Somebody - Nobody (Nov25)

Us And Them 

cursive gold on black carried by the beefy lad at the phone & accessories store on the walk-through for the aircon at City Plaza. Cheap items even in the higher design range, small businessmen can don a new, crisp and unfaded with tight collar once a week. 

         The scribe too tired to record a number of others introduced into the neighbourhood that month. 

         Second language composers up in HK or the studios across the Pearl delta, one guesses, magpie pickings in the exploration of the master culture/foreign tongue. 

      Urban Groove New York 

a variation on the commonplace theme borne by a mainland lass getting on the bus at upper Geylang.   

      Vandal Is Going To Destroy The World 

black gothic represented by a younger local still trying to find his feet in hipsterdom, and of course struggling in the strangulating environment. (This lad wants to offer his girl advice on some recent trouble in either her friendship, or work group.) 

         Quite absent at any of the Komala Vilas tables half hour later. Interestingly, one finds the Indians far less prone to such faltering billboard tees; whether locals or the imported labour. Garish colour and thrown-together patterning take the fancy of this cohort. 

         It is the local Chins, and then to lesser extent the foreign talent from the region—not the labourers—striving for the Euro-Ameri leg-up to somewhere / anywhere. The locals, once Chinese, in the steamy hot air now feeling for something other. Straining. Identity, precious commodity not automatically conferred, even with money and other top-shelf signifiers. Casting around, marooned on this castaway island. I AM SOMEBODY they wanna declare; assert. A tee often presses the case that cannot be made otherwise. 

      FULL OF HIDDEN TALENTS 

Tick behind prison bars white on black said a lot—young fella at the Guillemard stop opposite Versailles condo, in the triangle with Waterina & Sunny Views returning… 

         Somehow the ol’ fave here had unaccountably slipped from memory: NOBODY IS PERFECT / I AM NOBODY, mostly proclaimed by dowdy dads and prematurely aged teens foot-dragging along the pavements and through the malls. 

         Painful enough to make a feeling observer well and truly wince. 

       Luck Is Where PREPARATION Meets Opportunity 

Weekend wear on a clean-cut, fresh-faced local aspirant, no-one will believe of course. Purchased with his own money and carried hopefully. 

         The success of the Sing’ model thirty years flat-out in the making, leaving only the final riddle unanswered: Who/What are we? / Aren’t we somebody too? 

         Government PR sleeves rolled-up working overtime as usual.