Hanoi Annoys – A Travel Mix

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And now, because I can’t quite leave my Hanoi experience behind, and fear I’ll be unable to update this blog as regularly as I’d originally planned (though I have done a lot or writing already), I present this travel mix. Sure, the actual Vietnamese-ess-ness-ness is tenuous, but it’s an eclectic set of Western-influenced S.E. Asian tunes (courtesy of Sublime Frequencies compilations), S.E. Asian-influenced Western tunes, vaguely Summer-inflected pop hits and drones, and simply good music. This goes some inadequate way to documenting my experiences so far in Vietnam, Malaysia and Laos. Here it is, Hanoi Annoys:

1. Animal Collective – Kids on Holiday
2. Onra – Take a Ride
3. Sinn Sisamouth – Don’t Let My Girlfriend Tickle Me
4. Arthur Russell – The Platform on the Ocean
5. Samsimar – Indang Pariaman
6. Arp – Potentialities II
7. The Magnetic Fields – When The Open Road Is Closing In
8. Warfield Spillers – Daddy’s Little Girl
9. Johnny Guitar – Bangkok by Night
10. Sun Araw – Bump Up (High Step)
11. Thee Oh Sees – I Was Denied
12. J.T. IV – Death Trip
13. P.M.7/Jupiter – Susie Wong
14. Studio – Out There
15. Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti – May The Music Never Die

Phởtball, Phở and Fried Street Frog Phở-eva!

I’m writing this enshrined in my Superior Room on the third-storey of a dingy hotel in the heart of Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown. I’ve had a day consumed by travel – starting at 5.30am, waking and washing in Hanoi, driving to the airport, suffering a delayed flight to K.L., a lengthy bus trip and connecting light rail ride to the hotel, not too mention the loss of an hour due to changing time zones. Yeah, yeah, nothing too serious but I’ve been feeling wretched all day, and want nothing more than to stay inside until, well,  I do it all again tomorrow en route to Vientiane. It’s been a bit of a traveling misstep, but, hey, I’ll learn.

Today’s low becomes all the more emphatic given the great experiences of the past two days. The past and present were nevertheless intimately related. I’d started feeling ill a couple of days ago, prior to joining the friendly staff of Hanoi’s Jasmine Hotel in a game of seven-a-side football. We rode to the outskirts of the city where it is apparently easier to reserve one of the small synthetic turf pitches. Within 20 minutes I felt like I was drowning in the humidity but, with it starting to pour down, I managed to put away two goals, as we went onto win 7-6. My performance was bettered only by River, one of the managers of the hotel, who scored a decisive hat-trick. We consolidated the victory by heading to one of Hanoi’s many fine bia hoi establishments where I drank glass after glass of freshly brewed beer accompanied by several fine dishes, the highlight being crispy garlic-fried frog. The beer went down so effortlessly and with such refreshment that I forgot entirely my nascent sore throat.

Then yesterday, I was invited by Spring, River and Nam to visit the home of Lomh (sp.?), another Jasmine Hotel staff member. I was told to be ready at 8.30am to motorcycle an hour into the countryside to experience ‘real Vietnam’. The fact we didn’t get away until close to 11 probably saved me from death by rice wine. Every two minutes, it seemed, someone wanted to partake in a shot with me, shouting cheers and joyously shaking hands, while singing traditional songs altered to have some sort of reference to the ‘Australian’. It being July 27^th, a day to commemorate the war dead, the party some thirty or so strong, comprised of several intertwining families, were certainly of a mind to celebrate. Dish after succulent dish was served, with plentiful portions heaped in my bowl, and over-generous rice wine top-ups coming with alarming regularity. ‘Don’t worry,’ Lomh told me, ‘Vietnamese drink lots of rice wine, go to sleep for two hours, get up and play football’. Spring eventually had to pull me from the celebrations, as several of the soldiers in attendance were getting very physical with their admiration; brimming with enthusiasm, they were insistent I stay on for the afternoon.

After what was indeed a refreshing sleep, three abreast on reed mat laid on a hard bed frame, Nam whizzed me back to the Hotel, for him to get some work done and me, it would turn out, to rest up in preparation for another party, this time at Spring and River’s house. From the countryside to the urban centre, I experienced the amazing organism that is Vietnam’s road network: the seemingly lawless, highly instinctual ebb and flow of cars, motorcycles, bikes and street-peddlers with their don ganh poles. This night time gathering was much the same, everyone finding a seat on the floor among a galaxy of delicious dishes. All made it their priority to make me feel welcome, most testing their English on me, however rudimentary, at least once. I can’t remember having ever fielded the question of ‘how are you?’ so many times in one sitting.

Despite Lomh’s assurances, I woke up completely ragged from the rice wine. My sorry state perhaps contributed to the immense sadness I felt sitting in the taxi, watching Hanoi blur once more before me. The cab window, like a television screen, had a disctancig effect – nothing like the tactile tour of Hanoi I’d been given, where the sights, smells and sounds (oh, those horns!) make for an unavoidable visceral reaction. This, reduced to the lingering, second-hand taste of rice wine.  I’m grateful to have been given the means to focus on the Vietnam beyond the decadence spoken of in Western rhetoric, that overt Orientalsim we are fed. Instead, I was given just a glimpse at the resilience and optimism of its people. That won’t ever leave me, nor will the memory of those people welcoming me genuinely and unquestioningly, though the exact details may blur with time.

