Paris, picture postcard

The charming Parisian street corner cafe. Endlessly imitated and replicated. By New Yorkers who want their very own croissants and macaroons in the Upper East Side. By Tokyo trendoids, who mix guileless admiration and an equally naive disregard for context by lovingly and uncannily recreating, cracked-mosaic tile by cracked-mosaic tile, a hyper-authentic cafe in anally accurate detail that overlooks an artificial concrete-filled and zelkova-lined canal. The Parisian cafe is an inexhaustible fund of kitsch. The sad truth about it nowadays, however, is that the endless plundering of this particular icon of modern culture has led to, by natural selection and the continuous refinement of key ingredients (good coffee, bustle of human traffic, social space, privacy in public), a triumph for its conscientious students who have far outstripped the original. Weaned on the modern franchised equivalents, the visitor to Paris in search of centers of cafe culture is likely to be disappointed. The dull gleam of those iconic sidewalk tables and the dowdy wicker chairs in green and yellow weave could do with some freshening up. The service is a little too curt, the waiters too surly, the peeling paint pushing the limits of charm and tending towards a queasy sense of decay. And, hey, when was the last time they scrubbed down those smudgy window panes?

The truth is, not only is the search-and-rescue of these authentic cafe specimens often a fruitless and stubborn quest, but also evidence of unthinking worship of a pretty outdated archetype - one that means little except when consumed in situ . More progressive cafes in cities that like them that way are souped-up hyper-cafes, social spaces enhanced with wondrous organic set lunches on the menu, free WiFi, design and architecture mags, fair-trade sustainable-labor low-calorie caffeine-free wheatgrass-boosted beverages for a demanding audience. They are your lifestyle nodes, connectivity platforms, environmental rights watchdogs, ambient music retreats.

What Paris cafes (in Paris) offer you is rather feeble in comparison - the rights to a fraying aesthetic integrity that rings increasingly hollow (Paris invented style, but no longer has the patent on it), the distant consolations of history and myth, a romance that requires the absolute complicity of the devoted Francophile for the experience to hold together...What Paris offers you additionally however is the freedom from images. By which I mean not postcard museum-city images but rather the pop metropolis imagery of the postmodern sort that makes our cafes look like Scandinavian furniture showrooms, or contemporary art galleries, or fashion boutiques, those kinds of mixed-use multi-functional spaces of conscientious design. Paris, especially when understood in the context of the other three that make up the Big Four, represents anti-design, or at least a resistance to re-design. This isn't to say that Pop hasn't made any headway in Paris, of course, but for the most part historical context and faithfulness to itself and its past weighs too heavy in the balance for much re-engineering of this city's image of itself to take place. To look at Paris is not to look for aesthetic aspiration or innovation, but rather for aesthetic independence. Paris gives you the master copy from which a million copies emerged, and one feels uneasy when confronted by this; unelaborated, unenhanced, referencing nothing but itself. You might not be used to the relative simplicity of this primitive order of signification; here is a hermetic, non-hybrid city of self-completion and pedigree. Paris, the lone modernist pitstop in an inter-urban network of cross-reference?

Be with me, my beloved love, that my smile may never fade.

Some of the plucky criticism hurled by my friends at Eric Khoo's third feature, Be With Me:

"I have a thing against disability movies."

"The piano soundtrack is so feeble - just like in a Taiwanese serial."

"What are they subtitling?"

After the lurid nightlife and housing-project anomie, suicide, prostitutes, necrophilia, an abiding obsession with social misfitism in general, I thought it was nice to have a wholesome story for a change. Eric seems to have momentarily given up the custodianship of his social outcasts and other unsavories; here are characters who are not only not socially stunted or alienated, they convert alienation into charity, longing, desire - and the glimmering prospect of possible fulfillment. Leaving your characters to wallow in their isolation, self-inflicted or not, is easy. Too many directors treat their fashionably depressed muses as canvases of misery; the storyline and dialogue become ripe for pathetic fallacy; incidental glimpses of big cities are excuses for "urban dislocation". Whereas enacting self-healing or reconciliation onscreen is a choice and demands a suspension of style, of aesthetic detachment and the smirk of irony - in other words, an unflinching sincerity that I think simply requires a higher level of craft.

