Don Porfirio - El Senor de la Bestias

On our first day in Toluca, I noticed this face on a wall. And then it just kept reappearing...















We were told that the artist of the faces was a homeless man in Toluca known as the Don Porfirio / Lord of the Beasts (El Senor de la Bestia) and he had been drawing these faces around Toluca along with a rambling political text for some time. He was frequently seen with his many dogs following him, hence the beasts, and I wish I knew how to speak spanish because we eventually met the man himself on the street in front of Los Portales... He asked me where I was from. I said Singapore, but then he asked me to list some other cities and went off on a tangent about the China and eventually Vietnam War. Due to my poor (ie: nonexistent) Spanish I did not know what he was going on about...









To be honest when I was first told that the place where we had been standing at was "Los Portales", I thought of "lost portals" like these were gateways to mysterious places elsewhere. I also wondered why he asked me to name some other random cities near Singapore. Perhaps it was all the same to him, whatever country I might be from did not really matter. Or perhaps it is all the same to him, all the countries have evil people in them that need fighting against, that there will always be stories to be told and drawn in the countries. Or perhaps there is no complex story, this is just the mad ravings of an artistically inclined homeless man in Toluca. Who knows? Its amazing to find his drawings in small corners, on walls, everywhere in Toluca...

Another mystery is the stereotypical asian features of the characters. Although I could not seem to find out from him why they looked asian, and some others told me he was not drawing asians but the stereotypical small mexican person, this one in particular seems to suggest that he is infact consciously drawing a chinese character because he writes "Chinese Monk" on top of this one drawing:

La Pulqueria (San Fellipe Tlamimilolpan)

"Pulque, or octli, is a milk-colored, somewhat viscous alcoholic beverage made from the fermented sap of the maguey plant, and is a traditional native beverage of central Mexico. The drink’s history extends far back into the Mesoamerican period, when it was considered sacred, and its use was limited to certain classes of people. After the Spanish Conquest of Mexico, the drink became secular and its consumption rose. The consumption of pulque reached its peak in the late 19th century. In the 20th century, the drink fell into decline, mostly because of competition from beer, which became more prevalent with the arrival of European immigrants." (From Wikpedia)

The other evening, Luis flagged a taxi for us and asked to find a pulqueria. The very kind taxi driver took us on a ride away from the city conurbation and into the more "country" parts. Surprisingly after not more than half an hour of driving out, we were no longer in a city.





Soon we were on unpaved roads. Asking around also revealed that there were supposed to be very few if not no more pulquerias around the place and we were in a corn field. It looked a bit sketchy...



Corn fields in San Fellipe Tlamimilolpan

... until we stopped finally in a place where they said they did pulque. At first they were suspicious of us, but later one of them invited us in. And so we came in to their house, and they gave us pulque in a clay earthernware. It was cold and delicious. They said they were preparing it for a big soccer game in a field nearby, when they would sell this pulque.



Our taxi driver with the owner of the house. You would never have a taxi driver in Singapore agree to randomly take a few hours detour and a long stopover at some random stranger's house for a few hours to have some fermented cactus juice. It was very nice of him to accompany us and indulge us on our adventure... They seemed to have a good conversation together as well to the extent that for some periods of time I forgot he was our taxi driver whom we had simply flagged down on the street.



On the wall, there hung an old drawing of jesus, which looked almost like a chinese wayang character to me because it was so ornately decorated. There was a bit of a rain outside and there was a cat hiding in the house with the dirt floor. It was making a meow sound every few minutes.



Another customer came in. He was a "regular customer". He claimed to have been drinking for 6 days in a row, and we could almost believe it since he kept lapsing into self-doubting and hand-wringing phases of "I don't mean any disrespecting!" inbetween taking a shine to me (becoming almost slightly creepy and repeating "I... LIKE.... YOU" in espanol to me, while pointing to me and pointing to himself and repeating this). He said he would drink for one more day, and then stop after the 7th day of drinking. In his strangely white trainers and bright modern printed shirt, it was hard to imagine where he had really come from, or what he had been doing, or what was going on with him or why he kept talking about respect and not wanting to disrespect others.





