Hello, world! The only pattern in the rhythm of my writing is that there is no pattern. It has been 2 years, 3 months, and 7 days since the last weekly update – enough time to embark on a minor crusade, discharge conscription obligations in all countries (save Eritrea & North Korea), or produce 107 full-colour Sunday strips of the funnies.
Somewhat excusably, in this intervening period, I have also embarked on:
- 1 thesis adventure (on housing & development, itself spawning a dusty old blog)
- 3 trips (My Oxford graduation, a family visit to Hong Kong, and a jaunt to north Vietnam with my brother)
- 1 Instagram post (no more, no less, keeping it consistent in that regard)
- 2 sets of 2 university applications (1 going exceedingly well, barring my re-nationalservicisation, 1 pending)
- 1 chapter proposal (leading nowhere, sorry to my editors!)
- 1 website (locatable at www.serangoonreview.com)
- 8 board games[1] (so that’s where the time went)
- 8 gigs[2] (largely of the UK-adjacent bass music category)
My return to this blog is driven primarily by a desire to chronicle ongoing events and discoveries of my life, since the shame of an unfilled physical diary is ephemeral at best. For all the humdrum of doing human resources in the military, life is still filled with lovely, radiant moments that should be celebrated. A month or so ago, my brother turns to me: I’ve been keeping a gratitude journal where I put three things down each day. It’s been a pretty good habit. As for this blog, it turns out plenty of people close to me – including said brother – never knew about its existence, so hello!
Milton dashes across Vietnamese road, 2023. It is a pretty good summary of my past year, all things considered – especially since its companion photograph, Ernest sits still in Maju Camp, 2021-3, is under military embargo.
The second motivation has the people around me; those with creative engines of people around me hum & thrum their way, and from whose minds beautiful things unfurl. Whether close or distant I want to celebrate the work of ML[3], NYW[4], DL[5], LC[6], CCY & JC[7], ZZ[8]. In some cases, too much time has elapsed since our previous conversations,[9] but quiet observation from far produces its own inspirations.
Where a more self-critical/procrastinatory me would find fault with my past categories of Reading & Writing & Listening & Doing, March 2023 me just wants to write. Rather than compressing 27 months of updates here, I shall peaceably settle for sharing recent ones.
Reading:
I struggle to finish long books, especially when available only digitally. Woe befall the man attempting Mason & Dixon off a Kindle, nor did Pynchon’s more recent Bleeding Edge fare any better as a hard copy. Another book I love the concept of, David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, has been borrowed twice from the library to little return/two returns. It is less that postmodernism is necessarily a drag, and more than the collagic whirlwind of fractured consciousnesses, perspectives and realities also bifurcates my attention between book pages and mazelike online references.
Help!!!
What therefore surprised me was how fantastic a read Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree was. The first time I (digitally) cracked it open on a flight to Hanoi I had to struggle with an offline copy of the Merriam-Webster[10] every other paragraph – nonetheless, it is a book that rewards, rather than punishes its readers with the paucity of plot viz density of vocabulary. My review (written on a plush carpet from office, retirement impending):
Rivers meander, churning up fish and foam, depositing silted memories on their shores. Cities sprawl in their own way, decay and dilapidation exercising their chokehold amidst underhanded dealings and bare life. Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree forsakes plot or linearity, instead whiling between these two zones– both givers and takers of life, through which time flows like water or traffic through the streets, seasons come and go like the motley crew of Knoxville-dwellers. These characters have vastly different trajectories of love and loss, while deprivation, disease and depredation lurk around every corner. Kindness and cruelty mingle like scum on water – omnipresent, intertwined, and settling into every surface.
The delightful difficulty of McCarthy’s prose is immediately apparent from the prologue. His vocabulary is not just precise, but neological . Stinking houseboats, belching waterfronts, dank tenements and bitingly-cold winters are rendered in ways that transcend verisimilitude, and test readers to enter a terra nova of the imagination wherein the simple act of grasping a fish (cupreous, placoid, glaucous) renders it as simultaneously literary and more-than-real. Or, as James McWilliams articulates – such terms ‘pin down a hidden reality otherwise lost to the vagaries of inexactitude’.[11]
More could be said about the ephemerality of life – across fairly self-contained chapters, the titular character spurns numerous opportunities, some by chance, some familial, to make new connections. Genuine, romantic desire is snuffed out in acts of god or madness, while financial windfalls invite brief jaunts into the city that do not change his fate. What unexpectedly endures is McCarthy’s biting sense of humour, laughter and joy mingling with death and decay. Suttree buffets a reader’s senses with the sounds of words and ghostly images – churning and circulating like booze in veins. I was sad to see this colossal epic end, unlike the exhaustion that The Road or Blood Meridian left me with.
