esprit d'escalier

On Everything and Anything
With the recent goings-on, I thought I'd do a post on humour. Singaporean sense of humur. Or maybe I'd blog about the subtle differences between trance, drum & bass, techno and house music. Or maybe about how time is flying past so quickly. Or maybe about how my laptop keyboard is irritating me because I can't type fast enough without the frequent typo or hitting the "€" button.

Then I thought heck, maybe I'd just do a little on everything.



Supafly Inc's Moving Too Fast is a rather appropriate song for my current situation now (the song, not the video). Back then at the threesome outing with Qinhao and Melvin, I still recall I had 4 weeks left to go. Now with August 1 round the corner, it seems that one hour is a privilege. So many things to do, so many people to meet, so many things to pack, so many partying nights. It's Mambo on Wednesday again with the Gryphon Guys, KTV Outing tonight with my colleagues from Coastes. Perhaps I'll slot in a BF2 outing with the section 1 guys again for good measure, bu we'll see about that.

Speaking of which, the Moving Too Fast song is house music. Of all electronic music genres, perhaps the only one which I don't exactly appreciate now is techno. I'm not a music kind of guy: I don't know how to categorise music according to their kind of beat. All I do is listen and categorise. Below I've included examples of artistes in their genres, and some sound clips for you to sample if you like to. I'm just bored.

- Techno belongs to the world of Floorfilla (who could forget the Anthems or Italo Dancer) and Cascada (Miracle and Bad Boy), just to name but two of them. The most common form of Ah Beng songs and ringtones.


- Trance is much more sophisticated, with artistes like DJ Tiesto (search Traffic), Armin van Buuren (A State of Trance), Ferry Corsten (with LEF & Daylight, although his music is becoming much more acidic lately) and the likes.


- Eurobeat is hard to distinguish from Techno, although it can be differentiated. Initial D relies heavily on Eurobeat songs from Vicky Vale (Dancing), Leslie Parrish (Remember Me and Save Me) and so on.


- Drum & Bass has the fastest BPM among all the electronica, and is very, very seldom heard in Singapore. I've heard of a club that plays D&B but I forgot where, if only someone could enlighten me. Search for artistes like Syncopix, Pendulum, Cyantific, Concord Dawn or the occasional Freestylers song.


- House music is the most common form of electronic music played in clubs, with a multitude of artistes and albums flooding the genre. It has a wide range of samples so I can't really put my finger to it, but just listen to Ministry of Sound's Clubber's Guide albums and you should know what I roughly mean.


That said, let me conclude this section on electronic music. Arranged by order of Increasing BPM,

House < Techno < Trance < Eurobeat < Drum & Bass,

But of course, there are always exceptions, but these is generally it. Hope it has opened you emos into my electronic world. IF you still don't appreciate the difference, just know that I can't tell the fucking difference between My Chemical Romance, Panic! At The Disco, Taking Back Sunday, Death Cab for Cutie and rubbish like that as well. Those bands are for wussies going through a common phase in everyone's lives.

I am beginning to see fewer and fewer emo wannabes on the streets. Is it because they have realised being outcast is normal especially for people like them, or have they all bled slowly to death by slitting their wrists? Nobody knows. Nobody cares. The only time I slit my wrist was when I was doing an Art Project, and back then I don't even remember feeling "more alive". ,,|,, emos.

Speaking of which, the Singaporean sense of humour is beginning to disgust me. I don't mean to act sanctimonious here, but seriously, humour is deprecating from the likes of Dara O'Briain or comedy troupe Smack The Pony to stuff like Jackass The Movie. It is beginning to appeal to the younger crowd that hurting yourself intentionally and being filmed is much funnier than the subtle jokes of Hot Fuzz or Monty Python movies. To them, it is the scene of Borat wrestling with his buddy naked in bed that gives them laughing fits, rather than the fact that he has shown the world about redneck culture, or the fact that Jews are still being "outcast", albeit in different ways.

http://www.adequacy.org/public/stories/2001.12.2.42056.2147.html

Just check out the above link. If you felt angry or pissed, you're probably an emo kid.

My initial qualms about Neil Humphrey's (yeah I think it was him) statement that Singaporeans don't have a sense of humour were confirmed when I went to watch The Simpsons Movie. Most part of the movie nobody saw the subtle (and not-so-subtle) jabs at Disney and Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, or at the political scene in America, or at other things I deem to be funny and subtle. At this point, I may seem like a snobbish atas bitch, which I probably am, but when you spend $7.50 laughing on your own in the cinema you tend to have thoughts like these.

So how do you cultivate a sense of humour?

1) Current affairs. Yes, current affairs, or at least know what's happening around you. People who are uninitiated probably wouldn't snigger at my new Harry Potter series, LTA X and the Half-Blood Prince, or maybe because it's just plain lame. But if you just understood, then good for you, you're one step into better humour.

2) Command of language. There's no use if you don't understand a word they're saying at all. This is probably one reason why people laugh at Jackass, because there's no language to understand at all. Yes I'm snobbish. Fuck me.

3) General knowledge. You've got to know who's Bono, know that he's Irish, he's a musicmaker to laugh at Colin (in the Simpson's Movie) when he said his father wasn't Bono. Then you've got to look deeper and realise the jab at the fact that they are probably implying Ireland doesn't have any decent musicians, and then you've got to know why the Americans are always having Irish jokes. Then there's Hot Fuzz, a British comedy spoofing the cop shows. Spoof in another kind of way, not in the way Scary Movie is spoofing the rest.

Of course, I do succumb to slapstick humour once in a while, what I'm saying is humour is not only slapstick.

I'll need a witty wife to keep me entertained in future.

Cruiser tried to give some lame sign off here at 12:17:00 PM