JT's farewell luncheon with JL, Y, V and I at Club Chinois. They now undercut JNC by a full S$10, and discounting a small handful of ill-advised fusion fusses and minor blunders (indicated by *), could there be a finer place to fritter the afternoon away? Laura Fygi in the background is vaguely unsettling though.

*1. Suan ni bai rou, "Bovril sauce type" (JL)
2. Deepfried crustacean comets
3. Bicellular har kow with English mustard
4. Yam croquette surreptitiously strewn with parsley, which is "always the wrong erb" (Y)
5. Salmon sashimi with an "aged richness" (JL) which induces harmonised pleasure-groans
6. Quick-fried squid-prawn bounce-blossoms with sugar peas in shellfish bisque
7. Braised-deepfried seabass-cod with fragrant mushrooms
8. Rack of lamb with mango salsa and carrotcake cubes
*9. Salmon in dragon's beard sliver-cocoon with chilli sauce two ways
*10. Caesar salad of uncommon sweetness
11. Suckling crackling
12. Assorted Chinese charcuterie
13. Veal tenderloin cubes in pepper sauce
14. Phoenix claws
15. Chinese spinach in high-grade soup with three eggs
*16. Waterlogged century eggs, potent sort
17. Ziggurat of spinach-smeared tofu and nameko mushrooms
18. Hua diao herbal chicken elixir
*19. Seafood dumpling in Penang laksa-borshcht-minestrone
20. Braised shark's fin with steamed egg and silversprouts
21. Wasabi mayo prawns (this I think enjoys undeserved celebrity, along with miso cod)
22. Summerberry tiramisu
*23. Wallaby foetus, fallen into bowl of boiling almond milk
24. Mango otak-blancmange with succulent hairs of pomelo
25. Chng tng-guilinggao

Photo shoot in the Club 21 gallery linking the Four Seasons and the Hilton, the one with the perfectly ergonomic chairs which demand uprightness and poise of you.
Models splayed on glass panel.
Peranakan marriage parody, ossified postures, seated bride and groom laterally separated by long austere altar on which rests a stunningly incongruous designer vase containing gnarled Pocky-pretzel plants.
Derring-do around a toilet bowl, naughty dalliance at the urinals, more Magritte mirror-compositions.

In this day and age of nasal-congestion sprays, snazzy dentistry, anal probes and colonial douching, the most sophisticated implement we have to clear out our ears with is the feeble cotton bud (although JL insists their proper function is to induce orgasms; roll them around the aural G-spot, bilaterally caressing both canals at the same time with the candyfloss). When things get really sticky, the doctor draws forth his enormous syringe which, let's face it, is a pretty naughty size and shape, shoves it up your narrow orifice and proceeds to shoot the shit out of your head, with screaming pulses and flatulent gurgles of warm water.

Similarly, few routine health procedures involve as much notional head-on carnage as the scaling and polishing of teeth at obligatory six-month intervals: the dentist grimly brandishing his squealing instruments, attacking and grinding down your rock-faces, refining your pearly quarries, spurting a fine grimy mist of tartar, blood, saliva.

* * *
One of the twins pounces on JL as we step into Salut for the first time in a very long while. They look slightly sheepish, subtly contrite for having dared to raise prices in spite of the depressed economy (but of course everyone knows the fine dining industry is impervious to the fluctuating ebb and flow of economic cycles. The wealthy set, insulated from and undiminished by the downturn, still need their foie gras, their Chilean seabass, their oeufs a la truffe blanche at S$40 each). The Japanese-fetish contagion first contracted by M. Stroobant has spread here. Edamame? Mameko mushrooms? Uh-oh.

JL and Y both have the prawn "tempura" with apple compote, JT and I have the staple seared scallops, this time without the viscous sesame glue. Faultless as usual. Then "panfried smoked duck breast in hay" (formerly "panfried hay-smoked duck breast"). (Expected to manger a manger) Slightly more truculent than usual, but customarily robust in flavour, and a beautiful meld with the asparagus risotto. The desserts are astonishing. Warm pear tart, the mille-feuille butterflake sort, with mascarpone ice cream. Dark choc-Bailey's bavarois with caramelised hazelnut (MIA), a quivering caldera which requires a steady hand to eat properly.

