yeah! safin defeated hewitt in a scintillating performance in an enthralling match which, truly, offered just about everything you could see in a tennis match.
of course as usual safin needed to break a racquet before he got going.
and when he got going - ooh, what a sight. 72% first serve percentage in set 3 even after screwing up his first service game.
all those booming winners down the line. and that drop shot. and that crazy bender off-balance and out of the court and all.
and he knows portuguese! brilliant.
in any case beating hewitt was the least he could do after killing off the tennis god in the semis. who took out agassi before that. the 20,000 aussies just made it abit harder.

quite interesting how perspectives can change over time, especially the depth of perception. doesn't have to be of people (those are hardest to prove right or wrong). was watching finding forrester again on saturday night and i took so much more out of it than when i watched it around three years ago. i loved it then, i love it even more now. it so smoothly amalgamates two quite different cultures, not just in terms of plot or character. this time i paid more attention to the music, and i realise the filmmakers did a wonderful job...subtle, yet so powerful and poetic.
still bits here and there that i didn't get. but gorgeous anyway. you'd never think a film about the bronx (among other things) could be described thus.

today marks the end of a quite insane week.
monday went normally enough (but these days, how normal can normal get?). then from tuesday the action in melbourne started to heat up, so that, coupled with a lit essay, an econs essay and countless mental blocks (plus my crazy and still ongoing attempt at courting arrest via downloading albums off soulseek), resulted in my getting something like just over nine hours of sleep in three days.
then friday came. i was foolhardy enough to go for pe (thankfully no tekan or anything, just good ol' b-ball), which was succeeded by geog s (which, for some reason, was terribly uninspiring), then lit s, then a monster photog session when the seven of us plus ms ho and ms tang had to somehow handle 89 j1s and bring them around the school to take photos.
needless to say i was bushed, absolutely, and was at that stage of lethargy where you don't really feel like sleeping anymore.
went to bed at 1.20 and i basically got more sleep that night than i had the last three days. i woke up at 1.40pm that afternoon.

i need more money. i see more money in my near future.

yay! finally bought funeral. am very satisfied with myself for that.
i booked the cd last week expecting it to arrive like one month later, only for bao to inform me that there was a copy sitting on the shelves on hmv.
so i duly went down today and paid the remaining 75% of the price and claimed the copy. the poor sod who booked his copy but decided not to buy - i laugh in his face. hahahaha. so there.

then i trooped over to sembawang across the street and got my brother his birthday present. no idea why i did that - it's the first time i'm getting him anything for his birthday. perhaps he's becoming more like a brother and less like a pest? :p haha. or perhaps i feel more like a brother nowadays.

pretty pretty video made with night-vision film:
http://www.boardsmag.com/screeningroom/musicvideos/484
i find it absolutely gorgeous. for one there's spike jonze's very slick, smooth use of nightvision and transitions. and also there's bjork's enigmatic charm that beams white like her eyes in the green-black canvas of flora in the background.
her voice, apparently, is an acquired taste though. (one that i have more or less acquired, but vaish says it's kinda creepy and eerie. maybe it's her voice. or maybe it's the fact that she was watching it alone late at night? but i also watched it alone late at night. ah well whatever.)

isn't it odd that sometimes you feel you've got yourself all sussed out, then when someone asks you to map your world of yourself out you find that all these predeterminations you have of your self are but nebulous clouds of dust. like the rolling fog over the namib desert that law showed us in class today. and you cannot for the life of yourself pin yourself down on your map. ...is the essence of self-appraisal confusion? seems (in my case, at least) kinda true.

haha cca feste was an unexpected success, made all the more surprising by the fact that we hadn't managed to get the backlog to display or the 02/04 leftovers to sell which eventually meant that we had only joyce's brilliant poster-thingy and three copies of the 02/04 issue - one torn up as decor, two left as display - to bank on.
which yielded us 70 names on the signup sheets. and a substantial number showed genuine interest. very heartening.

photog also benefitted much from the bumber crop - 200-odd names is going to give us a major - and hopefully pleasant - headache in planning this year's photorientation.
but a headache nonetheless.

in other news i have compiled a stress-buster compilation. not the venting sort of stressbusting, but something to let you relax and indulge.
well it's working for me, at least.
split nicely into two halves - the airy side a and the more worldly side b.

