My new toy

I would love to write about all the recession nay-saying and the impending doom that befalls us in 2009, plus gripe about those predatory chain of bankers making irresponsible policies that caused the collapse of Lehmann Brothers Bank. But instead, I think I’ll just like to gaze lovingly at my “in-spite-of-recession” toy, the very retro-styled Voigtlander Bessa-R with her new Ultron 35mm f1.7 oculars. This is a fast 35mm, wide-angle lens, great for photographic stories in low-light conditions. Though tedious, the analog camera holds a charming engagement with History and Sound. If you ever get your hands on this non-electronic camera, listen to its film advance lever and the shutter…all working mechanically to catch that moment.

What a work of beauty! And how apt that I should just have seen Ben Kingsley’s “Elegy” where the most poignant moment was him immortalizing Penelope Cruz in his Leica.

Ode to the Egg

“Oh milky white egg, spew forth your glorious white …” nevermind. I can’t write an ode to the egg without some hint of vulgarity. Anyway, have you seen such a nice eggie? Some excerpts from the Oxford Book of Food Writing: a genre I can never fathom because the tired descriptors of food just being “nice lor” is all I can think of:

“In English the word egg is something to cup in one’s palm. On the page, the extra g, like a linguistic wink, lends the word the same oblong shape as the thing itself. Egg nestles against the curve of the tongue.

In its shell it is all smoothness and balance. Next to it, other kinds of beauty seem bony and embellished… Yet the egg lends its beauty generously—witness the way egg tempera allows itself to be saturated with color; the chalky aura that bathes a Vermeer, as though the painter has cast his light through a broken shell.

The love of eggs is a love for the tiny and tender—pinkie-sized squash, potatoes like marbles, three-week-old chickens, skinny-limbed lambs and calves—but taken one step backwards.”

Dearest SOTA students…

I wished I took pictures of all of you in the exam hall today! But a big thank you for that unreserved birthday singing…And happy Birthday to Amni too!!

Honestly, I couldn’t possibly cry in front of you and lose my professionalism. Thank you again…

Dear Gary, dear friend…

There’s my favourite image of him, sitting alone in the canteen, fingers pressed together and working at his laptop. WIth all the theatre kids in his heart. Just Gary, humbly intelligent, yet full of warmth and kindness in our simmering climate. No words can express how great your absence is to our work room and our school. Yet great poets do try to evince how great such loss can be … so to my friend, dearly missed amongst all:

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroke; why swell’st thou then;
One short sleepe past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

Torquing the talk

 No particular reason for this post, except that I’m reading a review of Jeremy Clarkson’s books here, and also looking at an irritatingly cute driving icon on mycarforum. I must admit, looking at it driving is hypnotic.

Anyway, here’s a quote from Clarkson (boorish, unorthodox and something of a chauvinist) that just stuck in my mind.

“I should make it plain at this point that I still like fast cars. I like them to telegraph their intentions through the fabric of my underpants. I like them to be crisp and responsive and loud and powerful. But I am unusual.”

– Jeremy Clarkson

Barry’s Trotters

At the end of Potter mania, kids please do not recite your loyalty oaths all over again…Go on to read Susanna Clark’s “Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell”; if you are more adventurous, try any of Sharon Creech’s books or savour Eyes of the Dragon–an early masterpiece by Stephen King… anyway here’s an outrageous parody of ol’ ‘arry that’ll ruffle a few Hogwartian feathers. I particularly like Simon Cowell’s expression. Enjoy!

Man without a Country with a Nice Bag

I’ve never really liked Russian leaders…with the exception of one.

Boris Yeltsin struck me as a bull in the political china-shop, the temporary man of the people who would later become a man of the bottle. (Heck, this man danced at a rock concert stage while campaigning for re-election in 1996.) But he could never carry that buffoonish swagger and simplicity the way Ronald Reagan could…

And there is the chillingly austere Vladimir Putin, former KGB man from Leningrad. Perry Anderson has this wonderful description that Putin cuts a somewhat colourless, frigid figure in the West and that “in cultures accustomed to more effusive styles of leadership, the sleek, stoat-shaped head and stone-cold eyes offer little purchase for affective projection.” True, I’ve never seen a smiling portrait of the man.

