DC's

* (restored)

 

‘Haw Par Villa is a Chinese mythology theme park in Singapore with more than 1,000 statues and dioramas glorifying Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian folklore. Built in 1937 by brothers Aw Boon Haw and Aw Boon Par – famous for selling the popular medicinal paste Tiger Balm – older locals look back fondly at a place where parents would bring children for an education in morality, complete with bloody visual aids.

‘In 1988, the Singapore Tourism Board took charge of the Tiger Balm Gardens and renamed it “Haw Par Villa Dragon World”. The Haw Par in the park’s name is based on the Aw brothers’ personal names—Haw and Par, which literally mean “tiger” and “leopard” respectively. The dioramas and statues were restored, while plays, acrobatic displays and puppet shows were organised and held there. The management imposed entrance fees but the high fees discouraged visitors, so the management incurred a loss of S$31.5 million over 10 years. The park management made a profit during its first year of operations after renovations in 1994, broke even in 1995, but started incurring losses over the next three years and was forced to provide free entry in 1998.

‘Thousands used to throng the park, and it once stood shoulder-to-shoulder with attractions like Singapore Zoo and Jurong Bird Park. In its glory days, this avant guard theme park was an iconic symbol in Singapore, and considered a must see by locals and foreigners alike. “Every Singaporean over the age of 35 probably has a picture of themselves at Haw Par,” said Desmond Sim, a local playwright. Those pictures would probably include the following statues, each made from plastered cement paste and wire mesh: a human head on the body of a crab, a frog in a baseball cap riding an ostrich, and a grandmother suckling at the breast of another woman.

‘But the highlight of this bizarre park are the Ten Courts of Hell. This attraction used to be set inside a 60-metre long trail of a Chinese dragon but the dragon has been demolished, so the attraction is now covered by grey stone walls. A tableau of severe disciplines are shown in painstaking detail, along with a placard stating the sin that warranted it. Tax dodgers are pounded by a stone mallet, spikes driven into a skeletal chest cavity like a bloodthirsty pestle in mortar. Spot the tiny tongue as it is pulled out of a screaming man, watch the demon flinging a young girl into a hill of knives. Ungratefulness results in a blunt metal rod cutting a very large, fleshly heart out of a woman. Perhaps the most gruesome depiction is an executioner pulling tiny intestines out from a man tied to a pole. The colons were visible and brown. The crime? Cheating during exams.

‘However, Haw Par Villa is facing an afterlife of its own. As the country of Singapore developed, and became almost futuristic in it’s modern appearance, the thousands of dated figurines that make up this park began to lose their luster along with much of their original appeal. Some of the areas of Haw Par Villa have been shut down due to lack of preservation Hardly anyone goes there anymore, and closed sections of the park point to an uncertain future. For some it’s a refreshing antidote to the mall-culture, but it looks like mall culture is winning out over a day out in hell.’ — collaged

 

 

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Gallery

 

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Presentations

Haw Par Villa: The Renaissance
by Genevieve Kong

 

Copy of Haw Par Villa
by Jiamin Wu

 

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Tours

Haw Par Villa Singapore: The last blooming lotus

Silent visit

It will all be demolished one day. The land is worth billions.

A walkthrough of the Ten Courts of Hell attraction at Haw Par Villa

 

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Rebranding Haw Par Villa

Proposal #1
by Leonard Koh

This rebranding project aims to promote about Haw Par Villa through the creation of a new identity to create a new impression to people who have been there before and arouse the curiosity of those who have never heard or been there before. Other materials have been created to promote about the area and others have been created as keepsakes and a reason to return.

Logo

 

Corporate Stationary

 

Postcards (Sun Wu Kong)

 

Postcard (10 Courts of Hell)

 

Postcard (Laughing Buddha)

 

Direct Mailer

 

Calendar

 

Park Map

 

 

Proposal #2
by Chinwee

An extensive and different take on rebranding for Haw Par Villa. Targeting the youths for a change, this project aims to revive Haw Par Villa and also the traditional chinese values and cultures that comes with it.

