3014 Down, 2000 More To Go

There is something very character-building about hand-indexing five thousand songs. Having laboured over this task in fits and starts over the past couple of weeks, I can confidently say that I am now a better person. More patient. More meticulous. More thin. OK, not more thin, but all the rest is true.

When my hard drive crashed and died, I lost all the songs on it. I retrieved them from my iPod onto a new drive, but iTunes refused to associate the songs on the iPod with the same songs in the hard drive. So what's the problem, you ask? The problem was that I was about one third of the way into listening to and assigning ratings to every single one of the five thousand songs in my library. If I was now unable to match the records in the hard drive with the songs on the iPod, I would lose over a hundred hours worth of song ratings. There is no way that someone with an obsessive-compulsive streak like me could bear such a loss. So the only choice left to me was to match each song to its MP3 file manually.

(I could explain why I was so keen to have all the songs rated, but it won't make me sound any less crazy so I won't bother.)

After indexing about five hundred songs I realized that this could be an informative experience. For instance...

I noticed that by far the funniest song titles belong to the Ramones. In 1974, Dee Dee, Johnny and Joey Ramone played their first concert. They did not really have the same name; they just thought it would be amusing to pretend to be brothers. With that same whimsical sense of humour they went on to record songs like "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue", "I Just Want To Have Something To Do", "The KKK Took My Baby Away", and my favourite: "I Wanna Be Sedated".

On the other hand Pink Floyd are the masters of the weird song title. After "Pigs On The Wing" and "Take Up Thy Stethoscope And Walk" you think you've seen it all. Then you come across " Careful With That Axe, Eugene" and you think the limit of eccentricity has been reached. Then you spot "Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict". I'm convinced that the band used to generate song titles by picking words at random from a dictionary and squeezing a preposition or two in the middle just to make a complete phrase.

Be that as it may, one can only entertain oneself with song titles for so long. It came to a point in the indexing process that I began to wonder whether I had lost my mind. Was the effort I was putting into it worthwhile? If I decided to just give up on the ratings, would it really be so bad?

Then, just as I was about to lose my religion, my faith came back to me in the form of jet lag-induced insomnia. I spent six hours in a late-night marathon of keyboard-bashing. I knocked the whole darned library into shape and order emerged out of the chaos on my hard drive. Beautiful order, rising like Aphrodite from the foam.

With a silent (lest I wake the neighbourhood) roar of triumph I clutched my iPod to my chest, did a little victory lap around my chair, and fell into a deep victorious sleep such as only the righteous can enjoy.

Now all I need to do is listen to all the as-yet-unrated songs and rate them. It should only take me another couple of hundred hours or so to finish that task.

Anyone got a straitjacket to spare?

Through The Looking Glass

I love dogs of all sizes, from giant Great Danes and St. Bernards down to little bitty Dachscunds. But if an animal can be cradled in the palm of one hand, I cannot consider it a dog anymore. Anything that small is either a hamster or a guinea pig. A dog is an animal that really should be visible to the naked eye.

Laura (real name kept secret to protect my safety) does not think so. She's a 200-kilo realtor with a 2-kilo dog. I'm not kidding; Duchess, her Yorkshire Terrier, rides around in a litte pouch suspended over her mistress' ample tummy. Together they look like a strange species of marsupial, a cross between a Kangaroo and a fur mitten.

We met them while viewing houses in Boston. They lived up to every caricature of a large woman with a pet the size of her fist. In a loud falsetto voice Laura told us about Yorkie party she was taking Duchess to. There would be about 30 of these creatures milling about like possessed furballs. And the only way to identify individual animals would be by their jewelry. Duchess' birthday was coming up later in the week. And for that grande soiree she would be prepared with nine (yes, nine) different dresses. Heaven only knows what mountains will be moved when Duchess has her "sweet sixteenth" birthday party.

Fortunately all the other people we met in Boston last week were sane. And we were really lucky that we had Sally (real name hidden to protect her from the embarassing revelation about to follow) to take us around. We loved that she shared our interest in food from different countries. That was not obvious at first, when Sally extolled her town Newton for being more tolerant than neighbouring Wellesley. The Wellesley town council would allow only Starbucks to open a coffee shop. Newton, on the other hand, was willing to admit Dunkin' Donuts as well so that its residents would have access to different kinds of coffee. (To her credit, Sally went on to talk intelligently about middle-eastern, Indian, Thai and Chinese food, all of which are also available in Newton.)

