My friend Ed made a piano sandwich today. He is a brilliant human.
Let me just say: of all the playwrights who have inspired me in the past decade, Anna Deavere Smith takes centre stage. My views on art are very much influenced by her work, and she inspires me to the point where I look at what she's done and want so desperately to drop everything and follow in her (docu-dramatic) footsteps.
Twilight: LA completely changed the way I thought about theatre. I have always been a firm believer that art, and especially theatre, is necessarily political, but there was always a twinge in the back of my mind that it could only have so much impact. Then I found her work, and I started to realise just how powerful theatre can be.
From her show On the Road: A Search for American Character:
Christophe Gilbert's aesthetic perfection is unsettling, evoking the sense that something sinister lurks beneath his calm surrealism.
You can see more of his work here.
Alexandre Alexeieff is most famous for inventing pinscreen animation with his wife Claire Parker. You know those neat little pin-art frames you can get? It's like that, times a thousand.
Alexeiff also illustrated a number of books, and his work in this arena evokes that same shadowy inscrutability that pinscreen animation creates. These are from The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe:
A good portrait shouldn't just be a good photo; it should capture the essence of the subject and intoxicate you with its incredible sense of intimacy. This is why I love Mark Seliger's work.
I had to fly home early, cutting my two weeks in Singapore down to two days. Gone were the dreams of meandering luxuriously through the final leg of my trip; instead, we rushed through the town in a haze of taxi-rides, rooftop bars, hawker centres and family dinners.
Here are some other things I did:
Pointed at the Singapore Flyer.