Singapore Art Museum

I don’t know if I’d rate the Singapore Art Museum particularly highly if I were a foreigner, because it would be full of names I’d never heard of. Even visiting it as a Singaporean, most names apart from Chen Wen Hsi, Georgette Chen and Ng Eng Teng draw a blank with me. But I found myself enjoying the museum’s permanent collection more than the Rodin exhibition we’d primarily gone to see; perhaps I subconsciously prefer painting to sculpture, or modern over classical, or perhaps it was just the familiarity of paintings I’d seen before on previous visits to the museum – I don’t know. It’s three in the morning and stream-of-consciousness is about all I can manage.

I like this museum, always have. I like its retention of the simple beauty it must have had as a school, the spare elegance it still has as an art museum. Today the revelation hit me that my parents walked the same corridors I was walking down, in the days when it was St Joseph’s Institution and they were students there. They met and romanced here. It’s a beautiful place to be able to remember falling in love in, I think.

I was also struck by the thought that this awareness of a personal history can only happen for me in this country. As far as England is concerned, I didn’t exist before 1999.

Afternoon Of Poetry And Music

Saturday was Rafflesian, the morning spent judging quarter-final debates, the afternoon at the Creative Writing Club’s annual Afternoon of Poetry and Music, which I’ve attended for the past seven years or so.

APM had its usual mixed bag of poetry – some I didn’t get or didn’t like, some that could have been good if their authors hadn’t delivered them so badly, some I wished I was a good enough poet to have written, many I knew I would never be a good enough poet to write. Poems by young strangers and old friends. Lee Tzu Pheng’s beautiful and elegiac Falling Into Timelessness, which I must find and read many times more. Alfian Sa’at’s Autobiography, from that second collection I haven’t read nearly as many times as One Fierce Hour and really should sit down with soon. Musical performances which gave me varying degrees of enjoyment depending on the novelty of their repertoire and the skill of the performers. Handel’s The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba arranged for saxophone quartet, well worth watching. Ploddingly and badly played Pachelbel’s Canon, a real waste of time.

Crepes (quality good, quantity bad) at Raffles City (continuity unintended) with Terence, Yi-Sheng, Cheryl and Miss Ho. Wandering, talking, coffeeing later on, conversation that can’t really be alluded to because of the reasonably private nature of most of it, but I suppose the main point here is that I went home from the day happy and remembering why, according to the Myers-Briggs test, I am apparently an extrovert.

Food With Friends

So I finally decided to act like the social being anthropologists tell me I’m meant to be, and got a life.

Friday lunch with Vikram at a Chinese in what I think is now called H20 Zone, where our suspicions that we’d been given a tourist menu (photos accompanying every menu item) were confirmed when we peeked in another menu (which they told us was for “drinks”) and found it photoless and about $2 cheaper across the board. So we ordered our crispy baby squid (another ticked item on the summer food list) and sambal brinjal conspicuously from the photoless menu, and were charged accordingly.

Dinner with the Twins and their parents involved more ticking of the food list once they’d discovered a list existed and insisted on getting me satay and a baby coconut in addition to my chicken rice. We drifted and lounged and chatted around the Raffles Town Club pool, probably well-raisined by the time we got out to do girly things like hair masques and steam-rooms. There was the pleasant feeling of lives that had moved on and developed almost wholly independently of each other but which could still be described out of more than politeness (because we wanted to), and responded to out of more than avoiding awkwardness (because the connections that power conversation were still there). They still refer to me as “hoggie”, short for hedgehog, because I am apparently “prickly but cute.” I would have suggested just “cactus” instead myself, but suppose old friends are allowed to do things like tell me I’m cute without being killed with blunt objects.

Packrat Blues

I decided to make a start on tidying things in readiness for the move to a new family house. It’s only scheduled to take place after I’ve returned to England, but I thought I’d do what I could now to reduce the amount of my junk my family will have to pack up.

