Clearing Decks

I’m all “New laptop! New start!” at the moment and totally geeking out over reinstalling all my favourite software (which of course also includes copious online research on whether all these programs are still theeeee best ones for me), and since I spend more time surfing the web than any responsible adult should, a big part of this is achieving optimal Firefox zen. But before I went on a trawl for shiny new extensions to fill surfing needs I never knew I had, I decided I needed to do a little bookmark pruning. I haven’t been the best at keeping my bookmarks under control over the years, which became a lame reason for me not to use online bookmark syncing services like Foxmarks because I felt like this would only encourage me to perpetuate my disorganized shitpile rather than lick it into shape, and this needs to change soon.

A particularly mucky sump in my bookmarks toolbar was the folder I’d called “To Blog”, where I would happily drag links with every intention of blogging them but then blithely continue surfing and never get round to writing the entry. Once the dropdown list of bookmarks in this folder reached the bottom of my screen, I ostriched my head in the sand and just stopped adding bookmarks there. To the best of my recollection, the contents of this folder have not changed since maybe 2006. But upon exploration I found there was still some good stuff in there! Just so that I can delete it with peace of mind, here it is:

Articles:

  • Grief, Gratitude and Baby Lee: Beautiful, poignant article about perinatal hospices. I hope people know that the anti-abortion community isn’t actually all about murdering doctors and hating on women.
  • Soulseeking: From now-defunct (and sadly missed) Stylus magazine, Nick Southall writes about the conundrum of loving music so much that you sometimes forget how to love it, something I’ve grappled with for years. In 2005 when the article was written, there were definitely some readers of this blog who would’ve identified with it. I’m not sure if they’re still here any more but if the article resonates with you, holla.

Poetry:

Photography:

I only mentioned File magazine once here before but loved way more photographs than I linked to at the time.

Moo, Bamboo And You

I’m post-processing some photos with the intention of ordering postcards from Moo. (Wanna discount code, anyone? If you haven’t bought from them before and buy using the code EA2A2G before Jan 31, you get 20% off and I get a Flickr Pro account to replace my expired one, so it’s win-win.) And since the last time I asked you all for photography feedback the results were so interesting, I thought I’d get your views again.

Which version of this photo (snapped in the Arashiyama district of Kyoto) do you prefer? And if you were processing it, would you increase the contrast between the ray of light and the dark of the forest more than I have? Any other feedback on the photos or the processing is totally welcome, of course!

Ray (colour)

Ray (black and white)

Bridging

2009 has started with lots of small happy things for me, though it’s quite possible that a notable feelgoody achievement for me is a non-issue for someone more active and productive. Writing a letter, as in with a pen, on paper, to be sent in the post! Completing my Chiang Mai photobook only 2.5 years after the relevant holiday! Watching girls viciously beat each other up in a muay thai tournament at Golden Mile, while some of the best fried chicken I’ve had in a while (Diandin Leluk’s) was still travelling to my fat ass!

I wanted to add a photo to this entry to break up the text overload here lately, and with apologies to the boys, it’s not going to be the girl-on-girl action. Instead, here’s my favourite picture from another happy thing I started the year with, a night visit to the Southern Ridges aerial walk:

Follow the yellow bridge road
Follow the yellow bridge road

Fluffoshop

I’ve been going through some of my old digital photos lately, partly to clear more space (40GB was plenty in 2003 but doesn’t go far these days), and partly because it’s beyond ridiculous that I’ve hardly printed a single photo since going digital.

Also, I’m intending to test out a few photobook services and eventually pick one to do a wedding photobook with. It’s one thing to be a chilled non-Bridezilla and it’s another to be more than a year past your wedding and shamefacedly explaining to kind-hearted inquiring relatives that no, we don’t have an album to show them yet, yes, we could have ordered one from our photographer but no, we didn’t because we wanted to control costs and DIY it, and yes, it’s pretty lame when the end result of “controlling wedding album costs” = “no wedding album to speak of because we spent too much time sitting on our asses watching Dexter”.

Anyway! I decided to use old holiday photos to do the test photobooks because I thought I would be less likely to descend into a little pit of perfectionism with those. Of course, then I just happened to discover that ingenious people have found ways to use Curves with Photoshop Elements and install Photoshop actions to do all sorts of neat things which I can’t be bothered to do manually. (None of this is possible with the default setup of my antediluvian Photoshop Elements 2.0, though I’m fully prepared for some of you to gently inform me that this life-changing Photoshop Elements revelation is really the equivalent of celebrating the invention of vacuum cleaners because previously I would have had to suck dust into my mouth and spit it into the bin.)