It's tricky work, though - here, in a quasi-documentary chronicle of a real woman with a disability, you have to avoid the additional pitfall of looking like an omnibus episode of Extraordinary People. What might seem like technical clumsiness of Eric's part, I think, is something of a transcription of Theresa's personal plight - the "slow" pacing as we observe her daily rituals of cooking, teaching, typing, all carried out with a labored grace. Duration and process is palpably tracked - this is her duration and process, of course, not ours, and we might be inclined to dismiss it impatiently.

The teenage puppy love and security guard threads are unfortunately insufficiently developed and occasionally mar the tone of the film, but if they bear watching alongside Theresa's story, it is thanks to their lightness of touch. Mee Pok Man and 12 Storeys had characters that circled fruitlessly within the confines of an endemic situation. While Be With Me's minor characters still yearn - and perhaps still fruitlessly - they are crucially now no longer unconsoled. There is questing, desire unrequited or unfulfilled perhaps, but nonetheless a redeeming movement, an emotional investment that rescues them. There is the work of reconciliation and empathy: love letters, memoirs, translation; all of which suggest that Eric is moving on from important work about social divisions in Singapore to the more onerous task of reflecting on social integration, healing divides and starting rehabilitation.

Paris, the Shanghai of the West

As the hype piled up about Shanghai being the Manhattan of the East, the quintessential 21st century city; while Singaporeans flock there in droves to "tap the market"; while every third kid at one of the tonier American colleges is mugging Chinese characters, I decided that I would hole myself up in the has-been citadel of culture of a crumbling Europe, the museum-city a century past its prime - Paris.

One of my Chinese professors told me that when she went to grad school in Chinese back in the 80s, it looked like she was taking the nobler route, immersing herself in the dusty heritage of an ancient civilisation then suffering the fallout of a failed exercise in radical social reform; whereas her East Asian Studies contemporaries studying Japanese were seen as dirty businessmen looking to "engage" Japan and thereby get their grubby hands on a prime piece of Bubble Tokyo. Now the situation is the exact opposite, of course: students of China now all look like the investor-opportunist sort who can't wait to sink the roots of their shiny new skyscraper HQ in Pudong, whereas Japanese scholars are silently imbibing the culture, in spite of grim economics, as Tokyo goes the way of a moribund West Europe.

So while devoted Francophiles will bemoan the passing of some mythic Jazz Age Paris, or American Expat Paris, or Cubist Surrealist Paris; while Paris falls out of favor because it looks increasingly dowdy (especially in relation to a Cool-Britannia London), shouldn't it be that it gains in cultural cred because it's stagnating? You certainly don't go to do business in Paris; you couldn't care less how the Bourse is doing! If you go to Paris, it has to be because you want to drink in that delicious cocktail of decay; to recover the "authentic"; where crass commerce counts for less, and witty banter more; where life is distilled into an espresso cup, written in the crumbs that fall from your crusty baguette. To go to Paris when it is no longer fashionable, to visit a great city when it is slightly out of phase - that's when the air is heavier with myth and memory. This is just an extension of that adage about the pleasures of anticipation, the disappointment of fulfillment, and, finally, the further pleasures of reminiscence. To walk Paris in 2005 is something like time travel armed with a stack of postcards or old photographs: where have these images gone? And why do you cling to them more resolutely - "no, no, this is the real Paris" - when you have a completely different city in front of you?

2

With all that talk about global cities nowadays, four favorites always seem to make the list: New York, London, Paris, Tokyo. You know how they write it up in style magazines or couture articles or architecture journals: "this swanky new watering hole in downtown Guangzhou could make you believe you were in St. Germain," "taking a cue from hip London gastropubs, this newcomer to the Chiang Mai dining scene..." It's a magic invocation, to even look like you've borrowed a signature aesthetic or intangible spirit from the Big Four. Of the four, though, I don't think Tokyo deserves to be there - if only because the "global" bit is problematic. If we're talking about expat numbers or accessibility to foreigners, Hong Kong or even Singapore might be a better choice. And that's only if we force ourselves to pick an Asian candidate. LA's diversity outshines any Asian city, ditto San Francisco, although it's more a global village than a global city. New York and London are probably unshakeable choices. And then there's Paris. First of all, I think it definitely helps to be a declining colonial force. As the messy processes of post-colonialism kick in, suddenly there's this huge influx of subjects from your former possessions; people you once enslaved and subjugated return with a vengeance, intent on filling jobs you no longer want to do yourself, flooding your markets with cheaper goods that they made themselves, perhaps. There you go, instant diversity, a London full of Indians, Kenyans, Jamaicans. Paris overrun by Vietnamese, Algerians and Senegalese. Everywhere you turn there's a curry house, or a sheesha bar, or a banh mi counter.

