Full Of Sound And Fury

Rangitoto

2012-01-22T20:53:00.003+13:00

It's as if it calls out to me. Whenever the new year comes around, I feel compelled to visit Rangitoto, a volcanic island that sits in the Hauraki gulf.

As far as Auckland tourist destinations go, it doesn't get more exotic than this. Rangitoto has an intense terrain of loose scoria.

The volcano itself is six hundred years old but there still isn't much vegetation growing on it. Even birds don't yet feel at home here; when I stop to rest and close my eyes, I don't hear any birdsong.

So I think I go there while the year is still new because the terrain itself is like a carte blanche of sorts.

One of the joys of hiking in New Zealand is seeing the lichens that hang off the trees and carpet the ground, making the forest all velvety and mint-green.

At the summit, a sense of exhaustion and accomplishment.

And if it's a rainy day, one gets a marvelous view of the clouds.

After climbing this volcano a few times, the view doesn't really matter anymore. What I enjoy these days is feeling myself move in the world, a tiny speck of energy crawling over this side of the planet - moving while the planet itself whirrs, and while the ground beneath roils around like an insomniac.

Related post

Sailor

2011-12-14T23:16:00.003+13:00

My friend, we seem to be the masters of time. We squander eternities. We are extravagant with our days. Near again, now again, then again, still.

Seasons greetings from our art collective

2011-12-04T17:31:00.000+13:00

Parlour is (from left) Kirsten Dryburgh, Harriet Stockman,
Vera Mey (getting a massage) & Lydia Chai...

Parlour gave away free massages, lemon cake and lemonade this weekend.

That's it from us this year.

Enjoy your holidays and see you next year when we launch our new projects!

Christmas is round the corner

2011-11-23T13:32:00.002+13:00

So I painted a series of wrapping papers. But I don't have any gifts. Perhaps the wrapping could be the gift itself. It is late Spring now and the honeysuckle have blossomed. It would be great if I could capture their sweet vanilla scent and wrap it up with these sheets of paper for Christmas.

Berlin

2011-11-03T13:23:00.000+13:00

Reading Kafka & nibbling on chorizo

Walls of Berlin

2011-10-31T23:59:00.001+13:00

Nicola Farquhar

2011-10-05T23:04:00.000+13:00

Image from Hopkinson Cundy

I'm blown away speechless by Nicola Farquhar's new paintings at Hopkinson Cundy. At this moment, it is eclipsing all the other art events I have attended this year. Hell, it's already one of my favourite shows of 2011. Will hopefully blog more about this in the future, but you really should go there and take a look at this wonderful exhibition.

Recent activity

2011-09-18T20:46:00.000+12:00

Oh yeah, my friends and I started an art collective called Parlour.

So far, we have organized one online project and also kick-started a series of exhibitions in artists' living spaces.

In the future, we also plan to organize informal critique sessions for artists.

The dope's all here!

Something like sharpening pencils

2011-08-14T22:35:00.003+12:00

words

I write the words but I feed on them too. Not quite like cannibalism. It is like purging myself in order to create more space within. Then, once my words are in the world, they transform unexpectedly. Almost instantaneously, they sow seeds and grow into something else. I think the creative process is about that movement, having that breath, like pumping the blood in and out. Keep putting things out into the world so that your soul can breathe better and nourish itself once more.

sounds

Today I have been thinking about sound... Perhaps sound waves are the very definition of Life because they denote movement. Nature abhors a vacuum and all that. Li-Young Lee wrote in a poem that the 'first sound' was Water - a biblical image. Then I started thinking about the sounds we don't hear that are all around us. We are bathed in soundwaves all the time. We are sound itself, and we form part of that ongoing musical score that the universe is performing.

goodnight

Have a good week ahead, everybody.

Meditations on a Saturday night

2011-08-07T03:19:00.000+12:00

When faced with an obstacle, dance through it.

Move with it so that it becomes a part of you.

When that happens, there is no more obstacle.

The shoulders of giants

2011-07-28T23:17:00.000+12:00

My strength comes from the knowledge that I walk with my ancestors; they have paid for my crown, how can I not wear it? It's 2011, I'm a Malaysian woman making a decent living and doing what I love and I am making art. All this is possible because of the people who fought for my independence before I was born. Thank you so much.

"Poetry has now become something extraordinary; it has now become a weapon"

2011-07-10T15:03:00.004+12:00

National laureate probed over 'seditious poem'. (27/6/2011) "Poetry has now become something extraordinary; it has now become a weapon," he told a throng of journalists jostling to hear the soft-spoken man.

Unggun Bersih

Semakin lara kita didera bara—
kita laungkan juga pesan merdeka:
Demokrasi sebenderang mentari
sehasrat hajat semurni harga diri.

Lama resah kita—demokrasi luka;
lama duka kita—demokrasi lara.
Demokrasi yang angkuh, kita cemuhi;
suara bebas yang utuh, kita idami!

Dua abad lalu Sam Adams berseru:
(di Boston dijirus teh ke laut biru):
Tak diperlu gempita sorak yang gebu,
diperlu hanya unggun api yang syahdu.

Kini menyalalah unggun sakti itu;
kini merebaklah nyala unggun itu.

--

24—25, 6.11. A. Samad Said, Malaysia's national laureate.
Listen to our dear poet's recital (with guitar accompaniment!) here.
An English translation has been attempted here.

Raise Your Skinny Fists In Da Air

2011-07-03T21:59:00.001+12:00

The hardest thing about my art practice right now is stretching watercolour paper...! I spent this afternoon doing just that and now that the hard part's done, the molecules in my body can now breathe. PHEW. The paper is actually drying nice and flat. Ye-hay!

Winter has caused my knuckles to crack and bleed. Moisturizing is not an option since I have to keep my hands oil-free when I paint on paper. But I guess bleeding on the painting isn't a good look either. Gar! I belong in the tropics.

Arrrrrr!

New art writing

2011-06-26T16:00:00.001+12:00

My essay on Fiona Connor's Something Transparent I & II will be published in the upcoming Hue and Cry journal (a bumper issue by the looks of it!). Writing this essay was a difficult process (the usual reasons being late nights at the library, writing with adrenaline and little sleep, and self-imposed pressure...) but sooo satisfying. I managed to hand it in a week before my deadline!

So, see you at the magazine launch!

Werckmeister Harmonies

2011-06-06T01:14:00.011+12:00

Man, I love long takes. Here is the ten-minute masterpiece of a take that opens Béla Tarr's Werckmeister Harmóniák (Werckmeister Harmonies) (2000):

I love everything about this scene. I love how it plays out like a theatre performance captured on film, without compromising its film format. I love how the shuffling of feet roots the viewer in the scruffy bar setting while the character Valuska waxes on about heavenly bodies. Even in this single scene there is a crescendo when the camera rises above the lamp and rests on the tableau of drunkards enacting a solar eclipse. I love how deftly the camera moves around the merry-go-round of staggering dancers. And how many times, you wonder, did the film crew have to rebuild that fire after it had been extinguished?

Werckmeister Harmóniák is shot in 39 long, languid and elegant takes. Its narrative is so subtle that I'd describe the movie as a collection of abstract and beautifully shot scenes.

Let's manage a synopsis anyway: The film is about a grim and dreary town that is on the brink of having a violent revolution. A circus show arrives in the town, its only attractions being the preserved carcass of a mammoth whale and a sinister dwarf-like figure called 'the Prince' - the arrival of both somehow triggers violent behaviour in people. The Prince is a mysterious figure who is only seen in shadow and whose voice sounds rather like a radio.

Just as the opening scene illustrates the movements of our solar system, so do all the characters revolve around the central figure of Valuska. Valuska is a simple, gentle and dreamy young man who does the paper round, takes care of his uncle(?) György Eszter who has retreated from society to flesh out his theories on music, and seems to do the bidding of most people around him (though he isn't bullied into errands; he is well loved among the townfolk).

[I'm gonna pause here briefly to say that it's impossible to have 'spoilers' when discussing this film. It would be like having a spoiler alert for a poem; I could tell you what happens in the poem but it wouldn't diminish your experience of it.]

Valuska acts as a messenger between uncle György and his estranged wife Tünde. György is called upon by Tünde to take on a leadership role and calm the anxiety-ridden town, but Tünde is only persuading him to do this so that she may become a prominent member of society again. In the end, György is impotent to stop the violent momentum of the thuggish townfolk (and the thugs who arrive from other towns to see the whale).

The film culminates in another well-choreographed scene (above) in which the mob charges into a hospital and pulverizes its feeble inhabitants. This scene is bloodless, yet portrays the viciousness of man in all its mindless glory. The mob's momentum screeches to a halt, however, at the sight of an old, emaciated man naked in a bathtub - a reminder of humanity amidst brutishness. How quickly the emotion transforms from aggression into shame here.

Who knows what the whale symbolizes? The dignity of the ancients? The sublime? Somehow I feel like it doesn't matter. Maybe the whale simply acts as a witness to the doings of mankind. Its glassy inert eye is impervious to human suffering. Perhaps this is how Valuska and the whale are similar; they are both innocent witnesses who get damaged along the way, but Valuska carries the heart and hope of the film. Valuska is captivated by the whale and possesses an astute understanding of what is happening to his town on a psychic level.

The images in Werckmeister Harmóniák are indeed memorable. I think Béla Tarr manages this not only by composing his shots well, but by lingering on them so that they burn into one's memory. I've heard this type of filmmaking described as a 'cinema of patience'. But you don't read a poem for a punchline, do you?