Brand Identity

 

Park Map

 

Park Souvenirs

 

Posters

 

Brochure & Postcards

 

Outdoor advertising

 

Popup Brochure

 

Website

 

Direct Mailer

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Malik, Hey. I think it is Furry BlackLight. That name rings a loud bell. I’ll check for when it is next and see if it has a dress code. Ah, thanks for filling me in. Exciting and intimidating almost can’t exist without one another in the best cases, so, yeah, give it your all. All luck needed. Let me know how it goes if you remember. ** jay, Very fun: that investigation. You’re not rambling, I’m an excitable one too, and finding a perfect fit for your tastes is heaven. It just makes me more determined to find it. The artist who’s doing the ‘God Jr’ graphic novel is a manga expert, and I’ll see if he can give me some pointers. xo. ** Carsten, Thanks for the links/tips. I’ll go for them a bit later. Miles Davis had already gone electric at that concert. I think it must have been when he was early in the investigations that culminated in ‘Bitches Brew’. Yes, when comments have a bunch of links in them, they’re often sent to ‘moderation’ and then I have to approve the comment before it gets posted. Well, go find some conducive musicians? Is there an experimental musicians scene in your general area? ** Adem Berbic, If there’s a magic shop there, I’ll find it, trust me. Hope your ass feeling wasn’t just illness being flirty. You on your feet? ** Charalampos, You can buy ‘Worsted’ from the great Asterism site here. Yes, I did spotlight a Schutt book, and I need to illuminate another. No, the Amsterdam venue is just bringing us in for the evening and overnight. It’s unfortunately during a busy screening stint. We have Berlin, Palermo, and Amsterdam pretty much back to back. So I’ll have to go to Amsterdam again one of these weeks. ** _Black_Acrylic, I think of electroclash as a compliment. It seems to be making something of a comeback. Peaches seems to be packing them in on her current tour. That score doesn’t seem self-indulgent at all. Not in the slightest. ** fish, Good question. I was certainly a major social misfit in my wannabe magician days. Maybe it’s not so disassociated from wanting to be an experimental writer. In LA there’s this place that’s pretty famous called The Magic Castle where magicians hang out and perform for other magicians. You can only get in if you get permission from a professional magician. I went once when a friend of mine was starring in a movie where he played a magician. It was pretty fascinating watching the magicians try to impress people who knew all the tricks. ** Steve, Hey. Glad you dug some of it. I don’t know where that gif is from. I just saw it, and it intrigued me. To me it looks like it’s a moment from some theater piece. True: the persona thing. Enjoy your efficiently working body. ** Bill, You’ve seen Gong Slayer live? Wow. Haha, Slava has very liberal interpretation of what the word collaboration means. He interviewed me for a magazine once. That’s it. ** Hugo, Yes, Whitehouse reuniting for that gig is a big surprise. They must have been offered a lot of cash. I don’t know what a tomodachi life island is. ** HaRpEr //, I don’t even know what the mood one needs to be in to want to listen to Sunn0))) would be called, but I certainly go there. Lish certainly seemed capable of helping quite a wide variety of writers, from Raymond Carver to Lutz to DeLillo to Sam Lypsite to Schutt to Barry Hannah to Denis Johnson to … that’s a wild array. I think I relate to your description of your editing a lot. It feels right. ** sal, Haha, yeah. There’s tons of gay poetry going on du jour, but I haven’t read any that has that ‘shoot for the stars’ aspect that was the rule of thumb in the 80s. Boy love was considered a total legit subject back then, for instance. A lot of the better known poets of that time went there. Really impossible to imagine that now. ** Laura, Hi. My pleasure. I’m actually kind of curious why they put Rothko on the cover. I’ll ask Stephen. Bit of a surprise. I think I’m more on the balls of my feet today. Lyricism is maybe the best the truth can offer. Uh, it would probably take me days and a lot of referring to my notes and graphs to yes or no your theories, and I still might not be able to. It’s that kind of book. ** Okay. I thought I’d bring fake gore back to blog for a day. See you tomorrow.