There seem to be different models of globalism-in-the-city, though. My sense is that if in New York you are a third-generation Shanghainese immigrant whose grandparents came in the 50s, that is your identity. Let's look at the Chinatowns, I think their situation reflects this. In Manhattan it's that downtown warrened mess around Spring St et al; in London it's that two-street-thoroughfare plus several alleys (really small, this one) just off of Covent Garden and Theatreland. But it's in Paris where you'll find the leafiest, airiest, most pleasant Chinatown of all - although it really is more of an Overseas Chinese Town - but more on that later. Paris in fact has not one but two (and some would say three) Chinatowns. The biggest one is in the 13eme, a roughly fifteen-minute walk south of the Latin Quarter, a vague triangle shape bound by the Avenues de Choisy and d'Italie, and in the south by Boulevard Massena. Despite the signs changing language once you cross Place d'Italie, there is not much of a sense of an otherplace. In Manhattan once you hit Chinatown the streets are suddenly grittier, there's more trash lying about, the smells are invasive. In Paris you saunter along wide tree-lined boulevards. The architecture, too, is striking. Instead of the low-slung and closely packed shophouse-like layout you find in New York and London, le quartier chinois in Paris is a series of brutalist concrete housing projects interwoven with the usual five or six storey apartment blocks; but there are also sizeable tracts of individual houses, and some landscaped condominiums. It seems like some of the Parisian knack for human scale and gentleness has rubbed off on the 13eme. This Chinatown has been Pari-sized, generously expanded to Paris proportions - which means wider thoroughfares, more sauntering and loitering space. And this is pretty much my tenuous point, that in some way or another, even after a possibly longer history of immigration, the Chinese diaspora in New York and London still seem to inhabit the margins of the city, or at least a slightly grimier share of it; whereas Paris seems to have allowed the Chinese more space to develop, so that finally they become not just strangers in permanent transit, but normalized Parisians who also happen to be ethnically Chinese. And by extension, while the usual case is for these Chinatowners to identify precisely with this marginal state, to carve out a mini-state within the city, Paris's 13eme seems to "remember old Shanghai better than Shanghai itself," to recreate more convincingly and less violently the image of a faraway Asia, a bettered and more harmonized vision (whose truth value is however questionable) of all that cheaply romanticized Eastern glamor sold to the West by Wong Kar-Wai movies or Shanghainese cigarette poster pin-up girls. The 13eme seems to simultaneously evoke an erstwhile Shanghai and a present-day Paris; it is a foreign elsewhere as well as an elsewhen. And, in addition to all that, maybe it's also just Paris.

This is the bigotry I am trying to defeat

On my very first attempt at throwing a dinner party, everything was more or less a disaster. It was basically a meal of stiff salad, dry meat, thin sauce. But all this was enlivened by some twee touches: frozen cherry tomatoes, a green mayonnaise, blue curacao "cocktails". I also tried to cram as many colorful "elements" as possible onto the same plate. Next to the few forlorn slices of overcooked steak I forced in some blushing tomatoes, gangly asparagus, drunk mushrooms (literally: they had been left to drown in a huadiao jiu marinade). Then I wisened up, and decided that no, you didn't have to have laundry list assemblages on a plate to make a good dinner. The embarrassing variety went from micro to macro, intraplate to interplate. This actually leads to more craziness: you're forced to compose with more balance. Herbs cannot repeat themselves; there must be meat and seafood; main actors and a supporting cast; starches and salads, and so on. Last summer I tried to produce a banquet and ended up with a tapas buffet, where I had been forced to commit the ingredient-tautology crime by putting lots of rocket, basil and pinenuts in everything.

