Thursday 30 August 2007

Fusion


Fusion food is the new big thing in Singapore. Thai crossed with Indian so that glass noodle spring rolls now precede Tandoori chicken. Italian crossed with Chinese, so that linguine now comes with fish head curry. But sure didn’t we Irish invent this years ago when we took our national dish, the humble spud, and fused it with foreign dishes. We took 9,000 years of Chinese culture and reduced it to pouring curry sauce over chips. We insisted that Lasagne had to be served with potatoes of the chipped or gratin variety. And we trained every eastern European that entered our catering industry to say at the end of each order, “do you want chips with that?”
 
It’s difficult to find chips in Singapore. I thought of this on Friday night as I tucked into some fast food after a night of decadent consumption of outrageously priced alcohol products. The hawker market on  Panang Road is pretty famous I believe. But at 1am you’re just looking for a high cholesterol fix. Unfortunately I had to make do with some steamed chicken and spicy noodles. I know this because I found most of it down the front of my shirt the next morning. You just can’t get junk food here.
 
Fusion was also the theme on Saturday when we went to Fort Canning for the Womad concert, or world of music art and dancd as I now know it. I always thought that Womad  was a 70’s reggae band. So imagine my surprise when the first act was a Japanese Ainu band that mixed traditional Japanese instruments with something that sounded like Led Zeppelin. This was followed by an Israeli guy who did a passing imitation of Pavorotti crossed with Little Richard. All of this was done the way Singapore does things. Everybody brought a little plastic bag to bring home their rubbish, the queue for soft drinks was longer than the one for beer and the toilets had paper and soap. Oh, and everybody stood up, sat down, clapped or held hands when they were told to.
 
You could say it was anti-septic but the searing heat and 90% humidity was hardly conducive to healthy living. Most people here live in air-conditioned buildings, travel in air-conditioned cars and trains and if they do go outside, they keep it to a minimum and walk at a pace that would make Corporal Jones from Dad’s Army look nifty. Bu we decided to spend the weekend outdoors. This meant that by the time Youssou N’Dour came on at 11.30pm, we were solely testing the old cliché that horses sweat, men perspire and ladies simply glow.
 
Let’s just say that by the time we all got up to bop to Seven Seconds (the only song I recognised the whole night to be honest) there was a lot of glowing going on. Once it was all over, we made our way down to the hundreds of taxis waiting at the main entrance. Because that’s the way they do things in Singapore.
 
The way things are set up here, you’d swear that the City had been designed by a teenager who spent hours on City Planning games on their PC, when they should have been out playing football.  Or perhaps this is Second Life for real people. They neatly package all the clothes shops into Orchard Towers, all the electronics into Simlin Square and all the prostitutes into Orchard Towers, known to every taxi driver as the four floor of whores. No matter where you want to go on a Friday night, if you're a Westerner (or Caucasian as they call us when they are trying not to offend) this is where the taxis will want to take you. That’s about as rude as they get here.
 
But it’s like the City planner forgot that the thousands of tourists who pass through here might want more than shopping and the immoral pleasures that the four floors may offer. So they decided to build a resort but stuck it on an island off the coast called Sentosa, so as not to interfere with the relentless pursuit of capitalism that goes on everywhere else here. They stuck in a load of sand and made the flimsiest beach I’ve seen since I lived in Luxembourg. A couple of bars of the Phuket variety and some funky little trains to keep the kids happy.  But walking around it on a Sunday afternoon is like walking along the floor of a swimming pool filled with very warm water.
 
But life is not supposed to be about order, The centre cannot hold and all that. So I’m heading back to a climate that is unpredictable, where trams don’t always run on time and where the beaches have been created by the sea, rocks and time. Fusion, in other words, as it should be.

Wednesday 22 August 2007

Looking for soul in Singapore

August is a wicked month. I believe Edna O’Brien once said that although my limited education and inability to access Google means I can’t confirm this. The Singaporeans certainly seem to think so. They call it the ghost month. Nobody buys a house in the seventh Chinese month or so the story goes. Although it’s clear that Capitalism occasionally sneaks in and overcomes superstition.
 
This is a strange country in many ways. It’s the darling of the Economist and the World Bank. They say it is the world’s most open economy, which is code for allowing the Americans to come in and steal as much of your assets as they like. You can see this open economy in the shopping palaces of Orchard Road, the Tag Heuer watch arcades in Raffles Hotel, the money lenders in their banking temples along Boat Quay and Simlin Square, where you will find the latest in Japanese electronic gadgetry. In some cases before the Japanese have even invented them.
 
