Learnings From The Stage

Hello if you still remember this old blog, I certainly do! I haven’t been writing quite as intentionally of late, a lot of my writing has sort of tumbled out of my soul and fingers and I have only realised in hindsight that I have Done A Write.

Here’s one of those. I overdid it and went to about four gigs in the last 30 or so days— I say ‘about four’ because it’s entirely possible I went for other smaller shows played by friends around town, smaller, yet still triumphant gigs made sweeter by the fact that you have some idea of the work, hopes and fears poured into making some of those shows possible. But smaller, local shows aside, I had been to see the Belfast hiphop-punk trio KNEECAP, a revolutionary young band who keep it very real, singing and rapping about their lives in Belfast, the problems faced by the city, the feeling amongst the Belfast youth, and package all of that in a bilingual mix of English and Gaeilge, the Irish language.

Of course things get political with them, but admirably, they keep it very local, often addressing their local representatives and MPs in delightfully witty bars often rhyming an English line with an Irish one. I got to chat very briefly with one of their MCs, Móglaí Bap after the show, and the whole band also seems like extremely lovely lads.

Things get political with KNEECAP! On a sidenote, this picture is like a modern Renaissance painting to me.

My next show was seeing The Last Dinner Party, only a few weeks after. So many gigs! A real indulgence on my part. But they were majestic and opulent and put on a grand show: they aren’t very tall girls, but as the show went on, they just seemed to grow taller and command the whole crowd with confidence and a fire in their bellies! An incredible live act.

Singer Abigail Morris in action

The band’s music connects the dots between Queen and Freddie Mercury, and Florence and the Machine, who they have supported in the past. They bring together rock music, decadence, evoke Edwardian and lavish opulence, even if just for one night, even if constructed themselves as a façade, as many of their talented fans did, creating their outfits from theatre props in the most DIY fashion, and I listened fascinated as they explained their choice of threads to me (it was a long wait at the doors, so I got talking to folks around me).

The band also draws on singer Abigail Morris’ experiences of growing up going to a Catholic girls school, and her thoughts and feelings on realising she was a lesbian in that setting. A lot of their music touches on themes of being a misfit, and that really connected with large parts of the crowd that night.

Guitarist Emily Roberts takes a guitar solo

And their guitarist Emily Roberts is a totally cool person and an inspiration!

Then came a slew of local shows: everything from farewell shows for bands playing their final shows before graduating, some capping off a big year by selling out a crowd of nearly 800, to local acts honing their skills on the circuit. But then came the big one this week.

I saw Queens Of The Stone Age this week. They’d normally play a routine stadium show on tour in a bigger city like Toronto. The End Is Nero tour came to Toronto last year, but I didn’t feel it justified travelling and staying over, as much as I loved the riffing, the weirdness, the performanceship of a seasoned rockstar like Josh Homme! But then late last year, the Queens announced something very strange, very different, very special. They were going to embark on a tour across Canada, playing only second cities, places that no international touring band would ever play: cities like Edmonton, Calgary in Alberta, Saskatchewan; Winnipeg, Manitoba! The tour also happened to be stopping by my city, and that’s when I decided I had to go.

Small town shows tend to be quite special: the venues are smaller, just because they often are less populated than the big cities of millions, and sometimes crowds in LA, London or Toronto can get a bit complacent with what they have: a QOTSA show is a regular night out to a city that knows they’ll never be skipped on tour. Queens of The Stone Age are sort of competing with 50 other events around town, and maybe even four other notable headliners playing elsewhere the same night. Local icons! International bands! American rock icons! European indie legends; so much to choose from! I know when I went to see The Last Dinner Party, right next door, I ran into a friend from uni who had also travelled to Toronto to see a different band, Flipturn, the same night. We were in the same building.

But when shows go to small towns? Queens of the Stone Age were certainly the talk of the town! We were so excited for this gig, and I think that translates to much better crowd energy. The band were having fun for sure, Josh was in a great mood, chatted a lot with the crowd, had a moment of deep realisation that he conveyed to us by saying, “you might be thinking, who are these weirdos? I’m standing up here, and I often don’t know what I’m doing, but looking at you all, I’ve just had a realisation. Aren’t we all just weirdos? It’s great! I hope you all have a very weird night! I hope this is just the beginning. I hope you step out tonight after this and get hit by an Uber driver on mushrooms. And that’s just the beginning of your night. I hope it gets weirder.”

I can very seldom say that I have been told with the most love it’s possible for a heart to hold that someone hopes I get hit by a taxi, but it was just one of those nights!

Josh Homme, self-proclaimed king of the weirdos

It was a fun night! I’ve been to many smaller, indie/independent bands’ shows recently, even those who are on the rise are still well limited by their budgets. So it was refreshing to see the QOTSA live show and production, which was immersive, drew me in completely and really complemented the performance. Flashing white lights synced to the drum kicks! QOTSA and Josh seem quite drawn to reds and a bit of devilish imagery sometimes, on previous album artworks. I must say, red does suit Josh. When the lights flash red, every movement he made fell into place. It all seemed right and natural. He gets lifted out of the elements of reality and becomes a character. It all becomes a bit surreal!

(Look, I know I talked about how TLDP ‘got taller’ as the show went on, and how reds made Josh Homme seem otherworldly and surreal. You may think I might have been tripping on LSD throughout these gigs, but—maybe even embarrassingly? I don’t know—I did all these gigs stone-cold sober. Not high, not even drunk. I’m just really, really excited about music, and you must forgive me for that. We only get one life to enjoy it all in.)

Anyway, speaking of poisons of choice, as was the case with Foo Fighters, who I saw play a small arena of 4000 in Montreal last year (when a band that regularly plays to 50,000 people plays 4000, it sure becomes an ‘intimate’ show! Perspective is everything), you’ve got to be a certain level of rockstar to let a modern day venue allow you to smoke indoors—on stage! But I think Josh Homme and co. earn the right to smoke indoors. It’s also a bit of a fan moment to say, ‘I was close enough to the stage that I could smell Josh’s cigarette’, that’s a line that maybe belongs in the ’90s, doesn’t it? 😛

Anyway, I wish something that noxious didn’t look as cool as it does, but I did manage to get a really cool shot (and a short video clip) of Josh puffing a cigarette on stage, mid-guitar solo. And I think it’s one of the coolest gig pictures I’ve ever captured.

