Door Gift

Last week J and I found a box of old Christmas decorations he bought before we'd even met. It was only after putting some of it out on the door to our flat that it occurred how sad it must make Boy #106 and Girl #15 look - home alone clutching the iron gate while the body-less snowman twirled above their heads in the monsoon weather. Perhaps some kid in our block (we discovered later it was the 9 year-old niece of our neighbour upstairs) felt this way too, because last night, she slipped this painting under our door.


company for the home alone kids this new year's eve with Mr Cross-eyed, Lil' Fearful, and Ms Those-Aren't-My-Friends

friends, whoever it is you will be with this evening - you, them, him, her - amps wish you good company.

More than bricks and mortar

I've never before been near or inside a building designed by Pritzker Prize winner Frank Gehry. Since the Sentosa "Integrated Resort" ultimately did not go to Kerzner & Capitaland with their Gehry bid, the chances for that now are even more remote.

Of course, Gehry's recent freeform and curvaceously faceted buildings, such as the Guggenheim Museum at Bilbao and the Disney Concert Hall in LA, have attracted a good amount of love and hate. In the same way, one of us islanders had described his design for the Sentosa IR as "a wad of wet tissue", while another, a "lantern" (I reckon it looks like a lion fish - which, if true, is a great literal dig at the Merlion!). Well, at least it was a design that stirred some imagination and inspired opinion. Give me architectural tissue or lantern anytime instead of Universal Studios...

What led me to think about Gehry was a random link to this Interview with Gehry in the Opinion Journal. Even if you don't know who Frank Gehry is, it's an interesting read for what it says about a man - and death. Or rather, what facing death may say about a man.

The interview cites his famed ignorance of computers, his reliance on teams of engineers and architects and this:

Then apropos of very little in particular, he says, "What I am interested in is, since it's 150 people here and a lot of people's lives and futures depend on it, how do you create a succession?" Again Mr. Gehry sounds passionate. "There's a way to leave it and pull the plug and I am fine and they"-referring to his employees-"lose." As part of managing for his own death, Mr. Gehry has been trying to build the public personae of the people who work for him, trying to direct some of the limelight that seems always oriented towards him in their direction. In the catalogs and exhibits devoted to his work, he makes sure to mention the people who worked with him on his various projects.

The interviewer calls this Gehry's "old fashioned virtue".

Some nights ago as J and I walked out of the cinema after watching Curse of the Golden Flower, the conversation wandered from the emperor's "necessary" tyranny to how things should be IF J, one day, have employees.

Our conclusion was that the "old-fashioned virtue" of Gehry's is something that must be pursued. Of course, Gehry's approach can be understood as anachronistic because succession is seldom an issue today. The mark of success is being able to sell off your company for a huge profit as soon as possible. Quick and easy. And it is both "old-fashioned" and a virtue because the workplace tells you that aggressive self-marketing is what keeps you successful, not letting others - much less your employees - steal your limelight. So in contrast to all this, while Gehry may have a parent's obstinate insistence on knowing what's good for you, he seems a good man for having a parent's wise, loving generosity.


image by J

And as usual, J has a more succinct way of putting all this: (taken from his flickr)visited a client today. an italian. he told me that he wants to help other succeed. Hence, he always beileve in giving his employees, those who show potential, opportunities to learn his culinary skills. and even to give his employees reasonably good (by local standards) renumeration packages. Local bosses, learn, learn. This should not be a world where you pay $1 to someone, and you intend to squeeze $1.20 from them. This should be a world when someone ask for $1, give them $1.20. They will give you $2 back. pay-it-forward, so they have beautifully coined this act of generosity. :)

blessed

Friends, amps wish you a blessed Christmas - albeit belatedly - and give you this drawing by J/TOHA in his inimitable freestyle, about insatiable appetites and the real blessing that we may therefore miss.


click for flickr view

And in keeping with this theme, our favourite presents this year include a small container of "A Hot Hot Rub for Aches & Pains" from cousin KM that promises to also "Conquer All Demons" (!) and a faux gold plaque from an aunt that declares for us "Christ is the Head of this Home".