* * *
"We can do more to get greater enjoyment from our waterbodies."
"Rustic fun at Coney Island". Is it just me, or does this have an inescapable sexual innuendo of the strapping-farmhand-and-buxom-milkmaid-rollicking-in-the-hay sort.
A brief photo shoot in the orange-walled lounge, me as photographer, Y as creative director.
We are especially incensed at the slapdash delineation of The Nangka in the models; one looks like Strepsils and the other looks like that pink kueh which is like soon kueh except its stuffing is glutinous rice and not turnip. Such careless replication of textural detail!

* * *
I don't really tell jokes per se, nor do I care to hear many (especially not from people who think themselves very engaging raconteurs, the "life/live wire of the party", masters of occasioned and orchestrated banana-peel humour). I prefer the spontaneous combustion of a writhing wit, the flighty revelry of a free intelligence. Hijacks, offshoots, swerves, ricochets, hairpin bends, oblique and astounding L-shaped knight moves.

For the most part I think I make a strenuous effort to eschew flaccid sentiment and corny trash in all their guises: sappy boybands, conversational platitudes, paralysing social ritual. It has always been about intellectual probity, the impulsion to nobler things and loftier ideals, principled severity and discrimination, the repudiation of ignorance where such ignorance is remediable. But such trifles and tritenesses, surrendered to infrequently, spark in me a fuller measure of critical sharpness and clear-eyed mordancy. There can be no accurate appreciation and praise of genius without prior schooling in the recognition and execration of mediocrity.

Also, they are confessedly a diversion, and a lazy indulgence in mental laxity. A reprieve from an exaltedness I seldom feel able to live up to; from wrestling with complexity; from stalemates and contradictions. An unvarying excellence of company is a daunting and wearying prospect. Surrounded by ingenuousness, I am entirely at ease, unpressured and unguarded. The constant nurture of ardent eloquence in defence of higher things is a terrible and unremitting strain.

Oh, what pretentious rubbish. That can't possibly explain all the brazen Chen Xiao Dong concerts, the relentless magnetism of KTV lounges, all the other inconstancies, the shameless aberrant behaviour which I cannot reconcile even to myself. I am looking for middle ground, when all compromise appears untenable. I stand here, a neurotic tangle, but with personas pliant; open-jawed, facing my first real identity crisis (and what an absurd notion that is, says the Nabokovian harshness in me): can DDD and DDD cohabit the same person? Henceforth, that is. They have been congenitally conjoined in me. The question is whether the conjunction is possible for much longer.

That has been my adolescent life, that Flaubert quote you see at the top of the page.

I went swimming alone today, rediscovering the bliss of being buoyant, segueing through fluidity, feeling frictionless and unretarded.

I am even dressing differently. G would be happy to know this.

19.07.02, 1400
A historic tabular configuration: A, S, S, T and myself in the ultra-soigne Restaurant 360, glass panelling inscribed with glib quotations tangentially relevant to food and the enjoyment thereof, sunlight-freshened vestibule containing eight shrink-office-type swivel chairs and Zen pebble landscaped-ashtrays. Not quite 360 degree view of nascent waterfront developments, trawling boats and The Nangka. As A has suppressed his foreknowledge I blindly order a catastrophic garble of an entree, tuna tataki with marinated couscous in tomato and watermelon consomme. On second thought, I have only myself to blame. How could I possibly not have sensed the disorderly constructedness, the shrieking disjuncture? Fishy and fruity? What was I thinking. What were they thinking. Also what the hell is tankatsu. Parcelled red mullet and mushroom ragout better, mascarpone ice cream full of throat-abrading sediment. A pleasant white selected by A, slick, sanguine and honeyed. Conversation is stilted, disgracefully so for a group whose members are more or less strung together by extant strands of relation, however tenuous.