Coolest picture of the night, me thinks

Anyway, so! What was this post all about anyway? It was about reflection. Reflecting on some great shows I got to see, in a move of indulgence that saw me attend three major concerts in a 30-day window. All of this was just setting the scene. I’m sorry my writing gets this long, there’s more to where that came from!

I felt I had something to learn from these very, very different gig experiences. You can learn something from people at every stage of their careers. Someone like the band The Struts, who opened for QOTSA, had more to prove to this audience than the headliner who everyone had come to see. And they put in the work. They pulled out all the stops to put on a tireless, energetic and very engaging show, encouraging singalongs of ‘woah!’ (ah, a classic UK indie rock band from the 2010s!), working the crowd, telling them, “our job tonight is to warm you up for QOTSA, and that’s what we’re gonna do!” Fair play to them, they did, and from word I heard around me, they’ve picked up a few new fans!

Someone like KNEECAP, a hip hop trio, obviously have a very different style of performing than QOTSA. A five piece band with instruments can fill up a stage. Can two MCs and a DJ with a laptop fill a dauntingly large stage? KNEECAP could! They were masters of engaging the crowd, hopping around on stage, drawing the crowd in with their energy, shouts, engaging lyrics and all. No mean feat all the hobbling around, given one member, Mo Chara had just broken his foot! He was on every corner of the stage with a giant plaster on his leg, and I commend that because that was definitely painful!

And so, some reflections on what I as a performer can learn. I wrote this on my Tumblr initially, and a friend who read it told me parts of it helped them get through a presentation, which I hadn’t thought of before, but isn’t it also just a performance put on for an audience? That’s now my favourite piece of feedback. But I want to put it up here on my WordPress blog too, just to stretch those writing fingers again. Let me know what you think!

---

Just reflecting on the vast and varied live show experiences I’ve been able to have in the last thirty or so days… I’ve moshed with Kneecap, danced with The Last Dinner Party, cheered my friends on at their band’s last show as they decide to split up and go their separate ways on graduating, and experienced the grandeur, rock n roll-in-the-stewardship-of-the-weirdos of Queens Of The Stone Age. All, you’ll agree, very different experiences.

First I’m even lucky to have them all— I’m lucky that I’m in the situation where I’m able to enjoy liking a broad palate of music like that. I was able to take a friend to every single one of these gigs (although I guess the bands themselves were my friends in the local band’s case…). That’s never been the case before, so I’m glad I have friends with whom I share these tastes.

I remember a while ago it wasn’t possible to have some of these interests at the same time. You couldn’t like hip hop and rock at the same time (goodbye 2015, I won’t miss you). I chose the rock side back then, being a guitarist. I’ve moved to the middle of the road now, and I’ve seen brilliant performers on both ends of the musical spectrum.

Both energetic, engaging shows led by musicians with a keen sense of showmanship. Both things that I as a performer want to learn from: both how to fill a stage/space and be comfortable in it. To draw attention to your strengths, and maybe endear people to your weaknesses, or put on such a show that the audience never realises something may be missing.

All so different, but showing me a different aspect of performing and receiving performance. Of lighting, visuals, the whole sensory experience. Knowing how to build a show that’s entertaining even without having eyes always trained on the frontperson: how do you build a show can be experienced in the seats, in the back row.

Josh Homme and Emily Roberts though, they make me want to start a band right now. QOTSA make me want to fill stadiums. Kneecap make me want to inspire. The Last Dinner Party make me want to connect. My friends make me want to fill that gap of not enough girls in rock bands.

I swear this happens every time I go to a gig, but here I am and I’ll say it again. I want it all. I want it all.

The Secret Spice Handshake

Today I found out why no two people to cook Indian dishes have ever achieved the same taste. It all comes down to one “ingredient”.

One “ingredient” I say, because it’s garam masala (which translates roughly to hot spice), which isn’t one ingredient. Sure, you can buy it as a single ingredient, but it’s essentially a mix of a bunch of Indian spices: crushed peppercorns, cumin seeds, red chilli powder, two types of cardamoms (green and black), coriander seeds (not coriander leaves mind! That’s garnishing and belongs in the trash I hate it so much), and a few more: cinnamon powder, nutmeg powder, curry leaves, a bunch more, even I don’t remember them all.

But the point is, the amount of each spice determines what your garam masala will taste like, because there’s no one dominant ingredient really. So it comes down to your tried and tested/passed-down-family proportions, rather than the ingredients themselves, and this is just talking about one single ‘ingredient’ of a dish. Some people use ginger and garlic/ginger-garlic paste, others feel tomato and onions will suffice, some parts/cuisines of India use more sugar in cooking everything (Gujarat), some eat drier, spicier food (Rajasthan, possibly because it’s mostly desert. Little grows there!), if you head down south, the ingredients used are entirely different: they prefer rye, tamarind, round chillis (no idea what they’re called)

**Update: I found out what they’re called. Ramnad chillis, or locally, ramnad mundu, or gundu. They’re native, naturally, to a village called Ramnad in Tamil Nadu, and they’re used in the state’s famous Chettinad cuisine.

These are dried gundus, as they are when used in cooking.

Fresh gundus. Look like cherries, don’t they? Don’t mistake them for cherries when you eat them!

Oh… saying that to myself over and over I just realised, gundu in Tamil means fat. Gundu chillis. Really. That’s what you came up with, Chennai? Fat chillis? Keep it right up…

It’s funny, because I had to google what red round chillis are actually named and learned that chillis aren’t even native to India, no matter how they’re the first thing you’d associate with Indian cuisine (general). They were introduced from Portugal in the 1500s (Vasco da Gama, etc.). Before that there was just… black pepper. Even then, north Indian food, which is even more heavily associated with spice (dried red chillis are called Kashmiri chillis, afterall!), was in the dark about chillis until much later, when a Maratha king (mid-west-ish) decided he’d had enough of northern ignorance.

