Tangled Up In Bluegrass

A few posts ago, I wondered whether there was a bluegrass scene in Singapore. Jacob didn’t know, but in typical Jacob fashion he decided to make one.

Jacob with straw hat, bandanna, dungarees and bottle of moonshine
Host with the most.

It’s a pity the photo doesn’t capture the tighty-whities visible through the open sides of the dungarees – those really drew the whole costume together. Note also the bottle of “moonshine”.

 

I wore dungarees too. I’d like to say I bought them specially for the party, being far too hip and funky to ever have such items of clothing in my wardrobe, but I can’t. First, I last wore them as recently as the age of 17. And second, I kinda like dungarees. They’re very comfy. (People on my Flickr friends list can view our double-dungaree atrocity. Please note that in this second picture we are deliberately trying to look like the products of inbreeding.) [Edit: Just to clarify, I’m happy to add anyone who knows me in real life to my Flickr friends list, though I don’t see why you’d bother if you’re not already a Flickr member – me looking retarded isn’t exactly a rare sight.]


To All The Sushi I’ve Loved Before

Eatin’ some down-home sushi on a Willie Nelson bandanna, just like we used to back on the farm.

 


Unsquare dancing

It was quite a riot. I think we all have a reserve of country music dancing skills hidden deep within us, it just takes an appropriate occasion and sufficient alcohol for them to surface.

 

Throughout the evening I was never very satisfied with the photos I was taking, because, well, it’s dang hard to photograph wildly dancing people. I either had to use the flash, which I ordinarily prefer to avoid, or settle for extreme blurriness. But you know, I think the photo below does actually capture that party quite well – happy people, clappin’ and dancin’, all viewed through an alcoholic blur.


Second Link (National Library Drama Centre, 3 Sept 2005)

It isn’t too often that I unhesitatingly plonk money down for theatre in Singapore, having previously suffered the cultural equivalent of third-degree burns with godeatgod and Private Parts, but Wild Rice’s Second Link just had too much going for it for me to pass up.

Last year, a Singaporean playwright chose and arranged a selection of Singaporean literature, which was then performed in KL by a Malaysian cast working with a Malaysian director. Last week, they brought that production back to Singapore and added its logical counterpart – a performance of Malaysian writing, chosen by a Malaysian playwright, to be performed by a Singaporean cast with Singaporean director – to round up the production.

I think the conceptual appeal of this will be immediately clear to someone familiar with the historical and cultural baggage which tends to unduly define relations between Singapore and Malaysia from time to time, and I’m glad to say that the concept was satisfyingly backed up by an abundant supply of craft. The complex, capricious relationship between the two countries gave the production an interesting foundation, the selected texts breathed life and nuance into the concept, and the truly impressive performers from both countries ensured that this promising experiment became a resounding success.

What was ultimately quite intriguing was how different both halves were, something that is only partly explained by the different contexts in which they were created. (Eleanor was specifically choosing Singaporean literature as a showcase for a writing festival in Malaysia. Malaysian playwright Leow Puay Tin had no such constraints, and chose excerpts from articles, interviews, folk-tales and songs, as well as conventional poetry, plays etc.)

Eleanor’s selection and arrangement evolved thematically and had, by and large, a serious, fairly contemplative tone. Leow Puay Tin’s was subtitled “Tikam-Tikam” (definition here), the pieces to be performed were determined on the spot by audience members picking numbers, and the whole thing therefore unfolded almost randomly apart from a fixed beginning piece and end piece. In terms of direction, the Singaporean cast set a slightly more slapstick tone and milked every joke in the texts for all it was worth, whereas the Malaysian cast exaggerated things a little less. The thing is, both styles were thoroughly enjoyable in themselves, and were made even more so by the very fact of their contrast.

Well-earned diplomacy aside, I will however say that ultimately I did enjoy Tikam-Tikam (the Singaporean production of Malaysian texts) more. Superficially, I wasn’t in the most energetic of moods, so the livelier production woke me up a bit. Also, I think the strong Malay cultural presence in many of the texts (something entirely absent in the Singaporean texts) just made them feel relatively more exotic to someone like me who doesn’t find being part of Singapore’s majority Chinese race very interesting.

