please stay for a while

Hey where did we go,
Days when the rains came
Down in the hollow,
Playin’ a new game,
Laughing and a running hey, hey
Skipping and a jumping
In the misty morning fog with
Our hearts a thumpin’ and you
My brown eyed girl,
You my brown eyed girl.

Whatever happened
To Tuesday and so slow
Going down the old mine
With a transistor radio
Standing in the sunlight laughing,
Hiding behind a rainbow’s wall,
Slipping and sliding
All along the water fall, with you
My brown eyed girl,
You my brown eyed girl.

Do you remember when we used to sing,
Sha la la la la la la la la la la te da

So hard to find my way,
Now that I’m all on my own.
I saw you just the other day,
My how you have grown,
Cast my memory back there, Lord
Sometime I’m overcome thinking ’bout
Making love in the green grass
Behind the stadium with you
My brown eyed girl
You my brown eyed girl

- Van Morrison, “Brown-Eyed Girl”

I had a whole long draft typed up, about everything I am feeling this last weekend before leaving York, with all my stuff in boxes and bags once again, but somehow it never reached a stage where I felt it could be published. All the words just seemed so useless; no matter how much I wrote and rewrote whole sentences, paragraphs, I simply couldn’t - still can’t - really, really put across how I feel. So much has happened so quickly over the past two weeks.

And then “Brown-Eyed Girl” came on the radio and I thought, this is it. This is how I feel.

Do you remember when we used to sing
Sha la la la la la la la la la la te da.

Do you remember? I hope I never forget.

0 | +1?

the foreign question

This post isn’t what it probably sounds like. I’m not going into a lengthy, thoughtful, well-considered (ha) spiel about being foreign in England/being foreign in Australia/the evils of having foreign talent invade Singapore (which I don’t really believe in anyway). No, I intend to talk about pop music.

I’ve been listening to a great deal of Japanese music lately; in fact I’ve been listening almost exclusively to it, except when I think I should take a break and put on my entire library for a while. In particular, Jpop groups Kanjani8 and NEWS have been dominating my airtime. I think I’ve actually created a playlist that consists exclusively of the songs I have from them (plus one invading Arashi song). And I don’t really have a lot - maybe 30ish - so you can imagine how many bajillion times I’ve heard each individual song by now, but I’m still not tired of them.

It dawned on me yesterday, while watching a NEWS concert DVD with English subtitles (thus being the first time I’ve actually seen what the lyrics mean in English, I have no idea what I’m singing along to in Japanese most of the time), that actually, if these songs were written in English with exactly the same tune and arrangement, I would probably hate the large majority of them - or at least be indifferent towards. This is because most of the lyrics turned out to be pretty inane, and as far as English songs go… even if everything else about it is wonderful, I have a lot of difficulty really loving songs with bad lyrics. I’m talking lines like “show me your secret paradise, baby” and “let’s dance and throw off our clothes” - which admittedly sound better in Japanese, but still!

Yet - I still love my trashy Jpop songs. It’s totally inexplicable. I know the lyrics are ridiculous, but the tunes are brilliant. They absolutely define catchy and the singing is good (surprisingly, Japanese manufactured boybands can indeed sing). Which makes me wonder what it is that makes me like a song, and whether listening to foreign songs is actually a better barometer of what your tastes are in music, pure music, sans words and meaning and inflection. Or are lyrics and music inextricable from each other? Then why is it that I like these songs in Japanese but not if they were in English? I have no idea, honestly.

6 | +1?

i said, babe, you’re not lost

Now and then a particular song among my thousands really jumps out and speaks to me, and today it is this deceptively simple one, which I never realised was so beautiful until I heard Michael Buble sing it with the lights dimmed, video off, and eyes closed in Manchester last year.

*

Maybe I didn’t treat you
Quite as good as I should have
Maybe I didn’t love you
Quite as often as I could have
Little things I should have said and done
I just never took the time

You were always on my mind
You were always on my mind

Tell me, tell me that your sweet love hasn’t died
Give me, give me one more chance
To keep you satisfied, satisfied

Maybe I didn’t hold you
All those lonely, lonely times
And I guess I never told you
I’m so happy that you’re mine
If I make you feel second best
Girl, I’m sorry I was blind

You were always on my mind
You were always on my mind

Tell me, tell me that your sweet love hasn’t died
Give me, give me one more chance
To keep you satisfied, satisfied

Little things I should have said and done
I just never took the time
You were always on my mind
You are always on my mind
You are always on my mind

0 | +1?

sweet child o’ mine

For a long, long time (since Christie implemented it at Avendesora way back when) I’ve been wanting an easy, idiot-proof way of including an avatar in my posts. Having searched high and low for a Wordpress solution a few years back and failed to find anything (other than tedious workarounds that would require me to memorise the filename of each image and type it into the custom field of every post), I kind of gave it up, but it occurred to me today that perhaps advances have been made since 2.2 and I really ought to see what 2.6.1 plugins have to offer. And I wasn’t disappointed! I found a fantastically straightforward plugin that works via dropdown menu - as all such plugins should work - and is so dead simple to configure that I didn’t even have to tweak my layout code beyond sticking a few lines of CSS into the stylesheet. And now I have an avatar on all my posts. I was so unnecessarily excited by this that I wasted a good hour or so uploading a tonne of icons, then going back and selecting one for each of my previous posts. Ah I’m easily pleased.

