Blank Doll eats.

Just finished Gentlemen and Players that Xuan has very kindly lent to me and am currently basking in the strange glow of nostalgia for the recent past that is my jc life. I had no idea how much I really loved my jc until I finally had to leave it.

Am now trying to think of a way to modify the recipe Xuan's mother gave to me. Middle Eastern pastries have captured my attention for the moment and I am seriously considering ordering rosewater over the net since I have as yet found any in Singapore. Do Indian desserts require it? I should ask around.

My inspiration is back, my ibook has been fixed with much alacrity and M. le roi me parle encore.

My life is more or less back on track and with luck, will stay this way until I get my ass to Paris.

C'est tout.

Blank Doll.

My sister has ruined my ibook :(

C'est tout.

Blank Doll.

Only a world caught in the throes of the latest wave of globalisation would there exist such culinary extremes as a return to local-centric organic fare and molecular gastronomy. The one is an embrace of the earth, a celebration of our storied past and the fruits of a spirited sojourn back to the bosom of nature, the other the inspired madcap apotheosis of industry that brings to the forth the very midas touch of science and technology. On one hand we have El Bulli, on the other, Chez Panisse. If I were any more melodramatic, I'd proclaim the existence of a new Iron Curtain, the modern day Cold War fought in every restaurant and places of nourishment.

Anyway, I was just brooding. It seems to me that there are always people whom I inevitably let go off/ who inevitably let go of me. You for one. I remember the initial excitement of acquaintance. I remember your amusement at my clumsy pretentions, your mirth at my wounded childishness, my delight at having pleased you so, my admiration for your talents and our very mutual amity. How deliciously cliche, the way we got so familiar with one another so quickly, our fingertips pressed against one another and a world engendered. Perhaps too quickly in retrospect. I am wont to wreck friendships that way, I am too quick with my words, too callous with my denounciations, too intemperate with my emotions. I think I exasperated you, disappointed you then gradually, lost you. Perhaps in my anger I thought it little to have let you go but then when I turned around, I found I was the one who had been let go off. My pride will not have me ask for forgiveness and I do not think you care anymore.

Yet another wound to add to the countless others. This will be different because I had a chance and I ruined it. It shall not happen like this the next time, I promise.

C'est tout.

Blank Doll retires.

Encapsulated in a Warhol campbell soup can is a man's indignation at the pretension of art. It is a man's assertion that the line between art and functionality is moot, that something so mundane as an aluminium soup can may be raised to art. Yet therein lies the irony or perhaps the sort of cynicism that made pop art so famous: by playing to the hype, plying on the shock factor, Warhol transformed the soup can to art. It is only art by association, a parody of the mastery that art entails.

Although in all due candour, Warhol made some superb silkscreens. Think about it, I'd love to have silkscreens for curtains.

Anyway, have I wished you happy birthday? I think I did. Ah well, HAPPY BIRTHDAY! Even if it's really late.

Skipped French yesterday to go for the really weird Ravenscroft that was showing at DBS Arts Centre in aid of Habitat for Humanity. Plot crawled at the beginning and the atmosphere was more ennui than tension only to totter and stumble later like the drunk inspector. Comic relief punctuated the somewhat clumsy attempts to layer half-truth upon half-truth. Accents needed tweaking. A weak character. Jo would have made a better Marcy, I thought.

Chocolate cake and walnut cheesecake at Canele thereafter with Val because the Chocolate Factory refused to make souffle for her. The French chef there is daunting, to say the least, how strange.

Dinner with XJ later at Marmalade. Crab Caesar was adequate if not too fresh, tomato linguini tasted better and the salmon was done well but the chilled soba limpid and too dry.

Drinks later at Indochine which makes this the umpteenth time we've been there. Val wanted to snitch a drink from the bartender but to no avail. I've given up on cocktails because the quality is so inconsistent from place to place, time to time, bartender to bartender, that I've just gone on to drinking neats.

I like rum.

Oh and we went into the cold room which was really cold. Haha, and then proceeded to drink shot after shot of vodka. The next time somebody wants to get high, tell me and we'll open a bottle. Tis too tedious to try with shots and cocktails.

Val was really cold but her camwhore instincts were stronger. XJ's skin blanched palpably and you know me, I like the cold.

In time to take the mrt back home! I've made a pact with myself, as long as I make it in time to take the mrt back, I can drink the equivalent of my otherwise exorbitant midnight transportation fees.

I refuse to run 6km with a headache.

C'est tout.

Blank Doll types.

The past weeks have been relatively interesting. Drinks at Max Brenner's (gross, don't go) with Geri, Cand, Kris and Steve. Steve is going back to Indonesia! Let's hope he comes back. Breakfast, erm, lunch, erm, something with Tong, Victor, Jo and Cheryl which was quite interesting. These are people I haven't seen for quite some time and whose amity I sorely miss. Sometimes, you've got to hate the army.