Lydia

Weekend resolution

2011-05-07T00:37:00.003+12:00

It has been a stressful time lately. Hubby and I have been working round the clock on our art. This weekend, I resolve to go out and do stupidly fun things. Like watching the dogs play at the park. Watching a dumb movie at the cinema. Baking cookies. Hm, what other things can a car-less couple do?

My neat discovery of the week

2011-04-08T21:09:00.001+12:00

I got into a serious tizzy on Tuesday after reading about the forgotten volcano under the Auckland suburb of Grafton. The news item mentions a 19th Century explorer named Hochstetter who, in actual fact, noted the existence of this volcano in his 1864 map of the area, before it was covered in houses.

...AND I JUST HAPPENED TO BE LOOKING AT THIS VERY MAP LAST WEEK FOR MY ART RESEARCH!

"Checks on the second oldest geological map of the Auckland Volcanic Field, published by early explorer and geologist Ferdinand von Hochstetter in 1864, showed four volcanic vents in the vicinity of the city's Domain."

Talk about synchronicity. Here it is, the second oldest geological map of Auckland, by Hochstetter:

Detail below, showing the four volcanic vents (see the red oval). Just north of the four vents are written the words, 'St Stephen School' and 'Tuffcrater with Eruption Centre'.

My friend Andy helped me decipher these words written across the four vents: it is 'Tuffkegel', which is German for tuff cone.

The Art of War

2011-04-03T12:16:00.000+12:00

Why I think Black Swan is misogynistic [spoilers included]

2011-04-02T21:10:00.003+13:00

Friends, in the next 600 words or so, I appear to spew bile on Darren Aronofsky's widely lauded Black Swan. I suppose I ought to qualify this post by pointing out that I do think this is a fascinating movie with good performances all round. However, my immediate reaction to it is that it is sexually exploitative, but these being my initial jottings, I would welcome rebuttals or differing responses to the movie.

· I’m not surprised that Black Swan turned out to be a love-or-hate movie, judging from Aronofsky's previous film The Fountain which I disliked but my friends enjoyed. (I watched The Fountain again on DVD recently to see if I was unfair in my initial assessment... and still found it dull). I wouldn't say I hate Black Swan but I certainly wouldn't watch it again. It's nice eye candy, but I don’t enjoy the movie's

(a) simplistic Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy,

(b) nor its one-dimensional portrayal of mental illness,

· Also add the, shall we say, 'mishandled' lesbian scene to that list. One of the reasons I feel this film is chauvinistic is that the girl-on-girl sex and masturbation scenes are there to sexually thrill (be it for a male or female audience). Apparently after Aronofsky asked Portman how they could get men to go watch a ballerina movie, Portman suggested they throw in a lesbian scene. Furthermore, the way the scene is shot is more pervy than sympathetic; it feels like a teenager's wet dream. Same goes for the scene where the ballet instructor seduces Portman's character.

Gah, how does the back of my throat taste?

· I can think of a better director who uses eroticism in a sexier and more sympathetic way. In David Lynch's Wild At Heart, Laura Dern's character who is a very sexual woman is shown seduced (well, it's actually an attempted rape but it's that simple and that complicated) by a despicable man (Willem Dafoe) and the episode is quickly followed by a deep sense of shame on the woman's part. Please don't take this to mean that female sexuality must always be tied to shame! My point here is that Lynch shows eroticism from the woman's point of view, while Aronofsky's manner in Black Swan’s “erotic” scenes is entirely voyeuristic.

· I understand that Black Swan is meant to be hyper real and over the top (ie of course not all ballerinas are bulimic, and of course the fact that Nina quasi-kills herself is a joke about how they oughtn't take their job so seriously, really, in the large scheme of the Universe), hence the superlatives and stereotypes. In fact, I'm completely okay with the plot involving a sexually abusive ballet instructor, because it is not the plot that I take issue with, it's the director's treatment of the film. If Black Swan were an exploitation movie (which it is not) - in the tradition of Russ Meyers, Tarantino, Rodriguez - it would sit well with me. But it is too sure of itself, its style is too polished and serious to be so. I would say the same of films made by Olivier Assayas who seems to make films about strong female characters but builds them up to tear them down (in the case of Assayas’ Irma Vep, by reducing Maggie Cheung to an Oriental sex object), which is a form of misogyny. Aronofsky wants to make an absurd movie but it's not absurd enough. It is easier to control a film's script and visuals than manage its tone. And tone often arises involuntarily. Maybe Aronofsky succeeded with the absurd plot but his treatment betrayed him.

· I certainly wouldn't dismiss a film because of a chauvinistic character - in fact, the arrogant ballet instructor was the most entertaining to watch simply because he had the cheesiest lines. Hilariously offensive.

Thomas: Feel the dance, Nina, feel it!
Nina: I'm feeling it... Impressive.

· My point, in a nutshell, is this: Black Swan is like a satire that forgot to bring the jokes.

· It means to be so overtly chauvinistic as to be absurd and laughable (ie having lesbian relations makes you an edgier ballet dancer - cue guffaws) and to a large extent the plot and characters achieve this. However, the way the film is made, the way the camera ogles over Portman's body, and the polished seriousness of the film's execution - all these contradict its intended hyperbole.

Off to the mountain

2011-03-27T00:28:00.000+13:00

to think &

to collect metaphors

Christchurch

2011-02-26T14:01:00.000+13:00

Snapshot of Christchurch CBD taken just after the quake. Source: Twitter.

Ngāti Āhia!

2011-02-19T19:31:00.002+13:00

Ngāti Āhia! belting it out at Artspace

In mid-2010, my friends and I started New Zealand's only Asian waiata group.

Why Asians only? Well, most of the group's members were born overseas and, for various reasons, had decided to adopt Aotearoa as a second home. One way of achieving that was to claim local culture as our own to some degree.

With the waiata group, our aim was to have fun while learning another culture (Maori) and to contribute to the growing multicultural conversation in Aotearoa. Okay, that sounds rather lofty when in reality we were simply enjoying each other's company. Our weekly practices became excuses to crack jokes, share ghost stories and eat together. To sing communally, regularly, is a great tool for fellowship - if one didn't go to church or sing in a band, where else would one get such an opportunity?

And so our modest singing group Ngāti Āhia, tribes of Asia, was born.

Our group - all seven of us - met up weekly to learn Maori songs with the hope that it would one day culminate in a public performance. Admirably, every person in the group was committed to attending rehearsals. Most had not learned Maori before, so language was a constant struggle.

But we were not without some reservations. Some felt we needed a member from the Maori community to make sure we were approaching things the correct way. We wanted to be funky. We wanted to be fresh. We just didn't want to outrage anybody. It was important for us to unite people, not divide.

It was at this stage that our friend Shigeyuki Kihara got us in touch with her choreographer/artist/director friend Charles Koroneho.

Sifu Charles in the audience

Having Charles as a mentor was a revelation. Not only did he teach us amateurs how to sing better in public, he encouraged our project and shared our enthusiasm, introducing new songs to our repertoire.

When we voiced a concern about potentially causing offense with any aspect of our waiata presentation, Charles basically said to us, "Look, [as an outsider to Maori culture] your actions don't have to be policed, but you can be guided into the culture." Charles was the perfect person to provide us with such guidance. We love him!

Chillin' out post-performance

In December, we debuted at a private function at Artspace. Words cannot express how nervous we felt. I was fixated on getting my pepeha right. Vera and Eddie did a good job in their roles as kaea (song leaders). Pam, who has the best voice, help us put on a strong front. Our guitarists Sy and Fabian didn't miss a beat.

Our hard work and energy paid off. The audience - made up of arts practitioners, enthusiasts, patrons, etc - was so encouraging. One elderly couple came up to us and said we were a 'revolution'!

It's early days yet but I'm hopeful that Ngāti Āhia will keep going strong this year. Watch this space!

Photos courtesy Tahi Moore, Sze Ning Ooi & Sy Fong.

Wagner And Me

2011-02-05T23:30:00.000+13:00

Stephen Fry talks to cellist and Holocaust survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch

Stephen Fry shares his lifelong love for Wagner in this movie, Wagner And Me. You don't have to know much about Wagner to enjoy this - Fry walks you through certain stages of Wagner's life and gives some insights into his work. Fry is adorable as an embarrassingly star-struck fan. One precious scene has Fry sitting with a pianist at Wagner's own piano and being in thrall of key passages from Tristan and Isolde being played. His childish enthusiasm is infectious! A large chunk of the film is also about Fry coming to terms with the fact that Wagner's music was sullied by Hitler who was also a big fan and who appropriated the music for his own fascist ends.

Now playing at Academy cinemas.

Readings

2011-01-23T15:11:00.001+13:00

Sharon Bakar and Bernice Chauly, longtime organizers of the monthly Readings, will soon launch a collection of the best works in this series. In the meantime, the next Readings event is on next weekend. Here are examples of the Readings posters I've designed in the past:

Poster design: Lydia Chai

Calm before the storm

2011-01-16T18:51:00.000+13:00

I'm so happy!!! I finished the most difficult part of my current painting, which is to lay down the large brushstrokes in my composition. It is now 90% complete.

I'm physically exhausted.

But, mentally stimulated!

I think I'll sit down with a book now.

Today's the last day of my summer holiday. From now on, my work schedule is going to be relentless, so it makes me sad that I won't be seeing my friends as often this year. 2010 left me with no social life to speak of.

That said, I'm looking forward to what 2011 will bring.

I have health and youth on my side.

Bring it on!

New year, new paintings

2011-01-07T09:16:00.000+13:00

Even my coffee mug is full of colour

Vote this government OUT

2011-01-06T09:02:00.005+13:00

If I'm not smiling today, this is why.

