Archive for June, 2013

((AUMAN)), Suar Marabahaya

Saturday, June 29th, 2013
((AUMAN)), Suar Marabahaya

((AUMAN)), Suar Marabahaya

((AUMAN)), Suar Marabahaya – Wow, I really love ((AUMAN))!! I went to the Rocking The Region music festival at the Esplanade outdoor bandshell that my friend Faisal helped put together, and they put on a great, ferocious, funny show, with lots of environmental banter between songs. I bought their CD, which is a beautiful piece of art full of great music, as well as one of their tasty t-shirts. All right, ((AUMAN))!!

((AUMAN)), Suar Marabahaya

((AUMAN)), Suar Marabahaya

Looks cool, doesn’t it?

Ever since I saw the band play at Rockin’ The Region on June 7th, and Sigmun the same event the week before that, I have been listening to nothing but ((AUMAN)), Sigmun and Black Sabbath on the iPod. Oh Lord yeah!!

The CD has 11 well-written and well-crafted songs, half of which hover above the two minute mark, while four go past three minutes and one goes up beyond four. The album starts off with “Year Of The Tiger”, great drum sounds, and then a huge Sabbath-ish riff kicks in, tough guy chorus vocals, and then darker riffs mixed with wicked tiger cries. Some gothic chanting just to make it extra dark. Awesome!!
“Unholy Terror” is a slick rocking song that is a wee bit Soundgarden-ish. “W.K.G.G.” is near bluesy at the start, but then becomes a cool little hardcore number. “Viva Rimau ! Rimau !” starts out with some cheerleading, and then goes into full hardcore drive, very nice, before slowing down to something pretty groovy, and then dirge-like and more tiger screams. “City Of Ghost” is groovy at the beginning, with a deep, dark moaning vibe that gloms on and on. “Suar Marabahaya” is a crunchy, chunky hardcore rocker with cool tough guy choruses. “Subsonic Teenage Dream Machine” is hard and crusty, but gets interesting in the middle with some cool guest singing interplay. “Broken Hard Rock” gets nutty with a long drum intro, then some real rock from the rock (or maybe it sounds like it’s from Seattle?) “(We Are) The Sons Of The Sun” is the nearest the album has to an anthem, and comes with a huge Rage Against The Machine-style riff that really has to be heard to be believed. The band also brings in some horns here – great tune! “Sangkakala Apokalips” is quite metallic, with big stadium chants, it’s not one of the release’s stronger tracks initially, but does become very exciting toward the end as the band builds up a cool wall of sound, throws in some Iron Maiden dynamics, then wraps it up. The final song is “Macho”, a classic of traditional Dangdut style Indonesian pop music that the band covered – perhaps to be ironic, perhaps to poke fun at the scene’s macho presence. It starts a about 15 seconds in, so be patient with your CD and your CD player (or your MP3 player, whatever turns you on), it’s worth the wait.

Here’s what the band looked like at Rockin’ The Region.

((AUMAN)) at Rocking The Region 2013

((AUMAN)) at Rocking The Region 2013

The band was quite genteel at the Esplanade, here’s a look at one of their regular shows in Indonesia, playing their ironic cover of/tribute to Vetty Vera’s dangdut classic “Macho”:

By the way, here’s the original:

The Death of Captain Marvel

Tuesday, June 25th, 2013
TDOCM

TDOCM

The Death of Captain Marvel – This collection combines the classic “The Death of Captain Marvel”, Marvel Comics’ first graphic novel, with three other Captain Marvel titles. The first one, Captain Marvel issue 34, tells the tale of Marv’s encounter with Lunatic Legionnaire Nitro (the cover of that issue is also cropped for the cover of this collection), along with Marvel Spotlight On Captain Marvel, issues 1 and 2. The former is important because it shows the source of the cancer that kills Marv in the graphic novel, and it’s also a pretty good story, but I’m not sure about the middle two tales, which are about the Titan’s computer Isaac, who’s gone insane and thinks it’s human.

By the way, Nitro’s super-power is that he can blow himself up… nice super-power!

