A virtual collection of annotated Maps of Singapore, Singaporean toponymy, and other psychogeographical games.
Mysterious but consistent set of scribblings on the walls of the entire dingy four-storey stairwell of the old disused Yangtze Cinema of R-rated film infamy, now turned into a ramshackle Western Food paradise and lunchtime haunt frequented by hungry SGH nurses, PRC handphone peddlers, old chinese men, and random chinatown office workers.
“Given the transparency of the programme (a national education museum using popular entertainment methods to aimed at educating the masses on issues of military and national defence and stirring patriotic singaporean sentiments), you would think that the architects would attempt to load some kind of symbolism onto the image of the building. But they would rather not, it seems. A prudent decision perhaps.”
From an essay I wrote some time back on the Capitol Theatre: The city, sociologist Rob Shields once argued, is always “a ‘crisis-object’ which destabilises our certainty of the real”. Indeed, cities are sites of constant change. Sanjay Krishnan, a literary scholar, remarked that in Singapore “scaffolding seems the only unchanging feature in a city [...]
Mysterious but consistent set of scribblings on the walls of the entire dingy four-storey stairwell of the old disused Yangtze Cinema of R-rated film infamy, now turned into a ramshackle Western Food paradise and lunchtime haunt frequented by hungry SGH nurses, PRC handphone peddlers, old chinese men, and random chinatown office workers.
“There seems to be a public image of any given city which is the overlap of many individual images…. Each individual picture is unique, with some content that is rarely or never communicated, yet it approximates the public image, which, in different environments, is more or less compelling, more or less embracing…” -Kevin Lynch, From [...]
“Debord’s map images a fragmented city that is both the result of multiple restructurings of a capitalist society and the very form of a radical critique of this society. Its figuration of a type of inhabiting is simultaneously related to and distinct from Fredric Jameson’s “aesthetic of cognitive mapping”, a concept most succinctly described in [...]
“Fortunately, in the last twenty years, Singaporeans and their government have come to the realisation that cultural inheritance is not the only aspect of the island’s legacy.” Positive reinforcement at work? Some excerpts from a guidebook on gardens and parks in Singapore, written in 1992.
The odd way in which people speak of the Blue Hour as if it is a physical space and not a time of day.
Paul Ricoeur writes: “Whence the paradox: on the one hand, it has to root itself in the soil of its past, forge a national spirit, and unfurl this spirital and cultural vindication before the colonialist’s personality. But in order to take part in the modern civilization, it is necessary at the same time to take [...]
“We used to have to walk back and hold hands and use a lighter. See the light, see where you were and then you’d walk on, and the image of where you’ve just were would still be on your retina. You couldn’t see anything, but you’d see stars.”
Excerpts from a Wire interview with Burial.
“The parachute weighs fifteen kilograms, it is a very heavy and extremely hard thing to carry, one is really… condemned, one is really… minimised! In a word, it is terrible: one cannot carry it, one cannot walk with it. One is forced to bear it.” – Perec, The Parachute Jump
In the same year that man first watched a man-made satellite penetrate into outer space (the successful orbital launch of the Soviet unmanned Sputnik on October 4 1957), Gaston Bachelard published The Poetics of Space.
A song by The Observatory.
Marc Auge writes: “If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a nonplace.”
This is a list of non-places commonly found in Singapore.
“Was there, after all,
ever any green door in the wall at all?”
A story by HG Wells.
The sensation when you are in a moving vehicle and in a seperate vehicle you see a person who is travelling at the same or slightly faster/slower speed than you are so that your motions sort of slide and elide the distance travelled at the same time.
“When I look back at this there’s nothing to grasp, no starting point. I was inside an underexposed photo from 1982 but I was also sitting on a bench in Haringey.”
A song by The Clientele.
“Une autre ville pour une autre vie”, an essay by Constant Nieuwenhuys – “We require adventure. Not finding it any longer on earth, there are those who want to look for it on the moon. We opt first to create situations here, new situations. We intend to break the laws that prevent the development of meaningful activities in life and culture. We find ourselves at the dawn of a new era, and we are already trying to outline the image of a happier life and a unitary urbanism – urbanism made to please.”
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