We learn. As A said, "your spreads have gained focus." Last night there was a roasted cauliflower soup with manchego cheese shavings that managed to stump everyone. Popular guesses were lentil, mushroom, lotus root, turnip, but first prize (for truth value) went to J's "that braised Tientsin cabbage with Jinhua ham and dried scallop dish". I was flattered (but not as much as the cauliflower was), because that's quite a lot of flavor to come through from what was really just some vegetable pulp. Everyone seems to think cauliflower is the poorer and less glamorous cousin to broccoli, but I think that's just because it's quite hard to fuck up broccoli - just blanching or steaming or stir-frying and it usually emerges in an edible state - whereas it really takes some inspired tweaking to wring any sort of credibility out of a cauliflower. It also has that anaemic color and stodgy image which are hard to dispel. Actually, that's not really true across the board. The French have a very high regard for cauliflower; ditto for artichoke and white asparagus. They definitely have a very different champion vegetable league table from, say, the Americans or the Chinese. That's key, I think: the French usually have elaborate vegetable preparations (discounting their salads). Just like some of their specialties - tete de porc, boeuf bourguignon - that rely on laborious mise en place to achieve culinary transubstantiation, lots of French veggies have their own fairy tale in which the humblest root gets to dress up in cream-and-butter finery so that it can sit respectably next to the all-star meats - leg of lamb, calves' liver. After roasting, cauliflower becomes the Cinderella to her evil broccoli stepsister: a rich and melting gold mixture that makes great soups and other preparations requiring a soft core (maybe a gratin, or fritters).

There was also a snowpea, feta, pinenut and mint salad, lamb sausages and roasted sweet potatoes with caramelized shallots and coriander, a spaghetti aglio olio tossed with shitakes, saucisson sec and lots of garlic and parsley. And for dessert, a...I'm not sure what to call it. It started life as a "warm flourless orange and ginger cake" but after a minor catastrophe in the oven, I was forced to exhume the whole lot and repave the road, so to speak. Kind of a rough job, some improvised masonry, but it turned out ok. Of course it looked nothing like a cake. A shepherd's pie, maybe, or a crumble, or an orange brownie. Topped with the gelato that A kindly brought along from Ricciotti, it was something of a personal triumph for me, and a good save, this being my second ever attempt at baking.

Thanks to everyone who came. Now I'm off to scarf up the leftovers.

Star City Sydney

Last month I was in Sydney for five days with my family. Family holidays used to be high-octane roadtrips in New Zealand, catamaran adventures in Pattaya, castle and manor-trekking in England. Nowadays the parents aren't in such hardy shape anymore, so we're rarely able to tear ourselves away from the cities. Last year our daily itinerary in Japan read something like: 9am wake up, 10am breakfast in hotel, 11am step out of hotel for a walk, 12 noon lunch, 2pm parents and brother head back to hotel in taxi for afternoon nap, leaving me to amble through hours and hours of synthetic concrete Tokyo glamor until about 7pm when we'd arrange to meet somewhere for more food. The experienced has never thinned so far, though, at least for me. If anything, it's made me more of a flaneur than ever. Every new city throws me a challenge I rarely decline - to suss out the soul of the place, to divine its "thereness", how its people, buildings, transport arrange themselves. Usually, this involves quite a bit of fanciful extrapolation of my fragmentary impressions, but of course that's precisely the point. The flaneur's amateur anthropology is never meant to be a measure of the new city, but merely the measure of his city in relief, chalked up against a matrix of all the ones he's ever visited. Spending a semester in Paris this year taught me more about Singapore than Paris; every arrondissement that grew familiar to me, as I walked its streets daily and committed their pattern to memory, was a liminal mental map in magic tracing paper which, viewed against the light, turns out actually to be just another ititeration of a blueprint for Singapore.

