now I'll believe anything's possible
I have done the near impossible. Found the Holy Grail? The Lost City of Gold? Perhaps finally achieved the Ideal in physics and "discovered" a grand unified field theory? While these might all seem like worthy, or at least interesting, goals, I have done something much more difficult. I have found the surest sign that there actually is culture in Singapore (as opposed to, say, a population oriented entirely towards business, shopping and eating): a subversive element.
Now, I know I've written about what it's like here, with cameras and rules and a cleanliness that borders on sterility, and I've wondered, "where are the people who don't want to live this way?" Now I have, at long last, found them.
It started like this: I was perusing the newspaper yesterday morning, over a cup of coffee and roti prata, searching for the comics (surely the most relevant part of any daily news source), when I came across pictures of breakdancers and some rapper that looked vaguely familiar. Now this looks interesting . . . reading the article I discovered that that very evening would mark the beginning of a weekend long festival seeking to bring together "traditional" art and "street" art. An interesting idea, particularly for Singapore. So, I got the address of the place and decided to check it out (it being Friday night, it being Singapore and me having nothing else to do). So I went down, watched some graffiti artists spray canvas alongside painters, watched some local rappers, saw some breakdancers, saw a rapper from Toronto freestyling alongside some Indian drummers. Long story short, though, I made friends with the b-girls, who are from Ottawa, interestingly enough, met the rapper from Toronto (Jason aka Vandal), who offered to show me around KL when I pass through next weekend, and various other people involved in an art scene here that is not pretentious, not really based around making big money, and seems to be subversive. The space itself was a kind of gallery/theatre/cafe all rolled into one, that encourages young artists here in Singapore. The event was being held in the garden, where the walls were scribbled with those universal slogans of disenchanted youth such as: "Class war, not race war" "Bush and Blair are . . ." You get the idea.
So, here I am in Singapore, looking at the city a little bit differently, feeling a little bit more at home. It just goes to show that those pretentious old French postmodernists were right about one thing: where there is power, there is the struggle against it, in some form or another.