Resuming normal service

After a week of talking and talking and talking with friends and family over the phone and over coffee, beer and meals -- about how I feel differently about my life, about how I "maybe" want it to change, about "connections" I've made with new friends, about enjoying late night chats, about feeling guilty about leaving, about what might happen if I do this and what might not happen if I didn't do that, N. summed it all nicely yesterday at dinner when he observed: I've turned into a lesbian.

Hauling myself back from the carpet-munching abyss, I have decided to refocus. Back to basics!!!

1. I will work towards moving to HK or Tokyo at some point. I won't rush. I will look around. But I will go and join the Care Bears in the forest.

2. In view of 1, I will put on 10kg and resume my quest to look as "super-kawaii" as possible.

See? Who says life has to be complicated? :P

The night Tracey spoke to me

In case anyone is wondering, the new title of my blog - and the quote that accompanies it - is from a little-known Everything But The Girl b-side called "Horses In The Room". It was released just after the time Ben Watt from the group nearly died from some intestinal disorder and describes (I think) the strange mix of loneliness and hope he felt in his hospital bed. I understood the song better when I read his book "Patient".

It's the title of my new blog because I felt that the David Sylvian lyric of my old blog "Laughter And Forgetting" wasn't quite representative anymore of what I feel today about my life. I guess I like the idea of "throwing the windows open and letting the light from my room hit the pavement". Ok, a little over-dramatic, I know :)

EBTG is my favourite group in the world, which is strange because they are so British to the point of being insular. I used to grapple with this cultural identity crisis all the time: Why do I, a Chinese Singaporean, like a British duo so much that writes constantly about Oxford Street, Notting Hill Gate and abandoned shipyards in the north of England? Why am I so crazy as to hunt down every song they've recorded, and buy every single and album they've released? I dunno. It's partly to do with my obsession with music when I was a teenager growing up in the 80s, and partly to do with the strange way that the singer Tracey Thorn somehow speaks to me.

Speaking of speaking to me, she did -- once, at a concert. When I was studying in the UK, I went to their concerts every year that I was there. And in my final year, EBTG nostalgically decided to hold a special concert in the first venue they ever played at -- the London ICA. They would only sell 150 tickets, which was the total attendance for that first concert. I stayed up all night to phone in when the bookings opened and secured the tickets. I then wrote them a super-long and gushy fan letter about who I am and why I'm going to the concert.

On the night of the concert, in between songs, Tracey said something to this effect: "We get letters from fans all around the world and we got one recently from someone in Singapore, who is here in the audience tonight. And he said, dear Tracey and Ben, you guys always seem to play the same songs, like Apron Strings, but there are so many great songs on your albums that never get heard at concerts. So, then, here is a song that we've hardly ever played before..." And she launched into this song from their 1988 "Idlewild" album:

Shadow On A Harvest Moon
Everything But The Girl
Let me tell you about this torch I carry
It's not much of a career
And it won't make my fortune I fear
But it stays alight and won’t be buried
It’s brighter year-by-year
And someday it will surely disappear
When it does I’ll know I’ve laid to rest
The ghost of your unhappiness
That flits around from room to room
A widow on a honeymoon
A shadow on a harvest moon
So put away this torch you carry
For it's doing you no good
And surely you know by now that you should
And come the day you die or marry
Will you be understood
When you say that you wanted but never could
Turn your back and lay to rest
The ghost of your unhappiness
That flits around from room to room
A widow on a honey moon
A shadow on a harvest moon
I write these words to make them true,
"I've drowned my torch and so should you."

Partly fish, partly porpoise, partly baby sperm whale

Tonight I rediscovered one of my very favourite Tears For Fears songs, a quiet contemplative cover of a Robert Wyatt song. In my opinion, it's one of the most beautifully written songs ever.

Its a b-side that is on a deluxe version of the group's 1986 "Songs From The Big Chair" album that I bought today. This marks the 4th time in my life I have bought this record -- once on cassette, once on vinyl and twice now on CD. Remastered songs sound amazing, especially on my new CD player :)

Sea Song
Lyrics: Robert Wyatt

You look different every time
You come from the foam - crested brine
It's your skin shining softly in the moonlight
Partly fish, partly porpoise, partly baby sperm whale
Am I yours? are you mine to play with?
Joking apart, when you're drunk you're terrific
When you're drunk I like you mostly late at night
You're quite alright
But I can't understand the different you
In the morning
When it's time to play at being human for a while
We smile, we smile, we smile
You'll be different in the spring, I know
You're a seasonal beast
Like the Starfish that drift in with the tide, with the tide
So until your blood runs to meet the next full moon
Your madness fits in nicely with my own, with my own
Your lunacy fits neatly with my own
My very own
We're not alone

Weatherbox, David Sylvian (Virgin DSCD1, 1989)

For most of the 17 years that it has been out in the market, I've been searching for David Sylvian's "Weatherbox". Released in 1989, it's an achingly beautiful limited edition boxed set featuring the albums 'Brilliant Trees', 'Alchemy', 'Gone To Earth', and 'Secrets of the Beehive'. Each of the CDs is covered in gold paint and the booklet that accompanies the CDs is so wonderfully textured your fingers tremble as you hold it. When I was younger, I couldn't afford to buy it when it came out, but also my love of Sylvian's music only grew much stronger in later years.

