Singapore

I spent a week in Singapore awhile back, a week that dissolved like grains of sugar in weak tea // here are a few fragments from this city, which I consider to be the true twenty-first century city.

Once a rule sighted a strange beast that he assumed to be a lion, and hence Singapore got its name: the Lion City. A city named for a mistake; a city that was always a site of transglobal commerce (or so the travel computer on the Airbus 380 from Narita tells me).

There is an island here that used to be called something like the Island of Death from Behind -- it was a prison island-- but in the 1960s they had a contest to rename it; now it's called Sentosa, meaning Tranquility. You take a monorail there, to the simulacrum, and are greeted by exuberant calypso-esque music; the manicured gardens scream with cicadas, and off the white beach of sand bought from Indonesia, tankers fill the straits-- An oil refinery looms in the distance-- It's my twenty-first century nightmare-- But at least they tried to make a playground for the people-- Some utopian impulse at work there, though terribly misguided--

On my last night in the city, my friend treats me to a ride on the Singapore Flyer, the world's largest ferris wheel (until Beijing opens one in a few months)... It takes 35 minutes to make the rotation. It is raining.

You have little context for this photo (besides what I wrote above), yet you can vaguely tell it is of something Important & glorious, no?
In a 4am taxi to Changi, I stare at the television inside the seat in front of me, watch repeats of a commercial for Global Handwashing Day. There are sort-of-headlines, wannabe headlines, information-fragments that stream past on the top of the screen. IN KAZAKHSTAN, THEY EAT, DRINK, AND RIDE HORSES. Or, AIRCRAFT MAINTENANCE IS AN INDUSTRY WITH $1 BILLION GROWTH POTENTIAL. signal/noise floating past in the sultry night, blurred skyscrapers blinking past in the unstarred night, you can vaguely tell something important and glorious is unfolding in this city, in this century, but you can't make sense of it; the whole thing crawling past contextless, speaking indirectly to a silent viewer--