Long time no blog. But there’s not too much to report here in fact… I’ve been working hard, Naoko has been baking lots of yummy stuff, and Zen has been studying hard: he has his regular primary school, he takes Japanese lessons on Saturdays, swimming lessons on Sundays, and now he’s learning how to play softball on Sundays as well. It’s good fun. In July we had a special visitor who came to see us twice – Peggy Yang! She was my student in Taiwan in the mid ’90s when she was only a little older than Zen, now she’s 20 years old and doing an internship here in Singapore. Yay, Peggy, thanks for coming to visit us.
Peggy and Zen
Peggy and Peter and Naoko
Zen with Naoko’s latest creation
Zen with his first baseball glove (Mizuno, black)
ZenTube
Zen singing a local version of “Frere Jacques”
Zen and the Malaysia train
Zen’s finger tricks
CD review
Electrico: “We Satellites” – Electrico is one of Singapore’s most high profile bands (it’s a relative term), and they combine keyboard dancibility with guitar rock. In this way they are similar to Coldplay but not quite as dull. In this way it’s almost possible to listen to an entire album without getting restless. The opening track “Zero” is a short, groovy electronic experiment and it then goes right into “Save Our Souls,” a moody tune with that buzzing, soaring guitar drone providing that kind of tense counterpoint that I like so. Maybe a little bit like “Machines Of Loving Grace,” but not quite as dark. “The Slaves And The Digits” is a reggae rocker with cool keyboards (I can’t believe I’d say that) and a wild bass sound, it’s quite good fun. “We Satellites” is a punchy rocker, and the lead singer has a pretty good voice, and all the other components are there – restrained use of keyboards, good guitar effects, nice bass, and a steady drummer. The band’s attempts at ballads are less successful, and are actually quite awful. Sorry guys – great production for a band that has improved since I last heard them, but there’s still a bit of work to be done.
Book Review
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen – by Paul Torkay – This is a very unusual book about a fisheries expert who is approached by mysterious people who seem to have a lot of money to engage on a foolish mission to introduce salmon to Yemon. Tigers in Antarctica, squid in the Himalayas, flamingos in Iceland, pandas on the moon. Maybe, why not? The story is told in a series of letters, emails, testimonials and transcripts, so you get a good sense of the unreliable narrator as various points of view of the same incident, but in a more natural way than perhaps Rashomon or the like, since there was no crime, just a project unfolding and coming to its natural conclusion. Some of the characters are a bit caricature-ish, particularly the main henpecked narrator and his shrew of a wife (who has concluded that you need an income of over 70,000 pounds a year to support children, etc.). The mysticism of Sheikh Muhammed is a bit hard to take for someone who has never met a whiskey-sipping mystical sheikh, but the loving descriptions of the geography of Yemen, the sport of fly fishing and the life cycle of the salmon, as well as some brilliant character sketches make this a book well worth reading.