the folly of exam art

disclaimer: all opinions expressed are my own unless otherwise noted.

i am exhausted, body and soul. every bone in my body is screaming for sleep and to just not do any art ever again. for the last few months art has felt like absolute poison. there are so many problems with the way art is “taught” that i don’t know where to begin. today the following excerpt occurred:

“you all have to know, conceptually, what you are doing for your coursework. M, what are you doing? your theme is liberation and freedom. E, you are? showing your home culture and the struggle of reunification of the two Koreas. M? juxtaposing life and death. Flory?”
“uh.”
“okay, your botanical studies of plants record and preserve them, commenting on the . next!”

what disturbed me most was that these concepts were mostly what my teacher as an experienced A-Level art instructor had devised, based on our individual subject matter, to impress The Examiner because they were “sophisticated, high-level concepts”. for some of us it wasn’t really what we thought or felt about the subject matter, but it didn’t matter because what we wanted to do didn’t particularly matter if we wanted an A for our exams. besides, we had to meet the marking criteria.  yes, there is a mark scheme for art. how can you quantify art? they have it down to a mathematical – harhar – art, i swear. 5% for “recognising and rendering form and structure”. 10% for being able to “handle tone and/or colour in a controlled and intentioned manner”. 6% for “making informed aesthetic judgments”. 5% for “showing development of ideas through appropriate processes, worksheets, etc. before arriving at a final solution”. who comes up with these things? who allocates the marks for this? how can you quantitatively appreciate art? one of my teachers even admitted that most successful fine artists would fail A-Level Art because they wouldn’t meet the marking criteria. you can certainly tell if someone is more skilled at drawing than someone else, but how can someone tell if these were really their intentions or if these intelligent-sounding annotations weren’t something that the teacher helped the student come up with?

the mark scheme is ludicrous, but the approach to art can be even more ridiculous, particularly at A-Level. the art faculty here has a track record of producing stellar art grades year after year which does come, in one form or another for some of us, at the expense of any love and joy we derive from making art. there is so much pressure on staff and students to perform that a lot of the aspects of making art become formulaic and stifling. one of them is how everything must be “fine art” (again, The Examiner plays a key role in this). there are several implications here. there can be nothing cute or pretty, since that would be commercial and non-sophisticated. the easiest way to “fine art” is to “grunge it up”. i am all for “gutsy” and “expressive”, but so many people do it in the same style that it gets tiring, and it is often accompanied by “it will get you high marks” that i’ve begun to loathe those words and what they imply. this past week i’ve been thinking about art styles and realised that there are certain styles of art that students fall into when they take art here – a “house style”, if you will, so that you can at once develop and quash individuality. to “grunge things up” we fall back on methods like using wax, using charcoal and big marks, ink and satay stick.

and it’s not just the media that people use (and in similar fashions), but also the subject matter chosen. the exam makes for such generic work. choosing subject matter is something that is always done with the exam in mind. every year somebody does plants; every year one or two students will end up with a final piece that consists of a painting of scarf wrapped around the face and showing just the eyes, or a variation thereof. someone will study flowers (and HENCE use Georgia O’ Keeffe as artist inspiration). cloth is a very, very common subject matter. ropes are becoming increasingly common (especially after i did a full project on it last year). butterflies are discouraged by some members of faculty. furthermore, people tend to work backwards so that they can meet exam expectations. i can’t count the number of times i ‘ve heard “oh i drew this thing, THEN i came up with some bullshit to tell the teacher about why i did this and what my intentions were etc. i didn’t actually think of anything.” i find this so, so sad — that people have to twist things to fit a rigid system, invent reasons for doing things, not feeling what they are doing.

it’s no surprise that every single year people have a love/hate relationship with it, mostly leaning towards hate. at too many points in the past few years we’ve all slammed down our brushes and snapped, i HATE art. art isn’t fun anymore. last term we were all so burned out with all the pressure and expectations for art that we literally couldn’t work for two months. artist block feels ten times worse than writer’s block. we’d go to class and stare at our papers and attempt some drawing, doggedly pushing on even though we were hating every second of it. M summed it up when she said, “i used to look forward to art lessons, but now i don’t even want to be here.” several friends dropped art because they couldn’t stand being hemmed in by the mark schemes, by exam expectations, by the inordinate amount of pressure placed on us to get good grades. so much about it is about demonstrating things. if we are expressing something, it is for the sake of communicating a concept which then has to be explained like an academic paper. everything we do is given a label and dressed up in exam jargon – “exploratory surfaces”, “aesthetic judgments”, “sophisticated composition”.