But if Karl Marx was to take a wonder in his time travels along Singapore River, he wouldn’t be too disappointed in how this little country has turned out. Every citizen is entitled to a house, which they buy at a cheap mortgage from the government. You’re guaranteed a job so long as you do your military service and chip in with some community work. That bit isn’t obligatory but Prime Minister Lee, who along with his Pappie has ruled this country since independence in 1965, is looking down on everything. Including this blog I suspect, so I better watch what I say.
 
Its East Germany with Rolex watches. Stalinist Russia for the Ferrari set. Asia doesn’t fit the sort of economic model we studied in school. The De La Salle brothers hadn’t contemplated a communist country like China taking on the West in consumerism. But the brothers did teach us about all those martyred priests in the boxer revolution and the superstition behind it. Which might explain why the Chinese want to start the Olympics on 08/08/08. Eight apparently is the luckiest number. Unless the ghost month falls then one presumes.
 
Superstition never had a place in my life, but spirituality does. Superstition to me is about fear. Spirituality is about hope. You have to dig hard to find the bones of God here, but he pops up in the strangest places. I woke on Sunday morning to a thunderstorm. Singapore was having weather of biblical proportions. When I lived here in 2001, the sun rose every morning at 6.46 and set at 6.50, the temperature was 32c during the day and 29c at night. It would rain for 35 minutes at 2.40pm each day. And that was everyday. It was as regular as taxes and the shattered hopes of the Louth football team. It was so regular you wondered why the paper bothered to print the forecast or sunrise times. It was Groundhog Day crossed with the Weather Channel.
 
But now it’s different. Perhaps it’s global warming or it could be the monsoon season. Or maybe, it’s God. I turned on the TV and not surprisingly the Ads were on. Asian Ads aren’t known for their humour so I wasn’t expecting much. It opened with a cartoon man sitting on a park bench looking glum. A dog walked up to him and said, “Have you seen a talking dog around here”? Without saying anything the man just pointed in the opposite direction. The voice over said, “Not surprised by a talking dog? Maybe you’ve lost your soul”. When you’re sitting on a bed in an Asian hotel doing a passing impression of Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, this comes across as fairly profound. It turned out to be an ad for the Korean Capital and I guess the agency thought it slightly ironic to use a dog in this context. At least they stopped short of having the dog say, “Please don’t eat me”.
 
But it spurred me into thinking that this is Sunday and I should feed my soul. I’d spotted the Catholic Cathedral the day before. From its design it was clear that the French brought the church to this part of the world, despite, I’m sure, the best efforts of English colonialists.   On my way there I found the remains of a Buddhist offering in the stump of an old tree beside the road. Three sticks still simmered long after the worshipful had moved back to their toil in the real world. The oranges and flowers were there as an offering to the Gods. Somebody had knelt here and prayed beside a main road in the capitalist hub of this globilised city. I passed a Hindu temple divesting itself of it’s fantastically clothed guests and a little further on, a group of Filipino maids, dressed to the nines in their Sunday finest and enjoying the only day of freedom from their serf like existence. Like me, they were making their way to Mass.
 
The congregation was an ecclesiastical united nations. Chinese and Indians whose ancestors had clearly been shown the light by Irish Missionaries joined the Filipino’s. And immigrants from Cambodia and Laos who had been led here by the French. And the occasional Gowhylo like me (as we honkies are known by in this part of the world). There was a lot of singing, which I found to be a bit Protestant, but was prepared to overlook given the day that was in it. Father Ng gave a rousing sermon, which I boiled down into an understanding that all sheep are going to heaven while all goats are going to hell. That’s another thing the De La Salle brothers never taught us.
 
I got back to the Hotel and turned on the TV.  It was back to the usual stuff, Football and stock markets. All this country cares about. Except for some of us who burned sticks, went to Temple or sang along to Chinese accented hymns.  We had opened a crack in the tough shell of consumerism and let a little light in. And I felt that if nothing else, I would certainly be surprised by a talking dog.   

