Rama Llama Bang Bang

I was very happy with the kind comments I received on the Tiong Bahru Uncle photos as I thought they affirmed the refinement of my aesthetic and my maturation as a photographer and artist. My recent Tokyo holiday helped hone my eye even further, with the avant-garde sensibilities of the city inspiring me to envision the spaces of everyday life in new ways, and opening my mind to the nuanced dimensionalities of existence.

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So, here’s my favourite thing I bought in Tokyo.

New Bathmat

Wallpaper* magazine, don’t call me, I’ll call you.

Gettin’ Down To Catchin’ Up

Perhaps my longest absence ever, but let’s look on the bright side, I probably won’t disappear like this again till the divorce. I’ll leave gushing about the wedding & honeymoon to future posts – the point of this one is just to flex long-idle blog muscles (ow ow ow) and reassure you that now I’m married I no longer have to spend quality time with Alec on stuff like meaningful conversations and showing love and support. I can instead devote myself to aimless websurfing, calculating how many maids I can afford to sub-contract for that whole child-rearing thing and generally letting myself go.

(Kidding! I’ll just make Alec pay for the maids.)

(OK, OK, still kidding! It’s just that jokes like these don’t seem to go down very well with people when we make them in real life so I’m using this as an outlet.)

Since returning from our honeymoon we’ve unfortunately had to work pretty long hours. Spare time has been spent converting a tall ang moh’s “gentleman’s-club-influenced” bachelor pad into a marital home capable of housing a small Chinese wife with crippling Internet addiction and a penchant for bright colours.

Now that the teabags are no longer stored 2m off the ground, our next priority is making sure everyone who helped with our wedding knows just how grateful we are, because distracted thank yous and hastily dispensed gifts on our wedding day are really not enough.

And once that’s sorted, we’ll finally, hopefully, get some time to reconnect with all our personal joys again before we become one of those boring couples whose main interests are each other. I’m so out of touch with music at the moment that I don’t even know who the latest overhyped mediocre Internet indie sensation is, and Alec hasn’t worn spandex in public for months. And as for you, dear readers, if there are even any of you left, please keep popping in! I can’t pretend I just write this for me – if I did, I’d keep it on my hard drive – and although I’ll need to put in some work to make it worth your while to keep reading, I’m really hoping you won’t give up on me just yet.

Ornament

We found this a couple of weeks ago on our second visit to the Bukit Timah Salvation Army store and just couldn’t leave without it. I believe in home decor speak he could be described as a conversation piece, you know, like a Philippe Starck product or an ornate family heirloom.

Installation

I had wall space to fill and a collection of prints and postcards to fill it with – various Eschers (Reptiles, Concave And Convex, Relativity, The Tower Of Babel), Guernica, one of Picasso’s mutations of Las Meninas, Dorothea Tanning’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Jack Yeats’ For The Road, a photo of Cornelia Parker’s Cold Dark Matter and that Flandrin I really love.

The Eschers and Picassos are black and white, the others are in vibrant colour. I had this vision of connecting the black and whites to radiate outward like spokes from a hub, and then surround their tips with the coloured prints. I worked assiduously on the arrangement, Blu-Tacking, sticking, checking for crookedness and congruence with surrounding prints, re-arranging where necessary. Finally, I stepped back and surveyed my work proudly, convinced that despite a congenital lack of graphic or spatial talent, I had indeed come up with something artistic here.

It was a huge swastika. I took it down.

Flat Chronicles: Kind Of Settled In

The domestic pleasures I’ve been enjoying lately don’t really make for sensational blogging, but I’ll write about them anyway.

  • Central heating finally works (Yay Alec for figuring it out!). Temperature in flat thankfully no longer the same as temperature outside.
  • Basil plant well-recovered from its downward spiral into dessication. (Out of desperation we absolutely drenched the soil with water.)
  • Carpenter’s finally fixed curtain rods (no more fear of death by falling-curtain-rod-concussion) and adjusted height of shower bracket (no more fear of hypothermia while soaping). You’d think the automatic objective of anyone putting a shower bracket into a wall would be to put it at a height at which the shower head could actually be put into it, but apparently not so with whoever did it for this flat. Unimaginable joy last night with the realization that I could actually have warm water cascading down me while I soaped, instead of doing so shiveringly while I clenched the shower head between my knees.
  • Bookcase and shoe-rack finally assembled. Shoe-rack relatively simple with only one kind of nail used, but bookcase very complex with multiple screws involved. Much loud cursing when I discovered, after building the whole bloody thing, that the unvarnished side of one of the wood shelves was facing outward rather than towards the wall, but will think up inventive ways to either cover it or exploit it artistically.
  • Very importantly, we have unlimited Internet access. Downloading has begun, along with associated time-suckage, loss of ambition, eventual ruination of lives etc.

I also forgot to mention before, that not content with perpetrating navel-gazing, geekness and chronic social dysfunction only in my own person, I introduced my flatmate Tamara to the joys of Blogger. Unveiling of our new kinky FlatmateCam soon to come. Well, not really, given that we spend most of our time eating, drinking and girltalking, which I suppose isn’t particularly arousing.