wasn't American/Pop Idol yet -- who we thought the winners would be. Fancying myself as good a talent-spotter as Lou Perlman, except, you know, not creepy and pedophiliac, I -- after consulting my copious notes ("Contestant 5: Perfect pitch, but too much melisma") -- dutifully filled out the contest form with my predicted order of finish.

When the results were announced, I didn't really get that many right, so it was a bit of a surprise when I found a letter weeks later telling me that I had won a consolation prize. One part of the prize was a gold plated watch (in retrospect a monstrosity, but I wore it proudly for a few years, until my arm fell off due to the poisoning). Another was a box of maybe five or ten Maxell blank cassette tapes.

Color me encouraged. I was fifteen or so, and was well aware of pop music by this time. I listened to the radio, and may even have started buying music -- hypothetically, let's say things like the Flashdance soundtrack -- but of course didn't have enough of a disposable income to purchase as much as I really wanted. With this prize in my trembling little hands, however, I realized that I could try taping music off of the radio, which, back in those days, was not yet niche-y and crap.

In particular, there was a request program on every week night, when the DJ, in his best Casey Kasem impression, spun popular numbers that some boy would dedicate to that girl who took the #17 bus and sat in the fifth row from the back every other third day, and Ohmigawd I LUV YOU 4EVA!!!! If you could tune out the putrid sentiments, this was really the ideal show to be taping, because it was one of the few times the DJ didn't talk over the beginnings of songs. You had to be alert, though: ever phobic about dead air, the DJ was prone to just abruptly shut it, whereupon the first note of a song would immediately blast. This wasn't a game for the constitutionally weak.

The endings of songs were more of a crapshoot. I was blessed that my family's stereo was quite a good one, with an all-important feature: a fader knob. This allowed me to manually fade the endings of songs, so I could be more certain of editing out the DJ. It was quite an art, if I may say so. On the one hand, you didn't want to fade too early and too quickly -- the song has integrity, after all, and needed to be whole. On the other hand: be too greedy and wait too long, and you're punished with the DJ yapping his flap over the dying notes. If this happened, as it sometimes did, I would have to sigh, rewind, write off the attempt as a lost one, and hope that someday somehow I would get a second chance to record that elusive Shakatak number.

So this was me, every week night: sitting beside the stereo with gigantic headphones on; hanging on the DJ's every word so that I wouldn't be surprised by the song coming up; trained to release the pause button spryly, deftly, to catch every first note; then, all tense, fingers ever-ready on the fader and pause button. (That's not even to go into all the traumatized second-guessing after a recording: sure, it was great to get the Modern Talking number in full, but do I need a Modern Talking number in full? And this Nick Kamen song got cut off early -- should I rewind and tape over? But what if Nick never ever gets played on the show again?) Those were white-knuckle evenings, but in this painstaking fashion would I thus fill a cassette with pop hits. It made each song more precious. And there was no turning back: when the original prize cassettes ran out, I was hooked and bought many more blank tapes. Home taping was thrilling music!

I was a sad, pathetic kid.

I recently found these compilations at my parents', arranged in order; each tape was meticulously produced, with unfussy but proper covers, and songlists. Yes, I was anally retentive even at that age. I like how they provide a picture of my developing musical tastes -- not an exhaustive picture, of course, since the song choices were subject to the vagaries of radio. Nevertheless, it was fun to rediscover them; after all, my CD collection only tells the story from around 1988, so these tapes are like little time capsules of me in the 80s.

So I've decided to record, for prosperity, the tracklistings of these compilations. If the tapes haven't rotted away or been eaten by the Moths of Good Taste, I'll even play each one as I blog (although it won't be as if I'm shooting 24 here). I'll probably document one tape every week until I run out, or until I lose interest in the whole enterprise, whichever comes sooner. It could be interesting -- or possibly deathly boring. But there should at least be many chances to snark on -- or memoralize -- the teenage me. I'll show myself no mercy; and you, you should be afraid, very afraid, for I will speak of Baltimora and Black Lace. Consider yourself duly warned.