Aesthetic™. Don’t you dare rub your eye. (Kashmiri chillis and corresponding red chilli powder)

(Note: that above is poetically and comedically great, but historically inaccurate. His move north was to challenge the Mughals, then emperors of India till just before the British takeover (and partly directly responsible for it), who contributed their lot to cuisine. A lot of what you think of as stereotypically heavy Indian food/takeout, is in fact Mughal and is called that in India. So while you’d “takeout Indian” in the US or Canada, “go for a curry” in the UK, you’d be “eating Mughlai” were you to order the same in India. It’s assimilated into Indian cuisine comfortably enough that people sometimes use the words synonymously (or who are we kidding, use “Indian” to exclusively mean “Mughlai” and may not have heard of the latter word. Unrelatedly, I was quite pleased when a friend told me the town he lived in, which had a fair Indian diaspora, did some excellent south Indian food!)

Garden variety green chillis, “locally” called hari mirchi (hari = green, mirchi = chilli/spice). I say, ‘local’, but there are at least 200 local languages in India, so obviously, it’s not local to them all…

Unfortunately I cannot tell you much more about them, even after spending an embarrassing 25 minutes googling. I am still not sure if they are grown in Andhra Pradesh (Andhra Pradesh? Telangana? I don’t even know any more… and whichever of the two it is; the new Andhra Pradesh or the new Telangana, or if it was pre-split Andhra Pradesh then that, but whichever it is), it is one of the largest exporters of chilli in the world!

But green chillis could well be grown in Kerala. Or Gujarat. Or, as the one thing all of google unanimously agrees upon says, in your back garden from chilli seeds! I should grow chillis from chilli seeds. I love green chillis. Then again, all the magic of a green chilli lies in the seed: that’s where all the spice, flavour and capsaicin is! I might end up eating it before we’ve even begun…

Anyway! I could go on for hours about chillis: there’s a variety of lighter green coloured green chillis which have (allegedly) all the flavour of a green chilli and none of the spice. They do still have the seeds, they just don’t bite. They’re for Lite^TM enjoyers of spice.
That sucks the joy out of my life. That they specifically bred chillis for mildness makes my head whirl. Still, with the sheer variety in Indian chillis, it’s quite passable as just Another Type Of Indian Chilli.

Light green, devoid of any juice, joy or purpose.

Disgust.

Anyway, I could absolutely go on about chillis for hours and this post wasn’t even about chillis, it was specifically about the Indian enigma and unique kitchen handshake that is garam masaala, and we’ll never figure it out. That is the conclusion. Thank you all for reading.

Beetle Bailey

Owing to the pouring spells of rain we’ve had of late, I found myself face to face with a massive beetle this week.

It was just sticking to the window, minding its own business and trying to go unnoticed, but with the sun spotlighting it like the next runway model meeting the bigtime, you couldn’t really help notice it. Trouble is, it nearly gave me a heart attack, since I couldn’t see it too well against the harsh sunlight, I almost mistook it for a cockroach and freaked out.

How, you ask, can I so seamlessly mention harsh sunlight and pouring rain in the space of a paragraph? To answer that, I’ll have to explain to you the four seasons experienced in my city: mild summer (December to February), summer (March to May), wet summer (June to August) offensively out-of-place summer (September to November). Hope that handy guide helps.

My dad decided to play uppity landlord and promptly evicted the beetle. I don’t blame him, this guy was huge. But if that was to be the end of the story, I’d have to fill the rest of this post with fluff. Safe to say readers, that was not the last we saw of it.

This beetle instead goes the clever route and decides to try its luck again later that night. It slipped under the door. How a creature that big manages to fit itself under a door frame baffles me but after watching an eight minute video compilation titled Cats Are Liquid, I don’t question such things anymore.

So I come across this beetle, which my dad has now nicknamed Beetle Bailey in honour of the Sunday comics, later at night walking along the floor. I don’t know if you’ve ever had the chance to watch a medium sized insect walking anywhere, but they’re large enough not to be too quick in their scuttling. It’s a bit hypnotic, because their stride is instead quite rhythmic, so I’ve been gazing at it for about ten minutes.

The original Beetle Bailey. Now imagine this, but entirely different: size of a thumb, brown, stick legs, etc.

Now a tiled floor and a plywooded doorframe is barely a poor man’s substitute for the woodland outdoors (actually who am I kidding, I live in a city), and you never realise this more acutely than when you see an expert climber trying to navigate a smooth wall.

He’s getting nowhere fast. A good reason for that comes down to an old story I must first bring up: we once had an event I cannot remember now that needed some prettying up around the walls. Now we live in a rented place, so getting anything permanent on the walls was out of question, so what did we do? Whacked on some smooth, shiny gift-wrapping paper. The perfect quick-fix. Of course years later, it’s still stuck on there, so don’t let the “nothing permanent” bit trouble you too much, but I digress.

No Spider-Man he, he puts a tentative foot up the wall and ingloriously slides down.

Never mind. With the conviction of a beetle who cannot understand why a smooth, yellow gift wrapping paper should be any different from a tree bark, he tries to scale the foil wall again.

I’m not sure what beetular physics is at play here, but the effort of trying to hoist himself up front first onto a shiny vertical surface dealt him the decisive blow of flipping him over onto his back. Beetle Bailey is in trouble here, me thinks, as flipping onto the back is usually some sort of endgame for insects, since it leaves them fairly helpless. I have absolutely no intention of touching it, fraidy cat as I am, but from afar I can’t help thinking, what is it going to do now?

Well I didn’t have to think for long and neither will you readers, because here’s what it did next—
It flopped right over, doing a 180 degree turn, not by rolling over its side, but as close as I can describe it, by arching its back and propelling itself up length wise, from the head. Just imagine your favourite action person (or rather, their unsung stuntsperson) but you’ll need to mentally shrink them down to a round tiny brown bug.

All this happened in the blink of an eye, twice it did this and twice I was astonished. It’s not something to get used to quite easily!

But if you thought that was the end of its athletic achievements, it then demonstrated some A-grade thievery stunts and gave a 101 in burglary by showing me exactly how it got in, by slipping under the door to my grandparents’ room. A mere slit of a gap. Conquered by this tall, fat beetle.