Little more than a year ago, political aide for the opposition, Teoh Beng Hock, died while in the custody of the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission. Today, the coroner in Teoh's inquest delivered an "open verdict", saying that he can neither rule that Teoh's death was a result of suicide nor that it was homicide.

This was supposed to be the day that Teoh's family finally got some justice. I am devastated for them.

This is Teoh with his fiancee. They were to be married that same week that he died, therefore nobody believes it was suicide.

Lawyers for Teoh's family insisted on a second autopsy. This time Thai pathologist Dr Pornthip Rojanasunand was flown in to examine the body and give her report.

"You have to understand. I work for the rights of the dead,
not the Selangor government."
- Dr Pornthip Rojanasunand

Teoh's son was born on February 2010. Compassionate Malaysian citizens have set up a trust fund for the boy.

Despite Dr Pornthip's view that there is a 80% possibility Teoh's death was a result of homicide, and other evidence such as wounds made on his body that were clearly NOT a result of hitting the gravel, the coroner delivers an "OPEN VERDICT". No, Mr Coroner. Teoh Beng Hock was murdered.

Murdered :(

Teoh's family, inconsolable.

His mother and sister

Lawyers for Teoh's family speak out:

Railway memories

2010-12-31T09:35:00.000+13:00

Still Malaysian soil at time of writing

Right smack in the heart of Singapore is a small piece of Malaysian land that is the KTM railway station. Even the train tracks are technically on Malaysian soil and it snakes right across the little island nation. Thankfully for Singaporeans, this minor irritation will cease soon, as from July 2011 this historic building at Tanjong Pagar will no longer function as a railway station. Instead, the KTM train will depart Singapore from the Woodlands checkpoint, at the northernmost tip of Singapore.

This building marks the beginning point of the famed Orient-Express rail route. It also has an interesting interior that was highlighted in an art project by Malaysian artist Simryn Gill at the Singapore Biennial 2006, where she published a booklet discussing the large murals inside the building.

The murals portray the various ethnic groups in Malaya

For me, this building and its familiar route to Kuala Lumpur has sentimental value. As a Malaysian who studied in Singapore for a few years, I would return home for the holidays via the overnight train. As I recall, it cost $40 for a bunk and the journey, from whistle to welcome, lasted from 10pm to 7am.

I'd sit up in the small bunk with my CD player, the curtains shielding me from the bright corridor lights. Baby cockroaches crawling around the bed sometimes interrupted my enjoyment of the view outside the window: the Malaysian heartland at night.

I especially remember the dark fields and my delight at seeing stars above them; they reminded me of The Little Prince. The train stopped once in a while to pick up the lone passenger who had been waiting for it in the wee hours. Outside my curtain, the shuffling of feet and faint toilet flushes; train doors opening and closing.

There was little hope of getting much sleep on those rides. As the world outside my window grew lighter with the dawn, the train made its way to another historic railway station in Kuala Lumpur. It felt good to eat an A & W breakfast at the station, and to hear Malay being spoken, and to be home again.

(1) Other musings on Malaysiana: Creation Myths, Malay ghost stories, Growing up in 80s Malaysia!

(2) Other people's documentation of the Tanjong Pagar railway station: The Long and Winding Road, Railway Diaries, Why We Should Have The Green Corridor

Once A Great Love

2010-12-21T22:24:00.001+13:00

Once A Great Love

by Yehuda Amichai

Once a great love cut my life in two.

The first part goes on twisting

at some other place like a snake cut in two.

The passing years have calmed me

and brought healing to my heart and rest to my eyes.

And I'm like someone standing in the Judean desert, looking at a sign:

"Sea Level"

He cannot see the sea, but he knows.

Thus I remember your face everywhere

at your "Face Level."

Very Rapid, Very Vapid... Film Notes

2010-12-14T21:35:00.001+13:00

One minute film notes.

On watching Inception

When was the last time Dicaprio didn't play a broken man? I can only think of Celebrity. Don't get me wrong, he's a brilliant actor but I want to see a happy Leo for once.

Play someone happy, Leo

Brad Pitt was refreshing in Burn After Reading. That made him the best thing about this movie for me.

Some actors excel at doing certain things

(1) Nick Nolte is good at playing wounded characters. He's not afraid to look pathetic. See Thin Red Line, Hulk and Tropic Thunder...

(2) Laura Linney is good at pulling a sad smile. She can appear bright and desperate at the same time.

(3) Jeremy Davies is not afraid of playing supremely irritating characters. I respect dat.

(4) Greg Kinnear excels at playing selfish, vain, wanky characters (see You've Got Mail, Little Miss Sunshine, self-absorbed victim in As Good As It Gets), the kind we all come across in our own lives. I also respect dat.

Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky

Don't know much about either historical figures but in this movie Chanel and Stravinsky are both cold characters who seem to deserve each other. Their affair is purely physical (and there's no foreplay in the first love scene!) which makes it difficult to believe that either character attaches deep sentimental value to the relationship in old age, as is suggested in later scenes. The most interesting relationship, therefore, is between Stravinsky and his saintly but sickly wife who is not a dimwit at all - she is, in fact, his most prized musical critic. In the most emotionally honest scene of the movie, when she confronts him about his affair with Chanel, she confesses that she is frightened of dying. In that moment, the complexity of a marriage is shown where betrayal, intimacy and sadness are felt in quick succession.

The Social Network

I was asked by a few friends and co-workers whether I'd recommend this movie to them. I found myself wondering if friends who aren't on Facebook would enjoy it. I wondered if certain factors played a part in my responses: Is this person something of a Luddite? Would the fact that Zuckerberg managed to shut the Harvard server down come across as an impressive feat, or would it mean nothing to this person? Is he disdainful of others who keep up with the Joneses? If he's not on Facebook but is still a hip techie would he still be interested in the story arc of friendship and betrayal? Would this person find intellectual property an interesting issue or is he somebody who thinks that the discourse is old hat and we live in a Wikileaky world of free information? Oh well, if I recommended this to you, or did the opposite, it was probably pretty arbitrary!

Other film bites: One Minute Film Reviews, Bad Lieutenant, Notes On Seeing Taika Waititi's Boy, Film Festival Snippets, Sofia Quentin R Crumb and Feminism...

Late night scrawl

2010-11-04T23:40:00.003+13:00

I think I've just figured out that... I can achieve poetry in my essays (and general non-fiction items), but not write poems proper. Maybe it is easier for poetry to pop up in my prose because the reader does not expect it and so that makes it sorta striking. Like that evangelist guy on late night tv commercials who says "My friend, when you've come to the end of yourself..." - Whoa, I thought, when I first saw him on the telly. Who'da thought an infomercial could be so existentially poetic? Impressive, because unexpected. Nuffa this. I'm going to bed now.

Home on my mind (updated post)

2010-10-27T21:21:00.001+13:00

I have been watching news video items on the web chronicling the Altantuya murder case, reading more protests about the mega tower, watching the Prime Minister's wife's insipid yet chilling karaoke video and finding out that Malaysia may be bankrupt in 2019.

Sigh.

I think I will tuck in early tonight and continue reading Sybil Kathigasu's war memoir, No Dram Of Mercy. She is Malaysia's famous war hero who helped the guerrillas fight against the Japanese in WWII. I will read this to remind me why I'm proud of Malaysia...

(update) I'm almost done reading this book and every time I put it down, tears well up in my eyes. (It can get embarrassing when I am reading at my office desk!)

This woman and her friends fought so bravely and mightily for our freedom.

And we frikkin throw that freedom away.

We frikkin don't deserve to claim these people as our heroes.

WTF.

Sybil Kathigasu

Beavering away

2010-10-12T19:51:00.002+13:00

a 'working drawing' for Aerial Painting

When I work on a composition, I tend to forget about the difficulty involved in executing certain brushstrokes. I want to be a better painter! I want to be able to move my brush with skill and precision so that I can execute my ideas perfectly! At the moment, I am mapping out a new painting and have figured out the climactic point within the composition (yes, it is very much like music!). I just know that I will be very nervous when it comes time to make the actual painting. Such is the thrill and challenge of a new painting, every time. I am so thankful to have all my faculties intact and enjoying work like this.

And you know what? It helps to have Pulp and other 90s pop music playing in the background! :-)

I am against murder porn

2010-10-03T01:08:00.002+13:00

Once again, the news media is being dominated by a young woman's murder.

I am SICK of seeing murdered girls in the news as well as on the various crime tv shows that inexplicably remain popular among viewers.

Am I drawing a correlation between fictional mutilation of sexualized women on tv and actual violence against our womenfolk?

You know what? It's hard not to.

But I am not saying that murder porn is the cause of actual murders. I'm saying: Let's look at how women are being portrayed on our screens. Let's ask why these tv shows are so popular? What is so fascinating about finding out how a beautiful young woman gets dismembered??

Notice how crime tv always has to package Murder with Sex. Not only do the female detectives exude repressed sexuality, but week after week the victims in these shows are mutilated, often scantily clad, females.

Try telling me that this doesn't contribute to sections of society feeling that rape and physical force is titillating.

Let's CHANGE the way girls and women are portrayed on tv. Please read about Geena Davis' organization which monitors such media content and tries to educate content-creators about having more empowering images of women on our screens.

Related RANT here.

Cable tv killed 1Malaysia

2010-09-27T01:38:00.001+13:00

This tear jerker is still talked about in my family,
we sing the theme song's refrain now and then

I'm just gonna put this idea out there that with the advent of cable tv our experience of other ethnic cultures was suddenly very limited.

