Ada Lea‘s ‘hurt’ on the album one hand on the steering wheel the other sewing a garden has a line in it which goes ‘get on a bus back to Montreal’. I’ve thought a lot about the genius of this line ever since I heard it. One one level, it speaks to me personally, because […]
August: Music and cricket for a lockdown
Going into higher gear. The Low Mays’ 人生贏家2: 明星生活 (Life Winners 2: Popstar Life) – I once wrote about the band here and their track about Flat Earth. I’ve since watched an interview and am convinced these five (six?) Hong Kong men are just taking the piss and they do it well. The autotune on […]
Listening in July: anniversaries, ‘oldies’, and favourites
July was the 20th anniversary of The White Stripes’ White Blood Cells. Listening to the album brought back memories of seeing Jack White in Montreal and the crowd going crazy over ‘Seven Nation Army,’ the song whose riff gets sung out in unison for no reason during hockey games. It also brought back memories of […]
New trilingual piece
When I first started writing, it came naturally to me to write in whatever one considered Standard English was. It just seemed like the “right” way of writing. Going to school where English was a second language, there was an insistence on correcting mistakes. When I started teaching English, this was still standard operating procedure. […]
Post-postgraduate life
I recently submitted my final assessment for the Master of Public Policy and Management at the University of Melbourne. I promised in a previous post to do a quick summary of what that entailed. I was enrolled in the programme in a part-time capacity for a year and then due to Covid-19 I decided to […]
Joel Mak 