—
On the nonfiction front, Jon Savage’s This Searing Light, The Sun and Everything Else has been living well up to being Joy Division: The Oral History. Looking at the article chosen (The History? Why not A History?) tells us some about authorial ambition – and the first few pages deliver, with a view of Manchester and Salford as a vision of industrial modernity gone wrong that lays the pipes for musical dissonance and punk (post-, original) going right. There are some fascinating anecdotes here about the Manchester Punk scene (‘The idea [behind C.P. Lee’s stage show Snuff Rock] was to get an unemployed kid every night, then get them to commit suicide onstage as part of the band, so live or die they’d make a million’), the oft-forgotten Nazi connotations of Joy Division (of comfort women, prompting some perplexed reviews in contemporary magazines[12]), and of course about Ian Curtis itself.
The unmediated manner that Savage presents the voices of Joy Division’s members, affiliates, revelers etc. through is reminiscent of other monologic, unrestrained oral histories (Svetlana Alexeivich, Studs Terkel etc.) with little authorial gloss or intervention. Rather, these accounts, rarely exceeding a page at a time, are sequenced chronologically. In doing so, Joy Division’s history unfolds as the history of a mere band, contingent on all these chance meetings at record shops or knowing the right promoter and paving over each members’ oddities; yet also a resplendent, era-defining band, with the payoff to their meandering rise to prominence pure classics like Unknown Pleasures.
A funny story – I meant to pick this up at BooksActually once when it first was released, but blinked and missed it. Cue a visit to Esplanade library, after some unmalicious misinformation about the library’s demise (it lives) and there it was! A known pleasure amidst tomes of music writing on genres I don’t care for. Currently I’m on the chapter October 1978 to May 1979 (across the pond, Francis Ford Coppola releases Apocalypse Now; around the world, it is the birth of the 21st century, if one believes Christian Caryl).
—
This week, I also took a closer look at two manuscripts (which really could be thought of as manuscripts about manuscripts, writing about writing). Not going into too much detail since they are undergoing rework for publication, but what a joy it is to see ideas sculpted and take shape, or jump into the intellectual and creative trajectory of someone, media-res to tease out how their texts took their shape. Just the editor DNA in me talking (per my friend SY: “i have to say ure interests in things are very meta”), but in a world where so many dreams have their wings clipped, why shouldn’t being a passenger on these fairly-formed flights bring happiness?
Listening:
The troubling thing about splitting a Spotify subscription with a friend’s brother is that none of the sunk cost fallacy creeps up on you, and my listening platforms are a spiralling mess across YouTube, Soundcloud, and Mixcloud too. Over the past year I’ve increasingly turned to two DJ-focused channels that could not be more different – the vinyl-heavy My Analog Journal with its guest DJs spinning tours across genre, region and time, and green-tinged, grungy underground Keep Hush for all things UK bass. More aligned with the latter is FOLD, broadcasting straight outta a lift[13] – I remember being enamoured with Tim Reaper’s set amongst others.
There’s recently been an exciting revival in jungle, pushed by producer-DJs like Dead Man’s Chest, Coco Bryce, or my personal favourite, Nia Archives.[14] The centre of orbit of jungle, moreso than drum and bass or dubstep, remains in the UK – of course this is fairly natural given the genre’s origins[15], but I’ve always considered Singapore unusually marginal as far as music tours go. Cue my pleasant surprise when Revision Music (helmed by Nez Senja, who has recognized most of my football kits whenever we’ve spoken) managed to bring Tim Reaper in for a night of jungle.
Perhaps this should be thought of as the return to a longer history of underground music, which as this Vice article elucidates, featured legends of the scene like Stevie Hyper D, dBridge, and LTJ Bukem. Scene veterans like Kiat, signed to flagship label Metalheadz have recently been joined by returning talents like Aresha (who spearheads the bimonthly Kings of Bass event), and recently, Vortex.
As for Tim Reaper’s set itself – rave reviews are especially unsuited to text, so take my word for it. It was good.
(I’m being facetious. There is plenty of fantastic writing on even something so experiential, fast-moving and sonically spectacular – the recently-released book JUNGLIST is on my radar for precisely that reason, just that it is so hard to pick up in Singapore! Forward-thinking site e-flux also has a recurring series on raves, and checking out the bios of any of these contributors is sufficient to send one down a long, dark tunnel. Mostly I was just too tired to remember the tracklist – who could be silly enough to slot in a night out at Clarke Quay after trooping around western Singapore for 12 hours?)
