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02 2021

FICTION SPECIAL BRAND NEW SHORT STORIES BY SINGAPORE’S FAVOURITE AUTHORS

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O N T H E C O V E R : Lewis Tan Photograph by Pierre Toussaint Cover and this page: denim shirt and jeans, both by Bottega Veneta.

T H I S WAY I N

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Editor’s letter Contributors What does it mean to be a local?

BULLETIN

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Music Charlie Lim and Aisyah Aziz team up for a powerful duet Accessories The bag we’re decreeing the accessory for now Fashion ‘Made in China’s’ new meaning care of Feng Chen Wang Fashion Discover the hotly anticipated mash-up between Gucci and The North Face Timepieces Cartier breathes new life into its archive Timepieces Your favourite Rolex just got bigger Timepieces These watches get a glow-up Art A must-see exhibition comes to Singapore Art Sculptural installation made personal by Singaporean artist Dawn Ng Fragrances Hermès releases its first men’s scent in 15 years Design Looking back on decades of interiors excellence Drinks A new menu for MO Bar Cars Porsche plugs in

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STYLE 48

Lewis Tan’s moment has arrived, and he’s not wasting a single minute of it Discover the brands that are thinking locally when it comes to design Presenting the most investment-worthy watches for your wrist From preppy to proper, find a hairstyle to suit your style

JOURNAL 80 86

Tackling California’s wildfires Air travel is being reinvented, and this time, the journey is more important than the destination Podcasts have taken a turn for the fiction, entertaining you on the go

FICTION SPECIAL 99

Six of Singapore’s favourite authors present new pieces of fiction exclusively for Esquire

T H I S WAY O U T

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Overshirt, shirt, pants and shoes, all by Prada.

Esquire Endorses The comfort of home cooking

MASTHEAD

Editorial

Art

Production

Editor-in-Chief Mitchell Oakley Smith Features Editor Wayne Cheong Associate Fashion Editor Asri Jasman Writer Joy Ling Writer Derrick Tan Sub-editor Julian Tan Editor-at-Large (Watches & Jewellery) Celine Yap Contributing Motoring Editor Daryl Lee Group Digital Creative Producer Vanessa Caitlin Editorial Intern Ishan Singh

Art Director Jerald Ang Junior Art Director Penn Ey Chee Picture Editor Kenny Nguyen

Group Production Director Anna Tsirelnikova Media Traffic & Client Services Coordinator Dao Thu Ha Prepress IMV Repro Senior Reprographic Prepress Technician Phuong Ngo Reprographic Prepress Technician Anh Bui Digital Imaging Graphic Assistant Nguyen Phan Anh

IT Manager Roger Valberg

Contributing

Writers Johnny Davis, Stephanie Dogfoot, Chris Hall, Lauren Ho, Robert Langellier, Jordan Melic, Luke Somasundram, Nick Sullivan, Simon Vincent, Daniel Yeo

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Photographers, Stylists & Illustrators Daehan Chae, Adam Goodison, Donghui Ko, Jolyon Mason, Brad Ogbonna, Pierre Toussaint

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President Michael von Schlippe

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Published by Indochine Media Pte Ltd (201214107E), MCI (P) 112/08/2020, 1 Syed Alwi Road, Song Lin Building #02-02, Singapore 207628, Tel: (65) 6225 4045. By permission of Hearst Communications, Inc., New York, New York, United States of America.

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Discover Milaidhoo Create your own story of a small island at the heart of a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve with a wonderfully vibrant coral reef. Find your place to simply be, to make meaningful experiences and to enjoy re-invented luxury. Discover island-inspired barefoot informality and spacious outdoor living in our contemporary Maldives style villas, where you instantly feel like you belong. Start your Milaidhoo Story at www.milaidhoo.com

A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Singaporean artist Dawn Ng’s epic installation work, ‘Perfect Stranger’, is the result of a year-long conversation —conducted over email, text, phone and in-person—with what was, at first, exactly that: a stranger. In reflecting on the re-staging of the piece, Israeli psychologist Zehavit Efrati—no longer a stranger to Ng after hours and hours of animated discussion, but also no longer a resident of Singapore, having returned to her native Israel —thanks the artist “for being my friend, my perfect stranger, when I was a foreigner in Singapore, and made me feel at home”. Just as powerfully as the artwork (featured on page 32), now on display at the Asian Civilisations Museum, Efrati’s statement spoke to me because it confirmed that home, beyond just a physical structure, is such a complex—and universal —concept that’s unique to each of us. For this month’s cover star, the actor and martial artist Lewis Tan, the sense of identity that hangs on the idea of home is somewhat fraught. Born in England and raised in Los Angeles, but also having lived in France, Thailand, Spain and China, Tan identifies as half-Asian and halfBritish; his mother, a former fashion model, is from the UK, while his father, the renowned stunt coordinator Philip Tan, is of Chinese descent but grew up in Singapore after being abandoned here at a young age, later owning restaurants along Orchard Road in the 1960s before relocating to

MITCHELL OAKLEY SMITH Editor-in-Chief

the UK. “I go to Asia and they look at me as an outsider… it took a while for me to get a grasp on how the world sees me as opposed to how I see myself,” he explained during Esquire Neighbourhood last November. Ahead of the release of Mortal Kombat—Tan’s role of a lifetime—we sat down with him again, and you can read his story from page 48. We decided to dedicate this issue to the concept of both home and of homegrown. They’re terms bandied around a lot—particularly over the past year, as we were all instructed by our respective governments to return ‘home’. I did the opposite and moved to Singapore in the middle of 2020 (apologies to the Australian Department of Home Affairs) and then, for the first time an expat, I became much more attuned to this idea that home isn’t necessarily always where we were born and hold citizenship. Rather, home is a feeling of familiarity, belonging or of security. It is, essentially, what you make it.

Photograph by Georges Antoni

Home is where our story begins

CONTRIBUTORS

Meet the authors behind our fiction special Stephanie Dogfoot is a poet and stand-up comedian who has won national poetry slams in Singapore and the UK, and is the founder and producer of a monthly poetry night called Spoke & Bird. Their first poetry collection, Roadkill for Beginners, was published in 2019.

Simon Vincent is the author of The Naysayer’s Book Club, which was named Book of the Year by the Singapore Book Awards in 2019. His writing has appeared in Nikkei Asian Review, Southeast Asia Globe, Mekong Review, OZY and as well now Esquire Singapore.

Illustration by Penn Ey, Chee

Daniel Yeo wrote the novel The Impermanence of Lilies and has also been published in Writing the City, an anthology of stories by the British Council.

Jordan Melic is a Singaporean of Indian and Chinese heritage and studied filmmaking and literature in Paris, France, where he continues to live with his young family. A Tree to Take Us Up to Heaven, a speculative odyssey told through the rich stories and many lives of island Southeast Asia, is his debut novel.

Lauren Ho is a reformed legal counsel who writes funny stories. Hailing from Malaysia, she lived in the UK, France and Luxembourg before moving with her family to Singapore, where she is ostensibly working on her next novel following last year’s release of Last Tang Standing.

Luke Somasundram’s scripts have been staged by LASALLE and Checkpoint Theatre, and as you’ll find in his piece for Esquire Singapore’s fiction special, ‘Re: The NonExistent Albino Alligator’, he has a unique ability to entertain and delight with his writing.

COLUMN

This is home, truly, so don’t call me an expat After a quarter of a century here, NEIL HUMPHREYS knows that Singapore is home

Once the taxi driver catches a glimpse in the rearview mirror, there’s a creeping sense of inevitability. The question is coming. “Where you from, ah?” By the most conservative of estimates, I’ve heard that question at least a thousand times. Taxis, lifts, meetings, reunion dinners and, most bizarrely of all, the changing rooms of the Anchorvale Community Club swimming pool have all hosted this benign interrogation in the last 25 years. Being asked about one’s country of origin whilst semi-naked in a changing room leads to all kinds of paranoid insecurities about one’s nationality and physical appearance. What have they seen? Is there something about my genitalia that screams ‘working-class Englishman’? Are they thinking of a battered sausage? Or do I present my interrogators with an image of the harsh, cold, shrivelled conditions of a British winter? But the eagerness to restage an airport customs interview in public encounters persists. The opening

question is always the same, but the outcome varies, depending on the mood of both parties. If I’m feeling playful, I’ll avoid giving the answer that is obviously expected. “Where you from, ah?” “Sengkang.” “No lah, last time.” “Oh, last time?… East Coast.” “No, I mean last time.” “Oh, you mean, like, before last time… I see… Toa Payoh.” By this time, my irritated inquisitor appears at risk of exploding. Veins throb. Steam appears. Teeth grate as the racial profiling software refuses to compute the information. White man cannot be from here. White man must be from elsewhere. So continue interrogation until white man gives a satisfactory answer and then leave him in peace to towel-dry his testicles. In most instances, the line of questioning comes from a genuine sense of interest and curiosity.

Illustration by Penn Ey, Chee

and believes that locals are not just born; they can be home-made. So don’t call him an expat.

COLUMN

Such labels not only get in the way, they can be prejudicial. As a general rule, I react to being called an expat in the way I might react to a syphilis diagnosis.

Statistically speaking, the odds of a 46-year-old Caucasian being born and raised in Singapore are obviously slim. Therefore, I am forever destined to join those other poor sods that cannot be stuffed into clinical, state-proscribed boxes of race, religion, gender, sexuality and so forth. We are marginalised—but proud—members of that mythical group known as The Others. Eventually, I’ll pitch The Others to Netflix, a dystopian black comedy about an alien invasion in a Little Red Dot, where the only means of native communication is repetitive questions like “Where you from, ah?”, “Why you so tall ah?” and “You marry a local, is it?” On all three counts, I invariably disappoint. Ah, listen to me. Listen to my First World problems as a white, straight male, typing out my twee musings about the concept of home and belonging from my air-conditioned office. What a tough life I lead. Of course, I don’t. I’ve never shied away from my fascination with the previously alien concept of white privilege in Singapore, writing quirky books about the surreal experience of leaving one country where being working-class was somehow wrong and moving to another where simply being white was right. I went from being a council estate kid in a Ken Loach film to a British expat in a Somerset Maugham novel in a single flight, even though neither cliché bore much resemblance to my rather bland reality. Singapore has been a happy home for the best part of 25 years. My status should be no more complicated than that. But of course, it is. Those tedious hyphens show up to spoil the party, with their charmless obsession with what divides, rather than unites. In the media, house style dictates that the adjectival British-born or Singapore-based or Singapore permanent resident or even the more literal Caucasian writer usually precedes discussions about my new children’s book. I can only imagine horrified parents sitting their child down to say: “I know you wanted that new book by NJ Humphreys, but… well… he’s a hyphen. He’s ‘British-born’. Yeah, I know. It’s terrifying. He’s also ‘Singapore-based’, which sounds incurable to me.”

Honestly, who cares? As deforestation spawns animal-to-human viruses while the planet boils and the Trump family continues to hang around like a foul toilet smell, birthplaces and borders are less important than where we are right now and where we belong. Being home-made is no less important—or worthy— than being homegrown. As COVID-19 ruthlessly demonstrated, a passport colour has little bearing upon an individual’s contribution to society. When the migrant workers stopped, Singapore essentially stopped too. The lockdown was not a time for nationalistic chest-beating or an exclusive, myopic focus on homegrown talent, but a humbling acceptance that the island always was—and remains—a fluid, potent mix of local and imported ingenuity. An excellent exhibition at the National Museum of Singapore—Home, Truly—currently explores the peoples’ history of the country since the 1950s, using oral accounts to chronicle daily life. I loved it, more so because the final section highlights the role of migrant workers in times of crisis. Are their experiences any less Singaporean because they were born elsewhere? Are mine? Are yours? Once we start adding qualifiers and caveats to a person’s local life, are we not potentially diminishing their life experiences, as if they are somehow less significant because the person was born in Mumbai rather than Marine Parade? Such labels not only get in the way, they can be prejudicial. As a general rule, I react to being called an expat in the way I might react to a syphilis diagnosis. Apart from the nauseating, imperialistic whiff of privilege that surrounds the term—expatriate derives from the Latin ex (out of ) and patria (fatherland) —an expat gets thrown in with the alien cast of The Others again. By its literal definition, home must be elsewhere. But it really isn’t. I feel like I’m from here. My family feels the same way. That’s what home is. And that’s actually what I say now whenever I’m in a swimming pool changing room and a stranger kicks off with the usual ice-breaker. “Where you from ah?” “I’m from here,” I reply sagely and proudly. And then, I revert to type and make selfdeprecating jokes about my shrivelled penis.

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38 The store is a bastion of good design, but its seasonal catalogues are equally important in global design history.

22 Meet the talented menswear designer that’s redefining what it means to be Made in China.

BULLETIN

30 The Japanese artist who continues to advance and refine her oeuvre—even in her 10th decade.

Home-grown artists Charlie Lim (left) and Aisyah Aziz sing ‘Won’t You Come Around’, a bilingual release in English and Bahasa Melayu.

BULLETIN Music

MUTUAL CONFIDANTS Charlie Lim and Aisyah Aziz ponder on love and conviction

Words by Derrick Tan

with their new track, ‘Won’t You Come Around’.

The freedom of being solo is liberating. Just me, myself, and I. But when someone significant enters your life, reciprocal understanding and compromising should be initiated. Otherwise, it’s just a one-sided relationship. No duets will materialise too. After successfully releasing collaborations with artists around Asia such as Singapore’s Linying and Gentle Bones, South Korea’s Bibi, Japan’s Miho Fukuhara and Kan Sano, and Philippines’s Clara Benin, acclaimed local singer-songwriter Charlie Lim continues to pair up with kindred bonds—mostly recently fellow homegrown singer-actress Aisyah Aziz for his first music release in 2021. An atypical joint effort performed in English and Bahasa Melayu, this bilingual duet, ‘Won’t You Come Around’, showcases the distinctive vocal qualities of both singers to convey relationship woes, consideration and sensitivity in particular. Lim expresses, “Ultimately it is a love song, but it’s more about understanding that the search for ‘real love’ doesn’t exist—it’s about what you build together over time.” Embedded in lush modern R&B arrangements with gospel influences, the duo emphasises the growing pains of learning to understand, accept and rely on each other in a long-term relationship. Both didn’t neglect selflove too. In addition to the importance of learning to trust in a relationship, the personal struggle one faces in search of peace of mind and finding patience to love oneself are highlighted too. Not easy to accomplish, but it is necessary. As reflected in the song’s bridge refrain regarding the paradox struggle—“Patience is a virtue, but I don’t want to change you.” This tune is co-written with long-time collaborator Chok Kerong and Lim had finished writing the melodies and his part of the lyrics before realising the song had the potential to be a great duet. “Even though the

production is quite modern, I felt like the mood of the song was reminiscent of an old soul ballad and thought Aisyah would be perfect. She’s so expressive and her tone and phrasing makes her one of the best singers in our generation, and everything she brought to the table just fit so effortlessly,” says Lim. One striking aspect of the song is Aziz’s verse that’s penned in Bahasa Melayu. Its bilingual interpretation happened organically while the duo was recording in the studio. “Neither of us planned it to be that way, but when we were in the studio tracking the demo, it felt instinctive for me to start [in Malay],” says Aziz. The song’s message is further extended to a music video that also stars both singers. They play two characters stuck in a trance while roaming around aimlessly through the sea, sand and gravel in two seemingly parallel universes. Before their timelines converge, they take respite in each other’s company after having gone through their individual struggle. Directed by Jonathan Choo, another frequent collaborator of Lim’s, the music video dabbles on the concept of navigating through life and time. Choo and his team envisioned the characters’ movements to be slowed down as a representation of how one should not rush to make a decision, but rather to be self-aware and observant of oneself and one’s surroundings. “The visuals are pretty open to interpretation,” says Lim. “But I liked the idea of having sand representing time, water as change and rebirth, and the gravel of the road as a kind of death. There are quite a few shots that do reference themes of a number of my previous videos as well, which is another thing I like to do because things always come full circle.”

‘Won’t You Come Around’ is now available to purchase and stream on digital music platforms including Apple Music.

Words by Asri Jasman

is now bigger (and perhaps, even better) than ever.

In the latest incarnation of an icon, the Dior Men Saddle bag

the

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BULLETIN Accessories

Call it a ‘master plan’ if you will—it’s pretty clear now that Kim Jones had been setting into motion a defining strategy at Dior Men. The artistic director seems to have a consistent two-prong plan of attack with regard to the house’s menswear as well as shoes and accessories each season. If Dior Men’s ready-to-wear is a constant reminder of the house’s couture sensibilities—the intricate handiwork treatments, deftly hand-finished garments and expert manipulation of fine fabrications—and in ways that stretches the capabilities of its artisans, the shoes and the accessories take on already familiar shapes but updated for the now. The Saddle bag was once a forgotten women’s handbag. Created by former Dior creative director John Galliano for the summer 2000 collection, the peculiarly shaped bag was a favoured accessory by almost every it-girl of the early noughties, before it was tucked away into obscurity as an onslaught of other it-bags came to the fore. It was a resurgence of pre-loved items that revived the Saddle bag’s popularity and it hasn’t stopped since. Jones’s interpretation of the once women’s-only bag proved that the Saddle bag had more to offer. The Dior Men

The Dior Saddle now comes with an adjustable strap that can be worn across the chest and a new buckle.

Saddle bag stays true to the original shape but the top handle has now been replaced with an adjustable strap that allows it to be worn across the chest. It’s also been topped off with an era-defining hardware and fastening mechanism courtesy of a creative partnership with Matthew Williams of 1017 ALYX 9SM—a key element differentiating the Dior Men Saddle bag from that of the one that sits in Dior’s womenswear universe. It has been three years since then, and it’s time for an update. While small and mini iterations of already established bag designs (including the Saddle) have been making the rounds for a couple of years now, Jones decided to go in a different direction for summer 2021. The aptly named Maxi Saddle is the biggest interpretation of the Dior Men Saddle bag yet. It retains all the functions and design elements of the Kim Jones ‘original’ but, of course, power-packed

with more storage space. An updated feature of the Maxi Saddle is the addition of a smartphone case situated along the shoulder strap. The zipped case is removable and has been designed in such a way that one’s smartphone (or anything really) is always protected and within easily accessible reach. Because of its more robust size, the Maxi Saddle also now triples up as a messenger bag, expanding its wearability aside from a crossbody and over-the-shoulder. The bag may look like a blown-up version of its predecessor but its functionality has also been elevated. Is bigger, then, better? In this case, it just may be.

MADE IN CHINA Anyone apprehensive about the term need only look at Chinese-born fashion designer Feng Chen Wang and her rule-breaking,

Words by Asri Jasman

high-quality designs.

BULLETIN Fashion

Feng Chen Wang x Converse 2-in-1 Chuck 70 (bottom right) incorporates the designer’s signature deconstruction design approach.

Feng Chen Wang is more than just one ‘thing’. Born in China’s Fujian province, Wang studied menswear at London’s Royal College of Art and graduated in 2015 with a Masters of Arts in Fashion Menswear. Her collections since then have been a fusion of contemporary streetwear-leaning styles with elements of her Chinese heritage —neither of which is done in any sort of stereotypical fashion. “I didn’t think that much about what is streetwear fashion or what isn’t,” Wang tells me of her thought process in starting her eponymous brand. “I think anything that makes you feel comfortable is the best thing, and that’s a very important thing for me to consider when designing.” If streetwear gets a rep for being repetitive and gimmicky at times, there’s none of that in any Feng Chen Wang collection. While Wang likes the relaxed attitude that streetwear-centric details (often taken from sportswear) exudes, she has the same affinity for the rigidity and structure of traditional menswear tailoring. The balance is undoubtedly clear-cut in every collection. It’s this combination of time-honoured techniques and details with a streetwear sensibility that has gained her quite a cult following, especially among the streetwear crowd. It helps too that quintessential sneaker brand Converse has been an ongoing partner season after season, beginning with spring/summer 2019. It’s with this collaboration that Wang’s love for deconstruction and reconstruction materialises to full effect on a single pair of footwear. Wang’s interpretation of

Converse signatures such as the Chuck 70 and the Jack Purcell looked like no previous other interpretations. They’re often taken apart to their very bare bones and then reassembled to create an entirely new design, all while still retaining the defining elements of each signature silhouette. It’s a skill that’s inherent in fashion legends—the likes of Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto—and one that Wang indisputably possesses as well. What’s been a rather admirable characteristic of the young designer’s appeal is how in touch she is with her Chinese heritage and her ability to incorporate elements of that seamlessly into her designs. “I wouldn’t say that it will be a part of every collection in the future—because you don’t really know what’s going to happen in the future as a creative—but everything I’ve been doing so far is very related to my personal life,” explains Wang. One fine example was the spring/summer 2020 collection that was inspired by traditional crafts that originated from her home province of Fujian. A trip back home during the annual Qingming festival (ancestors are paid their respects) reminded Wang of her grandmother and the way she dressed. That led to Wang searching for a workshop able to make the fabric her grandmother would wear and then collaborating with them directly for her collection. Because of COVID-19, Wang has settled back in China for the time being instead of the usual shuttling to and fro her London and Shanghai studios. The confines of

the pandemic have spurred her to focus on strengthening her direct-to-consumer sales channels, even setting up a dedicated WeChat store for her China-based clientele. In fact, the pandemic hasn’t really impeded Wang’s activities much. The Feng Chen Wang spring/summer 2021 collection is a creative release resulting from the effects of COVID-19. Using acid wash as one of the collection’s recurring treatments, no two acid wash garments are alike in any way. There’s also a heavy use of patchworking different materials and colours in a garment, a kind of technical make-do-and-mend approach that adds a human touch to the entire collection, especially where human connections aren’t necessarily safe in many parts of the world. There’s also a new collaboration that’s slated for a spring/summer 2021 release. Wang is getting ready for yet another footwear collaboration, this time with UGG, and applying the same kind of deconstructed flair to the brand’s classic styles. She has already affectionately called the styles “winter boots; summer wear”, owing to the juxtaposition of elements that the Feng Chen Wang x UGG collection will dabble with. UGG may have had a rather polarising reputation over the years (you either really hate it or love it), but with Wang onboard the collection is bound to be one that we’ve never seen from the brand. And one that’s certain to be marked with a sense of contemporary cool by this Asian fashion creative.