We stayed at the Star City hotel, which in fact is just the "housing" element in a monstrous mixed-use complex that includes casino, international cuisine, two theaters, and quite a bit of shopping. In other words, the nightmarish sort of Integrated Resort that will soon materialize on these shores. As with all corporate commercial developments, it's terribly difficult to make these things look good. They sprawl this way and that, you're obliged to stuff some peripheral retail into the mix so that "trapped" consumers might throw a little bit more of their money away on a neck massage or a chocolate selection. There's never any sense of human scale; corporateness wants you to feel the awesome moniedness of their operation, and so they go in for double, triple-height ceilings coated in sparkly acetates, or maybe those low-cost high-gloss laminates in weird color schemes like turquoise and ochre. The flooring is usually some odd tint of marble, the railings and balusters usually mismatched and in burlesque styles. In keeping with themes, there might be a large Roman centurion statue somewhere. I'm not sure what effect all this has on the average (Asian) destination tourist. I suppose it's all rather impressive and "grand" in a facile sort of way, or maybe it all really doesn't matter. This is just the window dressing, the characterless Junkspace that has to be there, passageways of transit that connect casino to restaurant to toilet, so who gives a fuck about what it actually looks like.

The casino itself is a fascinating cross-section of most of Southeast and subtropical Asia, although there are some Koreans and Mainland Chinese as well. In an inner-city suburb of one of the finest harbor cities in the world, a culture of sunshine and slacker surfdom, here we find the clearing-house of the game-mad holidaying Asians of the world (usually wearing those soft sun-hats, even indoors).

We may have something going, actually. People who doubt the soundness of building a casino here in Singapore, like me, think we know what will really pull the tourists, but maybe we don't. "We" think the perfect holiday is going truffle-hunting in Emilia-Romagna, skiing at Courchevel, trawling the shabby chic restaurants and dive bars of the Lower East Side, but I'll bet the bigspenders who really make up the tourist figures want nothing more than precisely this sort of low-exertion, protected, culturally synthetic experience. It's only the liberally-educated poncy people like you and me, who think too much about these things, formulating elaborate leftist critiques of median tourism and poshly theorizing about it, that really think we'll get anywhere with this Renaissance Arty City tosh.

Unities of Habitation

1

In search of some stuff I needed for Thursday's dinner party, I hopped on the NEL to Little India. Thought Y might've been working at spell#7 but she wasn't, so I had the better part of the afternoon alone to ramble around the place. I'd heard a little about Tekka Market from enthusiastic family (the thosai?), and in the full midday heat the place was swarming with hungry workers on lunch break. I guess given the location, there was an expectedly higher proportion of Indian food stalls, including a bryani "specialist" with a snaking queue, a couple sarabat stalls where it looked like they still tarik the teh (most drink stalls nowadays seem to pass teh-si off as tarik, foamless and headless at the top). The wet market side held the biggest surprise - I think this guy was featured in the thickass ST National Day supplement. A couple stalls away and already you sense something is amiss. The stall with the kaffir limes and curry powder packets is playing a pulsating Hindi dance track, but what's that other refrain floating up above the mix...a clarinet's insistent singing, buoyed along by a driving double bass, frenetic manouche guitars...that sweet sound of dixieland and hot jazz is coming from just around the corner, from Chia's Vegetable Supply. In a wet market devoted chiefly to the spices and herbs of South Asia, here is a man who will sell you tarragon and sorrel. I think. I didn't get a close enough look, but I assume that's the market he's aiming to corner.

On the other side of Serangoon Road is Tekka Mall, a vaguely oval-shaped and largely untenanted place. It's pleasantly light-flooded, thanks to the skylight that stretches across the entire ceiling. Nothing much of interest, except that the basement has a strangely extemporized feel to it, businesses that look like they've just moved in, a little nervously, aware that this isn't exactly a point of peak human traffic, and have that half-hearted moved-in look because they are prepared to move right out again if business doesn't pick up - which it quite probably won't. There's a money changer in an uncommonly well-polished booth, a couple of forlorn snack stands, and one of those Japanese-inspired S$10 barber kiosks. It put me in mind of one of the most exhilarating things about densely constructed Asian metropoles - their sometimes slapdash layout. It could be vegetables sold straight out of parked lorries in Bangkok, or fake Rolexes spread out on the pavement in Taipei. If there isn't enough proper space to set up your little shop, snatch a little parcel underneath the stairwell, on a rooftop, in the slender hollows between walls, wherever. If this is programmed space, say, those perpetually unstable few square metres next to the entrance to the Gallery Hotel (I've seen champagne boutique and florist), then maybe the compactness makes your stuff look sleeker and more sharply editorialized (and therefore more tasteful). If not - if you find yourself having to hawk your wares at the perilous junction of an escalator and a cliff, then you get a free dramatic backdrop for your retail environment.