Trauma Texts

In my honours class last year we dealt extensively with the topic ‘Terror, Pleasure and the Image’ largely by examining film through the filter of ‘trauma cinema’. Janet Walker coined the phrase, as far as I know, to describe films and documentaries that have trauma as both subject matter and aesthetic. Much of Walker’s focus centred on films portraying incest and the Holocaust, and the use of filmic techniques to convey the frailty of memory in the face of disquieting events that is evident in so much trauma. Two films that came immediately to mind for me were The Diving Bell & The Butterfly and Fragments of Antonin. The fact that the former was initially a published memoir, and my supervisor’s brief mentioning, in the same seminar, of the hiphop music genre as an outlet for catharsis or a bloodletting of trauma, led me to wonder about what other cultural items could possibly be defined as ‘trauma texts’. Now, I’m serviceably knowledgeable about film but no expert on ‘trauma cinema’, and to me the notion is transferable to other cultural forms, especially if part of the aim is to replicate the symptoms of traumatic experience on the audience (my supervisor largely disagreed). In relation to music, I definitely don’t mean isolating your average Emo narrative about being done wrong, I mean something much more holistic (as I’ll attempt to illustrate further below).

Walker employs theories of post traumatic stress disorder to illuminate the amnesias, fantasies, and mistakes in memory that contribute in order to better understand of how personal and public historical meaning is made. That is, partially, the way films represent trauma, and how they shape our conceptions of trauma. Film may be an high sensory medium, but it is like music and literature in that it can only re-present reality. And it does this through various techniques. As do literature, and, perhaps most contentiously, music. In relation to this discussion, novels like William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, in particular, stick out, for their use of stream-of-consciousness, non-linear narrative, vignettes, ellipses, in depicting heavy drug use and violence. The decentralising of the plot, particularly in Naked Lunch, contributes a disorienting effect that, in essence, mimics reality. Film may have a more overtly affective influence on its viewers, but, I would argue, the written word can be similarly enveloping, and capable of verisimilitude. The reception of the viewer/reader is what interests me most.

I might also argue that trauma representations are prevalent throughout much of ‘popular’ music (those quotation marks are important!). And so I bring up an extreme case, an artist by the name of Xiu Xiu, which is mainly one guy, Jamie Stewart. On arguably his most accessible and popular album, Fabulous Muscles (2004), Stewart manages a song that graphically depicts a U.S. troop killing a young girl, and others documenting instances of incest and sexual abuse. The narrative on ‘Support Our Troops OH! (Black Angels OH!)’ is delivered in spoken word, which means we aren’t necessarily coaxed into the illusion we are experiencing this event. But taking the whole song into consideration, the impact is not so far removed from ‘trauma cinema’. The musical backdrop is considerably confronting, dense and electronically pulsing but not entirely without melody. It can be an unsettling experience, providing spatial and temporal fragmentation. Is this the soundtrack to a traumatic experience?

Much of what Stewart writes is supposedly autobiographical (though liberties would lead me to dub him more auteur-biographical), something I think contributes greatly to his divisiveness. He is accused of being at once myopic and an exhibitionist, criticisms I find rather endemic of explicitly autobiographical/counternarrative works. Another way you could look at Xiu Xiu’s music is to say that it “sets out to disturb their audience in pursuit of higher artistic goals” (AllMusicGuide, 2004). To me, Xiu Xiu very occasionally achieves this.

Now, I may well be misappropriating ‘trauma cinema’, but it’s an interesting discussion anyway.

[Xiu Xiu MySpace]

A New Day

The Newcastle Day Co-op is a newly established journal/online magazine that will feature my writing of a more academic bent, as well as that of several esteemed colleagues at the University of Newcastle. Lift-off is scheduled for the end of July, and you can expect an article from me on online music consumption and the formation of virtual communities or followings premised on ‘user-centric’ taste-making. I will expound on the argument that community may be something that is “felt or experienced” rather than demonstrated through overt participation or displays of social capital.

The hyperlinked nature of the blogosphere, the ability to move seamlessly from blog to blog, to discover new music with a single click, hints at a new sort of online community defined not by a single allegiance but a nomadic trawling of what is available. As such, blogging communities may lack demonstrable evidence of interaction, and, arguably, affiliations are not made with singular blogs, rather they are dispersed over a range of blogs.

Stay tuned.

Peaking Lights – Silver Tongues Soft Whisper

I used to buy all my music, or only very occasionally acquire music through illegal channels. Now, I probably download two or three albums a week. I still regularly purchase albums – it’s just that, needless to say, I’m exposed to a lot more music than I ever was previously. This is great. But it often means I don’t spend the time with an album I should. On this blog I’m focusing on songs and albums that have endured the test of time, no flimsy one-week wonders.