Now I haven’t much to say unless you have an active imagination, but I’m just saying that if limbo was an Olympic sport, and if the rules of sport could’ve stretched a bit to allow a beetle raised on home soil to represent the country in the Games… I’m not saying it’s very likely, but we’d certainly come home with more medals. Namely, gold for strangest competitor (gender neutral), world icon (Beetle Bailey as he is, according to my dad) and perhaps even deadest contestant (squash. He’d do our squash team some good I imagine.)

Look, I know I know, if we focused on the possible, we’d work on getting limbo recognised as Olympic sport.

It’d probably be a very aesthetically appealing sport, sort of like diving, synchronised swimming, ice skating, with the judges giving “limbees” a score out of ten. Most graceful beetle might be in the cards.

Anyway, the point of all this is, I’ve lost a beetle. Now as I’m writing this at 2 AM, one can only imagine the many possible directions this post can take by the time dawn breaks and shines its light on the tiled floors of my grandparents bedroom…

---

Update: I awoke this morning to hear the tale from my dad. Far from counting its stunts as luck, this Beetle decided to journey further, and was found by my dad early the next morning in his bathroom.

Pouring Thoughts

Gleefully and utterly delighted, I am here to inform you that the rains are finally here! After days of heat, light showers and other false starts, including a cyclonic storm that made me lose my mind (a state I declare based on the following evidence) and record a snippet of howling wind as an audio file titled “Cyclone ASMR” (don’t ask when the record drops), it’s finally monsoon proper!

When mum says you can’t have the ocean because you already have the store-variety version in your own backyard… although it sounds very poetic to ask for the ocean.

Perhaps also, it’s a celebration and acknowledgement of the fact that our drainage system has been overwhelmed in only the first few hours of the rainy season. We’re breaking records here, folks!

‘Rainy season’ is a word I haven’t used in a long time actually. I don’t know if this is the case universally, but if memory serves me well, as you grew as kids, you were encouraged to learn the ‘big boi’ (a nice, gender-neutral update to ‘big boy’. Maintenance and upkeep is a must!) version of words: pants became trousers, rubbers became erasers, trash dustbins, or so I’d thought… as it turned out, I found out later on that one of the features of growing up in a country that is neither Britain nor America, is that you tend to pick up bits of both versions of English. My mum uses more Britishisms while my dad favours Americanisms, and us kids picked up bits of both and thought it must be the natural progression. In all likelihood, one had more syllables than the other, and so it sounded more ‘grown up’ to a young kid! Either way, ‘rainy season’ soon made way for ‘monsoon’, although not all rains are because of the monsoon winds.

I sometimes wonder though, if trawling through social media would make a 10-year-old gasp with amazement as all their kiddie words are in heavy rotation on there. 

In more fun stories, I saw a dog trying to wade through the water, now a bona fide pool, running to get to shelter. I tried to get a picture of it, but I was so excited to see a dog that I punched in my phone password wrong so many times I got locked out for thirty seconds, and then it was a clicking marathon as I tried to catch a snap of that soaked poor little pupper (grown).

Readers, I clicked precisely a second after it was gone from all view. (And you aren’t getting a glimpse of my nonexistent-dog photo: it’s at the bottom of both the trash, and my deep well of embarrassment and shame.)

Oh well, at least the dog made it to somewhere safe and dry, hopefully.

A quieter, and greener spot (the dog did head that way). How badly a lane floods has everything to do with how low-lying it is, and how close it is to a drain. The closer, the more likely it is to be flooded with everything the drain can’t handle.

Also surf’s up dudes! If you think I’ve lost it (again), think again, because I’ve got some waves for you. No, not third waves, not this early! 
But our little swimming pool now boasted of enough ammo to have the capacity for some big waves. If you can ignore the fact that there’s no sun overhead and it’s actually not the sort of water you want to spend any more time than you can help in, then we’ve got our very own backyard wave pool!

Here’s some pictures of an auto leaving behind an impressive V-wake. Some kids standing nearby cheered it on, which must’ve been the autodriver’s biggest celebrity moment in the last few months.

Reminds me of the Wii Sports Resort wake-boarding game. I can think of nothing else. 2010’s nostalgia must’ve finally got to me.

On a vaguely related note,I saw a family of cats yesterday, and they seemed like they were on a picnic. There was mum cat and a dad cat, both black, and two little kitties, grey and orange, who were running around frolicking and playing.

Remember the false starts I’d mentioned above? There had been some drizzle over the past days, and it was windy, which meant quite a few leaves had been shed. The aforementioned storm also took out a nearby tree, it had snapped from the wind and its leaves were turning brown and falling off. A very autumn-like view, only in peak summer. The cute ginger kitten was chasing flying fallen leaves and trying to trap them under its paws until it lost interest and began play-wrestling with its sibling as their parents supervised, sunbathed and licked themselves. (Of course, the moment it chose to stop chasing leaves like a pure angel happened to be exactly when I decided to run for a camera. I have had rotten luck with photography all week it may seem.)

Part of me can’t help imagining the parent cats sitting somewhere they call home today and thinking to themselves, as we all would, “oh thank goodness we took the kids yesterday and hadn’t planned for today, the weather’s awful!”

I imagine them, also trying to make the kids do crosswords to keep them busy on this ill-weathered day, and the kids wanting to go out for a splash. Or who knows, they may be tweeting about it on Instagram (I wrote, in my nasally-est, snarky Luddite voice. And I know you can’t “tweet” on Instagram. (Some historian is going to find this in seventy years and go, awww look at the cute people of 2021! They can’t “tweet on instagram”! Life was so simple back in those days!))

As an added bonus, here’s some colourful umbrellas courtesy of some walking ladies. Enjoy and stay safe!

Reflections

It’s so weird how the people you’re closest to are the ones you find so hard to open up to. I’ve been thinking about this for so long and ultimately I think it comes down to a mix of a few factors: someone you can open up to in the sense that you are close to them, you can trust them and you know that they won’t judge you, or you don’t care enough to feel differently about their judgement. 