I started with the lowest compartment of the cupboard – relics from childhood – and had to conclude after going through it all that I am a packrat of the highest order; the combined effect of the dual considerations of sentimental value and but-it-might-come-in-handy-some-day is that the eraser collection (I’m not kidding) can’t be thrown away despite the fact that I would have to write out the Encyclopedia Britannica in pencil and then rub it all out again in order to actually use all of it, the Sea Monkey pamphlet can’t be thrown away even though those little ripoffs are long dead, and Strawberry Shortcake (unfortunately naked) also has to stay, because you don’t throw away Strawberry Shortcake.

But some things had to go, and so I made painful choices.

Thrown: Generic toy cars
Kept: A MicroMachines tune-up station cleverly disguised as a can of motor-oil. A small, rather pathetic Transformer-wannabe truck that in its robot form strangely resembled Duke Nukem. Five metal replicas of commercial airlines. My neighbour Roy and I used to combine our collections of planes and have plane beauty contests. We’d trundle the planes down the length of the “runway”, they’d do a turn at the end and get trundled back, and we’d score them out of ten. My Korean Air plane won many times because it was this lovely sky-blue.

Thrown: Balls of knitting yarn
Kept: Squares of knitting which I knitted every time I learnt a new stitch; a practice scarf rendered unusable by an inexplicable foray into stocking stitch three-quarters of the way through it. An unfinished square was still mounted on the knitting needles. I tried to continue it. I could remember how to knit, but not how to purl.

Thrown: Whoopie cushion, with deep regret – its rubber had melted and stuck to the box and it was a pale shadow of the fart maelstrom it once was. I loved that whoopie cushion. Sigh.
Kept: Fake bloodied bandage with nail, calculator that squirts water when you press the keys, sweet tin with leaping snakes when opened, rubber centipede, two snakes (one rubber, one plastic), replica revolver which shoots a flag saying “BANG!!!” when you press the trigger.

Book-A-Minute Odyssey

I wish I’d read the Book-A-Minute synopsis of Catcher In The Rye before I ploughed through the whole bloody thing all those years ago, because (I know I’ll probably tramp on lots of toes here) their synopsis is spot on and much less of a waste of time:

Angst angst angst swear curse swear crazy crazy angst swear curse, society sucks, and I’m a stupid jerk.

Other quality works well-showcased here are Animal Farm, Slaughterhouse Five and War And Peace.

In the SF/Fantasy section, I can also vouch for the worth of their synopses of Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World, The Great Hunt, The Dragon Reborn, and The Shadow Rising. Somewhere in the middle of book five I decided that four overly thick, repetitive books of intensely irritating characters with little or no redeeming qualities had been quite enough, and gave up in disgust – I therefore cannot comment on the accuracy of further synopses of the next, oh, ten million books in the series, but insofar as they ridicule it, they’re probably right.

I disagree with their David Eddings synopses because the Mallorean didn’t mirror the Belgariad. A more accurate approach would be to summarize the Belgariad and the Mallorean, then describe the Elenium and the Tamuli as “See the Belgariad and the Mallorean”. If you’ve never read David Eddings, this will have made absolutely no sense to you, but if you have, you will know exactly what I mean.

Terrapin Therapy

“He’s lost all interest in sex,” my mother confided. Thank God she was talking about my terrapin, and I certainly assumed she was talking about his attitude towards my other terrapin.

She was describing the symptoms of his recent malaise to my cousin, who normally doctors humans, but who’d somehow been pressed into service so we could avoid paying yet another hefty vet bill to a vet who merely gave him multi-vitamin shots and a hygiene spray clearly labelled with “Do not use on iguanas and amphibians”. (I know terrapins are reptiles, but it was hardly encouraging.)

My sister walked in and declaimed “CAN YOU SAVE HIM???!!” My brother described the trends he’d been noticing in his (the terrapin’s) stool. My father sat on the couch and shook his head slowly.

Enduring Love For Trail of Dead

The two boxes of books and CDs I sent home in early June, when I didn’t know whether I was staying or going (cue Clash song in the soundtrack of my life, ha ha), have arrived. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed Source Tags And Codes until it started distracting me from Enduring Love, which I’d been hunched over till very late the previous night.

