More photos of Bangkok

Reading@Kinokuniya

I'll be doing a promotional reading of my poetry book, "last boy" at Kino this Saturday! Don't forget this:

Saturday 20 January
2pm-3pm
Kinokuniya Bookstore
Takashimaya SC.

Photos of a hospice ad for E-Ching

 

 

 

Virgo

Brian Gothong Tan made this and the following videos for my poetry book launch. "last boy", available at Kinokuniya, Borders and Books Actually.

kami/kaze: a correspondence

My Bangkok pictures can only be uploaded individually.

An unnamed night market I just happened to wander into.

A consistent taste in puffy topiary.

Ah, Thailand.

Wow...

...Xiaxue believes that if you're drunk and wear slutty clothes, you're asking to be raped.

Seriously. She goes on about her crush on a rapist here.

Can we please teach our young men and women the definition of rape in this country?

RAPE = SEX WITHOUT CLEAR CONSENT

And I agree that it's problematic to label all drunken sex as rape, but the circumstances in which sex occurred in this case do not suggest consensuality at all.

I wish at times like this that I believed in karma.

After the Firecrotch

I've been reading the Press Release of the American Dialect Society's 2006 Word of the Year nominations (click here). I was especially struck by the Most Outrageous category, which in previous years presented awards for the words "cliterati" and "santorum.

Most Outrageous WINNER Cambodian accessory: Angelina Jolie’s adopted child who is Cambodian.
RUN-OFF: Cambodian accessory 61, sudden jihad syndrome 36
Cambodian accessory 20
firecrotch: a person with red pubic hair. 10
macaca: an American citizen treated as an alien. 14
tramp stamp: a tattoo on a woman’s upper bottom (or lower back). 7
sudden jihad syndrome: an outburst of violence from a seemingly stable and normal Muslim. 38

And yes, the word that sprung out at me was "firecrotch", because I have horribly fond memories of being in sophomore year, disrobing a Jewish engineering student in my Furnald single, astonished at the brilliant ginger of his pubes.

I do miss my college days, not only for the kind of play I was getting but also for the kind of person I was, eager to love, eager to speak, helpless, senseless, relentless.

I don't have a pic of his pubes but I have ended up bookmarking one of his nipple. The auburn is only subliminally visible, due to the fineness of the hairs.


Other wonderful words:

Most Euphemistic
WINNER waterboarding: an interrogation technique in which the subject is immobilized and doused with water to simulate drowning; reported to be used by U.S. interrogators against terrorism detainees.

Most Useful
WINNER climate canary: an organism or species whose poor health or declining numbers hint at a larger environmental catastrophe on the horizon.

Most Creative
WINNER lactard: a person who is lactose-intolerant.

Hmm. I suppose this post suggests that my sexual perversity is inextricable from my literary perversity, followed by gustatory hunger. An ideal date would thus involve being humped vigorously while my partner recites the works of Helene Cixous and allows me to devour raw tuna off his wasabi-coated tits.

Bento Porn

Speaking of food, have I ever told you I read cookbooks like pornography? Food blogs too. I just stare at the beautiful photographs and imagine eating the creations (when I actually do eat the compositions, as has happened with Chubby Hubby's recommendations, I generally find my fantasies too heavy to stomach).


And there's no food as erotically supercharged as bento. I've been going to half-arsed American bento blogs like Cooking Cute and Bento Corner so far, but I just found the best Bento site ever, with pictures of obscenely aesthetic lunchboxes galore.



The site's in Japanese, but it's http://www.e-obento.com/, for those of you with similar perversions.

The Omivore's Diorama

A few of you may be familiar with my perverse habit of photographing every meal I eat while I'm on holiday.


I don't know the names of half these foods, incidentally.

Preemptive nostalgia

Woo weet! These are the photos I was trying to post before I left Singapore for Bangkok. I got into this frenzy of photo-taking just before leaving, just to preserve something of my everyday life before it got foreign again.

So here's a few shots of the last days of 2006:



It was Dongzhi, the Chinese winter solstice festival, and my family had made tangyuan with pink food colouring and boiled pandan leaves as per tradition. (And as per current lifestyle, they didn't bother to save any for me when I came home after midnight.)



I also went to Bukit Timah Plaza to see Dr Chang Tou Liang, my GP (I switched over from Nam Sang Clinic because the doctor there has known me since I was a toddler and is consequently infuriatingly patronising). His prescriptions didn't help my cough much, but guess what? It turns out that he's one of the two reviewers for The Flying Inkpot Classical Music Review site, which is still really active, despite being somewhat delayed in its updates.