Clay pottery keeps the cold stuff cold, and the hot stuff hot. Its great. Plastic and metal sucks. I went to the Museo the other day and the clay pottery was all intact whereas the metal artefacts were corroded badly. Now that we are in the era of plastic, nothing will last like that clay that we started off with.



On the way home there was a bit of rain, and subsequently it flooded for a while. When we returned to the centro everything was silent and closed at night. People go to sleep early here I reckon... I am going to do the same and wake up early instead. I can still hear the distant strains of a mariachi somewhere... probably at the Portales...

Vamos a la Mexico

In a sudden twist of fates, I have come to the undiscovered country of Mexico, to teach a workshop at the Facultad Artes, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México (Toluca, Mexico) along with a few other Singaporean/South-east Asian based artists/educators. Much thanks must go to Luis and Anne-Marie for putting the amazing trip together, and I've also been learning lots from them and Andreas who taught a workshop about Pure Data, which I am very excited about now.

Mexico is brilliant, it resembles a mix between the clamor and chaos of Indonesia (visible signs of poverty and high income inequality) and a bizarrely European style (colonial buildings and Spanish speaking population) and European weather. The weather is hot in the sun during the mornings (22 degrees and more) but as the sun ebbs away the weather can fall suddenly (to 10 degrees or lower). You can put your milk carton outside your window. And leave a pack of crisps on the table and find it still amazingly crunchy on the day after.

We are currently in Toluca, the capital of Mexico State, and the UAEM (our host) is a public university, meaning that students aren't paying private fees for all the facilities in this art school. And a fully-fledged art school it is! Smelling of paint, with a great computer lab for both mac and pc (the only problem is the spotty internet), a large traditional printmaking studio, outdoor sculpture areas, sound recording studio, film studio with professional lights, rigging, rails, etc. Impressive for a public school to have amassed so much!

One of the important criteron for whether I would seriously learn a foreign language would be whether the language itself already has a large body of literature, and in that respect Spanish is a language I would love to learn. A visit to the bibloteca and the bookstores here in Centro Toluca show no paucity of literature and poems to be entertained by. I have made some puerile attempts to learn spanish along the way, enough to hire a taxi to places and back or ask for food, and found some poetry books by Toluca's poets. Maybe eventually I will be able to read them!

Here is what it looks like to me:

























See all images in my Flickr Set: Mexico

Soon I will post more on: Following the trail of the El Senor de la Bestias, our trip to a surreal Pulqueria in a small village called San Fellipe Tlamimilolpan, Mayan Calendars and the Aztec Barcode, and Pedro Infante....

Ruby on Rails / How to use Slidedown to make HTML5 slides in Markdown

Last weekend I attended a railsbridge session which was hosted by newcontext at their amazing office; Desi from Devchix, along with many other helpers guided a roomful of girls through a workshop on building and deploying our first Ruby on Rails app. I think its great that they have female-focused programming classes because there are really not so many girls doing programming! And it was good because I needed that little push to get me over the main hurdle (ie: INSTALLING RUBY ON MY MAC) and then the rest was really a breeze. I'm excited to build more things in Ruby and to get more acquainted with running things on the command line on my mac!

For more information on railsbridge check out:
- Installfest Guide - how to install ruby
(do note that for mac 10.6.8 the instructions are slightly outdated, you will only need GCC-10.6 instead of Xcode)
- Railsbridge Curriculum - the lessons we went through

My own notes are here.

I noticed that they were using an interesting html/jquery based presentation tool which was called Slidedown, and since I will be teaching a workshop in Mexico next week I thought I should try to use that instead of using Prezi or some other random desultory method.

