villagers/creatures of habit

The Aosando art fair pairs up artists with shops in the backlanes of Aoyama. A great way to get traffic to the quieter shops, and to get people to notice new artists.

On each of our visits to Tokyo, J and I have always ended up going to the same restaurants, museums and retail stores. Today, for instance, we chatted with one of the chefs and walked down our favourite street to the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. But just as we note how Tokyo has changed (or not) each annual or biennial interval, I think we notice how we, too, have changed (or aged!!!) each time.

J: I now understand what you mean when you say you sometimes prefer Taipei to Tokyo.
Y: You do?
J: Yah. It's the language thing.
Y: Yes, and with it, the whole thing about accessibility... and alienation (ooh, big word) of cities.
J: Yah, for the first time, I can imagine what it is like to be alone and living in Tokyo - the loneliness and the possibilities.
Y: No kidding. It's a great place to run away or escape to. But in the same way, cities don't give a shit about you, so if you can't fit in or feel alone, it really hits you. Maybe that's why we always go to the same places in Tokyo, just to connect to this place.
J: In comparison, that's why Singapore is so attractive to expatriates, no?
Y: Uh-huh.
J: It has all the pretences of a big city, but in reality, in essence, it is a -
Y: - village.
J:Yah, like a village. Everyone more or less speaks some English. The aunties - if you stay in HDB - will talk to you and ask you questions. In no time, you will quickly find friends, know someone who is friends who someone who is also friends with someone...
Y: Yah. All the good stuff but also the trappings of a village. Which sometimes makes you want to run away to a real city...hah!

Well friends, if you ever feel like running away to Tokyo, there are two places we will not hesitate to recommend in Tokyo:

(1) Have a meal at Chopsticks Cafe or the Sora no niwa tofu restaurant. Both are at Shibuya, and for 4000 yen each, you can afford 5 courses of good food and at least 3 rounds of beer/sake/cocktails. Not to mention the great service and ambience.


Seasonal tofu starter at Sora No Niwa.

(2) Visit Issey Miyake's work
This includse 21-21 Design Sight, a design museum adjacent to the Midtown complex at Roppongi, and his Pleats Please store at Aoyama. The former always has intelligently curated shows while the latter never fails to have pretty (for J's sake) and friendly retail staff who are ever ready to talk about design, no matter how difficult it may be for them in English.


Night view of 21-21, architecture by Tadao Ando. J testing his new camera at 3000 ISO

tunnel-visioned tokyo

Tokyo - that's all we'll be seeing this coming week! And that is plenty because it is going to be the week of the Tokyo Designers Week, 100% Design Tokyo, Design Tide at Midtown, the Emerging Directors' Art Fair, the Aosando Art Fair... But of course, J and I are just looking forward to walking in another city.

We'll try and load up the photos here as we go along! Meanwhile design critic J is appalled and depressed by changi airport.

finally!

J decided to ditch flash and started all over again with plain ol' homemade vanilla html instead. So finally!

watching 'em grow

My brother E, good citizen him, has three kids. E1 is three, E2 is one and M3 is a month old. Each is their own person.

It's been interesting just watching them grow and express their personality. E1 is gentle and agreeable ("You try. It's good. Try.") E2 is observant and a quick storm. M3 is a small parcel that sleeps and poops. So far. And it is easy to imagine the joy associated with parenthood. Brother E's is obvious. A typical conversation in the car as Brother E drives us home after dinner on Sundays goes like this:

Bro E: I gotta think using about a different strategy with E2.
J&Y: Yah, they are so different!
Bro E: With E1, once I smacked him on the backside a little harder. I just wanted to test how far to go. Experiment, haha. And he immediately knows he has done something that has made me more angry than usual.
J&Y: Aiyah, he's a softie.
Bro E: But with E2, it's different. If I just slap his hand when he does something wrong, he hits me back! It's like monkey see monkey do still.
J&Y: Hmm, he's a fierce one.
Bro E: ... I must think about it some more, use a different strategy.
J&Y:...
Bro E: You know, it's nice seeing how E1 has changed in the last 3 weeks. He used to just ignore his little brother. But yesterday, while we we out on a walk, he suddenly just kissed E2 on the head! It's nice, seeing him learn to relate to his little brother and show his love.

Awww. But no, we have not changed our minds about not having our own. That's three negatives in one sentence.

gone to meet the bookmaker

click to view in flickr

The description of Tuas on streetdirectory.com begins "Tuas is Singapore's version of Chernobyl."

Comparing Tuas to Chernobyl is way too flippant, but to most of us islanders who don't work in a shipyard or any of the heavy, manufacturing or chemical industries, Tuas will seem somewhat surreal.

There is really no distinctive architecture - just these monotone blocks, some of them windowless or clad in metal. There are no high rise buildings. Even the trees are low and overwhelmed by the concrete and steel. The streets are wide. Or perhaps they feel especially wide because the traffic is sparse, save for that roaring truck. There aren't many people hanging or walking about as you drive by. But although the place seems deserted, there is the knowledge that inside those concrete and metal blocks, there is almost non-stop activity. Man operating machines operating the economy operating man.

Why were we in Tuas? To visit a bookbinder for one of J's projects.

It was fifteen minutes to one o'clock when we arrived.

the wake-up bird

Several weeks ago, I blogged about the calls of the wake-up bird. It has plagued me since. Not the calls per se, which I enjoy for the way they enter the HDB soundscape of bus stops, chittering mynas, chattering children and the incessant varied noises from the nearby taoist temple. But rather just identifying the bird itself.

Not satisfied with mystery, I've since been searching online recordings of bird calls. But with no real clues, it got as desperate as googling "whoo-ooo bird call". At one point, we even thought it could be the frantic call of the monkey that has wandered from the pierce reservoir and spotted hanging around our street.

But a monkey it is not.

island biography

Check out this book by tym and Mark Frost about the lives that made our favourite island in the tropics! From the previews so far, the book promises to be a great read.

There are 4 things amps recommend that you do:
(1) Read the previews/snippets from the book and the writers' posts here.
(2) Buy your copy from the bookstores, or pre-order one. Of course, proceed to read it!
(3) Attend one or all four of these events where the writers will talk and gamely sign your copy of the book.
(4) Buy another copy for a friend.