It’s really hard to find a mix of all three: unable to open up about emotional details to absolute strangers (emotional details being different from physical or spatial details: event details.) I can go on for hours to complete strangers because they’re “throwaway” in a sense and I never have to see them again. I will very often not remember what I’ve told people I later on grow close to and this is something many of my friends will end up reminding me about, that I told them something that’s actually quite a close and personal detail but I’ve told them in a story. I have no memory of doing this, but because their details are all right, I must’ve told them. No other way to know something I’d never tell anyone! But their opinion or judgement was so throwaway to me at the time that I didn’t even bother to remember that I’d told them this. On the other hand, it’s quite hard to open up to people very close to you. 

This is quite especially true of parents and family. Maybe it’s different in other families, but in ours I think there’s a pretty clear distinction between family and friend. Maybe it’s because the idea of blood being thinker than water is firmly ingrained in us. Perhaps even to its detriment, it makes water a sweeter drug to take. It means you don’t choke on thick blood. There’s a certain… not formality but just a sense of not trusting in a way. Coming back to the three criteria, you’re close to them, and you certainly trust them, to an extent… but you don’t know them not to judge you. You don’t know what your family thinks of you, besides that they try and see the best in you. In a sense, the implicit instructions sort of are, “don’t be emotionally vulnerable or fragile around me”. You’ve never seen them be able to deal with that sort of thing really. Kids are very good at picking up soft signals. In ours, it’s sort of been that you’ve never really seen them be emotionally vulnerable in front of us, even to each other. There’s oddly enough, in a fairly (emotionally) conservative family, a very strong sense of independence. You deal with things yourself. When neither of your parents, or anyone in your family has ever really been needy around each other, it doesn’t really set the precedent for you to be open, vulnerable, needy or fragile emotionally. Not to them anyway. Strength is praised, weaknesses cause irritation and rectification. Flaws are not to be accommodated, only fixed. 

In that sense, it’s actually a wonder that a rant can make it around our house and live to tell the tale, but then again it’s also not very surprising. Anger is a different emotion to need. Frustration is allowed, tutted at but accepted, but vulnerability? No one knows what to do in that situation! 

You don’t ever want to find out. If it hasn’t happened in twenty years of your life, there can’t be any good reason for it happening. Besides, you learn to cope. You find your own outlets. Sometimes it’s writing and poetry. Sometimes it’s putting things to music, always a massive help. Sometimes it’s just writing longform rants. Of late, I’ve found unfortunate friends who have had to put up with things no one needs to be hearing. Bless them for doing it. Sometimes you just need time away from people. Because you can be emotionally vulnerable alone. When no one can see your face or read your thoughts, where no one can see you dance or hear you sing, or practice a language you are the only speaker of for miles. Where you can emote to the comedy you listen to, laugh at a joke, respond to music, write your jokes, have this little world that’s your own. Listen to podcasts, hyperfixate and obsess with no judgement. No negative reactions, no over positive reactions, no reactions. No judgement. Where you needn’t explain a joke or what’s going on in your head. What do you do when you haven’t a place to hide your face? Winston notes, the only place you’re really safe is in your own mind, but the eyes are the window to your soul (1984, George Orwell). Your face is an extension of your head. There’s extra effort in trying to not emote, perhaps even more so than it is to not engage with anything that stimulates part of your personality at all, but I refuse to become the soulless bog I have found myself falling into the term-time cycle of becoming. I can never forget the period where I completely lost touch with music. Thought I could live without it. Thought that I’d be okay if it were never part of my life, because I wasn’t needy or dependent on it. Wrong, I could live without it. It just wouldn’t be my life I was living then. 

Many people have this fear of becoming their own parents. This fear of turning into the worst of them. Kids have a knack for discerning what’s good and what are the not-so-good traits in the people they spent all their time with. There are bits of my mum I don’t want to become, and there are bits of my dad I don’t want to become.  I want to become Gruff**. I want to become the good bits of Damon. I want to be as experimental as Matt, as bold as Billie, as curious and observant as Gruff. I want to be as kind and noble as Kane, I want the strength and conviction of Jacinda Ardern. These are the people I want to be. I want to be what my parents never were. I want to be as charismatic as Liam or Damon. I want to be as prolific as Gruff. I want to be as easygoing as Elis and as optimistic and quick to laugh as Russell, and as enterprising and taking risks and chances as Johnny. I don’t ever want to stop taking the opportunities to be a different person. I don’t ever want the pressures to mean I settle. For anything less than what I want to be. Never. I never want to be soulless.  

** my heroes, mentioned here are:

Gruff Rhys, Super Furry Animals frontman

Damon Albarn, Blur, Gorillaz 

Matt Bellamy, Muse frontman and one of my biggest heroes 

Billie Joe Armstrong, Green Day

Kane Williamson, New Zealand’s current cricket captain and an absolute example of how to be a good human being. He’s also the “Williamson” that my blog’s pseudonym comes from!

Liam Gallagher, Oasis frontman

Elis James, Welsh comedian and broadcaster

Russell Howard, comedian and one of the most optimistic people I can think of

Johnny Marr, guitarist in the Smiths amongst (many, many!) others, and an absolute hero of mine. 

A Comparison of Two Dystopian Novels

Today I was reading someone’s criticism of the modern-day dystopian novel genre, about how many dystopian novels (especially in the Young Adult (YA) subgenre, represented by books like the Hunger Games and Divergent (the first praised by the author for its real criticism and understanding of the subject matter it was critiquing, while the second was the focus of their criticism)) seemed to almost follow a formula and how many seemed strangely made for the screen, having somewhat confused themselves with enticing storylines of adventure and drama that are so easily transferred to the silver screen, happily marketable, able to “criticise” the ills of the world—and particularly, capitalism—while being a bit too comfortably promoted by capitalistic ventures.
And it got me thinking. The very first thing it had me thinking was this exact phrase: “Is the future of dystopian novels dystopian?”

Second, it got me thinking about books that I had read in the genre (being a Muse fan, dystopia is mildly on my radar I would say), and I realised that I’ve never, ever thought of a book like 1984 and a book like Ready Player One to be of the same genre, even though they both technically would present themselves as dystopian novels. One is meant to give you a rush of thrill and make you go, “whoa, cool!” and basically make you want to live in what the author will otherwise take the pains to say is a world you don’t want to be living in. (Please bear with me while I stack the two books side by side… as ridiculous as that may sound to some of you!)