In an excerpt from the autobiography of Abdullah bin Kadir, Sir Stamford Raffles’ translator, Jonathan Lim was a scream as Raffles speaking fluent but totally British-accented Malay. Mark Teh’s Daulat: Long Live was performed in the style of a delegation paying tribute to a sultan, but contained bitingly satirical content aimed at Mahathir and Lee Kuan Yew alike. For Lee Kok Liang’s Flowers in the Sky, where the poet finds inspiration for his Buddhist meditations as he hears the call of the muezzin from a nearby mosque, Gani Karim intoned that beautiful call to prayer as Jonathan Lim recited the poem. In Singapore, the call doesn’t go out directly from every mosque any more, they just play it on the relevant media channels. I was reminded, watching this, that I haven’t heard it since I was in Turkey, where hearing the call at dusk while the Blue Mosque was wreathed in sunset remains one of my most spellbinding travel memories.

Add to all this the personal ties that enriched my appreciation of the experience – curator of the Singaporean texts was Eleanor Wong (the best coach I have ever had), original director of the KL premiere was the late Dr Krishen Jit, for whom I bought lots of coffee, called lots of cabs, and generally did a lot of running around for when he came to conduct drama workshops at the CAP and have fond memories of – and the presence of sexy charismatic bald men on either side of the interval (Edwin Sumun from Malaysia, Lim Yu Beng from Singapore) and you have the best theatrical experience I’ve had since For The Pleasure Of Seeing Her Again. This production really, really needs to be given a more extended run, because three performances just don’t do its achievement justice.

The Observatory – Blank Walls Launch (Esplanade Recital Studio, 2 Sept 2005)

When I returned to Singapore from London in 2003, I was so depressed that I lost all my “overseas excess” weight effortlessly within a few months. During these, probably some of the worst months of my life, one particular night still stands out as atypical – it was the night I visited the Esplanade for the first time, fell in love with the place, and realized that there was indeed something Singapore could offer me that England couldn’t. (Granted, it’s now two years later and I can’t actually say I’ve discovered a second thing, but let’s not go into that.)

The visit in question was to see Kreidler in the Recital Studio. A local band opened for them. I had no idea who they were, or what people thought of them. I just listened. And was blown away.

That local band was The Observatory, and what an introduction they were to a scene I knew nothing about. I don’t know how long they’d been together at that point or how many gigs they’d done before that one, but I think they were fairly newly formed and don’t think their first album had been released yet. I found out in time to come that they were, well, pretty famous.

Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps portentously, since that night the band (and the Esplanade) seem to have been present at a number of the rare moments in my life here where I am actually content to live in the moment, in Singapore. So due to that almost overdramatically sentimental part of my psyche which assigns symbolic meaning to certain experiences of mine, they have become rather special to me for reasons which go far beyond the music they play.

This is why I was very happy to attend Friday’s launch gig on Friday for their second album, back in the Recital Studio where I suppose you could say it all started for me.

I’d heard many of the songs already at previous gigs, but almost all stood up strongly to repeated listening. My Whole Life is probably my favourite album track, though I tend to prefer Sea Of Doubts live.

The only two I wasn’t keen on were Finch, which I have heard multiple times live and have hated every time, and Olives, which I’m undecided about. It’s odd, I really should like Olives a lot more than I do because it sounds so Sonic Youthy, but it’s just never worked for me the three times I’ve heard it live. I feel stupid saying this, but Leslie Low’s voice is almost too nice for the song’s discordant guitars, and it ends up detracting from them for me. It sounds a little better on the album, maybe because his voice is louder in the mix there, but I’m still not fond of it. Having said that, I do think it took balls to pick one of the most challenging songs on the album as first single, and I do actually hope it does well. Maybe it’ll grow on me.

WOMAD 2005 / Blur About Bluegrass

At WOMAD last Saturday night, Asere’s Cuban rhythms proved too much for my cheapo OG shoes after one too many salsas with Kris (who is such a great lead that he can even make salsa-hata me enjoy it) and I later managed to spill a full cup of someone else’s abandoned JD and Coke completely down the front of my trousers, but really, a little sartorial despair was a small price to pay for the sheer nostalgia cheese joy of winding my ba-dee and wree-ggling my bel-ly to APACHE INDIAN.

It crossed my mind at some point during the night that although I’ve gone to 4 world music festivals by now (3 WOMADs, 1 awesome awesome RWMF) I’ve still not managed to see any live bluegrass, which is a big pity given that it’s one of my favourite types of world music. It’s a combination of missing whatever opportunities have arisen (I had to miss Foghorn String Band at RWMF because they played on the only night we weren’t attending), and there not being many opportunities arising in the first place. The festivals I’ve been to seem to feature South American music much more prominently than North American music, and bluegrass acts don’t seem to tour Asia on their own either, though given the popularity of country and western line-dancing here I’d think there might be a fairly receptive market.

I don’t actually know where I’m going with this, I’m just thinking out loud. If anyone out there can tell me anything about the bluegrass scene in Singapore (if there is one at all), please feel free!

