album review: Lady Antebellum, “Golden” (2013)

What I love about Lady Antebellum’s music is that the trio’s voices make incredible harmony, particularly duets between Hillary Scott and Charles Kelley (Dave Haywood is primarily on instruments, but also provides backup vocals).

They often look at love from all sides, singing about fraying, frayed or existing relationships. You’re bound to find at least one track focusing on either subject matter in their albums.

Golden, their fourth studio album, has more sprightly tracks than the habitual croon-like country ballads like in their previous albums – Lady Antebellum (2008), Need You Now (2010) and Own The Night (2011).

The choice of the first track of any album is a critical decision, me thinks – it’s what will make listeners opt to buy more of your music or dismiss you completely.

Lady Antebellum does not disappoint: Hillary Scott’s kicks off the album with “Get To Me”. The mid-tempo song starts with a catchy guitar and drum arrangement, and that’s what I love most about it.

“Goodbye Town” is another pop-rock, sing-along track with an undertone of heartbreak reminiscing good times with an old flame.

I’m not too fond of the lyrics in the first verse of “Nothin’ Like The First Time”. They’re a bit amateurish, making me think of a novice who’s just getting into songwriting. Which is odd, considering that the members of Lady Antebellum are incredibly talented, having written award-winning mega-hits in the past.

“Downtown”, released as the first single from the album, is already a hit. Hillary asks her man why he no longer treats her the same way he used to in the first heady days of their relationship, putting some funk with the “uh-uh” bits in the song.

Another up-tempo song, “Better Off Now (That You’re Gone)”, is a breakup track that you can dance to. Which is certainly a good thing when you’re bidding ‘adios!’ to someone who hurt you, instead of making things morose and depressing.

The song paves way for a slower track, “It Ain’t Pretty”, where Hillary is the main vocalist. She delivers the sadness without overwhelming us with her vocals.

Though their voices complement each other in “Can’t Stand the Rain”, the song doesn’t really pop out for me.

I’m always eager to hear the track that an album is named for/after: “Golden” is a gem! It’s the album’s sweetest ballad, and I fell in love with it just as I did for “When You Got a Good Thing” from the Need You Now album.

First time I heard “Golden”, it reminded me a little of Marc Cohn’s “Walking in Memphis”, but I won’t hold it against the band.

Charles carries this beautiful love song in honor of that special someone, with Hillary providing backup vocals. The mellow harmony between the two and the accompanying guitar makes this track a striking song in the album.

“Long Teenage Goodbye” is a nostalgic song, looking back on the past with its theme of young love.

“All for Love” has less of a country influence, a rockish back-and-forth dramatic duet between Charles and Hillary about their broken relationship.

Charles takes the lead vocals again in “Better Man”, telling the love of his life that she makes him, well, a better man. It wouldn’t be surprising if grooms were to add this song to their wedding playlist!

“Generation Away” veers away from the trio’s steady subject matter about love and relationships. It’s one of those songs that would close a concert, the trio wanting to be part of history and hoping that the generation away will “talk about us that way”. The climax of the track shifts, too, with the song bleeding into the traditional spiritual tune, “He’s got the whole world in his hands”, making the song just playful and merry.

Overall, the album is as pleasant and terrific as their previous platinum-selling albums, and the memorable tunes will leave you singing and rocking along.

Best tracks: Get To Me; Goodbye Town; Downtown; Better Off Now (That You’re Gone); Golden; Long Teenage Goodbye; Better Man

a brief look at Sidney Sheldon’s portrayal of women in his books

A while ago, I took a “refresher course” in Sidney Sheldon books.

I had read them when I was younger, and I figured that since so much time had passed, reading them all over again would be like reading them afresh.

And so I read every Sidney Sheldon book – including those by Tilly Bagshawe –  from The Naked Face (1970) to Angel of the Dark (2012).

At the end of each novel, I had a different reaction to the books than the one I had back then. I suppose because when I was 12, I didn’t read books as critically as I do now. I didn’t take books so seriously and pick them apart, pointing out the flaws in characters or the holes in the plots; I just read them because they were exciting and they entertained me.

Then, the globe-trotting adventures that Sheldon took me on were thrilling, sometimes having me up at late hours of the night because I didn’t want to put the book down.

The excitement was still there as I read the books again, but at the end of it all, I was left questioning his writing.

I was stricken by the racism, homophobia, chauvinism and bigotry that Sheldon incorporated in his books, particularly in his early editions, such as A Stranger in the Mirror (1976).

