I remember when I first went to the Projector. I was with my friends walking along down Geylang Road after eating Vietnamese food at Grandlink Square. I was 17. The sun was baking me with a constant laser beam, pew pew pew, and I was walking under one of those building scaffolding things, you know the ones that are bamboo in Hong Kong and metal everywhere else. Someone suggested that we should go to this new cinema. Holy shit, it had bean bags AND you could bring your own food in! We popped into a mama shop and scooped up a bunch of junk food before heading to Golden Mile. The film we watched that day was BLADE RUNNER 2042. I fell asleep three times.
The cinema itself wasn’t anything special. Actually it was kind of shitty. The seats were squeaky as hell when you flopped them down (yes flop them down not BEND!), the leg room was nonexistent and you could hear the movies from the adjacent cinema halls at 30% volume. The seats were kinda uncomfortable and you couldn’t really get a good view from like half the seats. But there was something that was so down-to-earth and innocent about it all. Sure, the seats were small, but you could sort of sit anywhere after 10 mins of the movie starting. The toilets were cramped as hell, but the walls were flushed with movie posters, ironically turning it into a photo spot. There was this time I peed beside a guy (?) in a skirt, but that’s a story for another time…
And before the movie started they used to run a different “No phones” intro, not the Turkish Luke Skywalker one but it’s slipping my mind…
The place just had a lot of soul. It had a punk vibe, but it wasn’t exclusionary like most Singaporean hipster places. It was truly accepting of all kinds of art. Before Cineleisure and the big blockbusters, they were showing all sorts of shitty ass foreign movies at their matineés for the unemployed (me). I remember this particular bad one, a French animation about aliens taking over Earth but only keeping humans (or was it cats) to give them massages while they listed to Lizst. Or the Tarkovsky, where I sat in the middle row for 3 hours smelling friend chicken grease from the guy sitting in front of me. I didn’t sleep at all for that one by the way. Fucking fantastic movie. OR the time I brought nachos in with my friend and we spilled it all over ourselves in the dark. It was just a cool place. If you ever had a Projector membership, you’re cool in my book.
Me and my guy Martin Scorsese have always maintained that moviegoing is a social experience. I don’t think you should be quiet. In fact I support people who are loud as hell at the movies. And this is coming from someone who would watch like 30 movies outside per year. The crowd at The Projector always leaned creative. They were never afraid of expressing themselves. Even compared to AFA crowds, where I’d feel uncomfortable if I laughed too loud. You’re supposed to laugh at the cinemas! You should laugh and scream and cover your eyes, that’s the point of being in front of the big screen. If you want everything to be quiet just connect your AirPods and stare at your iPhone in the palm of your hand while you travel from Woodlands to Tampines on the brown line. Seriously, two of the best movie experiences I had were for Parasite and The Substance. People were laughing and hollering and screaming at the perfect timings. It’s true that film is a dialogue between the creator and the viewer, but it’s not just one viewer. The magic is that many viewers can have the same physical reaction. And that moment is magic.
But the MVP experience was definitely the first Ichiko Aoba concert. I lost my shit when I found out. THE Ichiko Aoba was coming to Singapore? Ichiko Aoba, the singer who made me learn guitar even though I bought an acoustic instead of a classical accidentally? Ichiko Aoba, the artiste who influenced me to only play fingerstyle? Ichiko Aoba, who soothed my soul with her playing and her voice in the darkest of times? I booked the ticket without looking at the price. The concert was to be at The Projector’s REDRUM. The one straight ahead from the entrance. I was wearing a buttoned long sleeve because I had no idea what I was supposed to wear. Everyone went in and seated themselves. Then there she was, almost Hobbit-like, all 130cm of her gliding onto stage with her expensive-ass classical guitar. Then she gave the craziest performance I’ve ever heard, making only one mistake in the whole hour. There were like 40 people there. Seven years later I watched her again at the Esplanade where she filled 2,000 seats. I was in the back row this time. Way less intimate, plus she made more mistakes, but I was so fucking proud of her. She actually had fans who WEREN’T depressed hikikomori losers now. WE MAJOR. Started from the bottom now we here baby.
Strangely I wasn’t too sad when I heard the news. And I’m not sad now either. The Projector is gone, but something new will come from it all. The creative people in Singapore need a space. The sad people too and the marginalised and the dreamers and the unusually emotional. Come on man, I need some place to watch lousy foreign films at 2pm that’s not AFA.
Art is dead, they’re coming for our spaces my friend.
Yet while The Projector is gone for now, it will materialise again maybe if not in name then in spirit. I know this.
Now for the serious topic. I was thinking about how more people are supporting Palestine. To copy-paste my reddit comment below:
“It’s not just young people, it’s people worldwide in the Global South. While they probably wouldn’t put a label on themselves, they definitely have a clear anti imperialist and postcolonial stance.
Most of these people’s grandparents were brutalised during WW2 and the subsequent violent decolonisation wars, along with coups and whatnot. The struggle in P has become a litmus test as well as an unintended crash course in political science for a whole generation. What I is doing is functionally identical to colonial and settler genocides justified by white supremacy and control of media narratives.
I’ll just give two examples here. The first is the illegal settler rush into West of what we know as the USA today (1850s). White settlers illegally settled the Indian Territories. Native Americans were displaced and massacred, their land taken and eventually driven to Oklahoma.
Sound familiar? Except back then, it was called “manifest destiny” and “white man’s burden”. The “Trail of Tears” is the Nakba. The wording is different but the narrative is the same.
The second is China. After the Eight Nation Alliance invaded China (1910s), it carved up the country and furthered it’s colonisation. While not fully colonised, cities were occupied. The ENA made them pay billions, crippling their economy. It’s the same playbook the imperial powers used in Africa and Latin America. And today, 7 out 8 of these powers are staunch supporters of I, either through directly giving them bombs and money or military alliances. Looking at its past and generational trauma, it’s not hard to imagine why China has always supported P.
Now the question I ask myself every day: is it going to be any different this time around? Or it another people going to be cleansed off the face of this earth?”
Too harsh? Idk. I just finished How to Hide an Empire by Immerwahr and The Question of Palestine by Said. It just seems crazy to me somehow. Because if you’ve ever felt bad about indigenous people getting genocided and displaced, guess what it’s happening again.
I also put the course codes on all my old posts. And I realised that my entire NTU OneDrive was wiped. So I just lost 4.5 years of stuff in a poof. Lucky I posted it here! It does feel kind of sad. I might ask NTU if they can get my stuff back. But it doesn’t seem important to me right now. I’ve been throwing shit out of my room. I just threw out 70kg of trash including a 2m tall shelf. Next to go is this cabinet, the spare bed, another bookshelf and then I have to repaint the walls and get a new chair and two mood lamps and a peg board and drill two wall shelves and a guitar stand and cushions and maybe a new table too. This project has been taking up all my time and it’s honestly pretty fun. I want to put my posters back up too.
And I’ll probably start taking Malay lessons next week. Not my preferred way of learning a language, but it’ll have to do. I remember when I was in Spain, my friend who is the only FtM I have ever met asked me if I would stay in Singapore or go elsewhere after graduation. Realistically I never had a choice. As an only child and as someone with no career prospects. Of course I wanted to travel the world, walk the Camino, swing around on trees in Cebu or some shit and go rock climbing in Colorado. But we take what we can get. I have faith that I’ll do all these things one day. And that’s my long-winded way of explaining why I’m learning Malay instead of continuing to learn Spanish. After Malay, probably Tamil, but let’s focus on Malay first.
Anyway, keep busy my friends. Ciao!