Remember when the only thing showing on the telly on a Sunday afternoon was a Hindi movie? My family spent many hours enjoying Hindi and Tamil movies together. Then 7 o'clock swung around and it was Cantonese drama time. Tony Leung crying over Dodo Cheng's comatose body in the hospital. Leon Lai breaking some girl's heart.

We live in the era of customization and only see and hear the things that we want. We subscribe to the Astro channels that we feel comfortable with, naturally: the Chinese watch NHK, the Indians stick to Vaan, etc. Our only common tv experiences are Star World, ESPN, etc - the English language channels; but even then not all Malaysians watch these.

Meanwhile, the internet which has the ability to provide us with information that is otherwise unobtainable is often used in a way that divides people further and reinforces prejudices:

“The most striking power provided by emerging technologies [is the] growing power of consumers to ‘filter’ what they see.” (Cass R. Sunstein)

"...it’s possible to spend hours surfing without ever entering new waters." (Elizabeth Kolbert writes, in this fabulous New Yorker article)

When I moved to Singapore to study, my teacher told us to write about our childhood for an assignment. I wrote about growing up on Hindi films and she found that hard to believe. At that moment, I was so proud to come from a country where, back then at least, the races shared the same tv shows a lot more.

Oh well, at least we are still as enthusiastic about each other's food as ever!

New blog find

2010-09-26T20:28:00.001+13:00

Alan Gray's illustrations are deceptively casual - here he captures Gordon Ramsay

There has not been a blog that has made me laugh for five minutes straight, until Reality TV NZ. Written by Melenie Parkes and illustrated by Alan Gray, it offers an entertaining recap of reality tv episodes currently airing in New Zealand. I love Alan's masterful drawings that capture the essence of each character (check out Tyra's scary eyeballs) with just a few strokes - right up there with Quentin Blake, imho. Seriously the most fun I've had in the blogosphere to date :)

Now showing @ Annexe gallery, Kuala Lumpur

2010-09-25T22:45:00.000+12:00

Flung II (Lime)

Some of my paintings are currently on show at the above gallery. Read more about the exhibition here.

Today's meditation

2010-09-19T22:20:00.001+12:00

Perhaps no one can say that they are strong enough to withstand emotional and spiritual affliction. Who can say, when in the throes of a challenge, that they are strong?

If we are lucky, we will be confident of pulling through and the end will be in sight, somewhat; but mark that the sensation of weakness lingers and victory is not yet guaranteed.

In reality, survival is a matter of placing ourselves away from such harm, as we would walk around fire.

Sometimes it takes all our strength to keep our distance from the things that hurt us.

I do not content myself with the belief that there is bravery, only acceptance of the task at hand.

New Malaysian Essays

2010-09-16T22:33:00.000+12:00

Happy Malaysia Day, everyone.

(For the benefit of my non-Malaysian friends, this is not to be confused with Independence Day.)

As a special Malaysia Day gift, Matahari Books has generously uploaded New Malaysian Essays Vol.3 as a free download. Yay! It looks like quality material.

So far, I have read Wong Chin Huat's How To Demonstrate Creatively: A Manual of Innovative Civil Disobedience in Malaysia. Now that's something you wouldn't be able to buy off the shelf in Malaysia! Admittedly, the tone of this essay is a little dumbed down, but just skip to the bits where he offers ten suggestions for creative demonstration in Malaysia. They're not so much ten suggestions as a list of actual demonstrations attempted by various individuals and groups in Malaysia in recent years. I quite like this one:

On September 16 1999, hundreds of Malaysians - Muslim, Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Sikh, Taoist, Atheist - had decided to fast together

...as an act of protest and solidarity. How effective. Actually, I nearly choked up when I read that one. I'm a real sop for that sorta thing.

NME Vols.1 and 2 are actual physical books for sale. You can order them from the Matahari website, if you're intrigued.

John Berger deserves an entry all his own

2010-09-08T16:37:00.001+12:00

Love the man, love love him. Watch him in this 1995 interview. See how he answers every question, including "Are you a Marxist?", with dignity, grace and generosity.

How on earth did he and his leftist friends know that American Abstract painting was being secretly supported by the CIA to counter communism? The rest of the world found out only in the 90s.

I haven't been interested in his fiction, but I guess I ought to read G., the novel that won him the Booker Prize which, to the judges' horror, enabled him to donate generously to the Black Panther Party.

I fought very hard for John Berger to win for G, and then he threw it in my face by giving half the prize money to the Black Panthers. - George Steiner, Booker judge in 1972

The Booker, you see, had a dirty little (open) secret. Its sponsors, Booker McGonnall, had garnered much of their wealth, as Berger related in his acceptance speech, from 130 years of trading in the Caribbean. "The modern poverty of the Caribbean is the direct result of this and similar exploitation," he said. He also later told everyone that he was going to give half his prize money to the Black Panthers - who were, as he explained, "the black movement with the socialist and revolutionary perspective that I find myself most in agreement with in this country". - The Guardian

I need to read more of his books. I do not know any other writer who combines poetry with politics the way he does. Just the crystal clarity of his writing is inspiring enough.

Not all desires lead to freedom, but freedom is the experience of a desire being acknowledged, chosen and pursued. Desire never concerns the mere possession of something, but the changing of something. Desire is a wanting. A wanting now. Freedom does not constitute the fulfilment of that wanting, but the acknowledgement of its supremacy.

Today the infinite is beside the poor.

- From Berger's Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance (in my top ten books of all time)

Read him! :)

In the author's own voice

2010-09-07T19:38:00.001+12:00

Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf
as snapped by Lady Ottoline Morrell

Now available on the BBC website is their valuable archive of interviews with key British authors. Most exciting for me are the podcasts featuring Virginia Woolf (it's funny and quaint the way she pronounces 'mysterious' - messTEErious), John Berger and Zadie Smith (is it me or does the interviewer get slightly irritated by her coyness/self-effacement?). I can't wait to explore the others. What's more, it's all FREE.

Tan Twan Eng's Gift of Rain

2010-09-05T22:47:00.000+12:00

I'm following up on the first impressions I jotted down here.

When I finished reading this book earlier this week, I did not want to pick up another, preferring to let my mind further marinate in the ideas, emotions and atmosphere of this story.

In my initial notes, I wondered if this was going to be a satisfying novel. I was aware that the first half of the book was setting the reader up for something explosive in the second half. So, does the latter half indeed live up to the former?

Thankfully, yes, it does. But it is hard to tell you why without giving the plot away. Suffice it to say that the bonds established between family members and friends are very much tested in the latter part of the novel, when Malaya falls to the Japanese. When I finished the last page, I found myself returning to the beginning almost immediately to see how everything tied together.

Gift of Rain is not perfect but it is a strong novel, its ambitions numerous: it is a WWII story that includes the points of view of its Japanese characters, a story that explores ancient philosophy through the art and discipline of aikido (I read somewhere that Tan is himself an aikido black belt but don't let this lead you to think that this novel is an aikido manual... far from it), and an unusually intense friendship between a young student and his sensei who happens to be the Japanese enemy. The novel deals with all these difficult themes effortlessly, meditating on the problems of free will vs determination.

I really enjoyed reading about the deepening relationship between said student (Philip) and sensei (Endo-san). Philip has ample reasons to mistrust Endo-san, yet a spiritual reality that is even bigger than the war keeps him close to Endo-san. Their words to each other is not the language of lovers or between teacher and student, but of soulmates who have no need for words. That said, I like how real doubt clouds Philip's thoughts about Endo-san:

'When I am gone, what will you most remember of me?' Endo-san asked, his eyes on the planes as they faded into the distance.

I pondered the question. 'I don't know. I don't even know what to think of you now; how can I even contemplate what to recall of you?'

With each cycle of mistrust and regaining of trust, their relationship deepens.

Some novels make their readers aware of the 'space' within. For example, Preeta Samarasan's Evening Is The Whole Day largely takes place in a big house, so that we can sense the claustrophobia, or 'cabin fever', experienced by its characters. Gift of Rain is the complete opposite because it is set in wide open spaces. Since rain - that bringer of both destruction and blessing - is a recurring motif, Tan often paints his scenes with images of clouds, open seas and clear skies. I have actually skimmed the book for cloud/sky references and counted more than ten. My favourite one is this simple but effective line:

"Dark heavy clouds rolled over the ridges like surf breaking over sea boulders".

Even the swords used by the two main protagonists are named Cloud and Illumination, mirroring the spiritual progress towards enlightenment. Rain, of course, lowers the sky and obscures vision and clarity, hence the most harrowing period of the novel features non-stop heavenly showers. Finally, I must mention a very rewarding scene at the end that involves the Union Jack, which further illustrates my point about the freeing wide open spaces of this novel - but to tell you would be to give too much away!

So, would I recommend this book to anyone? It really depends. A 'Western' reader unfamiliar with Buddhist philosophy and reincarnation might find the mystical bits annoying or difficult, or she might find the Japanese concept of duty over love rather challenging. However, such a reader might also enjoy the twists and turns of the plot. In any case, the descriptions of people and evocations of place are beautifully written, so yes I would say, to anyone, that this is a worthwhile read.

By far the best thing about this book is that it has spurred me to read up on this period of Malayan history, something I have not done in earnest since my school days. Somebody once said, "Art should make life more interesting than art". Isn't that the wonderful thing about literature, how it can get you enthused about other things in life?

Creation myths

2010-08-30T23:23:00.004+12:00

Happy Independence Day, Malaysia! (31st August) Here is my entry for Merdeka.

