The Ultimate National Day Wish List

I was interviewed by Sinema for this. See their blog at http://sindie.blogspot.com.



Maybe I should explain that I was still wearing my costume for ContraDiction when they did the interview at 0:08. That's why I'm dressed so weird.

ROJAK 16: next Saturday night!

I'm hosting again!


It'll be on:

28th August 2010,
Saturday, 7pm
Blk 263,
Waterloo Centre,
Singapore 180263
1st storey void deck

I've been extremely behind with my updates.

But here we go:

1. I'm going to be a torchbearer for the Youth Olympic Games on Friday 13 August, roughly around 10:35am on Kallang Road, slot number 6081. You can stand by the road and support me if you like!


Announcements

Yes, I know it's ridiculous and that the YOG itself is really pretty fucked up, and the uniforms are fugly: baggy grey and orange, with clear stipulations that we are not to alter them or wear them in a non-uniform manner or promote any socio-political-cultural agenda with them while we're running.

But NAC Literary Dept asked me to be a teensy part of Singapore history, and since they've generally been pretty cool people, how could I ever say no?

2. My interview with Boo Junfeng about his upcoming film "Sandcastle" is up on Civic Life.



It's showing in Cinema Europa, VivoCity from 26 August onwards. Go early so you can convince the cinema to keep it in the theatres longer.



3. I never mentioned the fact that I've got a story up there myself: Last Kampong Boy, a brief summary of my father's memories of growing up in Tiong Bahru.



I think I'll talk about ContraDiction in a separate post.

I've done an interview with Royston Tan.

It's about his upcoming movie, OLD PLACES/老地方, co-directed with Eva Tang and Vitric Thng. It's up on the Civic Life Tiong Bahru blog, commissioned by the British Council.

The movie itself is being shown on TV: it'll be on Sunday 8 August at 8pm on Okto (wah, so many eights, must be auspicious). It's a series of personal stories told by ordinary Singaporeans about the vanishing places in Singapore.

Trailers here:







Loads of photos on the website. Tune in!

The IndigNation calendar is up!

Click here.

Including the literary reading ContraDiction SIX!

Sunday 15 Aug
7-9pm@72-13

Our annual queer literary reading is back! Curated and hosted by Ng Yi-Sheng, this year’s edition will feature writers such as poet Joel Tan, fiction writer O Thiam Chin, songwriter Amanda Tee and (hetero) guest stars Bani Haykal and Michaela Therese.

Five Foot Broadway Mini Musicals
Presented by MUSICAL THEATRE LIMITED

SIX new short musicals are performed In-Concert style, showcasing local musicals writers:

YS: I won't be around for this, so why don't you turn up and let me know how it goes?

1. MEE POK MAN (Ng YiSheng and Ting Si Hao)

2. CUPID'S BET (Darius Lim and Ken Lyen)
3. THE OTHER WOMAN (Stella Kon and Desmond Moey)
4. IL CASINO (Richard Lord and Ken Lyen)
5. ESTHER (Joshua Greene)
6. BIRTHDAY BLUES (Mohamad Shaifulbahri and Ken Lyen)

FREE Admission - Register through email MTLminimusicals.register@yahoo.com.sg .
The HALL, The Arts House
2010 July 9 FRI 7:30pm (SOLD OUT)
2010 Jul 10 SAT 2:30pm (SOLD OUT)

2010 Jul 10 SAT 7:30pm (NEW SHOW!)
Call Desmond Moey (+65) 92721648

I'll be in Europe from 4 to 22 July.

I have a press pass for the Over het IJ and Julidans Festivals in Amsterdam, then the Theater der Welt festival in Ruhr, which is part of its European Cultural Capital 2010 celebrations.


View Around the World in 80 Books in a larger map

Yeah, I'm surprised they gave it to me too. After that I'll be in Zurich for a week, working on a book.

A review of "Over There: Poems from Singapore and Australia" in Cordite Magazine

It's a short review. The weird thing is, there are only three poets mentioned in the whole thing, and I'm the only Singaporean.

Click here: http://www.cordite.org.au/?p=9719

UPDATE: How blind of me. There are four poets, and Heng Siok Tian's the other Singaporean. D'oh!

ROJAK 15! I'm co-hosting


Who: FARM
Where: Emily hill, 11 Upper WIlkie Road, Singapore 228120
When: 12.06.2010 Sat 08.00pm till 12.06.2010

It has been a long while since the last one. We have been busy the whole of last year and also spent some time moving to our new space. But now we are back with ROJAK 15!

It's happening on 12th June, Saturday, 8pm till late at a lovely shed on Emily Hill. Thank you to the good people at Emily Hill and sixdegrees for their cosy space for the night. You can see the shed in the poster, taken by Jeremy San! Thanks Jeremy :)

For directions and a better view of the space, you can download the poster here.