* * *
Disco Dancing Darryl threatens to appear this night, but the recrudescence is disrupted by Dutifully Disparaging Darryl, who is a bit stuporous owing to the day's irregular meal schedule. He however readily obliges to vegetating at the Milkbar with A, who, finding the company insipid, plays an absoultely riveting game of snakes and ladders with himself.

[The events which follow this have been deemed inappropriate material for public disclosure and are for the participants' relish only.]

22.06.02 Mercredi: la ville rose
Sky of milky blue, cloudless, modulating into a deeper but more diffident shade. Bleached russet, ochre, burnished persimmon and ripe jambu. Here pigeons are more daring, avoiding oncoming traffic sometimes on foot. Light confers lustre on leaves, sets shadows on the facades of buildings.

Sipping attenuated coffee opposite the entrance to the Basilique St. Sernin, apart from the infernal roar of a passing motorcycle, the atmosphere is simply perfect - studiedly shaded, precise colour-concordance, air cool and inert. Sparing chatter, squealing swallows (robins? orioles, thinks J.), padding saunter of pedestrians. And thankfully, how few of them there are!

rue de Taur is exceptionally picturesque: pawn-shaped balusters, burnt sienna, "garnet and pencil-lead" colour scheme (cf. Bordeaux: sandy clamshell, weatherlashed sepia, "uncooked wholewheat pasta")

Sheltered by a venerable maple on a quay of the Garonne, small mound of dogshit three metres away (but fortunately downwind from me), anonymous violinist performing practice passages in the apartment above my rear. An obnoxious street-cleaner has just swept the shitstack away, dispersing its foul fragrance into the currents of air flowing beneath my nose. Now there is a daubed shitsmear across the sidewalk; a Pollock swish-splodge. Assortment of summertime insects roost on my trousers, on J.'s nose, on my arm where I flick them away, assuming them to be inanimate particles which will not form pulverised pasty pigments when accidentally squished. Beleaguered by swarms of divebombing insects, we adjourn to the riverbank proper, copiously shaded but still bug-prone. Flies circle our heads, never landing, but still a loathesome thought.

We visit the Jardin des Plantes, a prettily-preened piece of greenery where nuclear family foursomes frolic, geriatrics vegetate, couples stroll. There is a most curious species here,

Cupressacees Calocedrus Decurrens

a fairy-tale sort of tree, a marooned stage prop from the forest which Little Red Riding Hood traverses to get to her granny's: waxy to the point of artifice, plasticky sheen, unnaturally varnished trunk and branches, eerily anthropomorphic.

There are only so many fat-soaked mushy beans one can eat in the course of an evening. Duck and beans seem to me an unimaginative and far from optimal pairing. Surely the addition of an assertive herb or alternate vegetable would supply the necessary counterpoint. I am thinking rosemary and shallots/celery/leek. As it is it lacks sufficient dimensions to keep me engaged throughout. What is more, it is exceedingly liable to congeal into a molassey mess if you do not dispose of it rapidly enough. This is food to induce sloth, listlessness, languor.

06.07.02 Saturday
Expedition to Notting Hill Gate tube station where the Portobello Confederation is located. All (most) dealers use the same plastic bag to distribute to their customers, and there is the uncanny presence of an information counter. Specialties of every conceivable and ludicrous sort are here: Ottoman antiques, cigarette ephemera, fin-de-siecle lace and glassware. Prices uniformly huge. I spot the exact same frameless uncircumscribed magnifying glass (jade and silver according to dealer) which I bought for SGD 20, for GBP 20. Shooed out of countenance by draconian antique postcard-dealer after I disrupt his arcane classification system which I imagined I was respecting.

From the entrance of the antique dealer concatenation the colour series scheme of the toy-buildings is: bleached lavender, Yakult orange, rose-salmon, cyan, baby blue, cream, Baskin Robbins Daiquiri Ice, butter, cream, sailor blue, chalky grey, Bouillon Racine green, butter, capsicum red...