A time to live and a time to -

image by J

Y: Hey, do you notice that there's always more funerals and wakes held in the void deck in December? More people die in December yah?
J: Oh yah.
Y: I wonder why...maybe it does actually get colder in December and old folks are weaker so they will fall sick and get pneumonia?
J: Yah, that makes sense.
Y: Or maybe it is psychological...you know, December is a time for reflection, and old people, they look back on another year that has passed and that the new year is approaching, maybe they grow tired or think that it is time to go -

On our small tropical island, sometimes it feels like nature does not offer many reminders of the rhythmns and seasons of time and life. The trees shed their leaves all year round, it rains or drizzles without seeming pattern, humidity is a heavy monotony to bear, and the weathergirl never quite tires of reading the temperature range of 26 to 33 degree celsius (someone in the office once joked that we do have seasons - aircon and outdoors). But in the last few days I am reminded how the coming and going of the monsoons, however less dramatic than their Indian manifestations, however unexceptional, do mark our small island's years.

In one of my favourite Hou Hsiao Hsien films A time to live and a time to die, the audience views from a distance (literally, given the number of long shots) the life of a 50s taiwanese family nearly transplated from and the barely perceptible rhythmns of their life. We do not know how many years have passed in the film, except that the children very slowly but surely have grown taller.

I remember in the last scene of the film, we see the narrator's grandmother lying on the tatami floor by the porch, seemingly taking an afternoon nap on a hot and humid summer day. And in that oppressive stillness, the narrator slowly comes to realise from a trail of ants by his grandmother's silent body that she has passed away.

2-in-1 saturdays

click pic for larger view in flickr. J/TOHA coloured this drawing as well. For his version, click here

It's always hard drawing kids on the train since they can't ever keep still. Even when they do, they are always quicker to notice you. And unlike adults, who will pretend that they are not aware of you (or that anyone would even think of sketching them), kids have no qualms about making their knowledge obvious and staring back. But this girl was sitting quiet in the pram. She looked way too old to be still pushed about in the pram. She stared vacantly ahead and did not fidget. Occasionally her eyes would move, but not her head which was supported by a child-sized pillow.

After a good afternoon of kueh pie tee and wine with colleagues at my boss's apartment, J and I spent the rest of the day with Ma J at the hospital. These 2 halves of the day could not have been more different.

By 9 or so, most of the visitors to the hospital had left. Some patients had turned off the lights by their beds and were asleep. Others, like Ma J, kept their eyes open - even if only the narrowest - perhaps afraid to be left alone once they gave any indication of sleep.

Right beside Ma J's bed was a wall of windows. The view from the 9th floor this side of the hospital was completely un-blocked - there was not any highrise buildings. There was the hospital driveway, a field, some old barracks or houses (now an old folks home) and clean stacks of private apartments in the middle distance and beyond. Traffic was sparse and considerate on the quiet side roads. And this being a Saturday night, not many windows on the apartment blocks were lit. Those that were gave out a warm orangey glow, the kind of light you imagined people would slowly dance to or doze off in as music played.

As I stood by these windows looking out, a constant December breeze on the skin and the very last of the wine leaving my head, there was a calm and a comfort. Perhaps like me, you would say that the view was peaceful. But if you were a patient lying beside these windows looking out - maybe a bedridden patient like Ma J - I wonder if this view was not one of the loneliest, the December wind through the hospital's woven blanket a cold companion.

Review/ Skincare: Origins - Comforting Solution

I used to have good skin until puberty came and I have my first boil.. The rest was history and I've had senstitized skin since then.

This is my first Origins product since I first started in 2003. I'm already in the x bottle as of now. This product has a very gingerly, zesty smell which took awhile for me to get used to it and soon I fell in love with it.

Frankly speaking, I dont really feel that this product does anything for my skin except for the smell and the placebo effect it has on me.

* Picture source from Origins Website*

the cosmopolitan vs the homebody

image by J

J/TOHA writes: One of my japanese class lecturers used to call me "cosmopolitan". Frankly, I don't know why. That was a huge word for me! Anyway, I have been reading a bit about design and the world of creatives. And it seems that one of the most commonly quoted source of inspiration for these folks is travelling. As I have an extremely sensitive nose, I cannot endure long flights, since my nose would be all clogged up and my throat will become extremely dry. So the furthest I have ever been to is Japan. But I have been thinking about travelling quite a lot these days. Maybe because it is the end of the year. Or maybe the cosmopolitan in me is calling.