Here is a song to detract from the eyecandy-geekness of this entry:

It’s “God Knows…” by Hirano Aya, and it’s that song from Suzumiya Haruhi that my sister and I were supposed to sing at Animania last week. Neither of us had heard it before and the chorus gave us a helluva hard time (try it, it’s FAST!), but the song itself is really catchy! If you’re inclined to snag it, right-click on the player and you should see a “Download this song” option.

1 | +1?

ikenai taiyou

New layout!

Every now and then, I go through a phase where I just want something dead simple. It usually comes after a layout which was very graphic-heavy and complicated, and goodness knows the previous one was. I was hoping not to use a single graphic in this layout actually but eventually succumbed to placing a teeny pattern background in the header to save the whole thing from becoming overly dull.

But the big thing about this layout, really, is that it is fully liquid (i.e. columns dynamically resize with your browser size and it should be cross-broswer compatible, give it a go); which is not such a great deal if you are a better coder than I am with CSS, but is a great deal to me because the 3-column liquid layout has been an elusive goal that I have aspired to for a long time now, and I never had the patience (till now, while dissertation-procrastinating) to carefully, slowly pick apart some sample CSS and try to figure out how it’s done.

I also have catchy new music to go with the new layout, available for download on the etc. page and for live preview here!

This is “Ikenai Taiyou” by ORANGE RANGE (theme song from the jdrama Hana Kimi), my song of the moment and one of the most incredibly catchy things I have ever heard. It is also my current jogging song. I have it pretty much on perpetual loop on my iPod when I run.

And this is “Exodus” by Maksim Mrvica (probably better known as just Maksim, of The Piano Player album fame). If you’ve been obsessively watching the women’s gymnastics Olympic events, as I have, you might recognise this as Anna Pavlova’s floor music. It’s by far the most amazing of all the floor routine background music and sent me on a mad hunt for the track when I first heard it. (Anna’s floor routine is also amazing, by the way.)

2 | +1?

sleepless beauty

So I don’t normally embed media in my posts… but this, this piano remix of a song from Gravitation, is amazing. Perhaps my reaction to it was so much greater because I’ve just wasted a good 6.5 hours of dissertating time over the past two days marathoning the entire Gravitation series (♥) - maybe because I really like piano - maybe because I love the original song, and the contrast between the two is awesome. Have a listen and then have a listen to the piano version again:

Just… so much love.

2 | +1?

i am the heart that you call home

And if you don’t love me let me go
And if you don’t love me let me go
- The Decemberists, “The Engine Driver”

If you love me, won’t you let me know?
- Coldplay, “Violet Hill”

I knew these lyrics from Coldplay’s “Violet Hill” (a song I’ve been hearing a lot on the radio and playing a lot on my computer) sounded incredibly familiar, and it dawned on me the other day when a Decemberists song came on on my iPod. It’s not the same meaning, and not quite the same beat - Coldplay’s a lot more thumpy, as you might expect - but the two lines, when you listen to them, sound similar enough to warrant a bit of a doubletake.

And probably because I’ve been doing quite a bit of work on meaning and inversions of meaning, lexically speaking, the odd resonance of these lines really stuck with me. They almost reverberate off each other in a matter-antimatter kind of way - if you love me - if you don’t love me - let me know - let me go. I don’t really know what to make of it, I’m sure Chris Martin didn’t mean it at all, but it’s evocative…

I’m really liking Coldplay’s new sound, actually. It’s really different, very U2; there’s the Brian Eno influence I guess? Having listened to a lot of Eno’s ambient music before even knowing he had anything to do with U2, it’s definitely present in the sort of sprawling soundscapes that Coldplay are experimenting with in Viva La Vida. The title track - their newest single - is another amazing song ♥ though after reading the lyrics a lot, I can’t make up my mind if it’s meant to be political or personal. Maybe both.

0 | +1?

a little housekeeping

It is truly shocking how much time I can bring myself to waste tricking out my site when I have something new and shiny to play with. Wordpress 2.5.x is such a big step up from WP 2.2 and earlier (which I stubbornly stuck with for the longest time ever because I was too lazy to upgrade) that it’s like stumbling into your favourite toystore and discovering they’ve added another floor of fascinating gadgets - built-in comment avatar support, smiley customisation, improved metadata handling - And I’m still at that stage of new layout love where I can stare at it all day and egotistically admire my handiwork. Not good for the dissertation…

Anyway, I have a couple of fantastic songs up in the etc. section now, so check it out! And I should get back to work.