Do Yourself In (The Arts House)

It’s a pity last Friday’s DYI was only a one-off event, because it had a great vibe to it that I wish I could experience again.

I’ve danced to a fair amount of drum’n’bass in my life, but till last Friday I’d certainly never danced to drum’n’bass on rich brown wooden floors in a building which used to be a Parliament. It’s a little hard to describe the small beautiful stage they had in that bar, and which the DJs played from that night, because I was generally so tripped out from the experience (and the heat) that I didn’t scrutinize it carefully enough. I think it had a sloping, almost mini-cathedralesque, wood-carved ceiling.

The music in the other room downstairs was less to my taste, though I did embarrass myself slightly by throwing a fit when they suddenly played Galang and exuberantly bounding to the DJs to say hello!! oh man I’ve loved this song for the past one and a half years but never heard it played in Singapore till now so thanks for playing it!!

How will I ever become a genuine hipster if I can’t even perfect the art of detached world-weary ennui?

I Not Kelong

Okay, just in case people are getting bored with my incessant yawping about how much I love London blah blah blah, I’ll mix things up a little with some local flava. The depression I always get upon returning to Singapore has rendered me boring and mopey for most of the time I’ve been back, but I did manage to drag myself out of my shell of self-pity enough to have some fun. In an attempt to be fair to Singapore, the next few posts will reflect that.

Of Indie Nights And Missing Willies

Much gratitude to Terence for telling me about Friday’s indie night at Cafe Cosmo – I usually take an arrogant pride in never relying on anyone else to tell me about cool events/albums/books/anythings, but I’d have been clueless about this if not for him. The cafe itself is a lovely place; upon first walking in it reminded me of Hideout, but after further exploration revealed model planes hanging from the ceiling, shelves of toy collections on the walls, and indie CDs for sale (apparently the cafe are sole distributors here for labels like Hydrogen Dukebox and Kranky?!), it became clear to me that there was no longer any point comparing them.

I feel a little guilty every time I subject Alec to indie nights, because conversations between people who’ve spent a decade or more obsessed with music are obviously not very interesting for people who haven’t. This time, however, Dominique was also there, and in the same boat as him. They seem to have got along well. I returned from a nice chat with Daren to be informed that they’d “lost Willy”. Apparently, Willy had been in Alec’s pocket right before they went to the bar to buy drinks, but what with Willy being “a bit small”, Alec couldn’t find him in his pants any more.

“Willy”, for anyone wondering, was a “Willy Weeder” card in the Happy Families card pack they’d been playing with. Sorry, Cafe Cosmo!

Genuine Joo Chiat?

Friday night was one of those pleasant surprises the Internet throws my way from time to time. Tony, who runs the Betel Box backpacker hostel in Joo Chiat, organised a dinner outing to PeraMakan for a small bunch of Joo Chiat enthusiasts and well-wishers he had met over the Internet – Jaclyn, who is proud to call herself a Joo Chiat girl, Emilyn her colleague and erstwhile professional pedophile bait (it’s a long story and I probably shouldn’t write about it here), Victor the engineer who spends his free time observing, photographing and filming Chinese temple ceremonies for posterity, Su Yin, another traditional culture enthusiast, and finally, me and The Ayatollah Of Joo Chiat.

PeraMakan was pretty good, but there was a mildly awkward moment during the meal when someone asked me to name my favourite Katong/Joo Chiat eatery and I stage-whispered “Actually, I really like True Blue!”¹ across the table. Despite my lack of social graces, I really liked PeraMakan’s beef rendang, Penang plum sauce pork ribs and ikan chuan chuan, although my plebeian tongue found its MSG-free bakwan kepeting soup a little flavourless. I found its seafood otak a little drier than I would like, but still think it’s a jolly good idea and would try it again. To the general outrage of my family I’m not generally a big fan of ayam buah keluak, chap chye or nangka curry so these dishes didn’t particularly delight me, but I can’t say there was anything wrong with them either. And for quite a feast, we paid only $20 each.

After dinner we walked down Joo Chiat Road for kopitiam Vietnamese drip coffee, and Victor rendered me bug-eyed and fascinated (and also thoroughly endeared by his passion for the subject) with his tales of people going into trances in temple rituals .

Finally, we made our way to the Betel Box, which is a pretty damn awesome hostel for any tourist actually interested in immersing themselves in Singapore. It’s cheap but cheerful, cleaner than most other hostels I’ve stayed in, and Tony takes his guests on food walks, nature walks and cycling tours where all they have to pay is the cost of their food or bike rental.