One can embark on so many interesting adventures via footnotes. Reading the aforementioned Malay Poisons And Charm Cures has led me to another book I am keen to delve into: R.O. Winstedt's Shaman, Saiva And Sufi. A similar sort of book, it is about the mysticism of Muslim Malays and was published in 1925. You can read many of its chapters on Google Books.

It is not a fascination with the dark arts that drives my curiosity here. I am primarily interested in the etymology of the familiar Malay words I grew up with, and the origins of cultures.

And I have to say, even though I do not have a drop of Malay blood in me, Malay culture is part of my culture too as a Malaysian and I take full ownership of it. No amount of racist propaganda is going to make me think that I am an outsider in my own country; the mountains accept me and call me theirs - who can argue with their authority?

Today I want to write about creation myths. I love reading them, and even wrote one myself a few years ago which I would like to expand into a larger story. Anyway, in his book, this Winstedt chap relates several versions of a Malay creation myth I had not heard of before, but which very much resembles the Maori creation story of Rangi (sky) and Papatuanuku (earth).

In the Moluccas the earth is a female deity, who in the west monsoon is impregnated by Lord Sun-Heaven.

A very Zeus-Danae style of procreation!

The Torajas in Celebes (Sulawesi) believed in two supreme powers, the Man and the Maiden, that is, the sun and the earth. The Dayaks of Borneo hold that the sun and the earth created the world. ...

...A Kelantan account relates that sun and earth once had human form, sun the form of a man and earth the form of a woman, whose milk may be traced in the tin-ore of Malaya and whose blood is now gold.

Meanwhile, the following brief account reminds us of the tremendous influence Indian culture had on our region all those centuries ago:

Actors in the north of the Malay Peninsula say that "the earth spirit, whom actors fear, is the daughter of Seretang Bogoh, who sits in the sun and guides the winds, and of Sang Siuh, the mother of the earth, who sits at the navel of the world."

Many religions at once unite and dissociate the fruitful earth and the gloomy underworld. But as Malay drama came from India, this northern tradition may be a corruption of Hindu mythology. By some Malay actors Raja Siu, lord of the surface of the earth, is invoked along with Siva, and the name [Siu] is perhaps a corruption of Siva. Anyhow, in time Siva and Sri usurped the place of Father Sky (or Father Water, as he is sometimes called) and of Mother Earth in the Malay pantheon, and today even the existence of these two primitive gods has been forgotten.

Winstedt goes on to explain, or conjecture, how these early cult figures evolved into djinns and spirits...

Reading all these ancient stories makes me feel connected to all these disparate cultures that today seem at odds with each other. We are indebted to Indian culture for its great contribution to our literature, early medicine, arts, medieval astrology; and yet in today's Malaysia many Indians are made to feel like 'third citizens'. Deepak Chopra teaches that everyone shares the same atoms, and the same breath.

This Merdeka, as all others, I am hopeful that we can keep this in mind and not let our minds be blinkered by the politics of hate.

I would also like to bring your attention to Amir Muhammad's Merdeka project, Sejarah Melayu Reloaded. It is his very funky, witty retelling of the classic Malay Annals, which was often quoted in our primary school history textbooks. Dating back to (according to Amir) 1612, Sejarah Melayu was the go-to source for the early history of the Malayan Archipelago. Amir's updated version is spiced up with entertaining pictures, too.

Salam merdeka kepada saudara saudari berbagai kaum di mana jua mereka berada.

Malay ghost stories

2010-08-29T02:16:00.003+12:00

I have here in my hands, even though I know it is improbable that I am typing and holding it simultaneously, John D. Gimlette’s Malay Poisons And Charm Cures. It was first published in 1915 but the edition I have in front of me was issued in 1971 by Oxford University Press. I obtained this interesting artifact from the library a few weeks ago.

I would like to share what I learned about the Malay word hantu, which means ghost, from this book. As a Malaysian and therefore having had a childhood ‘bombarded with warnings of unfriendly spirits’ as my friend KB would put it, the fascination with this word is unsurprising. The spirit world is so real to us - too real!!

Gimlette quotes H.N. Ridley’s (the author of List of Malay Plant Names) suggestion that hantu is sometimes used to mean “false” in Malay botanical nomenclature. Limau hantu, for example, is the name for “wild pomelo”.

paku langsuir

Certain wild plants are said to be planted and cultivated by spirits. Paku langsuir, the Malay name for bird’s-nest fern, is made up of the words “fern” (paku) and “female vampire” (langsuir, or langsuyar), the creature that makes her home within this wild jungle fern. In Malay mythology, women who die in childbirth are said to turn into langsuirs, and when they do, all hell breaks loose. Interestingly, I have heard that Malays boil the leaves of the paku langsuir as medication for women in confinement, so that the fern becomes, in my mind, a strange symbol of feminine duality, that of nurturing mother (because the fern resembles a nest) and that of angry she-devil.

There are other interesting uses of 'hantu'. Gimlette writes:

Certain clouds, when of very quaint or changing form (hantu dagok) are believed to be the ghosts of murdered men.

In Kedah, an evil spirit called Hantu Doman is a survival of the Monkey-God, Hanuman, who occurs in the Hindu legend Ramayana. It is described as having the face of a horse and the body of a man.

The word hantu is applied to the middle finger (jari hantu), perhaps supporting the old superstition of “making the horns” against the Evil Eye;

a sea-shell called siput laut, unidentified, is called hantu, and the word siput, if used in another sense, signified the lines or markings on the hands used in palmistry.

And now, to see if I can go to sleep after reading all that…

A bit of film silliness

2010-08-27T22:55:00.000+12:00

Best understated ending for a film: Eat Drink Man Woman

Best love scene: Don't Look Now (see Jonathan Lethem's essay, Donald Sutherland's buttocks)

Saddest love scene: Smash Palace

Sexiest Hitchcock scene: The 39 Steps, when the two main characters are unwillingly hand-cuffed to each other and she has to remove her stockings...

Second viewing surprisingly rewards: Eagle Vs Shark, As Good As It Gets, Basquiat

Second viewing surprisingly disappoints: American Splendour, Lost In Translation

Most interesting book to film adaptation: Tristram Shandy A Cock And Bull Story

To be continued...

After the Quiet

2010-08-25T12:10:00.000+12:00

looking out from Tiritiri Matangi Island

I have managed to catch a virus and sprain my neck at the same time. Today is my final day convalescing at home. Admittedly, it's a welcome relief from the coal face. Working six days a week at my non-art jobs isn't so bad. I'm often asked how I manage that on top of my art practice. The answer is, other aspects of my life give way, like not having the time for family and friends. A slipping exercise routine. No time to watch films. Overgrown armpit hair. A slightly dirtier house.

It may sound pathetic that I have to be sick in order to catch up on all the things I have been remiss in. I finally had some time to put finishing touches to a few small watercolours, watch three Hitchcock films (Topaz, Mr & Mrs Smith and Rebecca), listen to book podcasts and also start reading Tan Twan Eng's Gift Of Rain which I picked from the MPH store at KL airport. I still haven't made human contact outside the house, though.

This is not a book review

Gift of Rain is proving to be an enjoyable read. It is set in 1940s Penang and Perak, and I find myself stopping every few pages or so to drift off into a reverie of my childhood and experiences at the very places that Tan describes in his book. It's the story of Philip Hutton, a young lad of English and Chinese descent growing up in Penang. He befriends a Japanese diplomat who starts teaching him aikido and becomes his sensei. Their friendship deepens but is frowned upon by others as the threat of a Japanese invasion looms over Malaya.

I'm only two-thirds into the novel, so I can't say whether the story is satisfying. But I'm very much enjoying the telling of the protagonist's special friendship with his beloved sensei, as well as Tan's gift for apt similes like this one:

Under the eaves were more carvings, crawling down the columns that held up the roofs like petrified vegetation.

Many of Tan's descriptions of Malaya are very romantic... Okay-lah, a bit drama-lah, but this time I really don't mind-lah. Consider this passage about Penang itself, narrated by the protagonist, Philip:

I have never seen the light of Penang replicated anywhere else in the world - bright, bringing everything into razor-sharp focus, yet at the same time warm and forgiving, making you want to melt into the walls it shines on, into the leaves it gives life to. It is the kind of light that illuminates not only what the eyes see, but also what the heart feels.

I want to check with my Penangite friend KB to see if she feels the same way, heh heh. Perhaps that is what Home feels like, anywhere in the world.

Can't wait to reach the conclusion. I'm dying to find out how the characters betray each other. If you're thinking about buying this book, I recommend looking past its production quality! The print job is amateur; you can make out the pixels in the letters and the ink comes away when you rub your clammy fingers on them. Oh dear, is this what all print-on-demand books look like?

Craig Cliff

I've started reading Craig Cliff's blog and added him to my links bar. He is a New Zealand author and his first novel, A Man Melting, was launched by Randomhouse just recently. This will be my next book purchase, for sure, but I am being VERY disciplined by promising myself to read the unread books on my shelves before buying a new one or even borrowing one from the library. I came across Craig's writing in Sport magazine (a literary magazine, mind you, so why on earth is it called Sport??) and was quite impressed by his short story 30 Ways Of Looking At Marumaru South which is made up of thirty vignettes, each told from the point of view of an inhabitant of Marumaru South.

I like that on his blog Craig writes things like: "I still feel a bit dirty with all this thinly veiled self-promotion, but hopefully there’s enough honesty in these sorts of posts to be, I dunno, redemptive?"

Art

Well, I've only a couple of hours left before my usual life routine engagements responsibilities sweep me up again in a vortex of activity... So, I'd best be art-ing along. I want to finish a watercolour work today. Friends, until next time!

She hobbles away coughing...

