Life x Art = Tabs
Here’s a back alley scene sketched and painted by a favourite local Singaporean artist Tay Thain Lin. These spiral staircases are a lovely visual talking point when I used to hold my walking tours around the neighbourhood.
Relics of the past, the purpose of these spiral staircases were for night soil carriers (because there were no modern toilets in those years) to climb up, collect buckets with human waste from the back doors, without entering the premises. These stairs are very steep and narrow footholds, so the poor carriers had to be really, really careful!
Life imitates art far more than art imitates life Oscar Wilde, 1891
This quote about how we see better with art has been fading in and out of my mind. One of Wilde’s ideas was that people only began to appreciate the beauty of nature today because painters revealed that beauty to us. Similar to what the drawing above showed, would we have paid attention to the cement louvre ventilation blocks against the walls, if we didn’t see it in the drawing?
Before you read on, if you haven’t planned anything this weekend, maybe you could take 30 minutes for a breather, walk around your neighbourhood and just observe. Find 5 things in the scene in front of you that your eyes would usually sweep past without pause, and look closer to see why it could possibly be interesting. Joy spotting begins with you!
Turning these pages
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Being normal: Over the weekend, I literally couldn’t put down Sally Rooney’s Normal People, after at least five friends raved about the book in the past year. The BBC series, based off the book, is lagi more poignant so I heard. I really enjoy reading fiction that hits so close to home, in fact, it feels as though someone just pressed “copy” and real life became chapters of a book.
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Sometimes lost in translation: Literary adaptations are boom town business, something The Atlantic notes is happening for Netflix. Of course, for shows with episodic plots, adaptation accuracy sometimes flies out the window for what the audience may want because ratings. What’s your favourite/most hated adaptation of book to screen?
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Peek-a-boo! The biggest thing I miss from travelling is going to museums overseas. While I appreciate Singapore’s museums (Asian Civilisations Museum is my favourite!), there is still so much more out there! For your next lunch break, grab a mug of tea, and peek into the Louvre.
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From my eyes to yours: Contemporary China in a visual newsletter, cute kitschy.
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Today in tabs: I keep at least 20 tabs open when I work/read on my laptop. This newsletter seeks to add 20 more.
Hello hello hello hello!
Good ol’ Thomas Edison was the first to use ‘Hello’ as a greeting on the phone, and on the same track, please don’t just type hello in your work chats. Nohello explains precisely why. Politeness is useful, but used in chats, you are just “making the other person wait for you to phrase your question, which is lost productivity”.
Thanks for reading,
Medhā