It’s sad that Tony’s efforts to make a great backpacker hostel in a district so rich with local heritage tend to get hindered by Joo Chiat’s sleazier denizens and bureaucratic red tape. Joo Chiat Road’s lurid signs and equally lurid women are a far cry from Keong Saik Road’s oddly harmonious mix of brothels, boutique hotels and yuppie bars, and an even farther cry from its past. The thing to note here is that removing the sleaze from Joo Chiat wouldn’t be gentrifying it and removing “authentic flavour”, it would be restoring it to its original state as a quiet haven of traditional trades and culture, and making it easier for tourists to choose Joo Chiat as a place to stay and explore in Singapore rather than the tedium of Orchard.

Having said this, while walking all the way up Joo Chiat Road on the way home after midnight, past bars redolent with alcohol and cheap perfume, “massage parlours” with girls pressed up against their glass walls, and many prospective “couples”, I never felt unsafe or even worried about taking my digital camera out to photograph this rather random collection of junk. I guess that’s Uniquely Singapore for you.

Roadside junk
Retro port-a-loo?

¹ A rival restaurant, which serves Peranakan food fit for the gods.

A Tale Of Two Free-Flows

Alley Bar’s “The Great Gatsby” party on Thursday was marketed as simulating the experience of a 20s speakeasy, but even before eleven, typical yuppie bar shite was playing instead of Duke Ellington, and the free-flow alcohol that had been promised was so impossible to lay hands on that the Prohibition experience seemed all too realistic. I had been expecting that we might perhaps have to queue or wait quite long to get drinks, but I guess I shouldn’t have assumed any sort of system existed at all – we ended up squeezed next to the bar for two hours with throngs of other people just trying to order, and only a small fraction of us ever got any drinks.

The whole exercise stank of a cynical attempt to harvest email addresses and mobile phone numbers when people signed up for the free flow, and then to drive up the profits of the other bars on Emerald Hill (almost all of which are owned by the same management) when the same people gave up on the free flow and bought drinks at these other bars instead, so as not to render their evening an utter waste of time.

So as much of a marketing/publicity exercise as I assume this was for Alley Bar, it spectacularly backfired on me. Deciding that we didn’t feel like enriching anyone responsible for such a shitty party, Ja and Ravi brought us to Bar Stop on Killiney Road instead, which I rather liked and will use for all my Orchard-area yuppie bar needs in future. Way to go, Alley Bar – your incompetence drove me into the arms of a rival.

In contrast, Home’s housewarming party on Friday was infinitely better managed, with roving beer servers walking around to replenish empty glasses. As a fairly regular patron, I didn’t feel too guilty about drinking deeply, but I hope some of the people who were just there for the free flow liked it enough to go back in future. It’s a good club and I’d like to see new faces at its various nights instead of the same bunch of us time after time.

House Of Flaming Mitres

[Preface: This is a fake flame. Fake because the author of the target post has since clarified what he meant, and I therefore bear him no hard feelings. But I’ll post this anyway because sometimes flaming is fun! (Right, singaporeslut? :P) He is, of course, totally welcome to fake-flame me right back.]

This makes me laugh. Brandon decided that because I (and a friend of his) like the Mitre Hotel, and because he doesn’t like the look of it (he’s never actually been there), this is a manifestation of “overreaching on the part of Singapore’s fashionably non-conforming youth.” Because “y’all don’t have to hang out in a shithole just cuz you’re sick of Zouk, yo.”

He discusses the issue with his friend.

They feel we fashionably non-conforming youth “duno whats cool”. (My thoughts: No one ever called me fashionable before! YAY!)

They wonder, “are they trying to rebel against the cleanliness of singapore?” (My thoughts: Dude, I’m Singaporean. Rebellion against anything whatsoever is not in my genes.)

His friend vows, “if someone brought me there i’ll kill him/her.” (My thoughts: No need. The roof might collapse and do it for you.)

And finally, “fuck them la. what they know. just sit down at void deck with 4-5 80 yr old uncles spewing stories in hokkien. everywhere oso got lor.” (My thoughts: Can! But got problem. Old uncle tells moving story in Hokkien about how he survived the war by eating cockroach exoskeletons, taught his kids to read with kacang puteh newspaper sheets, and now they are all President’s Scholars and so incredibly virtuous that none of them have even broken bond. Old uncle looks at me expectantly, waiting for me to respond. Speechless with admiration, I fumble for words, since like many young Singaporeans, although I can understand dialects all right, when called upon to speak them the right words don’t come to mind. Finally, I desperately splutter the Hokkien words I am most familiar with – “Uncle…KA NI NA BU CHAO CHEE BYE!”)

So there you have it, the real reason I go to the Mitre Hotel: I’m not welcome anywhere else.