Sometimes the storylines felt a little too farfetched (à la The Doomsday Conspiracy) and dipping into soap operaism (à la Nothing Lasts Forever) and he didn’t have the strongest suit in writing romance, but I just went along with it.

Perhaps it’s just the way things were in those days, but reading them in the year 2012, it was hard to ignore the slurs directed at the “minority” – non-whites, homosexuals, women.

I wouldn’t call myself a staunch feminist like my friend Gaks, but I appreciate female characters who are strong-minded and possess common sense.

Sidney Sheldon had a fondness for using female protagonists; half of the main characters in his books were women, and with each one I encountered, I couldn’t help but read a little too much into it.

He liked playing games with women; he would build them up, their careers soaring to the skies, before tearing them down and everything crashing around their ears.

He made them calculating bitches (Lara Cameron, The Stars Shine Down); power-hungry (Kate Blackwell, Master of the Game); man-hating, vengeful beings who would never let things go (Noelle Page, The Other Side of Midnight, Leslie Stewart, The Best Laid Plans); damsels in distress who are completely helpless and clueless and at the mercy of males (Catherine Douglas née Alexander, Memories of Midnight).

It makes me wonder whether he was a sadist, whether it pleased him to see his female characters triumph and then fail, whether he had faith at all in the strength of women.

Sometimes he doesn’t give us closure with his protagonists: in The Sky is Falling, Leslie Stewart from The Best Laid Plans is simply written off as having disappeared from the face of the earth after an utter humiliation to her name.

The men, on the other hand, came off as saviours, yet uncaring, sexist cads who looked down on women and used them as sexual objects (Larry Douglas, The Other Side of Midnight). They were also evil assholes with a God complex who would kill anyone who annoyed them the slightest bit (Constantin Demiris, Memories of Midnight).

Tilly Bagshawe wrote Mistress of the Game, a continuation of Sidney Sheldon’s Master of the Game. Instead of sticking to Sheldon’s voice of plot twists, Bagshawe did her own thing and twisted it with melodrama, foulness and utter, incestuous garbage: her idea of shock value was first cousins Lexi and Max being in love and lust. To sweeten that plotline, their mothers were freaking identical twins.

Perhaps if Sidney Sheldon were alive, he would be able to write a book that matches this decade, a book that wouldn’t be as offensive as his earlier editions were to women, blacks and homosexuals, a book where women wouldn’t be “forever doomed” at the end of the manuscript.

don’t you just hate it when…

Your candle melts through the middle instead of evenly all the way around.

You nick yourself during a self-manicure or pedicure.

You’re in a stuffy bus, you’re on the aisle seat, and no one is making the effort to open a window.

You tune in to a radio station and hear the last notes of a favourite song.

You over-scrape an airtime card, and you can barely make out the numbers.

You need something really badly and it’s unavailable.

You stub your toe. Or your elbow. Or your knee. So badly that you’re breathless, speechless and on the verge of tears.

You remember something from the past that shames you, pains you, or angers you.

Your chewing gum runs out of taste three minutes later.

You bite the inside of your cheek while chewing.

You wait for a response that never comes.

A stranger stands too close to you on a queue.

You have a deadline and the power goes off.

You’re broke.

You’re bored.

You hit “Reply All”…and that damaging email goes to the wrong person.

Your bra wire cuts through the material and digs into your skin.

Your jeans or top gets caught in a nail and rips.

Your sleeve gets caught in the door handle as you’re walking by and tugs you backwards.

Your button-up shirt fits well…except around the bust.

You’re indecisive and uncertain.

There’s an awkward silence in a conversation.

The radio presenter doesn’t tell you who sang that really awesome song you just heard. Or if they did, you can’t understand what they said.

You slice your finger while washing a knife or chopping veggies.

You break a mug, plate or glass by accident.

You can’t remember how to spell a simple word.

Your glasses slide down your nose.

Your glasses have dust particles and you don’t have your wipe cloth.

You can’t remember the lyrics or the correct tune to a cool song.

You’re put on hold for a long, long time, and then you hear the dial tone before you’re patched through.

You realize that you’ve been played.

Your leg is cramped with pins and needles.

You see something really nice and affordable, but you don’t have enough money for it.

You go back when you’re flush and find it gone.

Someone greets you by the hand and you feel how warm, sticky and icky their hand is, and it sucks that you can’t rub it off in their presence.

Someone holds onto your hand for too long when shaking hands.

You see a young schoolgirl spotting a horrible hair weave!