Wednesday 15 August 2007

Came so far for beauty

I awoke on Sunday morning with a start. I'd prefer to have awoken with something else of course, but on this morning a start had to do. It was a cramp in my leg. The sort of cramp that 1970's footballers used to get when FA Cup finals went to extra time. The sort of cramp that marathon runners get when a hill appears unexpectedly after 25 miles. The sort of cramp that young calves get on the boat to Holyhead.

Or the sort of cramp I get when I drink for 48 hours in a hot climate. I guess it's due to dehydration or a lack of salt in the diet, but when it happens you don't really care about the cause. You just want to jump out of bed and race to the nearest solid object with a view to pressing your foot firmly against it. I'm not exactly sure what this does, but when it happens primal instinct kicks in. This has led to some embarrassing episodes in the past. The confluence of climate and alcohol tends to happen when I'm on holiday. I've been known to bed down in a mixed dorm after a heavy nights cultural learning with my fellow back-packers. I've stumbled back to the dorm and crawled into my sleeping bag sans pyjamas. On occasion, I've had to hide sheepishly at the back of the bus the next day after my colleagues were awoken at 5am by a screaming Irishman lying naked on his back with his leg pressed to the wall while shouting obscenities at the Virgin Mary and the collected saints.

Normally I'd take this as an occupational hazard of being a bachelor playboy in the naughties. But on Sunday afternoon, I was due to climb into a large metal box, strap myself into a restrictive piece of furniture and expose myself to the sort of air pressure that encourages deep vein thrombosis in healthy adults. In short, a cramp wasn't the best preparation for a long distance flight. I had just spent three nights in Sydney on a mini family reunion. Eating, drinking, bobbing on the Manly ferry under an unseasonably warm sky and listening to didgeridoo music on circular quay (who would have thought that the aboriginals invented electronic drum and base accompaniment all those years ago). In short, all the things that makes Sydney such a wonderful place.

From there I took the short road to Singapore. Distance here has a different meaning to back home. I grew up in Dundalk (or Fundalk as it will be branded by Tourism Ireland). Our nearest town to the south was Drogheda (or Faluja as it will be branded by Tourism Ireland). It was 20 miles away, but you'd only go there for important events like being born or beating the crap out of their sissy football team. In Australia, they'd travel that distance for a decent cup of coffee or for petrol that's five cents a liter cheaper. People drive from Melbourne to Sydney and back every weekend, they put a brick on the accelerator and head for Perth while catching 40 winks in the back seat and they travel around Asia Pacific like it was a back garden.

You get into this mindset fairly quickly. I used to look forward to long distance flights with a mixture of excitement and dread. Excitement because I'm a big kid at heart and dread because my buttocks were not designed for aircraft seats. But somehow in my mind, I'd convinced myself that this was just a short hop. A 7-hour flight to Singapore was nothing compared to what some Aussies kids have to go through just to get to school. I decided I wasn't going to sleep as it was a day flight and it's amazing the amount of anxiety this releases. Trying to sleep in a narrow seat, surrounded by strangers and listening to the endless drone of the aircraft engines is no fun, so I settled in to watch some movies.

To my disappointment, the Simpsons Movie was not on the menu. When you desperately want to watch a film but are too embarrassed to go and see it in the cinema, in-flight entertainment is the best option. This is how I managed to see Shrek and Sleepless in Seattle for example.

In the end, I plumped for "I'm your Man", a biopic of Leonard Cohen that included highlights from the "Came So Far For Beauty" tribute concert. One of the best plumps I've ever made I reckon. It's difficult to express the genius of the man, but listening to him makes you realise how high the bar is set if you're ever thinking of writing seriously. The music was wonderful and for me it added a new dimension to the debate about what is the greatest version of "Hallelujah". Most of the girls I know lean towards Jeff Buckley. But that's because he was good looking and tragically died young (which is how girls like their men) while the guys lean towards Jack L or Leonard himself. Personally, I've always had a soft spot for kd lang's version, because I like my music in a female, man hating country voice. But haven't watched this movie, I'd like to add another to the list. Rufus Wainright is a man who sings like a woman, so I think he covers all the bases.

I got to Singapore in a thunderstorm. The rain danced in the street like a jazz singer on acid. I made it to the Hotel at midnight and threw myself on my 5th different bed in 10 days. As I drifted off to sleep, I dreamt of a cramp free night and the words of Leonard Cohen whispered in my ear.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.