And this was where I went to shop for jewellery for my grandma. Got her an utterly tasteless jade pendant which cost much more than I could afford. No-one saw me giving it to her either, dammit, so there goes the filial piety cred. On the other hand, she really seemed touched that *someone* remembered to give her a present.

Stuff on Bangkok tomorrow.

My latest e-mail to my family

Dear All,

Hey. Following the bomb scares and my friends' departure, I'm staying over with Singapore's foremost contemporary dance authority in a dinky little apartment right off the Skytrain line beteween Ratchatewi and Phaya Thai. God, these Thai names. They taste like deep-fried lemongrass strips.

Until last night, I was at the Riverfront Service Apartments at Bangpangpong, outside the main city area, but overlooking the Chao Praya River and the post-apocalyptic mid-construction sites that halted in the boom of the early-90s, never to be animated, frizen in their skeletal glory. My friends watched the fireworks from the balcony on New Year's midnight while I made friends with an international clique of gay farangs and luuk khreung (whites and half-castes )at a bar in Silom Soi 4. Don't worry; nothing scandalous occurred; these were the only guys I could find who spoke English and some of them spoke Thai as well; a towering Australian anmed David and a mohawked Bavarian named Volker took me to an after-hours Thai club in the middle of nowhere named CNN (so called because it never stops). Other people of note include Jose, a wheelchair-bound San Franciscan entrepreneur who's rather well-known as a bomb of happiness at parties; everywhere he goes people feel joy. I've invited him to have dinner when he and his partner come to Singapore, naturally.

Now, I'm staying with Tang Fu Kuen, who happens to be Singapore's foremost international contemporary dance authority - only everyone asks his advice for free, so he's subjected to working as a Southeast Asian heritage archivist for the Thai government. He's been taking me to fabulous restaurants and clubs like the SamSenSoiSarm and the Face Bar and the Bed Supper Club with his European choreographer friends (who pay for everything with their mighty euros and affable natures) and giving up his own mattress so I can have a place to snooze (he says if I go to a backpacker inn on Khaosan Road, I'll get blown up by another bomb, and while I wouldn't mind being part of history, he thinks it's unwise).

Tonight I'll possibly be going to see Suraiwong Road to see a fucking show, which he insists is compulsory. I was rather traumatised by the Patpong girls, who not only open bottlecaps and shoot darts with their pussies, but also withdraw long strings of needles therefrom.

This fucking show, however, involves two dicks. So don't worry Mum, I'll sleep soundly.

Love,

Yi-Sheng
B).

Texts 16-31 December

In a move towards greater organisation, I've decided to start listing my reading from the beginning of a month to an end rather than doing the whole ides-of-march shebang - and as per Cody's suggestion, I'm using +s to indicate the stuff that was actually good. My texts for late December were as follows:

*POETRY*
Cecil Rajendra's "The Hour of Assassins

*FICTION*
Madame de Lafayette's "La Princesse de Cleves"

*NON-FICTION*
Eli Solomon's "William Farquhar's Life in the Far East: A Chronology"
Jessica Williams's "50 Facts That Should Change the World"
Paul Arden's "Whatever You Think, Think the Opposite"
+Tom Wolfe's "The Painted Word"
+Daniel Ziv and Guy Sharett's "Bangkok Inside Out"

*GRAPHIC TEXTS*
+Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's "Lost Girls"
+Warren Ellis's "The Authority: Relentless"
+Jennifer Camper et al's "Juicy Mother: Celebration"
+Marjane Satrapi's "Embroideries" and "Chicken With Plums"
Alan Moore, Leah Moore and John Reppion's "Albion"

*PERFORMANCES*
Down Syndrome Association's "Natural"

*MOVIES*
"Monty Python and the Holy Grail"

Incredibly graphic novel-heavy, cos the sales were one and comic book compendia have prices that require a 40 percent slash.

Seeya in January!

Letter home from Bangkok

Dear All,

I'm safe in Bangkok! My flight back is Airasia FD3507 and it arrives in Singapore on Wednesday at 2220 hrs.

Have unfortunately only seen the interiors of malls so far (Don and Terry are shockingly uninterested in Southeast Asian sculpture), but cultural reports are forthcoming. So far, service has been consistently bad, but food has been decent, excepting some bad ramen (Terry does not believe in going to Thailand to eat Thai food, either).

Am spending tomorrow exploring on my own. Have bought a grievous number of T-shirts - none at all for Yi-Xian, partly because he's a brat and partly because I haven't found the exact combination of blue ringer tee and yellow circle of the iconic Red Bull design yet.
E-Ching, do you want a T-shirt inscribed with the entire Thai alphabet? It's very philologically dinky. It's being sold exclusively to the farangs, however, so I have yet to come across a version that comes ina size smaller than Gargantuan.