BULLETIN Fashion

TO INFINITY & BEYOND The most unexpected—and brilliant—

Words by Mitchell Oakley Smith

collab of the year has already dropped.

Designed to be cross category for men and women, The North Face x Gucci collection features everything from T-shirts and down puffer jackets to a tent and sleeping bags.

With international air travel all but off limits well into 2021, the reveal of the partnership between Gucci and The North Face could not be more perfectly timed for well-heeled yet forcibly adventurous travellers. As we venture into the great outdoors of our own countries’ backyards, the collection, dubbed a celebration of the spirit of exploration, is a fitting reflection of the way our lifestyle and sartorial habits have evolved in less than 12 months, and demonstrates the forward-thinking innovation of both brands. Since its founding in San Francisco in 1966, The North Face has remained committed to pioneering product innovation, outfitting outdoor athletes for the rigours of their adventures including, most recently, its roster of ambassadors such as climber Jimmy Chin and runner Coree Woltering. What, then, does it have in common with Gucci, an Italian luxury brand better known throughout its history for monogrammed leather luggage than for camping? “It is a well acknowledged notion that travel leads to self-discovery, and in this conviction The North Face is aligned with Gucci, which similarly empowers people in their quest to celebrate and express their own characters and personalities,” offers a statement from the company. The cross-category collection for men and women comprises ready-to-wear garments, soft accessories, luggage and shoes, as well more unexpected pieces (from Gucci, at least) including a tent and sleeping bags, all of which is branded with a graphic conjoining of the two iconic logos. And in keeping with the spirit of the outdoors, this capsule collection marks a dual commitment from Gucci and The North Face to long-term sustainability. The majority of its luggage is crafted from Econyl, a type of nylon fabric sourced from regenerated materials such as fishing nets and carpet, while its recyclable paper packaging is sourced from sustainable managed forestry.

BULLETIN Timepieces

new old watch alert Snagging the vintage Cartier timepiece of your dreams just got easier—right here in Singapore.

Recognising the need to give its historical models a platform that befits their rarity and esteem, Cartier has taken the decision to include vintage models at selected boutiques around the world, retailing them alongside the latest Santos, Pasha and Tank creations—an unspoken gesture that shows the company holding them in equal regard. It’s a big step for Cartier, one that began in London, followed by Paris, and now Singapore at the Ion Orchard flagship boutique. The selection will comprise vintage references from the 1970s, and retro models from the ’80s and ’90s, all the way to out-of-production pieces from the last decade. Working with trusted partners from watch fairs, as well as specialised retailers and internal teams, to authenticate the timepieces—the watches are sourced and restored by in-house experts—Cartier tags an impressive eight-year service warranty along with a brand-new authenticity certification to every watch. Essentially the full service right down to its signature red box. With the company having produced watches for more than 100 years—from the Tank to the Santos, from the Tonneau to the Tortue—you’re looking at what could well be considered a timepiece library of vintage Cartiers for the luxury watch connoisseur.

You don’t need to be a crazy rich Asian to know that when it comes to luxury shopping, it’s all about the in-store experience. With preowned and vintage timepieces, though, this is rarely the case, since independent third-party dealers and private owners have all but cornered the market, and your retail experience could range from adequate at best to fraudulent at worst. Which is a huge injustice considering the beautiful craftsmanship and heritage behind these timeless treasures. But if you’re a Cartier aficionado, you can kiss those dog days goodbye.

Words by Celine Yap

From left: pink gold Cartier Tonneau (2005) and yellow gold Cartier Tortue (2003).

BULLETIN

The OG modern Rolex just got 2mm larger. That’s huge.

By rights, it seems like the Rolex Oyster Perpetual (OP) should be the beginning of a lifelong love affair with the megabrand for a swath of watch fans. It’s the epitome of timeless, restrained design, with an appeal that lies as much in what’s left out as in what’s included. Yet while the OP, at SGD7,910, is the entry-level proposition for Rolex, many watch nerds cite its smaller size as the reason they shoot straight past it for bigger, more expensive and more noticeable watches like the Submariner and Sea-Dweller. Little do they know that the Oyster Perpetual is the granddaddy of them all. The name Oyster derives from the first waterproof watch, created by Rolex in 1926; Perpetual comes from the introduction of the first automatic movement, created by Rolex in 1931. These groundbreaking innovations meant a watch could keep water and dust out while running—perpetually—as long as it was worn. It’s more of a promise of performance than a mere line of products. And because the OP is the progenitor of most Rolexes made since the early ’50s, you’ll find the words Oyster and Perpetual on the dials of Datejusts, Yacht-Masters and, yes, Subs and Sea-Dwellers. Credit where credit’s due. But because of this rarefied status, it has remained resolutely on the smaller side. The trend towards dinner-plate-sized timepieces swayed things only a little when, in 2015, the introduction of a 39mm version hit what is widely considered the sweet spot in watch-case design. This autumn, Rolex went one step further, dropping the 39 from the line and bringing out the OP in a new, 41mm case, all the better to see its breathtaking simplicity. Changing a watch diameter from 39mm to 41mm may not sound like a very big deal to you, but in Swiss watchmaking it’s a seismic event. Whereas in the past few years many watchmakers have experimented with sub-40mm watches, Rolex’s move in the opposite direction is one that many will be monitoring intently. Maybe, just maybe, that sweet spot is shifting.

Words by Nick Sullivan. Photograph by Brad Ogbonna

PERPETUALLY COOL

Timepieces

BULLETIN Timepieces

glowing tribute Luminous watches hit a milestone. out-of-court settlements; by the mid-1930s, all five and dozens of their colleagues affected had died. Factory conditions were improved, but radium paint continued to be used on watch dials until 1968, when it was finally banned. The replacement was tritium-based paint; an isotope of hydrogen, tritium is sufficiently radioactive to create a glow, yet safe enough not to kill you. A by-product of the Cold War, it was made available to the commercial market in the 1950s when the US nuclear programme suddenly found itself with a surplus after the first thermonuclear warheads were found to create the tritium as a side-effect of detonation. By the end of that decade, tritium-based paints were developed by RC Tritec, the Swiss firm that today supplies lume to most of the industry. Watch companies used tritium for around 30 years until the Japanese firm Nemoto developed LumiNova, a zincsulphide based paint that boasted a longlasting glow once exposed to light, and emitted no radiation whatsoever. Since then, both Nemoto and individual brands have improved their products (the industry standard is an upgrade known as SuperLumiNova; big companies like Rolex and Seiko have patented their own compounds) and lume, as it’s colloquially known in all its forms, has become a fertile area for experimentation. Some companies—notably Ball Watch Company—have persisted with tritium, in a totally safe form; tiny tubes filled with tritium gas and coated on the inside with luminous paint deliver a long-lasting luminous effect. Others, like Vertex and MB&F, have crafted three-dimensional numerals or other dial elements from

blocks of solid lume (essentially a workable polymer infused with luminous paint). The latest trick, thanks to advances in composite case-making, is to bind the lume into the body of the watch itself. It is employed by Panerai on its 70th anniversary edition of the iconic Luminor Marina; two designs, one in carbon composite and the other in a new material it calls Fibratech, each use the latest X1 grade of Super-LumiNova to accentuate the case lines, crown guard and crown, while also being applied to all the traditional places on the dial. One of the most recognisable dive watches ever made, the Luminor silhouette has barely changed since the mid-1950s, but this latest set is emphatically contemporary, setting up the range for greater experimentation in materials and luminous treatments in the next few years. “For 2020, we wanted to celebrate Luminor, the line which has put Panerai on the map, by bringing luminescence into characteristics of the watch not used before,” says CEO Jean-Marc Pontroué. “Not just the indexes but elements of the watch such as the case, the safety lock system and the stitching on the strap. Right now, we are in development with ideas for the years to come, of how to make this luminescence even stronger.” The future’s bright, as they say. Words by Chris Hall

If the weather in Paris in February was a bit nicer, things might have been very different. In 1896, French physicist Henri Becquerel, fascinated with the concept of phosphorescence, began experimenting with uranium salts. He discovered that a block of potassium uranyl sulphate, if left in the sunlight for a few hours, would cause a silhouette to appear on a photographic plate, even if the two were separated by sheets of black paper. This was interesting; several compounds were already known to glow after being exposed to light —indeed, phosphorescent decorations had been used by ancient Oriental artists, made using crushed seashells—albeit none were as powerful as this. Waiting a few days for better weather in which to repeat his findings, Becquerel stored the salts and plates together, and was surprised to find on returning to them that the same results were visible without the help of the sun. He realised that the energy was not absorbed and emitted, but actually came from within the uranium salts themselves. And just like that, the world had discovered radioactivity. Years later, Marie and Pierre Curie isolated radium (sharing the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with Becquerel for their work on radioactivity) and by the early 1900s, radium-based glow-in-the-dark paints were in widespread use. It was known early on that radium was dangerous, but that didn’t stop it from being used on everything from house signs to toy dolls—and watch dials. It was assumed that the amounts used were too small to be dangerous to the public, and while broadly true, the same couldn’t be said for the factories where they were made. The women employed by the US Radium Corporation, New Jersey, licked their paintbrushes as they applied radium paint to watch hands and dials. In the early 1920s, some noticed pain in their jaws and teeth; examinations found their bones had been eaten away “as if by moths”. Five women sued the company and received

Celebrating 70 years since the model’s introduction, the 2020 Panerai Luminor Marina 119 uses newgeneration Super-LumiNova.

BULLETIN Art

it isn’t that

Clockwise from bottom left: ‘When I discovered the signpost to eternal love for humanity’; ‘Clouds’; ‘All of my love for humanity’; ‘Looking into the universe from my heart’, all 2019, all by Yayoi Kusama.

BULLETIN Art

black and white Iconic Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama presents an exhibition devoid of her characteristic colour palette.

Words by Mitchell Oakley Smith

Gillman Barracks-based gallery Ota Fine Arts has unveiled a keenly anticipated exhibition of new work by globally acclaimed artist Yayoi Kusama. Significantly, this exhibition marks Kusama’s first solo presentation in Singapore since 2017, when the National Gallery mounted a large-scale retrospective, and additionally, is the first time that these particular works are shown within Southeast Asia. But this series of work also marks an important departure from Kusama’s recognisable embrace of colour. In 2018, the artist began working intensively on a series of 100x100cm vividly coloured paintings and, the following year, continued the series entirely in monochrome. In these, Kusama’s varied motifs —eyes, faces, biomorphic shapes, nets and dots—are rendered in black and white, and as a result offer an entirely

modified experience for those familiar with the artist’s oeuvre. But in eschewing the primary palette typical of her backcatalogue, Kusama invites the viewer to explore the rich depth that exists in her painting practice, with its use of abstract figuration and microscopic views of the universe. From her childhood experiences with visual and auditory hallucination, and the subsequent development of her art philosophy of self-obliteration through compulsive repetition of singular motifs, such as dots and nets, Kusama’s practice has been keenly developed and refined over several decades. In some ways, the artworks showcased in this exhibition, which marks the end of the decade-long My Eternal Soul series, represent an encapsulation of her work to date. And with titles such as ‘All of my love for humanity’ (2019) and ‘Looking into the universe from my heart’ (2019), these works offer unique insight into the complexities

of the mind of the artist who, at 91 years old, seems particularly attuned to the universal themes of love, death, humanity and our relationship with the universe. Accompanying the series of 15 paintings is a sculpture installation, ‘Clouds’ (2019), made up of mirror-finished stainless steel forms that engulf the floors of the gallery like the mimetic liquid metal robots of the Terminator film franchise. Reflecting and complementing the organic lines of the exhibition’s paintings, Kusama’s installation adds an additional layer of immersive experience that we’ve come to expect of the artist, and demonstrates an insatiable desire to continue expanding her creative vocabulary, even in her tenth decade.

Yayoi Kusama: Recent Paintings is on display at Ota Fine Arts, Singapore until 6 March 2021.

perfect

stranger

Singaporean artist Dawn Ng’s mesmeric installation holds special resonance in our new world order.

BULLETIN Art

When Israeli psychologist—and then Singapore resident—Zehavit Efrati first encountered Dawn Ng at a lecture the artist gave at the Singapore Art Museum about six years ago, she was struck by Ng’s ability to “catch words” to describe her ideas, emotions and thoughts. And though they wouldn’t personally connect for another two years, in 2016, they haven’t stopped talking since. Ng’s epic installation piece, ‘Perfect Stranger’, is the collective output of the pair’s exchange of words, ideas, pictures, poems, jokes, questions and answers, which occurred in person and over email during that same year. “Back then, we didn’t have the mere idea that at the beginning of the new decade that we would live our lives social distancing, wearing masks and counting our guests,” reflects Efrati. “In a way, Dawn’s idea to exchange questions and answers via daily emails can hold today the opportunity and hope to maintain close and authentic relationships from a distance… we might feel as if the world has become narrow or shrunk. Nevertheless, if we can hold the hope that we are able to contact truly and deeply from a distance, then we know that eventually we will be just fine.” Originally shown at the Chan + Hori Contemporary gallery in 2018, ‘Perfect Stranger’ is made up of a vast sea of paper washed in a gradient of words and colour. Given the vast change in the way we live post-2020, its new display at the Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM) acts as a narrative time capsule, with visitors invited to weave between the sculptures and explore for themselves the artist’s world and, in turn, reflect on their own sense of time, sense and self in our brave new world. The museum has staged Ng’s work—for the first time since its original display—in its most fulsome and originally conceived

format as part of a multi-exhibition series that aims to spotlight the people behind the institution through personal stories. Key to the project is Faith Beauty Love Hope – Our Stories, Your ACM, a special exhibition revealing the lesser-known human side of the museum through the perspectives of staff, tenants, partners, artists and collectors. As museum director Kennie Ting explains, “2020 was a really challenging year for all of us, at the global level because of the pandemic, but also at the personal level as we struggled, alongside our family, significant others, friends and colleagues, to make sense of things, to cope with grief and frustration, and to change. This exhibition represents what we all need most right now: faith that it will be better, beauty to nourish the soul, love to heal the heart, and hope to light our way.” Alongside thINK: Chinese Calligraphy, Connoisseurship, and Collecting, ‘Perfect Stranger’ confronts existential issues and mortality of life—subjects that guest curator Bernard Tan concedes he has grappled with over our strange past 12 months. Now based abroad, Efrati wasn’t sure she would be able to reconnect to the deep feelings she had for the project in what was her former home. “But today,” she says, “from a distance of oceans and continents, without knowing whether I can actually visit the exhibition, I know. I can forget about the words, as the ideas and feelings are rooted deeply in my memory, thoughts and heart. I hope these words will move something in your inner world, and even as you later forget them, that the feelings will continue to live inside you. Even from a distance.” ‘Perfect Stranger’ is on display at the Asian Civilisations Museum until 28 February 2021.

Words by Mitchell Oakley Smith. Photographs by Sarah Isabelle Tan

Vast sheets of paper, ebbing with words and gradient hues, lie in parallel synchronicity to form a soft stratosphere of colour in Dawn Ng’s ‘Perfect stranger’.

BULLETIN Scents

a sage’s

genesis

Hermès’s perfumer Christine Nagel ingeniously

Words by Derrick Tan. Photograph by Sylvie Becquet

forges the refined H24 among the botanics.

BULLETIN

Safe is comforting, but predictable. In contrast, to be a cut above the rest while upholding expected standards requires capable hands and skills. For instance, woody notes are always synonymous with men’s perfumes. Rarely other scents from the fragrance wheel get the spotlight. This doesn’t faze Christine Nagel in featuring another aromatic as an anchor for Hermès’s newest signature scent. “I had to open up other, less predictable paths to move away from the usual woodiness of men’s scents.” Named H24, this botanic herb and plant-based perfume is bold and daring for the French luxury maison. “It’s a name that’s dynamic, contemporary and modern. And at the same time, sober,” explains Nagel. Coincidentally, there’s no direct connection with Hermès’s signature jacquard tie of the same name. “I like it because it’s a name that talks about the house’s masculinity and movement. And at the same time, it’s both innovation and tradition. H stands for ‘hour’ and ‘Hermès’ [and] of course, H for ‘homme’ [which is] ‘man’ in French, and for ‘Human’. On the other hand, 24 is [taken from] ‘24 Faubourg’, our iconic address in Paris. It also stands for 24 hours of the day.” Inspired by Hermès menswear’s artistic director Véronique Nichanian’s timeless yet forward-thinking designs that shaped the urban man, Nagel sought to translate those properties through a fragrance. “I wanted a change and a different way of looking at things. When I look at [Nichanian’s] menswear designs at fashion shows, I sense that notion of fluidity, energy and suppleness. I immediately associated a vision of this man, dynamic and in motion.” The experienced perfumer describes the motivation to an accelerated film. “It’s like planted little saplings. The seeds are sown and through the strength of the plant that breaks through the earth grew to look for sunlight. This surge out of the Earth is the starting point.” So how is it possible to identify such physical aesthetic qualities and emotion using nose work only? It’s time for Nagel to exercise her prowess. Instead of having a woody note as the backbone, botanical takes the stage. H24 avoided the usual suspects. Instead, it highlights clary sage (salvia sclarea), narcissus, rosewood essence and sclarene as key ingredients.

The clary sage from the aromatic botanical fougère olfactory family is used by Nagel to make a parallel to Nichanian’s work. “[Clary sage] reflects the duality of Nichanian’s designs—sensual and soft like the leaf which is almost velvety. At the same time, you can feel that it’s very clear cut like the edges of the leaf. I chose the sage, which is a leaf, as the backbone. Maybe in this fougère category, everybody uses lavender. But it was more surprising for me to use sage.” Narcissus also has qualities that’s essential to H24 and its narrative. “Narcissus is a man’s flower as it’s quite green and raw. Thus, it’s comparable to the Hermès man that Nichanian often puts in her clothes—there’s always that electric touch of colour in her collections.” When encountered, narcissus is that spark on the H24 that’s recognisable. As Nagel explains, “I’ve worked on it using a special technology that distillates it with a material of synthesis [techniques]. Without removing that sparky side to it, I made it more supple that resulted in a process where one material dissolved and melt into the other, which they call the ‘fondue océane’.” Isn’t it ironic and taboo to use wood after declaring to steer away from them? The secret lies with the scent as the woody trail ends at its physical form. “The rosewood brings freshness and doesn’t smell woody at all. It was quite surprising and new for me to bring freshness through a wood and not citrus,” says Nagel. But gaining access to this elusive ingredient is challenging as Brazil completely closed its doors about 20 years ago because it involves deforestation of the Amazon forest. “I discovered small producers of rosewood in Peru that were sustainably driven. Since they’re respectful, they were able to get the approval to use this wood. Not only I’m happy to use this rare raw material once again, but I’m also glad to assist these small producers on their productions.” Lastly, sclarene, a material of synthesis, completes the quartet. Deemed “special, delicate and sophisticated” by Nagel, this biotech handiwork isn’t obviously detected initially, but grows into a sensual warm fragrance that’s akin to “warm, metallic steam” that sustains then H24’s musk. “This fragrance develops a scent that’s exactly of Nichanian’s tailoring workshops. A steam which has the scent of wool and hot metal. It’s very daring to showcase this warm metallic note.”

Photograph by Quentin Bertoux

Scents

BULLETIN Scents

The botanical H24 contains key ingredients of clary sage, narcissus, rosewood essence and sclarene.