You get an incredible urge to burst out laughing at a very inappropriate time.

Your phone slips out of your hand, and pieces fly off.

You watch your laptop fall.

That cool song sounds better in your head than when you sing it out loud.

You need to return something and you can’t find the receipt, or even remember where you put the receipt.

You’re cleaning your ears and it’s impossible for them to be detachable for a thorough cleaning.

You discover that your chocolate bar is melted when you open it.

You meet someone who has it worse off than you and you feel like a complete asshat.

how to convert DOCX to EPUB on Windows

I’m an ePub junkie, and this extends to my own writings. As I often edit and re-edit scenes, I like to have my “books” on the go, and my favourite – and the world’s – mobile book format is ePub.

2ePub has been my primary tool when converting .docx to .epub for free online. However, as my documents become lengthier and lengthier, the file size increases.

Converting a larger file size online from Word to ePub has been difficult lately, and so I’ve had to find some other way to convert my bulky files.

After plenty of experimentation with other programs, which came with their own errors and complications, I settled on calibre.

calibre is a free ebook management software that “can convert from a huge number of formats to a huge number of formats”. calibre supports different e-book formats:
Input Formats – CBZ, CBR, CBC, CHM, DJVU, EPUB, FB2, HTML, HTMLZ, LIT, LRF, MOBI, ODT, PDF, PRC, PDB, PML, RB, RTF, SNB, TCR, TXT, TXTZ
Output Formats – AZW3, EPUB, FB2, OEB, LIT, LRF, MOBI, HTMLZ, PDB, PML, RB, PDF, RTF, SNB, TCR, TXT, TXTZ

calibre, however, does not support Word documents.

Despite this limitation, it is possible to convert your .docx files to .epub:–

1. Convert your Word document to HTML:

• Using MS Word 2010, open your .docx document. Go to File > Save As > Choose the file name and the location you want the document saved in > Click on ‘Save as Type’ > Select ‘Webpage’ > Click ‘Save’
• You could save your document as a PDF, but as calibre states on their website, “PDF is a terrible format to convert from”. From personal experience when I opted to save my .docx to .pdf, PDF files do not single out Headings easily. You end up having chapters that are merged together and rather lengthy. HTML files are the best to convert.

2. Download and install calibre HERE

3. Open the application and add the converted HTML file for conversion by clicking on ‘Add books’.

4. Click on ‘Convert books’ and specify the output file format, whether it’s AZW3, EPUB, FB2, OEB, LIT, LRF, MOBI, HTMLZ, PDB, PML, RB, PDF, RTF, SNB, TCR, TXT, TXTZ

• With calibre, you can dictate on which device you’ll be using your ebook on. The default is “Generic e-ink” for all e-reader devices, but there are options for iPad, iPad 3, Kindle, Nook, Tablet, et cetera
• You can also edit the book Metadata of the Output file: Title, Author(s), Cover image, font & font size, auto-generate/create book structure (chapters and Table of Contents), rescale all font sizes, et cetera

5. If you prefer to read your ebook on your computer, calibre has an integrated ebook viewer. It has “full support for Table of Contents, bookmarks, CSS, a reference mode, printing, searching, copying, customizing the rendering via a user style sheet, embedded fonts, etc.”

Helpful page: calibre FAQs

colour me unimpressed: I hate “The Following”!

Warning: “The good guys will suck majorly and we’ll make sure that the bad guys get away every time. Yay to entertainment!”

Starring Kevin Bacon as ex-FBI agent Ryan Hardy, The Following is a thriller about Ryan’s pursuit of Joe Carroll, a serial killer of 14 women, and his extensive network (army!) of disciples.

As I write this, the 7th episode is playing, but I’m the least bit interested in what is happening: The Following has left me with an acidic taste of hostility.

I didn’t study Edgar Allan Poe in any of my years in school, or even come across his name, and this show has managed to convince me that he was a nutter.

In thrillers, there’s the good guy and the bad guy. You root for the bad guy to mess up so that the good guy can swoop in and fry their ass, but in The Following, the good guys have such a diluted part in the game that I hate them. They’re complete cabbageheads that it’s not even amusing to wait and see how they’ll redeem themselves.

Do the show’s writers have some sort of fetish of seeing the bad guys win?

It’s becoming tedious when the bad guys win in every damn episode, and the cops always emerge as chumps who have only figured out about a fraction of the whole story.