So since the early 90s, I've been on the hunt for something approximating to a Holy Grail of sorts in my CD collection -- a reasonably priced Weatherbox that is still in reasonable condition. But as the existing sets in the market get older and rarer, that has become more and more difficult to do, unless one wants to just throw money around carelessly. With the average set now selling at about US$320 on eBay, I've always been dead jealous of the fact that K.L. managed to secure one, at the original price of S$80 or so, when it first came out.



Then on Sunday afternoon, I found one in a tiny shop in the basement of a little-known mall called Sino Shopping Centre in the middle of Mongkok. It was right there on the cashier's counter and I nearly missed it. When I unwrapped it from its plastic case, I found it to be really quite exquisite despite its age. Better still, it was the Japanese edition (even rarer than the UK version) that comes with an extra booklet, just as beautiful, of Japanese-translated lyrics. The shop owner said that a collector had sold it to him some time ago and that was the only time he had ever come across a set. At HK$860 (S$173), I couldn't get to the ATM fast enough to get the cash.

That's the story of how my 17-year search for a bunch of handpainted CDs came to an end in, of all places, Hong Kong.

And it is perhaps also the story of why I'm considering moving there.

Hong Kong

Sometimes, very rarely, you meet someone you connect with so well you wish you had met him/her earlier in life.

Quite separately, I had an epiphany of sorts in Hong Kong -- the sort that soon leads to a scary whitewash of your life.

Identity crisis!

It has struck me, reading through all the previous posts on this blog, that I must appear to really care only about (a) clothes and (b) cute guys, and travelling to (a) buy more clothes and (b) meet more cute guys.

And this brings me right back to the day -- maybe 5 or 6 years ago -- when my younger lesbian sister said unflinchingly to me: "Kor, you are so shallow and materialistic!". I think she was in the midst of expounding on the importance of art in community or something and my eyes might have wandered over to something more interesting in the bar we were in.

Do blogs give an accurate representation of the people that we are? Or are we consciously blogging only about things which we feel our reading audience would find interesting? And do we, in our "real lives", eventually become the larger-than-life person that comes across online?

As I leave Singapore (yet again) for Hong Kong to (a) buy clothes (its the very tail-end of the summer sale) and (b) meet more cute guys (it's HK's first bear party on Saturday), I really have to wonder :)

But then again, who cares?

Cue the pulse to begin

As I watched the final episode of Queer As Folk, all I could think of was Zyn's comments on her blog when she saw it. "How could it end like that? I feel cheated!!" was the sentiment, if I recall correctly.

I thought the ending was okay, even if it was an abrupt pullback from equally abrupt plot changes that happened throughout the season. I never really took Brian Kinney's complete turnabout seriously and the mess of broken relationships and fresh new relationship cycles that was the finale is probably closer to what gay life really is.

Watching the characters reminisce about what far they have come, and how they really haven't changed, made me think of the long friendship that K. L. and I have had. And that last scene of Brian and Michael dancing together in the bombed-out Babylon -- that was K.L. and I in Crash in Vauxhall this summer. It's been a weird and wonderful 20 years and I have a feeling there's still plenty of drama left to be played out in our lives.

Of course, the end of any long-running series is like the end of a long journey itself and you look back on all the plot twists and developments with a kind of nostalgic wonder about how your own life changed in parallel with the story. I was still a banking reporter when I watched the graphic love scene between Brian and Justin, slightly shocked, in the very first episode. I was still 65kg when Lindsey and Melanie got married and Melanie had curly shoulder length hair. Somewhere in the midst of Ted's addiction to drugs, I think I moved into my current house. And I have fond memories of Sunday afternoons spent with C. watching one episode after another, so that we would exhaust the entire season within a couple of weeks of the DVD boxed set arriving from Amazon.

I don't care if critics called it cheesy and that the writing went to pot in the middle seasons. I don't care if people say the characters were cardboard and reduced complex issues to overly simplistic this-or-that dilemmas . And I sure as hell don't agree that the original British version was better (it was really boring, to be honest). For me, QAF was definitive in so many ways. And I will miss it. Really.