The best example of this, I think, is the entire thrilling extent of the most dramatically sited piece of urban architecture I've ever seen - the long and winding outdoor escalator in Hong Kong that links Central to the Mid-levels (already the name implies dynamic contours, the drama of ascent and descent). The escalator only goes in one direction at any time, of course. In the mornings, if you're seated (as I was) at a Central tsa tsan teng (breakfasting on a floppy fried egg, some greasy ham and a bun slathered slick with butter, all washed down with milky tea) with a good view, you get to savor the slightly alarming spectacle of office workers commuting to work on foot, whisked breezily along as the escalator rolls relentlessly downwards, from the heady heights of soaring condo blocks perched on the Mid-levels all the way down to the banks and office buildings of Central HK. After the morning rush hour the escalator runs upward. As a tourist in HK, this has to be one of the most heart-stopping things to do (that only rarely gets a guidebook rec) - taking the escalator upwards from Central - preferably at night, when sodium streetlights supply deepened contrast, and HK's neon heraldry is ablaze. It's pretty much a regular escalator, moving along at the normal speed (the reason why watching the morning escalator commute is vaguely exciting is because the commuters do the work of walking downstairs while also being expedited by the descending current). The awesome thing about it is that you get to be shuttled up above the thrumming activity of Central, surveying gradients and greenery, slowly weaving in and out of the sometimes treacherously perched citiness of HK. The vistas are straight out of Blade Runner, except that they have the additional drama of dizzy heights and staggered placement. In this bit of the city, buildings sprout up not so much where it is most propitious, but (almost) rather where it is least feasible. The Mid-levels may not be the most densely crammed part of HK - rather scattered compared to cheek-by-jostling-jowl Mongkok, for instance - but the mix is electric as well as aesthetic. Instead of the user's-choice pleasures of selecting a desultory itinerary through Parisian street warrens, here you are offered a glimpse at how buildings, and thereby cities, choose themselves: how they wind down the path of their own construction, how an urban organism battles the terrain for the ownership of it. An all-night convenience store balances itself at the edge of a makeshift park; the park that is forced to retreat from an encroaching hairpin bend in the road; the road that is impressed upon by the Italian cafe and its outdoor tables and chairs teetering over the pavement... Everywhere along the escalator's trajectory there are adhoc vendors and hawkers secreted in the interstices, shops and restaurants whose occupation seems tenuous. The skinny buildings they inhabit creep up against the suave curve of the escalator scaffold, press up tightly to a grassy cliff face.

Or else, in Tokyo, where residual spaces are daily annexed to outcroppings of retail space, a ramen bar that seats four people or a one-chair barber kiosk...oops, a bit of a lengthy digression, this. My point - that untenanted space holds promise for a yet unconfirmed commercial use, but that even a seemingly saturated environment is ripe for further exploitation. Maybe what we need is for entrepreneurs to behave like parasites, or toadstools after the rain. Fleeting, modular architecture, nearly weightless and eminently transplantable. A city of flux, of inhabitation and disappearance.