Kelvin Ang and Ng Yi-Sheng will join us once again as the hosts for the night.

Our presenters for the evening, in no particular order:
1. MINDWASABI, Design Strategy
2. Rage Goh, Poetry
3. Nataliette, Illustration
4. Natalie Lee, Graphic Design
5. Liao Jiekai, Film
6. Jeff Chouw, Photography
7. Brian Chia, Graphic Design
8. Dan Prichard, Film
9. Kenneth Chong, Architecture and Arts
10. Chan Mei Hsien, Fine Arts

(For the actual links, go to the original invite here.)

Bring drinks and beer to share for the beloved ROJAK dinghy!
It's all in the spirit of ROJAK sharing :)

See you there!

I wrote a poem about football.

It was printed in today's Today newspaper. The graphic is really super-cheesy (they printed our poems in curly fonts on scrolls for crying out loud, way to alienate the non-poetry reading crowd). But there's some decent stuff.

Commissioned by Mayo Martin, but I take credit for suggesting Pooja Nansi and Leong Liew Geok. Click here.

> theatre
Y O’Clock
faifai
Drama Centre Black Box
Thursday, May 20, 2010


The sheer inventiveness of Y O’Clock is enough to blow you away. The show presents audiences with a bewildering succession of ingenious handmade props: a tightrope, a smoke cannon in a cardboard box, a cloud made of edible marshmallow.

Japanese theatre group faifai thrusts us back into the imaginative world of childhood, engulfing us in an environment of constant play. Characters are portrayed as dolls, with actors manipulating their limbs and voices, surrounded by sets and costumes as colourful as a box of crayons.

Audiences, too, are invited to play. Before we even enter the theatre, we are given paper planes and are invited to draw on disposable plates, which will reappear later in the show, transformed into flowers.

Surprisingly, the plot isn’t truly gripping. The tale focuses on Potato, a part-time teacher at a daycare centre, played by Koji Yamazaki. He bonds with one of his charges, an eight year-old boy named Youji, and is highly disturbed when the child suddenly leaves the school to return to his orphanage.

The story is drawn from the real-life experiences of director Chiharu Shinoda, who formerly worked in a daycare centre. Its very ordinariness is to its credit: it’s a thoroughly believable story of adult alienation, taking place in a sea of childlike fantasy.

And of course, we love the fantasy. My favourite scenes are the dream sequences: actors slip into costumes to play giant mermaids, Egyptian mummies and King Kong gorrillas, terrorizing the world of the dolls.

But real life also becomes marvelously mutated in this show. At Potato’s class reunion, performer/designer Shiro Amano appears in business attire, controlling two life-size marionettes, forming a trio of identical yuppie salarymen. On another occasion, Yamazaki strips his clothes to reveal a crowd of felt tip faces drawn across his body: an array of characters to depict the chaos of a party.

And even the simplest of concepts is portrayed in the zaniest way possible. To show she needs to pee, actress Mai Nakabayashi balances a beaker on her head, while another actor fills it with a watering can.

Yet this show isn’t all bells and whistles. As a finale, the cast clears the stage in seconds, leaving a blank space where Potato encounters an adult Youji, and, with difficulty, he accepts the inevitable changes that life entails.

The two then begin a gymnastic dance, half-desperate and half-joyous. This becomes the thesis of the play: that as adults, we must not live in regret, but must celebrate the sensation of the present. This, regardless of the fact that the glorious playthings of childhood have vanished, never to return.

Re: the Singapore Arts Festival Blog

I've just blasted the National Arts Council Festivals Department on my blog for refusing to give the Flying Inkpot the tickets they asked for. Less than a week before the Festival began, they only agreed to supply 8 out of 13 tickets requested. No other theatre company has ever treated us so shabbily.

Read about it here.

But here's a little something extra: I'm feeling a little guilty about the whole situation. Why?

Reason #1. My own ticket allocation is not affected. This is because I pulled out of doing my reviews for the Flying Inkpot at the last minute. Why? Because the plays I'd decided to cover were "Cargo" and "Football, Football", and the Straits Times had later approached me to review these same plays.

I felt bad about cancelling these ticket requests with Inkpot and the Festivals Department, but they were pretty cool with it in the end. We've done this kind of thing before. In the end, it's the same person reviewing, but for a different company. Kenneth and Matthew volunteered to take over my review commitments.

Reason #2. I was told when I set up the Festival blog that me and my team of four or five could have "some" tickets. I went and assembled a team of about 20, so we could cover all the shows, and receive comps to them, too. And all our comp requests were approved.

The thing is, we're not going to be doing in-depth, incisive, Inkpot-standard reviews of the shows we're watching. That wasn't part of the agreement. The idea was just to write "something".