What is rather obvious is that the FBI have their heads stuck up their bureaucratic asses. Every new character winds up a follower, the cops are forever incompetent at not nabbing anyone since the second episode, Joe and his disciples are a thousand steps ahead of them…..Good God.

What’s more, there are giant logistical holes in the FBI’s modus operandi: killers get away easily, when logically, at least in less-shitty cop dramas, the FBI is on their toes, say, securing the perimetre.

All the cops have clearly not had proper target practice because they are terrible shots – even when a target is three feet away! They can barely put a dent in a chopper or SUV, just blind firing to scare off the bad guys, and shooting at nothing by wasting ammo.

Point three, the essence of the show is Joe Carroll and his devotees. This guy has everyone by the fucking balls, from a little kid to a grown ass man, they’re calling him “Sir” and they would even kill themselves to prove their devotion.

There’s no concrete explanation as to how he got all these randoms to kill for him. We are shown a few of the core disciples paying him a visit while he was in prison, gushing about his sainthood and oh-so-amazingness while separated by Plexiglas, and their common denominator of being Poe’s groupies.

The rest of them, it seems, were convinced to do his bidding simply by trolling the Internet for a messiah and being sucked in by his badly reviewed book.

Really? Doesn’t cult recruiting have a more personal feel to it? In this age of unbelievable Nigerian scam artists sending out emails about millions of dollars in an offshore bank account, people would kill for someone just by him communicating on a forum? I would understand a handful of people buying what he’s selling, but a whole freaking army?

Call me a cynic, but wouldn’t nutjobs like these whose aim is to kill need a blazing reason to be inspired to do such crazy shit?

Point four to my dislike of this show, it’s rather…evil. I mean, it’s not the kind of intriguing, psychological evil that makes you anxious about the end result (Breaking Bad), but it’s the grisly kind of evil that makes you think a show is completely ridiculous. I mean, when a disciple offers themselves up to be stabbed in the stomach by the cult leader in some form of sacrificial lamb initiation rite…

From the earlier seasons of Dexter I watched, I could understand why Dexter is the way he is. Joe Carroll? Not so much. Man is just obsessed with Edgar Allan Poe.

This show is definitely not for those who are easily repulsed by violent acts. There is heaps of violence, from dogs being slaughtered as guinea pigs to violence against women where they’re the preys. I should warn you that in the first episode, a woman stabs herself in the eye with an ice pick out of loyalty to the cause.

The show’s thrilling core is losing its edge; we might as well do without the cops and focus on the rise and fall of Joe and his cronies because everything about The Following is absurd.

What’s the end game here? Will Ryan Hardy catch up to Joe Carroll and shoot him in the head? Will it be an endless cycle of killing one follower after another to get to The Evil One himself? Will it be Joe Carroll one-upping Ryan Hardy over and over until the series finale?

I cannot see myself itching to find the premiere episode of the second season since I have such a vicious urge to shoot every goddamn follower.

God, I miss Fringe. It made some sense.

Happy Easter.

the book shelf: Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn

*spoilers!

“Marriage can be a real killer…”

“What the hell?!” was my reaction when I got to the last page of this book.

From the alternating first-person narration, Nick Dunne appears to be a normal guy who is aloof, selfish, and a philanderer. Amy Dunne appears to be a normal girl who just wants her husband to love her as much as she loves him.

After the ‘grand reveal’, I thought the author was smoking something illegal to have come up with a plot so dark and characters so crazy and depressing.

The intriguing plot gave me high hopes about how everything would turn out…
…and I felt completely cheated after investing myself in this psychological-mystery.

The normal couple I thought was just having some tension in their marriage turned out to have a toxic relationship. If there had been a physical manifestation of Amy, I would have punched her to death.

For a whole year, she made plans on how to frame her husband for her murder.

At the beginning, she succeeded in making me feel sorry for her: in the first part of the book, Amy’s narrative is through her journal.
In it, she is the wife who genuinely loves her dickhole of a husband. Nick is The Bad Guy, the one who won’t even bother letting her know that he’d rather drink with his buddies than have dinner with their couple friends. Amy is The Victim, The Good Wife who will not nag or argue with him about his thoughtlessness.

After all that, I was thrown for a loop when it was revealed that Amy was batshit crazy, a selfish, smug and stuck-up psychopath who went to extreme measures when displeased.

Naturally, most women who find out that their husbands have been unfaithful a) leave b) find vengeance in the form of a hefty divorce settlement c) give them a second chance and repair the marriage, not d) plot on how to frame them for murder.

