Singapore – the real champion!

I am just astounded by how grand, how fairy-tale like the Singapore F1 event was. Nevermind the fact that Alonso came back from a dismal position and upped the ante in a scintillating race. Who cares if Ferrari f***ked up majestically? (A little does of humility would be good for the stallion). To me, the real protagonist of the event? – The City. Brighter than Vienna on Christmas Night and Louder than London in rush-hour. Really proud of the organizations and the brains/brawn that cobbled together such an exciting race.

The whole 5.067km route was lit up on a LUX level of 3000, which is about the brightness of an overcast day in Yorkshire.  Put the lights on with the aura of the Supreme Court, the colonial buildings and modern skyscrapers, plus the hysterical howl of those F1 engines…(light V12s?  F1 isn’t my pet subject) and you have something really magical…

My funny takeaways from the F1: The silly Singtel Gridgirl who didn’t stand at attention when the most beautiful rendition of “Majulah Singapore” was sung. You can kiss your $20,000 prize money goodbye!! My second takeaway: I can never forget her…the Immaculate safety Car.

The SL63

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.

Vdub in the house…

..delivered in a pristine, germ-free and very clinic-like hallway. Finally, a piece of engineering I have that came from the people who gave us u-boats, beer and nuclear fission. At times, this car on the road is an absolute beast, in others as docile as Jane Austen. I’ve watched far too many times the golf ads on night-driving.com and finally, I’m so happy to own one. Just me and my little shell. I know the Golf is no Ferrari but i take my hat off to one Coco Chanel who makes me feel all warm and snug in this car with this quip of hers: “It is the unseen, unforgettable, ultimate accessory of fashion that heralds your arrival and prolongs your departure.” Nice!

Klingon Anti-Gravity gun?

This side of paradise

Every once in a while comes my mother’s injunction for her son to mind the less fortunate , “Don’t forget the starving and poor in the world!” she would say. This would be followed by her pleas to say the rosary for the fettered, harassed and downtrodden.

But on days like these when you visit the austere Mercedes Benz showhouse, empathy flies out the window. Today, I was blessed with the chance to test drive the new Mercedes SLK 200 Kompressor, and of course there were the assessing looks by the bemused salespeople. (Was I wearing the right clothes, the right shoes? Did I reveal that haughty nonchalance?)

I didn’t have to survive the mean gaze of those bureaucrats long, because my friend Dion quickly ushered me to that gunmetal beauty on the second storey. It’s a two-seater of course, and we joked that you’d only need to send the girl back. Hang the other friends and prospective parent-in-laws! They could suffocate in the boot with the golf bag for all we cared.

The interior of the SLK is breathtaking. No, it’s not the F-22 cockpit but all the impressions of being in a good sports car hits you instantly. The finish on the panels, the amazing HUD, those immaculate buttons, the gear-stick. I take an eternity to savour the details, grinning like an idiot.

We set off from Alexandria to Tuas, a necessarily long distance to put the car through its paces. The first thing you feel is that the SLK’s not torque laden. Its in-line 4 cylinder power plant churns out only about 181 horsepower; its supercharged compressor engine kicks in on the highway when you floor the pedal, and everything’s going hazy because it doesn’t seem to let up after that! I mean, look at the length of the bonnet, it’s as long as South America; There’s certainly oodles of power to utilize, even at 130km/h! Slopes, undulating surfaces and even pasty little Subaru WRXs don’t deter it…

So we tried all sorts of fun along the way, cruise control; taking off the folding roof, ramming the accelerator with abandon etc. The handling also seems just about right, (I did not test the heavier 6-cylinder SLK350) and the SLK experience just seems to be richer the further you drive. And all this while, my heart is just a butterball of desire and speed…

So imagine the dismay when I had to turn in the keys to this piece of heaven, which at the cost of $196,000 for the entry level, is way beyond my meager reach, unless I plan a diet of Colgate and Darlie for the rest of my life.

Oh yeah, for those with infinite pockets with an eye to this blazing car, please contact my good friend Dion Yong, official Cycle and Carriage dealer, and destroyer of peace in mens’ hearts: Dion.yong@cyclecarriage.com.sg

These crustaceans

Have you ever seen such an enormous mouth-watering crab? I’m not the sort to take pictures of food, but this certainly took the cake! Thankfully I was with small eaters Jason and Jong Yann, and I could relish a large proportion of this crab all to myself. The place: Mellben Crab at Blk 232, Ang Mo Ko Ave 3.

Hail to the crab, which like the lobster, doesn’t bark and knows the secret of the sea…

Anyhow, while eating this (since Jason was concentrating on his plate), I was also thinking of Eliot’s phrase from “Love Song of Alfred J Prufock”, where there is a famous mention of a sea creature: “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”  But do these claws refer to a crab or lobster? or neither? The academic brouhaha about the image is a real hoot. Just read the following:

Claude Rawson, professor of English at Yale University: “I think it’s almost certain that Eliot was thinking of a crab. After all, the poem invokes Prince Hamlet, who once spun a crab metaphor of his own: ‘For you yourself, sir, should be as old as I am–if, like a crab, you could go backward.’

