Ordinarily, confronted with a strange city, I'm inclined to look for the
parts that have broken down and fallen apart, revealing the underlying
social mechanisms; how the place is really wired beneath the lay of the
land as presented by the Chamber of Commerce. This won't do in Singapore,
because nothing is falling apart. Everything that's fallen apart has
already been replaced with something new. (The word infrastructure takes
on a new and claustrophobic resonance here; somehow it's all
infrastructure.)

Failing to find any wrong side of the tracks, one can usually rely on a
study of the nightlife and the mechanisms of commercial sex to provide
some entree to the local subconscious. Singapore, as might be expected,
proved not at all big on the more intense forms of nightlife. Zouk,
arguably the city's hippest dance club (modelled, I was told, after the
rave scenes in Ibiza), is a pleasant enough place. It reminded me, on the
night I looked in, of a large Barcelona disco, though somehow minus the
party. Anyone seeking more raunchy action must cross the Causeway to
Johore, where Singaporean businessmen are said to sometimes go to indulge
in a little of the down and dirty. (But where else in the world today is
the adjoining sleazy bordertown Islamic?) One reads of clubs there having
their licenses pulled for stocking private cubicles with hapless
Filipinas, so I assumed that the Islamic Tijuana at the far end of the
Causeway was in one of those symbiotic pressure-valve relationships with
the island city-state, thereby serving a crucial psychic function that
would very likely never be officially admitted.