Our momentous lunch at the Ivy has all the mystique and privileged aura of a secret society congregation. The door bitch says not "this way please" but rather "please come through" - we have cleared the hurdle of actually securing a reservation. The atmosphere however is not terribly rarefied - clearly the preserve of Bright Young Things and old money, but the tables are abuzz with animated conversation, vitality, laughter. "Frank Lloyd Wright horizontality". Diamond lozenges of stained coloured glass in apparently aleatory mosaic. Insidiously comfortable, even cosy. We have I think the best table in the house, a bloated crayon:

[limitations of layout preclude the inclusion of my sketched diagram]

Wholegrain bread excellent, as is the ivy leaf-embossed pat of butter. Weekend lunch menu, GBP 17.50:

1. Plum tomato and basil galette/Minted pea soup
2. Veal chopped steak, fried egg, chips, tomato relish/Roast free-range chicken, sage-onion stuffing, crispy bacon
3. Lemon meringue pie/Vanilla amaretti ice cream, peach compote

Everything was excellent, the lemon meringue pie trumping all the tartes au citron I had; the chopped steak a dressed-down Ivy burger in casual garb, perfectly grilled, egg perfect - limpid diaphanous white, quivering yolk, perfect chips, fluffy vs. crispy (inside vs. outside), tomato relish a synthesis of English condimental quintessences to form a new whole - ketchup, Heinz's sweet relish (green sort), mustard, chopped tomatoes, parsley, onions. J's dessert is the best sundae I've ever had - freshly compoted peach of a blushing sunset shade. We drink sparkling Malvern (Schweppes), 3.50 per litre, plus cover charge ("main dining room") of 1.50 and two person tip of 6.00, I pay 24.00 for the historic package, every penny gloriously squandered.

Woman: Excuse me, could you tell me where the washroom is?
Waiter: (without gesture) It's upstairs, madam.
Woman: (hysterically physical) Upstairs? Where? (points flagrantly) There? (looking like a wind-vane)
Waiter: (strenuously and obdurately stony in his gestureless direction) It's upstairs, madam. Upstairs.

A quick peek at the National Portrait Gallery, then we choose Tate Modern (Matisse-Picasso) over Tate Britain (Lucian Freud). Exterior: a Legollection of bricks chosen carefully for variance in hue. Interior: in the Turbine Hall of Gothic altitude, Tiffany-blue boxes adhere to soaring scaffolds of steel - boxkites, blueboxing.

Rooms are airy and vacant of obstruction (discounting tourists), with a disturbing but not unpleasant smell of macerated fruit/apricot-prune cake in the still-life gallery. I am pleased to find Svankmajer's Dimensions of Dialogue on exhibition, especially the first part with the cannibalistic Archimboldo heads. "This civilisation eats everything. It eats nature, whole cultures, but also love, liberty and poetry and it changes these into the odious excrement of the society of consumption and mass culture." Another Modigliani Tete, this time a limestone sculpture. A Klimt of diaphanous beauty, Portrait of Hermine Gallia, faded gossamer glamour threatening to vanish like an apparition. Damien Hirst's Pharmacy feels like a set from Sleeper, a Disney day-glo medicinal superstore. Dare I admit that one of the Pollocks quite caught my eye? But no, I changed my mind. Mortifying section on Mondrian and De Stijl. Lots of ludicrous "conceptual art": Michael Craig-Martin's An Oak Tree (A Glass Of Water) being the grovelling low point. Visitors proclaim it a "humpty-dumpty approach to life" and "sort of pseudo-philosophical", while of Duchamp's Fountain, one witless American dame says "I like the white, that it's all white". Elaboration (unintentioned?) of Duchamp in the toilet where the sinks are exemplars of tacit gadgetry, draining by the side via a slight incline.