Nagel masterfully connects the link of Nichanian’s Hermès urban man through research on raw materials which conveys those sensations seamlessly. “When she mixes fabrics such as fibres, cashmere and leather in certain garments, you can’t see any stitches, it’s seamless. They melt into each other. So that’s the freedom I have to look for when sourcing materials using my experience.” This vision extends to the H24’s bottle too. Showcasing the intricacy of glassmaking, the Philippe Mouquet-designed creation taps on the aerodynamic lines of this refillable object to express the spirit and energy of a contemporary man. Imagine that the bottle’s shape had been altered by an invisible hand’s firm grip. The box, made from 100 percent recycled and recyclable paper,

makes reference to the fragrance’s sustainable composition. Although certain scents can be deeply personal, anything goes with H24 even if it’s inspired by masculinity of the Hermès man’s universe. “There’s nothing sexier for me than women wearing a men’s fragrance, you know,” exclaims Nagel. “Personally, I’m dressed a lot in Nichanian’s Hermès designs. Because I feel the sensuality and it’s ‘so Hermès’ for me. I love these clothes as they speak to me. So, I created this fragrance for men. If women wear it, I’d be delighted. I think you have to give this freedom for everyone to do what they feel. But I don’t forget that my source of inspiration is a masculine inspiration. But if it attracts women, well, why not?”

BULLETIN Design

LIFE

At a time when most of us have become more acquainted with our home furnishings than we ever thought possible, Ikea has made 70 years of its iconic catalogue available online. Dating from 1950, the back catalogue of catalogues is as much a social history as it is an opportunity to review wardrobes down the decades—one you can peruse free from rowing couples, car park struggles with irregular-shaped boxes, or suspiciously cheap hot dogs. Launched to coincide with the exhibition, The Ikea Catalogue Through the Ages at the Ikea Museum in Älmhult, Sweden, the archive is also a trove of retro-interior kitsch. Marvel at the Miami Vice-style living rooms from 1985! Rub your eyes at the optic nerve-fraying bedspreads from 1958! Applaud the Zelig-like tenacity of the Billy bookcase!

The Ikea catalogue, catalogued.

Words by Johnny Davis

SHELF

To celebrate its 70-year journey in time and interior space, Ikea has curated a bespoke museum exhibition and published its annual catalogues reaching back to 1950 online.

The first two decades are product-only affairs: there’s a distinct lack of people among the sofas and the sideboards. Children turn up in the 1970s but so do adults smoking. The 1980s are appropriately poppy before everything gets more pared back and distinctly Scandinavian (and, alas, less fun) in the 1990s. Ikea launched in 1943 with founder Ingvar Kamprad’s mail order business selling first matches, pencils and postcards, then pens, watches and electric razors in Sweden’s Småland region. The catalogue allowed people to mail in orders using a coupon, while customers began taking home pre-assembled furniture from the first store in Älmhult in 1958. The flat-pack idea came about when an employee separated a Lovet table from its legs to fit it into a customer’s car boot.

While 2020 saw the Argos catalogue cease printing after 47 years—uptake had slumped to a mere 3.9 million copies—Ikea continues to defy the death-of-print doom-mongers. Today, over 203 million copies of the Ikea Catalogue are printed in 35 languages, which is more than either the Bible or the Quran. Any superfans/long-suffering customers leafing through the virtual library will have one possible line of enquiry thwarted, though: the Ikea Museum does not keep a library of old furniture assembly instructions. “Unfortunately not,” an Ikea spokesperson says. “We handle quite a lot of old products that need putting together and taking apart, so we wish we did.” Visit ikeamuseum.com for more information.

Lion’s Den comprises baijiu, ginseng, green coffee and goji berries.

ONE FOR THE ROAD MO Bar goes long with its Volume Three menu.

BULLETIN Drinks

Sarimanok, a rum and mango based cocktail.

Words by Joy Ling

Milkyway made with whiskey, oolong and brown sugar.

We’re given the impression that Mandarin Oriental’s flagship bar does not stop. Ever since its marked nomadic concept at inception three years ago, it has gone on to be named one of Asia’s 50 best bars with its Volume Two menu, and embarked on the Nomadic Foragers guest shift programme that took the team to destinations across Asia Pacific and brought back with it stories to tell. The medium of narration—16 distinct drinks. The bar has kept its beautifully visual menu, a source of pride and practically a signature, we’re sure. Besides sticking to the overview that displays the alcohol level of each tipple (a practice more bars should have… for prudence), Volume Three even indicates what type of ‘vessel’ you’ll be getting them in, many of which are bought or gifted from the original locations of the inspired drinks. The attention to detail carries on with the imagery splashed across the pages. If you’re thinking that they are generic pictorial elements, you couldn’t be more wrong. From guest bar seals to even a tattoo of one of the featured bartenders, these fill the book like embedded clues. With such keen storytelling, the stage is effectively set for the fabled cocktails. The Singapore and thunder tea rice tribute is easily a favourite, though we’d opt for the alcoholic option of local gin to add another layer of complexity to the nutty brew. Thunder (from SGD12)

comprises no minty tinge of the actual Hakka dish’s broth, but the rice-based brim foam rounds off the drink nicely. Those with a tendency for savoury can try White Rabbit (from SGD14)—a Bloody Mary twist of tomato, aged black garlic, and kimchi that the team now makes in-house. Or Rubi (SGD22), a Sri Lankan-inspired blend of whisky, pineapple and toddy palm so seamless that it reads off the tongue like one composite whole. Sweeter counterparts Pastel de Ramos (SGD24), a taste of Macau, concocts cognac with a satisfyingly heavy whip of custard, while the Sarimanok (SGD24), the rum and mango descendent of Volume One’s Mother of Dragons, is a lot more balanced than its forerunner. To pick one from the heavyweights, white negroni variant Lion’s Den (SGD22) is unapologetically bitter with the palate of baijiu, ginseng, green coffee and goji berries, yet delicious when simply paired with Chinese dates. It’s a feat that none of the full array is glazed over with each embodying a trip, a lesson, and a point of creative inspiration of the bar team. Headed by bar manager Adrian Besa and complemented with the service team’s jovial nature, it’s a journey that will leave you in high spirits. MO Bar is located on level four of Mandarin Oriental, Singapore.

BULLETIN Cars

GREASED

GERMAN

LIGHTNING Porsche’s first electric car is more than a Tesla

Words by Daryl Lee

rival—it’s a brilliant Porsche in its own right.

BULLETIN Cars

I’m very sure that in about two or three decades, automotive historians will look back upon the 10 years from 2010–2020 as the greatest-ever era for Porsche. In the past decade, Zuffenhausen can’t seem to put a foot wrong, releasing cars to both critical and commercial acclaim—even vehicles that run counter to its traditional sports car niche, like the Cayenne and Macan SUVs. Heck, Porsche has even managed to finally solve the vexed issue of the Panamera’s ungainly, bulbous caboose in 2017 with the second-generation model. But one hurdle has yet to be surmounted, the rather pressing concern of pressing an electric car into service in double-quick time—tightening EU emissions regulations and all that jazz, plus in a post-Dieselgate world the internal combustion engine has become deeply un-sexy. Remember, it was just in 2015 that Porsche announced the forerunner of the Taycan, the Mission E concept car, during the Frankfurt Motor Show. And here we are today, the Taycan, Porsche’s first electric car, and about as big of a milestone as the first 911 in 1964, and for a more recent example, that all-conquering cash cow, the Cayenne, in 2003. But the Taycan is about as controversial (to purists, anyway) as the Cayenne, since it’s the first Porsche in the carmaker’s 70-odd years of making road cars to not have an internal combustion engine… or for that matter, an analogue rev counter. To that end, the entire instrument cluster replaced by a curved 16.8-inch display supplemented by another pair of screens, one for the infotainment system and a portrait-oriented one just below

that which houses the controls for the air-conditioning, media controls and a space that functions as a trackpad/handwriting recognition area. In fact, there are virtually no analogue buttons to be found on the entire centre stack, and even adjusting the position of the air vents has to be done through a sub-sub-menu in the infotainment system. With all that, it’s easy to dismiss the Taycan as a bit of a gimmick. I mean, is it really necessary to have air vents you need to access a menu to operate, or a volume control not on a physical knob (yes, I know you can do it from the steering wheel controls), or I don’t know… the Porsche Electric Sport Sound. In a nutshell, that last feature amplifies the noise from the electric motors, mixes in some other appropriately techy sounds and pipes the lot through the speakers. For instance, you get a sort of low, V8-ish rumble at idle, building to a sort of angry UFO noise as speeds climb. With all that, it’s clear the Taycan is a completely different sort of Porsche… and yet, also one that’s completely familiar. To start with, it’s quick. Actually, scratch that. It’s stupid quick. The Taycan 4S gets 490hp (with up to 571hp on ‘overboost’; never mind the fact it doesn’t have a turbo or a combustion engine with which to do said boosting) and 650Nm, getting it from a standstill to 100km/h in four seconds flat. Of course, as with all electric cars, it feels so, so much faster than that, because all that power is available virtually instantly, with no gears to kick down or no engine inertia to overcome. A firm flex of your right foot is all that’s needed to take the Taycan from

BULLETIN Cars

ENGINE Dual synchronous electric motors POWER 490hp TORQUE 650Nm 0-100KM/H 4.0 seconds TOP SPEED 250km/h TRANSMISSION Single-speed, with two-speed rear axle ENERGY CONSUMPTION 26kWh/100km VES BAND A2 (SGD10,000 rebate) PRICE SGD485,988 (excluding COE, excluding options)

a leisurely canter to warp speed. Its response is, for want of a better descriptor, electric. Actually, the Taycan does have a two-speed gearbox driving the rear axle, and on sudden, hard accelerations, you can hear and feel the gearbox kicking down, just as you would on a ‘regular’ Porsche. And that speed is absolutely relentless. With even the most powerful internal combustion car, it sort of takes a breath to shift gears, but with the Taycan the speed just keeps building. And building. And building. That is, until you run out of road, into traffic, into the long arm of the law, or into an inconveniently placed tree. Whichever comes sooner. Even more amazing is how you’ve to bear in mind the 4S variant occupies what is nominally the mid-range of the Taycan line-up, with the top spot going to the monstrous Turbo S, capable of a supercar-destroying 761hp in brief spurts. But don’t go thinking the Taycan is a straight-line hero, because it’s so much more than that. In fact, it’s arguably the best-handling Porsche on sale today, in spite of the fact it’s carrying around a fair amount of weight—2,220kg to be exact with the higher-capacity Performance Battery Plus specced (a SGD26,536 option that grants it 56km more range and 55hp more power with a weight penalty of 80kg). The Taycan does a great job of disguising its heft, through a combination of black magic suspension tuning that grants it godly levels of control but still retaining a good deal of comfort during cruising, leech-like mechanical grip and beastly mid-corner punch. Unlike most electric cars that are built on the so-called ‘skateboard’ architecture—with the batteries housed in a tray under

the floor—the Taycan doesn’t handle in a bottom-heavy fashion. It’s even more amazing when you consider said battery pack accounts for nearly a third of the Taycan’s total kerb weight. While most of its rivals tend to flounce into dips and undulations, the Taycan handles with delightful neutrality. The sheer poise and class it exhibits ranks right up there with the best electric cars, the best sports saloons and even, yes, the very best Porsches. That’s saying something, since you can quite comfortably mention the Taycan in the same breath as the brilliant new 911. Sure, you might get some funny looks from those that claim to be ‘real’ petrolheads, but that’s only because they haven’t yet driven the Taycan. Which brings me neatly to why exactly I think the Taycan is so good. And the short answer to that is, I really couldn’t say myself. Sure, the Taycan does have jaw-droppingly good sci-fi supercar looks, perhaps the best-looking mass-production car Porsche has made in the last two decades (the Carrera GT and 918 Spyder limited-run hypercars don’t count). It has an equally stunning interior, if marred a little by the fiddly ergonomics of having virtually no physical buttons/dials/knobs/air vent adjustment. Or its handling, which is nothing short of superlative. But you could rightly argue that’s merely the quantifiable traits; traits all good sporting vehicles should have. More than that, the Taycan also is imbued with a certain something. What Porsche has done is to give an electric car, a breed that many petrolheads regard to be inherently soulless, a soul. And not just any soul, mind you. A Porsche soul.

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74 Styles to follow when you have a bad hair day.

68 Investment-worthy watches that will take your status to the next level.

ST Y L E

48 Lewis Tan, who played Zhou Cheng in Marvel’s Iron Fist and is slated for Mortal Kombat, is more than just an action star.

Blazer, trousers and sandals, all by Burberry; polo shirt, by Bottega Veneta.

STYLE

T he P ro t a g o n i s t Having grown up in and around film sets, is it any wonder that Lewis Tan is now making a living on the big (and small) screen? Step into the shoes of Tan, from stunt work to modelling gigs to being part of the emerging Asian actors wave, who is ready for the limelight.

W O R D S B Y WAY N E C H E O N G PHOTOGRAPHS BY PIERRE TOUSSAINT S T Y L I N G B Y J O LYO N M A S O N

STYLE

INT. EDITING ROOM – NIGHT It is a Sunday evening and you, Lewis Tan, are editing clips of a short film you’ve done. It also happens to be the start of a new year. Normally, people would take this time to recuperate from the New Year’s Eve partying over the weekend, but you are not most people. Some context as to who you are: 34 years old, 1.88m, half-Chinese/half-English. You were born in Salford, which, at the time, had the reputation of being a rough district. Your father is Philip Tan, a stunt coordinator, and your mother is Joanne Tan née Cassidy, an ex-model. If this was a movie, there would be a montage of you splicing footages, while some R&B tune worms its way into your ears from a portable speaker—but it isn’t. Earlier you’ve worked the entire day, and now your eyes are tired and your posture is a little sloped from all the sitting. This short film is something that you’ve personally financed. Your own money. You’re telling this to a reporter halfway around the world through videoconferencing. You tell him that your family didn’t come from money. The things that they have were earned through hard work. LEWIS TAN I understood the concept that people got famous and they were rich but I wasn’t striving for that. It wasn’t the goal. The goal was to make enough money to live so that you can continue to make films. That’s not to say you weren’t immune to being irresponsible with your money. The temptation to just blow it all for the sake of drip niggles at you. Sometimes you give in to them, but when it comes down to it your earnings are funnelled into your passion projects. Much like the short film you’re editing. You see this as a sound investment that can reap the rewards down the line. You’re Lewis Tan and you’ve scaled the ladder for so long that you’re starting to break into the big leagues. Your CV includes Deadpool 2, Into the Badlands, Wu Assassins and Iron Fist. Lately, it is in an as-yet-unnamed role in Mortal Kombat that’s set to be released on 16 April. If this was a movie, this would be the part where you, the hero of this journey, are confronted with the inciting incident; the moment that sets the story into motion. Like Dorothy being swept up from Kansas and into Oz. Or when the door to Boo’s bedroom is left open in Monsters, Inc. Or in Inception, when Cobb accepted the job from Saito. For you, what is the juncture that led you to pursue acting? What was the incident that sparked that love for the craft?

Blazer, shirt and trousers, all by Ermenegildo Zegna XXX.

Knit, by Bally.

STYLE

It’s hard to say. There’s not one moment per se. Maybe it was finding out that your father was involved in the film industry. Maybe it was the family’s move to Los Angeles during your formative years. You can see hints of your preference for the creative process. The standard syllabi in school didn’t excite you but you lean towards design. You’ll tinker about in Photoshop; you have an eye for visuals. What if your destiny lies in graphic or interior design? You were elated when you clinched an internship with the design department at Disney. Two years, you’ve driven to Burbank from school, working at the Happiest Place on Earth… only to find it wanting. It wasn’t what you hoped it to be. All the while, you were studying theatre, you were doing commercials. You auditioned for a lot of projects, most of which you weren’t called back for and some that did. You had a few roles with Nickelodeon and Disney but you were unsure if acting was your calling. At the time, there was little to no Asian breakthrough moment in the film and TV landscape. Your father advises you to change your surname to something white, something that people won’t push away when they read your bio. You reject this, of course. You know your father meant well but it’s unfathomable that you’d do something like that. This erasure of your family tree. EXT. CAMPUS GROUNDS There is a turning point that cemented your decision to become an actor. On the first day of college, you received a call from a casting director who wanted you to do stunt work on Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. LEWIS TAN “We’d like you to go to the Bahamas and it will be for a long time. We need a decision soon.” So, either I stay in college to study film or I can skip this and make an actual film. So, you left college and never looked back. You’ve trained your whole life for this moment: growing up around movie sets; listening to your father talk about movies; watching films with him. If this were a movie, the scene would cut to your DNA; molecules shifting about to denote visually how ingrained film is to you. You soak it all in whenever you’re on set. In fact, for Mortal Kombat, you refuse to stay in your trailer when you’re not shooting. Instead, you’re next to the director, noting the technicalities of the camera or the lenses used. You’re watching the tapes or talking to the cinematographer. That has never changed since you did Pirates of the Caribbean, watching Gore Verbinski direct the scenes. That’s how you grow as a filmmaker. That was your film school. But there are other lessons to be learned. Realities that proved to be harsh teachers. —-

STYLE

INT. APARTMENT – AFTERNOON You can hear the commotion two blocks down from where you live. It didn’t sit right with you when the protests swelled in large numbers with regards to the killing of Black men and women at the hands of police. You can’t stand idly by when your Black peers are screaming to be seen as equal and not as something less. After all, you have suffered from racism in your life. Someone offers a slight to how you look or a casual dismissal of your roots. It’s a lot less than what the Black populace experience day in and out. LEWIS TAN It does feel personal, but mostly I felt angry as a human being. I could hear the protests from where I live, near Beverly Hills. The chanting, the shouting, the marching in the streets. I couldn’t stay inside and do nothing. So, you get out and join in the march. You support the Black community with your presence. Even in the face of the pandemic, where large groups are discouraged, the risk felt minimal compared to a racist system that has entrenched itself into everyday living. You mask up, you join in the chorus of “I can’t breathe” and “Defund the police”. Names of the victims are recited: Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Dion Jackson… the list goes on and on. The parchment spools, the ink barely dry. —As someone from mixed parentage, you have to contend with your place in the world. As an actor, casting directors have a preconceived notion of what an Asian would look. To them, you are a square peg trying to fit in a round hole; you look Asian but not quite. You look Caucasian but that’s not it, either. EXT. STREETS OF CHINA – AFTERNOON If this was a film, we’ll cut to you in China. There, a sea of people in the hot streets of a busy intersection and then you appear, a head taller than everybody else. Attention swivels towards you as you walk down the sidewalk. The world doesn’t know what to do with someone like that. It took years to get the casting people to understand who you are as an actor and what you could bring to the table. It would be a dog’s age before the entertainment industry evolved to a place where they can write roles that could fit you. Such is the case with Iron Fist, a series based on a Marvel property about Danny Rand, a white martial arts expert who can call upon the powers of the ‘Iron Fist’. The TV series was a chance to subvert the ‘white saviour’ trope by casting an actor of Asian descent. Instead, the role went to Finn Jones who is white.

Blazer, polo shirt and trousers, all by Bottega Veneta.

Blazer, shirt and trousers, all by Ermenegildo Zegna XXX; boots, by Hermès.

STYLE

Then it was discovered that you were considered for the lead before you were cast as the villain, Zhou Cheng, instead. Your motivation as Zhou Cheng was to protect your masters from Rand. You fought against the Iron Fist using zui quan (drunken boxing in Mandarin). The cameo lasted about eight minutes. But you make your own opportunities, you keep moving. That steel in your spine, that stubborn refusal to quit, came from your parents. They instil that in you. Your father especially, although initially communication with him was difficult because of his emotionally and physically abusive childhood. At the time you didn’t expect much from him, but now that you’re older and have seen the realities of this world, you understand why he is the way he is. People will tell you that your father is one of the nicest people they have ever met. The sort that will give the clothes on his back if he could. But that wasn’t always the case. Your father—untamed and quick to anger—would get into street fights. Stare at him wrong at a traffic stop and he’ll jump out of the car to confront you. But then, he had a ‘come to church moment’, his demeanour changed for the better. It had even moved him to forgive your grandfather, who passed away this year. This makes for a good story. Something on the big screen even. So, as you work on a story about your father, about his life: what would a film of Philip Tan look like? —-

INT. SOUNDSTAGE - AFTERNOON You are Philip Tan and you’re still working, still paying your dues even though someone of your age and of your status should be enjoying the fruits of your labour. But while this sort of luxuries is welcomed, there is a gratification in the work. You’ve just finished a film with Mickey Rourke down in New Mexico. And now you’re back in England, prepping for another project. Your son, Lewis, says, with tongue firmly in cheek, that you will “happily die with a camera in hand”. Lewis is also trying to make a film about your life. You asked him why that is even a thing. You are a man trying to provide for his family. What you do is simple and expected. PHILIP TAN Why are you making a story about me? It is not a good story. And Lewis tells you. After good responses to the scripts he wrote, Lewis decided to work on his own dramatic take of an action film. No one was doing it so he decided to create his own opportunity to do so. He was meditating in a sensory deprivation tank when he was struck with this vision, his own Road to Damascus moment. Your son heard a voice telling him to start writing about you.