So I’ve been tinkering away happily and experimenting with stuff beyond the simple Levels – Unsharp Mask – Save For Web workflow I used to stick to. Here’s a little dog I photographed in Chiang Mai but never showed you because my Chiang Mai entries didn’t go beyond day 2. He’s not the most accomplished and sophisticated example of what I now hope to achieve with my radly haxXoRed Elements, but he is the only example I found myself petting with my mouse cursor.

Kansai: Day One (Miyajima)

Japan being Japan, we progressed incredibly efficiently, with excellent customer service every step of the way, from landing to baggage collection to sending our larger bags to our Kyoto hotel via the takuhaibin to collecting our Japan Rail pass to advance booking our train tickets to Takayama to sitting comfortably in the train to Hiroshima, watching the ticket inspector bow to the entire carriage before he started checking people’s tickets. I’ve decided it’s dangerous to go to Japan too often; when stuff is this effortless it makes you too soft to deal with the rest of Asia. Especially when you’re eying Laos for your next holiday (ulp).

After a quick 500Y udon lunch at a vending machine restaurant on the Hiroshima station platform, we hopped on another train to Miyajima-guchi, where we would take the ferry to Miyajima, our ultimate destination for the day. It is a sacred island to the Japanese, famous for the view of the Itsukushima Shrine’s torii (symbolic gate, it’s the red thing in the photo above) at high tide, AND IT HAS TAME DEER ROAMING THE STREETS. Of course, while planning our itinerary, I pretended to Alec that I was deeply interested in the religious and cultural aspects of the island.

NOW CHECK OUT THE DEER!

Miyajima Deer

Deer under a tree!

 

Deer in the bicycle lot!

 

Deer scratching its neck!

 

MUMMY AND BABY DEER! (The fawn kept trying to suckle by sticking its nose in between its mother’s legs as it trotted along behind her, which slightly disturbed my happy Bambi reverie.)

 

You are probably wondering how Alec managed to keep his lunchtime udon in his stomach in the midst of all this cuteness. It was tough on him, definitely. Here (visible to Flickr friends) is a very bored Alec stuck between mummy deer, fawn, and two little dogs. Don’t ask about the bacterial umbrella.

Eventually, once I had grudgingly accepted that stuffing the fawn into my overnight bag would be unwise, we continued our walk to Momijiso, our ryokan. We didn’t stay in any ryokans on the Tokyo trip since Alec was travelling for work that time, so we were glad to finally get the opportunity with this trip. In the price bands given by Japanese Guesthouses (a very useful service that helps non-Japanese speakers book ryokan rooms), A being the most expensive and D the cheapest, Momijiso is a C. So our room “only” cost us 33,000Y per night. You can do the math here, just try not to scream.

But hey, the trip was meant to be a belated first wedding anniversary celebration, and for the most terrifyingly priced accommodation we’d ever been in, at least it came with a lovely view onto the park, a carp pond just outside our window, two meals and a delightful obasan.

 

After freshening up, we took the ropeway up Mount Misen. We didn’t have time to hike up to the highest summit, but the views were pretty nice from what we did manage. The promotional pamphlet for the mountain is quite amusing – it lists a few things as among the “seven wonders of Misen”, but then clarifies that you can’t see them because they’re dead. The Ryuto-no-sugi is “the great cedar from which mysterious lights on the sea can be seen”. It’s now dead. The Shigure-zakura is a cherry tree which, on a fine day, “alone remains wet – seemingly caught in a rain. Can’t see the tree now because it has been dead.”

 

Dinner (included in the price of the ryokan room) was a spread of delicious home cooking by the aforementioned obasan – tuna, salmon and sea bream sashimi, cold tofu, lotus root with jellyfish, shrimp in light vinegar, grilled lobster (I’m allergic to lobster, so Alec got my lobster and let me eat his sashimi), sea bream in miso sauce, beef with green peppers and bamboo shoots, and for dessert, Japanese-style cheesecake and some of those huge amazing Japanese grapes where the juice tastes like wine when you bite into them. Here’s yukata-clad me (visible to Flickr friends) with just some of what we ate.

Miyajima at night is a far cry from its touristy daytime. Everything closes – no restaurants or bars are open because any tourist on the island eats in their ryokan.

 

The streets are largely empty except for a handful of strolling ryokan guests and the island’s nocturnal animals. A deer chased Alec 20m down the street after he bought an ice cream, and we also saw a tanuki! On the banks of the river, in the path of a powerful spotlight, a huge exhibitionist spider had made itself a helluva crib.

 

I didn’t see the big deal about Miyajima’s famous torii when I read about it in the guidebooks or saw pictures online. But in real life, gazing in the Miyajima evening calm at the bright red illuminated torii, its reflection rippling across the dark waters, was the moment I really felt like our holiday had begun.

