Your Probiotic Culture is Too Wild for My Inner Anthropologist

There’s something about this studio rendition of “Big Mama” by the boys of Left Lane Cruiser that makes me wanna get jiggy wit it in my bedroom and off the walls.

It’s raw, it’s hilarious, and it’s highly dance-a-ble.
Oh yes sir, you betcha hats off, you’re listening to the blues, buddy.

Pimp City (Plate 1)

I hate this pimp city of mine.
It treats me like a whore citizen.
(I do not trust its spoken ideologies)

This pimp city –
imports foreign brides to fill its coffers;
imports foreign whores to satisfy its needs;
imports foreign harlots to call its own.

It builds great asylums for everyone;
Its opiate for the masses is the demagogy of capitalism;
Its hypodermic remedy is the bewitching prism of narcissism;
It is a constructed heaven of self-surveillance and inward lament.

This pimp city –
it denies me the pleasure of being;
Exalted.

The Silhouette of your Unrequited Governmental Love makes me Feel Briefly Bad about Myself

for a conversional discourse on the End of State-Truth, press one

At the obscure edge of reason, I’ve always had a nagging suspicion for this city-state of mine. It’s that itchy feeling that says: there’s a logical flaw in reality, somewhere. Possibly, nearby.

I guess what I’m trying to say is: Everything that’s wrong about Singapore (to me) is encapsulated by TVMobile.

Ah, TVMobile – the bane of my commuter existence. When you’re there, I feel like smashing my fist into your screens and pulling the speakers out from their electrical bus sockets and setting the entire bus on fire (once everyone’s been safely evacuated, of course). When you’re not, I’m in a perpetual state of bliss for half an hour.

And yet.
In a cosmic-sense of veracity, you’re still around. And probably always will be. If I did an island-wide street poll of SBS commuters, I betcha a good 90%+++ would agree that you’re a general nuisance to our lives. Your programming sucks – two thirds of the time you’re playing annoying adverts with lousy sales pitches and blaring back-jingles; the rest of the time you’re serving up re-runs of badly scripted Channel 8 serials and canned-laughter-filled “Just for Laugh Gags” segments.

When I’m not grappling with your awful content (which really, are discriminatory towards non-Mandarin speakers and people with a tasteful sense of humour), I _have_ to deal with your static-prone-ass-of-a-reception-cabling-that-makes-the-shitty-programmes-shittier-because-everything-freeze-jams-for-a-few-seconds-and-the-farking-sound-keeps-repeating-even-when-your-screen-goes-blank.

And yet.
You’re still here. In my face. Every. Single. Bloody. Day. Why is that? If everyone agrees that you’re a piece of shit technology that really shouldn’t be part of the commuting experience; if everyone wants you to go away and leave us the hell alone – why, art, thou, still, here?

In any working, democratic, developed country/city, you would’ve been fixed. You’d either have been dissembled and sent to the waste dumps, or your reception technology + quality of programming would’ve been upgraded. You could have ended up being like the Miami Bus Transit, with a way bigger screen, and a GPS-linked map telling us where the hell the bus is, and where we’re all going.

You could have been useful.

Instead.
You remain the self-reflecting mirror-artefact of all that is wrong with Singapore society. Where a politically autocratic system has set in place a systemic discourse of “I should really mind my own business”. Sure we start petitions and write letters to the ST forum. We bitch about everything in our kopi tiams and taxi cabs.

But in the end, nothing really changes. We’ll go back to our cannot make it, increasingly stressful jobs; we’ll return to our safe, normal, increasingly expensive HDB flats; and we’ll continue to journey our ways around with you, dear TVMobile. Because nothing says Uniquely Singapore better than paradigm-enslaved worker drones who don’t give a damn about changing the system.

Is there hope for the future? Perhaps. I suggest we start by smashing our televisions.

Pantry Affirmations to Savoury Confectionary Battles

The Cupcake Executioners were butchering the Biscuit Brigade when General Toasty finally rode in on his vanilla seahorse Ascalon (to the flanks!) and brought with him the 23rd Chocolate Cookie Cavalry; it was at this opportune moment that the pancake shelling begun. It rained maple syrup that day; as the assorted confectionaries fought mightily in the hot sticky liquorice highlands and jam-filled rivers. In their marshmallow dugouts and nougat cake trenches, the wounded bled a deliciously bloody trail of raspberry sauce and lemon-lime cream – their dying recipes forever kept secret in the Great Scone Scourge of 1814. General Toasty himself, barely surviving the battle, was said to have indignantly declared the battle as “the Maddest Tea Party of our century”.

Hey it’s Sunday!

Hey it’s Sunday!
Let’s breathe a big sigh of relief together and get our heads wet with sparkling love!
Let’s evaporate away to the intimations of graceful pleasures!
Let’s dispatch our worries and cares and be beautiful!

Let’s stay in bed and daydream ourselves away, baby.