Indonesian celebrity

Last night I went round to Leo's place for music practice - we're up to four or five original songs for our jazz/funk project. It's an exciting time to be alive. 

As I left with my guitar and mini-amp and all my gear, a woman in her late twenties, of apparently ASEAN extraction, came out of another flat on the same floor. She held the lift door for me. 

"Thanks," I said as the door closed. 

She saw me in the reflection on the doors and turned her head. 

"Oh," she said. "You!"

I didn't really know how to respond to that, so I just smiled politely. 

All I can assume is that she recognised me from one of the local Indo-shops, where I often go to buy various bits and pieces. 

. 

Played my first football in about a month, on Sunday night in a friendly against a certain EUFC (no idea what that stands for). There seems to be a conspiracy against me getting anything in the Assists column -- three or four Perfectly Weighted crosses, either blazed over the bar or passed tamely to the keeper at chest height. I ask you!

Played my first football in about a month, on Sunday night in a friendly against a certain EUFC (no idea what that stands for). There seems to be a conspiracy against me getting anything in the Assists column -- three or four Perfectly Weighted crosses, either blazed over the bar or passed tamely to the keeper at chest height. I ask you!

A demanding audience


Other things what I have been doing lately. On Saturday, CK and I went down to Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Park (turns out it's actually quite easy to get to from our place, only being five minutes away, but over a footbridge to cross a busy dual carriageway).

We went there to glue gourds, as one does. The cabaca is a core component of the berimbau, the stringed instrument used in capoeira. It's used as the soundbox. A few of ours had cracks in them that needed gluing, so we needed fresh air.

We also had a new arame - the wire bit - given to us by our teacher, so while CK was gluing some of the cabacas I tried my hand at making the wire loops that go at each end to secure the arame to the verga (that's the big stick bit). I'd not tried it before, but it worked out fine.

It was also a good chance for me to practise setting up the berimbau. This is an important skill for a capoeirista because berimbaus are taken apart after use for transportation and because the arame puts a lot of pressure on the verga when it's on. So you need to put them together every time you want to play.

I used to struggle to bend the verga enough and not let it slip while I was winding the arame round the top and tying off the bit of string on the end, so that the end result would have enough tension. This time even the relatively stiff verga which was the first one we got, from Mestre Falcao, was no problem. In fact, I now have the opposite problem -- I was bending them too much and had to loosen the arame to reduce the tension.

Our brand new verga from Indonesia is still rather on the rigid side (and very thick at the bottom end) so I'll have to work on that a bit.

I practised playing the berimbau a bit, and attracted occasional onlookers. Despite me being quite terrible at it, I suppose the average passerby wouldn't know any better. One six/seven-year-old girl started dancing along. And when I stopped she demanded "More! More!"
Which was jolly charitable of her, I thought.

Pictures of hamsters

Bubbles:

McNulty:

I received a Facebook message just now, asking in all seriousness, "Do you know martial arts and how to handle a gun?" My life is sometimes quite interesting.

Books I read in 2010 -- part 2

On Literature, Umberto Eco
Pretty much what you'd expect. The James Joyce essay was good, had to skip the one about Sylvie because I am yet to read it once, let alone be in a position to "re-read it before you continue with this essay" as Eco recommends.


The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
Finished this on a plane back from Singapore.
Very good, which is sad because with a bit more work it could have been a Great Book.
However, more edits were not on the cards for obvious reasons, so it's stuck with a grand finale preceded by a first half more info-dump heavy than anything I've seen since Hitler's Peace.

It actually made me think it would be a good, or at least unusual, alternative way to present a mystery -- print the second half as a novel, but replace the first half with a dossier of character profiles and evidence sources for the readers to sift through themselves.
This is almost what Larsson did, but the presentation would be more fun.


Seven Up by Janet Evanovich *
Absolute rubbish. I don't know why I bothered going all the way to the end, although there was one good joke about Art Garfunkel. At least it was free.


Trullion: Alastor 2262 by Jack Vance
I tore through  this in just a couple of days. It's classic Vance, with somewhat better characterisation than he often manages. Luckily I didn't bother reading the blurb before buying it from the second hand shop, because although everything it says is technically true, it bears little resemblance to the actual story.

It's a wry but not comic mystery story, about a guy who comes back to his idyllic home planet to find his father dead, his older brother missing and part of the family land sold off by his twin brother, who has joined a weird cult dedicated to achieving things (the society of Trullion reckons idleness is the best path as far as possible).
To try and reclaim the land he needs lot, and ends up playing professional 'hussade', a combat game played on a grid of paths suspended over a water tank into which one shoves the opposing team -- the aim of the game (and this is the bit that really proves it was written in the 70s) is to reach the platform where the opposing team's lovely female mascot stands and pull a ring that makes all her clothes fall off. This would be an excellent variant game of Blood Bowl.
Also, there are space pirates. 


A Case of Two Cities by Qiu Xiaolong * 
A worthy but dull detective novel set in 1990s Shanghai. The interesting thing about it was how I was reading for a while thinking the translator wasn't very good because many turns of phrase really need the reader to know Chinese to follow them clearly. But when I checked the imprint page I realised there wasn't one -- Qiu is a non-native author in English.
I'm not knocking this as a concept, of course. Nabokov and Conrad are the exemplars here. But Qiu needs more help from his editors. The book is full of malapropisms. On occasion there are bits of language that have the sound of a translated Chinese aphorism or catchphrase, but aren't -- I can't decide if this is Qiu doing it on purpose, or if the editor assumes it's a calque and leaves it alone.
Either way, the book is poorly written, didactic and - worst of all - achingly dull in its plot and characterisation.


Flashman by George MacDonald Fraser 
Not bad. Basically what the Bond novels would be like if they'd been written by a decent author.


The Man Who Saved Britain by Simon Winder * 
Observer review here


Life Class by Pat Barker *
The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander *
Special Assignment by Boris Akunin *
The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl *




.... and a whole bunch of others. I forget.