BACKSTORY
THE LONG VERSION
Back in the post-colonial 1970s, rock music and comic books were banned in Singapore, and men with long hair were routinely arrested. Then slowly things got better.
Growing up there in the late ’80s, the bookstores were still poorly stocked, the libraries depleted, and only two music stores (Valentine and Da-Da) stocked LPs by anyone worth listening to. Movies were chopped up by the censors, sometimes producing ludicrous poetry. (You HAD to have a sense of humor.) My friends and I decided to devise our own fun.
We infiltrated the Film Society at 14, sat in the back and talked through screenings of Satyajit Ray and Taviani Brothers. We made $5 a pop reviewing records for an underground magazine called “Before I Get Old,” run by an expressionless pair of brothers who made us listen to (and then quizzed us on) historical bands like Velvet Underground, Patti Smith and the Who. We spent that money buying RE/search magazines. We made bad T-shirts declaring our devotion to Morrissey.
We made new friends (one who brought her pet python to school every day, one who made pencils roll off desks just by staring at them, one who claimed she was a ninja by night). I was somehow always surrounded by (strange and) remarkable kids. Our teacher Mr. Harris, a hearty Welshman, was alternately amused and exasperated with us, not least when some of us showed up one day disguised as nurses. Because of heroes like Sonic Youth, others of us started bands (like this and that).
And we created “The Exploding Cat,” a zine filled with zany collages and dedicated to shoplifters, Werner Herzog and regular people who wanted to knit sweaters for their goldfish (detailed instructions were enclosed). The first issue featured a silk-screened cover of Mark E. Smith, lead singer of The Fall. It was highlighted in the venerable zine listings bible, Factsheet 5, and as a result, while studying for my A-Levels, I also shipped off hundreds of issues and answered a ton of mail.
In other words, we did what rowdy, slightly-obnoxious kids in any minor city would have done to stave off boredom — except nobody else was doing it there then. That was good, because it made us special, AND bad, because we were all alone. When Julian scribbled a call to join his Mickey Mouse Dharma Bums Club on a library copy of “On the Road,” it was Ben who phoned.
We didn’t realize then, of course, that that was the beginning of something. We were the first generation in that part of the world to properly experience the liberating effects of pop culture, to live out some idea of freedom (even if it was only an idea). We could have been an arts collective — or something — but weighed down with teen neuroses, we never saw the big picture.
Over three months in the summer of 1992, we shot a surrealist road movie called “Shirkers,” which I wrote. I also played the lead, S., a peculiarly uncharismatic 16-year-old murderess. The other characters included Rahman the Visibility Inspector, Julian the Armchair Hedonist and an epileptic girl named Monster who loved to boogie. 200 extras, a double-decker bus and a gigantic dog named Mega were utilized. We abducted four seniors from a retirement home and stole children away from school; I narrowly missed a speeding train. A soundtrack was created. (Frustratingly, except for a trailer, the film remains in captivity today. The toxic director absconded with everything, later to die in Texas, though not before handing the materials over to somebody else — that’s a whole other story.) And then we disbanded, pursued different things, went to college on different continents, became different people, grew up.
A decade and a half later, ensconced in California, I look up my old comrades from time to time — one is a self-flagellating producer, one is a Virginia Woolf scholar, one is a Grotowski practitioner, one is a survey-tabulating student of Bongo-Bongo anthroposemiotics at UC Santa Barbara, and there are many more (bandits, plagiarists, faded pop stars). I look at them, from a distance, from time to time. I guess it’s not so bad having this atlas of invisible pals.