it’s not just art, damnit, but school in general – it’s all about the exams. i don’t know whether i should be grateful that they don’t try to hide it. no lesson goes by without some reference to exams or The Examiner, capitalised. i’m sick and tired of hearing the phrase “you have to show The Examiner…”, “in the exam you have to be able to…”, “you have to demonstrate to the Examiner that…” it isn’t just art, it’s every single subject there is.  this is the exam culture i’ve grown up with and it’s taken me this long to realise, consciously, that i loathe it. i’m a true blue product of that system: i worked like a maniac for the three years i’ve been in this school and have stellar grades by most standards, but at the cost of my sanity and emotional health. shed so many tears. there is only so much pressure that anyone can handle, and what people call “education” does a very good job of making machines out of everyone, and not teaching them anything about real life. how we are all assigned numbers, how the school is meant to “equip” us with “skills” and “abilities”. how to approach types of exam questions, how to outwit The Examiner, how to phrase, how to use PEEL in writing essays. how not to be a “leader”, as my school’s purpose statement would like to make out, but how to be a follower, a sheep, a conformist. there is a culture of academic excellence and a culture of mediocre effort and critical thought. these complaints have all been made before, by different people and different times all around the world, but i am still so bitter. the main failure of the two education systems i’ve known is that teachers mostly teach students how to jump through the hoops of mark schemes, and the result is that some subjects which are actually super-fascinating are shunned because of the way they are taught, and because students will instead take subjects that they are more certain of scoring highly or that at least have some “use” in the future. too many people i know took certain subjects because their parents pushed them to, because it would be useful for getting a job later, because it was a compulsory subject, because it would be easier to get an A in the exam. not because teachers had ever been able to instill any passion in them for it.

is it just me? how can people just sigh and shrug it off, and go back to their books and memorize things? when i first came to this international school i was so excited to be here. the grass always looks greener on the other side — i’d been trying to get into this school since age 11, but government policies and a, uh, lack of connections prevented that from happening until the year Hishamuddin decided to open up international schools to the general public (not that you couldn’t get your kid into one with a substantial amount of extra bribery anyway). it was what i’d always been dreaming of, so i was so determined to be on top of everything from studies to CCAs that i missed out on a lot of valuable things, like spending time with friends or watching movies or reading a lot more books than i had the time for, and now i don’t have the energy or time for it.

because my school is a corporate institution with parents on the board of trustees, and it’s mainly asian, there is an inordinate focus on academics – that’s what keeps the waiting list long. in terms of what the predominant concerns are, it isn’t very different from the local schools i used to be at (one chinese school, one private national-syllabus school). it’s about grades and exams and regurgitation, only they dress it up in fancier jargon and slightly more motivated teachers (higher expat pay). i’ve had so many conversations with my MUN director who despises the way this school is run as much as i do — quite a few of the teachers recognise and dislike the cold, business-like way this school is run, and especially local teachers who have a much, much lower salary than expatriate teachers, even if they are just as qualified. there is so much pressure on students and teachers to perform academically that there is no time to learn about anything else.

i’ve said this to many people, but the only thing we can do is to suck it up till the exams are over. and i will be glad when this is all over. everything i’ve said above is somewhat contentious, and if anyone from the art faculty saw this i would be shunned forever — artists are temperamental. but they never pretended otherwise.

sometimes i like my days like this

things seem to be drifting at the moment. it’s mid-january, and my art deadline is in two months. i haven’t done enough. it is never enough until you finish, and even then sometimes it hasn’t been enough. it’s been said by so many people, but school is a system designed to kill you unless you ignore it, or work around it, or immerse yourself so deeply in it you emerge on top of something that turns into a distant dream a few years later, something that becomes a few jumbled memories that you bring up with no uncertain nostalgia. mostly people are just hanging on. surviving, getting by day to day with tests, essays, paintings and idle chatter at lunchtime.

where am i in all this? i seem to be missing out on something, and yet it’s something i’m already accustomed to. they say, i haven’t seen you around for ages. where are you during our frees? and i have to pause to think about it: where am i? working. answering emails. printing notes. sometimes i’m here, sometimes i’m not. there were two tests today, back to back. literature is much easier: when in doubt you can usually rely on a context question and analyse language. it’s much easier to pull something out of the air. and strangely, even when i think i’ve written something truly awful, i never seem to do that badly. even when i’ve obviously repeated “we can see that” and “it can be seen that” far too many times over the course of an essay. economics is a different kettle of fish: A2 is a much bigger leap from AS, the latter being IGCSE economics with a few extra diagrams and a little more jargon. it’s all about picking up on key words and phrases. bringing this and that into the question. impressing the examiner. jumping through hoops.