 

HYPER GAL
SUNN O)))
The Black Warhols
Tyler Friedman
My New Band Believe
Asteroid Ekosystem
MEMORIALS
Vic Bang
ezcodylee
Gong Slayer
Annie Hogan

 

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HYPER GAL [Mere Wisp]
‘Springing from Osaka, Japan’s cultural center and historical heart, comes HYPER GAL, a two-piece band consisting of visual artist Koharu Ishida on vocals and noise artist Kurumi Kadoya on drums. The minimalist duo make maximum impact – stripping music down beyond the bare essentials, to create shimmering, no wave pop from blastbeat drums, glittery keyboard loops and ethereal bubblegum vocals – laced with velvet and firecrackers.’ — botanique

 

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sunn O))) Butch’s Guns
‘“Sunn O))),” the eponymous, twenty-somethingth album from the long-running Seattlian duo Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley, could be categorized as jazz or classical or avant-garde much more readily than rock, even though its only instrument is that most rock of objects: electric guitars — Gibsons, no less. There’s no percussion, vocals or seemingly any single notes; there’s song structure (or at least compositions) but you’d be hard pressed to identify it. It’s just massive power chords and feedback, droning and shifting into different shapes in a way that recalls a randomly generating video image, or Mark Rothko paintings like one on this album’s cover. When you sit and stare at one of Rothko’s massive paintings in a museum for several minutes, it feels and seems like it’s moving, although that’s impossible. While that’s not a direct analogy, it’s what this album feels like.’ — Jem Aswad

 

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The Black Warhols Choke
‘THE BLACK WARHOLS is the long-awaited project from Detroit-born, Berlin-based creative polymath, former Underground Resistance member, and Spirit of Detroit Award recipient for exceptional artistic achievement Alan Oldham aka DJ T-1000. But this isn’t techno. At all. Inspired by Oldham’s longtime immersion into Berlin’s legendary art and music scenes, THE BLACK WARHOLS is a weird mix of dubbed-out, trip-hop beats, shoegaze textures, a bit of industrial, and a smattering of Suicide/DAF-style electro-punk. A slowed-down, trip-hop cover version of “Rock On,” a glam rock anthem originally released by David Essex in 1975, is even on the sonic menu.’ — traxsource

 

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Tyler Friedman Štoniljid
‘Drawing on the legacies of downtown minimalism, METLASR connects avant-garde composition, aspects of global traditional musics and advanced synthesizer technique into an ambitious and singular hybrid. Animated by generative modular sequencing and grounded by undulating bass, the album focuses on an endless cascade of pirouetting geometric melodics, which are spread across a spectrally fused ensemble of crystalline FM and sampled pitched percussion – specifically gamelan orchestra, marimba, mbira, vibraphone and tingklik. The assemblage of voices interlace in fractal mirrors, aggregating into pointillist harmonizations heightened by multiple layers of dub processing. The use of alternative tunings — primarily 24-note per octave just intonation — infuses the poly-modal progressions with lush radiance, staging tension between the strange and the beautiful through neon inflections of subtle dissonance.’ — Days of Disorder

 

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My New Band Believe Kick Me
‘Careening and hallucinatory, it is fitting that My New Band Believe – the shapeshifting collective led by former Black Midi bassist and occasional frontman Cameron Picton – originated in a fever dream. The band’s name was one that lodged in his mind as he battled serious food poisoning while touring China with his former band in August 2023.’ — Patrick Clarke

 

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Asteroid Ekosystem Off Axis
‘The brainchild of avant composer, pianist, and ARIA Award winner Alister Spence, Asteroid Ekosystem brings together an extraordinary ensemble: guitarist and musical pioneer Ed Kuepper, improvisational upright bassist Lloyd Swanton (The Necks), and drummer Toby Hall (The Catholics / Mike Nock). Together, they create a hypnotic, genre-defying sound world where jazz, rock, psychedelia, and improvisation collide.’ –– Alister Spence

