Transported

Faceless Killers

The Dogs of Riga

The White Lioness

The Man who Smiled

Sidetracked

One Step Behind

Before the Frost

Return of the Dancing Master

Italian Shoes

Kennedy's Brain

Depths

What I have been up to

Haven't posted anything for more than a week now. Have been absorbed deeply in some reading and will probably be like this for the coming weeks too, at least before 13 Feb when we will be leaving for Yogyakarta. (Well, I can still read over there..) We have more or less decided to drop climbing Merapi, maybe some hiking at most, because husband is not confident that he will come out of it with his spine intact. (A slipped disc is always tricky.)

Anyway all this while, I have been reading Henning Mankell, another Swedish writer. His Fifth Woman and Firewall books are good and I have 12 more to go. Most of his novels have Kurt Wallander, a police inspector, as the protagonist. The novels are as much his vehicle for presenting well-developed fictional crime stories as social commentaries about the darker and colder (according to the author anyway) side of Swedish society. His writing (translated) while better than Stieg Larsson's, depresses me. I think it's because of the detail and attention he gives to painting Wallander's personality and life: A 50+ year old crime buster with a heightened sense of intuition and sensitivity but struggling with issues and is disillusioned with his life, who ends up having Alzheimer's towards the end of his career.

Coffee Addict

Illustrated coffee guide from here

Segafredo @ China Square is the best in town. They only have one outlet in Singapore, unfortunately. They make very good and very strong cappuccinos and I go there when I want to get away from work for a bit.

DIY project

My couch was due for a make-over. Letter cut-outs from $2 black felt (DAISO) + $4.90 x 3 white cushions (IKEA) = A new look.

Running off to Yogya

I am doing a bit of research for our upcoming trip to Yogyakarta, a large city located central-south of the Indonesian mainland of Java. We wanted to 1) get away during the Chinese New Year period, and 2) See Borobudur. For me, I wanted more than anything else to climb Merapi (literally Mountain Fire), a 3,000m high volcano. Bascially, I am dragging my husband along who is not entirely keen to re-live his army days. Getting ourselves fit is the main focus now, after my rather pathetic experience at Rinjani. It seems like the climb is shorter, probably due to the lower height, but more dangerous, as this climber described, due to the steepness and sharp rocks. Herman, who had also experienced Merapi, described it as an "ass-freezing experience" - not enough warm clothes high up in a mountain at 3am in the morning with whipping winds. This time, I am wiser - pack VERY light, and get into shape first. According to my research, the climb from the easier and shorter Selo route will start at midnight, taking about 4 hours (probably for speedy gonzalez) to reach the summit, in time to catch the sunrise. It will take another 4 hours to come back to firm ground. Generally the climb up and down should not take more than a day. February is supposed to be the wettest month; monsoon rains will most likely throw our Merapi plans into the wind. We'll see how it goes.

Testing redscale film

I was persuaded to try out some Lomography-produced redscale film by the folks at 36 @ Sunshine Plaza and after reading about it in SNAP!, the Japanese lomo magazine. So I tbought some and tested them out on indoor portrait, portrait close-up, outdoors, and indoor still life. Here are the samples. I must say the redscale effect is a bit too much for me.

holga 135, lomo redscale 200 negatives

Coupling

What do you do when two people spend too much time together? :)

holga 135, fuji sensia 100, x-processed

Office freak

This is our office freak. Her name is Lucy Lips. She is not real (clearly) but made of recycled materials like paper, stretchy mask, styrofoam etc. She looks scarier here because of the blue light effect. I got freaked out the first time I saw her, when I walked into the dark office alone early in the morning.

holga 135, solaris 100 (with color flash)

Road

This road goes round my place. It has a wide jogging/cycling path next to an empty (for now) green field which makes for a pleasant exercise ground. The greenery also brings down the temperature and the nights are always cool. This makes up a lot for living away from town.

holga 135, solaris 100

Hazel love

She is such a dear loving creature.

holga 135, solaris 100

Lomo - Botanic Gardens

These were taken in end Dec, when it was raining cats and dogs for days. We had some time to kill on a weekend and made our way to the Botanic Gardens. It was a cold, wet and dreary day, very rare for Singapore, and not really Holga's type of condition. The Gardens looked really bleak and somewhat weird mostly because there was some project going on (I still don't know what really) which entailed real sunflowers planted into big grass fields and spray-coated with some chemical that made them hard and gray. The "display" felt really artificial, complete with long sticks driven through the flowers into the ground, most probably as a form of support. There were also some strange metal structures nearby which resembled barren trees. At another corner, a cactus exhibition was being held.

holga 135, solaris 100

Friends @ Spruce

Dinner at Spruce restaurant @ Tanglin Road's Phoenix Park. It was good to meet and catch up over food other than for DnD.

holga 135, fuji sensia 100 slides, x-processed

Chelsea's shots

First attempt at shooting with Chelsea the GoldenHalf camera. The best thing about this camera is the "double shot" - shooting twice, pairing related items, whatever.

GoldenHalf, kodak 400 negatives

Lovely site

vintage pencil leads

clothes pegs

illustration of twigs

I stumbled upon this weblog recently when I was surfing around to perk up my mind-numbing day in the "sweatshop". Lisa Congdon is an artist and collector and she decided to start this project of posting photos of her collections or drawings, if the "collections" are imagined, one piece a day for the year 2010. I am not much of a collector myself, more of someone who prefers to clear out stuff (makes me feel like I am shedding my burdens, literally!) and so I am amazed at what she has. More to come of course, and I look forward to seeing what she has in store. Her drawings are lovely too.

Factory Girls

The author

Factory Girls is the story of millions of young female migrants who leave the impoverished rural countryside for the “instant cities” along China’s coast – in this case, it’s Dongguan in Guangdong province – in search of a better life. Leslie T Chang, a Chinese American, spent a decade living in China, working as a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. She made repeated trips to Dongguan, a sprawling city of factories and more factories with the largest network of highways in China, and eventually stayed on for some time and got to know several factory girls, namely Chunming and Min, intimately. The result is an intensely moving tale of the lives of these “ordinary workers”, whose ambition and fierce determination to move up the socioeconomic ladder, burns brightly throughout the narrative. They share mostly similar profiles - usually no more than 16 years old, leaving their homes for the first time, and having no more than a few years of formal schooling. Growing up quickly, learning to deal with life independently and expecting no help from anyone are among the first things they learn when they embark on their life-changing quests. Chang writes, “Life was something they faced alone, as they had been telling me from the first day we met. 'I can only rely on myself'.”

Why I like the book:

• It has depth. The author, a Chinese American with ancestral roots in China’s Northeast, draws parallels between the girls’ stories and her family’s migrations, first to Taiwan and then the USA. In doing so, she draws us deeper into the human and personal perspective, rather than hovering at the broad social and historical realm.
• She really knows the girls. She spent a few years getting to know them really well, especially Chunming and Min, going with the former on blind dates to seek a marriage partner and visiting the latter’s village when she returned home for the first time since she left two years ago. The depth of interaction allowed Chang to observe keenly the complex emotions experienced by the girls in their constantly drifting lives and the search for some form of stability as they strove to carve new paths for themselves.
• It is, at the end of the day, a very uplifting book. It will be hard not to come away inspired by the courage and determination of these girls in their quest for a better life.