Sun with Moon has a new branch at Central! Mummy and I never get tired of Sun with Moon for some strange reason. Just thinking about their goma pudding makes me feel nice and warm inside. Anyway, talking about food, I wonder if I can get Mummy to give me an advance on my birthday present and take me to the Cordon Bleu dinner held under the World Gourmet Summit banner. You just know Sean's going to die if he doesn't go.

Ah well, fat hope. Mummy's going off to Taiwan next week. Who the hell even goes Taiwan for fun anyway?

I have this weird obsession with bread which is starting to unsettle me.

C'est tout.

Blank Doll

One would think it obligatory for you to support me yet it's almost claustrophobically difficult to ask anything of you. Take some responsibility dear heart, you make a stronger case for your love when you do.

Anytime now I will emerge from this untimely funk and be revived once more. Everybody's falling ill around me, I just hope I don't. Sometimes all I really want is to go away.

Paris me manque- C'est la raison seulement.

C'est tout.

Blank Doll fumes.

We live at the heart of a new darkness that is the enslavery of the world at large to the appetites of a privileged few. What and how we eat have spawned a faceless industrial empire unanswerable to none save those who would gain from it. This is the age of the industrialists and the gastrocracy. It is a travesty, a perversion of ecological rationale from which none of us are free.

We force-feed our animals food they were never meant to ingest, we subject them to cannibalism, we huddle and oppress them like so many objects devoid of life. Eerily similar to the first ages of capitalism, we have mechanized, harnessed and exploited life in the name of profit. It is a vast monstrosity of a food industry gorged on corn and petroleum aided by the chicanery of marketing and food processing. We think that corn-fed beef is virtuous, that margarine is better than butter, that fast food is edible. We have washed our hands off the daily brutality of obtaining food, we have turned our backs on the cattle which we kill for food, the victimised farmer, the streams of filth and corruption that flow outwards from the heart of this profound darkness.

Transfat, HFCS, xantham gum, the hydrolysis of corn into a million different things, the degeneration of nature's bounty to nothing but the chemical building blocks of the next great food fad, the subjugation of the land's resources for the satiation of our unholy gluttony and now, we add the corruption of organic food. Imagine the shock, the indignation, the revulsion, the resignation and then the seething cynicism of the people who thought to revolutionize the food industry. People who thought they could give back to this industry its soul, could reconnect our fundamental need for food to the telluric wisdom of life itself. Yet Whole Foods begin to resemble Walmart and McDonald's adopt the rhetoric of the green.

Therein lies the bitterest irony, none of us can be free from the tyranny of this system. Our working poor are ravaged by cheap unhealthy calories, farmers all over the whole continue to suffer from low prices while we at large must eventually bear the cost of our unwholesome practices. Short of growing your own food, none of us are exempt from guilt. It is from this hopeless morass that comes our abject failure as stewards of a benign deity on earth. We have sought to sustain life by producing ever more food but at the expense of other forms of life and even now, the less privileged among us pay for it. The farmers, the starving children in the global South who must go hungry because of the perverse economics that guide the food industry and above all, our future generations. We are a civilisation whose consumption patterns may only be sustained by the destruction of the land's regenerative mechanisms.

You cannot put something into your mouth, be it organic, fast food, free range chicken, beef patties, GM-free vegetables, pasteurised milk, breakfast cereal, Twiggies, gummy bears, salt or apple juice without playing accomplice to this inspired evil that now lies at the heart of the modern, globalised monoculture.

Bon Appetit.

C'est tout.

Blank Doll

Maman a retourne et ma vie est complet encore.

Chanced upon some ex-mohawk company recruit's blog. Interesting how so little has changed. The senseless pain, the breaking down of your corporeal integrity, the masochistic pride, the languid bliss I suspect the flagellated must feel and the feeling that something has been taken away from you.

My body nearly disintegrated from boredom in the office today.

There were so many things I wanted to talk about, none of which I can remember now. They were probably little thoughts I had in the odd moments of melodrama that is bound to afflict teenagers once in a while.

Speaking of which, this is my last year as a teenager. How terrifying.

C'est tout.

Blank Doll sits down and sleeps.

There is something curious about the texture of mushrooms and eggplants in general. Accordingly, Careme treated mushrooms like meat in his gastronomic revolution and one bite into a portobello steak sandwich will tell you why. Getting my little sister to eat her vegetables is never easy so I was pleasantly surprised when she actually took a fancy to my ham and eggplant sandwich at the Coffee Club yesterday. I like that place for a light lunch, so affordable yet so delicious.

Little children these days do not read enough. I bought her Machiavelli's The Prince and am now trying to secure Marx's Das Kapital for her. The latter has proved to be a tad difficult to accomplish and I suspect it's been banned in Singapore or something of that nature.

Had a strange nightmare last night. Woke up to the taste of salted dew on my cheeks again.

Je veux pas vos sentiments amicales, ni votre passion, ni votre voix. Ne pas proteger moi parce que je peux me proteger moi-meme. Vous n'etiez jamais d'ici et maintenant, je vous ai pas besoin.

Ce soir, je me couche en seul.

C'est tout.