it’s 5pm and i don’t feel like turning any music on. unusually. the only sounds are the faint hum of the processor and bursts of staccato-typing. even the way i’m expressing myself right now isn’t normal. (or is it?) i guess this is what happens when you spend an afternoon reading Murakami and Mishima back to back. you soak up something of that laconic style, the attention to detail, the meandering sense of emptiness, the descriptions of daily routines and the sense of trying to grasp something indefinite. all a poor imitation thereof.

i recently rediscovered my love for reading — not that i haven’t always loved reading, but being able to spend hours by myself devouring a book has become a rare pleasure. even more so when i can just walk out of school to the korean diner 10 minutes away and have a slow lunch over Dance Dance Dance. i love that korean diner, which is right across the korean supermarket. i don’t know what it’s called. you don’t usually give your home a name. that’s what it feels like – some place to go home to, and have a quiet meal. it was previously run by two women. one with cropped pixie hair, and the other with a ponytail. now it’s a couple running it – i think members of the community take turns every few months. the man who cooks the potato noodles is more talkative than the woman (his wife?), and offered me a sample of kimchi noodles, the tubular kind with a springy, bouncy texture, coated in a thickish kimchi sauce.

it is a pleasant, homey place, despite the barebones furnishing — fluorescent lighting, tables and stools, boxes for cutlery. the door to the small rectangular kitchen is always open, and i like watching the woman making kimbap at the counter next to the door. it seems to come so naturally to her, how she knows exactly how much of each ingredient to put in without making the whole roll an over-stuffed, hopeless mess. there’s another small window to the other side where you can peep into the kitchen and see what’s cooking, though no one really does that. i’m not tall enough to simply glance through – i would have to crane my neck to get a good look instead of just glimpses of wall and shiny metal, and while i’ve always thought about doing it i’ve never done so.

the food is as good as the previous, just slightly different the way same dishes are by different people. i only ever order two things when i eat there: kimchi jiigae, and bulgogi. it’s because they don’t do takeaway for hot soups or stews; for that i usually have the bibimbap or a kimbap. they used to put canned tuna instead of pork in kimchi jiigae – which was disconcerting, but not completely unpleasant. that version was incredibly spicy, purely about hot, sour heat, and i would drink about 4 cups of cold water throughout. i still do, but their current version seems to have a slow, sweet burn once you get past the spiciness — like tom yam, but less sour and with more cabbage, which i like. and they use pork slices – i usually discard the fat – which i prefer. i especially love how they serve it with a selection of side dishes, always different each time. today one of the side dishes thinly sliced – probably slow-cooked – eggplant and onions, each bite deeply sweet, tender, juicy and sesame-fragrant. the man beamed when i asked if he had extra eggplant, and returned with a small heap of it and a question: “what do you call this in english?”

“eggplant.”

“ekkplant?”

“egg. plant. like…” i gestured quite helplessly. i’m awful at explaining things to people; i always wish i knew more languages; i tried enunciating more clearly. “eGGplant. yeah. it has three names: eggplant, aubergine, brinjal.”

“ahh, eggplant.” he smiled and nodded. later i overhear him talking to a couple a few tables away: he’s been living in malaysia for a year and a half now, and likes it very much here. they comment that koreans all seem to like malaysia and i wonder if that’s true. it occurs to me that he always seems to be wearing a yellow polo shirt, which does suit his sunny disposition.

after this i head to starbucks a floor above for a drink and more reading. two Murakamis and one Mishima. their drinks are overpriced, mostly shitty and watered down, but they knows how to create a conducive atmosphere for working/reading/chatting. pleasantly unobtrusive easy-listening music, a couple of armchairs. i never know what to have. tea is ridiculous – ten dollars for a tea bag and hot water. “jesus, this thing is like liquid gold,” R griped the last time we went to a starbucks to wait for A. i have a skinny mocha with extra espresso. the foam on the top annoys me, but i’m compelled to drink it anyway. consumption based on a value gradient, saving the best for last: have the milky-vomit-like foam on top before taking a warm mouthful of thick chocolate. it’s slightly too sweet, as always. and then i spend the next three hours ploughing through Dance Dance Dance, then beginning Forbidden Colours. i’ve never seen anyone else behave the way i do in an armchair in a cafe: i kick off my slippers and curl up like it’s my own private armchair. you can really get lost in a book, dancing through rows and rows of serif text. random associations flash through my head at times but disappear just as quickly. i don’t intend to meet anyone i know there, but my economics teacher walks in for an espresso and greets me. i have no idea what he says – the words are all jumbled – but i wave and continue reading.