There are many types of travellers. Some feel the need to see every significant historic and cultural site, taste every possible local dish. The supermarket traveller. Some like the thrill of adventure and seek out only the most exotic and the most obscure. The trophy traveller. Others desire the luxury afforded only to the foreigner: the ancient massage technique, the flowered bath, the doorman's bow, the Louis Vuitton suitcases. The sahib traveller.

All are not, by dictionary.com's definition, truly cosmopolitan. Perhaps the real cosmopolitan is the business traveller - he is at home anywhere in the world, because he is most often everywhere but home.


image by J

When J and I travel, aiyah, we are most unadventurous! We do the very things we would in Singapore. We take the public transport in order to walk aimlessly around a certain district or to look for connections with what we already know - a film we have watched, a book we have read, a song we have heard or a reference found in any of these. So we end up in sometimes rather unexciting places. A quiet neighbourhood with housewives. A street where the only activity observable are art students taking a break on the college steps. An expired park with dry fountains. Then at the end of the day we stake out a cafe and sit for hours. If we are lucky, we strike up a conversation with someone. If not, we doodle or chat. We then usually return to the cafe or the same street everyday - as if eager to sink roots.

Us amps are definitely not cosmopolitans; we are homebodies! And perhaps we travel hoping to find in a foreign place an even stronger sense of home. Friends, what kind of traveller are you?

who's more tired - mama or her cat?

After a Saturday playing cleaning lady for J's ampulets studio while he played IT technician trying to overcome some ridiculous Mac/Intel/Adobe bug, we visited the mentally and physically exhausted Ma J at the hospital before rushing to catch Theatre Practice's re-staging of the late Kuo Pao Kun's play Mama Looking for her Cat.

Mama Looking for Her Cat was first staged in 1988. It is often referred to as the first multilingual play in Singapore. From watching a short clip of that original staging screened as part of Saturday's new staging, how I wished I was in the 1988 audience!

In the 1988 staging, Sasitharan (current director at the Theatre Training and Research Programme ), played an old Indian man Mama bumped into while searching for her cat. It turns out both of them are in a similar predicament, having had their cats "chased out" by their children. Though not speaking each other's language, they gestured and "meowed" their way into an understanding. In the bare black box setting, their physical distance across the length of the stage gradually was closed (on all fours, they moved) until Mama laid an understanding hand on the old man's shoulder - resolving a very well-acted comic exchange.

Kuo Pao Kun was attuned to the fractures of Singapore culture and history. These are breaks and disjunctures the island's people and leaders have intended or had to contend with. There are the cultural break-ups with the languages, traditions and heritage of each migrant community. These accentuate generational breaks, familial tensions. There is also the fractured relationship between people and authority, as well as the break between the island's post-65 history and everything else before. In Mama/Cat, the physical absence of a cat, Mama's loneliness, the children's busy-ness, the multiple languages and the use of nursery rhymes/games - through both extremes of absence and profusion - dramatise the fractures between generations and cultures. Yet those same strategies of rhymes/games and multilingualism offer the possibility of reconciliation.

In this way Kuo Pao Kun was larger than this small island.

Watching last Saturday's staging adapted by Singaporean cast and Austrian director Martina Winkel, there were moments of simple brilliance. The multiple languages and multiple media, when simply used, worked. The simulcast with Austria, including a moving telling of a migrant Turkish family's experience of dislocation in Austria, sounded on paper a tad fussy. But it added to the performance brief stretches of emotional and narrative simplicity and silence (ah, paradox) amidst the theatre studio's noisy dramatics.

And what a noisy 1.5hrs - visually, aurally and "poetically"! The set by artist Brian Gothang Tan (with its suspended screens and multiple TVs showing a live feed of the play), the soundtrack (audience could bring music to be mixed by a DJ), the "guest appearance" by Sasitharan (who sat typing his stream-of-consciousness laments on language and national identity onto the screen) and the actors' performance... noise noise noise.

Perhaps this staging wanted to drive home the point that in 2006, the communication barriers we face are not mitigated but built by the many more channels of information and translation.

Perhaps Sasi wanted, through his palimpsest, to make obvious the analogy between the impatience of Mama's children with our wilful insistence on being cultural orphans - our disregard for the langauge of our national anthem, our national amnesia...etc etc.