Richard Poirier, eminent literary critic, insists lobster: “crabs are endowed only with rudimentary claws, when they have them at all,” and concluded that “these are most likely the claws specifically of a Maine lobster.“

Louis Menand, professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center: “Definitely lobster. Crab claws are too prehensile anyway for the sexual misery ‘Prufrock’ means to evoke and not nearly funny enough. (I could never have guessed, Prof) Lobster claws are a witty variation on Tennyson’s super-eroticized hands in In Memoriam: swollen with longing but clumsy and vaguely mutant, desiring but undesired.

Positively hilarious, all this much ado about a crab!

Up

Give dear Margaret Atwood a chance a explain why you cannot get out of bed, and what needs to be done to haul you up. Up you go..

You wake up filled with dread.
There seems no reason for it.
Morning light sifts through the window,
There is birdsong.
You can’t get out of bed.It’s something about the crumpled sheets
Hanging over the edge like jungle
Foliage, the terry slippers gaping
Their dark pink mouths for your feet,
The unseen breakfast—some of it
In the refridgerator you do not dare
To open—you will not dare to eat.

What prevents you? The future. The future tense
Immense as outer space.
You could get lost there.
No. nothing so simple. The past, its density
And drowned events pressing you down,
Like sea water, like gelatin
Filling your lungs instead of air.

Forget all that and let’s get up.
Try moving your arm.
Try moving your head.
Pretend the house is on fire
And you must run or burn.
No, that one’s useless
It’s never worked before.

Where it is coming from, this echo?
This huge No that surrounds you,
Silent as the folds of the yellow
Curtains, mute as the cheerful

Mexican bowl with its cargo
Of mummified flowers?
(you chose the colours of the sun,
Not the dried neutrals of the shadow,
God knows you tried)

Now here’s a good one:
You’re lying on your deathbed.
You have one hour to live.
Who is it, exactly, you have needed
All these years to forgive?

The Immaculate GTI

Motor advertising is tough. I haven’t seen any really outstanding advertisements on cars that I love for eg. the Audi R8, but they had a nice tagline of “the slowest car we’ve ever built”, with an assemblage of all 3000 odd mechanical parts coming to fruition.

Not bad.  But here’s one that really caught my attention. The boy is a bigot and a bully. He rolls over his dad, crushes old bicycles, leers at women on the street, and finally owns a GTi. But the way the car reverses at the end is really something. Kudos to the advertising minds who were spot on masculinity.

Re-discovery

I was looking at some of my old pictures of Italy and there was this amazing outpouring of images that prompted me to put them in words. Of course, there is a a deep cathartic value in this for me, because Italy reminds me of Yat. And there’s this picture that I chanced upon, seeing her in the only way I can, of her in a sunlit terrace in San Gimigiano. And somehow the phrase “as clear as the light of day” seemed so appropriate to my sense of direction, and that I had to wrest some lines from memories that were choking me. So to my dear Yat, to whom some places in the middle of Italy mean little, but mean everything in the world to me…

In some half-imagined scene of mine,
Perhaps in a sunit piazza in Trieste,
I am thinking most deeply of you again.

I squint at these soft lines that say
“mai piu ritornerai, mai piu”, which sound like
the begging of all thirty good years of me
to return no more, no more to you.

Why these lines have loitered
Half-heeded in one’s throat, no one can say.
Not in this vast, ruinously classical urban space
Where the Italian afternoon goes on forever,
marked by long shadows.

The old Italians like Galilei and Columbus
were feted for mapping starry-eyed point to point.
Then why did I want to be re-discovered by you
In this cobbled square, when I caught in a lowered gaze,
that piazza really meant insurrection,
not connection.

Pain on the road

There are many visions of happiness as there are of love, riches and sex. But my favourite reverie rests on Henry James’s idea of paradise as a “perfect automobile going thirty miles an hour on a smooth road to a twelfth century cathedral”.

But take that perfect car, outfit it with the Grille of the Peugeot 207 Gti, and you have the most consummate grimace mounting the frontal intakes. It’s the grimace of high pressured winds buffeting against one’s face. The grimace of Ugolino gnawing upon Archbishop Ruggieri in Hell – “ La bocca sollevo dal fiero pasto quell peccator”

Then there is also the Audi R8’s twinking succession of 24 Light Emitting Diodes below its headlights, applied like tearful mascara beneath its eyelets. Nothing Moulin-Rouge about its appearance. Just pain, speed and tears on a smooth road…the perfect start to that paradise.

Boots made for walking

Here’s a bare-bones lesson in simplicity and direction:

Don’t ask for the true story

Why do you need it?

 Its not what I set out with

or what I carry

What I’m sailing with,

A knife, blue fire, 

luck, a few good words

that still work,

and the tide. 

 –Margaret Atwood

And did I mention that I also need my costly new pair of Aldo shoes to get me there too?