while i’m reading i compare the new Kinder Bueno White and its predecessor, the milk chocolate. it’s a bit of a gimmick, really – a different shell with the same filling. the milk chocolate version seems more balanced than the white. it’s light, crispy, and surprisingly substantial all at once. the White is almost tooth-achingly sweet, a burst of voluptuous sugary hazelnut cream. both wafers without the chocolate coating aren’t sweet. i suspect the milk chocolate stubbly bits keep the White from becoming too sickly, but i guess it depends on what you feel like. at room temperature the filling is more liquid and melts faster, like a creamy breath of hazelnut, but when it’s been in an air-conditioned room for a while the filling solidifies and holds its shape. that way you can let it lingers more slowly on your tongue, is significantly more viscuous.

i felt the need to record the day as it went, because of what i was reading. Murakami’s characters seem to do so many things alone, unlike most people i know, and carry out a mind-numbing existence that acquires a poignancy when he records it. an empty loneliness. on one level, it’s a procession of mindless details, one after the other without pause, reiterating the routines of living that so many people go through. who wants to read about that? most of all on a blog. but on another level the little hours that we carve out to spend time with ourselves are at once precious and infinitely wasteful. it’s not productive in this modern sense: no work is being done, no academic work being read, no things being planned for the future, no time being spent cultivating relationships with other human beings on this planet or fulfilling obligations to spend time with people. it wasn’t just the feeling that if i didn’t spend today the way i did, i would be restless and incapable of work later on, craving peace but having a to-do list on my mind. time spent alone allows me to rest my mind, gather my thoughts, pay attention to things around me, enjoy simple food cooked by friendly people. deliberately having no obvious purpose, even for a while, felt really liberating and restful, though the overcast sky suffused today with a sense of melancholy.

it’s like my sister said: “you’re going to be living with yourself for the rest of your life, so you have to learn how to spend time alone.” i think the both of us have it: that capacity for solitude. i can’t do it all the time, but for the most part, i would like to spend more of my days like this.

2009: a year in music

it’s been a very long time since i’ve posted here, and i’m long overdue on all the things i’ve cooked/done/eaten. it is already 2010 – my god, we’re at a new decade already – and i haven’t done my homework from 2009. so much for starting the year on a clean slate. but we – Z, A, pie, I – did begin 2010 by shouting “PENIS!” from our balcony (we’d watched 500 Days of Summer some hours earlier) and promising to be nicer to ourselves, and not kill ourselves over academics or the like. oxford was not really for me (and i wasn’t for them either, since they rejected me), but SOAS at london looked pretty promising. the countdown to march 1 begins now, seeing as i’ve sent in my US applications to NYU, Brown and Amherst; now, however, beginneth the tedious application to Waseda University, Tokyo. in fact, that’s where i’ll go if they’ll take me. one dreams!

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2009 was – A summed it up best – a year of lessons. a year is just a convenient measure of time, but during that a lot of nonsense has happened and so have a lot of good things. we’ll not dwell on the nonsense, but i’m really happy to have met some awesome people – Z&A, two of a kind and two of my best friends; zw, who reminds me of the funny, convoluted ways fate works; su ann, who gives some of the best feedback on essays ever (and you can’t thank someone enough for that). and for editing, reading, correcting my application essays — i cannot thank people enough for simply being there for that — owen & alex m. for relentless grammatical, stylistic and structural editing; su ann & yvonen for super feedback and wise words; charlie for feedback and keeping me entertained at 3 am while i struggled with phrasing; my sisters, Z, A and A-from-downstairs reading my essays; zemotion, kaushal, anyone and everyone else for being very encouraging. especially kaushal, who used my suggestion for his NYU movie supplement – i only hope the ad coms enjoy puns.

