Where Got Ghost? is actually quite watchable!
And The Blue Mansion trailer is hella professionally done... I wanna watch this!
But Female Games stinks. I mean, really, really. All the Sayoni lesbians who watched it felt offended.
So what else is coming this year in Singapore cinema?
Monday, August 31, 2009
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
CONTRADICTION V this Sunday
Just to let all you guys know again, I'll be hosting our annual queer literary reading this coming Sunday:
ContraDiction V
Sunday, 30 August,
from 7-10pm
72-13 Mohamed Sultan Road, 2nd floor
(Here's how to get there.)
Part of the IndigNation Pride Festival
I've curated and emceed this edition, and I'm very happy with the standard of writing that's being represented, as well as the established and emerging faces who'll be present. It'll be very casual, so even if you're just curious and feel like sticking your head in a while for sh*ts and giggles, feel free. Be warned, though: seats fill up fast. Fortunately, there will be beanbags.
This year, our guests include Robin Loon, Jasmine Seah, Leona Lo, Michael Corbidge, Lee Yew Leong, Irfan Kasban and Iris Judotter, to name just a few!
Hope to see you there!
ContraDiction V
Sunday, 30 August,
from 7-10pm
72-13 Mohamed Sultan Road, 2nd floor
(Here's how to get there.)
Part of the IndigNation Pride Festival
I've curated and emceed this edition, and I'm very happy with the standard of writing that's being represented, as well as the established and emerging faces who'll be present. It'll be very casual, so even if you're just curious and feel like sticking your head in a while for sh*ts and giggles, feel free. Be warned, though: seats fill up fast. Fortunately, there will be beanbags.
This year, our guests include Robin Loon, Jasmine Seah, Leona Lo, Michael Corbidge, Lee Yew Leong, Irfan Kasban and Iris Judotter, to name just a few!
Hope to see you there!
Monday, August 24, 2009
By the way, I'm attached.
His name's Mohan. He's adorable.
Have announced it on Facebook, but wanted to wait till I had a good picture of us together before I blogged about it.
Unfortunately, when we're together we're always too busy chattering or PDA-ing to remember to ask someone to take our photo. (We're both quite on about queer activism - holding hands in public isn't just pleasure, it's also propaganda.)
I have tried to take a photo today, but he claims he doesn't photograph well, and - to tell the truth, with me being so pallid and him being so dark, we haven't figured out the right exposure yet.
So the above photo (taken with my Mac) really is the best shot we've got of the two of us together. If you wanna see what he really looks like, go to my Facebook page.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Datuk Hitler tries to deal with Malaysian polygamy
Maybe you could call this Madu Hitler.
Anyone can help to translate the Malay subtitles? Saya cuba belajar, tetapi hanya boleh faham beberapa patah perkataan sahaja...
Thursday, August 20, 2009
I have two poems in Asian Cha No. 8.
It's a HK-based online journal. Check it out.
Also, if you enter the Singapore national anthem in the original Malay into the English-Japanese-dada translation programme Translation Party, you get the following:
Singapore Rakyat northern Mali,
dragon, dragon, dragon, dragon,
dragon, dragon,
dragon, dragon, dragon, dragon, dragon,
dragon, dragon, dragon, dragon.
Dragon, dragon, dragon, dragon,
dragon, dragon, dragon, dragon
menuju, BERUJAYASHINGAPURA
North YANSEFUGADO mulia,
bahagia, to protect the country.
North Marilah berseru,
BAYAN dengan semangat.
Semua North bersatu,
majulah Singapura! Majulah Singapura.
It's singable in three verses!!! Try it!
Also, if you enter the Singapore national anthem in the original Malay into the English-Japanese-dada translation programme Translation Party, you get the following:
Singapore Rakyat northern Mali,
dragon, dragon, dragon, dragon,
dragon, dragon,
dragon, dragon, dragon, dragon, dragon,
dragon, dragon, dragon, dragon.
Dragon, dragon, dragon, dragon,
dragon, dragon, dragon, dragon
menuju, BERUJAYASHINGAPURA
North YANSEFUGADO mulia,
bahagia, to protect the country.
North Marilah berseru,
BAYAN dengan semangat.