STYLE

LEWIS TAN I didn’t know why I didn’t think of it before. Maybe, subconsciously I wasn’t ready. But this revelation was real. It had urgency.

EXT. SINGAPORE STREETS – DAY If this was a movie, there would be a scene of you as a child standing alone in a street filled with people too busy with their lives to notice you. It will start to drizzle before the sky opens its wrath. This evokes an emotional response from the audience; the rising sadness of you being abandoned on the street by your father. The trauma of your childhood that’s shared by the viewers. If this was a movie, it’ll flash-forward and present you as someone who arrived in London. You’ll take up martial arts, you’ll win national titles before finding the love of your life, Joanne Cassidy. You’ll settle down, there is a child on the way. You saw an ad in the papers about Peter Sellers looking for an Asian man who could perform martial arts, acrobatics and dance. You are one such man. You nailed the audition and before you know it, you’re acting and fight choreographing in Sellers’s film, The Fiendish Plot of Dr Fu Manchu. It would be critically panned and it would be Sellers’s last film before succumbing to a heart attack. But it won’t be the end of the road for you as it led to more jobs in the industry. You moved the family to Hollywood; you worked in Batman; you found Jesus; you want to give Asians more presence in the industry; you’re part of the Directors Guild of America; you expressed regret over Sellers’s usage of yellowface but it was a different time back then. You were just happy to work and you didn’t know about the racial politics. You, Philip Tan, your history is a rich vibrant tapestry that’s filled with brilliant crossstitches and frayed ends. And that story is carried through your sons. INT. EDITING ROOM – NIGHT As Lewis Tan, the enormity of your father’s life is a yoke and a quail’s egg—both heavy and fragile at the same time. That’s where the short film you’re editing comes into play. It’s a 20-minute action piece that you’ve directed as well as acted in. You wanted to see if you can do it. If anything, the process can be described as juggling—first as a director, you can address the performance, the light, the camera angle, costumes, every single thing within the frame; then as an actor, you need to be present, your only function is to live and respond as the character living and responding, as the character. You can’t inhabit both roles at the same time, you always need to switch between the two. LEWIS TAN Then when we cut, I’m immediately bombarded by a hundred questions: what are we going to do after this? What lens do you want to use for this scene? What colour should it be? And I’m still thinking about what I just did and how I can make the scene better.

Blazer, shirt, trousers and shoes, all by Bottega Veneta.

Knit, by Hermès.

STYLE

It may have been an exhausting ordeal but strangely enough, you enjoyed the process. If the experience had taught you anything, it’s that if you’re able to get through with a 20-minute action film, you can do a feature-length film. For now, the current thing that occupies your plate is Mortal Kombat. Your role in it remains a secret. Mortal Kombat was in development hell for the longest time, but now it has finally finished production and has a tentative release on 16 April. Iko Uwais is in it. So is Joe Taslim. And Hiroyuki Sanada. You gushed about working with them and the immense gratitude for being part of this. You’ve never worked harder on a film than Mortal Kombat. And yet at the same time, you don’t see it as work. Beneath the sore muscles, the fatigue, there is still that sense of play. It’s a mentality that you still hold on to. LEWIS TAN You lose a lot of your imagination and your creativity when you grow up. We become tainted as adults. You get stuck in a cycle and cinema breaks you out of that by reminding you of the beautiful things like hope, freedom, love… If this was a movie, the scene would be of you, adrift in a rolling ocean as you cling on to a lifebuoy; the gunmetal sky flashes and thunders above you. This would illustrate how creatives are the ones who cling on to the transformative powers of film. But it’s not. This isn’t the part where we end on a happy note, where peace washes over the world and there is no death nor illness. Happiness reigns and everybody is empathetic to one another’s needs. In fact, you’re not Lewis Tan; he is his own person and you’re an objective observer. Lewis Tan has his own role to play as Hollywood slowly becomes more receptive to more diversity in its films. Tan will gladly talk about representation in Hollywood, but he would also like to talk about his art—what he believes and says as an artist, not as an Asian artist.

Grooming by Joel Phillips

Is it unfair for Tan to carry this burden? Like many other Asian actors before him —Ng Chin Han, Ming-Na Wen, Dev Patel, Bruce Lee… the list goes on—having to lug this expectation to be a representation, is it required of him to take up that cross? He shouldn’t have to but this won’t be the last time a journalist will ask him, “What do you think about being Asian in Hollywood right now?” There is a word ‘sonder’, where you realise that the people around you live lives as rich and complex as your own. This may be Lewis Tan’s story but when you see him or someone like him, you realised that you too can be the protagonist of your own narratives.

STYLE

In our own In a globalised country such as Singapore, talent comes in many different forms and origins. But at the heart of it is the recognition of Singapore’s

backyard

Words by Asri Jasman. Photographs (opposite page and next) by Wanjie Li and Ethan Lai

potential as a land of opportunity for fashion despite its tiny size.

Iris Sangalang (left) and Dustin Ramos, the wife-and-husband duo behind Singapore-based menswear label Duxton.

STYLE

No barriers to entry, the freedom to travel everywhere and anywhere without any form of restrictions, and the ability to call any place home—these would seem like an ideal citizen-of-theworld situation. If there weren’t territorial demarcations, we’d theoretically be able to live our lives in nomadic fashion, setting roots where the heart desires and moving along for greener pastures. Home can oftentimes take on a metaphysical expression. The idea that it’s constrained to just one’s birthplace hasn’t held true ever since travel and emigration became commonplace. As cliché as it sounds, home is where the heart is, and can be as temporary as needed. Singapore’s position as a globalised country that is rooted in Asian values but peppered with Western influences has made it an attractive port of call for many who want the best of both worlds. In some ways, that has been a positive. No man (or a figurative ‘red dot’ on any world map) is an island, after all, and the influx of foreigners has served to vary exchanges of ideas and knowledge. It’s little wonder then that even within Singapore’s burgeoning fashion industry, there are constantly new entrants started by individuals who have made the country their home. Operating like typical start-ups, these small, independent Singapore-based fashion brands are proof that there’s potential in the country’s fashion prowess. And more than anything, fashion businesses and skills can start and flourish in Singapore. THE ONE NAMED AF TER A LOCAL STREET

For almost four years now, Iris Sangalang and Dustin Ramos have made Duxton Road their home. Coming from a tech startup background, the couple’s first business venture in Singapore is a café and multi-label-store hybrid called Monument Lifestyle that’s situated along the same stretch of the road occupied by lululemon and perfumer Maison 21G. It’s the accessible escape from the corporate confines of Singapore’s central business district that drew their attention to the locale. That, and the fact that they’ve met and got to know people in the area who’ve started unconventional career paths after decades in the corporate world. In a way, Sangalang and Ramos’s decision to name their fashion brand Duxton serves as an homage to their settled roots in Singapore and that there’s more to the country than sterile efficiency. That Singapore isn’t necessarily associated with fashion hasn’t fazed them one bit. “Why not is my question,” Sangalang quips when asked why base Duxton in Singapore as opposed to Los Angeles, California, where the clothes were originally manufactured. The city may not draw the same level of fashion credentials as New York City, but Los Angeles’s access to a global entertainment scene has proven to be beneficial to fashion brands, including Singaporean menswear brand Dzojchen that’s no stranger to the red carpet as seen on celebrities with the likes of Shawn Mendes, Timothée Chalet and the late Chadwick Boseman. “When we came here, we felt like this is where we could grow the most,” Sangalang explains. “Once we started finding amazing gems of talent who could become part of our team, it was absolutely a no-brainer. There’s so much talent here and it’s about enabling and empowering the talent, especially young talent.” She recalls how graduates from local design schools, the likes

Aloha cotton shirts, by Duxton.

STYLE

“ W E ’ R E N O T S AY I N G T H AT S I N G A P O R E I S G O I N G T O B E T H E N E X T L O N D O N O R N E W YO R K .

of LASALLE College of the Arts and Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, would come in to Monument Lifestyle applying for jobs as baristas, when their talents were better suited for more creative roles within Duxton. The Duxton team consists of the two founders and a host of young Singaporean creatives putting their stamp on everything from photography to styling to marketing. In fact, the brand has now refocused its manufacturing to within Singapore. It was a strategic decision that was spurred on by the effects of COVID-19 (the pandemic has left the States in a rather dire state) but also one which makes more logistical sense now that there’s a fully realised and dedicated team in Singapore. “We’re not saying that Singapore is going to be the next London or New York. But there’s no reason why you can’t make an amazing fashion brand in Singapore because it’s the same talent that’s here,” reason the two founders. “And if you empower them to do it and that they can do it, then it doesn’t matter.” It does seem like, as a brand, Duxton is almost entirely Singaporean, save for the two founders. “One of the reasons why we landed on ‘Duxton’ as the brand name is because it was a bit

In some ways, the interaction could be regarded as a first-world problem, but one that is relatable on many counts for anyone living in Singapore. Like any good entrepreneur, the problem became a driving force for Millington to figure out a solution that would not only benefit her husband, but also anyone who loves clothes and experiences a year-round summer. Millington was born in Dallas, Texas, and grew up being surrounded by a family of entrepreneurs. She was always given the freedom and choice to decide her own path in life but always with a strive to do her best in anything that she sets her mind to. Graduating with a degree in marketing and public relations, Millington worked at a lifestyle publication in Dallas where she dealt with events and anything creative. The experience eventually led her to found her own event-planning company, which she ran for three years before selling it off and moving to Singapore. “I think that was almost like my starter pack for starting a company. I always knew I wanted my own brand,” Millington tells me. Tropick wasn’t going to be just something fun for her because she was wary of making the mistake of starting a brand founded on something as frivolous as fun. “I wanted to be careful that I was

B U T T H E R E ’ S N O R E A S O N W H Y YO U C A N ’ T M A K E A N A M A Z I N G FA S H I O N B R A N D

ambiguous as far as where it originates from,” Ramos expresses. And with the brand being quite a regular fixture in trade shows in the US since launching, the somewhat familiar-sounding name (“Everyone’s like, ‘Oh! I’ve heard of that name’ no matter whatever country we’re in”) helped to connect the story of the brand, the founders and their relation to Singapore. Sangalang and Ramos have just opened their second Monument Lifestyle outpost within the Tiong Bahru enclave at 21 Yong Siak Street. They’ve also relocated their headquarters to the new space (it was previously situated just above the original Monument Lifestyle) that also doubles up as a mini studio. Duxton has also, most recently, launched a made-to-measure programme too as a way of including a more diverse clientele to experience what the couple calls the Duxton Experience. This, together with its kidswear line and an ongoing series that tells the stories of Singapore-based entrepreneurs called Duxton Stories, exemplifies just how unequivocally Singaporean Duxton is. T H E O N E T H AT S T E M M E D S I N GA P O R E A N I S SU E

FROM

being very business-minded about it. You see so many people do things that are just for fun and the business doesn’t really follow through,” she explains. The performance dress apparel sector then made sense for her, with not many brands (if at all) filling that particular gap in the menswear market in Singapore. But expectedly, there’s the issue of being a foreigner in a new country and not knowing much about the average consumer and retail landscape. Millington spent a year working in the corporate world (“I don’t have a corporate bone in my body!”) trying to understand Singapore’s culture better, and at the same time getting more information on how the fashion marketing and public relations industry works here. “Honestly, at the beginning, I felt like a lost puppy,” Millington recalls. “I didn’t have my foot in the door. You want to get in with the cool kids; you want to get in with the other brands here. And for Singapore, we still don’t have massive networks when it comes to fashion.” That search eventually led her to the Textile and Fashion Federation of Singapore (TaFF). Millington enrolled in the second cohort of TaFF’s fashion, beauty and retail entrepreneurship initiative, The Bridge Fashion Incubator (TBFI) programme that first started out in 2018. TBFI provided her not only with the kind of in into the local industry that she was looking for, but also afforded her with invaluable mentorship from the programme’s list of mentors and advisers ranging from established local brands

R E L ATA B L E

“I was on my daily morning commute every morning with my husband. And when we hugged goodbye, we were always drenched in sweat,” recounts Monica Millington, founder of Tropick. “We kept making jokes that if only his tailor could make him Nike shirts, basically.”

I N S I N G A P O R E B E C A U S E I T ’ S T H E S A M E TA L E N T T H AT ’ S H E R E .”

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Nothing says summer like Tropick, the menswear brand founded by Monica Millington (left); Take It Breezy shirt (above), by Tropick.

such as Naiise and Love, Bonito to international companies in the fashion and retail space. The experience also allowed her to tap into the learnings of the programme’s fellow members, many of whom are non-locals as well. “I’ve made amazing friendships and business partnerships because of TBFI. And also just being able to cross-check your ideas. As a solo-preneur, getting to speak to someone with years of industry experience and verify that an idea is good, or that it would work, was really big for me,” attests Millington. One of those ideas—that has since become one of the cornerstones of Tropick—is

to not do full collections or releases based on the traditional fashion calendar. Tropick officially launched in the midst of the pandemic in August of last year although Millington was set on initially launching in March 2020. But it seemed like divine timing seeing how Tropick’s four-way stretch shirts made for perfect options for the year’s impending ‘new normal’. Countless Zoom meetings that called for a professional outlook but still with a semblance of comfort of being at home, helped with the uptake. And now that more offices are opening up, the same shirts are proving to have staying power.

STYLE

Republiqe’s James Gaubert creates digital custom-made clothes.

There’s no doubt that the brand serves a niche market: one who loves fashion and uses social media as a tool to express themselves. “Whilst digital fashion doesn’t help with the functional benefits of clothing such as keeping one dry in the rain, it does support the emotional benefits. Today, people want to look good and feel good in the place they spend most of their time on: social media. We essentially help them to create their digital personas.” Digital fashion, in a way, is the environmentally friendly cousin to fast fashion—serving a similar purpose of easily disposal fashion but without physical storage issues, and the very fact that they don’t look like anything else that’s out there in the market. Republiqe’s designs range from the more realistic threedimensional renderings to those that are a bit more extravagant. While the clothes are generally womenswear pieces, there’s no stopping them from being made to fit a man. But Gaubert tells us there is a menswear collection as well as a gender-neutral one that the brand is currently working on. “Our digital-only approach certainly ensures we stand out from the crowd, challenge the norm, and almost create a sub-category within the industry. I sometimes think of us as a bit like Tesla. And if we can do to fashion what they have done to the automotive industry, then I will be incredibly proud!” Gaubert exclaims. TBFI’s programme manager Grace Nandar concurs that there are multitudes of the possibilities that a brand like Republiqe can offer. “The fashion industry is not limited to the design aspect. We are currently seeing how technology and digitisation are rapidly changing the industry landscape,” she expresses. And if Singapore’s able to continuously merge fashion with various other skill sets that can be developed, there’s no telling what the future holds for this globalised city we call home.

T H E O N E T H AT M A R R I E S T E C H A N D FA S H I O N

With sustainability being at the forefront of almost every fashion brand out there, tackling the hot button topic (in one way or another) has been imperative. For Republiqe’s founder James Gaubert who’s from the UK and a TBFI enrollee in the same cohort as Millington, technology can be more than just a vehicle for change; it could very well be the answer. Republiqe posits itself as the world’s first digitalonly luxury fashion brand that’s based in Singapore. While the idea of luxury and digital has been perceived as somewhat mutually exclusive, Republiqe’s unique in that it replicates the traditional notions of luxury fashion in and for the digital age. “Having spent a lot of time in Asia, I have been able to see some of the damage that is being done in factories and manufacturing plants with regard to fabric wastage and unethical production,” explains Gaubert, who’s spent decades in the luxury fashion industry. “On a personal level, my son who is an avid gamer also spends huge amounts of money—mine, I might add—on dressing his characters in games like Fortnite and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. And I guess it was looking at these two elements, and the growth of technological advances within the industry and coming up with a viable solution for today’s fashion and environmentally savvy consumer that Republiqe was born.” The approach is pretty straightforward. Republiqe is quite basically a made-to-measure brand that exists digitally and creates clothes that can be superimposed onto digital images. The main draw is that because the clothes don’t physically exist in the real world, there’s pretty much zero waste with hardly any carbon footprint involved in the process. The brand’s ‘digital tailors’ are able to fit any of Republiqe’s pieces onto just about anyone as well, ensuring that every creation is size-inclusive.

WATCHES

I N T E R E S T I NG TIMES When the world goes to pieces, wear something that won’t.

Edited by Johnny Davis Photographs by Adam Goodison

WATCHES

FUTURE CLASSICS From bottom left: Cartier Pasha de Cartier, with 41mm 18K yellow gold case and blue alligator leather strap. Hermès Arceau Grande Lune, with 43mm Henri d’Origny stainless steel case and blue alligator leather strap. Rolex Oyster Submariner, with 41mm Oystersteel case and Oystersteel bracelet. Bell & Ross BR 05 Blue Gold, with 18K rose gold case and 18K rose gold bracelet. Jaeger-LeCoultre Master Control Memovox Timer, with 40mm stainless steel case and blue alligator leather strap.

WATCHES

DESIGN From left: Gucci Grip, with 38mm stainless steel case and stainless steel bracelet. Patek Philippe Calatrava Pilot Travel Time Ref 7234G, with 37.5mm 18K white gold case and navy blue calfskin strap. Rado True Square Automatic, with 38mm high-tech ceramic case and high-tech ceramic bracelet. Breguet Marine Chronograph 5527, with 42.3mm 18K white gold case and white gold bracelet. Glashütte Original Sixties Chronograph Annual Edition, with 42mm stainless steel case and brown-grey nubuck calfskin strap.

WATCHES

TRIBUTES & ANNIVERSARIES

Photographer’s assistant: Isaac Dann. Props: Imogen Frost

From left: Blancpain Fifty Fathoms Bathyscaphe Day Date Desert Limited Edition, with 43mm stainless steel case and khaki canvas strap. Grand Seiko 60th Anniversary Limited Edition, with 40mm stainless steel case and stainless steel bracelet. Omega Speedmaster ‘Silver Snoopy Award’ 50th Anniversary, with 42mm stainless steel case and blue nylon fabric strap. Tag Heuer Carrera 160 Years Special Edition Chronograph, with 44mm stainless steel case and polished steel bracelet. Hublot Classic Fusion 40 Years Anniversary Titanium, with 45mm polished titanium case and black rubber strap.

WATCHES

This year, tidy your look with a clean and classic cut. Photographs by Daehan Chae Styling by Donghui Ko

S L I C K

BIKER BOB After straightening your hair, use pomade and a tail comb to brush your hair smoothly backward. Jacket, shirt and tie, all by Prada.

Facing page: M I D - C E N T U RY After dividing the part above the brow with a fine-tooth comb, apply a firm gel, spreading it evenly from the part to the tip of your hair. Then flip it back with a big comb, and complete by spraying with hairspray and setting with a hairdryer. Shirt, by Dior Men.

PREPPY After parting the hair in the middle, apply with downward pressure a firm gel from the inside of your hair. Using a fine-tooth comb, tidy the back and leave the bangs with a slightly natural finish. Sweater and shirt, both by Gucci; brooch, by Tiffany & Co..

P O M PA D O U R Create volume by spraying and drying the hair using a rolled comb, flipping and pressing as you go. Using your finger, apply a firm wax roughly, and spray the bangs with a firming hairspray for extra finish. Shirts, both by Louis Vuitton.

YOUR ULTIMATE GUIDE TO PHYSICAL & MENTAL WELLBEING SCAN TO SUBSCRIBE FOR NEWS, SPECIAL OFFERS, EXCLUSIVE EVENTS & MORE!

HEALTH CLUB

92 With more than 1.75 million different titles amounting to over 43 million episodes, it’s no wonder fiction is a popular podcast category.

86 With sustainability and Covid safety top priorities for travellers in our near-future, airships are set for a luxurious comeback.

JOURNAL

80 Follow a first-hand, 24-hour account of the fight against California’s worst wildfire season on record.

JOURNAL

BURN A dispatch from the front lines of the battle against the worst wildfire season on record in the US state of California.

WORDS BY ROBERT LANGELLIER

The Truckee Hotshots hike into work on a cool morning.