.

haha just returned from the national stadium where we watched singapore obey the bookmakers and obediently defeated a limp and insipid indonesia 2-1. best part was, we were sitting beside the indon fans, and about six rows above us there was this group of mats who obviously revelled in their geographical location in the stadium and proceeded to roundly - but i may add good-naturedly - abuse the indon fans on the other side of the blue and gold banners.
mark, shoujie and tsz san were also very up for it. especially mark, who no doubt caught the attention of a lot of people.
football matches are quite amazing things. you can abuse opposing fans for 90 mins and then after the match applaud each other and show general goodwill. we were shouting stuff like "balik balik balik balik, balik kampong...", some wierd tuneless "cheer" that went "lalala, lalala, eheheh, goodbye", and "nothing, nothing" everytime ilham or elie aiboy missed a shot, as well as some malay word which i afterwards understood to be a malay vulgarity. then afterward in the celebrations i clapped at and waved at some of the fans across the banners and i think they were waving and clapping back at me or in my general direction. funny game, ain't it, football?
oh. and i managed to quote shebby singh ad verbatim although i was at the stadium (thankfully) and not listening to him on the star sports commentary team.
he said, "oh vell vell vell, that for me, Richard, was a definite straight red card, no doubt about it."
according to my brother, who was unfortunate enough to have to suffer 90mins of shebbyspeak (he declined to come along with me/us) i was right down to the last word.
so there.

seriously. my og amazes me. did anyone even think that we would still be active one year on from onite?
of course we all hoped we would. or rather, could, given all the horror stories that our seniors told us ("my og disbanded like dunno how long ago", "it won't last, it's just a high" etc.) and their prophecies of doom did seem perilously close to becoming real when only 5 or 6 of us turned up for o2nite last year.
but we still keep in contact, quite a few of us still meet everyday at our new ja'cozy, and we went for onite on friday! haha. me, bharath, jiawen, blee, grace, glen and yingliang stayed for half of the campfire - mark had maths tuition - then went to cafe cartel and ate and talked and laughed a lot. our og is still alive! haha.
i should think we are the envy of some people. geri told me that she felt quite sad for the whole onite last year because she knew it wouldn't last. ileyas? we just has as much fun as possible, then ate at one of the ghim moh coffeeshops and vandalised the ja'tome, then a few of us felt reckless enough to go watch a midnight screening of school of rock. (i reached home at a quarter past three i think.)
i wonder how many of the immense number of ogs this year will last as long as we have. i'll admit it, the core group of ileyas has beaten the odds. for how long?
i choose not to think about it.
lindy and nick can and should be proud of us. like i feel when i get the surprised look whenever i tell anyone that i have an og outing to go to.
it's times like this that you toss cynicism and pessimism to the back of your mind.

i got a bit bored and irritated after trying out multiple dead ends in the maths tutorial, so i decided to take stock of my cd income last year, having opened my account for this with m83's 'dead cities, red seas and lost ghosts', an album which has been on my md for quite a while now already.

i bought in 2004, in no particular order:
u2 - the joshua tree; the black keys - rubber factory; ratatat - ratatat; broken social scene - you forgot it in people; modest mouse - good news for people who love bad news; lovedrug - pretend you're alive; joy division - closer; electric soft parade - the american adventure; mclusky - the difference between me and you is that i'm not on fire; air - talkie walkie; franz ferdinand - franz ferdinand; interpol - turn on the bright lights, antics; kasabian - kasabian; p.j. harvey - stories from the city, stories from the sea; suede - head music; the walkmen - bows + arrows; radiohead - kid a (special edition); paranoid android cd1; of montreal - satanic panic in the attic; the rapture - echoes; my morning jacket - it still moves; doves - lost souls; kashmir - zitilites; goldfrapp - black cherry; grandaddy - sumday; and the decemberists - castaways and cutouts.

which amounts to 26 albums and one single.
considering the average price of a cd to be $25 and a single to be $10, i spent 26 x $25 + $10 = $660 on cds last year.
taking away $200 supplied from cny angbaos and birthday angbaos, that means i have sacrificed $460 of my pocket money last year on music.
just some figures.

