part of a recreation of shophouses in the chinatown museum in singapore. some of the people interviewed as part of their collection of oral histories came from the same area of china as my grandfather, and even had a similar accent due to speaking the same dialect! with tiny rooms, housing sometimes five people, shophouses weren’t such ancient history for my mother either…
speaking of things in the past, i came across the issue of vice entitled ‘1994‘, which had me fooled as if it was a real archival copy from that year. it makes me think the spectre of that year influences most of my tastes. lisa carver? i read her autobiography, and have a couple of her old zines. and you know i have a big thing for zines in general. and my so-called life. and x-girl was an aspirational fashion label to me before i had any cash to buy any of their clothes.
which makes sense because i was only fourteen then. even if i was too dumb to find these things at that age, somehow they creep out of the past into the now and coax my aesthetic out. am i one of those people who think the nineties had more going for it in popular culture? then i think of flannelette and everyone’s shit long hair, and i snap out of it.
and other things now recently in the past, conan o’brien’s tonight show run. i’m downloading the entire last week and watching it chronologically, and then i will do… something.