IN LESS THAN A DAY, THE NORTH COMPLEX CROSSED 40KM,

8 September, afternoon Almost 13km to the southwest, a plume of smoke stretched into the clean western sky, rising like bread. It looked like a cloud creating itself. A calm settled in among the Truckee Hotshots as we watched from a hilltop at the northern edge of the North Complex Fire. This was my first season and seventh fire on a US Forest Service hotshot crew, a unit trained to fight the hottest and most remote parts of wildfires. We thought we were witnessing a typical blowout, when a fire crosses containment lines. “Well,” one of my crewmates said, “tomorrow’s going to suck.” Then the column collapsed. That day, dry winds blew across California and beyond, wrenching fires loose and sending them ripping across the forest. The entire West seemed to be going up in flames at once, from the August Complex in the Mendocino National Forest, where 37 fires were coalescing into the largest fire in state history, to the catastrophic fires in Oregon and Washington. Nearly 322km northeast of San Francisco, the North Complex started tearing through the Sierra Nevada at devastating speeds, launching flaming bits of pine cones and needles like scouts, igniting spot fires up to 6.44km ahead of the fire’s advance. In less than a day, the North Complex crossed 40km of the Plumas National Forest to the outskirts of Oroville, a town of 19,000, baffling experts with its rate of spread. The communities of Berry Creek, Brush Creek and Feather Falls were overrun. Unable to evacuate, 15 people died in the flames, mostly in Berry Creek. If it weren’t for the other simultaneous 2020 record holders, the North Complex would be the second-largest fire on record in California; instead, it’s the sixth. On 8 September, the day the North Complex intensified, a finite number of crews, including the Truckee Hotshots, were there to take it on, with no backup on the way. One air-attack firefighter flying overhead, who from his vantage could see for dozens of kilometres in all directions, radioed that what he was observing looked like “multiple intergalactic plumes across California”. Instantly, intergalactic, a word possibly never before spoken over the apoetic lanes of air-traffic radio, became the catchphrase all over the fire.

9 September, morning “There’s not a real plan,” Superintendent Scott Burghardt, the head of the Truckee Hotshots, told us the next morning. Our 20-person crew—Burghardt, captains, squad bosses, senior firefighters and an assemblage of apprentices and seasonals, myself included—had moved south to a staging area just outside the fire’s 40km run. We were huddled behind our two buggies, the tricked-out, green 10-seater buses that transported the crew. A steelheaded man with a considered disposition, Burghardt understood as well as anyone when to advance and when to fall back from a fire. “I don’t know how else to say it: Get your minds right to prepare for f**kedup sh*t,” he said. “We’ll try to come up with a plan, pick up the pieces wherever we can.” He left to assess the area—to see what was on fire and what wasn’t, and to start figuring out how to stop it. The staging area lay outside La Porte, population 26. If the east flank of the North Complex, by then a 1,012-square-kilometre fire, kept moving east, the community faced destruction. But with enough time, we could save it. Firefighting involves less fire than you might expect. The hotter the flames, the farther away we position ourselves. When a wildfire pushes flames 30m in the air and cinematically reaches the forest canopy, there’s only so much a crew of flammable human beings can do until it loses momentum. Instead, we’d light our own fire, known as a back-burn, in the direction of the advancing wildfire. When the two met, with nothing left around them to burn, they’d extinguish each other. There were two reservoirs between La Porte and the fire’s edge, connected by a ridgetop known as Mooreville Ridge. A narrow dirt road ran along the ridge; we’d start the back-burn there. But first, with the help of a few other hotshot crews and wildland fire engines, we needed to clear the understory to make sure our fire didn’t get out of control. Around 11am, we pulled the cords on our chain saws and started cutting out young firs, manzanitas and mountain whitethorn. Dustin Friedman, detailing as one of our captains, left to scout the wildfire’s advancing edge. As we cut and

Photographs (previous pages, this page, and opposite) by Robert Langellier

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Pages 80 and 81: A portion of a back-burn—a fire intentionally set by the hotshots in the direction of the oncoming wildfire—on the North Complex. When the two fires meet, with nothing left around them to burn, they’ll extinguish each other. That’s the idea, anyway. This page, left: Wildland firefighter Allister Ford helps battle a series of spot fires on the North Complex that jumped the fire line. Right: Sawyer Jordan Gearey patrols the woods behind the back-burn, making sure embers don’t cross the fire line and start new fires.

cleared branches, he descended a drainage toward the south fork of the Feather River known as Devils Gap.

BAFFLING EXPERTS WITH ITS RATE OF SPREAD.

9 September, 2pm After nine years as a firefighter, seven of them on hotshot crews, Friedman knew that a fire can change behaviour at any moment. But the speed of yesterday’s 40km advance had tweaked his understanding of its power. He made his way to the North Complex’s burning edge, crossed over the 61cm flames, and entered the ‘black’, the already-burned area behind the front. Friedman has always wanted to fly. When he left the Navy, he started flight school but quit to join his wife in northern California. On the fire line, he never stops talking, his eyes twinkling, about his dream to land helicopters full of money-heavy tourists on a barge in the middle of Lake Tahoe. His laugh is a trademark hyuk-hyuk. Even his face is birdlike, his nose sloping downward like a Feather River ridgeline, steepening as it reaches the bottom. Few hotshots understand aircraft better than he does. He is always looking up. So when a helicopter arrived with water to release bucket drops, Friedman was the man to direct it. From his position on the edge, he’d show the pilot exactly where to dump, not to extinguish the flames but to stall their advance long enough for our crew to prepare our own burn. The winds were favourable, helping to keep the fire in check. He flashed a strobe light to catch the pilot’s attention and managed to direct a few drops. But soon the fire front intensified, and the division group supervisor overseeing operations on this part of the North Complex pulled all firefighters off the line. Just inside the black, Friedman started to follow the fire’s edge, looking for a spot where he could cross and return to the crew. Then the winds picked up. If you’ve ever blown gently on a newborn campfire, you know what oxygen does to flames. Imagine one breath amplified to landscape scale. Its influence on fire cannot be overstated. Three factors determine a wildfire’s power: wind, fuel and terrain. On the North Complex, it was the wind more so than the woody debris or the steep slopes that was responsible for the deaths of 15 people. When the wind shifted on Friedman, the fire suddenly went from calm to burning forward, heating up, belching out smoke by the

ton. Within minutes, he couldn’t see more than 15m in front of him. It wasn’t dire; he’d been in dicier situations. But when it gets hot, you revert to what you were trained to do, find a safe place and go to it. Until the fire’s edge cooled enough to cross, the safest place for Friedman to go was where he already was: in the black. 9 September, 3pm While dragging brush from the road, I noticed that the light coming in through the trees was particularly beautiful, a soft, crepuscular orange tint that painted the sparse understory a gentle gold. It was an evening light, the light of a coming darkness, the light that creeps in through a closing door. That’s pretty, I thought to myself. One thing wildfires are rarely described as is beautiful. In truth, whether in daytime or at night, on a mountain or on a plain, in a forest or on grasslands, crowning or smouldering, a wildfire is awe-inspiring. It is one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen. But in nature, beauty is not often correlated with safety. A loud whistle pierced my reverie. We killed our chain saws. The voice of Derek Kramer, our crew’s other captain, came from 46m up the road: “Let’s go!” A pause. “Now!” A common theme on the lower rungs of firefighting crews is not knowing exactly what’s going on. In moments of confusion, you measure danger by the urgency of your

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Burghardt’s voice crackled over the radio. “I need you to get in the black,” he said. “I’m in the black,” Friedman said. “It’s not nuked out, but it’s good. It’s just hot. It’s just going to be a while.” “I’ll wait here as long as I have to,” Burghardt said. “I’ll be here all night.” The canopy above Friedman was still green. It’s possible for the understory to burn while the canopy remains intact, leaving a forest susceptible to another round of fire. Although Friedman could see where he was with his phone’s topographic map, the thick haze of the smoke left him unable to see the fire. He saw single trees torching here and there, but he had no indication of what might be coming down the valley. So he kept moving, adjusting his gait with each step so that no one part of his foot bore all of his weight. Like a child trying not to step in imaginary lava, he jumped from place to place, stood on top of logs that hadn’t burned. He scraped away ash with his chingadera—an oversize garden hoe, our crew’s digging tool of choice—to reach cooler soil to stand in. But even that was untenable. Burghardt’s voice came over the radio, asking if he’d begun making his way out of Devils Gap. “Not yet,” Friedman replied. Never one to miss a joke, he asked if he could get a cold drink. But in the confusion of the radio traffic, someone had suggested that the fire was coming up the valley that led toward Devils Gap. Even with Burghardt nearby to keep him calm, Friedman couldn’t help but ask himself: Am I good? The soles on his boots were melting. They split in the hot ash. Blisters were starting to form on his feet. He poured water from his pack onto his boots to try to cool them. 9 September, 5pm About 402m away, on the ridgetop, Burghardt blasted his car horn repeatedly, hoping the honking would reach Friedman and serve as a beacon, but the sound was lost in the noise of the burn. He’d need to take more drastic measures.

A smoke column rises from a very active fire, an unwelcome sight to firefighters.

Photographs by Peter Ross (this page) and Robert Langellier (opposite)

9 September, 4pm Friedman was dancing in the black. The fire’s edge was too hot to cross. The ground was too hot to stand in one place. Although the forest of white fir, Jeffrey pine and shrubs had already burned, timber takes a long time to cool. He was stuck. This wasn’t natural. Forest wildfires, typically caused by lightning strikes, burn off the debris, serving as a sort of cleanser for the whole ecosystem. Hundreds of years ago, Europeans hijacked an unfamiliar land, and for the past century, we’ve put out every fire we can, leading to the build-up of matted, impenetrably thick underbrush. The result has been climate-changed forests begging to burn. Now the North Complex was burning with Friedman in it.

[DUSTIN] FRIEDMAN WAS DANCING IN THE BLACK. THE FIRE’S EDGE WAS TOO HOT TO CROSS.

superiors. Kramer did not sound relaxed. We dropped whatever branches we were holding and all but ran the uphill road toward him and our buggy. Fire is fierce when you can see it; it is fiercer when you can’t. Eating smoke from the fire, which was now close by, we speed-walked, me breathing blood through my nose from having accidentally punched myself in the face while trying to move brush just before. Dust, blood and smoke filled my lungs. Finally, we reached the buggy. Burghardt stayed behind to help get Friedman out. “Load up!” a crewmate shouted. We chucked our tools into the buggy’s exterior compartments and climbed inside. Kramer gassed it, thumping over holes and bumps. Overhead to the southeast, we saw a plume rising between us and La Porte. We raced toward town, but the narrow forest road was soon bottlenecked with engines and trucks. Slowly we made our way out to the highway and back to La Porte. The community was safe. In the coming hours and weeks, the fire never would reach it. But at that moment, I didn’t know a thing. As we passed the local hotel and saloon, all I could think was These people are f **ked. Back in our staging area, we parked and waited. Over the radio, we heard about Friedman—that he was still in the black, waiting out the fire’s run.

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Squad boss Christopher Burns lights a back-burn through chamise, a highly flammable chaparral plant that can send up massive flames.

8 September, evening The night before, we bedded down at a campground in the Plumas National Forest. It was dark. The quiet at the end of a day on the fire line always feels premonitory. At the time, we had no idea of the human cost of the fire’s 40km run just hours earlier. Fir trees towered overhead, blotting out the

THE GROUND WAS TOO HOT TO STAND IN ONE PLACE. HE WAS STUCK.

Burghardt radioed for air attack, the fleet of aircraft dedicated to dropping water buckets and chemical retardant on fires, and asked for a water drop on the area near Friedman. But the shifting wind had sent smoke billowing up so thick and so high that aircraft couldn’t fly through it. Burghardt knew it was time to get his stranded captain out. “Dustin, I’m going to come get you,” he said. Burghardt grabbed his pack and chingadera and began to descend into Devils Gap. He was looking for a green finger, a place the fire had not fully overtaken and thus wasn’t as hot. He found one. Just as he was about to cross into the black, his radio battery ran out. Cursing, he backtracked to his truck to replace it. By the time he returned, that finger had heated up and was no longer viable. Eventually he found another route into the black. As he worked his way through the smouldering landscape, he hooted as loud as he could. After a few minutes, he heard a hoot in return. He moved in the direction from where it came. The men called back and forth, inching closer, until they found each other at last. Friedman was spent. He’d been running back and forth in the smoke and the heat for two hours. Burghardt led him out of Devils Gap and up to the ridge. They stopped often, scraping down to the cool earth, standing there to rest for a moment. Finally, they made it back to Burghardt’s truck and out to La Porte. From there, Friedman was taken to a nearby hospital and treated for second-degree burns and smoke inhalation. His life had not been at risk; it turned out that the reports of the fire’s run up the valley to Devils Gap had been overstated. Still, it would be six weeks before he could walk well enough to return to the fire line.

waning moon. While the rest of the crew bustled around, prepping and eating dinner, Friedman stood by a campfire someone had lit, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, talking to squad boss Christopher Burns. “There’s not enough firefighters in the country for what’s going on now,” Burns said. “No,” Friedman said. “The Plumas is going to look like the Mendocino,” the 2018 fire that decimated the Mendocino National Forest. “Soon they’re going to stop measuring these fires in acres and just do it in miles,” Burns said. “In miles now, oh yeah. It’s crazy, dude,” Friedman said. “There’s not much we can do,” Burns said. “Fight fire with hopes and prayers.” “Hopes and prayers. I guess we’ll keep digging line until we see God,” Friedman said. He paused. He was exhausted from a season unlike any other. “Me, I’m looking forward to two days off,” he joked, trying to lighten the mood. He gazed up at the black nothing above the campfire. “At this point, just tell me when I’m going home,” he said, something firefighters rarely know. Burns looked over at his captain. “Tomorrow’s gonna suck, yes. But it’s one day closer . . .” “To two days off!” they said together. They burst out laughing.

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STA R S HI PS H ANDS

W ERE UP

AND

As we begin to imagine the global travel industry post-Covid, airships are uniquely placed to deliver on our shopping list of 21st-century demands.

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ME A NT TOUCH

FLY

THE

S KY

Photograph by Kirt x Thomsen

Words by Mitchell Oakley Smith

Photographs by HAV

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In Philip Pullman’s trilogy of fantasy novels, His Dark Materials, and later in the 2019 television series by the same name, Zeppelins lined the sky in Lyra’s world. One of the many parallel universes in the multiverse, Zeppelins—based on the dirigible balloons we know as blimps or airships—replaced planes as the main form of air transportation, with the company National Ærobus operating across what is known as Brytain. Though while His Dark Materials does not conform to any specific period of history, airships were originally pioneered as early as the 17th century, becoming more common as a form of transport in the early 20th century, as the Brits, Germans and Americans expanded their development of rigid forms for Atlantic-crossing adventures. Of course, the spectacular and fatal Hindenburg disaster—one of the first widely broadcast tragedies of its kind—put an abrupt end to the prospering airship era of the interwar period, having shattered public confidence in the passenger-carrying blimps. For most today, our understanding of blimps is that of advertising banners that float above major sports games—Goodyear Tires being their main client —or for more covert military and surveillance operations. And yet in just two to three years, in the spring of 2023 or 2024, the first contemporary commercial airships will fly to the North Pole, nearly a century since explorers Roald Amundsen and Lincoln Ellsworth carried out the first certified trip in 1926 via an Italianbuilt, semi-rigid airship. Swedish-operated company OceanSky Cruises is dedicated to high-end, experiential travel—a sector of the industry it describes not only as growing, but significantly accelerated by our shifting attitudes to travel in a post-Covid era, thanks not only to its energy-efficient and low-impact approach to aviation but also for its slower, more mindful offering that makes the journey over land and seas just, if not more, important than the destination. Departing Longyearbyen, the world’s northernmost settlement in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, the two-day round-trip will cruise between 300m and 900m over the Arctic, the captain looking for favourable tailwinds to offer travellers the chance to spot polar bears, breaching whales and spectacular icebergs in one of the most remote places on earth. And while once arrived at the North Pole guests are invited to explore the local landscape with a knowledgeable guide, it’s the getting there that is the true selling point of OceanSky Cruises’s offering. Nearing 100m in length, with the interior cabin expected to command around half of that space, and designed for relatively few guests of just 16, in addition to four pilots and three service staff, this is no economy-class airline journey. Rather, airships offer a luxury experience where you and your companions can spend time, much like in a five-star resort, to sightsee from the transparent hull, perform yoga, enjoy meals

by an award-winning chef, and sleep in queen-sized beds high in the sky, without the incessant hum of an engine or any turbulence to keep you awake. “Picture yourself waking up in a cabin in a comfortable bed, looking out a generous panoramic window whilst the sun rises on the horizon over a beautiful landscape beneath,” says the founder and CEO of OceanSky Cruises, Carl-Oscar Lawaczeck, setting the scene. “You take a shower in your private cabin and walk to the main deck where breakfast awaits. You sip [on] a nice cup of coffee while you are carried away by the views of the landscape. The captain announces that you’ll be landing in one hour in the middle of the Atacama Desert [Chile] where, upon landing, you have 4x4 vehicles waiting to take you around an amazing national park, with no sight of any infrastructure. It’s how it might feel to land on another planet. During lunch, you’ll fly near the Andean’s impressive mountain range, while at dusk the captain joins you for a sunset drink, the windows open to enjoy the fresh air. And as the sun sets over the Pacific Ocean, tomorrow you will wake up to breakfast in Peru.” For now, OceanSky Cruises is only taking applications for its debut polar expedition (at a cool price of around SGD160,000 per person), but it’s easy to see the experiential appeal of airships. That the vessels can land on just about any flat surface—sand, grass, ice, snow and even water—makes them one of the only vehicles that can travel literally anywhere, with few limitations. There’s no need, for example, to take off and land on a runway, and an airship’s impressive range makes it perfect for remote exploration as it doesn’t require regular resupply. “Just imagine being able to travel in absolute comfort to places that otherwise requires complex and sometimes dangerous logistics: the jungles of Peru, or the world-famous

The cabin interior (opposite page) on board OceanSky Cruises’s airships are being designed to offer a luxurious, once-in-a-lifetime experience where the journey is as important as the destination.

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Because they can travel great distances and land on just about any surface, airships are perfectly suited to journeying to remote locations (opposite page) that lack traditional tourism infrastructure.

Inca ruins, or the Uyuni salt pans,” adds Lawaczeck. “Only with an airship are these journeys possible.” But just because we can, does it mean we should? The logistical complexity of many of the remote locations that Lawaczeck points out as possible destinations is the last remaining barrier between fragile, and fast-disappearing, ecosystems and the sheer impact of overtourism we see in popular destinations like Venice or even Kruger National Park in South Africa. And yet the self-sufficient nature of airships, and the minimal industry that surrounds them—in terms of hotels, taxis, highways, restaurants and so on that regular travel relies upon —makes them rather perfectly suited to our era of travel enlightenment, where leaving no trace is just as important as minimising one’s carbon footprint. And indeed, where cruise ships break up ice as they traverse the arctic, or the noise emitted from the flight path of airplanes can negatively interrupt natural wildlife patterns, airships cruise calmly and quietly overhead. “An airship allows us to travel free from most of the traditional infrastructure, making it a very promising new way of travel —changing the way we understand what travel is and can be,” says Lawaczeck. That shift seems to be happening already. The Covid era, as it’ll no doubt come to be known in the future, magnified the impact—already nagging us from the backs of our minds—of global travel. Of the 48-hour business trips to London and back; of the epic cruise ships backed up into an already-sinking Venice; of the 1,023 take-offs and landings each day, or 43 every hour, on Changi’s two runways. In a peer-reviewed, near-real-time report of global CO2 emissions published by Nature Research journals, the world saw an abrupt 8.8 percent decrease in global CO2 emissions in the first half of 2020 compared to the same period in 2019, the magnitude of which was a larger decrease than during

previous economic downturns and even World War II, with the timing of the emissions fall corresponding to the lockdown measures implemented by most countries. While on average, each passenger on a traditional aircraft equates to 204g of CO2 emissions per kilometre, the bulk of an airship’s weight (between 60 and 80 percent) is countered by helium, thus hybrid aircrafts cut CO2 emissions by some 75 percent, and the fuel that is used is decidedly cleaner, with less than 50 percent nitrogen oxide emissions. A research partnership with the University of Nottingham is working towards the production of fully electric, zero-emission airships, slated for the end of the decade. But while on paper an airship seems optimal to service the needs of 21st-century travel, the question remains: is it safe? While few actually remember the Hindenburg disaster, so etched into our collective cultural lexicon is it that, when combined with the comedy of an airship’s bulbous shape, we remain inherently sceptical about the viability of low-impact air travel. Lawaczeck, however, is effusive in his championing of the modern-day airship’s safety credentials. While the cause of the Hindenburg’s explosion remains unsolved, the most widely accepted hypothesis is that a hydrogen leak was ignited by a static spark, yet the vessels of OceanSky, like its contemporaries, uses helium as its lifting gas, an inert and non-flammable gas frequently used as a fire extinguisher rather than a starter. New airships won’t, then, unexpectedly explode. Add to this that its covering is made of several layers of a spacesuit material reinforced with Kevlar, the fibre used in bulletproof vests, and that its take-off and landing speed does not exceed 30km per hour—around the same speed as that of a bicycle—and you have a form of transportation that seems, by all assessments, incapable of disaster, or certainly far less than its more common counterparts. “It’s important to note that just like any aircraft, airships are subject to the same safety regulations that a regular airplane would be,” says Lawaczeck. “And aviation is known for being the safest means of transportation as a result of these rigid regulations.” As it stands, several companies, including the France-based Flying Whales, are exploring lighter-than-air technology, and while there remains some logistics in development and manufacturing of complete, commercially ready airships, Lawaczeck nominates the Airlander 10, manufactured by Hybrid Air Vehicles in the UK, as its top pick. “Airships,” he says convincingly, “will be inherent to many industries in the very near future: passenger transport, yes, but also cargo, surveillance, catastrophic relief and rescue operations. We will initially focus on the experiential luxury travel segment because we feel there’s a niche that hasn’t yet been covered and we want to be a catalyst for a new era of sustainable aviation.” The best part though? “The journey,” he says.