Peaking Lights’ Imaginary Falcons from last year is one such LP. In some ways it’s a very non-confrontational release; it doesn’t leap out from your stereo and thus probably doesn’t sell itself enough for many in this fast-paced digital age. It’s a fantastic package, including the Shawn Reed screen-printed artwork, which I feel privileged to own on vinyl. ‘Silver Tongues Soft Whisper’, in particular, feels timeless. The title is a perfect summation of the song’s softly unraveling power: all floating electronic pulses, waves of restrained feedback and looped organ and synth. Sure, it’s six fairly repetitious minutes, but it’s transfixing, a sort of reversal of time.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been getting Twinrex injections in preparation for my overseas jaunt and, while I’m not particularly afraid of needles, it has got me thinking of a time a few years ago when I did come undone via a spike in the arm. The one and only time (so far) I attempted to give blood, I passed out and fell into a semi-hallucinatory state. I remember streaks of colour and being overcome by an unnerving sense of bliss. It’s this state of not-quite-consciousness that I equate with ‘Silver Tongues Soft Whisper’. It’s blissful, lulling, but it’s not without a strange foreboding: a trap, some mystical Siren’s call, imploring you to sleep forever.

Writing this has prompted me to examine the lyric insert from the LP for the first time. These are some fine words but they’re largely indecipherable and, well, that doesn’t matter one bit.

[MySpace / Blogspot / Night People]

(Something #1)

Late last week I went to the cinema and saw Animal Kingdom, the first feature film from writer/director David Michôd. A stylized Australian crime drama with an incredibly strong cast, despite not being strictly a true story (it is loosely inspired by events related to the Melbourne-based Pettingill crime family in the late ‘80s) the film managed with subtlety a brooding menace and tension that cannot be separate from reality. Perhaps what most enamored me to the film was its undoubted Australianness without the prevalent cultural cringe.

Though it is never stated, through little fragments of cultural ephemera – a cricket match on TV between Australia and Sri Lanka in which both Kumar Sangakkara and Muttiah Muralitharan feature, for instance – the setting is revealed to be some time in the 00’s. Despite the often heavy subject matter, several scenes come away feeling like miniature tributes to Australian suburbia. The petty realities of Australia are not ridiculed; rather, like patchwork, they are weaved together to provide the story’s background. Without giving too much away, the opening scene portrays the teenage central character ‘J’ seated on a couch next to his mother, who has evidently overdosed. Before we learn the extent of the situation – put ambiguously, that J is waiting for paramedics – Andrew O’Keefe’s familiar voice wafts into prominence along with the brain-dead proceedings of Deal Or No Deal. It’s somewhat surreal, even unsettling, to witness the dislocation of such a commercial television staple from its ‘wholesome’ normality to this scene of despair: the ‘strayan accents seem more pronounced, and the actual premise of the game show, which I’ve always struggled to grasp, slips even more into absurdity. As J waits his gaze is drawn to the television, and despite his transfixed expression, one gets the feeling that it is only serving a mindnumbing purpose, as a conduit for misdirected emotion. Like much Australian television, then.

A discussion that reared up amongst friends post-viewing was the way good films will invariably leave out important storyline aspects, or only hint at them. This was evidenced in Animal Kingdom, for instance, by the unresolved sexual tension between Ben Mendelsohn’s ‘Pope’ character and J’s girlfriend. Indeed, there are several flashpoints where this question of possibility arises. This discussion need not be limited to film, however.

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Now, the only reasons I’m bringing up John Rechy’s novel City of Night is because I’m a good one-hundred or so pages into it, and it happens to satisfy the point I’m trying to illustrate. There’s not much further connecting it with Animal Kingdom. Renowned as being somewhat of an influence for Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, the 1963 paperback provides a stark depiction of street hustling through a stream-of-consciousness narrative style. I’ve found it interesting thus far that Rechy omits most of the actual ‘sex’ details (there is a whole lot of foreplay, har har); I don’t know whether (self-)censorship came into play or what, but there’s certainly a skipping over of those ‘vital details’. You could argue, as some notable scholars have, that this is what distinguishes pornography from literature. And, indeed, texts can achieve a heightened verisimilitude through saying less. I can’t remember where I read it – I think in an introduction to a Kafka work – but the line (or something similar), ‘art strives for description without the describing’, really holds true.

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In music too, it is really the interpretation, your interpretation, that holds most resonance. An artist can’t tell you what to feel. So, with someone like Ariel Pink, where often you cannot make out the lyrics precisely, or Brisbane’s Kitchen’s Floor where nearly all you are given is a pithy line like ‘I am in her room’, which just as easily sounds like ‘I am in a room’ – you fill in the blanks, apply your own patchwork. Sometimes from the haze of lo-fi tracks you’ll hear a line, or even a sound, that jumps out from the confounding or the inscrutable, and here you’ll find some ‘unique’ affective depth. Production, the way vocals or instruments are mixed, can add to the affective response: in the case of the briefly-mentioned Kitchen’s Floor song above, ‘Twenty-Two’, the vocal is delivered as if the singer is trying to impart something to you but can’t get beyond the few words he’s found.