purple magazine issue 19's supplement (the ryan mcginley purple book) NOT available in singapore

john clang: “I WAS 8 YEARS OLD AND MY BROTHER WAS 6 YEARS OLD. WE WERE PLAYING ON THE GROUND FLOOR OF BRAS BASAH COMPLEX, WHERE OUR AUNT LIVED. UNEXPECTEDLY A STRANGER APPROACHED, HELD MY BROTHER'S HAND AND STARTED WALKING AWAY. MY BROTHER TURNED AROUND, LOOKED AT ME HELPLESSLY WITH HIS LEFT HAND REACHING OUT TO ME, WHILE STILL WALKING WITH THE STRANGER. I FROZE, NOT KNOWING WHAT WAS HAPPENING OR WHAT TO DO. MY MUM WHO HAD JUST RETURNED FROM WORK, REACHED IMMEDIATELY BY YELLING AT THE STRANGER IN A FRANTIC, DESPERATE TONE. THE STRANGER LET GO OF MY BROTHER'S HAND AND RAN AWAY. TWO THINGS STUCK IN MY HEAD. I ALMOST LOST MY BROTHER AND I WASN'T THE CHOSEN ONE.”

being together: family and portraits - photographing with john clang. national museum of singapore, 23 jan - 26 may 2013.

huang zheng (mannequin)

jacob from manchestaah (upfront)

cassie (mannequin)

alexey (looque)

cameron (mannequin)

william (mannequin)

the media development authority (mda) of singapore has allowed cable television providers airing on-demand R21 (R-rated for 21 y-o and above) movies. a welcomed sign of a maturing society, singtel mio tv started offering such movies in october 2012, and starhub has done the same this month.

eleonora (mannequin)

handmade dolls by the illustrator, kuanth. www.kuanth.com

matvey (ave)

vivien (carries)

‘the act of killing’: an entry at the toronto international film festival 2012, is an inventive documentary by british filmmaker joshua oppenheimer about a group of ex-movie theatre gangsters who were employed by the indonesian military in the 1965 coup, to kill alleged communists and ethnic chinese.

now leaders of a right-wing paramilitary organization, they were challenged by the filmmaker to reenact their murders in their own choosing of favourite james dean, john wayne, and hollywood characters. the brilliantly subversive film-within-a-film criterion has werner herzog and errol morris credited as executive producers.

matt king (mannequin)

krystof (carries)

liza (mannequin)

snake by gerald leow

continuing with his themes revolving around western colonialism and its symbols, the work is a recreation of the greek statue, laocoön and his sons, replacing its snake with a cloth printed with quotes from participating writers. front lawn, SAM, through 13 feb 2013.

“Ultimately, luxury is tied up with notions of class – a subject fashion never seems to enjoy addressing openly. Which is the real reason, I think, that those in the fashion industry have such a tough time talking about luxury, let alone defining it.

Which is a shame, because if designers had a greater understanding of all the snobbery and guilt their labels inspire, and the diversity of class and income their labels are meaningful to, they might have something more interesting to offer us than mere luxury.”

- from Some Notes on Luxury by Someone Who Finds the Term Distasteful (Murray Healy), HERO NO. 8 WINTER/SPRING 12/13

article on ehren in jalouse magazine, shot by romain gavras

more of ehren

ehren's boots

ehren's back

ehren's ipad

ehren (mannequin)

lia (mannequin)

more of liza (ave)

My Recent History (John Frusciante)

“I started being serious about following my dream to make electronic music, and to be my own engineer, five years ago. For the 10 years prior to that, I had been playing guitar along with a wide range of different types of programmed synthesizer and sample based music, emulating as best as I could, what I heard. I found that the languages machines forced programmers to think in had caused them to discover a new musical vocabulary. The various forms of electronically generated music, particularly in the last 22 years, have introduced many new principles of rhythm, melody, and harmony. I would learn what someone had programmed but their thought process eluded me. Programmers, particularly ones fluent on machines from the early 80s and/or tracker programs from the 90s, clearly had a theoretical foundation in their employ but it was not the theory I knew from pop/rock, jazz or classical. The hands relationship to the instrument accounts for so much of why musicians do what they do, and I had come to feel that in pop/rock my mind was often being overpowered by my hand, which I had a strong desire to correct. I was obsessed with music where machine intelligence and human intelligence seemed to be bouncing off one another, each expanding with the incorporation of what it received from the other.

In 2007 I started to learn how to program all the instruments we associate with Acid House music and some other hardware. For about 7 months I didn’t record anything. Then I started recording, playing 10 or so synced machines through a small mixer into a CD burner. This was all experimental Acid House, my skills at making rock music playing no part in it whatsoever. I had lost interest in traditional songwriting and I was excited about finding new methods for creating music. I’d surround myself with machines, program one and then another and enjoy what was a fascinating process from beginning to end. I was so excited by the method of using numbers much in the same way I’d used my muscles all my life. Skills that had previously been applied by my subconscious were gradually becoming conscious, by virtue of having numerical theoretical means of thinking about rhythm, melody and sound.

Then I began a musical relationship with two friends, wherein I could do basically the same thing I had been doing in my living room, only with other people. This continues to be a band which is perfectly congruent with my nature.