Photograph by Tom Hegen

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ADULT BEDTIME STORIES ( B U T N O T T H AT K I N D O F A D U LT )

We’re not big on podcasts this side of the world, but its thriving audio drama genre has more than meets the ear. We take a novice dive into the realm of narrative podcasts on the good, bad, and somewhat strange.

Illustrations by Penn Ey, Chee

Words by Joy Ling

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The City Council announces the opening of a new Dog Park at the corner of Earl and Somerset, near the Ralph’s. They would like to remind everyone that dogs are not allowed in the Dog Park. People are not allowed in the Dog Park. It is possible you will see Hooded Figures in the Dog Park. Do not approach them. Do not approach the Dog Park. The fence is electrified and highly dangerous. Try not to look at the Dog Park, and especially do not look for any period of time at the Hooded Figures. The Dog Park will not harm you. And now, the news. – excerpt from Welcome to Night Vale pilot episode

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We won’t be the first to tell you that there are too many podcasts out there. As of January, Podcast Insights estimates that there are more than 1.75 million different titles amounting to over 43 million episodes. There’s even a podcast on podcasts, and multiple podcasts on how to podcast. Ask anyone for their perception of what the medium is and the answer will likely be something along the lines of a recorded radio show. The general attribution has also been why it’s often regarded as progeny to the live format, just one more on-demand option we’ve welcomed with wide open arms. Currently, chat shows and news channels make up the most popular ones across streaming platforms. SO WHERE DOES FICTION COME IN?

Cult classic Welcome to Night Vale is a shining example. Ongoing with close to 200 episodes and its own fandom, the show created by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor back in 2012 now has its own spin-off novels, live shows (the irony) and recap audio companion. I would like to say that the premise is simple, but it isn’t exactly. And that’s what makes it brilliant. The genre bending and blending podcast disguises itself as a community broadcast for the fictional town of Night Vale, where every conspiracy theory is true. Via its matterof-fact presentation, the disturbing paranormal events come across as comedy, which strangely gets funnier when you read the transcripts after. The best part about this surreal universe built upon Cecil Baldwin’s sole articulation and served in standalone pieces is that you can jump in anywhere. You are sorely mistaken if you’re under the impression that there aren’t as many types of narrative podcasts as their non-fiction counterparts. There’s possibly literally one of every kind. A fan of Batman? This year, Spotify will be releasing DC Comics exclusive Batman Unburied on “the darker aspects of Bruce Wayne’s psychology”, executive produced by Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins screenwriter David S Goyer. Which we should mention comes on top of at least 20 other unofficial podcasts on Batman. That’s actually late on the uptake, considering that Marvel had already released the first season of its titular character three years ago. You may be surprised to know the podcast was well received despite the fact that you don’t hear much from the man himself. Instead, in Wolverine: The Long Night, you follow special agents Pierce and Marshall on their investigation of the elusive Logan. It doesn’t mean that you don’t get to catch a ‘snikt’ every now and then. The ambisonic microphone used, which captures sounds all around it and translates that sense of distance for listeners, calls for actors to record simultaneously. Above that, physically acting out scenes. You’ll see Richard Armitage, who plays the infamous mutant, sprawled on the floor grabbing someone’s ankle and pretending to sink his teeth into it. “Luckily, we had the mic facing away from the booth so that he wouldn’t have to watch us watching him perform and spitting and frothing, but he did such an amazing job and that’s what we needed from him. That’s how his character feels so visceral,” directors Chloe Prasinos and Brendan Baker (the latter who also produces the acclaimed Love + Radio), tell Marvel Entertainment. Still, Armitage’s tone as a character we’ve previously ascribed another voice to does take some getting used to.

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N O W W H E R E D O E S H O L LY W O O D C O M E I N ?

If the supposed sweeping statement on the difference between fiction podcasts and audiobooks lies in production value, the way the comparison between the scale of theatre and film would be made, some are setting up to become blockbusters of their own. It’s one thing to have special sound effects, but the crux is crafting dialogue to immerse the listener into its world without any visual cues. Fun, satirical sci-fi Bubble very quickly familiarises you with its style within the first 10 minutes. Its creator, comedian and TV writer Jordan Morris, had initially intended it for the screen, but because the stage reading was too weird for TV and too good to waste, Morris then worked with Maximum Fun to bring it to the podcast sphere. It’s easy to see (or rather, hear) the corporate utopian society of Fairhaven, where hipsters and monsters abound in equal measure. Sure, there’s narration droned by Tavi Gevinson (that, we did not see/hear coming), but Alison Becker of Parks and Recreation opining reluctant heroine Morgan and 30 Rock’s Keith Powell as the unapologetic dudebro Van effortlessly set the stage. The distinctively cartoon vibe it gives is not ungrounded. The writers room also includes BoJack Horseman’s producer Nick Adams, and is now slated to develop into an animated picture with Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. But it’s definitely not the only podcast packing star power. The Left-Right Game is co-produced by and stars Tessa Thompson as investigative journalist Alice Sharman, who mysteriously disappears from the lives and memories of all but one of many people who know her. While many elements draw similarities to Alice Isn’t Dead (also by Night Vale Presents, small world), the plot is actually derived from a Reddit thread. There’s a lot that works and a lot that doesn’t. Having a partnership with Sonos and several notable names helming sound engineering certainly doesn’t hurt. How your body automatically braces when you hear an oncoming vehicle or cringes when you know the next scene involves gore. It’s like wanting to shut your eyes during a horror movie while remaining vaguely aware of what happens because there’s audio, except now covering your ears only well, cuts the show. The game’s sheer number of characters introduced all at once throws you off when you try to keep track with the lack of faces to identify with. And though accents are great and storytelling dramatic, it oddly appears too dramatic as if the cast is hyperaware of the listener. Tom’s role as narrator and connection to the ‘real’ world also gradually seems dispensable as the story progresses (sorry, Aml Ameen). Though far be it for us to dictate standards as the content is clearly engaging enough for Amazon Prime to adapt it for its audiences. We can’t begin to breach the surface of the many gems that have been and will be developed for adaptations, with current estimates ballparking the figure in the hundreds.

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The most prominent being Serial, Lime Town, Lore and the gold standard Homecoming. It may be the A-list cast of Oscar Isaac, Catherine Keener, David Schwimmer and Amy Sedaris lending their flair, but you do feel like you’re listening to the live audio of a movie. To sum it up in one word: convincing. F I N A L LY, W H E R E D O YO U C O M E I N ?

It’s no longer the punchline to that semi-racist joke, ‘What do you call a group of white men?’. It’s no longer a round-table chat on which fandom to get into, or talk show hosts looking for yet another arena to conquer (though I gladly consecrate my ears to Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend). Like every other medium, it has evolved and continues to evolve. Its flexibility has allowed it to cross domains in entertainment not just forwards to big screens, but also backwards to audiobooks. All five seasons of the highly accoladed slow-burn horror The Magnus Archive, told in tape-recording texture and peppered with ominous music, can be downloaded in collections. The fiction genre alone also toes the line between factual and otherwise, with the inspired-by-true-events The Memory Palace and The Truth. Easily consumed in as little as one-and-a-half minutes to the longest at under half an hour, the configuration is no longer susceptible to our excuse of short commute. Because we would not recommend any other activities apart from shuttling between locations while listening. With overarching meta scenarios and verbal accounts intentionally not entirely honest, you do have to pay attention to get a good grasp of the actual plot. You may wonder if it’s worth bothering with the format when all seems to eventually get turned into prime-time slots. You’re forgetting that it offers you the upper hand on Hollywood. Just as reading allows you to create your own permutations in your mind’s eye, you get to actively participate while listening. We won’t admit it, but on-demand has turned us into even lazier physical and mental couch potatoes, brainlessly feeding on what network budgets can provide. So take what the big studios cannot poach; the freedom to dictate how a place or face looks like, to be involved as you keep pace—even the opportunity to have Matthew McConaughey talk to your kids (as Hank the Cowdog, weird, we know)—and the chance for your imagination to run unbridled.

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R O B B R E P O RT

Six of our favourite authors present entirely original short stories that’ll leave you entertained and, surely, delighted.

FICTION SPECIAL Stephanie Dogfoot Lauren Ho

Luke Somasundram Jordan Melic

Simon Vincent

& Daniel Yeo

IN THE AIR Words by Daniel Yeo

FICTION

here was a time when I knew more than I do now. Then, I knew for certain that the passage of time was tied undoubtedly to the progress of knowledge. That the tick of the clock was the sound of synapses linking together in our brain, or, in today’s age, that of bits and bytes being recorded. It was a law, with its requisite graph, where the Xs were linked inseparably to the Ys, and as time sped forward, so did knowledge. Breathless, possibly, but it would have kept up. That particular time, I am sure, everyone would have known, before, at least once. Time and knowledge are also universal. Or maybe one is universal, and the other only seems so. I do not know for certain anymore. I do not know as much as I did before. Just as I do not know when was the last time I was on a plane. Or more specifically, when was the last time I was on a plane alone. What I know now, as I look around me, is that as a rule, one is not allowed to fly alone. In front of me, in the row uncomfortably close to mine, a man and a woman are sitting, together. I know they are together, because they are distant in a way that strangers cannot be. They are not fiddling with their seatbelts, looking for the button that reclines the seat, or riffling through the inflight magazines. They are just being together, separately. Perhaps they are looking at the couple in front of them. Like I am looking at the separate man and woman right in front of me. Through the empty gap between their seats, I see the couple, their hands clasped together, their heads leaning against each other. The separate man and woman are thinking of another time, another place, when they were that couple, and other men and women looked at them. They are deciding certain things, while I am deciding whether I should envy them still. Across the aisle, a family. Through the intermittently flowing stream of passengers, I am spying. A father, a mother, a son, and a daughter. The father and mother are seated at the ends of the row, like guardians to a tunnel. When together, they have ceased to be individuals and have become roles. Perhaps that is why the father looks like he would rather be somewhere else, preferably someone else, and the mother looks like she would rather be sometime else, preferably years ago, when the future was much more difficult to choose, though more pleasing to imagine. I am spying because the daughter is rocking back and forth like a scrawny tree in a strong wind, her arms flailing like spare branches, occasionally knocking into the back of the seat in front, barely rooted in place by the seatbelt. She is singing the same word over and over again, a song in her mind, composed entirely of a single-worded chorus. It sounds beautiful to me. I am examining her face, those wide eyes, that broad forehead, and even though I cannot help it, for some reason, I feel embarrassed, as I try to discern the things that make her different from myself, if it was her innocence, and my lack of it.

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The father is trying to make her stop whatever she is doing, even if all she is doing, is being. He looks like he is embarrassed too, for his daughter’s behaviour. But I am surmising because I cannot know what he thinks. I can only watch his actions and read his words. The son starts to raise a ruckus, and even as he acts up, he is carefully seeing how far he can go, testing the waters of his father. He supposes his sister swimming ahead, and he wants to see if he can catch up. The father slaps the son on the arm and rebukes, “Stop it!” He goes on to say, “You’re not like your sister. Would you rather be her?” That moment, inside my chest, my heart slightly crumbles. I turn away. Back to my own row, where in the seat beside me, there is no one. There is nothing but an absence. And as I am deep in a ponder of that absence, which feels distinctly feminine, a voice comes and shatters it, “Sir, would you feel more comfortable with that in the overhead compartment?” It is the air stewardess. She is bent forward slightly, with a milliondollar smile and ten-yen eyes. I can count such things. The shiny plastic name tag on her blouse catches the cabin running lights and catches my eye, and before I think about her question, I wonder, Yui. Which one of the thousand Yuis are you, Yui? I look down at my lap, where seated like a passenger is a wooden box. Small. Veins of cypress spreading along its length. I look back up at her, my head tilted, and because my brain and my mouth are two separate organs, reply, “I would, but I don’t think Grandma would.” The smile depreciates to nothing. Because timing is everything, and the plane is still on the runway, I conciliate, “But, I understand, let me stow it under the seat.” She smiles again, a slightly devalued smile, and continues her patrol down the aisle. For the remainder of the flight, purely by chance, I am served only by her colleagues, and never again have I received such a long parade of perfect smiles. Finally, someone at the other end of a radio decides that it is time for our journey to begin. It starts as a nudge, then escalates into a shove, and I sink back into the seat as the plane picks up speed. I look out the window and see Narita pushing past, other planes lined up by it, like piglets along a sow. The plane lifts its nose, prances backwards, and I hear the wheels go silent as it launches into air. I close my eyes, and wait for the thud of the landing gear retracting into the hold, that noise that always makes me wonder if it is supposed to sound that loud. I open my eyes in time to catch Tokyo putting up a show, sparkly lights clothing the city in a multicoloured blanket that shimmers and winks at me, questioning why I am leaving. Air becomes sky. Lights fade into depths, and in the moonless sky I see only darkness and the reflection of me looking out at it. I feel the plane level out to an even keel. A soft beep sounds, and the cabin lights dim. As the plane cuts through the sky, I hear the wind rushing past. I hear the world moving beneath my feet. I hear the waves churning

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in the seas. I hear the breaths of the forests, and the sighs of the peoples in the lands below, desiring, despairing, delighting, dreaming. Dreaming like I am. I wonder what they are dreaming of. From behind a cloud curtain, the moon emerges. It casts a pale light on the sheet of clouds below, and as we move, they mould, in shapes that answer my question. Now, I see. I see the peoples. I see their dreams, their hopes, their fates, their futures. I see all except my own. I reach underneath the seat. My hands touch air, and my lungs drown for a moment, before my hands touch the flat yet grainy surface of the wooden box, a feel they know well. I return it to the place in my lap, where I imagine they belong. In the darkness of the cabin, of the flickering screens and their watching multicolour-changing faces, I turn back to the moon, and then to my phone. On the plane, at this time, I am out of touch, and she is out of life. She is supposed to call. She used to call. In the moonlight waking hours. I would answer, “Grandma.” And she would ask me to open my shades, if they were closed. On those small little windows, in that small little apartment, down a small little alley in Tokyo. How small those windows were. How small my world was. The moon would stream in through the windows. My pitch dark would be a little less dark. She always knew when my shades were closed. She never called unless they were. She would ask me to look at the moon. “Well, it’s there,” I would say. She would ask, “Are you sure?” I would answer, “Yes.” And she would challenge, “Then why are your shades closed?” I never knew how to answer her, so I would leave it at that, like I always leave things as they are. Until she was gone, I had thought she meant the shades on the windows. I would lay down whatever was leaden on my mind, and holding on to her, on the phone, I would watch the face of the moon. I would watch it, without looking. Not seeing beyond where I was, or looking beyond but not seeing it. She would say, “All your answers are there, you only have to look up to see them.” Each time it wore different veils of shadows, revealing the parts I needed to see. The monochrome moonscape of volcanoes long erupted and dead, asteroids long flown and disintegrated, lava flows long flowed and solidified forever, framed by clouds and without. It looked one way, only once. Those shadows I never knew from where they came. She would have needed to call, because I was in Tokyo, far away from where I had belonged, in Hakone, from where I had to leave, because there was nothing there, except an honest living. We would be there, in our separate parts of Japan, our line silent as words passed wordlessly, as much between us, as with our moon. I would pass into dreams, the phone floating, landing like a forgotten feather. And one time, I passed into dreams, and she passed.

105

RE: THE NON-EXISTENT ALBINO ALLIGATOR Words by Luke Somasundram

FICTION

TO: ALL-SG SUBJECT: RE: OFFICE UPDATE Dear all, TO: ALL-SG SUBJECT: OFFICE UPDATE

It seems my last email put some people in a tizzy. Let me be very clear about what everyone is so nervous about.

Dear all, Super good news! The powers-that-be have given us unofficial official blessing to dip our toes in a partial return-to-office. Completely optional, of course, come in ONLY if you feel comfortable. But pandemic or no, I know everyone can’t wait to meet their fellow members of the BrainiBoost Supplements family again! This past year has been tough, but we are all in this together. And now, we can all be in the same room together too! (Just in time, since riverside office space isn’t cheap and our landlord wasn’t budging on the lease. LOL!)

Not only will there be no downsizing this year, there will be no mandatory pay cuts either. 2021 is not going to be a repeat of 2020. Things are on the up! I hope that eases everyone’s minds. Onwards and upwards, Phil

TO: ALL-SG SUBJECT: RE: RE: OFFICE UPDATE Dear all,

FYI, Sally and the office management team have been working to get the office shipshape! There was some water damage and a mild vermin infestation during the WFH period. The pantry was lost, as well as most of our BrainiBoost stock in Storage Room B.

It has come to my attention that it was not the downsizing rumour that was causing concern, but it was the mention of the large albino alligator. For full transparency, that hoax was started by some of the custodial staff who have since been reprimanded by Sally.

Thankfully, we lost nothing we can’t supplement (excuse the pun) with stock from our other warehouses! I can’t wait to start getting our awesome cognition enhancement product out to our customers across the country again!

Let me be very clear, there is no factual basis for their spurious claims. Any ‘tracks’ and ‘tooth-marks’ found could have come from any number of sources. Furthermore, how could a full-grown river alligator have gotten in the building during WFH? And even if an alligator did manage to get into the building, say, through the large hole we found in Storage Room B, what would it eat?

Finally, yes, I am aware that there is some gossip in the bullpen. I’d like to dispel a few rumours right off the bat. 1. Despite this financial hit, there will be no downsizing this year. 2. There is no large albino alligator loose in the building.

In any case, let’s get back to getting this year back on track! Our replacement supplies of BrainiBoost have already been delivered. All that’s missing from the office is you!

Staying positive, Phil

As previously mentioned, it’s totally optional to return to the office. But I strongly encourage everyone to come in! See you soon, Phil

107

TO: SALLY, ERNIE SUBJECT: CUSTODIAL RESOURCING

FICTION

Sally, It’s unacceptable for the custodial staff to simply stop showing up. Especially since they never returned their security passes! This is a serious matter! Please lodge a complaint with their agency. I’ve also CC-ed Uncle Ernie, our night guard, in this email. Ernie, could you let us know when was the last time you saw the custodial staff in the building? Onwards and upwards, Phil TO: ALL-SG SUBJECT: Thought everyone could use a laugh… ALLIGATOR FUN FACTS 1. Alligators grow throughout their lifespan. Male alligators can grow to five metres long! 2. Alligators use tools to hunt—they balance sticks on their heads to attract birds. 3. Alligators eat birds, fish, snakes, turtles and small mammals. Let me address the elephant (or should I say alligator, haha) in the room. In our Monday all-hands Zoom call, Stefano theorised that the so-called large albino alligator could be surviving on the missing BrainiBoost stock.

TO: ERNIE SUBJECT: RE: CUSTODIAL RESOURCING Did you receive my last email on the custodial staff? Sent from my iPhone Phil

I think the above fun facts prove otherwise. As you all know, BrainiBoost is a purely chemical supplement. It does not contain any fish, snakes, turtles, small mammals or birds. And just for Stefano’s peace of mind, I dropped an email to corporate asking what would happen if a large reptile consumed 500kg of BrainiBoost. They immediately called me back and told me I had no cause for concern and should NOT alert the authorities or any animal rights groups. Guys, if that doesn’t settle it, I don’t know what will! On an unrelated note, corporate also mentioned wanting to restart the workplace exchange programme. They will be sending us some personnel from HQ. Exciting! Onwards and upwards, Phil PS: Why is our all-hands still on Zoom? Surely we can have our weekly heart-to-heart faceto-face :)?