The story itself is more a tale of flashbacks, of Mar-vell taking leave of his friends and enemies, including Rick Jones – with whom he has a complicated relationship – and his new girlfriend/former enemy Elysius. The Marvel universe learns of it, it mourns in advance, Spider-man just can’t take it, all of Marvel-dom’s greatest scientists (Reed Richards, Henry Pym, etc) can’t figure it out. Gosh! Finally, there’s a strange battle with Thanos, and then… the end.

Yes, a very strange story indeed. Sorry for all of the spoilers, but you didn’t think that Marv would get out of it alive, did you?

Townes Van Zandt, Rear View Mirror

Tuesday, June 25th, 2013
TVZRVM

TVZRVM

Townes Van Zandt, Rear View Mirror – This is a great live album of Townes Van Zandt playing 17 of his songs live. There’s no information about when or where these songs were recorded, but it’s clearly a small club, and may be as recent as 1993, when the original album was released. The songs are great, and are mainly Townes’ voice and guitar, sometimes a second guitar, sometimes a fiddle. Townes never misses a note, which may mean he was nearly sober when he recorded this. All of the songs are fantastic, but maybe the most surprising one is the opener, “Pancho And Lefty”, his most famous song, done here with a bit of fiddle. It sounds great without the Mexican horns.

After Earth

Monday, June 24th, 2013
Ae

Ae

After Earth – After Earth is one of those movies that just looks really bad from the trailer, and generally people who don’t like M Night Shyamalam would write off without seeing it. Zen had seen some trailers and badly wanted to watch it, so watch it we did (ironically, he doesn’t want to see the new Man Of Steel film, ha ha – no interest – but he did want to see this one).

Due to a misunderstanding on my part about where the bloody cinema is, we got there late and missed 10 minutes. It must have been an eventful 10 minutes, because I get the feeling a lot happened. The predicted space ship crash happened, and the father and son team need to survive. The film sets up some interesting situations, and the main premise is very simple – go retrieve a homing beacon that is 100 miles away, make sure you survive multiple crazy dangerous situations to turn it on (meanwhile there are plenty of flashbacks and spooky dreams). Perfect.

The multiple crazy situations are pretty crazy, and suspension of disbelief will really only get you so far. At one point he loses his weapon. Where did it go? We don’t see him lose it, it’s just gone. He gets attacked, then protected by a giant bird that saves his life twice. What’s going on? At the end we get an encounter with a dangerous adversary that is resolved in a fairly cheezy way (why is everybody a trained Matrix-style trained kung fu killer?

Will Smith is kind of creepy as a super-soldier who doesn’t let go (“Take a knee, cadet”), and who looks more like Lawrence Fishbourne than Will Smith; Jaden Smith is kind of weepy and over-acting. He does a good job looking like a scared kid – maybe that’s what he really is.

Dust is alive!!

Saturday, June 22nd, 2013
DHA

DHA

Dust, 2-album re-issue (Dust, Hard Attack) – A great, great, great album! WOW!!! The best undiscovered near-Black Sabbath band ever! Truly astounding… (sadly, the creepy blue-tinted band photo that appears on the cover is less good than Hard Attack’s depiction of a dwarf invasion).

I learned at some point that Dust had been Marky Ramone’s teenage band and put Hard Attack on my wish list. Well, I never did buy it, and then I found out that their two albums were being re-mastered and re-released on one CD. Bonus!! So I made buying that a priority. Wow, I’m glad I did – I’m listening to this nearly as much as the new Black Sabbath album 13!!

On first listen I found it a wee bit disappointing. It wasn’t quite as heavy as I expected, and was more Cream-influended than Sabbath-influenced (people always say that Sabbath invented heavy metal – I truly believe that if Sabbath hadn’t existed, our metal would all be Cream-based… yuck!!), although I did dig the wild bass inflections. It definitely got better as it went along, and the second album is definitely better than the first. The Dust sound is great. The drumming is pretty solid. The singing is good. The songwriting is cool. The albums are a bit inconsistent, especially the first one, with odd weird ballads, pop or country songs thrown in, as well as some hints of early Rush. It’s… a strange collection of songs. But now that it’s really grown on me I consider this compulsory listening. What a great band!!