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besides the emotional ups and downs, though, there was time in between to indulge in the usual forms of media — books, movies, music. this is the first Best of 2009 post dedicated to music, though most of the new stuff i like either sounds old, or is old.

sunshine pop

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possibly the best song to wake up to in the morning – Hall and Oates’ You Make My Dreams makes me want to dance like Joseph Gordon-Levitt. plus the little shimmy. and that dance sequence! so old school. Zooey Deschanel’s Sugar Town, also from 500 Days of Summer, was also stuck in my head for days on end – it’s a sublime, contemporary cover of that old Nancy Sinatra song, equally cute and more than a little Southern in its inflections. i am a huge fan of Zooey.

happy, suitably rockin’ and full of la-la-las, but what really struck me about The Noisettes’ Wild Young Hearts was the refrain – which applied so, so, so much to 2009 – damn these wild young hearts. rather like The Ditty Bops and their incredibly sunshine country-swing-guitar-driven Wishful Thinking (which i’ve been emailing to quite a few people) with suitably cute and wistful lyrics:

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i bought an umbrella big enough for two
but it feels pretty empty under here without you
dry as a bone but i’m still alone
i’m so gray

when you’re standing in a puddle with wet feet
and your head is sore from pounding drops of sleet
when the cold and lonely hours put your heart to the test
maybe i’ll be the one that you like best

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the local goodstuff

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i’ve never really been into local music all that much, but there were some lovely releases this year. Estrella’s Stay, for instance, has a lovely hook and a slightly ethereal air to it — maybe it’s the lyrics, which are a little cheesy without being cliched, sentimental without being sappy, dreamy without being completely ridiculous. and it’s not perfect, which kind of makes it better. can’t say i enjoyed Ternyata as much, in which the malay sounds far too deliberate and non-native-speaker for my liking. Yuna’s Dan Sebenarnya, on the other hand, was perfect on that count – an acoustic-guitar blues-pop song with a soothing voice. her other song, Rocket, is also cute and quirky, if a little unpolished.

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the vid above is Zee Avi’s adorable ukelele-driven malay-english song Kantoi (Caught!), which has been covered to death by lots of people, though the little girl above did a good job on slapping on the cute. her songs all start to sound the same after a while; that warm, kind of 1920s voice sounded best on Bitter Heart, her first single after signing on to Brushfire Records. i remember posting quite a lot of Zee Avi during the earlier days on tumblr – lots of bittersweet flavours to her songs. on an unrelated note, i’m not sure how i went so long without ever hearing Man Bai’s Kau Ilhamku, a really old gem.

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i mentioned Kau Ilhamku because i first heard it as a cover by Zhi Wei, who i’ve posted about previously. his music is, as he’s said, a little difficult to pin down, since he sounds like quite a lot of things: jason mraz, john mayer, even linkin park in Who’s Listening. my description of 28 Days as a fabulously sexy song still holds, and his newest song, Bring Me Down, is right up there with the former as one of my favourites – it has an almost gospel feel to it towards the end, and is wonderfully sunshiny and optimistic.  if you have to listen to anything from this post, listen to that!

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christmas songs

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there are two really good times of the year to listen to christmas songs. 1) the month of december, but possibly excepting the day itself because you’ll have gotten sick of it. 2) every other month. july is a good one. they’re just so happy and holidayish, and excellent for cheering you up. Lenka’s All My Bells Are Ringing from The Hotel Café Presents Winter Songs is a perfect example – all twinkly and poppy and doo-bop, and guaranteed to put a smile on your face when it’s hot and hazy in july. actually, the entire album is pretty faultless, except for the Auld Lang Syne Medley (but i’ve never liked that song anyway). there’s my favourite version of Sleigh Ride by KT Tunstall (that voice! deep, jazzy, slightly hoarse. even this song sounds better when she sings it.) and Frosty the Snowman by Fiona Apple. Colbie Caillat’s Mistletoe is pretty nice, but i think the best one on that album is where Priscilla Ahn becomes her own choir and reinvents Silent Night with a mélange of layered harmonies — ethereal, frosty, really beautiful.

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but for the most part, christmas music tends to sound best as big band or jazz, so i’ve never understood why shopping malls insist on playing all that christmas techno crap. do these people honestly think that shoppers want to listen to Winter Wonderland being mangled with a crass, stomping beat? do these people have ears of stone? how easy would it be to just slip in some old christmas pop or jazz from the greats — why not Frank Sinatra’s rendition of Let It Snow!, which is totally unbeatable? Louis Armstrong? Ella Fitzgerald? even Corrinne Bailey Rae? (the last via su ann) but i digress. i’ve never heard a single Malaysian shopping mall play any good christmas music. in fact, i often think about hijacking their sound system so i could play some Elvis Presley on it. ooh, that voice. the Christmas Peace album, maybe. i love White Christmas, but the Pie thinks he sings it oddly.

instrumental lovelies

totally lovely, joyful and tear-jerking. one of the best “kid” movies of the year for this sequence alone, no dialogue needed. speaking of childish, i cannot lie. i have this on my mp3 player. while we’re still on this tangent, i also have the Pokemon theme song in English, French and Finnish. why i don’t have it in Japanese is beyond me.