But think Gorbachev and what springs instantly to mind? Disastrous Crimean holidays, Perestroika, Glasnost, the twilight years of the (good ol’) Cold War, my JC lecturer shrieking her high praises to this balding man… But yes, Gorby has always remained an icon of idealism to me. This is my favourite shot of him– just Gorbachev, pensively staring out a window, now a fashion icon for Louis Vutton, as if on his way in 1988 to defuse another “Evil Empire” remark from Reagan…

I live in Fucking, Austria…

This is so funny.. a list of the worst-named cities in the World. (Commentary not mine ok?)

1.Cockburn, Western Australia

Although this name is often pronounced “Coburn” by those who stand to lose from its awfulness, who actually reads that when they see this word?

2.Twatt, Orkney, Shetland Islands, Scotland

The Shetland Islands, pronounced “Shitland Islands” by the locals.

3 Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateapokaiwhenuakitanatahu, New Zealand

Locals call this hill in Hawke’s Bay “Taumata” because… Well. Just because.

4 Muff, Ireland

5 Titty Hill, Sussex, England

Falling squarely into the extensive Stupid Place Names From England category, Titty Hill is probably located just north of…

6. Thong, Kent, England

Which actually is south-east of…

7. Wetwang, Yorkshire… yep! England again!

Okay, so I’ll cut England some slack. It’s an old country. You know, if the United States is Google, then England is IBM. Their country is older than freakin dirt. They can’t be blamed for having names that sound funny in 2007.

8. Spread Eagle, Wisconsin

9. Cockup, Cumbria, England

Cumbria is a county in the very north-west of England. What the backwoods of Alabama are to America is what Cumbria is to Britain. They talk funny up there. Thus, it isn’t thoroughly surprising that they have a town called Cockup. What do you call someone from this place? A Cockupper? Cockupeleite? Cockuppian? Cockupican? I suppose it’s mildly better than Wetwangger.

10. Whiskey Dick Mountain, Washington State, United States

As hard as America tries, it can’t compete with Britain’s high standards. This was a good effort, though. Well done, Washington.

11. Hell, Michigan, United States

The people in this town at least seem to have a good sense of humor about their home’s unfortunate name.

12. Middelfart, Denmark

13. Horneytown, North Carolina, United States

Its proximity to Hookersville, West Virginia is no coincidence. I also assume that, like Hookersville, the naming of Horneytown took place before “horney” meant “aching for a hot piece of ass” with an extra “e”. But I’m starting to wonder why, pride and tradition aside, the townspeople in these little places never saw it fit to change their homes’ names? Do they enjoy being ridiculed by the entire English-speaking world?

14. Shitterton, Dorset, England

15. Fucking, Austria

The people who live in Fucking, Austria had a vote in 2004 to determine whether or not they should change the town’s name, and you know what they did? They voted against it, preferring instead to put up with international ridicule, numerous stolen road-signs and horrific Google results.

Verve and swagger

More cheek and chutzpah than Johnny Cash or John Wayne, more charismatic than Viggo Mortenson in a cowboy hat, this is really an unrecognizable Michael Stipe.
All right, so it’s an old music video from  the 1992 “Automatic For the People” and really, I should be paying attention to the odd lyrical tribute to Andy Kaufman and technology (Didn’t Buzz Aldrin land on the moon way back in 1969?), but it’s really Stipe’s desert gait that captivates me.

Please watch it here 

Call it sheer swagger or a nonchalent shuffle, what agenda could Stipes be thinking of whilst singing a surreal cocktail of wrestlers and men on the moon?

Oh, and what thrilling godlessness: “See you in heaven if you make the list… yeah yeah yeah yeah.”

The unguessable country of marriage

A whisper within an ordinary parting,
a sigh nesting in a word, it comes
inside another breeze, warmer, softly,
to touch your cheek or shoulder, lighting down
as down does and doesn’t and does again.
What was it?
You will ask yourself and you will ask
again until asking itself is like
a caress, nothing then something
and nothing again there in the dear as day,
but something, something meant–
what was it?