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Even spookier than the 3-minute original.

Not too long ago Noel and I were watching the opera singer Hayley Westenra covering the song, and it occurred to us that something was wrong. Her voice was beautiful, her rendition spot-on. . .but she was smiling! Smiling! And this song is sung by the ghost of a woman who died of heartbreak!

Andrea Arnold’s recent adaptation of the Emily Bronte offers an interesting interpretation of why Heathcliff was treated that way.

Our favorite version of Wuthering Heights is the one from 1992 with Ralph Fiennes as Heathcliff, Juliette Binoche as Cathy, and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s crazed/swoony soundtrack. Wait for Heathcliff’s reaction when he learns that she is dead.

But we haven’t seen the 2009 version with Tom Hardy.

It looks ridiculous, but it’s the best combination we know for listening to music. The wee iPod Shuffle only has an on-off-shuffle button so we don’t spend the next hour searching among thousands of songs for one we want to hear. The Grado headphones are the greatest headphones we’ve ever stuck on our head: you can hear every detail—the sharp intake of breath from the back of the auditorium in a live recording, the drool sloshing around the saxophonist’s spit valve, stuff like that. They hug your head comfortably but never feel constricting, and they don’t slide off.

We’d leave the house wearing this headphone-player combination but we’d feel like pointing at ourself and laughing.

We weren’t allowed to take pictures at the concert, so instead of Super Junior here’s a bunch of cats recreating the cover of an AC/DC album. From Kitten Covers, one of our favorite sites.

At 6:40 pm the screen flickers to life and the stadium is rent by a shriek like 13,000 Sharapovas serving an ace. In the video the 9 members of Super Junior are underwater, looking pensive/intense. Suddenly giant angel wings sprout out of their backs (skipping several stages of evolution), and the winged singers zoom out of the water in colored arcs and land on the streets of some city. Every eardrum in the place has been liquefied, but the screaming gets even louder as the distinctively-coiffed heads of Super Junior begin to rise from beneath the stage.

The Super Junior Supershow in Emotional Weather Report today in the Philippine Star.

Listen to this:
Singapore Indoor Stadium, 18 Feb 2012

The Full Sharapova

While the stadium goes berserk we’re taking notes and saying, “Hmmm, interesting.”

In Megasmall this afternoon we noticed a crowd gathered by the ice skating rink and thought there was some kind of competition going on. It wasn’t the ice they were watching, but the big screen showing old Whitney Houston music videos. Something from her blockbuster movie The Bodyguard (subsequently co-opted by Charice), which in the early 90s was so ubiquitous we wanted to take out a TRO on it. Yes, that song, “InDAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYY will always love YOOOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU…”

In those days we would turn up our headphones to block out the sound, but no noise-cancelling technology of the time could prevent it from shredding your nerves. We refused to watch The Bodyguard* because everyone was raving about it, same way we refused to watch Pretty Woman, Ghost, and later, Friends and E.R. Still haven’t seen them. We thought Whitney Houston was beautiful and had a great voice, but we did not care for her material.

Strange, then, that the sight of random mallgoers gathered before a screen was so affecting.

People die all the time, people who were loved, mourned and are still missed, but their passing goes unremarked except by those who knew them. Celebrity turns total strangers into extensions of ourselves—when something happens to them we feel like it’s happening to us. Whitney at the peak of her career was one of the most famous persons on earth, and then she made decisions that the audience disapproved of and became one of the most ridiculed.

As the impromptu Whitney memorial went on it occurred to us that this music we were either indifferent to or disliked actively was by default the soundtrack of the late 80s and 90s. You heard them whether you wanted to or not.

Their singer is gone, permanently fixed in the public memory at age 48, but we will go on living and getting older. Every time we hear one of her songs we will remember that she’s gone and we’re older. Until the time comes when we forget who sang the songs, which is even sadder.

*Remember Kevin Costner? Ruined by the love of his peers. They gave him Oscars he didn’t deserve for a movie we’ve forgotten. Adoration is dangerous because it is always followed by schadenfreude.

[Martin Scorsese (whose Goodfellas lost at the Oscars to Dances With Wolves) had to wait decades to formally receive the movie industry’s love, and to this day we look forward to his movies. We’re already standing in line for Hugo.]

We’re taking a quick trip to Jakarta on Monday. Not for the SEA Games but a tech launch. We have some free time Monday—any suggestions as to places we must see? (Not enough time to visit Borobudur or Bali.)

On these trips a soundtrack is essential. We’ve decided on the complete works of Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music.