I miss you all abjectly.

Sincerely,

;)
Yi-Sheng.

P.S. Spicy fried food is actually quite beneficial to a sore throat, provided that it's accompanied by hard tap water and Heineken.

Shouting her name forever

Columbia University, my alma mater, still refuses to apologise for expelling a student who protested our support of the Nazi regime.

"[Dean] Butler had Burke expelled for leading pickets protesting the Columbia administration's insistence on sending a delegate and friendly greetings to a major propaganda festival the Nazi leadership orchestrated in 1936 in Germany, the 550th anniversary celebration of Heidelberg University. Although he was a fine student and had been elected president of his class, Burke was never readmitted."
-Stephen H. Norwood, The Spectator

Y'know, most universities manage to make their alumni send them money. Columbia ends up making us at lest half-arsedly politically aware, and then flabbergasts us with their moral corruption.

Incidentally, I'm doing freelance writing for IBM, which of course was the company that gave Auschwitz the supercomputer that issued the serial numbers tattooed on the concentration camp victims' flesh. See here.

Was gonna post a bunch of photos about my last few days in Singapore before leaving for Bangkok tomorrow, but goddamned Beta Blogger won't let me post my pics. Blurty users, don't change armies.

Mood: belligerent.

Thought for the day

I was in the Singapore Art Museum yesterday evening and I ended up talking to a couple of New York girls, first answering questions on Singapore contemporary art and later stuff on Singapore itself. And one thing that came up was the fact that I'm really not that radical.

Despite the PAP's patronising attitudes, disconnectedness from broad sentiment and disregard for conventional definitions of human rights, I really do believe that at the end of the day they're thinking about the country's best interests. That there is a 'benevolence' to the dictatorship - often misguided, and self-justifying (hence the massive salaries), but ultimately that it's a government that wants to be the best government that it can be.

And it's a crying shame that you can't assume this as a given, to expect this from all the governments in the world. Maybe after a US education and the discovery that the American two-party system's just so mind-bogglingly lobby-driven and corrupt, it's harder for me to be idealistic about democracy.

Of course, you could point out that a religiously influenced government - the American religious right or Iran, for example - has a Messiah complex and thus believes it's the best government possible.

Hmm. Feel free to comment and disabuse me of my nepotistic, gerrymandering loyalties. I'm thinking aloud.

Technical difficulties

About a month ago, my digital camera suddenly started malfunctioning. As you can see, everything suddenly became bathed in a lavender wash:

At the Books Actually 1st anniversary party.

In the MRT.

Fuchshia???

I was going to spend megabucks on camera repairs, but the glitch has suddenly fixed itself. For how long, who knows?

Btw, the reason I needed to fix the machine was because I'm leaving the country briefly... details forthcoming.

Thai

Terry and Don, two of my bestest JC friends, have invited me to go with them to Thailand! I'll be there from the night of Wed 27 Dec to Wed 3 Jan. It's my first time in Bangkok as an adult. I have been told it's inspiring.

My friends will be flying back on Jan 1, but I couldn't get an AirAsia flight back any earlier; shoulda taken the bus and train; I mean, two days alone in Bangkok, what am I gonna do????? ;)

Seriously though, I could do with advice. E.g. I wanna write a Fridae article while I'm there but I don't speak Thai... how to be edgy news reporter like dat?

Texts consumed Nov 16- Dec 15, 2006

I wonder if these lists will ever be used as a criminal alibi? They really are one of those little compulsive rituals, though. It's got to the point that I try and read shorter books so as to prove to myself that I've read more - you'll notice I overdid the poetry and the graphic texts (i.e. comic books and children's books) this month.

Ooh - new policy! I'm going to bold the stuff I really liked.

*POETRY*
Eddie Tay's "Remnants"
Charles Bukowski's "Play the Piano Like a Percussion Instrument Until Your Fingers Start to Bleed a Little"
Hedwig Anuar's "Under the Apple Tree: Political Parodies of the 1950s"
Paul Tan's "First Meeting of Hands"
Maya Angelou's "Amazing Peace: A Christmas Poem"
Mani Rao's "Echolocation"
Kahlil Gibran's "The Prophet"

*FICTION*
Max Brooks's "World War Z"
Zai Kuning's "Bluemonkish"

*DRAMA*
Bertolt Brecht's "Life of Galileo"
Euripides' "Medea", "The Trojan Women ", "Hecuba" and "Andromache"