The one and only Antares

2010-08-13T19:10:00.001+12:00

This is a plug for my dear friend Antares who is re-releasing his album Second Coming. Click here for the background story, music samples and how to get your mits on a copy.

My art on view

2010-08-03T18:42:00.000+12:00

Retrospectively: the Choice! exhibition in Melbourne has been documented and now has an online home at Pippa's blog.

Upcoming: my painting in this year's Trust Waikato Contemporary Art Award (but renamed to Bold Horizon) can be viewed on the online catalogue. See you at the opening!

Film festival snippets

2010-07-28T21:24:00.003+12:00

This year, I lacked the energy to attend more than three films at the festival. Since I am so pressed for time this year, I've been turning to books more than going to the cinema. Going to a movie requires planning and a solid two-hour commitment! With books, I can read them on the bus, in the lift and while walking to work.

My festival film picks this year were:

There Once Was An Island (Te Henua E Nnoho)

Briar's first film, Allie Eagle & Me, was so well done considering how young and inexperienced she was at the time. I was glad to see that TOWAI got a lot of press leading up to the screening. It's a documentary about the island of Takuu which is quickly sinking due to the effects of global warming. It's very sad that the unique culture of Takuu's inhabitants will be wiped out through no fault of their own; my spirit is so tied up with Malaysia, I can't even imagine losing my country like that. I liked how Briar let the islanders speak for themselves, and often filmed them speaking to each other about the dire situation. I kept wondering how Briar managed to capture all these pertinent and interesting conversations, whether she set them up or just appeared with her camera mid-conversation. Also, the two scientists who visited the island to assess the situation were very pleasant characters and appeared to establish a good rapport with the islanders during their stay. I was amused at how they took to wearing sarongs after a while. I'm optimistic that this film will get a general release soon in NZ and would recommend it to anyone.

The Room

Nothing at all prepared me for this experience. It's very hard to describe; no wonder the blurb in the festival booklet was nowhere near illuminating. The Room is dubbed the Citizen Kane of bad movies. It was made in 2003 and has gained serious cult status since, so much so that audiences yell the lines out and arrive at the theatre with props. The movie itself is unremarkable (I've seen worse movies); what made it so watchable was the audience's behaviour. People were yelling (yes, most of the time I couldn't hear the movie itself) jibes and hilarious commentary. For some bizarre reason, framed pictures of spoons appear throughout the movie, so whenever one was spotted, audience members would yell "Spoons!" and waves of plastic spoons promptly flew through the air. I wish my friends had been there with me; this was definitely my highlight for this festival.

Sam Hunt: The Purple Balloon and other stories

This documentary about NZ's beloved poet Sam Hunt is good but it could have been better. Compared to TOWAI, this was not as slick - the choppy editing, the Courier New typeface... Well, it was still enjoyable watching the man perform his poems, hearing his old buddies talk about him, and seeing the old footage of Sam which must have been a pain to source. Young Sam seemed to surround himself with creative people who would become stalwarts in their respective fields. What a magnificent way to live, creative minds bouncing off and propelling each other. Listening to Robin White talk about the sweet old days when she and Sam were virtually neighbours and would often visit each other to share their art, made me envious of such lifelong creative friendships. Good ol' Sam.

Some descriptions of crime telly

2010-07-25T12:39:00.000+12:00

101 Ways To Kill A Woman
101 Ways To Kill An Innocent Child
Murder Porn

... If tv is saturated with this stuff, there must be a demand for it and if so, why the hell?

The subject matter ... became very misogynistic and gratuitous violence that was not my cup of tea. I thought it was going to be investigatory procedures about criminal activities like Watergate and Enron and Bernie Madoff and all kinds of things, you know, and it just became serial killers every day and massacreing women right and left.

- Mandy Patinkin on why he left the cast of Criminal Minds

Painter Lee Ufan on East Asian Cuisine

2010-07-10T14:54:00.001+12:00

"The cuisine of the three main countries of East Asia can be represented by the following formulas:

Japan A + b = A'
Korea A + B = A'B'
China A + B = C

In Japan, flavoring is added to plain ingredients to elevate them to a higher dimension.

In Korea, certain ingredients are mixed with others and with flavorings so that they interpenetrate to some extent.

In China, ingredients and flavorings are mixed in a way that produces a change, something completely different.

These tendencies can be seen as characteristic of the entire culture of these countries as well as their cuisine."

(1970)

From The Art of Encounter, Lee Ufan

Catalogue essay for "Choice", C3 Gallery, Melbourne

2010-06-24T22:46:00.000+12:00

Choice!

I remember first coming to New Zealand from Malaysia and wondering why a friend said “Choice” when I lent her my pen, also after I worked out that it wasn’t a pin she wanted. It dawned on me, of course, that Kiwis are fond of abbreviated phrases, so “Choice” is an adjective and not a noun, as in “the choicest of vegetables”. The whale is simply “beached as”. Doubt is expressed with a “Not even!”

In this new exhibition at Gallery 2, Pippa Makgill, an expat New Zealander currently based in Melbourne, has invited twenty artists from New Zealand, some who now live in Melbourne, to exhibit with her in Choice!. The exhibition's title is synonymous with "Awesome!", its tone celebratory and affirmative. Art of varying shapes and sizes was mailed to Pippa over a two-week period, resembling bulky postcards from home.

Pippa does not identify herself as a curator in this exhibition, since she has given the artists free reign to send her art that they feel comfortable entrusting into her hands, so this selection of art is limited to who she invited and what they were willing to send in the mail. She is more of a facilitator, creating a cross-tasman art channel. Her approach is that of inviting different friends to a dinner party and seeing who hits it off.

When I moved to New Zealand, my strategy for feeling less homesick for Malaysia was to learn more about the culture of my adopted country. I tried learning Maori because that was the language spoken here for hundreds of years. I put down roots – literally – and began a vegetable garden to feel as if I were being nourished by the land. I also turned to its literature because that taught me more about the nation’s psyche better than any history book could.

I learned, for instance, about the pakeha literary nationalists in the 1950s who struggled to find a uniquely New Zealand voice in their writing instead of looking back to England for an identity. This act of looking back interests me greatly, for I often 'look back' to whence I came - the distance provides a tension that is useful in my creative life. Hence I completely identify with CK Stead's sentiment that "remoteness is not something our writers should deny or regret, but something to be acknowledged, and exploited as an analogue for the immovable tensions which are universal in human experience" (from his essay For the Hulk of the World's Between, 1961).

These writers wearied of apologizing for New Zealand’s remoteness from the rest of the world. It seemed as though New Zealand were a question mark interrupting the ocean; a thin strip at the mercy of maritime weather, its face continually sculpted by the sea. Oh, to break free from its precarious identity!

Now isn’t that the same cry of the immigrant? I often wonder about things like whether my spiritual connection to my Malaysian ancestors goes from broadband to dial-up whenever I’m in New Zealand. Is my Malaysianness eroding the more time I spend away from home? It’s no wonder then that I identified strongly with the nationalist poets like Allen Curnow and Charles Brasch. They wanted to store up their own literary reserves to draw from, to be independent of geography in a way.

Since Brasch wrote the lines, “divided and perplexed the sea is waiting” (The Islands) in 1948, New Zealand has matured into a country comfortable in its own skin. As the contemporary New Zealand poet Bill Manhire puts it, “I live at the edge of the universe,/ like everybody else” (Milky Way Bar, 1991). With these lines, Manhire confidently (or indignantly) proclaims that he has learnt the trick of standing upright here, asserting his identity and ties with the land.

As a new migrant, however, it was my turn to form a question mark against the sea as I began to navigate this socio-political landscape that was foreign to me. I am still learning how to belong, as perhaps expat New Zealanders sometimes feel. This exhibition then is as much about the creative tension created by distance as it is about the choices we make in our creative practices.

Lydia Chai, Auckland

2010

Choice! An exhibition of New Zealand artists:
Opening Wednesday 23rd June 6 - 8pm
Runs 23rd June - 11th July
Gallery Hours: Wed - Sunday 10am -5pm
1 St Heliers St, Abbotsford Convent Foundation

Kia kaha

2010-06-20T01:14:00.000+12:00

It looks like I have worked about sixty hours, in my day jobs and my art practice, during the past week. Normally, by now I'd be hankering for a full day of sleep but I guess the adrenaline rush is keeping me buzzing.

Sometimes I feel like the water's coming up to my nose. The more I battle to stay afloat, the deeper I sink. I think my new strategy should be to lie on my back and let the water carry me.

I can do it, I know I can.

I've got a work in this show - opening Wednesday

2010-06-17T23:02:00.000+12:00

Notes on seeing Taika Waititi's "Boy"

2010-06-14T07:04:00.001+12:00

This is one of the best films I’ve seen in a long time. Boy (James Rolleston) is a kid growing up in a rural town. When his grandmother sets off to attend a tangi for a few days, Boy is entrusted with the task of looking after his siblings (and cousins, I think). Quite unexpectedly, his father Alamein (played very effectively by Waititi himself), who has just spent some time in jail for robbery, shows up at their house with the rest of his goofy three-man gang, the Crazy Horses. Boy is elated at having a parent again, since his mother died years ago, but we already know by now that Alamein can’t be up to much good. Boy spends much of the movie trying to act like the sort of man he thinks Alamein would approve of, basically apeing his wayward father… and it all comes to a head one night...

Boy has very funny moments from beginning to end but what lingers is sadness. Having said that, it’s not a downer of a movie at all – in fact, it ends on a very joyous note with the much-talked-about Poi E/Thriller mashup that is reminiscent of the dance numbers at the end of Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire and Takeshi Kitano’s Zatoichi.