2

After finding what I needed at Phoon Huat (171 Bencoolen), I headed for Rochor Center, where R told me I could find a thrift store (except I don't think this is an American thrift store, and certainly not in the hipster sort of way) that sold those standard-issue touchtone Telecoms telephones that everyone had at home in the 80s. This was my second attempt, and again I couldn't find it. I did find several fo jiao wen wu xuan though, selling large chrome-plated gold ingots, figurines in the likeness of that long white-bearded dude with the gnarled staff, variously shaped musical fountains (can plug in, one!). Also a mom-and-pop CD-VCD-DVD shop playing an assortment of Hokkien evergreens, and a couple of artisan workshops. There was an old man squatting on a stool handpainting couplets onto a chestnut-shaped ribbed red lantern, and an unmanned, shuttered shop with two unfinished guzheng propped up against its entrance. There was a kopitiam too of course, a huge furniture showroom, and a toyshop of the old-fashioned sort (five stones, marbles, kuti-kuti), a bank, post office, household miscellany... Walking this nearly self-sufficient complex, this machine for living , I thought of Le Corbusier and his unrealized vision for la ville radieuse. When he made his audacious proposal in the 1930s for a tabula rasa Paris, for its serpentine streets, tiny ruelles and allées to be bulldozed in order to make way for multi-laned highways, flyovers, concrete apartment buildings, glass and steel skyscrapers, Parisians were naturally outraged (except...hadn't they just been outraged at least twice in 50 years, first by Haussmann's designs and then the Eiffel Tower?) Here in Singapore, of course, there was no time for outrage, not when the SIT and then the HDB confidently pressed forward with plans for modern high-rise housing for a burgeoning modern population anxious to appear modern. What Le Corb proposed and had rejected in Paris, the city mapped as an efficient function, got realized to some extent in the Unité d'Habitation in Marseilles, a "machine for living" extended to an entire apartment complex interwoven with shops, services, social space. What Rochor Center seems to me is an application of these principles that seems to work. You might not agree with the facile color scheme of the four HDB blocks that sit above the four-storey terrace of shops and services (red, blue, green, yellow), but the mechanisms of Corb's machine are evident: anonymous cell-like residential units with easy access to essential amenities in one neat package. Well-oiled, too: residents milling about running errands, chatting in passageways, shopping, working. And today, squinting in the afternoon sun, I had to admit that even the colors had a garish postmodern rightness to them. Maybe this is what we need - to take Rochor Center as our modular SimCity building block, extend it as much as possible, propagate these machines for living. Or, in a clunky translation from the French, these unities of habitation.

To Liang Court

Nowadays Clarke Quay is starting to look more and more like one of those other iconic waterside/warehouse urban renewal projects: Faneuil Hall in Boston, Xintiandi in Shanghai, Cockle Bay/King St. Wharf in Sydney. The rules of the game are quite simple, and widely applicable - take a single, couple or entire contingent of sullen outmoded buildings that once saw life as granaries, warehouses, shipyards, gut them of redundant fixtures (but making sure you retain any crucially "authentic" structural details that give the lie to its ex-identity, its industrial ghost), slap on coats of paint, perhaps a complementary extension annex in cool steel and glinting glass so that some interesting past-future dialectic gets going...and suddenly these dead spaces get turned into festival markets, cavernous dance clubs, dramatically spacious restaurants. They botched the job the first time around, though: the old Clarke Quay was a tacky series of souvenir stands, shops selling sparkly knick-knacks, pewter figurines and colored crystals, that sort of thing. Now, not only do we have a restaurant mix taking wide liberties with various cuisines - an Indochine venture channeling Vietnamese-Cambodian but with an obvious Tang dynasty terracotta-fixture fetish ("Forbidden City"), a fashionably borderless pan/South-Asian/Pacific rim bistro called Coriander Leaf - but there is also that free-falling theme-park ride which looks like a bungee harness or a giant slingshot; and those droopy sunflower riverside dining pavilions (if anything, I think this says "fuck the shophouses" and hurtles recklessly forward Tokyo-style for retro-futuristic contextless plastic architecture...).