Some of us, like Rui An, will probably write really analytical reviews, but most of us will post a more personal response. And that's if we're lucky - so far, most of the rest of the team hasn't blogged much at all.

So I'm feeling a wee bit responsible for this mess. The least I can do is decry it and confess it.

Yurg. It also feels silly to go on about this when the Yong Vui Kong verdict is coming up on Friday. Also PinkDot on Saturday. I'll be there.

Singapore Arts Festival Blog!

I'm doing the official independent blog for the Singapore Arts Festival 2010! Check it out here:

http://singartsfestival.wordpress.com/

The official independent bit means that the department at NAC asked me to do it and is giving us complimentary tickets, but will have no control over what we say over there, though Kee Hong says he'll drop me a mail if there's a factual inaccuracy.

So far he hasn't contradicted my postulations that the guys who cut back on W!ld Rice and TheatreWorks funding are idiots, and that the marketing materials are weird and scary, so you know, I'm assuming that's factually true. :)

Other people who've agreed to blog include fellow Inkpot reviewer Ho Rui An, classical music reviewer Dr Chang Tou Liang, playwrights Irfan Kasban, Bryan Tan and Faith Ng, choreographer Kiran Kumar, poet Pooja Nansi, christ, who else, theatre researcher Ken Takiguchi, music writer Jeremy Yew, art writer Wong May Yee, arts worker Ephraim Loy, writer Richard Lord... y'know, I'm going to get their titles mixed up soon so let's just assume they're all cool interesting intelligent people who've got something worth saying.

Ooh, and if you feel like doing a guest post, write to me and let's do it!

Child's Play (or why baby Jesus looks so strange)

Yo! Forgot to tell everyone that Alan Oei included me in this exhibition!

The opening's already over, but a series of my poems called "Matriline" is still hanging up there as if it's honest-to-goodness visual art. Go and have a look, since I can't. I also have personally illustrated copies of "last boy" on sale.



Child's Play (or why baby Jesus looks so strange)
Dates: 1 - 31 Apr 2010
Time: 630pm - 930pm
Venue: Evil Empire, 48 Niven Road S228396

Artists: :phunk, Andre Tan, Ang Song Ming, Charlotte Cain, Eudora Rusli, Huang Wei, Kosuke Misawa, Lynn Lu, Rebecca Lim, Tan Wee Lit, Zhao Renhui, Ng Yi-Sheng
Curator: Alan Oei

What the...?

It seems that at the end of last year, someone at the National Library created an Infopedia article about me.

http://infopedia.nl.sg/articles/SIP_1619_2009-12-21.html

Infopedia's an online database on Singapore topics. There's even a blog, called Infopedia Talk, where every new update of Infopedia is noted. The latest writer to be included is the horror and transsexual fantasy writer Joash Moo.

NUS Evening of Poetry and Music

I'm doing a reading on Sunday (not tomorrow! Sorry) at the Arts House Play Den, 6:45 to 9:30pm. Come if you can.



More info here.

SDP's Let's Talk



At the Ubud Writers' Festival, at a forum on Internet connectivity and freedom of speech, I polled the audience on whether I should agree to a web interview with SDP. (That's Singapore Democratic Party, an opposition party in Singapore, for those of you from abroad.)

Surprisingly, given that it's a human rights event, half the audience members said yes and the others said no. (Those who said no said they were scared I'd never get a government grant again.)

Anyway, I'd kind of made the decision already: the only good reason to say no would be that I was afraid. And the only way to change society is to live without fear.

But I'm talking out of my arse a little. The truth is, I hate listening to myself on recordings so much that I can't watch this clip. So I don't know what bits of the interview got selected.

Ooh, fun fact: the interview itself took place on my birthday last year, 25 November. The interviewer and the director, Chan Tee Lick and Seelan Palay, are both born on the same day. What're the odds?

Verse City

I should also mention that I did a column about the state of Singapore literature for Quill, a Kuala Lumpur-based literary magazine funded by MPH. It's online here at the official site, and also at editor Eric Forbes' site, where it has more comments.

There's going to be regular coverage on Singapore lit by Singapore residents/citizens. Amazingly, the magazine accepted my name for the column: "The Noise Downstairs". :)

Interview for South China Morning Post

I got this done during last year's Ubud Writers' and Readers' Festival. Click to read!

Esplanade Concourse Show!!

Hey guys, quick news: next Tuesday and Wednesday, I'll be performing poems from "last boy" at the Esplanade. I'll be accompanied by indie musicians Clarence and Sam, who've created songs based on poems from the book. (They're the main act, really.)



That's them, btw. Yes, Sam is short for Samantha.


Once again:

Tue 26 and Wed 27 January
7:15pm and 8:15pm (same show done twice)
Esplanade Concourse

B).