Both are books set in the near future. 1984, written in 1949 and set in the titular 1984; Ready Player One, written in 2011 (I had to google that and it surprised me… I thought it’d be written around 2015. Ernest Cline was early to the 80s nostalgia trend!), set in 2045. Both imagine some forms of technology that didn’t exist at the time (or wasn’t overtly used in the manner that the book shows)—in Ready Player One, it’s VR technology, in 1984 it’s mostly surveillance technology. 

But the difference is in how these new technologies are used—Orwell makes the most mundane use of ordinary technology: two-way screens, mics, tubes, whatnot. As small as these might be, they were in a way physical manifestations of what was wrong. (Why? Because they existed in some form already, and that’s not how we saw them being used.) We had TV screens, mics had been invented, pneumatic tubes? Heard of them. But we weren’t used to seeing them used like this: these (relatively) ubiquitous things we considered harmless, screens watching us instead of us watching them, mics listening to us, pneumatic tubes destroying the undeniable truth as we knew it—as much as it was just a build up for the idea of people controlling us, of people listening, watching, denying, the technology was an important symbol representing and amplifying the book’s ideas. It was chilling. It’s what made the contrasting notebook of paper and ink seem so… free. Rebellious. Because in a world where the ordinary seems to have turned against you, it was the ordinary that also came to the rescue. Now what does Ready Player One do with its props?

The setting is futuristic as you’d see futuristic from a 2010s view. It’s VR, internet, fantasy, it sounds like a good world. (One thing though, yes we’ve seen VR headsets, but they’re not as ubiquitous, are they? It doesn’t chill you the way the items used in 1984 do, because we don’t yet see them as harmless everyday objects. It’s a bit unrelatable, so it’s not as effective. It comes off as more fantastical.) Yes, Cline is using the too-good-to-be-true contrast here: inside the Oasis, it’s wonderful! It’s fulfilling! You have friends, money, hope, luxury, life! Step outside though, and for most people it’s trailers stacked on top of each other, it’s poverty, theft, arson even. But you don’t live in that world very often do you? Read the book, and you’re always in the Oasis. Cline (in my opinion) got a bit carried away with the 80s nostalgia. Corporate henchmen blinded by greed and advertising options, which is probably the realest part of the whole book (and might I add, corporate henchmen who remind me of Pokémon’s Team Plasma) in the most glamorous version of the world? Can’t shake me that much, I’m too busy wondering how the heck that boy can game for 23 hours without his head swimming. Just writing this post is making me think I should get up and stretch now or something. 

Ready Player One focuses less on the chilling, more on the thrilling. I mean, it could’ve done a lot better given the time it was written was around when we were beginning to have our net neutrality battles, but it never got around to showing us any consequences. Too much threat of “don’t you dare” and no realisation in anyway of what could go wrong and why we should hate it. The worst the book did was have a gun-slinging action chase scene. He could have shown a world without net neutrality beyond just the money-muscle-flexing of “we bought better VR headsets”, it was a real threat to many people and could have struck a stronger chord. To me, Cline got carried away and mixed up his messages. It ended up becoming more about self-acceptance towards the end, and focussed a lot on the “weren’t the 80s a party, I wish I were around in the 1980s”. 

Bottom line, the big difference between 1984 and Ready Player One, two novels that bill themselves as dystopian future novels? One chills, the other thrills.

What do you think? On the one hand, perhaps it’s only a product of changing times. Maybe people reading 1984 in the ’50s could have thought it quite odd that everyone might have a TV screen, and that it could watch you—novel! Perhaps VR today stands at the same place, chronistically (is that a word? The opposite of anachronistically?), as a television screen would have stood in the 1950s—about three decades after its invention. To me however, Ready Player One missing its mark has less to do with the technological premises it employs, but the fact that it employs them too much. Cline spends so much time in the VR world, he doesn’t actually address the “real” world’s circumstances beyond “this boy lives in a stacked up trailer and comes from a dysfunctional family”. He gets too caught up in 80s nostalgia, and makes more threats than actually show why the evil-guy corporation’s implementation of this freemium model is a bad idea. This book was written around the time our conversations about net neutrality were popping up, so the book could have done much more. Ultimately, it’s more about nostalgic comfort (reinforced by the fact that the future is “bad”), more about thrill than chill, as a dystopian novel should leave you feeling.

But let me know what you think in the comments! (Or don’t, you’ve probably spent a while reading this. Treat yourself to a glass of water. Or an ice-cream bar. It’s summer, folks!)

So, Did E-Books Grow Up To Be Real Boys?

As a kid who learned the word “voracious” in one and only one context, I’ve read a lot. Most of my life, it was physical, paper books, and I could swear by those. The feel of the pages, the flipping sound, the smell of a new book, or the smell of an old one! Reading and feeling embossed book covers, the inside sleeve with a note about the author, their other books and maybe a sneak preview of their next one?! Physical books could do no wrong in my eyes (and still can’t). Reading almost never only happened in one single context though, so newspapers, textbooks, magazines, comic books, all added their unique experiences to the I-Love-Paper-Books reasons collective.

Many people’s idea of a good day

Newspapers, with articles that could be cut out if or when everyone else had finished reading them (and the ensuing involved race to get the paper in that slim period between when everyone who wanted to read it was done, and the paper being gone…), magazines with news about your favourite bands and enough well-written allure in them to help you find the next set of favourites; comic books, first friends in mirth, later instructors in how to draw yourself, the most patient of all teachers, oh and textbooks with weird notes and doodles, also being physical entities you could slam down without having a heart attack at the end of the day.

Yes but I’d probably hate you if you did this because I’d spend all day ironing out the creases

Clearly, I can slip into the book-romanticising crowd, and blend in well with their moans of the perils of modern day technology. But as a student, having the space restrictions and the frequent travelling that comes with it, e-books have become quite hard to avoid. I’ve had a Kindle for a while now, and I think I’ve used it for long enough to be able to reflect on whether I like it much as a concept or not.

