Now that my personal bubble is firmly back in place, I should be able to make and post something this weekend. This is just a post to say that I'm not dead. No cheerful art this time, however; I'm just too tired.
Speaking of which, something rather interesting is happening in Singapore right now. A twenty-five year old woman has been arrested for vandalism. Not unusual, except that her brand of graffiti is intelligent, ironic and extremely tasteful, and next to everyone is on her side on this one. We Singaporeans have a reputation for being a nasty impatient bunch who get antsy waiting for pedastrian traffic lights to change; the only socially-acceptable way to express this excess energy, the doddery old bat next to you being legally off-limits, is to spam at the traffic light button as if doing so would help the lights turn faster.
So imagine my pleasure when little round stickers started appearing on traffic lights saying stuff like
- Press once can already
- Anyhow press police catch
- Press to time travel
(Picture found on tumblr)
It wouldn't have been so damn funny if the stickers hadn't been classy black affairs tailor-made to fit the useless little arrow signs above the buttons. Or the hilarious use of colloquial maxims of the kind that our parents universally nagged us with when we were children, at the age where simply pushing a button was magic. I imagine the vast majority of pedastrians by this point were laughing too hard to be pissed at slow traffic lights, giving said button a much-needed respite; verily, Sticker Lady might have saved our Land Transport Authority (LTA) quite a bit of cash on replacing buttons that might have otherwise worn out too fast. More importantly, she was considerate enough to have made her stickers easily removeable, or they would not have disappeared and been replaced with the regularity that I have observed over the past several months. There's also a bit about her stenciling 'MY GRANDFATHER ROAD' on a bunch of streets (if you're not local/ you don't understand what the joke is, just take for granted that it's screamingly funny), which is not so easily removable, but it certainly makes me happier about using the road -- and, ironically, much better-inclined towards the LTA for not having erased it before I got to eyeball a photograph of it on Facebook.
So now that they've caught her, they're giving her an option between a $2000 fine and a three-year jail term, inclusive of prison caning. So much for my good feelings about LTA. So much for street art, humour, and the only kind of culture that Singaporeans can call Singaporean -- the kind that reminds us of the things we grew up with, the recognition that the very things we do that drive us crazy are in some sense part of the national character, and the sense of humour that keeps us sane in the face of steady inflation (God, you could buy a nice house in the US for the amount you're made to spend on a family car here) and the dead, cold, businesslike efficiency by which the streets are kept clean of all creativity. And then Bigwigs make speeches lamenting both our lack of culture AND Singaporean creativity in general. Forget about censorship, just leave us room to have a little fun!
http://www.change.org/petitions/mica-review-sentence-of-skl0-arts-censorship-in-sg
...aaaand that's about the most political any of my posts will get. Singapore is a great place to live, yes; Sticker Lady was technically vandalising public property, yes; it was a clever idea for her to have done it but she shouldn't have because she was tangling with the law, yes; she knew she was tangling with the law and was deliberately provoking it to make a statement, yes. And make a statement she did: the statement was important, and I'm behind her 100%. The stickers weren't doing any harm; you can't compare it to spray paint harassment or chewing gum sabotage on MRT doors (I'm fundamentally conservative; anything which Hurts The Economy or Negatively Affects Human Quality of Life is Wrong). It wouldn't do any harm either for the authorities to be less bloody stiff-necked about this particular business. It certainly hasn't done any harm to us lowly pedestrians except perhaps for our propensity to snort on bubble tea laughing too hard.
Frankly, if our Sticker Lady MUST be punished, let them punish her by commissioning her to make a bunch of awesome, funny and above all LEGAL signs for LTA that everyone can enjoy without worrying about whether the artist would have to pay for it with a pound of flesh. I call that fair. They can call it, oh, 'community service', preferably with a fat paycheck for expenses. I'd sign a petition for that.
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