i like my body when it is with your

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh … And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you so quite new

— ee cummings

adulthood IV

thoughts thought while scrolling through my newsfeed II

This friend eats out A LOT.

Antoine Dodson's grandma passed away 16 years ago.

I like the idea of cleaning up mudflats and mangroves but I can't think of any pair of shoes that I hate enough to deliberately disfigure with organic gunk.

Weird how the S3 just entered our techno-cultural consciousness much like a dream. Also a person included "Panda" in his name, so that's another friend I won't be able to take seriously.

I wonder if this person knows that his posts are viewable by 2.2 billion people with internet connection.

Contemporary Art.

Cake!

a website called SlideShare exists

Oh? Uploading your vacation photos has exhausted you? Try making clay bricks with half the number of fingers you've got. Do it now.

I feel so weird about "community improvement" projects overseas. What have we really learnt from condescension? Acts of humility shouldn't become one big corporate project. That's a nice straw hut though. Super ethnic.

the iPhone 5's longer screen has really unleashed a tsunami of complex Freudian imagery

new poem s/n 1255

while listening to the velvet underground
when I really should be sleeping
and am re-evaluating the gin and tonics
that were poured hours ago,
time like a rusty iron chain
hangs in the air,
as if the memory of a dead
dog. Tomorrow morning, I will wake
protesting, feeling for metaphorical sunlight.
The years don't mean a thing to me.
Hide my bones at the bottom of the ocean,
pretend this is origami, tell no one I said hi.

event horizons

Ideas for zines

1. A zine that resists the idea of curation. Brief discussion ("ironic discourse") about Found Objects, Found Objects in Singapore, short rant about curation availing itself to the masses/the masses availing themselves to curatorial powers, mechanical poems, articles plagiarised from my town council's newsletter.

2. A zine about industrial areas. Candid interviews with factory workers, The Immigré, short pull-out about "immigration chic", self-effacing article about gentrification fantasies, discussion about becoming post-industrial, art project that appropriates photographs of "industry professionals" and reinstalls the images in various environments to surreal and humorous effect.

3. A zine about Bishan that parodies zines about Tiong Bahru. Opens with "Brief history of Bishan" ripped off Wikipedia and drawn/annotated over with poetic sounding words, mythology, other histories, article that re-imagines Bishan as hipster enclave, article about the best drinks to be found around Bishan (none), article entitled "Dogs I have Known In Bishan", poem about the MRT station and the experience of change. 

Ideas for coffee

A latte made with fermented milk from nomadic tribes in the Sahara

A single-origin coffee siphoned over a period of 10 years then strained through limestone in the manner of stalagmite formation

Artificial coffee flavour pressurised and roasted into pellets that are then processed as if coffee beans

Coffee beans that are fried not roasted

Kopi Luak that is not vegetarian/PETA-supporter friendly

Ideas for libraries

"Late nights @ the library" 

Speak Terrible English Movement

Noisy libraries for urban-types who have gotten used to environmental noise in shopping malls

Library that is also a bar

Library that is also a gym

Sarcastic cybrarians Tell It Like It Is

Ayn Rand book-burning day

in media res rant

"If you think this sort of award is the only way to validate your intelligence—privileging intelligence as a quality above all else—then," he continued, looking out through the window but never quite looking at anything, "you need to shut the fuck up. Because you didn't deserve it. You didn't fucking deserve it. I know life is unfair—so sad—but everything will work out in the end. The universe turns in on itself to amend injustices both large and tiny. You will not amount to anything."

The room was ravaged by the silence that followed. The white noise of traffic was neutral and devastating. 

"I speak the truth," he said.

"You don't."

"There is nothing more repugnant than your sense of entitlement. I want you to know that."

How was I supposed to respond to this? A flipped table, a damaged paper lantern, a chipped nail. I can only think in images, and the world is conceived as a series of sense percepts that form an artificial holism, an impression of "experience" accessible to no one else. In this way, I am all alone in the world.

We are all alone, lonely, in the world.