[again I regret that the relevant drawing must be omitted]

27.06.02 Jeudi. Bordeaux Fete le Vin

1. Ste. Croix du Mont, blanc doux (deep urine)
"apply stalkish", dried apricots, beer, sultanas, honey, Melrose Place.

2. Favory, Cremant de Bordeaux, blanc sec ("lacklustre chrysanthemum tea")
Salers/Roquefort-like, foamy, speciously gaseous, leekish-onion tinge, Hugo Boss.

3. Chateau Fourcas Hosten, rouge sec-doux (attenuated ewes' blood)
blackberry-andouillette, gamey, Hungarian.

4. Falliol, Cotes de Bordeaux, rouge sec ("dark-dark-dark pink")
blackcurrants, traitorous, xing2 shu1

5. Saussignac, blanc doux (liquid gold/potent urine)
vanilla topnotes, carebears, peaches, "pears", Florida.

6. Haut-Medoc, rouge sec (arterial blood)
Roquefort, andouillette, incense, "offaly", watery (due to rainwater falling into glass)

21.06.02 Vendredi
Montmartre, the toy-bright district of Paris, tortuous alleys, hectoring caricaturists, vendors of simulacrum posters and postcards. The Montmartrobus driver negotiates the twists effortlessly. I finally am impelled to try to capture something on film. Fiddling with the functions, with the raging erection of the zoom lens, I attempt to frame a band of gargoyles.

In the Basilique du Sacre Coeur the chanting of hymns dissipates in a plangent, tremulous hum. How far is it correct to augment the interior with artificial spotlights? It must have been pretty dark in the hallowed gloom back then. Cardinals groping their way to the confession booth, sermons resonating over the tenebrific congregation, priors bumping into precariously poised altars.

I like the draughty metro stations, the musky smell of the gopher passages, the double barrier that must be wrestled with upon leaving the station, the artful debris contributing their miscellaneous odours, the dilapidated ceilings which threaten to drip away eventually.

Afternoon at the Louvre. At the very start of the Italian painting gallery gaggles of goggle-eyed bumblers are channelled by velvet-rope dividers into two streams of traffic - those who wish to gaze upon the Mona Lisa and therefore would like to get through this bothersome prelude as soon as possible; and those who having seen the one thing they came to see are in a hurry to get to the souvenir shop before it runs out of Mona Lisa postcards/posters/coasters/jigsaw puzzles. This is: primordial hunter-gatherer instincts, the craving for trophy items, transposed dramatically onto a modern vacation-industry setting.

The Vermeers are perhaps a little less lambent than what I imagined to be the case, but the light effects are enchanting, his subjects' attitude one of classical poise. Pieter de Hooch compares favourably I think (there is a certain amount of superstitious idolatry about Vermeer). I had little patience for the large-format Rubens - religious allegories, resplendent historical tableaux, portraits of hideous royals. Catherine de Medici looks like a rodent-troglodyte-dwarfess. I dislike expansive panoramas, preferring trenchant concision, modesty in the scale of conception; repose to conflict, (clucking) domesticity to savagery. Delftian interiors offer both in abundance.

22.06.02 Samedi
Provisioness of cheese to the presidential palace, Marie-Anne Cantin, was absent from her store, presumably beneath, in her subterranean storehouse attending to her children.

Emmental de Savoie, francaise
Less milky, more socky and woody

Salers
"better than Laguiole"
A remarkable taste gradient. Near the nose/centre, a taste of wine prevails; closer the rind/outer perimeter, there is an alarming bouquet of Chinese dried goods.

Brie de Meaux
Excellent. Well-rounded, dulcet and smooth, precisely imitating the taste of daikon. Is this what is meant by "mushroomy"?

We sit on a bench, truncated view of leg of Eiffel Tower, spectators to a spectacular Magrittean sky - clouds ominously well-defined by dramatic outlines, a vista which you know may just be a bit of a painting, or an illusive suburb or figment of reality, which may be deported away like stage backdrops in an instant; spirited off by the artist's machinations on a whim.