Wednesday 8 August 2007

The unbearable lightness of being

Do we go through life like a feather, taking us wherever the breeze might decide? Or do we chase a destiny like a pre-programmed automaton? Today, we come to you from the Forrest Gump school of philosophy. I like to keep abreast of the latest developments in modern thought. I’ve been known to dip into Karl Jung or peruse a BBC4 documentary on the unbearable lightness of being. I’ve spent many the drunken night in Dublin debating whether we exist or not with the world’s leading expert on the subject (that would be Snoopy, who cunningly managed not to exist whenever it was his round). I’ve even gone toe-to-toe with my mate Mark, the only person I know who has done a philosophy Masters. He did a primary degree and then realised he’d never get a job in this area. So he had to do a Master’s degree so that he would better understand why not getting a job is irrelevant.

But whenever I really want to understand philosophy, I dip into Forrest Gump. It might be simplistic or entertainment driven, but there’s something about his quest for meaning in a mad world that touches me. Whenever, I’m asked what my favorite film is, I’ll throw out a couple of Woody Allen movies, or if I’m trying to impress my questioner, I’ll come up with a dark 1970’s film, in a foreign language with an unhappy ending. Truthfully however, Forrest Gump is my favorite. It may have something to do with the fact that I saw it first saw it in September 1994 when I was at the lowest point in my life. I had traveled to Colorado after a long and over serious relationship had ended. I went there to find God, so that I could kick the shit out of him.

I found myself at a loose end one afternoon and disappeared into the comforting darkness of a picture house. The only movie on offer was an unpromising comedy with Tom Hanks, an actor I would normally watch with the enthusiasm of observing paint dry. My mood was not improved by the mid afternoon audience, which resembled the collected guests of the previous years Jerry Springer shows. They laughed, cried out loud and applauded at various points during the movie, emotions I like to reserve for artists who can actually hear your responses.

Two hours later however, I stumbled out into an autumnal Colorado afternoon with my heart feeling like a born again Christian in the moments after his baptism. “God’s make their own importance” Patrick Kavanagh once said (although he may have stolen it from Homer). We search for answers and they come to us in the strangest ways. It could be spiritual, it could be scientific or it could be as simple as a Hollywood fable that arrives in our mental in-box at exactly the point at which our mind is programmed to receive these answers.

The irony is that Forrest Gump provides more questions than answers. Is life just a box of chocolates? You never know what you’re going to get. Or is a blank canvas upon which we can all map our destiny? At the end of the movie Forrest says that he thinks it’s both. That was the line that hooked me and became the reason why I would see this film three times in the cinema, buy the video, the book, the Bubba Gump shrimp company commemorative mug and (I kid you not) the T-Shirt. Stupid is as Stupid does indeed. Then last Christmas, a now former girlfriend in a short and not very serious relationship bought me the DVD.

And so it came to pass that on Saturday night last, I finally got round to watching this DVD. I was in the process of unpacking in my trendy new apartment when I realised I was missing a cable that would connect me to the wonders of Australian TV. So I was forced to delve into my DVD collection and there was Forrest staring at me, fresh in his pristine wrapping and calling out to me that he had the answer to the quest I have undertaken.

I guess I’ve spent my life wondering if I’m personally responsible for everything that happens to me? If so, I feel this as a tremendous and overwhelming burden. Or are we part of a bigger plan, a sequence of seemingly random events that are subtly shaped by us to provide moments of serendipity, passion, pain and disappointment. You can get pretty messed up if you believe that there is a higher power shaping our destiny but when it doesn’t work out, you beat yourself up for not shaping your life better.

Forrest at least made me realize that it’s a bit of both. We can plan our lives and try to live to a program but every now and again events will come along that are either beyond our control or require us to look differently at our plans and adapt them to new circumstances. That’s not failure, its just life. You need a plan, but when events conspire against you, you have to change tack and head for fresh winds. And trust your gut feeling, particularly when you have a gut like mine that stands out as the most substantial part of your body.

As I sat in my furniture less apartment on Saturday with only a TV and DVD player for company, Forrest Gump spoke to me again and told me why I was here. This was where my gut was leading me. In that long desperate summer of 1994, Forrest Gump didn’t give me any new answers. He merely reminded me of something I had written when I was 19, but which took me ten years to really understand.

Today to kiss the lingering doubts goodbye.
To nail the lie.
The alibi of innocence.

Adapt or Die!