Coming home tomorrow!

And I have fantastic photos to upload! Just wait!

I'm still alive!

Just felt like saying so after a coupla moody days. It's not a lot of stress planning your slightly ageing father's tour of the Holy Land, but it's some stress.

Felt a lot better today after dipping in the Dead Sea. I'd love to post images, but my usual memory card's full and the other one won't copy on the computer.

Oddly enough, I'm experiencing a lot of joy reading English books (other than the Lonely Planet Guides). I finished Han Han's "The Other Side of the Rainbow" and now I'm supposedly ploughing through Jin Yong's "Lian Cheng Jue") a well as a second-hand extended dramatic poem by Pablo Neruda, but I came across C. S. Lewis's "The Great Divorce" and Michael Cunningham's "The Hours" in the convent library (yes, we're staying in a convent) - and it's just so refreshing to read English literature, with its ironic language - okay gotta log off.

Candlelight Memorial for JBJ this Saturday

In memoriam: Mr JB Jeyaretnam

Speakers Corner
Saturday, October 4
6.30pm - 10pm

Bring flowers & candles
Wear black
No speeches
(Clarke Quay MRT Station, Exit A)

Please help pass the word

Facebook: In Memory of JB Jeyaretnam

Apparently I've been shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize.

My money's on Wena Poon winning ofr "Lions in Winter", but I've only just started on her book so I can't be sure. Also, why the hell didn't Cyril Wong get nominated for "Tilting the Plates to Catch the Light"? (Did he not enter his book?)

Full list (minus Chinese) here, courtesy of Sharon Bakar:

English category :

1. Last Boy Ng Yi-Sheng
2. The Lies that Build a Marriage - Suchen Christine Lim
3. Lions in Winter: Stories - Wena Poon
4. Rainbows in Braille - Elmo Jayawardena
5. Five Right Angles - Aaron Lee Soon Yong

Malay category :
1. Bila Rama-Rama Patah Sayapnya - Mohamed Latiff Mohamed
2. Anugerah Bulan Buat Bonda - Muhammad Salihin Sulaiman
3. Langau Menyerang Masjid dan Cerita-cerita Lainnya - Suratman Markasan
4. Cetusan Kalbu Seorang Penyair Peter Augustine Goh
5. Perahu Melayu Di Lautan Khulzum Johar Buang
6. Sekeras Waja Selembut Sutera Manaf Hamzah

Tamil books :
1. Pin Seat Sankar Jayanthi
2. Aayul Thandanai J M Sali
3. Naan Kolai Seyum Penkal K Kanagalatha
4. Ouyir Ourugum Sabtham Palanisamy Subramanian

نهن في العردن

!بكر أبي و أنا ندهب إلى بير

عيد سيد

Texts September 2008

Scant reading this time, but I won't apologise: have been movin' my ass instead! (Also have finished one Mandarin book, which is an important achievement for someone like me.)

*POETRY*
+Vikram Seth's "The Golden Gate"
John Mateer's "Southern Barbarians"

*FICTION*
+Ruth L. Ozeki's "My Year of Meat"

*DRAMA*
Joan Vail Thorne's "The oExact Centre of the Universe"
Amy and David Sedaris's "The Book of Liz"

*NON-FICTION*
+Chris Alden's "China in Africa"
+Han Han's "Caihong de Lingyi Duan"

*PERFORMANCES*
Joavien Ng's "Lab"
+Ming Hwa Yuan Taiwanese Opera Company's "The Immortal of Peng Lai"
+T.H.E. Dance Company's "Old Sounds"
+Lee Wen's "Anthropometry"

*EXHIBITIONS*
+LaSalle's "NO WONDER"
+The Singapore Biennale 2008
+Showcase Singapore
+Wong Hoy Cheong's "Bound For Glory"
+NUS Museum's “Archives and Desires: Selections from the Mohammad Din Mohammad Collection”
+Ronald Ventura's "Mapping the Corporeal"
+8Qsam's "8Q-rate"

*FILMS*
+Lian Pek's "Mad About English"
John T. Bone's "Depraved Fantasies"
Royston Tan's "12 Lotus"

Luxor Temple by night...