All things considered, my experience with raves in Singapore has taken place entirely in a post-COVID era. New events metamorphise all the time – including the Last Mile event at Golden Mile mushing together typical Ernest interests of modernist buildings and Singapore’s underground music scene. In typical Ernest fashion I missed the boat on this one, but got my comeuppance at Tower next door – a literal pity party thrown by the Projector that brought in analogue dons Heavyitch (@itch_sg) and Vinylheavy (@vinylheavy/Akid Amir). Pan-Asian disco, filmgrain-tinged rock, sounds of the Rakyat all around. Going through the latter’s Instagram I find it quite funny that he’s played in Katong Shopping Centre, Desker Road, People’s Park Complex, and Pearl’s Hill Terrace too: echoing the nostalgia inherent to 21st century disco (for the vinyl presses here have long been dismantled) are the dusty, peeling facades of post-independence Singapore, each threatened by their own forms of precarity.
Doing:
In no particular chronological order:
Haw Par Villa remains a puzzling, fascinating place. Midcentury statues and vignettes of Chinese mythology stand restored but not revised, implying a timelessness to the park’s preternatural folk morality; against this, the tensions of pop-coloured buildings and gated access that signal a slow, implacable gentrification. Ghosts of last year’s party; lingering sounds and doubletime movement replaced by lingering sights and doubled movement.
—
My own mythology involves Marou Chocolate, descended upon this mortal realm from Vietnamese highlands. Despite my suspicion towards the ritualised aspects of filter coffee consumption (my wonky tastebuds? Emperor’s new cup?) I think about this brand a lot, ever since I received this as a stocking stuffer at a cousin’s wedding. Reading about Ghanian cocoa parastatals? I want chocolate. News update about Swiss exports of weapons? I want chocolate. Dilute cookhouse Milo? I want chocolate. Learning about Aztec court rituals? I want chocolate. More specifically, I want one brand. To my delight I have acquired chocolate in two dispersals, JY buying me a bundle of the special flavours (prior to the finalisation of my Hanoi plans) for my birthday, and my own pilgrimage to Marou’s store in February. There is something slightly discomforting about the colonial adventure the website sells as its origin story but
“Marou spent its early years scouring the Vietnamese countryside for great cacao. In trial and error, we met so many wonderful characters and got lost in such extraordinary places. The Marou adventure came to include budding engineers, old soldiers and die-hard pastry chefs. A curious taste for chocolate drew them all into Marou’s tent.”
???
I want chocolate.
—
Happy March 1st birthday to Linus, friend since 2012! In the spirit of sharing one happy memory, here he is from 2014.
For some Chinese Lang project, we hung with a lion dance troupe and they were nice enough to buy us chicken rice. Don’t think any of us woke up that day expecting to take a ride on a lorry either, but I count it as the unrealised beginning of the cameraman-support-character dimension of my life.
Next week we resume with our regularly scheduled programming. I’m sure of it.
[1] I particularly enjoyed Kaki Lima, from Malaysian designer Goh Choon Ean. It’s a card game about walking around Penang, eschewing tourist traps for a world of coffeeshops, five-foot ways and arts destinations. I bought this at a boardgame festival organised by Origames in late 2022.
[2] My streak of attending drum and bass nights to be broken at the end of this month – back to back partying I shall not do.
[3] Nearest and Dearest!
[4] A brilliant historical, linguistic, literary mind & time-contracting companion
[5] Unbowed by any obstacle, really
[6] Decade-long co-traveller
[7] Whose poetic elegance I have come to keenly anticipate
[8] Sagacious lay authority on batik, Buddhism
[9] My apologies to AP, BC & CL – catchups long overdue
[10] See this excellent post on the importance of a good dictionary, and why I use the MW: https://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary
[11] https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/black-oxygen-suttree-reconsidered
[12] See House of Dolls (1953), written by Yehiel De-Nur.
[13] Not to be confused with the lift that Tim and Barry got their hands on. Lifts, in any case, are my favourite zone of chaos: see this on chewing gum & HDBs here, not entirely a far cry from London’s tower blocks.
[14] I suppose I have been guilty of soliciting my friends for gigs with little explanation apart from bashing them over the head with 170BPM stuff – no chart-toppers, only heart-stoppers. I really like this little episode from longstanding electronic music channel Telekom as an introduction to the genre, which is quasi-gameshow, quasi-interview.
[15] Although cross-continent bleedthroughs occur, and sometimes give rise to entirely new scenes. If my old roommate Victor hadn’t hated rapping in any form, I’d have asked him long ago to explain whatever’s going on in Brazil, since this excellent documentary only runs 15 minutes long.
Leave a Reply