Random Joo Chiat

I’m a bit weddinged and kittened out. Here are some photos of Joo Chiat instead.

Can you believe this is just sitting in a Joo Chiat driveway? I did a double take as we walked past and Googled my hunch once I got home – yup, I’m pretty certain it’s a Ng Eng Teng work.


Another view

Peeling pillar on the five foot way

Not the best photo – I was too busy drooling in anticipation of this place’s divine otah. You can get better in restaurants, but as far as cheap street-side otah is concerned I haven’t tasted better. The site says it’s open from 7 am to 7 pm, but they’ve definitely also sold us otah before at about 3 am, which is of course when it tastes the best.

Singaporean Chivalry

Here’s a nice counterpoint to my story on Singaporean Generosity.

When I’m running late for work, I can shave 15 minutes off my hour-long commute from the East by changing buses at Fort Road. And, as anyone who knows me will not be surprised to hear, I’m running late for work pretty often.

There’s a crowd of regulars I’ve come to recognize at that Fort Road bus stop. One is a guy in his mid-twenties, tall, well-groomed without looking like he takes too much trouble over it if you know what I mean, basically quite good looking as Chinese guys go. He always has a book in hand, which he reads while waiting and also on the bus. Most recently, it was Crime and Punishment.

Two weeks ago, the bus that arrived at our stop wasn’t particularly crowded, but there weren’t any free seats. I was one of the first to board, so I walked right to the back and stood there. As the bus pulled away from the bus stop, I noticed that a heavily pregnant woman had also boarded the bus. It’s possible someone would have given her their seat if she’d walked deeper into the bus, but I can quite easily believe that her public transport experiences so far as a pregnant woman in Singapore might not have been sufficiently encouraging for her to bother trying.

So she stood right at the front next to the driver, I was standing right at the back, and the guy – let’s call him the Rare Reader – was standing about 2 metres behind her. Noticing the pregnant woman too, he turned round, tapped the shoulder of the guy seated nearest him, spoke to him and gestured towards the woman. The guy duly got up, the Rare Reader then walked to the front of the bus to let the woman know there was a seat for her, and she took her seat with a smile for both men. I, still standing at the back with my early morning grumpiness dispelled by what I’d just seen, couldn’t help thinking that if I were still in the market for dates I would have asked the Rare Reader out on the spot.

Singaporean Generosity

[Edit: I’ve made some changes to the wording of the entry, as it’s been suggested that it may have come across to some people as slanted and mean-spirited. I disagree, personally, but it’s no loss to me to change the words since my conscience is clear anyway. If the amended version changes your view of the events, feel free to say so.]

When I heard a colleague of mine had got a good bargain on a premium brand sale item which is usually quite expensive, I mentioned that Alec had been thinking of buying something similar, and asked if the sale was good. She said it was, and also that she’d gotten a $10 voucher with her purchase which had to be used on the same brand within the next week or so. Her mum had it at the moment, but if her mum didn’t use it she could pass it to me.

The following Monday, this colleague emailed me saying she’d brought the voucher, and could sell it to me for $5. She added that I could take it first, and only pay her if Alec ended up using it.

I have subsequently learned that we were operating under a misunderstanding – she thought we were going to share the cost-savings from the voucher, whereas it would never have entered my head to perform such calculations in the first place. But that doesn’t leave me any less bemused by the mindset.

I don’t mean to look gift horses in mouths, but surely I can’t be the only one who would just give a voucher like this away without a second thought? If it’s something I don’t intend to use and it didn’t cost me anything, I’d be ashamed even to charge a complete stranger for it (I’d have given it to the next person in the queue for the cashier quite happily, for example), let alone someone I know, and I’m not even a particularly generous person! (In case anyone’s wondering, this person is no worse off than me, so while not rich, she is hardly short of cash either.)

Your views? Was I unfair to have burst out laughing the moment I read her email?

Landmark

Gay’s The Word, the last gay and lesbian bookstore in the UK, is in financial difficulties (rising rent, losing out to chain booksellers etc.) and trying to raise money. Unlike the people quoted in this article I can’t pretend it had any profound influence on my life. However, when I lived across the road from it, the sight of it cheered me up on gloomy days, and it was a very convenient landmark for directing people to our flat. Also, given that I now live in a country where the main gay equality lobby group gets rejected every time it applies to be registered as a society, gay sex remains a crime on the statute books and bafflingly idiotic articles (well shredded by Jol here) about how gay porn marginalizes gay men can get printed in our national broadsheet, it is nice to be reminded that other parts of the world are not like this. If one of my London friends feels like popping the price of a pint on my behalf into whatever donation box I assume the shop has, I’ll pay you back when I see you in May. :)

1UP

I was wandering round City Plaza and spotted this shop.

I normally keep random camphone shots like this for my own amusement and don’t bother to post them here, but since I only just discovered last week that you can play Super Mario Brothers and about a million other old console games online without having to do the whole emulator thing, I figured spotting the shop might have been a karmic directive from the cosmos to share the link. Just to make sure all your lives get ruined too, you understand.