Semua North bersatu,
majulah Singapura! Majulah Singapura.
It's singable in three verses!!! Try it!
Saturday, August 15, 2009
I has a mentee!
She's a [redacted] girl named [redacted]. This is us at the Creative Arts Programme Mentorship Tea.
[image redacted]
She's my first official mentee! Interesting experimental bent towards prose poems. Hopefully this works out.
UPDATE: Photo from MOE official Ms Lim Siew Yea!
[image redacted]
God, I look cocky. I think I had chicken in mouth or something.
[image redacted]
She's my first official mentee! Interesting experimental bent towards prose poems. Hopefully this works out.
UPDATE: Photo from MOE official Ms Lim Siew Yea!
[image redacted]
God, I look cocky. I think I had chicken in mouth or something.
Friday, August 14, 2009
My review for The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee...
... kena censor by Straits Times in today's Life!. Sigh.
Don't really want fight, since I'm just doing it for the money. But the bit that got cut is the focal point of my review (and pretty damn scandalous, so I guess ST didn't want to cause a conservative uproar), so I reproduce it here, excised material in bold.
> theatre
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
Atlantis Productions, Inc.
Victoria Theatre
Wednesday
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is full of surprises. Sure, you might have expected this Tony Award-winner to be a song and dance extravaganza that inspires children to excel academically. Instead, it turns out to be a wonderfully mischievous drama, charming audiences young and old with its vivid characters.
The show takes a while to warm up. There is an energy missing from the first few scenes, as the cast sings too softly, moving without the exuberance one would expect of an opening. Even a song like “Pandemonium”, in which the contestants leap off their chairs in frustration, comes across as a little too tame.
However, as the players gain momentum, we warm to their roles. Johann Dela Fuente plays the endearing Leaf Coneybear, a child of hippies who feels out of place among all the geniuses, as he relates in his song “I’m Not That Smart”.
Another memorable figure is Nancy Park, an overachieving Korean-American girl played by Shiela Valderrama Martinez. After her solo, “I Speak Six Languages”, she dramatically forces herself to fail, encouraged by a kindly apparition of Jesus.
Extra spice is added through audience participation. Four “guest spellers” are invited on stage at every show, pretending to be students, and made to spell ridiculously obscure or ridiculously simple words – my night, guests got terms as varied as “pilgarlick” and “dog”.
Remarkably, these hapless guests are soon persuaded to join in some of the basic choreography, while the MC improvises commentary on their appearances, noting, for instance, how they were the first in their grade to grow facial hair.
The biggest surprise, however, is the level of adult humour in the show. This ranges from intellectual references to Nietzsche to shocking flashes of sequined panties under checkered skirts.
One character faces pressure from her gay fathers (their relationship is fairly dysfunctional, which is probably why the censors okayed it). Another character, played excellently by Felix Rivera, has a lament about the circumstances which caused him to misspell his word, entitled “My Unfortunate Erection”. Pretty funny stuff – and fortunately, it goes right over the heads of younger children.
Spelling Bee is not your typical big-budget musical, nor, in my opinion, is it brilliantly executed by this cast. Still, the power of the script and its lovable band of quirky characters shines through. Audiences can still expect a satisfying, rib-tickling evening at the theatre. Thankfully, no surprises there.
Don't really want fight, since I'm just doing it for the money. But the bit that got cut is the focal point of my review (and pretty damn scandalous, so I guess ST didn't want to cause a conservative uproar), so I reproduce it here, excised material in bold.
> theatre
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
Atlantis Productions, Inc.
Victoria Theatre
Wednesday
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is full of surprises. Sure, you might have expected this Tony Award-winner to be a song and dance extravaganza that inspires children to excel academically. Instead, it turns out to be a wonderfully mischievous drama, charming audiences young and old with its vivid characters.
The show takes a while to warm up. There is an energy missing from the first few scenes, as the cast sings too softly, moving without the exuberance one would expect of an opening. Even a song like “Pandemonium”, in which the contestants leap off their chairs in frustration, comes across as a little too tame.
However, as the players gain momentum, we warm to their roles. Johann Dela Fuente plays the endearing Leaf Coneybear, a child of hippies who feels out of place among all the geniuses, as he relates in his song “I’m Not That Smart”.