The opening song “Pull Away/So Many Times” starts off mellow, and then launches into a cool psychedelic rocker, with wild, aggressive bass lines. I could listen to this song forever (weird backing vocals kick in near the end, though). “Walk in the Soft Rain” is a so-so folk guitar strummer that is a bit less interesting, while “Thusly Spoken” is a nasty, yucky pop ballad. Yes, these guys do lose their way a bit. They come back onto the path with “Learning To Die”, a nasty and brutal little tune. “All In All” is a bit silly-sounding, but it’s okay. “I Been Thinking” is a silly country song, that is happily also very short. “Ivory” is a fantastic rocker that is also short – short and sweet!! “How Many Horses” is quite country rock-ish, with a really terrible, drippy solo. Oh well… “Suicide”, the second-last song on the album, is probably the best they ever did, right up there with the long psychedelic rocker “From A Dry Camel” on the second album. “Suicide” also includes a totally amazing bass solo – love it!! Closing the first album is “Entrance” (ironic title, dude), a short acoustic ditty.

The second, eponomously-titled album Dust opens up with “Stone Woman”, with a pretty little whistle, then some groovy slide guitar and some cool bopping rock. Yeah! “Chasin’ Ladies” is a great funky blues number with a great burbing bassline, and a cool echoey vocal line. We need more songs like this. “Goin’ Easy” is a true blues song, with some very nice slide guitar. “Love Me Hard” is a wicked rocker that drills on and on with great power drumming and groovy basslines. “From A Dry Camel” is a monster of a song, starting off with huge gong sounds, then some solo bass trudging away, the song really only picks up over one minute in, then three minutes in it picks up pace and becomes an incredible, psychedelic rock-out, and the last two minutes are kind of like the first two. A true masterpiece of sludge.

“Often Shadows Fall” is a very pretty, gloomy number. “Loose Goose” is an instrumental that ends off the album (and this set), just as the first album had an instrumental final song, but in this case the song bops and rocks and is effectively a fully-formed song waiting for lyrics.

The CD comes with a cool little booklet too, man, containing pictures of the band, and short blurbs from the three band members, as well as their manager, Kenny Kerner, who went on to produce KISS.

Lagnaa

Saturday, June 22nd, 2013

Wow, I went for dinner for the second time in a week at Lagnaa, bare foot dining, at 6 Upper Dickson Road in Little India in Singapore. This is the place where they have 10 levels of spiciness in their curry (I’ll lean on The Washington Post to provide some background). I’d been there on June 16th, after my band’s gig in Little India, and couldn’t resist an opportunity to savour their lovely masala dishes.

I brought Zen and Naoko this time, although Zen had been reluctant at first. We got there at 5:00 PM, a bit early, and found out that the upstairs “barefoot” section only opened at 5:3; the very kind staff lady gave Zen a popadam to munch on in the meantime and we wandered around the area and went for a beer at the Prince Of Wales, an old haunt of mine nearby on Dunlop Street. Nice. Got back to Lagnaa at 5:50 or so, with a healthy appetite, had the whole upstairs to ourselves the whole time, chatted for a long time with the staff about masala and curries, and enjoyed a wonderful meal. Zen, who had previously been reluctant to go out for food in Little India, even told me things like “this is the best curry I’ve ever had in my whole life, even better than Japanese curry” and “this place has replaced Bar Bar as my favorite place to go to in Singapore.” It really pays to have an open mind and try out new things!

Yes, a wonderful experience indeed. Both of the ladies who work there gave us wonderful stories about curry, about life in general, even a philosophical discussion about Indonesia’s slash and burn farming that has kept Singapore in a haze all week (which lifted this afternoon).

After we left the place we saw a beautiful full moon hanging over Little India. Awww… Took a cab home, chilled. Great weekend underway.

