Aubade to Attap Chee

Before dropping by Bishan Library to return Loh Guan Liang's "Transparent Strangers" today I had lunch with my father at the Junction 8 food court: Double Beef Pepper Rice 加蛋, Ice Kachang afterwards.

It's close to a year since the food court had its renovation works completed (*poof* went the hidden arcade within). I can't keep track of the number of Double Beef Pepper Rice meals I've had in this place, but I know that it's here where my brother swore never to eat the attap chee in a bowl of ice kachang ever again; that's after my father told an edifying tale of how attap chee is transported on trucks without boxes or any sort of protective layer to keep it from direct contact with the grimy surface of the truck. Gullible, but he was 6.

It was just my father and I today, though, because my brother had lessons while my mother was at work. After I very thoughtfully pointed out that his oversized t-shirt made him look rather foolish, he took an interest in the book I was about to return and flipped through it, before landing on the "About the Author" page. By the end of Loh Guan Liang's admittedly contrived self-composed author bio, my father laid down a damning judgement.

"Fucker."

When your parent swears it should take you by surprise (supposedly). I sniggered, though mindful that the bio hardly did justice to the guy's writing. I'm immensely fond of writing that has an acute awareness of people and places - "Transparent Strangers" did the trick. The collection is interspersed with verse on transit, transport; times of the day when we are transfixed by the crowd that envelops us, a sea of strange, transparent people. Loh's writing may be characterised by romanticised rumination, but the simplicity and candour of his words belie any sense of pretence (unlike his author bio).

So, in tribute to attap chee days of yore, and this book that was really good to have around during the Prelims period:

at lunches peppered with quips,

the same attap chee affliction;

no just desserts suffered, for those

not transparent about transportation.

--

Is attap chee translucent or opaque? (Not a PSLE science question)

Also realised this post is more like those on the "left" page but I'm too lazy to do the formatting again.

Why John is such a twat

Why John is such a twat / 12 Years a (Math) Slave

I don't enjoy doing math

but math just seems to love doing me...

I get that numbers may be a tool of some world without
sentiment, that one imperfection in the human make-up
that means we grief over love and life lost.
It should make things easier.

But really, Math, though:

Teach us to divide but then tell us we are more than a sum of our parts;
that we are more than uniformed hypotheses to be tested and
tested on; maybe we should let you convince us that
equality only exists in equations, that integration requires differentiation
but race, class, and borders do anything but unite.

Come on, who honestly cares about the number of ways "John" can sit
at a table of people without sitting next to those dressed in blue?
If John wasn't such a twat he'd sit with people regardless of colour and
save us all that trouble. But John is a twat after all.

Now, calculate the distance from A to B,
or S
or U
or you from me;
give us a figure to figure out and hinge our self worth upon
- who doesn't like another number
to remind me them how much they suck at numbers?

I once interviewed a maths prodigy; took us three tries
to finally meet - my very own 三顾茅庐 tale. Told me his
love for math stems from its freedom from language, culture,
politics - all of which complicate the real world - as well as its,
and I quote, "completely logical and systematic nature".
Gödel too believed mathematical truths to be self-evident,
but if that's the case, why does it all read like Greek to me？

Whatever happened to those who live
between the whats and ifs and buts and maybes,
not the Xs and Ys and Zs and GCs; tell us
Orion wouldn't have a belt if it were not for geometry,
and that we are all here in constellations,
in perfect equations, in little sequences and series that
make it seem as though everything happens in the same, deductible way;
as though everything can and must be explained...

But maybe there was a Jackson Pollock of the universe,
splattered the stars across the sky in some
sweeping act of rambunctious artistry, laid them bare in
nude nirvana; You see, not everything subscribes to your formulas;
which, you may say, is an art, and yet I'm pretty sure that
only things of the heart have art in them.

Even then, can your math - your fashionably flawless,
wonderfully water-tight math - explain how it is
that this was written in math class,
that the stars were written in math,
that all this was written in the stars?

That if we had to one day tell the story of the stars
we'd just speak of shapes and patterns
- not of hoping, coping, losing, then finding,
nor the weight of things that were and will be, but
just specks of significance, 3 s.f. and shit like that,
dots on lines on maps, finding their way around this place
without coordinates to the heart, or a compass pointing to okay,

forever thinking we had made sense of the world,
living the illusion that our trip around the Sun
was always a perfect circle.

--
This is an accumulation of lines from over a few months that I've only just managed to mash together very poorly but more importantly - an utterly relatable moment from one of my favourite shows: 0:21.

Jake Bugg: feeling Buggsy

- this backdated post has been shifted here from the now-defunct "left" page as an idea of what's to be expected on the "music" page! -

It's a Bugg-sy day because this lad just released his latest album.

"Broken" is one of his folksy tunes - not everyone's cup of tea, admittedly, folk, but when you listen to this a couple times more the tones and the words somewhat rub off on you. The first time I watched the video above was in 2013, though it was "Two Fingers" and "Seen It All" that I first came across (as with most people who listen to him). As much as I was won over by those two songs I think it was only after listening to this one and watching the clip for it that I paused and thought, "This guy's different."

At 18, he received a Mercury Prize nomination. At 20, he had a gig at The Royal Albert Hall. It's been a while since then but he hasn't quite reached the world-storming heights that those who hailed him as a "prodigious" Bob Dylan of my generation said he probably would.  Regardless - he has built himself an audience, and that audience listens.

There's actually quite some stuff written on Jake Bugg - such was (and to a slight extent, still is) the interest in him - but there is this one review on his debut album that I was brought to by a post rightly titled "Jake Bugg explains his poetry":

"There's a great story about Jake Bugg that illustrates just how different he is from your average British teenager. Shortly after playing his first gig, Bugg's friends, suitably impressed, implored him to audition for Britain's Got Talent. In their defence, it's no stretch to imagine Amanda Holden violently weeping all the fluid out of her body to the strains of 'Country Song' or 'Someone Told Me', but Bugg was having none of it. "I never would have done that," he told one interviewer, "because it doesn't seem genuine, it doesn't feel natural."

"...his scowling anger is just a front, a carefully erected facade that shields a vulnerable and contemplative soul...'Broken' is a song of such towering beauty and elegance, it boggles the mind that a scruffy teenager barely old enough to shave could have written it. On 'Two Fingers', Bugg talks wistfully of scheming on the streets of Clifton, where he and his mates would "skin up a fat one, hide from the feds", as though life held no nobler pursuit. You can tell that, up until now, his world has been small, and he might well have spiralled down the sinkhole that swallows so many marginalised estate kids. Eventually, however, Bugg comes to the same conclusion that we do: "Something is changing, changing, changing." If this debut album - rife with uncommon wit, insight and melody - is a testament to anything, it's that his small, unremarkable world is about to get a whole lot bigger."