#67 cendol

Why the fuck did I put 'Cendol' as the title of post #67? Well, back in my MCKK (we call her koleq, like the boat) days we have this adorable system, laundry numbers, in which everyone was given a number. It was a useful way to claim back your laundry - mark the tags or the laundry bag with the number et voilà! - but over the years it had developed into something like a nominal shorthand - "A 24! Datang depan!" - which at that tender young age did give me nightmares about being a prisoner with only a fucking number as my whole identity. Thing is, I was - is - A118, which was quite an awesome number (I turned it into a fancy schmancy 'S') and had been incorporated into numerous passwords ever since, and A67 was this great friend of mine, Za'im (with a frigging glottal stop) who's a great public speaker, a great poem declamator, and a great musician. When you're that good, there's not a lot of leeway for bitches like me to bitch about.

But I did find one. Well, not me, like a whole class. As it turned out after one especially cold night, our Mr. Perfect had a terrible case of Pseudomonas spp. rhinitis, and we being terrible mean boys called him cendol forever after. Cendol is this kind of cold drink mixed with lots of stuff but primarily with a gluten-type jelly strings, which looks like green bloated pinworms. As such it had passed down in our lingo to mean 'snot', hence Mr. Perfect's moniker, and the title of this post.

... Barf.

You must not blame me for sheer genius.

In another topic, the koleq orchestra team went to the SBP Wind Orchestra Competition (though I think they don't call them SBP anymore, because they're opening that shit up for practically anyone these days) this weekend and the they had just uploaded the video of their performance. I don't know how's the format these days but in my day they gave us three songs: an obligatory song, which usually emphasizes a musical aspect (like articulation, dynamics etc), a Chosen Song, and a Malay Song (which is usually composed by this fricking man named Suhaimi Yaacob, a director for SAS band, and guess who almost always turned up in the finale? Yeah, fuck that!). Video below:



I will tell you this: I'm so proud that they managed to do this after a major team crisis (that had their FB group buzzing for days) and only three weeks of proper training. The orchestra sound is so much improved - of course they have newer instruments and a larger palette to work with now, with so many sponsors KA-CHUNK!!! - especially the brass! The brass section used to be the byword for 'shithole' in our band, but the trumpets blazed like they're Leontyne Price (and you know that lady would probably live to see twenty more presidents before finally joining the choir upstairs) and the trombones, apart from two or three impolite honks, sound so sizzled up! I was confused why they're putting the tubas smack in the back of the rest of the ensemble but when you have like 4 -5 BBb tubas placement probably doesn't matter.

Apparently they're playing a suite from Die lustige Witwe (I can't help it, I love the original title more than its English counterpart - the FUCKING Merry Widow, so sterile, so sanitized. There's sex in the show, goddamnit!) and an original composition based on an old Malay song Seri Langkat. I can't tell you much because there's too much vibe in the recording to ascertain individual timbres, but I do think that Seri Langkat was better that DLW. I just want to scream "Did you listen to any recordings of Vilja at least?!!!" It's harrowing to hear one of the most beautiful lyric pieces EVER being played like a colour-by-the-numbers, but whatever. That alone is a big enough write-off in my book.

Apart from that, I do think the fast sections suffer from not being fast enough. It is an operetta, hence it must have a lively atmosphere. I do understand though that 3 weeks training is probably not enough. The fermati just before the coda were rather anemic from lack of crecscendo/swell, but there was a nice sexy trombone glissando, so that's a big plus (they do love flamboyant solos at the WOC).

The Seri Langkat is typical of my old director Mr. Rosman's style - I could listen once and label everything: Intro, Theme, Theme 2 (legato for days)+crescendo, Re-intro (mf), big Recap, Coda. His style (we called it RTM band-ryuu, because the director before that was big on symphonic-style arrangement) is tons and tons of syncopations and accents, nice (but not entirely unexpected) harmonic progressions, and lower brass chorale for days. The team actually did miles better in this song, but they have the benefit of having the composer at hand, so there's that. The trumpets especially did an awesome job. It's weird because the rest of the participants usually turn up with better Chosen Song than the Malay Song, but I think it's a good trademark move for the team.

Of course there's some spliced notes, some honks (clarinets and trombones I see YOU) but I don't care, I love the songs, I love the performance, I would have killed a child to be performing on that stage with them, but I'm here and they're there, and I hope they had the time of their lives on that stage, and most importantly GO INTO THE FINALE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

UPDATE: They didn't made it. They got silver, which means 'so long, suckers'. 

#66 hiatus hernia

I didn't realise I haven't been blogging for almost 2 months! OMG, there's so much to cover. First in March I went back to Sabah for an awesome two weeks. The first day my parents dragged me at 7 AM to the village pier to catch some fishing boats. The nice thing about these boats is you can get like 1/4 of the price of the price you're getting for fishes and squids at the day market! That's dirt cheap!