(Concept and implementation are far from the same. So many things that start out well-done often get degraded during a second release or an update I’m finding, and my guess is that’s to give companies something to call an improvement on the next iteration. For example, I have one of the Kindles that came out a couple of years ago, and before that, had a slightly older model, both belonging to the same e-ink line of hardware models (Paperwhites, I’m sure). I While my newer one had a slightly newer style of screen, I noticed that in addition to the screen not being a separate part of the device (with a ridge between the part that’s the screen and the rest of the body), but with a single plastic glass just covering the entire face of the device. I did notice that owing to this, the screen of the Kindle did seem whiter than the previous, which seemed a much more book-natural cream colour. It wasn’t too much of an issue, and being a younger person quite raised on the Internet and used to reading on a screen for other purposes, it didn’t make much of a difference to me until I compared it, and ultimately, I just enjoyed not having to read on my phone. But I can imagine if you were less used to it, the switch from the old Kindle to the newer one may have clashed somewhat with your taste. I put it down to either bad/overlooked design, or some unfortunate practicality in hardware development that I wouldn’t have thought about, and didn’t imagine anyone else had thought too deeply about it.

Fast-forward to me finding out about the new Kindle Oasis last year; it’s got a new, innovative and exciting feature: Yellow Mode™! Introducing the all-new Kindle Oasis, with Yellow Mode ™ technology– it feels just like a real book! It’s yellower, cream hues are more natural and welcoming to readers who prefer physical books, allowing you to stop thinking too much about the specifics of the device, and to just get lost in the absorbing world of a book, just the way you used to when you were a kid with a physical book, before we decided to get rid of those 🙂
Amazon Kindle’s Oasis: It Grew Up To Be A Real Book!

Except, shock and horror—this feature already existed! I can’t believe they simply tried to turn it off for one generation and bring it back pretending they’d invented the wheel… someone’s having trouble keeping with Moore’s law! Anyway, I massively digress.)

Good things about e-readers:

• Unlike what I had originally thought them to be, e-readers are not really iPads. I mean, they can be if you want them to be, but the whole point of most e-readers is that they’re book devices, and many favour non-LCD/backlit displays which means I’m not guilty of doing my eyes 10x damage reading them. If only I’d have known that, I’d have run through more Kindles and not had a telephone till I left for university. I spent all my phone time reading articles from the NME anyway.
• That’s another good thing about e-readers, you can use the internet with many of them as well. You do have to have infinite patience with them though, and another dose of infinite patience when trying to explain to someone why on Earth you’d ever want to use those when the slowest of phones could pull an impressive performance over these things.
• I travel. I have luggage restraints. In first year, I had about half a bag in books I thought I might want to read on the FLIGHT. It’s insane. Now I just prefer popping them all on one device and then making up my mind later (not very different from what I used to do earlier but at least I don’t look like an idiot trying!)
• Textbooks: 1. They very big. 2. Show two fingers to (*sniffs up*) Big Publishing by not buying your $200 + tax textbooks a course; get them online and then send their authors an email with the subject “:)” because they don’t really get paid much for their textbooks and research articles to get published. Many say they prefer you just email them asking them for access and they’ll email their papers to you directly, but I don’t read as many research papers so I digress here. You’re already paying a lot for your education, I guess, so why not.
• Eye-strain-wise, it’s also super useful for when you’re putting in long hours studying or whatever. You’d NEED to take a break, far sooner, with a laptop. But yeah, breaks are for everyone eventually!
• I send far too many websites to myself to read on my Kindle and then forget to delete them, but that’s okay.
• You can send your own documents as well. These days, I tend to write up the songs for and general flow of my radio show on a document and then just read it from my Kindle. It’s far more convenient than switching from the audio recording tab to the music playlists to the article I read on them and then to Bandcamp… I just write it out like I were new to radio. We’ll go “spontaneous” once I’m live again. (I can still have my show flow out on the Kindle though!)
• I have hopped from textbook to an article on Mogwai to Peter Hook’s book in a single sitting. Can’t do that with regular books!
• You can read in the dark! The Kindle now, stupendously enough, has dark mode?! I guess it’s for the night hours more than for anything traditional laptops and phones have them for, but also, don’t do that if you can help it. Don’t lie down and read. Don’t read in poor ambient light. Darkness is terrible ambient light and you’d have made the using an e-reader to lessen eyestrain point moot.

Nothing, I just found this picture really funny.

There are still some unique issues that come with books being… not books though.

• There isn’t the excitement of opening a new book and seeing new formatting anymore. It did help me jump from one book to another seeing a different margin width, differing book sizes and degrees of white or yellowing paper, different fonts and sizes, weights of books. On the other hand, most of our textbooks all had the same font, so they had a single vibe, and that meant if I wanted to throw my chemistry book on the floor, that vibe might carry over to physics, but then some things like the colours and thicknesses may differ. Or I could, you know, chuck it. Very literally.
• Easily the most annoying thing to me about e-books, and this applies only to the sort of books that are properly formatted for these devices (so not PDFs), is that you don’t know how long a book is. There are no page numbers. Only some weird metrics like “time left in the book/chapter” or word or location number, which means absolutely nothing to me. I want the page number.
• You can also resize these books, and with or without that, the text on the pages can move about a bit. Which means, if you know the line you’re looking for was somewhere in the right hand corner of page 52, there’s a big chance it’s moved just by you flipping a page. Even if you haven’t touched the font size.
• That might make you think that perhaps PDFs really are the way to go with these books, at least they know how to behave! But a PDF really is the same PDF from your laptop shrunk down to fit on a smaller screen, so the text can be small, unchangeable and leave you scrolling. You deal with it in hours of need but it can be really annoying.
• Running low on battery at important moments… I did a test with my test paper on my Kindle, with the thing flashing every 2 minutes begging me to plug it in… and I simply didn’t want to. No reason. I just sat there tutting at it going, “you’ll survive 8%, my god, stop being dramatic”. I’ll be honest, that was less of it inconveniencing me and more of the other way round.

And that’s about it! What do you think? Maybe libraries are a bigger factor in your sticking with the paper? Or maybe you’re the sort of tech-y free spirit who stick the paper to the man? I’ve had a university library send me a digital book, and it wasn’t even my university’s library. It was just one of those common publishing ones, Cambridge’s publishing press’s library system or something. But let me know! (I mean, if you’ve gotten this far, you clearly love reading and will read anything. This must be like 2000 words. I’ve been here an hour. It’s ridiculous.)