"You are retarded," he said. "You limit yourself by questioning the ontology of everything. It's bad enough that you can't even commit to a belief in the existence of the Real, but you sentimentalise it and make it your own personal, romanticised problem. Your selfishness is grotesque because it is embedded in your grasp of first principles, colouring everything you think and do and say."

I can control everything in this discursive space. 

He did backflips across the room and returned to the starting point. He shapeshifted into a carp, gasping for air on the floor. He turned back into a person. 

"Discussions about truth should have been done in the last epoch."

"No one knows who is talking and who is replying anymore."

fête

thoughts thought while scrolling through my newsfeed

3eanuts is so underrated.

I forgot about this page, and I forgot why I 'liked' it.

70% of permissible items on my newsfeed are really just ads for ready-to-wear collections.

I don't care that 3 of my friends "liked" samsung mobile

Hypothesis: the quality of a political facebook page is determined by the quality of followers. (or the type of people who "share" posts?)

Am probably the only person currently reading the articles on this art blog + I feel very alone

if only every politician was as savvy and thoughtful as Nicole Seah .

Maybe the only savvy and thoughtful politician I am following on Facebook is Nicole Seah, and there are many more, posting thoughtful and inspired things that only the savvy are capable of posting.

I need to make hashbrowns in my waffle iron.

Can't believe I might be attending college with this dude, whose web presence is 60% photos of him wearing a tacky shirt in what appears to be the same club.

What has become of this person (mean this in a good way)

Someone is watching dance videos on youtube, but more than that, wants people to know that his watching of dance videos is inconsistent with his way of life/character and is trying to provoke amused responses.

I wish my country's developmental status was high enough so I may preoccupy myself with designer metal trays for my self-published chapbook party.

I think family photos are very sweet, especially if someone >70 years old is in the middle of the picture.

This is a picture of a Chinese lady (?celebrity) wearing tinted aviators, cuddling a poodle.

Farmville still exists!!

I know an inordinate number of people studying pharmacy, but what does this really say about me as a person?

Stumbling on amazing recipes on newsfeed is the only gift facebook has given me

horrible premonitory vision of peers sharing pictures of their children/spawn + me clicking "like" on them out of obligation/sympathy

seymour

Vitagen saleswoman comes to my door.

Vitagen saleswoman: Do you want Vitagen?

Grandpa: What?

Vitagen saleswoman: Vitagen, uncle?

Grandpa: What? Yakult?

Grandma: No, Sustagen!

Grandpa: OH, Sustagen!

Vitagen saleswoman: okay, Sustagen. 

Phone rings

Me: Grandpa, call for you

Grandpa: (on phone) Who? Girlfriend? Fiji? Oh!

Goes on to talk about heart problems

Shard

After the ravages that took the bees by storm
and cleansed the clotted ceiling space

so they’d be no danger to the kids who slept
in that bedroom all summer, I discovered

in the charred ruins of their intricate city
a hand-size fragment of honeycomb, still

clear gold and full of good honey glinting
in its papery stiff hexagonals, which I took

the tip of my tongue to and tasted the pure
spirit of sweetness alive there, like words

from a letter you’d thought you destroyed — just
a scrap of phrases, but enough to call back

exactly what happened, and the good of it.

— Eamon Grennan

adulthood III

A Cocteau Twins playlist
A slideshow of found gifs
A plate of homemade sauerkraut
Picking at one's nails, crying
The sky turning purple at 7 PM

how to say

iam enim hiemps transiit imber abiit et recessit

For winter is now past, the rain is over and gone.

DUE NORTH was an amazing experience: I realize this statement conceals more than it reveals. I am still haunted by the Tagore poem, the line in Both Sides Now ("Tears and fears and feeling proud/To say 'I love you' right out loud"), the dissonant, luminescent tintinnabuli in Magnificat, brilliant and different polychoralities, etc. etc. The programme was rigorous and challenging, lustrous because diverse.

And now the hours seem to melt into each other because I am quite drugged and ill and dreaming of the invalid lifestyle, being attended to by concerned nurses and fed shotglasses of gin, while in fevered states writing, quite brilliantly and madly, heartbreaking things that are particular and also universal — not. I'm just drugged and ill, and my mind is mostly a fog that is starting to lift.

I am in very, very terrible shape.