I went to Slidedown on github, downloaded the package, and puzzled for quite some time over what to do with it. HOW WOULD ANYONE NEW TO THIS EVER FIGURE THIS OUT WITHOUT THE INTERNETS! Anyways, the inside of this package didn't look exactly like the file structure of the Suggestotron example that we built during the class (as the package came without a Gemfile). But there was a .gemspec file inside, which was the clue that I googled for. And this is eventually what I figured out:

---

How to install a gem in ruby

If there is a gemspec file inside the folder, this is what you should run in terminal:

gem build gemname.gemspec
gem install gemname-version.gem
slidedown yourtalk.md

That was just an example. Replace gemname with the actual name of your gem. So, in my case, after downloading the slidedown gem from github, this is what I actually typed in (VERBATIM):

gem build slidedown.gemspec
gem install slidedown-0.2.0.gem
slidedown mytalk.md

After I installed it, it generated my html for me inside the command.



I hope this post will help someone who might be sitting at their computer puzzling over this embarrassingly noob question that also stumped me... "HOW DOES I INSTALL A RUBY GEM???"

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I love editing my wiki, which has a pared down mediawiki text format as well, but Markdown is even simpler and nicer - so I find it most excellent fun to make my presentation in Markdown before creating it in HTML. So simple and clean! This is the example of what the Markdown syntax looks like when you create something in Slidedown.

!SLIDE

# This is my talk

!SLIDE

## I hope you enjoy it

!SLIDE code

    def foo
      :bar
    end

!SLIDE

Google is [here](http://google.com)

!SLIDE

# Questions?

Click here to view Slidedown Example

The Kampong Ulu Empat Puluh Wild Boar Appreciation Club

The Singapore River as a Bow-shaped Canal

Recently, I read, with some incredulity, that the Singapore River was to be diverted for the digging of new MRT tunnels (Downtown Line).

ST Breaking News (28 April 2012) - Singapore River diversion a herculean task:

"The plan to divert the Singapore River may be the most ambitious part of the MRT Downtown Line project. The herculean task, to begin by the end of the third quarter, will reroute part of the river next to Riverside Point into a bow-shaped canal. (…) The river is being moved so that the Land Transport Authority (LTA) can bore two train tunnels under it for the Downtown Line 3."

ST Breaking News (28 April 2012) - Singapore River to be diverted for MRT tunnels:

"Part of the Singapore River, the site of Singapore's earliest settlements, will be moved so that an MRT line can be built under it. In the first undertaking of its kind, the Land Transport Authority (LTA) and Korean builder GS Engineering & Construction will dig a bow-shaped canal to divert the river. It will then clear the drained portion of age-old debris and fill it with a stabilising material before boring two train tunnels under it. The original path of the waterway will be reinstated after the tunnels are completed."

Source: ST



Map Source: OneMap. Annotation by Debbie.

The fate of excavated debris and soil is something I have puzzled over for some time now. What will happen to all this "age-old debris" after they dig it up? Do they use it to fill up other spaces? Do they bury it somewhere else? Do they give the soil to others to reuse in other landfills? What happens to the soil from (commercial) excavations?

It has been known that sometimes the government does allow a pause in these redevelopment/construction works to allow for archaeological digs. This has happened for a number of old sites around the central part of Singapore, such as the Old Parliament at Empress Place, the National Art Gallery (a very short spell though). But crucially, because this has not yet actually happened, there is still a possibility for a proper request for an study of the dig site at the Singapore River before it too has been built over forever.

Back in April, I made some notes about John Miksic's lecture on "Guerrilla Archaeologists and the Singapore Story" here on my other Documentations blog. When he spoke about the importance of archaeology particularly in areas which were endangered and about to be dug up, I also immediately thought of the Downtown Line excavations which are all in the town area. I'm interested in the DTL excavations around Sungei Road. But of course, now it appears, the Singapore River itself is also at stake.

What is the importance of doing an archaeological dig? Why is it important to study the Singapore River then? Well, I think one thing that is often eclipsed in accounts of "Singapore History" is the presence of a history before Raffles. These archaelogical studies, as well as the acquisition of the Beilitung Shipwreck (however much the ethics might be dispute) are reminders that Singapore is not only in existence because of its colonial history, but it has a much longer history as a place in this region.



Photo taken on 4th May - Around the River Valley Station Construction Site



Photo taken on 4th May - Around the River Valley Station Construction Site



Photo taken on 4th May - Piling works have already started as evidenced by photos taken around the site.