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another instrumental i really liked this year besides the usual Bach is Project16 by ‘The Cloudy Sunflowers’, aka this guy who also writes the way i could not if i spent the next century doing nothing but writing. last i checked it was apparently incomplete and awaiting more reworking, but there’s something so alluring about the melody (which seems to have a slight oriental flavour to it). it feels like walking down empty dream streets when the sky is overcast and there’s a slight wind, as though notes are floating in on a breeze where you catch them one by one like butterflies, and let them go. best listened to fairly loud (can you increase the sound of nothingness?)

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not a video by the original band, but Royskopp’s Eple fits perfectly in this art student’s stop-motion video about post-its – the craft is fairly mindblowing. i’m also slowly getting into post-rock/neo-classical stuff, no thanks to self-proclaimed “post-rock slut” owen, who lets me download lots of albums off his server. Takahiro Kido’s music sounds most beautiful in the dead of the night, strange and atmospheric and most like Sigur Ros sans drums and guitar. Glitch is gorgeous, as is Sakura.

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revisiting the past

the later half of 2009 was a good year for revisiting all my, ahem, childhood music – otherwise known as 90s pop, the likes of which they don’t make anymore. Nowadays it’s all auto-tuned/stripper/c-rap nonsense. (refer to Selena Gomez, Demi Lovato, Miley Cyrus, etc) I feel like a bit of a dinosaur, but quite a few people my age have never heard of or don’t remember some of these bands. I suppose we were only 6 when Hanson released ‘Mmmbop’, but still. I mean, it’s House’s ringtone.

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Moonlight Densetsu is one of my favourite theme songs, ever. i was obsessed with Sailor Moon as a kid – i’d draw the Sailor Senshi quite often, and even went to an anime convention in One Utama (when it still had one wing) and asked for Sailor Moon’s autograph on my oh-so-epic drawing of a poster. (it was someone dressed up as Sailor Moon, alas.) in fact, i remember one Christmas when I was 8, writing a 2 page letter to Santa asking for all kinds of Sailor Moon paraphernalia from pencilboxes to hair like hers. her hair is wicked cool. i never got them, but i did get 50 bucks from dad – i mean, Santa. her transformations are ridiculously long – in fact, this applies to all the Sailor Senshis – but those are easily forwarded, and there are some hilarious moments during the series where they call attention to that by having the villain powder her nose while Usagi’s transforming and making that long justice speech of hers. that said, the song itself is super-catchy and has some wistful/epic-legend lyrics.

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a word about this ferociously underrated band: LFO were huge on MTV for a while, and kind of fizzled out. but their songs still have an absolutely classic summer feel to them, conjuring up lazy sunshine days by the poolside, clean-cut handsome boys and wholesome, pretty girls in swimsuits, skateboards, Abercrombie & Fitch. which more or less describes their videos. i can still remember all the lyrics.

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Backstreet Boys – Get Down. so good.

not, strictly, a 90s release, but a DJ Morgoth mash-up of Nirvana and Rick Astley: Never Give Your Teen Spirit Up. no added techno beats or anything like that – just Mr Astley’s rich baritone on top of the guitar riffs. (i didn’t expect that voice from such a Weasley-looking guy) entirely brilliant, with thanks to stephen’s blog 1/sec monaut, which is like having a personalized music magazine in your feed reader without all the superfluous crap.

Wallflowers – One Headlight

also, i had to: Lolly’s Hey Mickey is terrifically good and unforgettably awful at the same time. much like what some people have told me about Avatar.

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sexy music

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a word about Elbow’s Grounds for Divorce: aside from the husky, gravelly voice, sexy, grinding riff and the way it somehow always reminds me of zombies,  i managed to mishear “cocktail” as “concept” for three months, which my sisters will never let me live down. then again, R misheard “visas in my name” as “geezers in my nose”, so we are more or less even. another one with a really awesome guitar hook is Jamie Scott’s Made, which sound a little like Maroon 5.

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as if it wasn’t hot enough on its own, The Kills’ Cheap & Cheerful appears in Season 3 of House during a one night stand between a drunk Thirteen and another woman (who becomes Patient Du Jour for the episode).

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Juliet Shatkin’s Look But Don’t Touch appears in The Clique trailer, and the opening is possibly the best thing about it – the song starts to degenerate into irritating teeny-boppiness by the time the chorus rolls around.  N.B. I have read every single book in Lisa Harrison’s The Clique series. draw your conclusions.