Dichotomy of croissants:
A) Soft cottony fluffy tangle of wispy threads group
B) Charred crispy mille-feuille like group

I think the charred version more suited to eating (as discrete elements) with hunks of cheese. Cottons are more receptive to the spreading of conserve on them.

J's cassoulet d'oie is a frightening molassesey mire of flageolets in fat; redneck-trucker food or its equivalent; the nourishment of the yeoman stock of heartlander France.

The Musee d'Orsay stops at neo-impressionism so no Modiglianis to linger over here, unfortunately.

The Degas, especially the pastels, are opalescently beautiful. His figures, touched by dusky shadows, are best when their faces are not seen, bashfully turned away from the viewer, or backlit in tender relief. Insinuation is his dominant mode. Shimmering light, never flagrant incandescence. His Danseuses bleues have a coy deportment, crucially elliptical outlines of the vaguest sort, wispy, ethereal, cloudy suspensions for tutus.

Some Monets strike me as slapdash, visual jugglery and cantrip. Manet is not a favourite, although two of his still lifes, terse impressions, are quite brilliant - L'asperge and Le Citron. Pissarro's Paysage a Eragny is an ashstorm of colour, a Paddle Pop palette actually.

Cezanne is eternity, stillicide, perfect poise, sculptural repose. His Pommes et oranges: rosy lustre, preternaturally blushed, solid, burnished, statuesque. The large boarish woman in the blue dress, La femme a la cafetiere, rivals Jeanne Hebuterne for inexplicable beauty, a freakish aesthetic. Renoir makes cellulite look beautiful - his bathers, gloriously pudgy, wobbly at the waist, decadently lounging on the grass.

I must revise my opinion of Mondrian. An exposition of his early work contains one gem: Bois pres d'Oele, a Munchian suffusion of sunlight through foliage, recklessly daubed in purple, yellow, turquoise, orange.

Selected excerpts, clipped for concision but otherwise untampered with.
03.07.02 Mercredi: Il pleut.
Back at the self-service laverie around the corner; reading Hazlitt's On Reading Old Books while my clothes are spun around.

Second time at Bouillon Racine. I have the foies de volaille aux olives et taboule this time, precisely cooked, and 140 (+/-10) moules en bouillon de curry doux and frites - smaller, more slippery and lubricious, sweeter than the first time.

Le Quartier Latin, disconsolate and desolate art-house cinema off rue des Ecoles, is showing Bunuel's L'Ange Exterminateur. Contrary to baseless preconceptions, the seats are very comfortable, velvet-rope red plushness. But the walls are a lustrous blue with gold gilt; pair of cherubs apparelled in false burnish looking positively fiendish planted in the wings; large lotus-lights; simulacrum of Dutch/Flemish religious painting (Van der Weyden?), gaudily framed prints of august anonymous personages - the perplexing mise en scene of Tales from the Crypt. Something quite sinister is about to happen. There are a total of about seven patrons in the cinema. Sepulchral silence, not even the ambient hush of air-conditioning. Spectators to a stage which is uncannily appropriate to the film - florid accents and decor which bespeak facile glamour, mimicry, sham and semblance, cheap baubles with false glitter.

L'Ange is in Spanish with French sous-titres. It is a genuinely discomposing experience; to be made to feel a child, to grope through mechanically and cumbrously even the simplest and most perfunctory dialogue. Visually however the circumstances have all the comic, absurd deliberateness of a mime, actions and gesticulations elastically stretched and distended - wan women of delicate constitutions languishing and expiring, supplicants in hasty prayer, superstitious simpletons clutching colourful charms, people eating paper and plaster off the walls, "il n'y a plus du cafe?" intoned in a petulant whimper, desperates thronging to glean water from a water-pipe which bursts while they are trying to hack a path through from the inside; silly altercations, fraying composures, stunning circularity, the grotesquerie of self-incarceration, histrionic exasperation, a pretty predicament.