Shooting the Gods with Nick

Luckily, the nine a.m. Singapore sky was solidly overcast--perfect for walking.
The streets were dark stained from a steady rain hours before, now slightly steaming and silent as Sundays in most cities, except for the sizzling sound of taxi tires on slick pavement.
After walking just ten minutes, our shirts were thoroughly damp. A slight breeze stroked us--a welcome relief in the rising heat, as we entered the Tanjong Pagar Taoist temple complex. We split into different directions as we passed through the modest anteroom and spent a focused hour recording gently worn tiles, roof ceramics, newly gold-leafed colonnade brackets and altar dieties.

Nick was collecting collage imagery for work on a photographic series on Religion + War. Formerly based in Washington D.C., he is a professional portraitist who also taught photo technique at the Smithsonian. His new work is visceral and un-politically correct.
I was just savoring the visual feast before me--as usual.
As we moved to exit, many folks were arriving to burn handfuls of stick insense as thick as your thumb for departed ancestors.

We clung to the deep building shadows now beginning to form as we headed to the Pagoda Street subway escalator. The eastbound MRT offered its dependable cool relief as we boarded a desolate train and careened toward Arab town mosques. A short while later, we found the main mosque was closed so we opted to find a cafe to smoke shi-sha and drink mint tea. On the way, we were distracted by fabric stalls, prayer shawl and hat boutiques, perfumeries and bakeries--typical of the Baghdad Street bazaar. Weaving quickly through the sensual overload of a few final vendors, we eventually settled into a shady table as the cafe attendant fired our brazier and attached the plastic mouthpieces to our waterpipe. The white applewood smoke bubbling in the filtering bowl below softly complemented the crispness of the tea.

We sat, contented, for several hours, pinned to our seats by the heat of the day--we ordered Moroccan lunch and talked about Nick's living for 13 years aboard a sailboat in the Caribbean Sea. The mundane aspects of boat life like how to properly kill an ocean fish for a meal, is surprisingly not by clubbing but by pouring alcohol into its gills=instant death by vodka!! We left the conversation there as we slowly meandered by foot to the local multiplex.