TO: SALLY SUBJECT: RE: MISSING BRAINIBOOST STOCK Storage Room B has been ransacked again. How did this happen?! Please get the vermin situation under control. And please get in touch with Uncle Ernie, he should have been on top of this. Sent from my iPhone Phil

FICTION TO: SALLY SUBJECT: WHERE ARE YOU? Call me when you receive this. We need someone to clean up the stockroom ASAP. A messy workspace is not conducive to positive thinking! Also, if you are on MC, please let me know if I should self-isolate as well. Sent from my iPhone Phil

TO: SALLY SUBJECT: RE: WHERE ARE YOU? Sally, being completely uncontactable is incredibly unprofessional. I’ll have to make a note about this in your next appraisal. I’ve had to take matters into my own hands and clean up the stockroom myself. There wasn’t anyone in the office today to help me. :(. Sent from my iPhone Phil

TO: TEAMLEADS-SG SUBJECT: RE: RE: RE: OFFICE UPDATE Dear Team Leads, We’ve noticed office attendance numbers have been subpar, despite our clear communications on the subject. As team leaders, if you have been using carrot-based methods to encourage your direct reports to come into the office, I would suggest it is time to switch to more stick-based approaches. It’s time they recognised that we are all in this together. Regards, Phillip Lim CEO of BrainiBoost Singapore PS: Also, please inform staff that any loss of security passes will be severely penalised. They don’t grow on trees!

TO: ALL-SG SUBJECT: Personnel Updates The BrainiBoost family is expanding! I would like you all to welcome the latest addition to our team, Gladys! She will be starting as our new office manager replacing Sally, effective immediately. Here’s a little bit about Gladys. Gladys has over seven years of experience as a freelance office manager. In her free time, she enjoys rock climbing, baking and hanging out with her dog, Sir Woofsalot. Please give her a warm welcome if you see her in the office (which you can’t do if you don’t come into the office, so please come in for Gladys’s sake!). In addition, corporate has sent us some new security department teammates on workplace exchange. Quite the boon since we have been a bit short-handed since Uncle Ernie’s freak accident. Side note, the hospital tells me he is stable but still unconscious. And more good news—the doctors say they can reattach his hand! Please contact Gladys if you want to visit, she is putting together a hamper for him. Now, let’s get back to introducing the new members of the BrainiBoost fam—Alexei, Ryker and Krazy Eyes. Alexei has over 10 years of experience in freelance security, with the past three at our corporate HQ. When I asked him where exactly, he said it was above my pay grade. Haha! What a joker :D! His likes include Krav Maga, MMA and MCMAP. According to Google, that’s the Marine Corps Martial Arts Program. TIL! Ryker has over 12 years of experience in freelance security! His likes include nature, hunting and firearms. Impressive, I don’t think I’ve met a hunter before! Krazy Eyes has over 15 years of experience in freelance security and live resource acquisition. A world traveller, he’s worked in Somalia, Afghanistan and Tijuana, Mexico! Wow! His likes include knives! Onwards and upwards, Phil

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TO: ALL-SG SUBJECT: RE: THE NON-EXISTENT ALBINO ALLIGATOR Even though there’s no large albino alligator living in our building, we’ve noticed that many people are still citing it as a reason not to come into the office. You guys are saying this non-existent alligator has consumed all our BrainiBoost stock, “leading to a terrifying boost in its predatory cunning”. (Tad dramatic Stefano...) I’m also disgusted by the rumour that it has eaten multiple members of staff. Let me be very clear, this gruesome hoax is in incredibly bad taste during this trying time. I am trying to get us back on track for 2021 and this albino alligator hysteria is not helping. Please start acting more professional. On an unrelated note, we’ve noticed a spike in unexplained absences without leave among the people who do come into the office. Alexei, Ryker and Krazy Eyes have not filled out their timesheets all week and I have not seen them since their first day.

TO: ALL-SG SUBJECT: When you need something done right… Good leaders lead by example, so I’m going to show to you that there’s nothing to worry about. Later today I will lower myself into the crawl space underneath the office floor to prove that there isn’t a giant albino alligator living there! See you later alligator (LOL!), Phil

I have reported them to HQ, who were incredibly disappointed as well. Sad to say, I get the sense HQ expected something like this to happen. Their exact response to me before hanging up was, and I quote: “God help us, our worst fears are realised”.

TO: ALL-SG SUBJECT: URGENT: PLEASE SEND HELP

I can only surmise that those security boys have a history of bad behaviour. They have probably ruined the workplace exchange programme for everyone :(.

My apologies for the late email, but I’m afraid I have no other option. For some reason I can’t get a phone signal in the crawl space, so I can only communicate via our internal intranet.

Let me be very clear. I will not tolerate such antics in this office. I know I said there would be no downsizing this year but this sort of behaviour is really a no-go.

Anyway, as you know I have tried to look into the crawl space myself, but I appear to have gotten myself stuck. Somehow, after I entered I triggered a small collapse in the crawl space shaft.

Regards, Phillip Lim CEO of BrainiBoost Singapore

I know it’s a Friday night, but I’d appreciate it if one of you could alert emergency services. Sent from my iPhone Phil

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TO: ALL-SG SUBJECT: RE: URGENT: PLEASE SEND HELP Some good news—I have not seen a single rat (or alligator!) so far. In fact the crawl space is eerily devoid of life. In addition, I did find Sally’s old office pass, so strike off that security risk! In fact, as I type this I do believe I see another office pass, deeper in the crawl space. There’s almost a trail of them! Such a weight off my mind to recover these missing passes! Sent from my iPhone Phil

TO: ALL-SG SUBJECT: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE:

PS: Running low on battery, please send help when you can!

ALL IS WELL PLS RTURN 2 OF FICE. NO DAN GER. CANT WAIT MEAT U WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER. Sent from my iPhone Phil

TO: ALL-SG SUBJECT: RE: RE: URGENT: PLEASE SEND HELP I’ve managed to gather seven passes so far! Including the two temporary ones we assigned to Alexei and Krazy Eyes! Truly a relief, we are more secure than we have been all week! Also, I noticed a rumbling sound which I assume must be the ventilation system in the basement. I’m making my way toward it, there should be an egress point there. Funny how comforting it sounds. Almost like this great building our company calls home is breathing. Radical honesty time—when I first got trapped in the crawl space, I was a bit alarmed. But now, it seems like things are looking up. That’s a lesson for everyone about the disruptive power of positive thinking! Excited to see all of you (in person!) on Monday. Sent from my iPhone Phil

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PERFECTLY SYMBIOTIC Words by Stephanie Dogfoot

FICTION

hank you all for being here tonight. I am honoured to be introducing our keynote speaker, a man some call an ambassador of our species, a man we now all know as this century’s ultimate pioneer, responsible for taking the human race into a better future. The one man responsible for building the first bridge between humanity and the intelligence all around us. Consider how different life was one year ago. Consider how none of us noticed when they first emerged. That’s the story we tell ourselves, anyway, isn’t it? Obviously, we always noticed them when they arrived after the rain, on grass patches, on the sides of pavements, on nature walks, at the feet of old trees. One moment nothing, then a few hours of rainfall, soft pillowy whitebrown fungal bodies suddenly standing tall in the grass. Appearing as if out of nowhere. Small everyday miracles. Most of us never paid much attention. We couldn’t eat most of them. They weren’t harming anyone. We had all been conditioned to ignore them. They were just... there. Part of the background. Like pigeons. Or weeds. Most of us here can barely remember when they first started speaking to us. No, communicating. Just over a year ago. Doesn’t seem that long ago, does it? Remember how we thought we were going crazy? A pandemic of chemical imbalances in the brain, some thought. Aliens! Ghosts! People all over the world reporting hearing voices in their heads, after the rain. Where were the voices coming from? For months, no one could explain it. So we did what humans do best. We connected. We formed chat groups, forums, think tanks. We tried to rationalise it among ourselves even as the internet exploded with rumours and conspiracy theories. Media hysteria. Rumours of government control exercises. People were paranoid, understandably so. Some rejoiced. We tried mapping them, tried to find the source of the voices.

It’s easy to look back on this now and laugh at our ignorance, how no one hit on obvious. Mushrooms. But who knows how long we could have been wondering for, if it was not for one man. The visionary who opened our eyes to what was under our noses this whole time. David Attenborough has called him “the man responsible for discovering the final frontier of life on earth”. The New York Times has hailed him “the holder of the key to the next chapter of our planet’s evolution”. This is his final stop on his 13-country speaking tour and we are very privileged to have him here with us tonight. So please welcome onstage Mr Peter Tham!

Good evening everyone. Thank you for that introduction. I still get goosebumps every time I am introduced like that. I always feel I only deserve half this acclaim, the other half, of course, belongs to this guy in the tank in front of me. To a biologist, this mushroom is an average specimen of the Lepiota genus, commonly found in my home country, Singapore. To the rest of us, this mushroom is my research partner, an ambassador of its own kingdom. The mushroom I first made contact with one year, two weeks and five days ago, the first mushroom to identify itself to the human race. I still remember that day as clearly as yesterday. A year ago, I was an ordinary person. I had a nine-to-five job, I lived alone in a oneroom flat on a little city-state. To be perfectly honest, I could not tell you what drove me to go to my neighbourhood park that day. I hardly went to parks. But I suppose it was a busy week, I’d been working from home for too long and needed to leave the house. For some reason, I decide to lie down on the grass and look at the sky. Again, something I had never done before. I remember the ground was still damp from rain. I remember the moment when my head hit the grass and I heard my name. The moment my life changed forever.

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Of course, I’d heard the rumours. I’d never heard the voices before, I’ve always been a non-believer. My personal belief was this was a kind of mass hysteria. But as many of you know, hearing a voice in your head for yourself changes you, changes everything you believe. Peter, the voice said, Peter I am right next to you. You have to admit, that’s an extremely creepy way for anyone to introduce themselves. I look to my left and there, inches from my face is this tiny mushroom. Speaking to me telepathically. And I say, hello. And in my brain, I hear, Hello Peter, we mean no harm. The first successful two-way conversation between a human and a mushroom. And the rest, as you know, is history. This tiny mushroom has gone on to change my life, to change the course of history. I quit my job and dedicated my life to learning everything there is to know from this mushroom, catching up on thousands of years of knowledge that this one individual holds, I have started my own highly successful business which teaches people about how to communicate with mushrooms, with its own research arm. Of course, mushrooms have been trying to communicate with us for thousands of years. And they have almost succeeded many times. Just ask the shamans, the healers, and your hippy roommate who’s taken magic mushrooms and gotten a glimpse of their power and knowledge. But now, mushrooms have a direct line to our minds, we can talk to them, and we are getting closer every day to an understanding of how we can use that knowledge to improve humanity. For years we wondered if there was intelligent life on other planets. We never thought to ask about the intelligence under our very feet. We have never been alone in the universe, but silently guided by species much older and wiser than ourselves, and it is only now that they have managed to reveal themselves to us.

If there is one thing to take home from this speech, it is to let go and trust the mushrooms around you. Listen to them speaking to you, focus on their voices, write down what you hear, what they want you to do. They mean no harm. Do not be afraid. How privileged we are to be living in this exciting time where we can finally easily absorb the knowledge of the oldest, largest, best-connected organisms on earth who have evolved to the point of being able to connect with humanity. Perfectly symbiotic. Now humans and mushrooms are no longer passive organisms, but partners in the future of human development. We are all interconnected, and our interconnection is the key to saving our planet and ourselves...

The man beamed as the auditorium burst into rapturous applause. He took his mushroom tank and held it up. The applause grew louder. People stood up. He shook the hand of the man who introduced him and left the stage. He coughed once, twice. He had had a persistent itch in his chest for months. And another underneath his socks. The skin between his toes on his right foot was particularly itchy. He told himself it must be because of the weeks of non-stop travelling, not being able to change his socks. And who knew what kind of crazy microbes he was getting exposed to in that hotel bathroom. In the green room, he chugged his bottle of water. Well done, his mushroom said to him. You might have just changed the world today. In a matter of hours, his speech would be edited and broadcast on a vast and popular educational channel on YouTube. It was predicted it would go viral within the day, disseminating and spreading itself around that human mycelium network that spanned the planet. His message of trust, hope and cooperation would reach millions more people in an hour as the rest of his speaking tour combined. “We did it,” he said into his mirror, eyes suddenly wet.

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He rubbed the carpet. Yes, we did.

his

tingling

toe

against

own? Why can’t you bring yourself to touch antifungal cream? “Shut up!” You said it yourself: the evolution has already started. Soon you will no longer notice which thoughts are ours and which are yours. The man threw the tank to the ground, its plastic walls clattering against concrete. The soil and the small mushroom inside it that he had carried with him across four continents flew across the pavement. The man waited for something. A cry… of pain? A plea? But nothing. But don’t worry. None of you will even be aware when it happens. Once people are receptive to us, it gets much easier. Your speech will help so many people. He suddenly wanted to run. He felt desperately like he wanted to scratch his skin off. He wanted to scratch his fungus-ridden toes until they bled, then slice the fungus off. He wanted to reach into his lungs and scrape out whatever fungal build-up was making it hard for him to breathe. He wanted to reach into his skull and--Don’t try fighting us. No human body can survive without us. But that was ridiculous. He was out in public. In a new country. He put his hands in his pockets and continued walking back.

The man asked to stop by a pharmacy. It was a block away from the hotel. He told the limousine driver to go home and said he could walk back himself. The itch on his toe was intensifying. He found himself squinting in the painfully bright white-walled fluorescent lights of the shop, reaching for a small white bottle of antifungal foot cream. Almost as soon as his fingers wrapped themselves around its smooth plastic surface, he found himself recoiling, as if it was simmering hot or electrified. The bottle dropped to the floor and the man stumbled out of the shop, trembling. You wouldn’t poison your own family, would you? Your own flesh and blood? The man froze, stared at the mushroom in its tank. How is the fungus on your toe any less sentient than the one in the tank? “What?” the man hissed. It was dark and there wasn’t anyone on the street. It was getting more socially acceptable for people to randomly talk to mushrooms or appear to be talking to themselves, but he wasn’t about to take his chances late at night in a foreign city. You said it yourself: we are all interconnected. It was never just one of us talking to you. “You’ve been… lying?” The street lamp above him flickered. You never thought to ask. There are millions of us on and inside you. We’ve been monitoring you since you were born. We are everywhere. In your toes. In your gut. In your lungs. In your foreskin. In the folds of your brain. It just depends on whether there’s enough of us for you to notice. “What the f**k?!” He didn’t care who heard now. Did you really think you lay down on the grass out of your own free will? Did you really think you wrote that genius speech on your

A woman and her teenage daughter stopped him outside the hotel. The girl’s face lit up as he looked at her. “My god,” the woman exclaimed. “Mr Tham! We drove seven hours to hear you speak, you were so inspiring! My daughter has a special mushroom friend too! Can we take a picture with you?” For a moment, he wanted to scream about how everything he knew was wrong, a terrible lie. The woman and her daughter were smiling. Genuine joy in their faces. What good would it do to tell them any of this? What would it change? He stifled a cough and felt his lips pulling themselves into a broad, measured smile. “Sure, thank you for your support!”

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HARIMAU JADIAN Words by Jordan Melic

FICTION

hen disappeared around about the time when the surveyor from the Jabatan Pertanian (Agriculture Department) was killed. The surveyor’s body bore all the marks of a tiger attack—neck torn, head twisted, body covered in gashes—but for anyone who cared to look a little closer, it was clear that the perpetrator was no ordinary tiger. Five distinct claw marks were discernible in the prints left behind. Five claws, not four, like human fingers on a bestial hand. I hadn’t thought much of Shen when he first arrived. Mother was fond of putting up able-bodied boys in a small hut behind our house to help tend the field—there were enough of them to choose from. Some people would have been thrown in jail for doing that, accused of sheltering the reds, but no one dared say such a thing about Ibu Diah. In any case, so few people in our village remained by then, most either hauled off to the New Villages or simply gone elsewhere because they were fed up with the perpetual skirmishes. Mother said that Shen was from the hills, from the settlements near the Asli lands where the Temiar went to trade the forest produce that eventually ended up at the markets in Temerloh. Trouble was constantly brewing up there. To bring the area under government control, the army kept sending troops to establish an outpost—but it never worked. People said the reds had found a way to harness the black magic in the tribal lands to protect themselves. I had heard of army encampments that were engulfed by fire ants and of toyols (infant spirit) that got patrols stranded in ravines, but people were always saying things like that and it was hard to say what was true. Shen didn’t strike me as being very different from many of the boys that Mother put up. He was quiet, hardworking, grateful for the shelter though not likely to stay very long. He suffered from a peculiar skin condition, his hands and feet mottled with discoloured patches. When we worked together in the field, he was relaxed, even friendly, but he became guarded whenever anyone else was about, preferring to keep his distance. There was an instinctive watchfulness about everything he did, as if he was ever ready for trouble to break out. Reports of tiger sightings began not long after Shen started staying with us. I didn’t make too much of them at the time. The few tigers that survived in the wild understandably remained objects of fascination for people—although with armed men running about the jungle determined to kill one another at all costs, the threat they posed seemed somewhat diminished. Nevertheless, the tiger in our vicinity appeared to be sufficiently dangerous. The trail of chicken remains it left in its wake suggested that it was sick or carrying some sort of injury and was therefore unable to go after more satisfying prey. These tigers were the most likely to come after humans for food. None of this crossed my mind when I was with Shen. When he turned up late to the field, dishevelled, exhausted—something which did not happen infrequently—I made the most logical conclusion: that he was a red. Mother said never to ask any of the boys who stayed with us if they were reds; no one could accuse us of sheltering them if we did not know. “They’ve lost,” Shen said one afternoon abruptly as we harvested petai pods from a tree. “Who?” “The reds.” I stared at him for a moment before going back to picking the pods, uncertain if I should hear what he was saying. “Central government has found the ultimate weapon to defeat them,” he continued. “What do you mean?” He threw the petai pod he was holding into the collection basket. “Come,” he said, waving me in the direction of the hut where he slept, “I show you.” Mother would have told me not to follow. She was right.

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I FOUND IT SITTING ACROSS FROM MY WINDOW, WATCHING ME AS IF IT KNEW I WOULD BE THERE. ITS EYES GLOWED. EVERY SO OFTEN IT WOULD LICK ITS PAWS.

As I entered the hut, a peculiar smell came upon me: fetid, animal; the longer I stood there, the stronger the impression that the air in the room had been entirely replaced by it. Mother had set up a simple wooden frame for visitors to lay their mats on so that they would not have to sleep on the floor at night, but the frame was unused. Instead, by the entrance, loose soil and grass were scattered, forming a silhouette around where I assumed someone slept—it couldn’t have been Shen as the silhouette was massive. Then I noticed the gnawed-off chicken bones among the mess. A whiff of putrefying blood came to me. Shen was oblivious to the strangeness of any of this. He retrieved something from the windowsill and held it out for me to see. It was a vermillion fruit that resembled a pebble. “Oil palm,” he said. Here was the central government’s ultimate weapon. Shen proceeded to explain how they were planning to turn the hills into a vast oil palm plantation. It was a stroke of tactical genius. The Jabatan Pertanian, it turned out, was a far more effective war machine than the military; instead of battling through the impenetrable jungle, the government would simply burn it all down. Victory would be won with land titles and bitumen roads, not bullets. Without soldiers to fight against, what would remain of the reds’ struggle? It was only a matter of time before they surrendered. The Temiar were to be resettled in Aboriginal Reserves. I should have paid more attention to what Shen was saying—he never said much, so it must have been important to him—but it was impossible. As he spoke, clearly agitated, he bit into the oil palm fruit and ripped off strips of husk with his teeth. I had only ever seen dogs do such a thing, working their bite, the movement both savage and precise. He would chew the strips before spitting them out, unconcerned by the acrid, vermillion oil dribbling from his mouth, smothering his neck and chin, speckling the ground. Following that peculiar encounter with Shen, for reasons I did not fully grasp, I needed to see the tiger that was roaming our village. I would not be able to sleep at night and often ended up peering out my window into the labyrinthine darkness, seeking it out. Sometimes I would sense something moving about in the vegetation that stood out from the teeming jungle life—massive, emitting an obscure flesh magnetism. Shen’s hut stood at the edge of the property, flecked in tremulous moonlight, always quiet. One night, two figures dressed in military fatigues appeared. From the camouflage pattern of their uniforms that resembled a tiger’s coat, I knew that they were government soldiers. Oddly enough, they bore none of the usual military equipment, no helmets nor rucksacks, and clasped only their wood stock rifles. They appeared lost, bickering with each other as they wandered about. I went to see if I could help. As I approached, one of the soldiers raised his rifle and pointed it at me. I froze. The soldier was perspiring profusely. His hands trembled. “Get away,” he yelled. “What does it want?” came the other soldier’s voice. “Whatever you do, don’t look in its eyes.” The advice came too late; the soldier was staring me straight in the eyes. “If it moves, I shoot,” he growled. “Too many bloody spirits in this godforsaken place.” I should have been afraid, but I wasn’t.