Posted at 11:37 PM ||

 
Waste not, want not.

The Chinese New Year is a teeth-rotting time, which is one reason why I'm glad it ended last Thursday. (The year isn't over, of course, just the celebratory period, which is fifteen days long -- take that, Jesus!)

Traditionally, the festive season is filled with snacks and candy; most households will put out a selection of them on their coffee tables for visitors. (So it's like Halloween, except without the costumes and the deranged killers. For the most part.) In recent years, with the mass realization that kids hopped up on sugar let loose in expensively-furnished houses is perhaps not the best idea, the candy seems to be getting phased out.

Not being a big candy fan anyway -- also, not being seven anymore -- I don't lament this. There is, however, a sweet that I remember fondly from my childhood: white rabbit candy, which is around all year but tends to be especially popular during the New Year.

This bunny rocks. The taste of the candy isn't especially remarkable -- it's mostly like sweetened milk -- but what distinguishes it is how, after you peel back the first wrapper, the candy sits in another translucent wrapper, which can be eaten. It melts in your mouth! Awesome! Then after you ingest the wrapper, you'll hear hookah-smoking caterpillars calling to you. Or possibly I'm confused. Even without any hallucinogenic effects, the white rabbit and the whole edible paper shtick has lots of fans.

I've previously written a love letter to stuffed food, and to that I can add my love of food that comes close to being entirely consumable. Well, yes, that's a stupid way to put it, since many foods can be completely eaten. I guess I'm talking about food that comes in parts, and almost all its parts surprise you by being safely edible.

Of course, now that I've elegantly formulated this principle, I can only think of one other thing like that: the jackfruit. You can't eat the green husk unless your name is Gollum, but after humans scarf down the fleshy yellow part, you can boil the seeds and eat those too. It's not a well-known fact, that, and it also takes a little effort (in the sense that you have to boil water, a challenge for "cooks" such as myself), but the seeds are quite delicious.

So that's not quite like the effortlessly-edible wrapper of the white rabbit candy, but these two items, and the common idea that you can consume what at first seems like by-products and waste nothing, appeal to me. It probably says something about my upbringing, in which I was taught to be frugal and to eat everything, damnit, but let's not go there today, Oprah.

Next: an entry about my mysterious weight gain.

Posted at 1:25 PM ||

 
Philosophers working on the "which came first?" issue slipped through the cracks.

We mustn't panic. We mustn't panic.

We got the following delightful email at work today:

An outbreak of avian influenza, more commonly known as bird flu, has been reported in different parts of Asia and in our neighboring countries. The outbreak is caused by the H5N1 subtype of influenza A. Human cases also have been reported.

[We have] taken precautionary measures to reduce the risk of our community being inadvertently infected with the virus, in the light of the current outbreak in the region. Our immediate concern is the presence of poultry which some of our departments may keep for teaching and research purposes.

A recent survey conducted by the Safety Action Team concluded that [...] there is no live poultry. There are also no academic activities that involve handling of live poultry.

I mostly like the image of our undoubtedly high-priced and high-powered "safety team" knocking on doors, demanding to know if anyone is harboring chickens.

Posted at 2:22 PM ||

 
Monomania.

This is how my work day was bookended.

In the morning: my cab driver was so enraged by a car pulling into his path that he let loose a stream of invective that shocked my delicate sensibility, and then worried me as he showed every sign of wanting to follow the offending car to the point of becoming uninterested in actually taking me to where I need to be.

In the evening: I get an email response from someone who tells me that he is "surprised" that I showed no sign of knowing his research on such-and-such a subject, without considering that perhaps I don't know it because it's sparse and not especially well-known.

Posted at 5:20 PM ||

 
William, it was really nothing.