Lagnaa's highway to heaven

Lagnaa’s highway to heaven

10 – We declare you king
9 – Make my day
8 – Say your prayers
7 – Where angels fear
6 – I dare you
5 – You are crazy!
4 – Show off!!!
3 – Hotter (chef can’t, can you?)
2 – Hot (almost anyone can)
1 – Not h to (anyone can)

I'm now a four, actually...

I’m now a four, actually…

My peg

My peg

We're a curry family

We’re a curry family

Four curry leaves means level four, two curry leaves means level two...

Four curry leaves means level four, two curry leaves means level two…

Superbrain!!!

Superbrain!!!

Superbrain!!!

Superbrain!!!

Update – on August 23rd, one day after the full moon, five of my colleagues and I went to Lagnaa to try their curry, two of us (me included) tried the level five, four of us tried level six. Two of the level-sixers didn’t make it, the the rest of us did. It was great fun! I also got the chance to meet the master chef, K7 (Kaesevan), who explained that the measure of spiciness of the curries goes up by 100,000 Scoville Heat Units (SHU) per chili leaf; I tried Level five, which meant 500,000 SHU. Next challenge – level six. Last night was the full moon, so that means we have nearly four weeks to prepare before the next full moon – August 21st! I need to do a six before I can do a special seven at the full moon, looking forward to it!

lovely, lovely curry!!

lovely, lovely curry!!

the gang's all here!

the gang’s all here!

six leaves means 600,000 Scoville Heat Units (SHU)

six leaves means 600,000 Scoville Heat Units (SHU)

I'm at Level Five!!

I’m at Level Five!!

I'm at Level Five!!

I’m at Level Five!!

the beer was good too!!

the beer was good too!!

Sunday, June 16th, 2013

Today was a great day! I woke up early, went with Zen and Naoko to Zen’s softball game.

We had some practices and warm-ups, and then Zen played his first two innings as a pitcher. He did a good job, striking out his first two batters; it was nearly a no-run inning but the team lost a chance to get the third guy out. Oh well. Zen’s subsequent inning didn’t go well, but we were so happy that he had such a good first try. I couldn’t see the second game because I had to go off to my concert, but it turned out even better than the first one. Great job, Zen!

In the afternoon I had a show with my band MegalomaniA. We rocked the house – it was eight bands playing Black Sabbath songs. Some of them were pretty good too! The club has a strange stage, but that just made it more interesting.

Here are a few pictures from the weekend.

Zen striking out his first batter - OUT!!

Zen striking out his first batter – OUT!!

Batter Zen

Batter Zen

MegalomaniA rocks!!

MegalomaniA rocks!!

My friend's band!

My friend’s band!

Uh oh... looking for trouble...

Uh oh… looking for trouble…

Black Sabbath poster

Black Sabbath poster

Black Sabbath, 13

Saturday, June 15th, 2013
BS13

BS13

Black Sabbath, 13 – It was 1978 the last time Ozzy Osbourne got together with his band Black Sabbath to record new songs, the classic Never Say Die (much-maligned, it’s still full of great songs). They used Sounds Exchange in Toronto, Canada and froze their balls off from January to May putting the album together, a period of much misery according to Ozzy’s book (interestingly, Keith Richards had used the studio the year earlier to record his Toronto Tapes). At the time I was in neighbouring Mississauga, nine years old, and knew nothing about Black Sabbath. I was in grade four at school, with my favorite teacher Martyn Godfrey, and I went to piano lessons. I think that summer I might have started listening to the Beatles in 1978, but I don’t think so – it might have been 1979. Can’t be sure any more. Later, in 1981, I became a super-huge Ozzy Osbourne fan upon the release of “Diary Of A Madman”; “Speak Of The Devil”, where Ozzy records Black Sabbath songs with his own band, was the first music item I ever bought with my own money. I remember hearing Mob Rules play on the radio in 1981 when it was released.

A year after recording Never Say Die, Ozzy was fired from the band, and spent the next 34 years building a monstrous solo career, probably in no small part to the masterful management of his wife Sharon. Good job, girl. He has actually recorded and toured with Black Sabbath over the years, but there’s been no new album with him and the band… until June 11th, 2013!