Another memorable figure is Nancy Park, an overachieving Korean-American girl played by Shiela Valderrama Martinez. After her solo, “I Speak Six Languages”, she dramatically forces herself to fail, encouraged by a kindly apparition of Jesus.
Extra spice is added through audience participation. Four “guest spellers” are invited on stage at every show, pretending to be students, and made to spell ridiculously obscure or ridiculously simple words – my night, guests got terms as varied as “pilgarlick” and “dog”.
Remarkably, these hapless guests are soon persuaded to join in some of the basic choreography, while the MC improvises commentary on their appearances, noting, for instance, how they were the first in their grade to grow facial hair.
The biggest surprise, however, is the level of adult humour in the show. This ranges from intellectual references to Nietzsche to shocking flashes of sequined panties under checkered skirts.
One character faces pressure from her gay fathers (their relationship is fairly dysfunctional, which is probably why the censors okayed it). Another character, played excellently by Felix Rivera, has a lament about the circumstances which caused him to misspell his word, entitled “My Unfortunate Erection”. Pretty funny stuff – and fortunately, it goes right over the heads of younger children.
Spelling Bee is not your typical big-budget musical, nor, in my opinion, is it brilliantly executed by this cast. Still, the power of the script and its lovable band of quirky characters shines through. Audiences can still expect a satisfying, rib-tickling evening at the theatre. Thankfully, no surprises there.
Monday, August 10, 2009
There was a giant puppet of "Mrs Raffles" in the National Day Parade last night.
Given that:
1) such a character has never appeared before in the parade,
2) my play "The Last Temptation of Stamford Raffles", staged last year, featured Sophia Raffles as a prominent character,
3) the parade director this year, Ivan Heng, was also the back-up director of my play "The Last Temptation of Stamford Raffles" last year (my original director, Christina Sergeant, had a family emergency)
... did I inadvertently influence this year's NDP?
It could've been someone else's idea, of course. :) Like maybe Loo Zihan's:
That's from his multimedia project Sophia Raffles, staged in '07 at NTU.
1) such a character has never appeared before in the parade,
2) my play "The Last Temptation of Stamford Raffles", staged last year, featured Sophia Raffles as a prominent character,
3) the parade director this year, Ivan Heng, was also the back-up director of my play "The Last Temptation of Stamford Raffles" last year (my original director, Christina Sergeant, had a family emergency)
... did I inadvertently influence this year's NDP?
It could've been someone else's idea, of course. :) Like maybe Loo Zihan's:
That's from his multimedia project Sophia Raffles, staged in '07 at NTU.
Saturday, August 08, 2009
Friday, August 07, 2009
Things I do when I'm supposed to meet several deadlines in the week, #57
Pluck all the hairs off one side of my moustache.
Actually, I restored the balance, so I'm not freakish now. Well, other than in the everyday psychological way.
Wednesday, August 05, 2009
THE PATRIARCH ALWAYS PAYS at the Arts House at 4pm Sat 8 August
... is the title of the commedia dell'arte inspired play that I've devised with four other writer/performers as part of the DramaBox Blanc Space collaborative playwriting programme, under the guidance of American playwright Joan Holden.
It's a makeshift presentation using texts we wrote over the weekend, so it won't be stellar, but it'll be fun. It's a comedy set in old Suzhou about organ transplants! I play the faithful servant Ah Lek, based on Arlecchino.
Once again, it's on:
Sat 8 August, 4pm
The Hall @ The Arts House (i.e. the small building with the Vietnamese restaurant, next to the Arts House proper)
Price: FREE
The writers/performers are:
Chris Lee
Verena Tay
Peggy Ferroa
Jacklyn Kuah
Ng Yi-Sheng
It's a makeshift presentation using texts we wrote over the weekend, so it won't be stellar, but it'll be fun. It's a comedy set in old Suzhou about organ transplants! I play the faithful servant Ah Lek, based on Arlecchino.
Once again, it's on:
Sat 8 August, 4pm
The Hall @ The Arts House (i.e. the small building with the Vietnamese restaurant, next to the Arts House proper)
Price: FREE
The writers/performers are:
Chris Lee
Verena Tay
Peggy Ferroa
Jacklyn Kuah
Ng Yi-Sheng
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
Every Annie Lennox song remixed
by DJ Earworm, with her blessing. In the future, every a cappella group will be doing remixes like this.