The part of the waterway that they are planning to divert.



This signboard has the list and phone numbers of all the agencies involved.

I suppose the first thing to do is to raise awareness of the value of an archaeological study in that area. Someone has already set up a facebook group here for starters - Singapore River diversion - Protect Our Heritage where they are asking for 6 months to allow the NUS team to study the site. Will this be acceded to? Perhaps we need more public support to persuade the authorities to allow this break in construction for an archaeological study. But after all, what is six months to study a historical site that might never be accessible again for all eternity?

---

It looks like I might have to update my animation of the changes in the Singapore River.... although by the way things are going, maybe I should have to wait to see if other parts of the Singapore River also gets moved about. It's already been shown that here in Singapore there are no sacred cows: there are no monuments, no heritage sites, no geographical features, and no buildings here that cannot be wilfully moved or destroyed. But this is an attitude that needs to change - or at least for people to be more educated about what will be lost from all this, and what we could have gained from it as well...



The Singapore River as a Psychogeographical Faultline

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Another view of the River (from a screenshot I took in August 2010):



This CTE tunnel is under the Singapore River. Do you think the drivers passing through this part of the CTE are even aware that they are actually moving under the Singapore River itself? Under the waters and the waves and the boats and everything? Its funny how these things are so central and so many people pass through this area but most people still don't really look at the things around them.

Abstract McDonalds Floats in the Void of Time and Space

A new Mcdonalds outlet opening up at Bugis advertises itself with the strangest image ever - an empty image of a generic building - floating in space! This was found on a huge signboard outside Iluma, facing the busy Victoria Street.

I've always struggled to explain why I am drawn to empty shopping malls, although every last shred of poetry and meaning and history seems to have been wrung out of these sort of places. Perhaps because I have the experience of sitting in quiet, empty public areas like that after all the shops are closed (that being the only time when they are tolerable), and although these places and spaces which have been created without any architectural thought or merit, they are somehow still capable of becoming the repository of one's experience of the city. I suppose in that, even the most generic and undesigned space can become special through personal experience.

The Near Impossibility of Compatibility between a Mac and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and Samsung Pico Projector

I've been playing around with two devices recently, for work reasons. Both of them are incidentally Samsung devices - namely the Samsung Pico Projector SP-H03 (SGD399 Promo at EpiLife) and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (Retail Price SGD848). One thing I noticed is that although they are kinda decent products on their own, unfortunately they won't work right out of the box with a Mac. In fact they pretty much don't respond at all when connected to a Mac! It's times like these that I think that Apple does it the right way when I don't have to install a driver to print on most common printers. In this day and age, we expect the devices to be smart enough to connect up. At the very least I would expect some distant flicker of recognition or reaction from it!

These are my workarounds for connecting them to a Mac, I hope it helps someone else connect their devices to their Mac since it took me some time to figure these out. For the record, I'm using a Macbook Pro 15" running on Mac OSX 10.6.8.

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My issues with both Samsung products:

1. When you plug a mobile device into a computer, you would expect it to mount and charge, like an iPad would on any device whether Mac or Windows. Anything that requires me to install a driver/application and go through a very complicated method to access files shouldn't have been shipped out to unwitting consumers.

2. When you plug a device such as a projector into a computer, you would expect it to be detectable without having to completely stop what you're doing and reboot your computer.

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How to Connect Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 to a Mac

I tried using Kies, Android File Transfer, and via DDMS in Android SDK. DDMS stands for Dalvik Debug Monitor Server and its Android's debugging tool. Kies and Android File Transfer did not work AT ALL with Mac. Android SDK was a bit more hassle to install but essentially straightforward to do and most importantly, at least it works!



Hopeless Kies: Infinitely spinning "Connecting..." Dialog

Method 1: Kies - FAILED

Will not connect the Galaxy Tab to my Macbook Pro via USB or Wifi. In any case, it could only transfer photos, videos, and movies, and would not have allowed any access to the file structure. It perpetually says "Connecting..." but never does.