Of course, Black Sabbath had kept going over the years with Tony Iommi and a rotating line-up of original or new members, which included a great spell with Ronnie James Dio; the last Black Sabbath album was Forbidden, released in 1995 with Tony Martin. It did not get good reviews. Since then Iommi has released two solo albums, and another album with Ronnie James Dio in 2009 that could have been called a Black Sabbath album the way Heaven And Hell and Mob Rules were, but it wasn’t (the band called itself Heaven And Hell to save itself legal grief – nice move, since Heaven And Hell is also a great band name, and the relaxed legal atmosphere probably helped give rise to the current re-re-reunion and its immense productivity).

So lucky for us – now we get this, a new Black Sabbath album, released on June 11th, 2013 and called 13 in honour of the year it was released (and maybe to piss off Anvil and Suicidal Tendencies, who have albums with the same name out this year). While critical reviews that I have seen have generally been positive, there have been some mixed reviews from fans, who have plenty to gripe about for the absence of the magical Bill Ward on skins (apparently he was falling off his drum stool – too old to play?) or Rick Rubin’s production capabilities, but I have no complaints at all. It’s a great album! It gives us everything we want – great riffs, great energy, great teamwork, great lyrics (nobody ever mentions the lyrics – they’re superb!!), great reminders of the band’s sound through its various periods over the years, and funky, fun production elements. Wow!!

I even like the single “God Is Dead?”, which has great mood, great riffs, and a wonderful stomp towards the end (of course, the solo is ultra-short – Iommi more than makes up for that on the rest of the album). And here’s another thing that nobody mentions is the linkage between the recent death of Ronnie James Dio (Dio, of course, means God in many languages) and the obvious rivalry between Dio and Ozzy. Looks like Ozzy won that rivalry, and gets to shout “Dio Is Dead” night after night. A bit creepy, and I might be reading too much into this, but hey – what if?

The songs are fantastic, and extremely varied, as we get songs akin to the band’s 70s sound, 80s sound, 90s sound, and Ozzy’s solo sound. “The Beginning Of The End” starts the album with a pun, as well as big slashes of doom chords, just the way the first album opened up with the song “Black Sabbath”, and then gets into swing. It just goes on and on, before ending up with a positive major-chord chorus. Ultimately, it’s very doom-y, with a long solo. “God Is Dead?” is well known by now – bloody good, with a cool “Hole In The Sky”-ish stomp near the middle, although it does have some cheezy moments on Ozzy’s delivery (no worry, plenty of great moments too!); this the first song to refer to Satan, who is mentioned or is part of the spirit of several songs on the album (“Methademic” seems to be written from his point of view again). I believe that it was the best choice for a single, but could have been improved with a better solo (and one longer than only eight bars). “Loner” is crunchy and cool, a bit of a pop song. A lot of people I know call this their favorite song on the album, but it’s probably the one I like the least, from its over-simplicity right down to the annoying drum sounds. “Zeitgeist” is the “Plant Caravan”-isch tune, right down to the bongos (looks like Rubin showed some self restraint by not putting Ozzy’s vocals through the exact same effect as they did on “Planet Caravan”, clearly; it’s one of the only things that’s different about this recent update of that song). But it’s a great song nonetheless – you can never have too much of a good thing. “Age Of Reason” is a long song that kicks off with a fantastic opening riff, quickly gets into great verses, then goes through lots if huge changes; I thought at first that it sounds rather like a song from an Ozzy solo album, with Zakk Wylde-ish dive-bombing, but I do now believe it’s very Sabbath-y. There’s a great solo, and a wee bit of keyboards thrown in. “Live Forever” is a cool, crunchy rocker again, it could have been on the Devil You Know album the band did with Ronnie James Dio in 2009. “Damaged Soul” is a great bluesy number that gets pretty heavy. A great bluesy stomp that has a cool harmonica solo. As such, it’s the key song on the album for emulating the dynamics of the first album. Great solo too – it just goes on and on! “Dear Father” is a scary song about child abuse, also more like an Ozzy solo song. It has a crunchy riff and a poppy solo. At one point it picks up into a very cool stomp and charges along. Great! It closes abruptly with the thunder and rain sounds that you’d hear on the first album, probably indicating the completion of a cycle of Black Sabbath. It may also indicate that there will be no follow-up to 13 – that’s it from Black Sabbath, thank you very much, and that first song really was the beginning of the end of the band. Eight songs, just like they have on most of their albums.