The director as actor

Waititi is a fine director and he’s equally competent as an actor. Playing a role in his own film must not only be cost effective, but according to Waititi, it gave him more control over the project:

Waititi ended up casting himself as Boy’s wayward father Alamein, a flighty yet charming parental figure with more than a few schemes up his sleeve. “I auditioned lots and lots of people for the role, and it wasn’t quite what I wanted,” Waititi remembers. “The character’s based on a couple of relations of mine, and there were specific things that I really wanted, little character things. I wasn’t getting it, so I thought it just made sense for me to do it.”

And ultimately, that helped Waititi to better direct Rolleston and his fellow young thespians. “It helped to be acting opposite them and engaging with them while we were doing stuff,” says Waititi. “We’d just change lines or change the meanings of lines, which would change the performance. I could sort of micromanage that way.”

- In With The NEW by Sarah Kuhn, Backstage, Feb 4-10 2010

Besides the logistical convenience of it, I think that a director who assumes key roles in his own films is bound to encourage more conceptual readings of his work, too. What follows then is my take on the significance of Waititi’s dual role as director-actor.

Absence and presence in Taika Waititi’s films

Interestingly, Waititi plays absent characters in both his feature films. For a director to do this creates a couple of paradoxes. In Eagle Vs Shark, he plays the more successful older brother Gordon who inexplicably commits suicide (no, that was not a spoiler). In Boy, he plays the prodigal father Alamein who returns to his family after a stint in jail. Although Alamein comes back into the family fold, he had missed his sons’ formative years and remains emotionally incompetent and distant, and therefore still absent in a way.

First of all, absence only creates another kind of presence, if not a more pronounced one. Gordon and Alamein, by detaching themselves from their families in their respective ways, become emblems of loss; they are the void that the other characters circle around. Similarly, a director is somebody around whom everyone on set revolves. He is not an emblem of loss but an object of desire in that everybody working on the film, presumably, strives to serve his vision. Even without acting in his own film, the director is the very definition of presence because his unique sensibility is stamped all over the product.

Secondly, for the director to be playing a largely absent character is hugely ironic because we can’t help but recognize him as director of the film; it interrupts the viewer’s suspension of disbelief that the character truly is ‘lost’ to us. This is not necessarily a bad thing; I just think it’s interesting that this director places himself smack in the middle of that void.

Loss upon loss

In both of Waititi’s feature films, there is also –dare I call it a theme? – a narrative about loss upon loss. The loser younger brother in Eagle Vs Shark had already lost his parents’ favour even before his elder brother killed himself. Boy had already lost his mother when she died giving birth to his brother Rocky (again, not a spoiler) only to endure the loss of a father to prison life.

Enough with the Wes Anderson comparisons, already!

Waititi has more emotional depth. And he’s funnier. A common Anderson theme is the selfish parent who wreaks emotional havoc on their offspring. By contrast, how does Waititi handle this material? Where Anderson uses deadpan ‘humour’ to mask deep-seated emotional pain, Waititi has Boy displaying real disillusionment and loss. Anderson’s characters are stuck in a juvenile state of mind. Waititi’s characters experience true catharsis. It’s true, I dislike Wes Anderson films.

I didn’t want to mention the obvious, but

I think much has been said about New Zealand films moving away from its ‘cinema of unease’ aka ‘antipodean gothic’. At the recent Auckland Writers & Readers Festival, publisher Fergus Barrowman (who is married to writer Elizabeth Knox) picked out a scene from Boy to illustrate this point. SPOILER (roll over white text to read): When Alamein angrily grabs his jacket off Boy in public, notice how Boy’s friends crowd around him to comfort him. If this film had been given a darker treatment, the camera would have zoomed away from the boy standing alone on the road, betrayed by his father. Instead, Waititi has his Boy supported by his community, and then marching forward determinedly. This might be indicative of a sense that New Zealanders are shifting away from a ‘man alone’ mindset and into a more social mindset.

With young exciting filmmakers like Florian Habicht and Taika Waititi, we’re seeing some really joyous stuff on our big screens.

Comedy with sting?

2010-05-28T23:11:00.000+12:00

Dawn French interviews John Cleese

Dawn French: Do you think men are more cruel when it comes to humour?

John Cleese: I think men are a bit more armoured when it comes to humour. I mean, I think we spend a lot of time trying to laugh at things we're scared of.

Parky interviews Dawn French

Parkinson: Is there a difference between male humour and female humour?

Dawn French: Well, I've just done a series of documentaries called Boys Who Do Comedy and, to be honest, I thought I was going to find a big difference. I've never quite known, but I thought I would find some sort of latent thing that would be the key. And in fact I don't think there's any difference whatsoever. I think the only difference is the way that male comedians approach the job. They actually regard it as a possible career. Steve Coogan told me that in the sixth form he was thinking that it might be a possible career for himself and I don't think any of the women approached it like that at all.

Why don't females fare better in the Art world?

2010-05-16T16:52:00.010+12:00

The NZ Herald's run-down of the Writers and Readers Fest includes more notes on what Sarah Thornton said about the gender divide in the art world:

Thornton found interesting gender differences both among artists and art collectors. She suggests one reason why so few artworks sold for over $1 million are made by women ("maybe now 10") is that auction buyers are predominantly male, while collectors who are female often prefer to be primary buyers - that is, to buy direct from galleries and get to know the artists whose work they're buying. She says female artists in general are less interested in selling work and making collectable items, particularly in a factory-style studio - "they're less happy to delegate".

--

Update: I should add that there are some people who reject all speculations on the 'causes' of the gender divide: they hold that the only reason women are not as successful as men is pure and simple discrimination. So, women, you can stop beating yourselves up over not being pushy enough. It's not your fault that men, even less competent men, are given more opportunities because they are male and you are not.

From a 2008 article in the LRB (the rest of the article is not for the faint-hearted):

"At the time of the Nobel Prize, [Elfriede] Jelinek was asked whether she thought feminism had made any significant gains over the years. Nothing, she said, would lead one to suppose that it had."

I think all of us, men and women alike, will have our different ways of dealing with this information.

Notes on a festival

2010-05-16T01:37:00.001+12:00

The Auckland Writers & Readers Festival is my favourite time of year. It must be a surreal experience for authors to have to face the public so intimately, writing being such a private and solitary endeavour. I wonder if authors resolve, in addition to bettering their craft, to become better readers (out loud) of their work. Do they practice? Do they ever get a friend to coach them? Do they record their voice and play it back?

Thomas Keneally & Anne Salmond with Kim Hill

To be honest, I attended this because I'm a Kim Hill fan. Bring her back to talkback television, I say. Thomas Keneally, most famously the author of Schindler's Ark, was a lovely grandfatherly figure and a most enthusiastic speaker. He once got so carried away with some wonderful one-liners that he forgot Kim's original question and apologized, to which Kim said that her question wasn't nearly as interesting as Keneally's answer. Anne Salmond came across as a historian with a heart of gold who has humanity at the heart of her research.

An Hour With Charlotte Grimshaw

Just hours before attending this, I read Grimshaw's short story from Opportunity about a novelist who is interviewed onstage at a writers festival and reads a piece of revenge fiction to her ex-lover who is in the audience. What a fantasy! Haha. Grimshaw's description of the festival atmosphere, obviously based on the real one, stayed with me throughout my experience at this festival. Paula Morris chaired this session and she always has a fabulous sense of humour, though at times Grimshaw did not really pick up on Morris' banter. Grimshaw struck me as a reserved speaker; possibly because she feels she has to protect the other famous writers in her family? One thing she said that resonated with me was her utter confidence in her ability and validity as a writer - I can identify with this wholly as an artist. Apparently writers (like artists) are often angsty about whether they've made the right decision in becoming a writer. Not Grimshaw - she may have doubts about the merits of a certain piece she's working on, but she never wonders if she should be doing something else (like going back to law). Go girl.

An Evening With William Dalrymple

He is known as a travel writer, but I don't think that description fits. His latest book Nine Lives tells the real stories of nine individuals living in India (where Dalrymple lives, too) and how they have each undertaken very different spiritual paths. Somebody in the audience asked Dalrymple if he thinks the innate spirituality of India is corroding due to economic expansion and materialism. Dalrymple responded by saying that Westerners often romanticize India as a very spiritual place, but it is and always has been, even in Buddha's time, a very materialistic environment. He went on to say that there is value in both Western and Eastern religions, that one is not more spiritually superior to the other. Yes.

Sarah Thornton, author of Seven Days In The Art World

An audience member asked Thornton whether she liked the art world or thought that it was not a wholesome environment to be in. I thought this question brought up the fact that Thornton's book, in being so careful not to judge, does not satisfy the reader's natural need for the writer to take a stand. Is that why I see this book as some sort of literary candy, lightweight and uncontentious? Well, I think there is room for such a book about the art world. I certainly enjoyed reading it; though, being an artist myself and therefore part of the circus that is the art world, some of it cut too close to the bone for me (which is okay). Anyway, Thornton's response to the question put to her was that she is happily ambivalent about the art world. There was also an interesting discussion with chair Linda Tyler about why women artists are still not pulling in the big bucks as well as their male counterparts. Thornton feels that women artists are far less interested in the marketing aspect of their work than male artists. For eg, she had to work twice as hard in getting interviews with the women for her book; they seem to be more suspicious than men of the media. Motherhood, obviously, is also a major factor in holding women back from their careers: not just because of the time spent on mothering (Thornton is a mother herself) but also the fragmentation of identity that comes with being a mother.

Meet Karl.