Method 2: Android File Transfer - FAILED

Very disappointing as this was the "official" method listed in the Samsung website. For explanation, read this: "Google provide Android File Transfer and there is also a third party product called XNJB. Neither currently work and the reason for this is that they both use libmtp which is an open source implementation of an MTP Initiator. To understand why this is we need to go back to MTP. In MTP each device has a manufacturer code and device code, a list of which is maintained in the libmtp source code (take a look at music-players.h). Building the library hard-wires the device list inside it, which, at the last build of both Android File Transfer and XNJB did not include the requisite codes for the Samsung Galaxy Tab." - Who made the decision to direct consumers to download AFT if in the first place it is certainly not going to work with the Galaxy Tab? Also, why did they not ship Kies together with the product if its their software?



Also hopeless: Android File Transfer does not work in this case

Method 3: Via Android SDK - WORKS!

This was the last ditch attempt, but this method was the only thing that worked for me. You'll want to make sure that you have Eclipse Classic (Mac OS X for 64 bit) + ADT Plugin for Eclipse + Android SDK. I followed this guide on how to install Android SDK in Eclipse and it was a breeze.



Eclipse



Installing Android SDK



Installing ADT Plugin

While the Galaxy Tab is not connected to the computer, go to Applications > USB Debugging and make sure it is ticked so that Debugging mode will launch when the USB is next connected.

Go to the Android SDK toolkit window in Eclipse. Go to Windows > Open Perspective > Others... > DDMS.



SUCCESS!!! Here's looking at the files inside the Galaxy Tab 10.1
Now you're in. But should we have to go to so much trouble to access the device??? I am doubtful that most will take the trouble to do this. Plus its not very pretty, is it? This method is sure to scare off most casual users, I'd imagine.

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How to Connect Samsung Pico Projector to a Mac

A friend described this device as "an obstinate pony" and I honestly could not agree any more with that description. I enjoy having a larger projection of my screen, but I must admit that it doesn't come with much instructions, and it is hard to make it behave. For example, if you simply plug it into your mac, it won't recognise the device. After some hair-pulling and experimenting, I have found the (almost) fool-proof method of connecting it to a Mac. I have no explanation for why this works or what is going on. BUT TRUST ME IT WORKS.

FOLLOW THESE STEPS EXACTLY IN THIS ORDER:

1. Turn off projector and shut down your mac. Turn it off. Turn off all the power. Disconnect everything!
   
2. Start by connecting projector to battery, power, and then use D-Sub Gender cable and connect projector to Mac's USB drive.
   
3. Turn on projector first, before you start up the mac.
   
4. Turn on your mac next. Wait for your mac to have completely finished starting up before going to the projector and using its touch buttons to change the selected Input to "PC".
   
5. Projector should be showing the output from your Mac now. Note that you might want to switch to Mirroring if that makes it easier for you to see what is going on...

Sungei Road Chairs

In the morning and afternoon, these chairs are used by people at the market stalls, and in the evening and night, they are often left on the fence for people to use, where people sit late into the night to talk; and where casual passerbys, homeless people, or lost travellers sometimes stop to borrow them for a while. Although the shophouses have been burnt down, the land has been fenced up to keep people off it, and the market is slowly being edged out by the construction work, the community still persists and keeps camp on Sungei Road.

Narrative, Performance, and Bathos in Korean Pop Ballads

As some of you might be aware, I occasionally update my Preposterous Music Blog (over at http://basicbitchez.tumblr.com) This week, while searching for new abominations of music, I chanced upon this video. I have always had a particular preference for "intense" or "high-tempo" music, and have consciously avoided listening to ballads or slower pop songs because I felt that slow songs were uninteresting since they were not intense, exuberant, nor particularly danceable. I thought it was because some people just liked slow songs and I did not (I enjoy fast music because a fast background tempo also sets a faster tempo for one's own living). Anyway, for some reason, I did not instantly close the tab on this slower paced song by MBLAQ (which actually stands for "Music Boys Live in Absolute Quality", and I am not even making this up...) The song begins with a spoken word quote in English that goes "Time is too slow for me..."