Perhaps it was strange coincidence, but just as the album started getting better, the book started losing its momentum. An uneasy balance between ears and eyes had been maintained for the first five songs, which are “merely” catchy, but then Heart In The Hand Of The Matter came along, with its bells and crashing pianos and amazing drumming, and from then on Trail Of Dead started majorly kicking Ian McEwan’s ass.

By the time Relative Ways began, I’d become thoroughly annoyed with the book’s protagonist for his whining and paranoia, which I do think then begat more reasons for whining and paranoia for him than may originally have been likely, and I was getting depressed by the way the relationship in the book managed to spiral so suddenly out of fairly idyllic conjugal bliss into a minefield of recrimination and bitterness. On a personal level I wasn’t feeling great either. But there was something powerfully persuasive about those It’s okay passages, a sudden hushed drama in the music and the chord changes, a heartfelt earnestness in the vocals akin to how in Tonight Tonight (Smashing Pumpkins) Billy Corgan beseeches us to believe. And I always find myself believing, and so too, yesterday, everything really did feel okay for a while.

Every now and then something always manages to get under my skin sufficiently to manipulate me (even if just temporarily) despite all the cynical rationality I think I epitomize. It’s good when that happens.

McSweeney’s/Semen News

The following McSweeney’s Lists (almost always best read with no further introduction than their titles alone) amused me:

While we’re on the subject, semen is apparently an anti-depressant. Pass it on.

Celine Dion Reviewed

I have decided that every now and then on this site I should do something uncharacteristic. Branch out from the same ol’ same ol’. Stretch wings, and hopefully find myself surprised by unexpected gold at the bottom of rainbows, light at the end of tunnels, new and unhackneyed metaphors bubbling up from cesspools of cliché…

So here are some excerpts from a rather enjoyably-written review of Celine Dion’s latest album.

On My Heart Will Go On:
“The problem wasn’t so much an excess of technique, but rote excess. (Also, ever since Titanic I kept picturing Celine as the prow of a ship.) There was a primal leviathan of something, but it failed to engulf me. I felt right to be unengulfable, but not right to be ignorant about the nature of the engulfment. Twenty-eight million people can be wrong, but they’re not all likely to allow themselves to be bored.”

On lyrics:
“The sky is touched in one song, moonlight is touched in another, two songs have light in someone’s eyes, nine of the first 10 have sky or weather metaphors, rain can be cleansing but storms signify trouble, sun signifies rebirth, heaven signifies heaven, every child creates a skylight of beauty, etc”

London Levels Of Good

Every time I return to Singapore I am struck down by swollen eyes, streaming nose and horrible hair, and vanity-based gloom manages to depress me quite significantly. At the troughs of depression the flashbacks I get of London are always incredibly simple: me, on a street in London, it doesn’t really matter which street, just feeling good. This is the element of the comparison which stuns me: take a random day, time, place, and state of mind in London, and I am almost always going to be feeling better, whatever combination of those variables you come up with, than I do in Singapore.

But that’s just the explanatory prelude to Thursday. It was overcast, and the walk from Parkway Parade to the library left me pleasantly unsticky, except for the drips from my ice-cream. I walked along roads I never realized were so beautifully tree-lined until I remembered London, passed a bus stop that looks like a huge conch shell (my neighbourhood is by the sea), under an overhead bridge brimming with flowers. I was feeling London levels of good.

The library was as wonderful as it’s always been, huge glass windows letting in all the natural light that’s lovely to read by but none of the glare, students on the floor using the benches that line the windows the way I used to do my homework on our coffee table, an old man nodding off in one of the big comfortable chairs, a small earnest bespectacled boy using what must have been three family members’ worth of library cards to cart out a pile of books. I had to get travel guides to help Mum and Dad plan their trip to Ireland and Wales, so that left only two more books for me. I eventually decided on Enduring Love (Ian McEwan) and Felicia’s Journey (William Trevor), which I should be able to finish in a week at most (along with Julian Barnes’ A History Of The World In 10 1/2 Chapters which I’m reading at home).

It finally rained at night, quiet but intense rain, the sort where you look out and see sheets of water moving across vast tracts of Singapore like a purposive entity. I opened the balcony door a crack while I was reading. In the morning the pages of my book were wrinkly.