 

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MEMORIALS Dropped Down The Well
‘All Clouds Bring Not Rain is the second album from Memorials, the duo born out of two of the more quietly canonical acts in British underground music: Electrelane and Wire. The territory they cover is vast, traversed with the ease of people who have earned their passport stamps. It sits downstream of the Canterbury continuum; Kosmische drift bleeds into Stockhausen abstraction; Tangerine Dream sequencers into Radiophonic static, bleeps and bloops that feel lifted from a forgotten BBC education programme.’ — Hayley Scott

 

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Vic Bang Synthesise
‘Composer and sound designer Victoria Barca combines bleeps, crunchy percussion and chirping electronics on her albums to create music that blurs the line between acoustic and synthetic, laboratory-created and field-recorded. Her fourth album, released by Mondoj, has the power to create musical worlds. It combines electronic, electroacoustic and acoustic sounds, juxtaposing exotica-style sounds, quasi-folk forms, vocalisations and snippets of recordings. It also shows the potential and possibilities that sound offers. This album was created almost entirely without leaving home. Imaginary folk, futuristic folk, freak folk, weird folk – these labels evoke specific connotations, and I mention them to show how vast a conceptual and associative resource music can have when it is not assigned to a specific place or tradition.’ — Jakub Knera

 

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ezcodylee DON’T BE SCARED!
‘STUNT 4 LIFE is the clearest distillation of rapper ezcodylee’s punk-inspired ethos to date, neatly buffing out intergenre seams in pursuit of cathartic clarity.’ — Vivian Medithi

 

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Gong Slayer @ Bingo Art Gallery & Studios ABQ
‘Low end and midrange drones sure to vibrate the walls of your skull 💀🔥 48″ WIND GONG, 32″ WIND GONG, 18″ SOLAR GONG.’ — iron gnome

 

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Annie Hogan Death Rituals
‘Annie Hogan is something of a quiet icon of goth and post-punk. A longtime friend of Marc Almond, she put on early Soft Cell shows and played with his dark cabaret side-project Marc and the Mambas. She appears on Barry Adamson’s seminal Moss Side Story and has worked with Lydia Lunch, Nick Cave, and several members of Einstürzende Neubauten. She’s also been releasing evocative solo music since the late 1980s, the latest of which, the six track album Tongues In My Head, strikes an elegant balance of light and shade.’ — Claire Biddles