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Then I saw something. In a tree. It was Shen. He was crouched on a branch, looking as if it were perfectly normal to be up there. He watched the proceedings intently, eyes glowing. The soldier must have noticed the change in my expression; he turned around, following the direction of my gaze. Shen was gone. Then I felt it—feral, heaving, massive—right there, beside me. I didn’t need to look to know what it was. The soldier went pale. He waggled the rifle about and a shot rang out; the bullet whizzed past, not missing me by much. The two soldiers spun around and fled into the vegetation. I stood there in the returning calm, the crickets seeming to exult in the soldiers’ retreat. I should have been afraid, but I wasn’t. A moment later, the presence receded. I turned to look beside me and found only the swirling night. I didn’t see Shen for some time after the incident. I didn’t expect to. In any case, there were other things to worry about. The events of that night turned out to be a prelude of sorts of things to come. The government’s plans up in the hills soon started to make a difference; people were constantly moving through the jungle, odd characters popping up all over the place. Instead of troop carriers, excavators and bulldozers rumbled down the tracks. Mother received a steady stream of officials at the house—they evidently took her for someone sympathetic to their aims—and our veranda turned into a place where they could stop for some friendly conversation and an icy drink. Shen came back one overcast afternoon. I was out behind the house, chopping down an old, barren rambutan tree when he showed up. He seemed to materialise out of thin air—I only noticed him seated on a rock behind me when he asked if I needed help. He looked haggard and had obviously been in a fight. His battered appearance was heightened by how his bruises combined with the peculiar, discoloured patches on his skin. A glossy, vermillion wound ran across his chest. Neither of us mentioned the night with the soldiers. As he chopped away at the tree trunk, he pointed to the lane in front of our house; a white Morris Minor was parked there, the logo of the Jabatan Pertanian emblazoned on its door. An agent from the office had stopped by for a visit. “Don’t talk to them,” said Shen. “Tell your mother not to talk to them.” He wiped the sweat from his face and returned to chopping. “They will take your land,” he continued. “They will measure it, put up their sign, and steal it from you before your very eyes. You will be forced to leave.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the man from the Jabatan Pertanian had actually come to see if Mother was interested in acquiring a share of the oil palm plantation they were developing. Shen didn’t say much more. Before he left, he tried to make some small talk—asked me how my schoolwork was going and smiled when I said I had done well in my exams. That was the last I ever saw him. I think. It happened some nights after the body of the surveyor from the Jabatan Pertanian was found down a ravine bearing all the telltale signs of a tiger attack—those unmistakable prints covering the scene with five claw marks, not four. I was peering out my window, as I had become accustomed to doing, when I saw the tiger. There was no doubt something breathtaking about the sight of the majestic creature roaming free in its natural habitat. I found it sitting across from my window, watching me as if it knew I would be there. Its eyes glowed. Every so often it would lick its paws. Peculiarly, the fur around its paws was mottled with discoloured patches. Across its chest was a wound. The man-eating tigers were the ones that were injured, but I was not afraid. I do not know how much time passed before the tiger got to its feet and made to leave. It turned to look at me one last time before slinking away into the gloom. Somewhere in the jungle, I heard it roar—a magnificent thunder at once terrifying and tragic, shaking the treetops and reverberating across all time.

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unBLACKlister Words by Simon Vincent

t is almost 10pm on a Thursday when a man, who has showered, kissed his wife and fed their schnauzer after arriving home, lays before him on the dining table a glass of rum, a plate of Hokkien mee, a laptop and a document folder. He drinks, eats and sets to work, unfolding the computer.

Before switching the power on, he pushes the folder out of his immediate field of sight, still unsure of why he had felt the need to disturb its rest among the silverfish in the storeroom. It is not yet time for indulgences, he tells himself. He had his rum already.

L, Ahead of the 200-page dossier that is being prepared for you, I thought it would be best to send you my annotated report on the notable social media posts on unBLACKlister. As you very well know, it has caused a right stir and all kinds of people are having a go at broadcasting their renegade credentials and taking potshots at us—ah, the cheap thrills of fancying oneself an enemy of the state. Perhaps I should not be so glib. Our intelligence officers are not entirely sure what algorithm the still-anonymous creator of the unBLACKlister site is using. From what we can gather, it crawls through a set of user-fed data —your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Reddit profile, or even your Spotify account—and picks up keywords to measure your “dissident score”. Figuring out the agenda of this unBLACKlister character is our utmost concern, of course. While the site seems intentionally playful, there seems to have been a lot of work put into its algorithm. A dissatisfied member of our intelligentsia? An activist with a bone to pick? A foreign agency? (I doubt so, but, nevertheless, hope not.) unBLACKlister and all the fanciful think pieces on it would not have blown up if not for Ravin Pereira. He shared the site on Facebook and enough of his 100,000-strong followers spread the word for it to be a thorn in our side. His post was not the first one, though. The first was from a Reddit user, bearing the selfsame “unBLACKlister’’ moniker, in the popular Singahappenings Reddit forum. Curiously, this user only bothered with putting up this one post to introduce the site. Almost simultaneously, though, some anonymous, and since vanished, accounts shared links to the site in other threads. Pereira’s post, notably, appeared a close 10 minutes after these fugitive posts. Naturally, given his predilection for stirring things up, we’ve been looking into him as a suspect. No computing or data science background, though. He could, of course, be the leader of some new movement or protest. In any case, here are the various posts we should be wary of for their reach and influence. Yours sincerely, J PS: This new policy of using only initials for internal notes and emails feels a little unnatural. Never can be too careful, of course, as you always say.

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Media: Reddit Points of interest: First post on unBLACKlister, probably by creator of site Estimated reach: 150,000 number still rising as of 11 March, virality still in play after Pereira boost Name: Unknown Time of post: 4 March, 11.13am Content of post:

Serious or joke? Someone in the department, one of our humanities consultants, said this was akin to the tactics of a group called situationists, some prankster-philosopher type movement, as I remember. No idea if he’s right. Perhaps of little importance, this insight. Make of it what you will. Without the name of the person behind the site, we are left with posts like the ones cited below to make sense of the general terrain of influence.

Media: Facebook Points of interest: Activist, academic Estimated reach: 130,000 Name: Ravin Pereira Time of post: 4 March, 11.23am Content of post:

While Pereira has come out in public to share about his tenure denial, he has yet to provide any names. What a fiasco he caused last year. I know there are some in our department who thought your chat with the dean at his university was premature, but our intel suggests that it did have a dampening effect on his organising activities for some months. He’s since taken his work across the causeway.

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Media: Twitter Points of interest: Activist, performance artist, cache among literati Estimated reach: 10,000 Name: Ng Jee Meng Time of post: 5 March, 7.05pm Content of post:

Marxist term.

Gobbledygook, huh? Really wasn’t sure about including this, but for whatever reason, he’s cultivated a small but dedicated following and I think we should continue monitoring him. Even if his reach is modest, several of our impressionable students, especially from the arts, social sciences and humanities departments, gravitate towards him. Incidentally, my meeting with the arts council is coming at an opportune moment next week.

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Media: Blog Points of interest: Activist, journalist Estimated reach: 50,000 Name: Lisa Harvey Time of post: 8 March, 5.55pm Content of post:

The faux radicalism of unBLACKlister I have not used unBLACKlister. Several people have asked me for my “dissident score”, assuming I would have already used it, and others have asked me to share my thoughts on it. It seems that I have earned a reputation of sorts for these matters, which I shall loosely classify as civil liberty-related, and that’s precisely why I am not submitting myself for evaluation by unBLACKlister. I am not a data point to be harvested. Or at least I strive as much as I can not to be. We would all probably be familiar by now with the truism “you are the product”. More and more of us know now that social media companies thrive, without charging us for use of their services, because our consumer choices are being sold to advertisers all around the world. Yet, we might not always think “you are the product” applies to something like unBLACKlister because of its seemingly anti-establishment zeal. Put that aside, though, and think of just how curious it is to feed your data to this site. First, its creator is anonymous. We have no idea who they are and why they created this site, except for some nebulous agitprop slogans. Second, the “dissident score” you get is not even accurate and as meaningless as the result of a Buzzfeed quiz. Is there a point to any of this teenager-like posturing?

The rest of her essay touches on the trivialisation of activists’ struggles and I’ve left it out from this report. Lisa is one of our moderate and rational critics and, precisely because of this, is sometimes more of a threat than the others quoted here. I’m including her blog post on unBLACKlister to show areas of contention in the public discussion on unBLACKlister and to track potential talking points we could use in the future, if we ever need to publish a press release. Recently, a few idiots fed some of our MPs’ profiles to unBLACKlister and shared the Future Rebel and Dissident Level 1 ratings they got. FYI: At the next intel meeting, I will be sharing about our correspondence with our contacts from the relevant social media companies and about specific data points from the full dossier, including sentiment analysis of the public’s reaction to unBLACKlister. Don’t forget: the Minister will be there!

Some among Lisa’s own circle call her a government stooge. Laughable!

If you are in the camp of people who say they have nothing to hide when it comes to questions of surveillance, then this post would be moot to you. If you are, however, one of those people who are typically concerned about privacy and Big Tech, but have not applied the same standards to unBLACKlister, ask yourself why. And if this is all just part of a curious joke, are we cheapening protest through gamification? Now, I think

The man, who is fastidious even about being fastidious, is satisfied at a job well done by 10.30pm and ready to be downloaded by his boss first thing in the morning. Now, he can have fun. Reminisce. He retrieves the dusty folder from the far side of the table, feeling its fraying cover with superstitious restraint. It has no title and this seems revelatory to him. He decides against flipping it open, preferring to piece its articles together from memory. “I am good at my job,” he says out loud without realising it, before completing this line of thought in the security of his mind. “Because I understand them.”

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He was a rebel once, or fancied himself so after being reprimanded by his editor at the newspaper he once worked for. “Fighter”, “naive”, “young”, “idealistic”—these words flit through his mind that is now working its own algorithm, hungry for nostalgia. His wife, woken from his mutterings, calls him to bed from their room. At the sound of her somnambulant voice, he gets up and, amused by the thought of his self-importance, leaves the remains of his multifarious meal to be. On his way to the sweet succour of sleep, he passes by the schnauzer and has a sudden and sharp impulse to kick it. He doesn’t and that’s enough validation for him.

NUMBER TWENTY Words by Lauren Ho

FICTION

Foong didn’t believe in mincing words/ gilding turds; he would admit to anyone (even if they weren’t asking) that he was not attractive. Age had not been kind to him, despite his relatively young age of 43; his skin was sallow from a lack of exposure to natural light, his hairline receding to spite him, plus he didn’t have the money, charm or other illusory means of detracting the eye from the soft sag of age around his chest, which he had somehow—wrongly—believed was contained by the tight-on-purpose white T-shirt he was wearing. As she stared at him, smiling, Foong felt a familiar underarm seepage. Especially when she mouthed, Come home with me. She was, for all intents and purposes, acting suspiciously, and since locals were encouraged by the government to follow up on suspicious individuals…

e was the poster boy of the Average Singaporean Man, our Foong, ‘average’ being the keyword. Furred with little vices as even the best of us are, like a tendency to stare at cleavage despite his hardest efforts not to, and a finger that often strayed up nostrils (his) when he thought others weren’t looking (they almost always were). But surely Nothing to be Alarmed With. For he was also nice, our Foong, good—if a little milquetoast. He was a blood donor (especially when he was trying to lose weight). He had a creed: work hard; no drugs; be kind to humans and animals. No cargo pants on weekdays, especially white ones. Or skintight bike shorts on public transportation. Call Ma—in Balik Pulau, Penang—once every week; pay for Pa’s nursing care even though he left them for a total bitch three decades ago but was now the dumpee, and the Alzheimer-ed. Life! Also, respect women. Only plain vanilla consensual adult human-on-human porn. He’d never even downloaded anything illegally, which, considering he was a late Gen-Xer and had been around when Napster and Pirate Bay were considered ways to give the establishment the middle finger, was almost sweet. You could say our Foong was an ordinary Joe, not one to rock anyone’s boat, just like you and me. Not a creep.

They meandered. She knew he was tailing her because he clomped about most ponderously, not wanting to be accused of surprising her, and every 10 steps or so she would turn, smiling, her eyes seeking him out coyly. Then they came to a quiet road in an enclave of bungalows. She stopped. He stopped. Hello, she said. Warmly. He’d been expecting a barrage of insults. Hi, he replied, a wave sprouting out of him unawares. I’m sorry, but I’ll have to blindfold you if you want to come any further with me. Don’t worry, it’s only for another 800m or so. Is that necessary? he said. He was afraid of the dark. Yes, for my safety. Foong’s heart was freestyling. Okay, he said, allowing her to approach with a scarf. I’m going to look silly, he thought. I’m going to die. They were somewhere near Farrer Road, walking in a quiet estate. They walked for 10 minutes or so, his hand in hers. Whenever they heard someone approaching, she would press close to him and giggle, as though he was being led to a surprise party.

In spite of himself he followed her off the MRT. She caught his eye for several reasons: first of all, she was unmasked—something he noted once his brain processed the riot of signals her particoloured geometric print wrap dress and black velveteen kitten heels sent his way—or rather her transparent face mask made her look like she wasn’t wearing one at all. It was only after he’d inched closer to where she stood in the almost-empty carriage that he saw the glint of curved plastic of her mask. Ah. Then she caught his eye, held it, and—this was the clincher—she winked. No one, especially women who looked like her, had ever, in the history of humankind, ever voluntarily winked at men like him. Her plump lips, parted, were Ribena red.

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He stumbled a few times but didn’t fall. She was humming now, certainly an ominous sign—for which Asian lady hummed in the night? She had to be a pontianak, at very least. Something that fed on entrails. Yet he felt painfully alive, in a way he hadn’t felt, gosh—ever. He thought, if I should die today this whole experience will still have been worth it. Only let it be quick and painless. And don’t desecrate my corpse. I know Ma would want an open casket. I’m her only child. Here we are, she said, interrupting the part of the funeral service when his mother would show a montage of baby pictures, not all of them of him.

The group had been meeting in the nude for over seven years, born from an original pod of five to one that now numbered close to 20, when all were present. You would be lucky number twenty if you join, the woman, who turned out not to be a pontianak, said. What makes you think I would, he said. What makes you think I won’t split and call the police on you? They’ll find nothing, for one, she said, laughing. Anyway, us meeting like this in a private residence, in the nude, out of the public eye, is hardly… breaking the law. They tittered. She sidled up to him, still dressed. I know you, she said. I see you, friend. You’re no bottled-up lemming, you’re one of us, yearning for a different way of life. So, blossom! Cast it out, this spirit of benign submission! She untied her dress and shed it. Reject shame. Discard your mantle of meekness! The pantyhose came off; the frothy white lace bra, then her navy boy shorts. Her deeply tanned skin drank the moonlight. He stared, both fearful and aroused, aware suddenly of a low humming sound in his ears and the strident call of crickets. She was circling him now. Your T-shirt is soaked. Take it off, friend. He hugged himself. No. Why are you resisting? Because you fear judgment from a bunch of naked strangers? Yes. It sounded stupid when he said it out loud. You are the only one here who cares how you look without clothes. Stop being a coward! Coward! Coward! The group chanted. Free yourself, she said, slapping her chest like a tambourine, breasts rejoicing. Oh my God, he mumbled, trembling, faint. She really was supernatural, this one. Join us, friend, she commanded, merging into the group, which, almost as one, started to hop. Hop. Hop. Hop. His hands moved. Exorcising buttons, zippers. His clothes wilted off him, the cool

She undid his blindfold. They were in a very large house, with stories and wings. A department-store large residence in one of Singapore’s most exclusive neighbourhoods. The walls were timber and stone, living with plants. There were paintings and sculptures that he imagined would not have been out of place in a museum of national importance. The cooled air was scented and soft, like carefully laundered money. In the living room she finally relinquished his hand, and it felt naked. He flinched when he realised he hadn’t been touched by another person for some time now, closing in on two years. She motioned towards the sliding doors and glided out. He followed. In the yard, a gathering. Fifteen or more, folk of all ages. All naked. Dotted around the yard like gnome candles. Watching him. Then breaking into wide, unwaxen smiles. I brought someone, his new friend called out. Hi, Stranger! They chorused and waved. Bits and bobs of flesh and skin wobbled. What is going on here, he managed to say after they stopped moving. They laughed. Cheekily. Rebirth, a woman said, as a man cartwheeled behind her. Freedom.

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Part of the initiation was that everyone had to relay a fear or a pleasure to the group, depending on what the question of the week was. To Foong, some of their pleasures were scarier than their fears. One of them, elderly J, was an amateur taxidermist who favoured using rats—rats he raised. Another, a noted tai-tai, liked huffing aerosol deodorant. Then there was H, who made tableaus with human bodies and photographed them (while tacitly avoiding giving any information on the state of the bodies involved). And S, his initiator, sold sugarless cake with actual sugar baked inside. But he also knew what moved them. M worried for the wellbeing of the foster children in the home she ran; B, buff and perhaps too tanned, volunteered with his local MP because he was sick of seeing stray animals abused; and then the silent motherly type called L, who, in waiting for her eldest son to awake from his coma, had given up speaking—but not laughing. When it came to him, the leader of the circle that day, W, who Foong privately called Mr Overskinned, called out, Hey new guy, F! Tell us: what’re you afraid of? What makes your butt kentut or your heart stop? Foong hesitated. He’d thought he’d have something profound, illuminating, prepared when it was his turn, but he blanked. Three months with the nudists and already everything he once held true about himself was unravelling. So much of his world view had been built on hearsay, suspicions, a motley of vicarious experiences and inherited constructs that coalesced into this crown of unfounded fears he wore, daily. Like he’d always thought that he was too unremarkable—even ugly —to be loved, but just the other day he’d met up with one of the women from the group, D, after she’d asked him out since the last meetup. They had eaten blue gelato and kissed in broad daylight after the date. Clothes and all. Not knowing who I am, he said at last. He knew very little about anything, really. He was pleased with his answer, which had come to him shorn of guile in that instance. He was like a newborn, discovering interesting new things about himself every day. It was not too late.

night air a gentle psalm of greeting. His release was immediate, beautiful, orgasmic. Foong lifted his arms and ran towards his whooping pod.

They had rules. The rules were: Be respectful. No lewd conduct or sex. No touching. Keep your physical distance. (We are the original social distancers, one chuckled.) No names—everyone went by their initials. You were assigned one once you’d been by at least six times. Cell phones were tucked away for obvious reasons. They would play board games, sports, meditate, chant, dance, karaoke, discourse, altogether or in little groups. Each gathering was different, but there was always food. Potluck. Because some members couldn’t be around dogs (or cats), the house pets were kept in an indoor space. The garden was always trimmed down to a tender fuzz so that guests could lie down for the circle, later, without a wince. With so much tender acreage exposed, one had to take special care. It was a community; it was a safe space for those who hated clothing or what it represented. Here, they were themselves, as themselves. No artifice. Everything on the table. It was no wonder that the relationships formed through this group, romantic or otherwise, were the slow pickling kind, weathering all.

On their biweekly meetups, the entire group would cap the night lying on the grass for what they called bare circles. This was when newbies were initiated, assigned an initial instead of being called Stranger, which had been strange for him because there was no one in the world who knew Foong as intimately as these people did. They knew shrimp made him break out in hives; how hairless he was in places that were supposed to be hairy; how the evening breeze made his penis curl west, and who made it tremble.

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THE ESQUIRE EDITORIAL BOARD ENDORSES…

The taste of home No fancy dish plating. No complicated and complex flavour profiles. Home-cooked food, as we know and love, is usually wholesome with ingredients presented in their most rustic form, either sliced or diced. While eating out does expose diners to an array of international cuisines, the one we’re most familiar and comfortable with has definitely got to be food whipped up by our family’s culinary chief since we grew up relishing them on the dining table. And there’s nothing quite like them. Every family or household has their own unique recipe that isn’t easily replicated, even if it’s the same conventional dish. Take the humble fried rice, for example. One version could be simply rice and eggs, and another is a generous serving that includes cured meat or shrimp in addition to the core elements of it. Seasoning varies too. But both are still prepared in an orthodox manner. Choosing these simple yet modest home-cooked dishes over superior and elaborate renditions at restaurants has their benefits. When armed with a spatula and wok at the stove, you’re responsible for whatever’s going to be consumed. Nobody is foolish enough to produce an inedible meal. Unless you’re terrible at instructions. A study in Health Psychology, titled ‘Does self-prepared food taste better? Effects of food preparation on liking’, documented participants tasting either a self-prepared low-calorie raspberry milkshake or an identical ready-made milkshake, done by the experimenter in secret. The result? They were more likely to enjoy the milkshake they had made themselves, despite the latter followed an identical recipe too. This total control in the kitchen can also result in healthier meals. Salt and fat are maintained to one’s taste desire, hopefully in moderation. Then there are moments when we crave for home-cooked dishes. Even though ready-made options save time, an intangible ingredient is lacking. Thus, food memories come into play. Susan Whitbourne, professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Massachusetts, reveals that “food memories feel so nostalgic because there’s all this context of when you were preparing or eating this food, so the food becomes almost symbolic of other meaning”. Now you know another effective method to take a trip down memory lane besides browsing photographs. To achieve that, however, requires precise recipe execution.

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