Billy is my boyfriend. Billy is tall, dark, handsome, and he gives good wood. Billy is solid and upstanding. Billy does get around, though; many of my friends have had him, although each glimpse of Billy gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling in the pit of my stomach.

My latest sighting of Billy occurred in a cinema tonight, where I was watching Good Bye, Lenin!, the film about a son who, ostensibly to protect his staunchly socialist mother who has just awakened from a coma, pretends that Germany has not been unified. (It's quite a marvellous movie, even if I spent some of it distracted by a sense that the actress who plays the sister looks like Kelly Clarkson with 80s hair.) In a gorgeous but surreal scene, the mother eludes her son and steps out into a changed East Germany. It looks as if the jig is up, as she sees numerous signs that the wall has come down, physically and symbolically. One of these literal signs of capitalism is a poster for Ikea: specifically, for the Billy bookcase (cost: apparently 98 marks, trivia fans).

Sudden and unexpected identification is a lovely thing. In the darkened theater, I emitted a half-squeal and then laughed, way too loudly for way too long. Billy Ikea is my sign of capitalism too! For most of the second half of last year, it was painfully obvious that I needed more storage space for my gajillions of CDs. I figured out that a Billy CD tower would fit in the limited space I have in my apartment, and the medium brown version would even match the existing shelves, not to mention the overall deco of my chic-wood flat. When my annual Ikea catalogue arrived in September, though, I was dismayed to see that the Billy line was no longer listed in medium brown. Oh. My. God. Could it be true? I see the beech, the birch, the dark grey, the white. Where is the medium brown?

It was January before I finally got up the courage -- okay, and the time -- to physically go to Ikea. Thankfully, Billy brown had not run off with Allan (the wrench); he was there, as lovely a vision as ever. The catalog lies. But my faith in capitalism was restored, and I am again secure in my belief that wherever I go in the world, I will always find McD*nalds, St*rbucks, and that young homemakers just starting to make their way in this world will more often than not furnish with Ikea. Always, Billy. Call me!

Posted at 11:09 PM ||

 
Breast face forward.

I had lunch yesterday with a few friends, one of whom, Kilo, I haven't seen in, as far as we could determine, about ten years. Another person at lunch I could recall last seeing about three years ago, at an all-gay dinner party. His main memory of that party was of one of the other guests, who according to him got drunk and tried to molest all the men present. Crushing information, since I have absolutely no memory of being felt up. I decided that I must have left that party early. My story, I'm sticking to it.

Anyway, Kilo's been spending his time in various countries, doing Altruistic Things. Two mutual friends had met up with Kilo before I did, and opined that this calling has actually changed Kilo for the worst, since he now had something bordering on contempt for the people he was supposedly helping. That's a disturbing thing, of course, so I mostly steered clear of asking about work at lunch, the better to preserve my sense of him as Mother Teresa.

Mother Teresa with a healthy sense of vanity, that is. Of all the gossip Kilo provided, the best was probably the tidbit about himself having recently had Botox treatments. Kilo is nearing forty, but in gay years -- or in his mind -- that's more like eighty. Though I mocked him mercilessly and feigned disapproval, I was also somewhat thrilled by my very first self-confessed self-mutilating friend. I made like Helen Keller and fingered his face, but sadly it felt like nothing. He apparently only spent less than US$200 on the injections, which made us VERY dubious about their quality. But Kilo was able to strike several expressions during lunch, so the treatment didn't seem too botched.

Kilo also told a long story about how he had heard about some woman being thrown out of a St*rbucks for breastfeeding her baby in public, which according to him prompted a feminist group to protest by staging a mass breastfeeding sit-in. It sounded like an urban legend to me, though I haven't found anything online. Anyway, if it's true, I'm sure St*rbucks was more annoyed by the idea that there was a competing source of milk in their store, and it all went against their policy of "no outside food to be consumed on these premises."

Posted at 8:29 PM ||