Halloween

At Ida & David’s rather fabulous Halloween party on Saturday, my favourite costumes included the Statue of Liberty, The Chinese Teacher From Hell (with the most hilariously appropriate spectacles you could imagine), and every man dressed in drag (there were several).

I have a certain bias in what impresses me in Halloween costumes. Much like my disappointment at anyone attending a Bad Taste party who doesn’t make a good-faith attempt to render themselves as outrageously fugly as they can manage, I’m not drawn to Halloween costumes where it’s obvious that the wearer still wants to look hot. As Lindsay Lohan’s character so sagely observed in Mean Girls, “In the regular world, Halloween is when children dress up in costumes and beg for candy. In Girl World, Halloween is the one night a year when a girl can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.”

So my distaste for that general state of affairs is one of the reasons Alec and me went like this.

(For the benefit of non-Singaporean readers, the costumes are loosely based on two particular sorts of characters in Singaporean society that most Singaporeans would quite readily recognize, an “auntie” and “uncle“. It’s sort of impossible to distill the essence of auntiedom and uncledom into words, but I suppose their defining characteristics would be that they are middle-aged or older, decidedly unhip and unsophisticated, but generally good people who one addresses as “auntie” or “uncle” out of respect that they’ve had more life experience than you. Having said that, these particular depictions aren’t exact archetypes either. My auntie is more dressed up than usual, she’s put on her fancy clothes for the party. Alec’s uncle, on the other hand, has come straight from the neighbourhood coffeeshops without bothering to change.)

The second reason we chose those costumes was pure laziness. All that was required to put the costumes together was for me to walk downstairs and say “Hi parents, Alec and me are an uncle and auntie for Halloween. Can we borrow some clothes?”

My parents took it pretty well. My mum found some awful jewellery (all gifts, she swears) to wear with the leopard print blouse I pulled jubilantly from her wardrobe. My dad surfaced from the depths of his afternoon nap as I was rummaging through his clothes for a singlet to mumble “You want a torn one? Look deeper inside, sure got” and “Think they might be a bit small for him. But actually, like that will be better.”

So anyway, those were our costumes and I’m glad people seemed to like them. Apart from the fun of people wearing costumes, the party also included the fun of people removing their costumes. During the night an epidemic of male stripping somehow took hold and we ended up with almost every male in the place dancing shirtless in the living room, except, of course, some of the ones in drag – since that would clearly have been conduct unbecoming of a lady.

At some point a guy dressed as a French maid burst into the room where I was chatting with some people, pulling Alec along by the hand. “Honey,” he gushed to me, “your man is SO HOT! Omigod, and so are you!” Neither Alec nor I get compliments like this very often (assuming you ignore the attention Alec receives from the local prostitutes), and usually when we do the compliments are from people who could most kindly be described as…unfussy. But this guy had great hair and makeup and his dress fit him like a glove, so we were very flattered.

I shall take my leave with an anecdote from which it is hard to continue. At some point during the night I started chatting with a group of people I didn’t know, asking about their costumes and so on. One girl was a Raggedy Ann doll, another was The Chinese Teacher From Hell, the third was a cat and the fourth a Roman whore. Last was an Indian guy, wearing what looked like brown sackcloth underneath some white drapey cloth. I asked him what he was; he said to guess.

“Gandhi?” I ventured.

“Caesar,” he answered coldly, whereupon I excused myself quickly.

Eulenspiegel

Sorry everyone, I’ve been in a cesspool of work which I have yet to clamber out of, and the weekend after Kuching flew by with judging debates, watching plays written by friends, and doing household chores. I hardly even got a chance to go to Baybeats, though what I did manage to hear of it (A Vacant Affair, Bittersweet, Panda No Panda) was really boring.

While I’m treading water in shit, you could do worse than enjoy Hammer & tickle, a rather delightful article about Communist jokes. Apart from a number of rather funny jokes (Q: Why is Czechoslovakia the most neutral country in the world? A: Because it doesn’t even interfere in its own internal affairs.) the article tells of Eulenspiegel, the East German state’s official satirical magazine. Singaporeans especially may enjoy the following quotes, though of course for no other reason than that Singaporeans have a great sense of humour.