Amy elaborately schemes to humiliate Nick through the accusation of murder. It all goes well for her, the world hating Nick for killing his pregnant wife, until it all comes crashing down around her ears.
Desperate when her plans go bust, Amy returns home. Only a handful of people know the kind of person she really is, but they can’t prove it because she has a solid explanation for everything.

The worst thing for me about the book is the ending.  Gone are the days in literature and movies when the bad guy was sent to jail.

We’re told not to base our reviews simply on bad endings, but there’s a difference between an author robbing people of a well-deserved resolution, rather than giving in to the voices in her head and leaving readers unfulfilled.

Perhaps there’s an underlying theme in Gone Girl that I’m completely missing, but the ending just ruined the book for me.
After all the time I gave to read every word of this twisted book (took me  a week due to the constant mistrust when I looked at it), it ceased being weirdly engrossing and shocking to just plain stupid and bad.

It didn’t get better as I’d hoped it would, and it’s as though the author didn’t put much effort into writing the ending: too easy, too horrible, too unsatisfactory, too farfetched.

Of course, Amy and Nick were not perfect, but the author let Amy get away with murder, and she let Nick indulge her insanities.
Was it that Gillian Flynn couldn’t prove just how unhinged Amy was? Clueless as to how to wrap up the book, she opted to let Amy become a mother? For what, shock value?

I’m of the opinion that criminals should be brought to justice – especially in fiction. Loose cannons who are a danger to those around them need psychological help; they are not allowed to get away with murder, they are not allowed to be pregnant and they are not allowed to blackmail those they are married to.

Amy needed to be exposed – most readers agree on how unsatisfactory and horrible Gillian Flynn concluded this book – not have a sick form of happily-ever-after.
Nick had learnt the true nature of his wife, and from the build-up, I expected him to have the balls to walk away from her after what she put him through. He became weak and pathetic, on top of already being selfish.

Gillian Flynn’s justification of locking up these two psychos in their equally psychotic and destructive marriage was illogical: did Nick deserve to be married to a cold-blooded murderer who has no conscience about being manipulative because he cheated on her? He stuck his ween in some other girl’s hooch, while Amy killed someone.

The pregnancy itself was over the top to the story. Nick couldn’t find a way to outsmart his psychopath of a wife despite the pregnancy? What kind of environment would that child grow up in?
It was such doom to the glum tale. Poor kid.

I’m so bitter about the ending that I wouldn’t even give this author another shot, unless there was a follow-up story to Gone Girl.

As the book approached its anticlimactic ending, there really was no justice for anyone. Not for Desi who didn’t deserve to be killed, not for Nick, despite his philandering ways, who was framed for murder in such an elaborate way.

There’s no closure for anyone, poor Desi’s mother is left trying to convince people that her son was murdered, Amy self-impregnates or some sh¡¡ of the kind, and Nick wound up being as much of a psychopath as his wife.

Morality is not even a subject in this book, everyone appears to be a soul-sucking jerk, and lying and evilness is clearly the only way anyone can win.

All of it made the book a complete disappointment to me.

It’s too frustrating a book to recommend to anyone, and it annoys me to no end that weeks after reading it as I tried to come up with a review, I’m still pissed at how it turned out.

a sweet treat to love from Kenya’s Coast: achari

I don’t live in the Kenyan coast, so I love the dishes and delicacies that are from there.

Some Kenyan food – such as chapati, biriani, pilau – has influence from the Asia and Middle East due to the Oriental slave trade. Swahili dishes, especially, have that extra kick with an addition of spices. So…other than mahamri (sweetened ‘n spiced fried dough) and mabuyu (flavoured baobab seeds), I like snacking on achari.

Unlike the Indian achari that is a “curry made with common Indian pickling spices” (indiacurry.com), the Kenyan achari is a snack of sun-dried strips of mango, which are then dipped in a sweet, chili paste.

Achari has a subtle alcoholic taste, not because it contains alcohol, but due to the use of unripened mango.

The treat can be made with chili or without, and for me who does not like to have flames in my mouth, I rather prefer my achari just sweet.

For those of us who do not live in Mombasa, Malindi, Lamu – or anywhere in the coast – achari is a hard find.  Supermarkets may have an abundance of mabuyu on their shelves but not of achari. However, at the gates of Jamia Mosque in Nairobi’s CBD, a few coastal women have set up shop, selling a variety of coastal snacks. They’re often a few coins pricier than the amount you would pay if you were down in Mombasa, but they’re still worth the price!