*NON-FICTION*
Margaret Chan's "Ritual As Theatre, Theatre As Ritual"
Ian Blyth and Susan Sellers's "Live Theory: Hélène Cixous"
Gretchen Liu and Angelina Phillips's "Wayang: A History of Chinese Opera in Singapore"

*GRAPHIC TEXTS*
Andy Riley's "Loads More Lies to Tell Small Kids"
Popjustice and David Whittle's "A Girl Called Madonna" and "A Boy Called Marshall"
Allan Ahlberg's "The Little Cat Baby"
Edward Monkton's "Life", "The Wonderful Man", "The Lady and the Chocolate", "The Pig of Happiness" and "The Shoes of Salvation"
Guy Delisle's "Shenzhen"

*PERFORMANCES*
Alex Wang's "Believe"
Agni Kootthu's "O$P$"
Cake Theatre's "Divine Soap"
W!ld Rice's "Jack and the Beansprout"
Adrian Tan and Ng How Wee's "Pulau"
The Theatre Practice's "Mama Looking for her Cat"

*MOVIES*
Tony Scott's "Deja Vu"
Stephen Frears' "The Queen"
Lots of "QI" (ok lar, this was on Youtube)

Americana

My little brother Yi-Xian is studying at the University of Virginia (that's him after skydiving below). He recently went to his roommate's house for Thanksgiving. His blog is password-protected, so I had to re-post his latest entry (with permission of course). It says a lot about the way we were brought up, as well as our strange sense of meconnaissance towards American suburbia.

"Prosperity. Abundance. Affluence. Thats what strikes me about Fairfax, which is in itself representative of America itself. Upper middle class America.

I am under no illusions of my own upbringing in Singapore. King Albert Park is not the long kaw street which i pretend it to be. But the life that I've lived, as compared to the life that my room mate is used to has discrepancies which strike me. Dad is new money, mom is old money who struggled through the trails of new money with dad. I've grown up to look at price first before looking at quality when making purchases. I buy what i figure i need.

When i was in Singapore, i did splurge at times, but certainly not often. Necessity and cost benefit analysis have always been factors in making material decisions.

Its not like that in America. In a nation with abundant prosperity, and where even the poor and homeless receive benefits, the kids here grow up with things around them they don't really need, yet they don't realize it themselves.

Clothing. Fridges. The multiple TV's, the multiple game consoles they have, the den's they have, the indoor gym they forgot they had downstairs in the basement. They leave lights on, and waste and waste. Its part of their culture I guess. Part of the American dream is to have the ability to do so.

Casestudy: Bottled water. In Singapore we live on a stable supply of clean potable water from the taps at a reasonable price. Here in America that isn't always the case. Hell in the Bahamas when we were staying in the cheapo Towne Hotel, we had salt water streaming down from the taps. (which in itself wasn't all that bad given the cheap cheap cost) But the Harris family here drinks bottled water only. And their water supply is fine, just as good as Singapore water. Why waste money.

This just came back to me. In Tekong we had to drink crap water, not that that's anything in itself. But I guess the Singaporean male population learns to drink water from the tap there. But a vast majority of Singapore girls (generalisations, I concede) find that repulsive. But at least they don't drive down to NTUC and purchase 10 gallons worth of water!

America amazes me. The houses. The lifestyle. I understand why people immigrate here now, after seeing it for myself. And why people queue up in the embassies all over the world for the Visa's. For the green cards. I think I do. But I don't identify though. I liked my upbringing, and i'll be damn sure my kids grow up with one similar to that. With cram education, KAP Macdonalds, rice rice and more rice, tap water, heavy schoolbags, report cards, a cane (still debating about that one), a moody gloomy father, and a healthy sense of parental respect plus the army. I know i'm half spoilt. But i don't want them spoilt. And if they're ¾ spoilt, thats good enough for me."

If Zoe can do it, so I can I!

I remember a while ago someone noted on my blog that most intellectuals' blogs are chock-full of political views... mine, however, consists of stray odds and ends about sport, sex, books and trivia. Said reader called this "refreshing".

I however would like to reiterate that I am ultimately also a political animal. And in protest against the retention of Section 377A of the Penal Code, which forbids male-male sexual acts, I offer this graphic in tribute:


Rock never die, babe.

We live in a dangerous world

I'm making a list of concepts I've been learning in Wikipedia when I should have been writing.

For instance,

1. Hammerspace: in cartoon physics, the mysterious dimension where large objects may be stored behind characters' backs.

2. Lithopedion: aka stone baby; a calcified foetus, the result of an ectopic pregnancy which cannot be reabsorbed by the body. In surgery, a 76 year-old woman had a stone baby removed that was over 50 years old.