All in all it's been an interesting week. For the first time I got a good look at suburban America and it was beautiful. We drove through towns with charming wooden houses separated by wide tracts of forested land. Inside every town there were extravagant stretches of playgrounds and parkland, interspersed with lovely lakes and ponds. Winter was turning to spring in a wash of bright green. Not the deep, glossy tropical green of Singapore but a lighter, crisper, more temperate shade of green. And over the long weekend it seemed as if everyone was out running or cycling or at least out walking with their kids and dogs.

It wasn't all smooth and pretty for us. It took us half an hour to change terminals at JFK airport, which made us think wistfully of the efficient and passenger-friendly airports in Asia. The practice of tipping had me in a perpetual state of bewilderment. I'll probably need night classes to figure out whom to tip and how much. But that's all part of the normal friction of moving to another country with a whole other culture.

For now I'm just pleased that at the end of our week-long scouting trip we came back to Singapore feeling positive about Boston. There's plenty to look forward to when we move there in a couple of months. And in the meantime, we'll continue to soak up tropicana, Singapore style.

Man vs Machine

Here I am, at 9am on a Sunday morning in Boston. The weather outside is fine, which in April means that it's a toasty 10C outside and there is no sign of rain or snow. I'm wide awake and have been for about four hours. And already I've been outwitted by a washing machine.

Earlier this morning I'd gone to the hotel laundromat to wash some clothes. I had duly loaded the machine, closed the lid, inserted my coins, and rammed in the coin loader/machine starter. And then I and the machine stared at each other in dead, calm silence. I soon tired of trying to outstare a white metal object. So I asked a passing employee to help. With a pleasant smile (that screamed "You daft furriner") she sweetly pulled the loader/starter back out and presto, the machine started running.

It's history repeating itself. Years ago I visited a friend who had just moved to Bangkok. He was facing a crisis because he'd run out of clean clothes and didn't know how to operate his washing machine. The Thai user manual did not help. The building staff were a little better. We phoned them and said "Please repair washing machine" using every syntax and accent we could think of. Eventually we managed to transmit the word "repair". Then followed a Siamese version of Twenty Questions in which we successively denied damaging air conditioners, toasters, televisions, refrigerators and assorted other appliances. Eventually a technician came up to investigate and in about seven seconds had the washer up and running. In the process we learned that you have to turn the starter knob, and then pull it out.

So within 36 hours of leaving Singapore I have learned two valuable life lessons. The first, of course, is about the intricacies of operating washing machines in alien nations. The second is about the incompatibility between toddlers and laung-haul flights.

Imagine a three-year-old boy. Imagine getting him into a plane at 11 in the morning, wide awake and full of beans. Imagine keeping him there for the duration of an 18-hour flight. If you're imagining a small, roughly cylindrical object ricocheting off the walls of a flight cabin, you've got the right image.

In hindsight it was rather funny. I, my wife, and our Monster were seated at the back of the cabin. The Monster invented a sport which consisted of giggling all the way to the front, then hopping all the way to the back. Along the route he would stop at randomly chosen fellow passengers, look them closely in the eye, and then giggle some more. They were obviously unprepared for such childish attention; at this point it's worth mentioning that every one of them was a tired-looking businessperson.

After about 10 hours of alternating the mile-high hopscotch with lusty renditions of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star", we had gotten to know the cabin crew rather well. They were great - they went a long way to take care of us. Maybe they thought it was a neat way to get back at excessively demanding business passengers. Or maybe it was just the exceptional dedication to service that Singapore Airlines instils. Either way, they took fantastic care of us, bless their sarong-clad souls.

And now we're here in the promised land, with a week of house-hunting ahead of us. The weather forecast promises sunny skies. Let's hope that's an omen.

Caught In A Mosh ... Forever

A giant panda from hell plays speed metal guitar and laments mankind's extermination of other animal species. If you think that's bizarre, wait till you find out that he (she?) is called Death Panda.