Showers

Showers, showers, showers
Are the need of the hour
Whether you’re cold and bereft
And a cold wave has swept
On over city or town
Or further deep down
A warm shower
Is the need of the hour.

If you’re burning with the heat
And it’s getting hard to keep
That blazing flame in control
And it’s eating you up whole;
You try with your might
To capture the dying light
You’re wanting a shower!
It’s the need of the hour.

If you look up to the skies
Not a cloud passes by
And the sultry haze
Matches your personal daze
Step behind the veil
And all it entails, for
A shower, shower, shower!
It’s the need of the hour

Just a silly little ditty about the versatility of showers… be it a showering of love or praise, a cold shower to clear your head out, a good old fashioned monsoon or a hot shower to make your winter mornings bearable, it’s got it all.

Now of course, I can’t possibly relate to the last one, because it’s getting far too hot here… summer’s a-comin’!

Chocolate Or Crackers?

It’s officially holiday season! And for an expat like me (is that what I can myself?), it’s officially Schrödinger time. (It’s holiday season, but it’s also not.)

It’s Diwali this week, which means for the first time since lockdown began, we’ve had to clean the house out, and by “we”, I mean “not me”, because as I’ve discovered over socially distant (over 16,000 km and very responsible), time-zone factored online school, relaxing in the morning after a night long of school by washing windows is quite the way to wind down.

How much, you ask? So much that I’ve managed to break the spray-pump bottle we used to water the plants in little over a month washing windows. Plastic is a scam.

I’ve also found it pretty amusing to sing an old song by actor, comedian and musician George Formby, a Lancastrian Englishman who rose to fame in the 1930s and ’40s for his comedic morale boosting acts and wartime films in Britain. His cheeky sense of humour is on full display in this song, called When I’m Cleaning Windows (sometimes called The Window Cleaner).

The song, as performed in one of his films.

Fun fact: his lighthearted but sometimes risqué lyrics had him well banned by the BBC, who at the time were lead by moral strongman and man-who-made-frowning-accessible-to-the-masses, John Reith.

Man of the people, or rather, the collective frown of the people poured into one man, Lord John Reith.

(Note that I’m not doing the man ugly here. There genuinely isn’t a picture in the public domain of him actually smiling.)

Reith, who considered his role as Director of the BBC to be that of defender of public morality, famously refused to play Formby on the radio declaring, “If the public wants to listen to Formby singing his disgusting little ditty, they’ll have to be content to hear it in the cinemas, not over the nation’s airwaves”.

But Formby soon put an end to that: the royal family counted themselves as fans of his work!

Who’s laughing now, Lord Reith?

Either way, like everything else this lockdown, the window washing isn’t going great. They’re stubborn windows that won’t stay clean for long, making me feel like a smoker who’s decided to give up the fag: I’ll just clean these windows one last time, and then I’m done for three years, one last cigarette, just one more clean out tomorrow… but they’re dirty again!

For anyone keeping tabs, it’s these very same windows from 3+ years ago. Mmmm, read all about them!

Rounding up other things in the house that should’ve been thrown out years ago (I found mint chocolates from 2016), we found an old box of mini-fireworks we didn’t know we had, and taking things a little further, my grandparents weren’t even sure were fireworks at all. Small, triangular, squished up, or circular and similar: crackers or chocolates?

Which brings us to the absurd spot we’re in now. Chocolates or firecrackers? I wish I could put it out to the people to decide. Unfortunately, they’re gone. Someone’s eaten them.

Just kidding.

Chocolate?

It’s officially holiday season! And for an expat like me (is that what I can myself?), it’s officially Schrödinger time. (It’s holiday season, but it’s also not.)

It’s Diwali this week, which means for the first time since lockdown began, we’ve had to clean the house out, and by “we”, I mean “not me”, because as I’ve discovered over socially distant (over 16,000 km and very responsible), time-zone factored online school, relaxing in the morning after a night long of school by washing windows is quite the way to wind down.

How much, you ask? So much that I’ve managed to break the spray-pump bottle we used to water the plants in little over a month washing windows. Plastic is a scam.

I’ve also found it pretty amusing to sing an old song by actor, comedian and musician George Formby, a Lancastrian Englishman who rose to fame in the 1930s and ’40s for his comedic morale boosting acts and wartime films in Britain. His cheeky sense of humour is on full display in this song, called When I’m Cleaning Windows (sometimes called The Window Cleaner). The song, as performed in one of his films.

The song, as performed in one of his films.

Fun fact: his lighthearted but sometimes risqué lyrics had him well banned by the BBC, who at the time were lead by moral strongman and man-who-made-frowning-accessible-to-the-masses, John Reith.

Man of the people, or rather, the collective frown of the people poured into one man, Lord John Reith.

(Note that I’m not doing the man ugly here. There genuinely isn’t a picture in the public domain of him actually smiling.)

Reith, who considered his role as Director of the BBC to be that of defender of public morality, famously refused to play Formby on the radio declaring, “If the public wants to listen to Formby singing his disgusting little ditty, they’ll have to be content to hear it in the cinemas, not over the nation’s airwaves”.

But Formby soon put an end to that: the royal family counted themselves as fans of his work!

Who’s laughing now, Lord Reith?

Either way, like everything else this lockdown, the window washing isn’t going great. They’re stubborn windows that won’t stay clean for long, making me feel like a smoker who’s decided to give up the fag: I’ll just clean these windows one last time, and then I’m done for three years, one last cigarette, just one more clean out tomorrow… but they’re dirty again!

For anyone keeping tabs, it’s these very same windows from 3+ years ago. Mmmm, read all about them!

Rounding up other things in the house that should’ve been thrown out years ago (I found mint chocolates from 2016), we found an old box of mini-fireworks we didn’t know we had, and taking things a little further, my grandparents weren’t even sure were fireworks at all. Small, triangular, squished up, or circular and similar: crackers or chocolates?

Which brings us to the absurd spot we’re in now. Chocolates or firecrackers? I wish I could put it out to the people to decide. Unfortunately, they’re gone. Someone’s eaten them.

Just kidding.