best fire escapes ever

I read on Wikipedia that 80 percent of Singaporeans live in public housing. The public housing ranges from tall high rises to shorter buildings like these, near Arab Street. Aren't these stairs cool?

concrete park

Now that I'm getting over my jetlag, I can start to shoot some night photos!

family badges

I've been enmeshed in a serious amount of family time. All Chinese families are big. They are so big that this box was given to us at the funeral parlor. The box contains swatches of fabric to designate your relationship to the departed. I forget what each color was for, but they all signify different relationships: in-laws, on the mother's side, on the father's side, etc.



The box is resting on a tub of white shirts that people can wear at the wake. In many secular Chinese religions, white is the color of mourning.

Samy's

Eating with my family in Singapore is tons of fun. The other night we went to a well-known curry house called Samy's. You eat off banana leaves and guys come around and ladle food out of buckets. That's right, buckets. We had fish-head curry (in the background), lamb curry, chicken curry, among other things, and this naan that had cranberries in it!



Wash that down with a Tiger beer and you're good for a long nap.

stairway to heaven

My grandmother used to go to a Buddhist temple by her house and we thought she would want some Buddhist rites performed at her services. So the day she died, we went to the temple and got two monks to come out to perform some sort of rites at her wake and cremation. It was very interesting. The monks chanted at her wake while we stood around the coffin. The chanting went on for so long that I almost fainted. Afterward, the person closest to her poured water out of a teapot into a cup placed in a bowl next to the coffin. So my uncle poured the water into the cup until it overflowed into the bowl. While this was happening, we formed a human chain by each placing a hand on the shoulder of the person in front of us, so it was like a symbolic transfer of energy. I would have liked to shoot photos of the ceremony...but I was in it.



I shot this photo at the crematorium. These are the two monks that led the chanting on Saturday. One is from Ceylon and the other is from Burma.

banner change

I'm changing the banner on the blog today, so I thought I'd post the photo that I used for the original banner.



I shot this at a party in Crown Heights (Brooklyn) last year, at the end of May. Still one of my favorites. This new banner is a couple on a motorcycle in Buenos Aires.

a time for inappropriate laughter

My grandmother's wake was held on this block full of funeral parlors. It was very interesting. Next to us last night there was a Taoist wake, full of wailing music and at another they were burning things. We had some monks from her Buddhist temple come out.



Everything was really last minute and the funeral director offered this place as being available. He was giving us directions over the phone and my mother asked, "What's the name of the place?" And then I heard her repeat, "Casket Fair Price?" And I burst out laughing. She hung up the phone. "There's no way that can be the name of the funeral parlor," I said. Sometimes the Singapore accent can be deceiving. I thought it was probably something like "Cascade Palace," or "Cafe Place."

But no. The lights are in the way in this photo, but the name of this funeral parlor is indeed "Casket Fairprice." We could not stop laughing. And the name was printed on EVERYTHING: the chairs, the entryways and, of course, the hearse.