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that back and forth holler between the girls and boys has a very 90s flavour about it. Leighton Meester is incredibly sexy. also, her father is Mister Meester and she is Miss Meester. never fails to amuse.

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Lady Gaga

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gets a category on her own, because she’s awesome and her songs have been parodied mercilessly. the video for Bad Romance isn’t all that interesting, but i really love the song – especially the way she rolls her Rs during those ridiculous nonsense lyrics. i must have shown the vintage video to many people, but i never get tired of the huge difference between her then and her now – Electric Kiss is so thrilling.

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one of the best parodies of Pokerface by Christopher Walken, who reads the lyrics out loud with – of course – a poker face.

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especially for font geeks: a piss-in-your-pants hilarious Pokerface parody called Neutraface (which is really pronounced NOY-trah, but who cares).

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miscellaneous really good music

this post is definitely long enough (and i’m getting tired), so i’ll just finish 2009 with a few more tracks.

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Gomez – See The World

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Sonos’ I Want You Back is a minor-key acapella cover of an old Jackson 5 classic. that is a beatboxer, and it is actually a pretty depressing song.

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Od Yavo Shalom Aleinu – i have no idea how i found this song, but it’s one of my favourites. i think it’s a traditional israeli song, and a friend claims there’s a didgeridoo in it.

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Oren Lavie’s video for Her Morning Elegance never gets old – it’s just so lovely. nor, for that matter, does his album.

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Stellar* has been around for a while, but i’d never heard of them till some wikipedia-surfing led me to Boh Runga (sister to Bic Runga, who has released three delightful albums) and her band. i suppose no one really pays attention to what goes on Down Under. just some really enjoyable early 2000s pop rock – i think it sounds most like Michelle Branch, Matchbox 20 and Bic Runga. (her voice sounds a little like Leigh Nash, too)

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really like Dionysos’s Tais Toi Mon Coeur – the translation probably isn’t the best one around, but both song and video are beautiful and eloquently heartbreaking.

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Norah Jones & Willie Nelson’s Wurlitzer Prize — one of the best heartbreak songs around.

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yvonen also did a lovely cover of Ingrid Michaelson’s The Way I Am. miscellaneous tracks: Owl City – The Saltwater Room, Dawn Landes – Drive, David Gray – Babylon

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what were the best songs of 2009 for you? (if anyone’s wondering about the full stops in between each paragraph, it’s because i can’t get wordpress to let me leave spaces between paragraphs – goodness knows why.)

a Secret Recipe for failure

some weeks ago i found myself at Secret Recipe in Malacca. in Malacca. of all the places we could have gone to in a town famed for incredible Peranakan cuisine, we had to collectively gravitate towards the most convenient and familiar place: a shopping mall. now, Secret Recipe isn’t bad. their pastas are pretty decent, and their cakes – particularly the chocolate varieties – are quite popular at celebrations. but it makes the cardinal mistake that every, every restaurant i’ve been to falls prey to: serving a really crap onion soup.

if there’s anything that i shouldn’t ever do when eating out, it’s order onion soup. having made Thomas Keller’s inimitable soupe l’ oignon, anything else fails to live up to expectations. what can trump a soup with a base of slowly-caramelized*-for-five-hours julienned sweet onions, beef broth, rosemary and a dash of red wine? the answer: nothing. it’s depressing how restaurants mistreat and destroy a simple recipe. so i knew ordering onion soup at Secret Recipe would be a mistake (especially at only RM6.50 a bowl. what was i expecting?) but hope prevailed. and died upon its arrival.

if this is the way onion soup is normally treated and presented at restaurants, it’s no wonder so many people profess not to like it – they haven’t tasted a real onion soup. and Secret Recipe’s specimen was a prime example of how not to make onion soup: sloppy, badly presented and barely resembling onion soup.

for one, the onions hadn’t even been properly cooked. they’d been sliced (not even julienned properly) and tossed in a pan on high heat for probably a few minutes before having some stock poured over them. how do i know this? because it was pale, and kind of singed in areas. you don’t get that through slow-cooking. the soup tasted of mostly stock, with a faint aroma of onions. soup, yes, but not onion soup. don’t even get me started on the cheese, which was basically a depressing sheet of cheap rubber melted on top with some waterlogged chunks of bread.

my point being: it’s cold and windy right now, i’m sick and shivering and could really go for a good bowl of onion soup. definitely not going to find one at Secret Recipe.

