Sometimes it may be raining but your world remains dry. Naturally, sometimes when it’s sunny your insides are blurry. Where I am is an internet cafe - “the cheapest in Singapore” - in case readers from the papers want to know where Goblin Market really is.

It’s like this. Goblin Market has moved out of Katong into Joo Chiat this week. The new place will be in a house older than me, the kind where the rain is synonymous with zinc roof. For those of you who have visited Goblin Market at Katong (175A East Coast Road), you will understand why the act of re-creation, in the sense of place and memory, is as sentimental as it is impossible.

Which is why we will not try to. When Goblin Market reopens at Joo Chiat Place, I hope you readers and friends old and new find your way into ours. And when that day comes - I hope you find the quaint and the memorable in Singapore, in our factory, at Goblin Market.

For now, stay with us here if you are keen, where we are all under the same sky.

Reach us at bruceATgoblin-market.net or 65. 6348 8396.
Or come by to I Never Promised You A Rose Garden, #04-133 Far East Plaza.

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We spent our last day at 175A East Coast Road and our first night at our new location last Saturday.

Everything is going pretty smoothly for us, and we’re grateful to many, many people who’ve helped us over the past year.

Sneak peak:

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The contractors are there now, painting over the walls. It’s only been a year.

I tell my secret? No indeed, not I:
Perhaps some day, who knows?
But not today; it froze, and blows, and snows,
And you’re too curious: fie!
You want to hear it? well:
Only, my secret’s mine, and I won’t tell.

Spring’s and expansive time: yet I don’t trust
March with its peck of dust,
Nor April with its rainbow-crowned brief showers,
Nor even May, whose flowers
One frost may wither thro’ the sunless hours.
Perhaps some languid summer day,
When drowsy birds sing less and less,
And golden fruit is ripening to excess,
If there’s not too much sun nor too much cloud,
And the warm wind is neither still nor loud,
Perhaps my secret I may say,
Or you may guess.

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(Please pardon this message as it comes up over this one or two weeks. We need to address traffic problems.)

If it’s about clothes, visit http://www.i-never-promised-you.com.
Forthcoming designs (apparel) will belong there and so will its catalogue (online store) and all related postings.

If it’s about art, stay here. At Goblin Market.

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It’s about time.

If it’s about clothes, visit http://www.i-never-promised-you.com.
Forthcoming designs (apparel) will belong there and so will its catalogue (online store) and all related postings.

If it’s about art, stay here. At Goblin Market.

Thank you to all who have been our friends. This includes those who have come by our Goblin Market and INPYARG stores. Thank you to Marcus and Long for coming by Far East Plaza today and making me feel as comfortable in my own skin as only good reporters and photographers can. As I said, today is a day I’ll remember. Because those part of the journey define the journey. Getting there is the most memorable. As for the where, I don’t think I care.

Thank you to goa, as only a abbit can.

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Here’s the political editor of the Straits Times, spouting some shit again.

She is the WORST journalist in the world, and I don’t mean this hyperbolically. She writes badly and has no rational opinions. I think if she takes A-Level GP she will get a B3 at most, and that is after she memorizes and parrots all the PAP propaganda spoonfed to her.

The real sin: Singapore and China are examples of countries which are taking a different route to development, and look to be succeeding.

Succeeding at what? Making 70-year-olds sell tissue paper on the streets?

Countries are not corporations. The purpose of running a country is not to make a profit; it is to create a nation that is livable for people. The reason why so many people are leaving or want to leave is because the country is no longer livable to them.

For a country with a 6 billion dollar budget surplus, I think we can afford to run some things at a loss. That’s why it’s called PUBLIC transport and PUBLIC healthcare.

We such huge budget surpluses every year that we should stop paying tax for the next decade. Also, if we have such a big budget surplus, where is the money?

Back to the Worst Journalist in the World:

…prominent political columnist and current political editor Chua Lee Hoong and as well as ex-journalists Irene Ho and Susan Sim are all former ISD employees.

She should have just stayed there.

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Poetry is far away now. Winter has gone and there is an unchanging sky above the dull heads of trees and faces. This climate of making a living counts for time but not for aging. It is easier to become a robot than to grow old. I feel naked in the city where a shop is a face and a face is a shop.

What happened to the words and the lines in this head? They have been ravaged. That’s how Goblin Market came about. How INPYARG came about.

Popular Bookstore is selling Archie comics now. You can get three comics for ten dollars (where one is going for $5.95). I got two Betty and Veronica digests and another Archie Double Digest and brought them to the city with me.

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to be Singaporean?

This question must go back a long way, to hard definitions of identity and environment. The former is just too hard to blabber about, the latter a more forgiving idea. For many of us, outside our vocations and passions, can group ourselves according to which decade (or even half decade) we’re born in or which schools we’ve come from. The fact that this little word environment can and will make its influence for the rest of our lives reveal matters of identity find their way into everything we do, and every moment of being.

Much as we live our lives without tangible or definable traits of national being does not preclude us from having a unique identity. Identified or not, the identity lies in the being. Ok, ok, I am in the philosophical head or tail chase but before this day goes by again, I want to remember the peace we’ve had as a tiny country and re-wish the old wish I’ve always held - the wish to see more idiosyncrasies and ‘intolerables’ fleshed out, unhidden, un-judged.

Happy National Day, my countrymen and friends!

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There are two parts to us, I feel. I’m not referring to philosophical or emotional beings but to the state of minds.

Let’s put this to an everyday scenario. When I decide on what to wear as the day begins, I tend to choose the opposite of what I feel then. I’m sure there are some who knife their desires like this, and then some others who revel in desires. I do wonder how many fall into each group, and always if the theory is more a musing than a fact.

So the story goes to say that I’m likely to dress ready to voyage the world at the horses, and all subtle sex when running on top of trains. Despondency and desperation make a bittersweet D.

Desire.

I will post up the dress in the first picture when we get a shot of it. Available in store to those who spot it.

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Jimbala’s passport photo

Poetry fans and pigeon fanciers joined forces at Stanwell Tops headland to watch the first race of its kind, in which the verse-carrying avian athletes raced to reach their loft at Mt Ousley near Wollongong.

On a beautiful winter’s day, they soared above a blue ocean, a very different flight to the one that inspired the poem borne by the winning pigeon, Jimbala.

Holy Jimbala! Let there be light!

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