 

Tokyo: Day Two

In usual EPIC FAIL style, apart from never completing any travel blog series of entries I’ve started (or never even starting any at all, for Sarawak, Siem Reap and last year’s UK/Ireland) and wholly failing to write anything here about the awesomeness of my last three birthdays, my wedding or my honeymoon, I just realized while packing for tomorrow’s trip to Japan (to Kansai region and the Takayama festival this time), that for our February trip to Tokyo, I only managed to capture a few hours on the day we arrived!

So in a comically pathetic attempt to improve this record, I now present: DAY TWO of Tokyo!

We were lucky enough to be able to meet up with the closest thing we had to a local expert, our old hallmate Hsien Li, who was in Tokyo for a one year research stint.

After morning mass at the Franciscan Cultural Centre near Roppongi, she took us to Gonpachi, which, depending on who you believe, was either an actual filming location for the teahouse in Kill Bill or merely Tarantino’s inspiration.

 

Happily ensconced in our booth, we caught up with Hsien Li over nice inexpensive food (Frommer’s is so right when it says that from the outside you expect this place to be much more exclusive than it is) and lots of ocha.

 

Sated, we hopped on a bus to Shibuya, which is exactly what one expects it to be like from TV, and walked through it to Yoyogi Park. I tried out my A650IS’s swivel screen at a flea market we passed along the way.

 

The Sunday atmosphere at Yoyogi Park was great, with lots of bands strategically spaced out along the pathways, tinny-amp-sound-projection-length apart, some clearly dressing and performing to be noticed, others earnestly performing boy-band J-pop.

 

Tokyo’s rockabilly boys and girls were also out in force, and we joined their crowd of very entertained onlookers for quite some time.

 

Encircled by our gawking, they danced completely without self-consciousness, sometimes interacting with each other as they struck poses and whooped when a new favourite song started playing, sometimes absorbed in their own personal enjoyment of the music. It was pretty delightful to watch.

 

These rockabillies sure don’t do things by halves.

 

Hsien Li and Alec finally managed to tear me away from the rockabillies and we headed to the famous bridge where the Harajuku kids congregate. It’s an interesting experience being there, not quite like what I expected. I’d always assumed the sole motivation for dressing up like that and turning up there was to see, be seen, and pose for tourists, or else why not hang out with your friends somewhere more pleasant and spacious than the side of a bridge? But although they tolerate the crush of tourists jostling to photograph them, most of them are far more focused on their own little social groups and don’t play to the cameras at all.

 

Of course, I joined the throng of tourists too. This photo has garnered more views on Flickr than any other from my Tokyo set so far, probably because before a Flickr commenter informed me that the girl on the left was cosplaying the guitarist of Dir en grey, I just assumed the girls were gimps and tagged the photo accordingly.

 

Elsewhere along the bridge: a “Free Hugs” girl, a swarthy middle-aged man facing away from the pedestrians and into the road, blasting U2 on his boombox and screaming along in Engrish even though his voice was so hoarse it was nearly gone, another guy in his 20s/30s dancing wildly to music on his headphones which no one else could hear. Again, I know nothing about J-rock or cosplay iconography, so I have no idea who this girl on the right is. These living dead sure dress nattily though.

 

You’ve seen this one before, but I still love her so I have to include her here too.

 

It’s amazing how the tranquility of the Meiji shrine is only minutes’ walk away from the madness of Harajuku, in the middle of a forest. It was the first of many Japanese temples and shrines in muted green and weather-beaten wood that I soon realized I liked much better than their gaudy Chinese equivalents.

 

There was a wedding in process at the shrine. Although I’d initially thought none of my photos of the wedding procession would be any good because I was reluctant to charge forth and get too much in their faces, I somehow like how this one turned out, especially the beautiful expression on the bride’s face.

 

After this, we parted ways with Hsien Li, who had been a marvellous guide and incredibly tolerant of my incessant photo taking, and went to the Ukiyo-e Museum to try and understand what the big deal is about Japanese wood block paintings. Apart from the process of production, which clearly requires great skill and dedication, I unfortunately still find the aesthetic of the finished products rather unappealing.

Much walking, some gleeful cosmetics and toiletry buying for me, and a Maisen tonkatsu dinner later, we were ready to call it a night. But this first real day in Tokyo had done serious battering ram damage to the anti-Japan fortress I’d built in my prejudiced heart. The days that were to follow continued this assault. Oh and lastly, photoblogging a trip to Japan just wouldn’t be properly done without documenting some kawaii. We spotted this more than life-sized snow couple along Omote-sando. KAWAII!!!