Perhaps it was just a long day. So I walked out of the studio a little tired by the noise and lamenting. It was quite opposite to reading Kuo Pao Kun's script and watching that short clip of his 1988 staging where theatre itself - its process and the possibilities of engagement between work/audience/actors - seem to be able to present possibilities, not quite of healing, but at least of learning.

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Some other links on the play here:
> Malaysian arts website Kakiseni
> NLB's Infopedia page
> Ng Yi Sheng's Review at the Flying Inkpot

documenting love

image by J - from the fashion themed gallery

J and I went to take a look inside the newly re-opened National Museum this evening - and we loved it. Well, to be precise, these were what we loved:

(1) the restoration, extension and renovation works to the building by W Architects (Mok Wei Wei) with CPG Consultants. It created a sense of space we did not think was possible in Singapore - not the space that came with having miles of shopping floor, nor the empty granite hollows of our train stations. Instead, the unobtrusive glass and stone created new public spaces from or with the plastered surfaces of the 19th century building that were, consequently, at times grand, intimate or expansive. These spaces felt both storied and yet to be written.


image by Y & J

(2)the large LED wall installation by artist Matthew Ngui titled The building remembers/Remembering the building. The wall of LED lights captured and "reflected" images of the visitors standing before it, both in real time but sometimes in also recorded time. As such, there were stretches when instead of seeing your own immediate LED image, all you saw were random images instead of people who had stood before the wall seconds or minutes ago - creating these abstract patterns of bodies past and passing. When unlit, you would not guess that it was an LED light wall. All you saw was a stone-like surface of black that appeared as if it was a slice of the Fort Canning Hill behind the museum.


Y looks better in LED - image by J

ampulets reckon this wall would be a hit with the school kids.

(3) the things people wrote as a document of their lives, loves and their island's life. It may be my bias for words, but what struck me as I walked through the fascinating "Singapore Story" galleries that attempted to trace this island's history from the 13th century was the centrality and importance of writing as a record - perhaps even greater than image, taste or sound. Because the written word endures, not only physically or literally, but also as an evocation and an invocation of the past, the present and truth.


on the left is the Temasek Stone, supposedly the earliest stone text found on the island; and on the right are manuscripts of the Malay Annals which I want now, more than ever, to read - image by Y


the back of a pair of movie tickets from the 60s, on which a man/woman has written down his love - from the "film" gallery. Click for flickr view & J's translation of the text - image by J

(4) the possibility of return visits because there's really that much more to see. I especially recommend the "Singapore Story" galleries, or rather, the galleries that begin from the new rotunda extension. Go with the audio aid, which is easy to navigate and makes the entire visit so much more meaningful. The themed galleries on the second floor (on "food", "fashion", "film" etc) are disappointingly superficial, despite the profusion of fancy "experiential" displays. They pander to nostalgia, but fail mostly to scratch beyond that cosy wooly surface.

The "film" gallery is the themed gallery I enjoyed and would revisit. Maybe it is because, unlike food, film is an aspect of our modern history young islanders know the least of. Or maybe it is because films are themselves documents - unlike food or fashion, which have been presented only as objects of consumption - and have been curated as documents.


Y having tea with the colonial tai-tais - darling, that's just so yawn-making, you should go to the national museum instead

Well, the weekend's coming up - so you know now how to spend it!

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The museum's opening festival runs 2-31 December. There're film screenings, performances, and - hey, there's the history itself.

numbers

click for flickr view

Ma J gets back into the hospital for the 3rd time this year. The doctors are asking if they should send some kind of micro-camera into her body, but they are too busy to explain any further what it all means except that it costs $2k - and there's a 1% chance it may get lost somehwere in her gut!

This time Ma J is in a 6-bed ward (sb - yes, some kind of cattle class). Like the doctors who are too busy for the patients' bothersome families, it would seem that we also are too busy with our professional lives for the patients. So of the 5 beds that are occupied, 4 of the patients are accompanied by the families' domestic help. 4 ladies from Indonesia. They sit daily by the beds, assist the nurses with the changing of the patients' diapers and sheets, chitchat with the bedridden old women, give each compatriot smiles, and doze off. 3 of them actually stay over at the hospital - lying across an arrangement of peach-coloured plastic chairs. This being December, we are all glad a gentle wind sends relief constantly through the room's open windows, having found its way to the hospital in between the highrise condominiums and office blocks.