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** jay, Hi. I probably mentioned this before, but when I was a kid I was so obsessed with magic tricks that I subscribed to four Magic Trick of the Month Clubs, which were these ‘clubs’ where they’d send you a magic trick every month in the mail. Bliss has maybe never again come to me so easily. There’s an actual real stately home where the manga is set? Maybe bring a taser? I do very much want to go to the ABBA holographic concert. I was thinking I’d go when we went to London to screen ‘RT’ but it looks like that’s not going to happen. So I need to find a good excuse to take the Eurostar, and I probably need to be reasonably quick about it. ** Laura, Yes, that Imaad Wassif. Obviously he had to be on set when we were working with his son, and he’s super nice. He even agreed to be an extra. You’ll never remember this, but in the scene where the haunted house is open, three boys dressed as werewolves escort the first person in line to the entrance, and that’s Imaad. Lyricism can be a magic trick. I use it that way all the time. Magic tricks were like owning an amusement park. I had no problem explaining the tricks’ tricks. I’ve never been protectionist when it comes to suspense. I’m actually on my toes today. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Your test comment worked, did you see? I’m so sorry. I hope the blog is fully absorbent again today. Grr. ** Adem Berbic, Drat. Surely there’s some magic shoppe still extent somewhere in London of all places. But, yeah, probably in the boonies at this point. I’d be in the army of the magic people. Just tell the venue it’s going to be immersive and then do whatever the fuck you want. What are they going to do, sue you? My week looks reasonably okay if my instincts are operating properly. Yours? ** _Black_Acrylic, I don’t know Mr. Benn, of course, but that is a lovely title sequence. AI couldn’t make that if it tried. Thanks, pal. ** Carsten, Haha. Disneyland used to have this really great magic shop in Fantasyland, and when I went to Disneyland, which was many multiple times each year, I’d end up spending half my visit in the shop looking around in awe, and there was one guy/employee who did tricks for the customers who was really good, and it was only years later that I realised he was Steve Martin who worked there before his career took off. I don’t buy my Christian friends’ beliefs either, but, at least in their cases, the belief does something to their thinking that I find very interesting at least in short bursts. Yes, I went to that concert. Well, it was in 1968, so I would have been 15. My mind was seriously blown, mostly, in retrospect, by Nina Simone, who was at her most intense and angry at that time. ** Bill, The Paris Magic Museum! Located in the Marquis de Sade’s former basement! Love that place. Cool, Zac and I are going to Berlin soon to show ‘RT’. I’ll check that shop out. No, wait, both of those shops. Thanks, scout! ** Malik, Hi, Malik! Happy … what is it … Tuesday! Believe it or not, Criss Angel actually commented on this blog once years and years ago. I used a vidclip of him in some post, and he swooped in. He seemed friendly. Awesome about the congenial Furry Convention. They hold one here, but I’ve never gone. I think I will next time. I’ll look up those movies, especially ‘American Stream’. It sounds intriguing. Fond memories are overwhelming me about the New/Next Festival, which must be coming up soon. How are you? I think the last time we spoke you were preparing for a theater project, no? How did that go, if I’m not wrong? Best week to you, my friend. ** Steeqhen, Hi! Well, I’m very glad your colon is still in there doing its job. The human body is so packed they should call in the fire marshals. Promising sounding job prospects/hunting. Being a cultural critic isn’t bad — I did it — but I don’t think that job will pay your bills these days, but I could be wrong. Don’t let that stop you. Thanks about ‘God Jr.’. As I’ve said, the last section of that novel is my favorite thing I’ve ever written. ** Charalampos, Hi. ‘Arcana’ it is then. I know the new Dumont is premiering at Cannes, but I don’t know anything about it. Hi back from pleasant seeming central Paris. ** Steve, Hi. No, the gig was just a one-time gig. I assume it happened because all of the artists involved must have been excited to share a gig with each other. They were all at absolute peaks of their work at that point. Pretty mindblowing. Wow, that was a particularly awful scam festival that guy blew the whistle on. ** HaRpEr //, Yeah, I loved gag gifts as much as I loved magic tricks. Sigh. ‘Worsted’ is crazy good. Christine Schutt is very good. Her writing isn’t daring or innovative on the level of Lutz, but her sentences are excitingly worked and nailed. I should put a book of hers in the blog’s spotlight. I will. Thanks, I’ll try the Friko album. Cool. ** ⋆˚꩜｡darbbzz⋆˚꩜｡, Exactly. I’m like a curse on the people standing behind me. The best part of growing so quickly was being able to buy alcohol and cigarettes and porn and impress my childish looking peers. Wow, I just peeked at the first bit of your mix video, and what a thrilling beginning. I could stare at that giffy image forever, and I will. Everyone, The mighty and unimpeachable ꩜｡darbbzz⋆˚꩜｡ has made a music playlist with Jen from the Dark Crystal as the background and involving enchanted sorta songs from the 60s-70s, and I just tested it, and its promise is highly notable. Go be amongst it here. Amazing! Have a gooder than good one. Make that many. ** Sofeea, Hi, Sofeea. Thank you very much, and it’s lovely to have you here. Unfortunately, no, I don’t remember who wrote that essay or what it was called, I’m sorry. I wish I did. How are you? Who are you? ** Right. Today I made another one of my gigs featuring stuff I’ve been listening to and interested by of late. Perhaps something or other up there will find favor with you. See you tomorrow.