MBLAQ - CRY

The video is generic by most measures; like most manufactured korean pop songs, there is something deeply "performative" about it, but in this case, it is almost in an old fashioned boyband way. The boys are fashionably dressed to fit that particular kind of androgynous asian masculinity; wearing make-up; dancing dramatic "interpretive dance" moves (including an underwater scene) while they are repeatedly asking in engrish, "why are you making me cry?"...



Like that dance move from Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights.



Mandatory dramatic underwater scene.



Crying in the rain. Oh boo hoo.

Their relative youth and polished appearance makes it completely impossible for me to take their "emotions" seriously, and there is a lot of "over-enunciating" going on (the result of overzealous elocution classes perhaps?) which kinda disturbs me when I see how they speak. On top of that, they are performing the song in artificially created studio spaces... curiously prepackaged and isolated in a vacuum. So, yes, this is pure plastic artifice/performance. Nothing new I know, this happens all the time in pop music - but suddenly I realized...

....that I had forgotten that the word "ballad" had originally referred to stories or narrative set to music, and that the form of the "ballad" song was not originally synonymous with simply "slow tempo songs", but relating more to how the ballad was the medium for the stories that people told (set to music!).

So, when people buy into slow ballads such as this boyband ballad, is it because they are indeed, truly interested in watching the performance (as an obvious performance)? Is their main motivation for listening to it because they want to be absorbed into the drama or emotion?

Some weeks ago I realized that my interest in "horrifying" or bad music could perhaps be related to me being a nihilist at heart, which is why I gleefully embrace and hold up the symbols of youth-centric cultural mis-reappropriation and self-aware dumbing-down as the irrefutable proof that the world is quickly folding into an entropic black hole of meaning.

Its probably safe to say that most people probably don't have such a complicated reason for listening to pop music, and maybe some people just enjoy the slower tempo of a ballad song compared to something faster or too "intense".

But perhaps… they're in it for the STORIES. This puts it into a different perspective for me. That ballads exist because they are vehicles for popular emotional narratives. I would love to believe that, because I might try to develop a better appreciation for even the slow numbers then! After all, everybody (including me) loves a good story, aye?

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The Story Behind the Interpretive Dance in MBLAQ's Y

In an attempt to understand how they came about with their dance and songs, I searched further and found a useful video in which they explain their dance in one of their other tracks in detail. You should watch the original video "Y" before reading further.



Presenting: MBLAQ - Y



Dance Lesson: MBLAQ's G.O (left) and Lee Joon (right) explain the dance behind the track "Y"

Lee Joon explains, "After making an inverted triangle with both hands, spread the arms to create a Y with the entire body. Then, as if a man is making a fist and crying, bend down the upper body and gather the arms to the heart. To get emotional at this moment, act like you're at the market. Give a feeling like you are demanding a discount. 'Cut the price a little!'" [“양손으로 역삼각형을 만든 후 팔을 힘차게 뻗으며 온 몸으로 Y를 그린다. 그 다음 남자가 주먹을 쥐며 울듯이 상반신을 숙이며 팔을 가슴 쪽으로 모아준다”... “이때 감정이입을 위해 마트에 간 상황을 연출한다. 깎아달라는 느낌을 줘야한다”... “좀만 깎아줘”]

After that demonstration, G.O adds that you should put on a "시크" or chic facial expression (whatever that means) and he also adds this line of comedic gold: "Imagine when you are in a restaurant and 10 minutes has passed, 20 minutes has passed, and your order still has not come." ["이 표정은 음식을 시켜놓고 10분이 지나도 20분이 지나도 음식이 나오지 않았을 때를 떠올려야한다"] (At this point, the camera hilariously cuts to Lee Joon's face, suddenly seething with seriousness)

If this is not the most brilliant description of a dance ever (coming from the artistes themselves), I don't know what is...



Now, please watch MBLAQ's "Y" again.
(aka "Y U NO GIVE ME DISCOUNT? or Y U NO SERVE ME FOOD ALREADY?")