sangsara.net

  • Tiny Fry’s electronics concept store, Singapore

    100 words

    P157

    I don’t think this electronics store is affiliated with that Fry’s, but I like the fast food/supermarket theme they’ve got going with refrigerators as storage shelves for iPads and MacBooks on the inside. The signboard outside shows featured products (everything with a screen is shown displaying a burger) with a superscript type treatment that makes $400 look like $4.00. Clever. They seem to have iPhone/iPad cases that the usual Apple authorized retailers here don’t carry, as well as things that are outright impossible to find outside of Singapore’s Sim Lim black market: Kindles, Nooks, current-gen Apple TVs, etc.

    Location: Level 1, Millennia Walk.

  • Nudged

    333 words
    It’s been a long day. I heard the news about Steve Jobs from Facebook and Twitter while I was still in bed in the morning. I didn’t think it’d be this soon; like John Gruber, I kept believing he’d pull through again. Not shocked, not depressed, but deeply moved by the enormity of what had been lost.

    I said to someone that future generations capable of mapping time and parallel dimensions might look at their charts and see how the course of our world changed at this moment. Things are different now, for us all, than they might have been if he lived to be 90. I don’t know anyone who could doubt that.

    At lunch, I bought the iPod classic I’ve been thinking about for the past week. Silver, not black. Closest to the original. I remember getting an iPod with my first Mac, an iBook, and loving it passionately as an extension of that computing experience, one that I was thrilled to take out with me each day. The music player and laptop had nothing in common from a technical point of view, but they were both imbued with the same values.

    Steve’s values, or Apple’s values? The common theory is that these days, they’re indistinguishable thanks to codifying efforts by Jobs himself, but I can’t discount the value of great leadership or ignore the subtle differences present even in people who share the same values. The company he founded will continue to succeed within the trajectory they’re now on, but we’re missing a nudger now. A man who puts the rest of us on a different course as a matter of his own existence.

    I didn’t want this to be a Steve-Jobs-changed-my-life post, but crossing paths with those first two instances of his work caused my own views and interests to be nudged, my trajectory recalculated. Until the maps of some time travelers fall into my lap, I can’t imagine the life I was going to have before he touched it.

  • Maison Ikkoku cafe, Singapore

    412 words

    Spent my afternoon off at a new cafe in the Kampong Glam/Arab Street area. It takes a whole lot of inspiration from Japanese culture, by which I mean they had a Japanese barista champion instruct their team; the second-floor menswear boutique is 80% independent Japanese labels; the decor is minimalist, eclectic, intimate, and well-worn all at the same time, just like any self-respecting Japanese hideyhole’s should — it only lacks the sonic environment of one, substituting a bordering-on-hip soundtrack of singer-songwriter tunes and Bristolian trip-hop for what would normally be a mix of guileless cool jazz cuts and barely-audible breakbeats. From vinyl.

    The coffee, anyway, was fantastic, and alongside cupcakes, savory pork buns, and other snacks, they offer a variation of the Spam musubi. No seaweed wrapped around the body, no soy sauce and rice wine seasoning fried into the Spam (only a small sachet of Japanese soy sauce accompanying the clingfilm-wrapped slab on a plate… don’t use it), but the use of furikake in the shortgrain rice is a nice touch. Like I said, it’s a variation, and one I’m happy to have in the absence of Spam musubi anywhere else on this island.

    I was told they get really busy on the weekends, so I don’t know when I’ll have a chance to be back again. Opening hours on weekdays are 9am to 7pm. Fridays and Saturdays, they’re good till 10pm. In about a month or so, they expect to open a cocktail bar on the third floor, and it’s my guess they’ll revise the opening hours of the cafe to suit demand as things progress. If I can’t make it in for a cup of coffee after work, there’s always alcohol (as one review mentioned, pork and alcohol on the menu are cause for a bit of a double take; it’s practically in the shadow of a giant mosque, and right in the middle of an Islamic cultural district).

    It’s the kind of place I fully expect to find started by a handful of hardened advertising and design veterans who’ve finally had enough of the slog and now want to live out their cafe dreams, but this article says it’s run by two married couples, and I heard today that their backgrounds couldn’t be further from the theory. One of them worked in freighting, it seems. With any luck, my retirement job will be in fund management.

    0163__maison_ikkoku 0171__maison_ikkoku 0169__maison_ikkoku 0165__maison_ikkoku 0166__maison_ikkoku 0167__maison_ikkoku 0168__maison_ikkoku 0172__arab_street

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    Maison Ikkoku – Facebook Page
    20 Kandahar Street
    Singapore 198885 

  • How the Taylor Lautner movie ‘Abduction’ fooled my subconscious into buying a ticket

    37 words

    Can you deny the similarities in composition and atmosphere? Loved the game, pretty much let down by the movie. Hard to believe John Singleton was doing anything but pandering to the teen market with this job.

  • From the rooftops of Chinatown to a Mexican restaurant by the river

    54 words

    Couple of unposted GRD3 photos from the last couple of weeks. The bar at the top of the Screening Room is a great place to drink in near darkness, and at Cafe Iguana a week later, I learnt from my colleague (from Chicago admittedly) that they don’t have Chimichangas in traditional Mexican cuisine.

  • Keisuke Tonkotsu King ramen

    167 words
    P439

    This place just sprang up near the office, an offshoot of the Keisuke at Millennia Walk (not to be confused with the also- excellent Nantsuttei). Now, a proper Japanese ramen restaurant near home or the office has always been a dream of mine, in the way that being able to experience the convenience of good noodles down the street as if one were living in Japan is the next best thing to uprooting and actually being there, so I’m really glad that their standard bowl is well-crafted and authentic. The staff seem mostly Japanese and prone to misunderstanding your English, which I consider an essential part of replicating the full experience. They give you all the boiled eggs you can eat for free (“even you eat one hundred is okay”), bean sprouts in a separate jar that you add to your own noodles, sesame seeds in a little mortar and pestle, and a bunch of other condiments.

    I am going to get so fat on this shit.

  • A Chinese clan association reopened nearby

    20 words

    Every day that I get to shoot with my Ricoh GRD on the way home is a good one.

  • The Closing of Borders Wheelock by the Landlord Similarly Named

    219 words

    We had a look at Borders yesterday, with its shutters down and roses left for it by visitors. A large piece of cardboard on the inside was on display, with a handwritten goodbye letter from its staff to Singaporeans thanking them for their patronage and acknowledging their sense of loss — they too had grown up there and loved books, it said. The final line: “P.S. remember to look after your books”, was sweet enough to offset the embarrassment of their having misspelt “privilege”.

    By evening, someone had come along and left a note on the glass: “U can’t do this to us! (sad smiley), (heart) Singapore.” It seems having a large bookstore in the middle of Orchard Road for 13 years did little to instill some standards of English language use.

    —

    I remember the first time I visited the store, all those years ago, and being floored by the breadth of what was now within reach, shelves upon shelves of poetry — that eventually, and sadly, dwindled down to a small and forgotten handful of crass anthologies in a corner — how it forced me to plan and prioritize and comprehend that much time had to be made, and many more sacrifices to be accepted, for the countless books that I now could read but for the most part never would.