...is pretty awesome!

Father's well again!

So we're back to sharing mineral water bottles. :)

Unfortunately, we're afflicted with the unfortunate disease of ruinitis, otherwise known as post-Pharaonic ennui. Enough with the pyramids and stelae and sphinxes and obelisks and asterisks and ampersands; we have been jaded by sandstone.

Saw Karnak this morning; will see Luxor tonight and the Valley of the Kings tomorrow. It takes a while to remember that what we're seeing is fuckin' awesome.

And then we're on for a 20-hour bus ride over to Mount Sinai. It's the Ten Commandments/Prince of Egypt megaschlep!!!

To all of you guys back home, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's photolog. :)

Oedipus at Aswan (Warning: members of my family really shouldn't read this post)

My father's sick. Or getting sick. Or recovering. He doesn't know. Probably picked up a bug in Cairo or Alexandria due to my enforced exposure of his body to grungy backpacker life.

I may in fact be killing my father.

At the same time we're being forced to bond: I'm talking to him all the time, we're helping each other across ruins, sharing bedrooms.

Thus we arrive at my unique problem:

1) To fall asleep, I find that it helps to relax my brain with sexual fantasies.

2) I tend to fetishise men who look like teenage versions of my father.

3) Everyone keeps commenting how young my father looks.

This definitely isn't good. I'm between sleeping with and killing my father, and tomorrow we're going to Luxor. Which was, in the old day, Thebes.

And of course, we've already met the Sphinx. (Photo coming.)

I definitely need to get laid sometime. I don't think I care much for Egyptian men, though. An awful lot of them have forehead scars from praying too much. I know that sounds like a ridiculous stereotype, but wait till you see it.

Sigh. Israel might be more fun, though. You know how Orthodox boys get over the "thou shalt not lie with another man" judgment? They do it standing up.

We're in Egypt!!!

And our legs are super-shacked from climbing so many pyramids!

That's my dad in front of the Red Pyramid in Dahshur. Those buggers really are bloody awe-inspiring. I've led him through temples, catacombs, mosques, hypostyles, courts, churches, fortresses, museums, subway systems and very smelly alleyways in the five days we've been gadding about so far. And amazingly, he can take it at the age of 59. Everyone keeps thinking he's my best bud, not my daddums.


He's wary, though. He's taking extra care of his health by snoozing a lot (I've become an early sleeper in tandem with him). Unfortunately for him, I've consistently booked us in budget hotels (with me it's second-class all the way, I told him). After travelling for years in four-to-six-star hotels, it's a little bit of a culture shock for him.

We're also sharing rooms and washing our own clothes. I'm seeing a little too much of his naked body these days. Shades of Noah and Ham.

Nyahaha. I love abusing my daddy.

I'm also inviting him to be culinarily adventurous. Above is something I ordered on the menu of Al-Shark in Alexandria called "Caw Lee Fatta", which I figured out was probably "Cow Leg Fatta", fatta being a heavy rice and bread dish.

Turns out that it's some kind of tendon rice pudding with chips.

It was actually good! But I couldn't finish it.

I really have to recommend the mango juice at El-Qobesi in Alexandria too. Lonely Planet called it the best mango juice, ever, and I'm inclined to agree. You sip that stuff and you can't move. You're transported into another state of epicurean consciousness.

Unfortunately, this being our second night in Alex, I decided to order something different. In addition to the obligatory juice (mango-guava-strawberry, each in its own delicious stratum), I got an extremely heavy fruit salad to go with it - banana, green honeydew, date, fig, pear, persimmon and grape.

Ugh. Too much. The embodiment of jelak.

Interesting incident last night: the owner of El-Qobesi gave me a free mango when I showed him what Lonely Planet said about the shop. Then I walked into another street and started taking a photo of people praying in a mosque, when a young man in a car suddenly started calling for me to show him my passport, saying he was the police.

I figured he probably wasn't the police, so I walked on. He followed on foot. I tried to protest. He was joined by a friend who told me, "When police ask for your passport, you show them!" and boxed me in the right ear.