and m83 is brilliant. don't let the 'electronic' tag fool you; their music is no less emotional and multifaceted than what you might call 'traditional' or 'organic' music. their sound (in this album at least) is best described as 'lush' - vibrant soundscapes are created with synthesizers and beat machines, coupled with keyboards, strings and some very soothing vocals. the introduction - in fact, abundance - of feeling in this album is quite akin to seeing, for example, a blooming expanse in an otherwise futurised, dystopic world.
brilliant.

first day.
would have been so much more lively had the teachers not decided to try and extend their two-month break.
by the time ms law had geog with us i was in no mood to study at all and only around 15% of whatever was said in the class actually entered my head.
and when we went back to class ("class") for "gp" i was so bushed that i fell asleep once nothing seemed to be happening.
it's not easy to keep yourself bright through a day of nothingness for, well, nothing. i wonder how petr cech (and dudek/kirkland at home) manages to keep focused for so long with two brick walls in front of him every weekend.
the (rare?) occurence of me sleeping in class was apparently reported to emily by shane, for reasons that are and probably shall remain unknown to me, so imagine the surprise when at the start of the ra mag meeting emily comes over and says "hey i heard you were sleeping in class."

and jenny leong - well...she seems so innocuous in person, but what abby tells me after every time she meets with her never fails to drop my jaw. new lows every time. having everything planned out for us may have been convenient and all, but kinda takes the fizz out of it all, don't you think?

shebby singh dispenses cliched comments like a cookie cutter.
(=p)
and i hope anjali's command of french is good enough to navigate the french menus on her sony-ericsson that i set for her.

oh and for a demonstration on the term "duelling guitars", refer to bloc party's "banquet". brilliant british beats.

rediscovered the wonders of ok computer last night. it, as well as kid a, always has something fresh for you everytime you listen to it.

for example. i never realised (or realised and forgot) that airbag had so much of scratch effects embellishing the drumming. it's really an amazing wonder how phil manages to so closely recreate the electronically-chopped-up drumbeats where one drumline suddenly disappears into thin air only to resurface at a moment where you'd least expect it, and is all creatively mixed together to produce a fresh experience each and every measure of the song.

and paranoid android. three part prog-rock opus with majestic sweeps of jonny's guitar and thom's menacing lines. ("kicking squealing gucci little piggy.") and if you listen closely to ed's guitar lines just a layer under jonny's you realise that there's quality throughout the whole song, foreground or background. plus. a song like let down would undoubtedly have become an anthem throughout the whole music world - yes, even in the pop sense - while not the most technically inspiring song in their repertiore, it is probably their best ever melody, and would definitely have hit a level higher than isaac brock did last year with float on, had the video for the proposed single not been so... mundane.

and. electioneer - power, subterranean homesick alien - bliss, exit music - tragedy, lucky - triumph and catharsis...

whee.

first - happy new year~!
it's the new year and for some reason i don't feel like sleeping just yet. was trading songs with bao at the turn of the year - i sent her the walkmen's "new year's eve" and u2's "new year's day" from the limited soundbank on this computer, and she sent me azure ray's "the new year" and death cab for cutie's "the new year". how interesting. :]
i still have not completed my maths homework even though i have had two and a half chapters to go for three weeks already. plus the frost essay. my geog industry map has gone with the dell, and i seriously do not feel like recreating it.

so. one quite exciting year gone, one more to come, even though 2004 and 2005 will be exciting in different ways. no mid-year major football tournaments, no real holidays, no more early morning soccer matches (if i can help it)...
and the new copyrights act has kicked into action. i think.
which means that people like me and bao and aps are not very far from becoming wanted criminals. how interesting.

and channel i has ceased transmission, and we probably have seen the last of the good shows from channel u, which undoubtedly has beat channel 8 hands down in just about every department but dramas in the short four years. so now for chinese television it's back to the staple of cheesy sitcoms, hosts who helm programmes like being made to do so at gunpoint and bad graphic design. quite sad, really. i'm going to miss the soccer reporting of lim woan fei in the ch u news.

honestly i still haven't got my priorities clearly sorted out. but it seems to be getting clearer and clearer that my real passion is music, despite my inability to create it. will have to find some way around that in the future.
maybe i could go to hmv and work my way up to become a label executive or something. haha.

speaking of hmv. i've ended 2004 with a two-month absence from the payment counter at hmv heeren or citylink.
this cannot continue. sigh.