It occurs to me that I've had an obituary on my front page throughout the entire Chinese New Year season.

This must be rectified! CNY was actually pretty good for me! My brother's come home for a brief visit from his back-breaking job in Manhattan i-banking (he's a 21st century rickshaw coolie, I told him) and I'm getting embarrassing loads of angpows.



Also had a pretty cool Valentine's Day, after carefully extracting an agreement from my folks to allow me to stay out on the 14th (which was the first day of CNY, for those of you not in Singapore). Mohan'n'me went for dinner at Out of the Pan, then watched a Malay language mini-musical about King Solomon's love for Balqis, Queen of Sheba, which included sequences in which they share a joint of weed and he can't remember how to spell his name in Arabic.

(No, seriously. It was called "Fewling", and it was put up by Panggung Arts. Also on this week is Cake Theatre;s "Invisibility/Breathing" and Ravindran Drama Group's "Taj Mahal", so by Saturday we'll have watched a Malay play, a Mandarin play and a Tamil play all within seven days.)

After that we wandered over to the Esplanade, where they had a singer called Imelda singing "Xi Mei Gui" and all the wonderful old CNY songs which Mohan complains are never played in department stores anymore ("ji di long dong qiang dong diang, wo yao qu bai nian," etc) and then moseyed over to the River Hongbao.

They'd brought in all these floats from Chengdu. It was bloody surreal, man.


These gals were rotating. Creepy note: they were on sticks! No actual feet under their skirts. They probably come to life at night and jump around like pogo sticks.


This dragon sculpture is made out of porcelain plates and spoons! Mohan said it reminded him of Montien Boonma's "The Pleasure of Being, Crying, Dying and Eating", now showing at 8QSAM.



Some of these tigers were also rotating. And their eyes were light bulbs. They were the TIGERS OF THE DAMNED.

And we're the pandas of the damned! (Contextual note: I'd just been asked to take a lovey-dovey photo of a heterosexual homoethnic couple, so I insisted on them taking one of us as well, just to make their jaws drop. Well, okay, so I did also want an excuse to hug the boy, but this is the reason why I didn't take care to pick better lighting.)

Okay, us Chinese are just plain weird.

Gongxifacai, bubugaosheng, dajidali, niannianyouyu, shengtijiankang, xueyuejinbu, xinniankuaile, wanshiruyi... ah fuck, can't remember any more.