I ran. They chased me. At first down the road, then I crossed over to the other side of the road and found a provision shop where there were bright lights shining. The shop owner made me sit down with him and insisted I stay down there when I explained what had happened. A shoe-shiner sitting nearby got me a glass of water.

They're good people here in Alexandria. (I say that mostly because they're much better than the Cairenes, who try and swindle you at every turn. It's bloody awful.)

I've got lots more stories to tell - bonding with my dad, and the way Egypt is so linguistically decentralised sometimes; in the tourist spots you hear as much English as French and Spanish and a bit of German and Portugese and Italian, and there are Coptic goldsmiths and catacomb tour guides who speak better Mandarin than I do, good god.

But I've gotta go back to mistreating my father:



Gesundheit, daddy. B).

I'm going to Egypt and Israel from 17 Sep to 18 Oct.

Just for pleasure. My dad's always wanted to go since he was a kid and he watched "The Ten Commandments". He's trusting me to make all the arrangements, so I'm reading Lonely Planet cover to cover.

"If you are visiting Sodom via the southern route..."

Seriously, that's one of the lines in there. :P

In Conversation, After Viewing the Moon at the Mid-Autumn Festival

My Mother: I now understand that you really can 气死. You can become so angry that you want to have a heart attack and die. Ki si lang.

Wondermark!

I was cruel to a friend.

Not going to explain. Just want to state this so that people don't assume I'm a nice person all the time.

"Survivors" by Errol Morris

Biennale Blog!

Unsatisfied with my umpteen other blogs, I've also volunteered (or was I volunteered? I can't quite remember) to maintain a blog for the Singapore Biennale.

http://www.singaporebiennale.org/blog/

I'm bein' plenty bitchy. Trying to make the site readable is one of the justifications. The other is that there just is so much to be dubious about, including the TVC:



Don't worry; I think the art will be pretty good. (Crosses fingers) Opening previews on 9th and 10th, open to the public from 11 September.

Goodbye, Cheebye: The Joy of Lex

Part of our farewell party involved a good ol' traditional game of Sexy Scrabble. Rules are that every word you put down has to have something to do with sex. Raunch ranks higher than standard orthography.


Note, for example, neologisms such as HERCOK, BANGNOTIE, PENIO (which was originally just PEN) and BAAGASM (this was at first just GASM, but it mutated into AAGASM and then finally to its current incarnation, which is probably a sexual climax involving a sheep).

Also note the multilingualism of the board: NONOK (Malay for vagina) and DIU (Cantonese for fuck) share the board with JIEB (which was originally JIE, but now might be short for jiebye...?).

A few further explications: ZULU => ZULUVA (either someone who loves a guy called Zul or someone who loves sex in zoos) and SEX/EASE => SEXTEASE => NUNSEXTEASE => OLNUNSEXTEASE -=> OLNUNSEXTEASER.

Gawd, why am I blogging. I have the Biennale press conference tomorrow and way too many articles due.

Season of Migration to the North

Two weeks ago, my little brother's flew back to Virginia for his final year of college.

To wish him goodbye, we ate chicken rice:



And rode the Singapore Flyer. Look! The fireworks festival was on that night.


Below, you'll see evidence of the Tourism Board's systematic marginalisation of Tamil:


Even Italian, Spanish, Portugese and Singlish are deemed more important to print than Tamil! I mean, I thought they were trying to wipe out Singlish. (It's not even very believable Singlish. My sister's ascertained that "lah" is only used in the context of replies.)

That's her below, being grumpy in the sky.


It's a rather nice view, though.








Not incredible, but not bad. Worth about 20 bucks, okay, the first time round anyway.


FAMILY'S WORTH SO MUCH MOAR!!!!

Goodbye, Cheebye

Last night we had an all-night farewell party for my JC Creative Writing Club pal *****. [name withheld, because he's got a reputation.]

At one point, we pulled out the MacBook and started making faces.









From now on, none of us will be able to run for office. Ever. Again.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Comics

Incidentally, I recently found out that my godmother doesn't believe in evolution.