 

The Dancing Sky (National Museum of Singapore Night Festival)

The National Museum has cottoned on to the truth I have always known – that crowded outdoor events during the heat of the Singapore day are invariably miserable sweat-sodden affairs – and organized a rather delightful Night Festival instead. Here are some photos from The Dancing Sky, last weekend’s performance art spectacular by Italy’s Studio Festi. I haven’t a clue what any of it meant but it sure was pretty. I was in a rather bad position for photos and other people’s photos on Flickr are much much better, but I’m still happy enough with what my darling F31fd managed handheld.

The first half of the performance used the museum building as backdrop. There was a huge flying sailship and a grand piano that soared through the air complete with dancer on its lid, but unfortunately my photos of those weren’t very good.

 

The second half was set in the Singapore Management University garden, and it started with the projection of images onto a screen of water in the centre of the garden, like so:

After this, performers appeared on platforms dotted around the perimeter of the garden. A good place to watch all these performers was the centre bit where the water screen had been earlier, so that’s where I stood to watch this girl dancing:

Shortly after I took the above picture, the water screen came on again without warning, so I spent the rest of the event looking like an extremely low standard entry into a wet T-shirt contest.

Photo Walk: Tanjong Pagar Plaza

I was depressed two Saturdays ago about my DJ classes ending, so I distracted myself from that by revisiting an older hobby – photography. The DJ school is near Tanjong Pagar Plaza, an old public housing building with lots of activity in its communal spaces on a Saturday afternoon, so I went on a little photography expedition there. I generally prefer blog entries with a few well-chosen photos rather than a slagheap of mediocre ones, but at the moment part of trying to get myself back into the photography habit is to be a bit less of a damn perfectionist. (Essentially, I accumulate photos, but procrastinate on processing them or printing them because I make the excuse that they’re still not quite good enough.) So here goes, a bunch of passable but not outstanding photos, which are hopefully still better than posting nothing!

This was taken hurriedly on the way to class so it doesn’t have the best composition, but I still like its odd collection of elements – outer shell of the disused Yan Kit Road swimming complex in the foreground, beautiful old shophouse in the bottom right and the towering half-constructed Pinnacle@Duxton blocks in the background.

 

The first two floors of Tanjong Pagar Plaza are a mix of little shops, some self-consciously modern and others which look as if they haven’t changed in twenty years.

 

I just totally loved that illustration on the sign.

 

The shops enclose a tiled quadrangle full of benches and greenery. Everyone’s down here on a Saturday afternoon, anxious crowds spilling out of the Singapore Pools betting outlet, cooks washing vegetables in huge plastic tubs, middle-aged men shooting the breeze, and one sweaty photographer trying to be as unobtrusive as she can.

 

In another country I might refrain from this photograph for fear of exploiting the image of a homeless person. But in Singapore, I’m pretty sure he just decided the shaded bench was cooler for napping than the inside of his flat.

 

Time for a quick poll! Which of the following two photos of the old men playing chess do you prefer, and why? I couldn’t decide, so asked my colleagues and got different, thoughtful answers about each photo. I’d be interested in hearing your views too.

This was a quick snap in very dim lighting so it’s not very sharp and could be better composed, but I processed and posted it to remind myself of what is possible with the Fuji F31fd’s amazing low light capability. If I were using my other camera (the Canon A650IS, also beloved but for different reasons), I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t even be usable.

 

I had fun taking these photos! Gotta do it more often.

Tokyo: Smoke Break

Back from Tokyo, and it was awesome! Unfortunately, immediately upon returning I have been catapulted into a work shitpit, so I can’t do much updating at the moment. In the meantime, maybe you might enjoy chilling with my Harajuku girl while waiting. I’m printing her out and sticking her to my wall at work this week to remind myself (a) that I was just on holiday, and (b) to breathe.

Harajuku Girl

Bumbly Baubles

Just to show you I’m not full of shit with my resolution 1 of 2008, I took a bunch of photos of the jewellery I made towards the end of 07. I started out with my whole “making stuff” initiative by making marble magnets, which went pretty well (even got my colleagues hooked!) but they’re harder to photograph because of the surface reflections on the marbles.

I like jewellery making because at its elementary stages it needs very little artistic ability, just a finicky nature that makes you care about how neatly you are twisting your tiny bit of wire around your other tiny bit of wire. I’m not entirely adept at that yet, which is why I have taken the opposite approach to conventional product photography in the following photographs. Instead of focusing on showcasing the product by keeping backgrounds and other details simple so as not to distract from the exquisite workmanship of the jewellery artist and the evocative beauty of the sparkling stones, I have exploited various pretty things in my home in the hope of camouflaging my flawed work and cheap-ass beads.


First ones I made. Background appropriately shabby chic, emphasis on shabby.

Closeup

Closeup

The toy cars are about 30 years old!

Woot, a set!

An absolute bitch to make.

My favourite photo, because I drank the wine afterwards.