Reflection 1: Pre-departure 17 April 2006

Budapest 31 December 1983

And now I remember the song of the Gene like so much: 'what will it take - to whip you into shape - a broken heart - a broken heart - It can be arranged - it can be arranged'. Why then is this sense of waking up, of giving up, of abandoning all hope larger than life, always fresh and astonishing and not quite credible? why indeed? Enough of this self-pitiful self-hatred, impossible to get out of or get any sense out of anymore, and I'd rather be in China. I write all this only for ritualistic reasons, because I happened to be writing when the hour of the annual rite approached, and much as I respect your opinion on the matters, I have never been terribly impressed by your ability to make sense out of my own life. It is really asking far too much, since direct experience has always been the source of all my own insights, that you give me insights merely on the basis of my insights. Research is not exactly, as Burt says, the process of fidning that there is no particular reason why you shouldn't hold your preconceived opinions, but it is curiously difficult to make sense out of someone else's records, isn't it?

*) quoted from a book I read in Beijing 2004. Slipped the notes on the title and author somewhere.

T h i n k O u t

pla•ton•ic /pltnIk; NAmE tn/ adj. (of a relationship) friendly but not involving sex: platonic love Their relationship is strictly platonic.

de•sire /dIzaI(r)/ noun, verb
noun
1 [C, U] ~ (for sth)| ~ (to do sth) a strong wish to have or do sth: a strong desire for power enough money to satisfy all your desires She felt an overwhelming desire to return home. (formal) I have no desire (= I do not want) to discuss the matter further. (formal) He has expressed a desire to see you.
2 [U, C] ~ (for sb) a strong wish to have sex with sb: She felt a surge of love and desire for him.
3 [C, usually sing.] a person or thing that is wished for: When she agreed to marry him he felt he had achieved his heart’s desire.
verb (not used in the progressive tenses)
1 (formal) to want sth; to wish for sth: [vn] We all desire health and happiness. The house had everything you could desire. The medicine did not achieve the desired effect. [v to inf] Fewer people desire to live in the north of the country. [also vn to inf]
2 to be sexually attracted to sb: [vn] He still desired her.

Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionarly Online

Can the alteration be smooth? Feasible, might be, but is it sensible to pursue?

[soundtrack: My Bloody Valentine's Loomer, Loveless, 1991]

Treading a New Musical Realm

I'm happy.

It has been a rather musical rich the past few weeks - as I seem to finally find a mate to just blurting out all the long-meant intention on exploring music in a much more cerebral way, moving far beyond the mainstream (read: MTV and the likes). I always meant to do it - especially in the last two years - but felt that I never got it right. In late 2002, I encountered a really passionate music geek on this theme, but looking back, I kind of wasted those precious chance. As he walked by off my life - with all the knowledge still very much encassed in his head - it left me with a huge void, a realisation of having such a loose ends on what could be that rare chance to significantly alter my musical knowledge.

I, for example, did not manage to move beyond the first few pages of Simon Reynolds's Energy Flash: Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture nor Kodwo Eshun's More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, the two bibles he brought for me. This exceptional encounter exposed me to what Oi! music is [don't laugh], to the fact that voila! there's actually such scene in the capital, in addition to what I've known for long as the punk scene and the ever so mobile indie's.

Anyway, this year's encounter (or last year's to be precise) started with me meeting this young lad from Berlin who was tailing his cool parents doing a stage design workshop in Yogyakarta. He said he plays in a band, and before too long I gave him a first glimpse of what's going on in the local scene, in forms of some CDs (courtesy of the foundation I work for, hiha) and some cheapo cassettes we found to sample during one of those last rounds in the so laid-back city. He then paid a surprise trip two months later, now with his (remains) cool mother, and a trip to Bandung soon drew him to the familiar sound of Teenage Death Star. He wanted to release TDS, but they were still recording, and by the time he's back to Berlin, the band disbanded. Ouch.

Now, proceed to a string of sped-up few emails - from and to my capital and his - which have been pooling some names, old and new. He introduced me first to The Monks, a punk band of the 60s, whose members were the American GIs stationed in Berlin. This is really tickles me, the phenomenon of obscure bands who are resurrected to life online, forty years after their split-up. The wonder of 2000s. I described him this Japanese band with a french name (which I forgot the exact name) from the 70s, who once hijacked an aeroplane and then joined all those legends in the Hall of Fame of Obscure bands after the frontmant mysteriously gone missing. This little story sent him off to a quest of identifying the band, cos I am totally hopeless at remembering, enacting those one-mentioning in the past of someone's passionate blabbering on the subject. I miss it - his blabbering - and him at the same time.

Then, it's the young lad's turn to tell or send me some strange sound. He fast-forwarded to the 2004's Wolfmother, a newcomer (founded in 2004) from Sydney (argh). That'ts where I decided to really read the backdated Wire I've got at home. I just proposed him to do this 'genealogy' study (sort of) together, tracing those influences (the band's version) of other's bands from what they claimed themselves. Wolfmother claimed they are influenced (among others) by Boards of Canada (which was the cover story of October 2005's Wire). From the article, I learnt that the two Scottish brothers love Cocteau Twins, really a gem sound soundbites I had experienced for the first time sometimes in August 2005 (more than two decades late!).

From my office's humble PC, I could only captured the fractured seconds of Wolfmother's Mind's Eye, but listening to their White Unicorn (playing looping on their website), for sure, he's right. Whatever influences the band claimed (BOC or Beck), their music clearly is rooted in those sounds of Black Sabbath, White Stripes or Led Zeppelin. I think, one of my 'eternal shame' is for some reasons, I always seemed to postpone the urge to start knowing at the very least, one of those three. Time to do my homework.......