5 | +1?

using ideas as my maps

Spiffing new domain, spiffing new layout, and you will not believe what went into coding this… I don’t even really want to think about it now that it’s done. I’m particularly proud of having successfully negotiated both horizontal and vertical centering and then relatively-positioning a text block within that div layer. I’ve also cleaned up a whole lot of old code by doing this up from scratch instead of appropriating and adapting an older layout, which is kind of the digital equivalent of cleaning out the dusty cupboard. And and and, the comment layouts have been revamped! (But you’ll have to leave a comment to see that.) /geek

It’s kind of empty right now though because I have literally spent near on eight hours just working on this layout, wrangling PHP and CSS, tweaking colours, tweaking code, doing things with block elements that I’ve never done before, &c and I am too braindead to think of how to fill up my etc. section. I was going to upload some music, but I’m afraid you all will have to wait to hear the dulcet tones of The Byrds (whose cover of Bob Dylan’s “My Back Pages” inspired this layout).

*

I was stumped for something to write to make this a noteworthy first post for my shiny new (hopefully permanent) space, and then I remembered I had yet to post about the Matchbox Twenty concert.

L to R: kyle, rob ♥, brian, paul

As you can see from this photo, Jia Min, Jenny and I were in the unfortunate position of being stuck in the upper circle with many people’s heads and a lot of space between us and the stage. Sadly they’d decided to make the stalls standing room only, and as much as I love MB20 I wasn’t about to gladly sacrifice my feet for them.

But distance aside, the concert was wonderful. They did so many of their old songs - “Hang”, “3 AM”, “Long Day” all way back from their first album - and nearly all of my favourites - “Real World”, “Disease”, “Push”, “Downfall”, “Bright Lights”, “Unwell”, “Hand Me Down” - all songs that I’ve listened to over and over again, so so many times, songs that are so in my system that I could sing along to them in my sleep. Rob played piano on “Bright Lights” and I have such a weakness for my favourite musicians on the piano - so that was good. Undoubtedly (for me, at least) the high point of their performances for the night was “Bent”, which is probably fitting as it’s the title most people would name if you asked them to name an MB20 song off the top of their head. “Real World” and “Downfall” lacked a teensy bit of oomph - perhaps it was just that their live backing music was different from the CD backing tracks and I’m too used to the latter - but “Bent” was explosively powerful. I’m not actually such a big fan of the newer songs, I think the music isn’t as catchy as the Mad Season/More Than You Think You Are era and the lyrics aren’t as simple and honest either, but as always with a good band, hearing the songs live made me like them more.

The best thing about the show, as Rob himself said, was how many people were just so into it; he said the thing about being in the UK was that reporters always asked them what it’s like being here because they’re a band that’s so much bigger in the States, but then they do shows like this and they’re blown away by the realisation that there are so many people in the UK who’ll pay to come see them (the Manchester Apollo’s not a small venue at all, and it was absolutely packed). And it’s just… so true. I remember back in first year when my seminar group were having drinks at a pub and Beth and I were discussing the sex god that is Rob Thomas, and everyone else had never heard of him, and I’d always thought I’d never get to see them here because they just aren’t that famous in the UK. But everyone at the concert were clearly fans, everyone was singing along, so loudly that you could hear the audience as a collective voice singing their hearts out along with Rob. The girl sitting in front of me couldn’t have been more than 10. She was wearing an MB20 T-shirt, and she and her mom were clearly having a ball of a time, and her mom knew every word to every song.

rob at the piano

in all fairness, MB20 isn’t the best live act I’ve seen in my concert experience (that would be Michael Buble). But for some reason, some inexplicable reason that I can’t put my finger on, they’re a band that mean a lot to me; I remember the heartbreak I felt when Adam Gaynor left and it came back fleetingly, wrenchingly, when the band took to the stage and there was only 4 of them and not 5, I remember singing out loud in my room to Mad Season late at night when it was just me and my CD player and a last-minute assignment, I remember all these individual songs that spoke to me at different periods of my life - “Bent” and “The Burn” in secondary school, “Bright Lights” and “Unwell” in JC, “Mad Season” and “Real World” in university - so many times, I’ve just been listening casually to my iPod and suddenly the lyrics of an MB20 song would hit me with that yes yes yes feeling. I feel like if there’s any band I can say I grew up with, it would be them, they’re the one band from my teenage days that I haven’t grown out of and who’ve followed me all this way here to York. And seeing them live was such a big thing for me… I almost feel that I’ve come, in an odd way, full circle.

0 | +1?