I'm not making this up.



The guitarist is Marty Friedman, formerly of Megadeth. The vocalists are from Akihabara48, an all-girl Japanese group.

This could only happen in Japan.

At this point you're probably wondering why I know this. It's because I recently watched the loudest movie ever. Sam Dunn is an anthropologist and a heavymetal fan. He did what any such person would do - he made a documentary called "Global Metal" about heaymetal music around the world. And watching it made me feel like a teenager again. It took me back to when I was 14 years old and there was a new boy in school. He had just moved to Delhi from Cyprus, and he passed around a tape with music like I had never heard before. It was loud and it was rude and it could only be listened to at maximum volume.

Soon afterwards I heard of a band called Metallica, and how they had titled their first album "Kill 'Em All" in a nose-thumbing reference to record company executives who blocked the original title: "Metal Up Your Ass". Then, in quick succession, I discovered Iron Maiden, Slayer, Anthrax and a host of other bands with evil names, twin guitars, double-bass drums, and buckets of attitude.

My parents (and probably my neighbours) waited for me to grow out of it. But the thing is, once you're into metal, I don't think you can ever get out. As one of Dunn's interviewees in another documentary put it, "Metal fans love it forever. Noone goes 'Yeah I was really big into Slayer ... one summer.'"

The popular stereotype is that metal fans are long-haired drug-toking satan-worshipping anarchists who are incapable of fitting into civilized society. And while that is completely true, it totally misses the point. Which is that they are hearing-impaired long-haired ... anarchists.

Sometimes that stereotype can get quite hilarious. Years ago, when music was still sold on vinyl records, Iron Maiden went on tour in America. They inadvisedly scheduled a concert somewhere in the bible belt. A local preacher decided to crusade against their diabolical influence by organizing a bonfire to burn their albums. His devout followers duly bought a lot of records (somehow believing that this would be a bad thing for the band) and chucked them in the flames. All seemed to be well until someone realized that the plastic would release vapours. Evil, Satan-worshipping vapours. Panic struck and the crowd disappeared hastily to escape the fumes from Hell. Days later when the band arrived in town to perforate some eardrums, the only people who showed up to scream and point at them were their fans.

Coming back to Global Metal, I was blown away by some of the vignettes. There was the fan from Iran who somehow managed to keep up with his favourite music while living in a country where music CDs are illegal. There was the guy in Dubai who wore a traditional dishdasha like the ones in the picture below while being interviewed.


With a sheepish grin he reminisced about playing in his school band. and doing a cover of Jimi Hendrix's classic Purple Haze. He had worn just such a dishdasha on stage - except that it was all black.

There was the rather pudgy and incongruously named Sahil "Demonstealer"Makhija, lead singer in a band in Bombay. And the absolutely hilariously named band Bhayanak Maut. That's comic-book Hindi for "grisly death"; the humour in the name is sadly untranslatable.

There was a guy from Israeli band Salem recalling the time they sang about the holocaust. That sparked a debate in the national parliament about whether it was appropriate for a metal band to sing about such a serious topic. There was Max Cavalera from Brazilian pioneers Sepultura describing their first time in Jakarta. The fans, mostly students, got excited and rushed the stage to get closer to their idols. The police were already on edge because of political activism in Indonesia's universities so they panicked. They beat the kids down with batons. Then they forced 20,000 kids to sit down on the ground and watch a show by one of the loudest, fastest, most energetic bands ever.

And the absolute best part of the movie for me was X-Japan. In the late 1980s they started creating what would eventually be known as Visual Kei, a sub-culture that fused their musical style with extravagant make-up and fashion.


Don't be fooled by the posing and pouting. These guy kick ass and they kick it very very hard. They make the American glam metal bands of the 1990s look like a bunch of wusses; check out their videos on Youtube and you'll know what I mean.

So there you have it - giant Japanese pandas, Indian "demonstealer"s, and kosher headbangers, the world of heavymetal has it all. Is it any wonder we don't feel the need for civilized society?

A Soupcon of Soup Cans

The first time I heard of artist Andy Warhol, I thought he was the ultimate pretender.