*caramelized is technically incorrect, since no sugar is involved. unfortunately, goldenized hasn’t come into common parlance yet.

of cabbages and queens

i keep promising myself i’ll keep a diary. not a diary where i write down my thoughts, but a notation of what i did from day to day – can’t remember it otherwise. i’ve forgotten what i did every single day of the past month, and twitter isn’t much help since i don’t really tweet things that i did. i can’t even remember when i made molly’s chickpea-tomato soup (though it was when A came over) – which, by the way, is totally delicious. it’s a gut-warming concoction of tomatoes and nutty chickpeas, an undercurrent of rosemary tempering the acidity of the tomatoes, and i don’t even know how else to describe something so perfect for a winter night in a tropical country, except that even my little sister who hates all the “strange things” i cook up loves it. she actually does.

this term has been fairly insane. not that i’m working very hard or anything, but that i’m not. it’s almost as though i’m trying to cram about 18 years worth of not-slacking into as many hours of the day as i can – actually watching TV for a change, finishing Seasons 3, 4 and 5 of House M.D. (where will i get my binge fix now?!), scrolling through pages and pages of MLIA (and copiously reblogging them), and spending this afternoon reading Steinbeck’s East of Eden in one sitting. reading feels fabulous. and i’m having a life that isn’t work for a change.

most days i get to eat really good food – some meals are good while you’re eating them, and nothing to complain about, but some of them are the kind of meals you mention a few years later and set off half-hours of reminiscing. like Aunty K’s shepherd pie, the secret of which apparently lies in the Lea & Perrin’s sauce, and most definitely the 1:1 ratio of mashed potato to meat filling . or the char siu at Overseas, dark, intense, sticky chunks of meat, sweet-savoury and caramelly, yielding slowly to the bite and dissolving on your tongue.

i may profess to try and eat anything and everything, but i really am boring in food choices – i return to the same few delicious things over and over again, just because they’re really good. i mean, i’ve made these chocolate chip cookies twice thrice within the last month. scads and scads of them. the last few times i ate Japanese, i ordered some variant of raw fish. then there’s the turkey-spinach wrap i have every time i go to Marmalade, because their lamb kofta is overwhelmingly large and flavourless, the lasagna is a wobbling tower of too much cheese, and their Oreo cheesecake is definitely made with gelatin. why would anyone make a cheesecake with gelatin? the mind boggles. and hey, that turkey wrap is good stuff.

and for a week in october, i was eating braised cabbage every day. every day. i pretty much vegetated that whole week. that was the week R, the girl who’s modeled for my art pieces for the past two years, came over and cooked lunch with me. we made cumin-lentil soup, which she and my sister hated (“that’s dhal! you can’t drink it!!!”) but i rather liked.

we made brownies, cookies, grilled chicken and the eponymous braised cabbage, another molly-orangette recipe. there is a certain brilliance about molly, especially when she can persuade R to eat the first carrots that she’s ever liked, which is no mean feat. the girl hates her veggies.

truth be told, i wouldn’t be able to resist the cabbage on sheer aesthetic value. it’s right there, that humble stack of leaves perched on the plate next to the grilled chicken. sure, it’s no Keller creation, but it has a rustic, homely loveliness to it – the multi-layered mellow-looking curves softened in the heat of the oven to yield perfectly to the teeth, nestled closely in crinkly, golden-brown wedges. and the taste – subdued, comforting, like curling up under a blanket, the intense chicken-salty juices and the sweetness of the cabbage mingling, its bitterness dissipated through long braising.

seriously, you have no excuse: it is dead easy to make, as long as you have two hours to spare. so do yourselves a favour, and make it. the poached egg sounds as though it would be fabulous. it’s gorgeous with a grilled chicken thigh, rubbed with sea salt and black pepper, grilled for 20 minutes at 170C and another 10 at 200C for the skin to crisp up.

for dessert, hot and cold brownies – the brownie component from Fran Bigelow’s Chocolate, the recipe for Truffle Brownies (or something along the lines thereof), and R’s contribution, Tin-Roof Ice Cream. chunks of brownie in the ice cream make it feel as though you’re eating the same thing at different temperatures, which is oddly addictive and lovely. and that brownie is no joke – that is rich stuff.

it’s days like these i love most – slow, fabulous lunches with friends, long leisurely chats about everything and nothing. trying to get R to eat vegetables, discussing the ins and outs of life in england with A&Z. that’s one type of day. the other type of day is today, where everything proceeds normally, but is then punctuated by euphoric surprises. like finding out i received two CIE awards for Lit and Art (World). followed by MY SISTER JUST GOT ENGAGED CHYEAHHHHH!!

over and out until the endorphins wear off