There are three “bonus songs” on the second disc that’s included in the deluxe edition; bonus songs are great, but I’m not sure why they needed a second disc – there are only 69 minutes of music combined between the two discs, it would have all fit onto one with five minutes to spare. As such, all of the bonus songs are good, and should probably have been better on the album in the place of weaker songs like “Loner” and “Dear Father”. They are also pretty short – in the official eight album songs, half of them are over seven minutes long, but the three bonus tracks are only five minutes long or less (“Peace Of Mind” is only 3:41, nearly as short and tight as “Paranoid”, ha ha). “Methademic” starts with cool acoustic guitar before breaking into that unstoppable riff and some songwriting and lyrics (great Ozzy snicker here). Of course, the anti-drug lyrics are a bit hypocritical, but the song still makes a nice partner song to the anti-heroin “Hand Of Doom”). Later, he reveals that he’s singing the song from Satan’s point of view by snickering again and saying “Hell is where you’re going… heh heh heh, I’ll see you there”). Cool psychedelic sound effects at the end, man. “Peace Of Mind” is a cool mid-tempo rocker full of crunchy guitars that sounds a bit like “Live Forever”. “Pariah” has one of the coolest opening riffs of any song on the album – actually, it’s a double opening with a very nice mellow electric start-up, before breaking out into a killer riff. The song has a very tender, beautiful solo. Great closer to the set – better closer than “Dear Father”, actually… which proves that you need to get the “Deluxe edition” and not the regular release (as an added feature you’ll also have the satisfaction of knowing that you’re getting what the vinyl snobs are missing out on, heh heh).

Here’s the song “Naivete In Black”, which can only be bought on the Best Buy version of the album (whatever “Best Buy” is – we don’t have anything with that name in Singapore). It’s a short, crunchy rock/pop number.

Great album – get it if you haven’t already!

13 is the number of times I have listened to Black Sabbath's 13

13 is the number of times I have listened to Black Sabbath’s 13

The Observatory “In The Mouth Of The Open Sky”. Sky Tree Grove. Gardens By The Bay.

Sunday, June 9th, 2013

Saw The Observatory today at a cool installation at Gardens By The Bay. Rock ‘n’ roll!!

Here’s the awesome poster that the band designed for the gig:

In The Mouth Of The Open Sky Observatory Live June 8th 2013

Here are some pics from the day.

good quality cialis

The Observatory. Sky Tree Grove. Gardens By The Bay.

The Observatory. Sky Tree Grove. Gardens By The Bay.

The Observatory. Sky Tree Grove. Gardens By The Bay.

My shoes: The Observatory. Sky Tree Grove. Gardens By The Bay.

My shoes: The Observatory. Sky Tree Grove. Gardens By The Bay.

Sky Tree Grove. Gardens By The Bay.

Sky Tree Grove. Gardens By The Bay.

Sky Tree Grove. Gardens By The Bay.

Sky Tree Grove. Gardens By The Bay.

Our cool weekend

Sunday, June 9th, 2013

I haven’t written for a few weeks, time to catch up.

Last weekend I had a blast attending the Rockin’ The Region event, I saw Damn Dirty Apes from Malaysia (instrumental post-rock from Malaysia), they were so-so, but Sigmun from Indonesia, Jogjakarta, were stellar, with their spacey Sabbath-influenced sound. I also bought the cool retro Pop Yeh-Yeh collection of psychedelic pop from 1960s Malaysia and Singapore.