Not so long ago, though, before this post-industrial infatuation with freshening up the godowns and derelict shophouses hit us, before light industry became perfumed ruins, Clarke Quay was basically just a vaguely functional dock with our own little Tokyo compressed into a neat mall package: Liang Court (and the adjoining Hotel New Otani). Liang Court is now being redeveloped by CapitalLand, which means that we can all expect another sparkling white-tiled and highly polished mall soon stocked with Bread Talk and Food Junction, maybe a satellite Crystal Jade outpost, with or without a new regional inspiration... In the basement, Meidi-ya and its spillover operations (Pokka Gelato, tonkatsu specialty restaurant, Four Leaves bakery) still draw the weekend Japanese expats in search of prepacked bentos and forty-five dollar punnets of Kyoho grapes. The anchor tenant, Daimaru, is now sadly reduced to a bargain basement crockery and houseware section. A mammoth electronics superstore now sprawls over most of the ground floor, casting the deathly pallor of its sodium display lights across onto the mall floors - which, previously a marbled chocolate-calico, have now been retiled in scintillant white. What I hope doesn't disappear: the bubble lifts that spirit the ambling consumer up to the now deathly quiet second, third, fourth floors, occupied by ailing rosewood furniture, clunky chinoiserie galleries, pallid watercolor scrolls, lonely lighting fixtures; as a kid I remember taking the lift up from the basement carpark with family in tow to Tung Lok for dim sum lunch (this before the islandwide invasion of Crystal Jade). The return journey on the lift down to the carpark was always the more thrilling one; surveying the milling crowd of shoppers below, the little tummy-whoop of vertigo as the bubble plummeted down its cabled track, the ground rushing upward to meet you. There was also Trader Vic's, a "Polynesian" restaurant where you ate out of hollowed coconuts and settings made out of woven leaves. You could dine very well there, on festive appetizer platters piled with samosas, spring rolls and other things you might believe are South Sea specialties just because there are maraschino cherry halves and pineapple rings interwoven with the frozen dim sum selection...but there were also roasted meat skewers and goopy fruit relishes and smoky grilled fish, and it was of course a bonus if you bought their act, played along with the tribal village theme, sipping a turquoise Tiki-tiki cocktail, nibbling on macadamias, borne aloft to a cloudless night on the beach by magical marimba and bongo beats...Nowadays of course we are all a lot more sensible about the dining out thing, and decide that we want to eat in light and airy surroundings. Instead of earnest theme restaurants selling you a Pacific island holiday fantasia of synthetic straw huts and swaying plastic trees, we achieve an equivalent transport just by fantasising about wonderlands of Danish chairs and lampshades in witty materials.

To Jenny

One may have noticed a recent trend towards light, fuss-free cuisine, as promoted by some of the more popular cookery shows. With an emphasis on friendly can-do dishes using widespread ingredients, it seems the new buzzword phrase circulating in foodie circles is "simply delicious"!

According to many fast-paced executives, pressed themselves to climb a corporate ladder, the trend for them is to become disllusioned with the fine-dining scene. They now prefer to spend more me-time on weekday evenings with spouse and children by dashing home after work in the car, just in time to whip up a one-man (or woman) culinary storm in a home-based domestic type setting, surrounded by captivated loved ones. However, they also wish to transplant the professional styles of cooking into a more user-friendly mindset, so that the whole family unit can joyously savour restaurant classics while still cosily attired in the comfort of their casual home clothes.

Yet, the sticklers to restaurant cookery may react violently with shame and horror to so daring a suggestion. "No," they offendedly exclaim, and then add, that the home kitchen should not be invaded thus by trendy movers and shakers from the restaurant realm. They seem to be right. The humble domestic kitchen is certainly no place for a truffled turkey! Home cooking and restaurant cuisine are definitely mutually at odds with the other, and no cultured foodies worth their salt would dare to dream of mixing the two. As it is, however, the situation is a positive nightmare!

"I have several ladies of leisure coming to me for home kitchen tips," says Madam Victoria Sng-Wallace, a retired cookery consultant, 57. "Nowadays, everyone wants to spice up their repertoire of dishes preparable at home. Ladies like to introduce labour-intensive foods like Peranakan sambals into the home arena, but they don't wish to undertake the aches and pains caused by squatting there and pounding - two typical actions that the preparation of rempahs require."

But there seem to be more ironies to the situation. The opposite dilemma is common in professional kitchens, where chefs find that they are no longer called upon to conceptualise elaborate pleasures of the table (let's say, in the late 90's grand French style). In the current dining climate, diners tend to have a minimalist dining frame of mind, thinking that it is trendy to dine lightly rather than heavily. Whereas, ten or perhaps even fifteen years ago, a typical epicure might have eaten in true splendour, zooming straight in onto the plumper cuts of meat on the menu, doused in a liberal overpouring of cream-based sauce, today's jet-set considers this vulgar - and also fairly unhealthy. Instead, dishes like poached fishes with organic vegetal accompaniments or fruity accents are the current fashionable rage.