Sunday, August 02, 2009
Texts July 2009
Weirdly enough, I've read only a handful of non-graphic books and watched only two films this month. What's wrong with me?
*POETRY*
=Wong Yoon Wah’s “Beyond Silence”
*FICTION*
=Mikhail Kuznin’s “Wings”
+Julia Leigh’s “Disquiet”
*DRAMA*
=Bryan Tan’s “Travelling Light with a Heavy Heart”
*NON-FICTION*
+Robert Schnakenberg’s “Secret Lives of Great Authors”
+Terry Tan’s “Stir-Fried But Not Shaken”
=Margaret Mead’s “Coming of Age in Samoa”
+Stephen Fry’s “Moab Is My Washpot”
*GRAPHIC TEXTS*
+Larry Gonick’s “The Cartoon History of America”
+Kurt Busiek’s “Superman: Camelot Falls: The Weight of the World”
=Daphne Gottlieb and Diane DiMassa’s “Jokes and the Unconscious”
*PERFORMANCES*
=World-In-Theatre and Singapore Indian Association’s “Thillana Mohana”
+W!ld Rice’s “Own Time Own Target”
+Short and Sweet Singapore’s “Gala Final”
=The Theatre Practice’s “4:48 Psychosis”
Fran Borgia’s “Film – Faust”
Action Theatre’s “Streetwalkers”
*EXHIBITIONS*
+Woods & Woods’s “Resuscitation”
+Brian Gothong Tan and Zulkifle Mahmod’s “Synaesthesia”
+Peranakan Museum’s “Baba Bling”
+National Museum’s “Night Festival”
+NUS Museum’s “Site, Situation, Spectator”
+Yi Hwan Kwon’s “A World Not Quite Alike”
Jendela’s “The 28th UOB Painting of the Year Competition”
=Your Mother Gallery’s “Seelan Palay: Solo Exhibition”
=Singapore Heritage Festival’s “Corridors of Celebration”
*FILMS*
=Marcel Gisler's "Fögi Is a Bastard"
= Chukiat Sakveerakul’s “The Love of Siam”
*POETRY*
=Wong Yoon Wah’s “Beyond Silence”
*FICTION*
=Mikhail Kuznin’s “Wings”
+Julia Leigh’s “Disquiet”
*DRAMA*
=Bryan Tan’s “Travelling Light with a Heavy Heart”
*NON-FICTION*
+Robert Schnakenberg’s “Secret Lives of Great Authors”
+Terry Tan’s “Stir-Fried But Not Shaken”
=Margaret Mead’s “Coming of Age in Samoa”
+Stephen Fry’s “Moab Is My Washpot”
*GRAPHIC TEXTS*
+Larry Gonick’s “The Cartoon History of America”
+Kurt Busiek’s “Superman: Camelot Falls: The Weight of the World”
=Daphne Gottlieb and Diane DiMassa’s “Jokes and the Unconscious”
*PERFORMANCES*
=World-In-Theatre and Singapore Indian Association’s “Thillana Mohana”
+W!ld Rice’s “Own Time Own Target”
+Short and Sweet Singapore’s “Gala Final”
=The Theatre Practice’s “4:48 Psychosis”
Fran Borgia’s “Film – Faust”
Action Theatre’s “Streetwalkers”
*EXHIBITIONS*
+Woods & Woods’s “Resuscitation”
+Brian Gothong Tan and Zulkifle Mahmod’s “Synaesthesia”
+Peranakan Museum’s “Baba Bling”
+National Museum’s “Night Festival”
+NUS Museum’s “Site, Situation, Spectator”
+Yi Hwan Kwon’s “A World Not Quite Alike”
Jendela’s “The 28th UOB Painting of the Year Competition”
=Your Mother Gallery’s “Seelan Palay: Solo Exhibition”
=Singapore Heritage Festival’s “Corridors of Celebration”
*FILMS*
=Marcel Gisler's "Fögi Is a Bastard"
= Chukiat Sakveerakul’s “The Love of Siam”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