^^^The guy with the trucker cap's my Dad!!!

I think this is boat #3

It's a goddamn war. The guy's with the black cap's my uncle^^^.

It was such fun, and everytime I got up early I went with them. My dad looked happier (he retired a year ago), and my mom lost some weight, so all was happy on the home front. The problem was my little brother, the one who got punched by his seniors just before his exam (what fuckers!). He'd been having coughs for a week before and when we got him to a private clinic they had him on suspicion for TB. Fuck! But he got better though, as if he's determined that his cough is going to go away in a week. Which it did! Maybe I should've trademarked his DNA or something.

And then my dad had to choke on some fruit seed (a duku seed, which was as big as a baby's thumb maybe) and we had an entire day's rush to the nearest hospital (which was 20 km away) and mind you the only one who had the license to drive was my dad, the one who had to be anaesthetised (they did a laryngoscopy, shove a tube down his throat), and we (well, I - I was the only one who went with him) had to wait 4 hours for him to get up from his groggy sleep. Which I did not begrudge at all, because I had such a great time talking to the MAs of the Emergency ward, you know, gouging the field and shit like that.

The thing that chafed my ass was the behaviour of some MOs over there. Mind you my dad, like my second brother, had what people in my place call the black rage. I mean we all get angry and shit, but my dad's kinda hands-on with his anger. And he had waited for 3 hours before he got called in, and we hadn't had any lunch, and when he got called in there's this young upshot giving him attitude. "Pakcik, apa masalah?" while typing into his damn phone. I just want to scream bitch, is that how you're taught at med school? I had to flinch while my dad's voice got louder and louder until the MO got him to the Emergency and did a laryngoscopy.

And then while I'm waiting outside the Emergency, eyeing the family members, people filling up prescriptions and what did I see? MOs trailing their fucking stets at the handle of the handbags, like a goddamn ribbon, with the diaphragm part hanging down halfway their thighs. I just want to puke on the stets, just make it unclean and be done with it, at least after then they'd probably put them in some proper place. I mean how expensive is a purse with an MO salary, nothing fancy just a small purse like a lot of HOs I see wearing in the wards all day to put their shit in?

Turns out it was okay, and dad only had a little trauma (self-inflicted, if I may say so, he poked a pencil down his throat a few times) and he was eating normally two days after. But that got me thinking real hard: if anything happened to dad we'd probably in very deep deep deep shit.

After that I fetched my IC (I lost my IC in Manipal, then I got it replaced but I can't claim it because I already went to Melaka - basically for one year I was an illegal bitch - not really, I had my passport and everything) and went to see my grandma. See, my grandma went to Mekah for an umrah in November I think, and she looked amazing! She cut her hair - she looked like Maggie Griffin with black hair and smoother skin, and she looked totally relaxed. And then my - I don't know how you call it - late granddad's brother came (with wife #2) to pass on some invites for his son's marriage thingy, which turned out to be an impromptu family conference, in which I learnt my family (on my mom's side) came from the Kinabatangan river and her ancestor basically destroyed a whole village and cut everyone's ears and strung the whole thing up over a wire stretched across the goddamn river, and mind you, this is our Nile, our Mississipi, our Mekong!

Basically I had a really nice time back home, but holiday's really hard because they last only so long and I had to go back to Melaka. The past I month I've been in Surgery posting, which I will only tell you it's hard as fuck, but I won't bitch and moan because despite my foul mouth and everything I'm committed to this. But we had wonderful lecturers, and I had wonderful, cooperative patients, who couldn't have been more sweet to me despite disturbing their rest and all.

Rant over - last week I had a smashing portfolio challenge ('You have very nice handwriting' YEAHHH!!!) and I rewarded myself by trolling Amazon and buying thousands of stuff, hehehe. I bought Duetti, Anna Moffo's Broadway album, Frederica von Stade's baroque+Mozart album, Mady 'darling' Mesplé's Best of album, and Dima's Rachmaninov Romances. It was heaven! The Duetti album was exquisite, Flicka was working it Baroque-ryuu style, Moffo could've been another Ella Fitzgerald (and you know she could've done the scat like a huge sexy violin - like Battle did), Mady was crazy - a huge F there, an orgasmic Ab there! I tell you people were stopping under my window and calling me up whether I have a vibrating sex bunny in my room.

The only thing I had some reserve for is Dima's latest effort. He sounds amazing and everything, but I don't know, sort of manufactured. You can definitely hear the technique, as opposed to being lulled by its 'absence'. He certainly have the language down pat, but the core of the sound is just not what it used to be. I always say he was never a dramatic Verdi baritone, and what he do best is the lyric-noble roles like Germont, Onegin, Posa. But he went where he went, and a recording is certainly not the best - or only - way to judge an instrument, and I utterly wish him the best.