He once described how he got the idea for a particular series of paintings: "I'd asked around 10 or 15 people for suggestions. Finally one lady friend asked me the right question, 'Well, what do you love most?' That's how I started painting money."

And so he went on to paint dollar signs in various shapes and colours. And when he wasn't painting dollar signs, he was painting cans of Campbell's Soup. 32 different flavours of Campbell's Soup. I really didn't get it. They said he made 'Pop Art', which sounded suspiciously like a polite way of saying that his work was kitsch, not art.

But I have resolved to live life large. So when I found out that an exhibition of Warhol prints was running in Singapore, and that there was no admission fee, I had to go. I'm so glad that I did!

The thing that I had never appreciated before was that through his art Warhol was telling the story of his times. It wasn't Pop Art in the sense that it was lowest-common-denominator product, packaged to sell millions of copies like a New Kids On The Block album. On the contrary, it was art that observed popular culture. A great example is his portrait of James Dean, or rather his portrait of a Japanese poster for the James Dean movie Rebel Without A Cause.

Here's the original poster for the movie (I could not find a Japanese one, but this gives a good idea of what it would have been like).


And here's what Warhol did with it; I love the way he stylized the portrait to make James Dean look even more sullen and aggressive than in the photograph.



Warhol did not just observe, he also commented.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were American communists. They were sentenced to death by electrocution in 1951 for passing military secrets to the Soviet Union. Julius was strapped to the chair first, and he died quickly. Ethel was not so lucky. She recieved a charge of electricity for 57 seconds but at the end of it she was still alive. Two more charges were passed before she was pronounced dead. Eyewitnesses said that by then smoke was rising from her head.

Warhol made 10 prints based on a press photograph of the death chamber. Individually, each image is intensely haunting.

And when you see all of them displayed side-by-side, the effect is profoundly disturbing.

There were a hundred Warhol prints exhibited and I loved almost every one. I did draw the line at a poster titled How To Tell If You're Having A Heart Attack. It was exactly what it sounds like and incredibly dull. But that was a rare exception in a collection of sheer genius.

So I am now officially a fan of Andy Warhol. I'm a proud purveyor of Pop Art. And my farewell tour of Singapore is off to a flying start!

It Begins Now

I spent all of Friday in a blue funk and I could not understand why. At first I thought it was because I had started the day by pissing off people from 8 in the morning; but I'm way too thick-skinned, and probably too misanthropic, for that to bother me for long. Still, I spent all day feeling sorry for myself for the most trivial reasons (and probably pissing of manymore people in the process). Then, late in the evening, it dawned on me what had happened.

A couple of months ago, my company decided to move me to a new assignment in Boston (Massachusetts, not Lincolnshire, in case I have any British readers). I've had time to get used to the idea, but in truth it seemed far off in the future because the actual date of my move had not been fixed. That changed on Friday when my new boss made it clear that by the end of June, I would either be in Boston, or I would be in deep doodoo.

So now there is a date. And it's less than three months away. And it feels like it's tomorrow. I have twelve weeks or less before I pack my bags and leave on a jet plane. I know what you are thinking: "Twelve weeks is a long time, so stop whinging you snivelling infant". You're missing the point. There is a clock and it is counting down. I can almost hear the ticking. It used to count in months, now it's in weeks and soon there will only be days left.

I have so much unfinished business! So many things I had planned to see in Asia this year! I spent last Christmas planning my travel in 2008 to Laos, Vietnam, Tibet and Australia and now I don't know when (if?) I'll get to go. There are so many people to say goodbye to, and some of those people deserve really looong goodbyes.

(And there are so many places I still haven't eaten at in Singapore!)

I could go on and on and on but ... that way lies despair. So I won't go there.

Now that I know what's been biting me, I'm going to bite back. I'm going to make the next twelve weeks count and I'm going to start today. Twelve weeks from now when I sit by an airplane window and take a last, parting look at skyscrapers sprouting out of a carpet of tropical foliage, I'll still be sad; but I'll also be satisfied. Because twelve weeks from now I'm going to look back and say to myself "Dude, you really went out in style!"