The week was a blur, and then the next weekend came! Went to another installment of Faisal Yahu D-curated Rockin’ The Region free concerts in the Esplanade bandshell, which was damn cool – saw ((AUMAN)) from Indonesia Sumatra and the local doom supergroup Satan, then headed over to the Artistry cafe in Bugis to check out my friend Farid Long’s solo performance of Beatles songs. To my surprise, my friends in the Pinholes were there too, and they also had a great set of Beatles songs too, including a rousing chorus of “Obla-di, Obla-da”, great!! Farid’s set was intense, as you can see from the photo, the Pinholes were slightly shambolic, as they tried our various things, but in the end got the drunken, distracted crowd boppin’ nonetheless. Awesome!

After four hours sleep, we rose early and headed out to East Coast Park for a company activity – beach clean-up and garbage picking! There were 50 of us, staff and families, from two parts of my company, and we had a very nice time tidying up the beach from 8:30 to 9:30, learning about the type of garbage people toss aside (50% cigarette butts, 50% random weird crap with no pattern at all). After 9:30 we hung out, blowing bubbles, talking, Zen and I played catch ball and pitching, then everybody went off. We stayed behind and walked to the Carl’s Jr at the far end of East Coast Park. It was far!! Got there, had our burgers and fries and cola, then took a cab back home. Naoko and I slept for 90 minutes, Zen did homework (!!!!). In the evening we headed out to the National Library to see a stage play, Pursuant. It’s about a future Singapore police state where dreams/dreaming is an illegal activity as it’s counter to the national good, and where compulsive dreamers are put in a “concentration camp”, where they learn… to concentrate. Lots of dangerous allegations in this one, I hope no one who’s important to the government gets a look at this… wow!! Practically subterfuge, actually. One of the reasons we wanted to go is because Zen is applying to both the music and the theatre streams of School Of The Arts, with theatre being possibly the easier one to get into (it also leads to film studies in later years, which is interesting for Zen), but Zen has little experience seeing stage plays. Now he’s seen a modern stage play, in addition to the traditional dance performance of Ramayana in Indonesia in March, I think he’s equipped with a good understanding of what he’s getting himself into.

Today we slept in past 9:00 AM, which we hardly ever do. It was a very tiring day yesterday, so it was well-deserved and overdue. Great. But we still found time to play guitar, to throw the ball around, and to have fun.

typical Singapore parking, straddling the sidewalk. Thanks, asshole.

typical Singapore parking, straddling the sidewalk. Thanks, asshole.

Storm's comin', you better hide...

Storm's comin', you better hide...

Damn Dirty Apes playing a free concert at the Esplanade bandshell

Damn Dirty Apes playing a free concert at the Esplanade bandshell

Sigmun playing the Esplanade bandshell

Sigmun playing the Esplanade bandshell

Heading out to see Star Trek: Into Darkness

Heading out to see Star Trek: Into Darkness

On Orchard Road, after seeing Star Trek: Into Darkness

On Orchard Road, after seeing Star Trek: Into Darkness

On Orchard Road, after seeing Star Trek: Into Darkness

On Orchard Road, after seeing Star Trek: Into Darkness

On Orchard Road, after seeing Star Trek: Into Darkness

On Orchard Road, after seeing Star Trek: Into Darkness

((AUMAN)) from Indonesia, live at the Esplanade riverside bandshell

((AUMAN)) from Indonesia, live at the Esplanade riverside bandshell

The great Farid Long playing Beatles songs

The great Farid Long playing Beatles songs

The Pinholes are go!!

The Pinholes are go!!

Pete, the Pinholes and Farid

Pete, the Pinholes and Farid

Picking up garbage on East Coast Park

Picking up garbage on East Coast Park

Picking up garbage on East Coast Park

Picking up garbage on East Coast Park

Picking up garbage on East Coast Park

Picking up garbage on East Coast Park

Hanging out at East Coast Park.

Hanging out at East Coast Park.

East Coast scenery

East Coast scenery

East Coast scenery

East Coast scenery

Weird ad sighted while hanging out at East Coast Park.

Weird ad sighted while hanging out at East Coast Park.