Eulenspiegel was founded in 1954 as the state’s official organ of humour. There were no censorship laws, as the East Germans were so proud of telling the west. Instead the editors had to guess what kind of jokes were permissible. Every week the magazine carried three or four pages of anti-imperialist humour, in which capitalists in top hats counted their money, GIs enslaved Africans and doves sat atop hammers and sickles. Eulenspiegel could also print anodyne comic critiques of daily life in East Germany, as long as they didn’t incriminate the politburo. Ernst Röhl was able to write things like this: Man doesn’t live from bread and ham alone. He needs something green. And green things have been in short supply for a long time. Cabbage has been more the subject of discussion than digestion. And the Adam’s apple is the closest one gets to fruit at the dinner table. But this year Mother Nature has been particularly green. Cucumbers are no longer the shoemaker’s bribe. Onions no longer raise laughs in cabaret sketches…

People like Röhl saw themselves, rather self-indulgently, as fifth columnists, eating away at the regime from the inside. But there were limits to permissible satire. Once the cover featured “young pioneers” with long hair—a decadent western fashion. The politburo was livid, but the magazine had already been sent out, so the police reclaimed all the copies they could from newsagents and post offices. Eulenspiegel once tried to make common cause with Pardon, its West German left-wing counterpart. After all, Pardon also attacked Adenauer and American imperialism. But the editors of Eulenspiegel were stung when Pardon rebuffed their advances, on the grounds that the communist satirists should criticise their own leader, Walter Ulbricht, the same way the capitalist ones went for theirs. The editors of Euelenspiegel printed a rebuttal entitled “How do we write about Walter Ulbricht?” in 1963: “We know from various reliable sources that President Ulbricht has a terrific sense of humour… [but] the transparency and virtue of our state makes it not only difficult but simply impossible to write a satire about its representatives. Where there is nothing to uncover, the satirist will find no material. So how do we satirists write about Walter Ulbricht?… We send our greetings and best wishes to the first secretary of the central committee. We wish comrade Ulbricht health, stamina and a long life.”

This article could have been satirical, but wasn’t. Rather, it occupies the strange socialist space where the serious and the humorous are identical. Eulenspiegel was the only place where serious criticism of the state could be published. Readers wrote in with complaints about their leaking prefab apartments and so on, and there was a column called Erledigt (Dealt With) which celebrated the grievances that the Eulenspiegel had managed to redress, and often came with printed apologies from factory managers and landlords. Nothing illustrates better the inverted reality of communism: real problems could only be presented in a context of laughter, presumably so that one could always claim one was only joking. In this realm, where humour turns out to be a complex social dance, the idea of the joke as simply subversive breaks down.

Breathe And Stop

I found myself thrust upon the horns of a dilemma on the bus home after dinner the other night. The bus stank of sweaty teenage boys and BO that had triumphed despite Lynx’s most valiant efforts. On the other hand, after a meal at the Garlic Restaurant, my breath presumably stank too.

And so a challenging question of civic consciousness arose – should I breathe through my mouth or nose? The former would spare me the olfactory assault of Eau de Adolescence, but the latter would spare my surrounding passengers the feeling of sizzling in a wok while awaiting the addition of pak choy and oyster sauce.

I eventually decided in favour of the former. We were all just ingredients in an armpit stew anyway.

White Meat Diet

Alec, ranting: Every day, I eat the same ta pao¹ local food as everyone else in the office, or I walk out to somewhere like Lau Pa Sat and eat whatever takes my fancy there. But then there’s ONE day, where I just HAPPEN to be eating McDonald’s in the office pantry, and everyone who comes in says “Oh, you don’t like local food?”

Me: But I thought you talk quite a lot about local food with them?

Alec: I do! But it’s like they refuse to believe! We went for a buffet and I didn’t eat wasabi with my sashimi and everyone’s first remark was “Oh, you can’t take spicy food?” GRAAARGH!

Me: Well, why don’t you explain that your girlfriend is local and you eat everything she eats?

Alec: Oh, that’ll be no use. They probably think you’re some SPG anyway.

Me: Haha, they’ll be all like “Oh, you eat cock?”

¹ Takeaway

Ellen, My…Er…Bellen

Ellen Allien’s set at Zouk last night was cruelly short, ending just before 4, and before I’d got the chance to storm the DJ console and ask her to marry me.

Her set didn’t feature as much fembot voiceovers as I would have liked but it was still intensely, braincrushingly good for the most part. And when, during a beer break, I finally heard that wondrous disembodied voice proclaim “You…make…me…go MAAAAAAAAGMA!” I shoved my beer into Alec’s hands, raced back to the dancefloor, and went apeshit. I think anyone who drinks beer in Singapore will understand that sacrificing the first five minutes in which beer is actually cold and not nauseatingly warm should be ample proof of my love. O Ellen! How many more warm beers I would have drunk just to explore unknown trrrashsssscapes with you a little longer!

Still, in almost all respects it was a better night out than DJ T and M.A.N.D.Y. had been the previous night, except that I’d like to suggest to the dude in the striped cap that 1) it would be good to find a dance style that doesn’t involve elbowing people in the boobs and not apologizing, 2) your goatee looks like pubic hair, and 3) wearing the SAME CAP to two sweaty smoky club nights in a row is kinda gross.

Since the night ended earlier than we’d expected, we channelled our mutual lust for Ellen into supper at Arab Street. Cheese-coated chillies and almond spice smoothies are great at any time of day but when consumed while reclining on the cushioned floor of Ambrosia at 5.30 a.m., they approach divinity.