3. Simlish : a nonsense language invented by voice actors of the popular computer game, the Sims. Despite its lack of organised grammar, players have attempted to crack this language and codify its laws. The Black-Eyed Peas have recorded songs in this language.

4. Moon Type: a writing system for the blind, an alternative to Braille, reportedly easier to learn for those blinded after birth. It is used by only 400 people, all of whom reside in England.

5. Heterochromia: a condition in which the colour of an individual's irises is different. This may be congenital or acquired, through injury, inflammation, tumours or misuse of eyedrops.

6. Lori and Reba Schapell: craniopagus conjoined twins from Pennsylvania. They share 30% of their brain matter and have distinct personalities: Reba is a trophy-winning bowler, country and western music player and wheelchair designer. Lori is a laundress, and holds Reba's mike.






7. Suncake: 太陽餅, a popular Taiwanese dessert from Taichung and an alternative to mooncakes.

8. Sky Kingdom: Kerajaan Langit, the infamous Teapot Cult of Trengganu. Founded by Ariffin Mohamed aka Ayah Pin in 1973, it emphasised ecumenical dialogue, inter-religious harmony, dream interpretation, and worship of its leader, who claimed to be the reincarnation of Shiva, Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed. Designated as one of 22 heretical Islamic sects in Malaysia, its commune was demolished in July 2005.






9. Kanzi: a 26 year-old male bonobo ape from Des Moines, probably the non-human animal with the greatest command of human language. Kanzi has demonstrated understanding of over 3,000 human spoken words and communicates by typing via a system of 348 lexigrams. Efforts have been made to allow him to communicate with other linguistically talented apes such as the ASL-speaking gorrilla Koko and the orang-utan Chantek, via Internet chat.

10. Coulrophilia: Sexual attraction to clowns. Nuff said.

The Animated Communist Manifesto!

Check it out...

Texts 16 Oct 2006-15 Nov 2006

Well, I'm doing better on the numbers of books I'm reading... though this month I evidently cheated a bit by concentrating on poetry. Also, I'm definitely focussed on sex and gender in the non-fiction field.

*Poetry*
Laurence Ferlinghetti's "Coney Island of the Mind"
Yeow Kai Chai's "Secret Manta"
Tony Harrison's "Under the Clock"
Dante Alighieri's "Purgatorio"

*Drama*
Pedro Calderon de la Barca's "Life is a Dream"

*Fiction*
Hitomi Kanehara's "Snakes and Earrings"
Muriel Spark's "The Snobs"

*Non-Fiction*
Gerrie Lim's "Idol to Icon: The Making of Celebrity Brands"
Laurence O'Toole's "Pornocopia"
Michel Foucault's "Birth of the Clinic"
Xinran's "The Good Women of China"

*Graphic Texts*
Paul Di Filippo's "Top Ten: Beyond the Farthest Precinct"
Alison Bechdel's "Fun Home: A Tragicomic"
Design Singapore's "20/20 Movement: Singapore Design Tour"
Edward Monkton's "A Lovely Love Story"
Doreen Cronin's "Vote for Goat"
Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler's "The Gruffalo" and "The Gruffalo's Child"
(admittedly, the last few are children's books)

*Performances*
ETC's "Horseface"
Cake Theatre's "Cheek"
Eleanor Wong's "Jackson on a Jaunt"
Muna Tseng's "Stella's Room"
The Fun Stage's "Initiation International" (second night)
Joshua Greene's "Esther" (live reading of musical script-in-progress)

*Movies*
Asia Carrera's "Appassionata"
Annabel Chong's "Pornomancer"
"Akeelah and the Bee"
"DOA: Dead or Alive"
Kim Ki-Duk's "Time"
Davis Guggenheim's "An Inconvenient Truth
Martin Campbell's "Casino Royale"

Did I mention I'm also a performance artist?

Title: Coverage
Materials: 92 Biennale badges, black tights, Biennale tote bag, names of Singapore artists not included in the Biennale scribbled all over my body.
Location: Biennale closing events.
Purpose: To raise consciousness of the lack of coverage of non-Biennale local artists.
Reactions: Generally positive, even from NAC staff. Biennale director Low Kee Hong was especially appreciative that I'd placed Tan Swie Hian on my crotch.

At LaSalle-SIA School for the Arts.

With a lovely young man in Tan Kai Syng's video art class.

Washing off the words. It was a rainy day and I was meeting a young man in the evening.
That being said, come to my poetry book promotion at Books Actually on Thursday, y'all.