2010-05-13T23:07:00.002+12:00

This package arrived in my mailbox today. Cardboard and brown paper were lovingly cut and cellophaned to cushion CK Stead's hot-off-the-press memoir against bumps and scratches. I dig such reverent handling of books.

CK Stead lives in Auckland, where I now live. How wonderful it is to share the same city as one's favourite author; to recognize the street names and landmarks of one's neighbourhood in works of fiction, and to read about fictional characters sipping coffee at one's own regular haunts.

Great fiction is powerfully transformative and makes us think twice about the familiar. A typical Auckland downpour has me recalling an evocative passage about rain in Stead's Death Of The Body, which includes these lines:

The air seems filled with water. Or as if, through the water, float pockets of air.

Even now, as New Zealand approaches autumn, I look outside the window and think of how Stead perfectly describes what I am seeing in All Visitors Ashore:

Autumn - early autumn - can offer the best Auckland weather, with that windowpane brightness and clearness of air and light that belong to Wellington and the South Island, but with the mildness that belongs to the North. It is, for that season only, mildness without a blurring of edges. The blade is sharp, the water sparkles, the far hills have precise lines and don't melt into one another, and the mind is fresh and alert.

Another reason I like Stead is that he is not afraid to speak his mind. This is brave, considering how small the literary scene is in New Zealand. Actually, this country has a dearth of top quality writers, but the scene is small in the sense that the market is small and there are few literary reviews - if one review gives a new novel the thumbs down, rarely is there a second review to hopefully balance it out.

Fresh from winning a couple of major awards overseas this year, Stead has now found himself in the middle of controversy again: something you can read about here. The article certainly tries to make a mountain out of a molehill and I for one am glad that Stead is paying no attention to the hot air:

“New Zealand isn’t grown up enough to celebrate its own successes without envy.” (Stead)

I applaud Stead's comment. We need more public intellectuals like him, and less pettiness. [I have read about the other 'controversial' views he has held in the past (his unflattering portrayal of feminists in Death Of The Body and Villa Vittoria, for example, was something I delighted in, even though I am a feminist myself) and yet I remain unoffended. This man usually talks a lot of sense.]

I now have a "CK Stead Omnibus" at the left column to keep track of his podcast appearances. Check it out!

Podcasts. I love them.

2010-04-23T16:14:00.000+12:00

NPR's Culturetopia podcast

New Yorker's wide-ranging podcast (though I think the Fiction section is the meatier & most worthwhile)

New York Times has something for everyone

New Zealand-based Women On Air podcast

Authors On Tour

Bad Lieutenant

2010-04-05T14:19:00.004+12:00

I have just watched Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant. Now that's fine moviemaking. It's disturbing and funny. It's fantastical and gritty. It's about a corrupt policeman who solves crimes in the most nefarious of ways, and nevertheless manages to get promoted. Since he has no moral compass, he does not solve crimes to pursue justice; he does it mostly to save his own skin. In fact, almost everything he does is a selfish act. He knows this. He stares his own doom in the face and laughs.

Nicholas Cage is an actor who hams it up - a lot - instead of acting like a normal human being. Yet he is very watchable, because he channels all that intensity to make the story believeable. It's like some sort of hyperreal acting. Or extreme comedy.

Herzog fans must have chuckled to themselves when they saw iguanas and crocodiles in some hallucinatory scenes. This film is set in New Orleans but it looks like Herzog couldn't help himself and brought the jungle to New Orleans.

"Shoot him one more time, his soul's still dancing". That line is from the awesomest scene in this movie.

Signalling the end of summer

2010-03-31T12:48:00.001+13:00

Art proposals

There's never just one deadline, there are several and they arrive at the same time. Augh. It's been a mad rush to submit art proposals. I've done two now, and one more to go. Sometimes when a proposal of mine is turned down, I feel as though I had busted my gut for nothing. But then I think of it this way: an artist doesn't lose as much money when a proposal is turned down as, say, the amount of money architects lose when they don't secure the tender for a project. And if I just keep at it, someone will give me a chance eventually. I'm a believer!

Two poems about the end of summer

I would like to share with you two poems by two very different New Zealand writers. The first, March and Mrs Simpson by Brian Turner, combines the atmosphere of cool early autumn nights with the author's favourite pastime, fishing. "Mrs Simpson" (I had to google it) is the name of a trout fly, those colour feathery things to lure fish at the ends of fishing lines. "The King was lured by the latter" refers, of course, to the incident where King Edward VIII abdicated his throne to marry a Mrs Wallis Simpson. "Ida" refers to the Ida Valley in Central Otago.

March and Mrs Simpson
by Brian Turner

March, and all of a dewy, brisk sudden
the nights have drawn in, and all
that I know by name has finished flowering
weeks ago, so it's autumnal,

though the Ida's mostly still dry
and the dam's as low as it gets
and slummy. The trout sulk by day
and don't begin to move

before eleven. But after that, stars
brilliant and perky above, I toss up
between tying on a Hamill's Killer,
a Fuzzy Wuzzy, a Woolly Bugger

or a Mrs Simpson. The King
was lured by the latter, so Mrs Simpson
it is. And ten minutes later I feel
the tug that says, Works every time.

The second poem is Bidding the lover goodbye by CK Stead. I just love this poem so much. Goodbye, summer!

Bidding the lover goodbye
by CK Stead

Pampas heads
in wind
against the sun
are white flame
at the sky's blue altar.

They are the plumes of horsemen
riding away
over the hill.

Farewell summer!
Vale!
There will never be another like you.

Poem of the week: Achilles

2010-03-20T22:09:00.005+13:00

Carol Ann Duffy is doing her British Poet Laureate thing again. She's hit the news after penning her latest poem titled Achilles. It's about David Beckham's heel injury. I think it's remarkable that a poet can make headlines with a new poem, the way a filmmaker might do with a new project. Perhaps news coverage comes with the Poet Laureate package.

Achilles

Myth's river - where his mother dipped him, fished him, a slippery golden boy flowed on, his name on its lips.
Without him, it was prophesied, they would not take Troy.
Women hid him, concealed him in girls' sarongs; days of sweetmeats, spices, silver songs...
But when Odysseus came, with an athlete's build, a sword and a shield, he followed him to the battlefield, the crowd's roar,
And it was sport, not war, his charmed foot on the ball...
But then his heel, his heel, his heel...

I like how the word "heel" has become a cry at the end, evoking a rocking motion as well. This sounds a bit obvious, but what makes this poem enjoyable for me is the rhythm and internal rhymes (build, shield, battlefield; roar, sport, war...) - and here you can listen to Duffy herself reciting it.

Working on the Bend series

2010-03-18T17:41:00.002+13:00

Once I get these paintings framed, they will be on sale at the Baradene College art exhibition, from 7 to 9 May 2010. The Bend paintings (Bend I, II, III & IV) are playful riffs on certain motifs that crop up in my larger works, so they were fun to do. Sorta like improv solos. I like having a sense of rhythm and musicality in my work.

Thinking about thinking

2010-03-08T12:03:00.004+13:00

According to Geoff Dyer, DH Lawrence said he preferred painting to writing because it costs the soul far less.

I think of my own writing as filtering what comes into my head and sorting or rearranging the drawers of my mind.

Writing is difficult but it feels intuitive because even when I don't yet know how a piece will take form, I know that the nugget is already within me; I just have to chip away at it.

Painting, on the other hand, is a process of opening myself to new ways of thinking and doing. For eg, an idea may require me to go about making things in ways I am not used to. Another eg is that all my paintings are visual puzzles that I have to solve. In this sense, I find painting to be more demanding than writing sometimes. It forces me to step out of my comfort zone.

I'm not sure whether I agree with DH Lawrence. Writing tends to act as a friend who lets me pour out my troubles, counsels me and makes me feel less useless. Whereas Painting raps my knuckles and tells me to get on with it. This also helps me feel less useless. If I were completely honest, I would say that I like writing more than I do painting, but I most definitely need both.

I wrote a poem about cabbage trees this morning. I was supposed to be painting.

Above image: Cabbage trees in Whakatane, taken in 2008.

That Oxford slacker

2010-03-06T23:32:00.003+13:00

Geoff Dyer talks about John Berger, creative non-fiction, loving and not loving DH Lawrence, being a slacker AND his next book project which sounds VERY exciting.

If only this fler were PM

2010-02-22T09:26:00.001+13:00

Raja Petra speaks of meeting Altantuya's father.

Back in Auckland

2010-02-19T17:22:00.003+13:00

It is always painful leaving family, friends, the tropics, the madness, and all the love and goodwill that comes with Home.

Every time I visit my home country, I feel replenished and equipped with more life skills. This is because my 'cultural elders' - older family members, mentors, spiritual partners - are always giving me 'one last piece of advice', like thrusting gold nuggets into my palm before I return to my life in ang-moh country, New Zealand. I truly am held up by a whole village of people who love and care about me.

How I deserved to be so fortunate, I don't know.

Ten thousand miles between us but I carry you within me wherever I go.

More gems from Latif Kamaluddin

2010-02-07T23:19:00.008+13:00

In the wake of Anwar's sacking in 1998, I found solace in a book of poetry by Latif K called Bad Breath and Fireproof Drag Queens, Otherwise Known As Khepa's Dilemma Being A Concretoceptual Celebration of Irrelevant Research (2002). I had discovered it in my favourite bookstore, Silverfish Books, and was probably drawn to the striking cover depicting (presumably) the poet himself sporting a long beard and sunnies.

It is a weird and lively collection of word art; a mix of political satire, horny verse and philosophical meanderings. Take this piece, for instance:

Ya lor.

Now that the Anwar saga has reared its ugly head around again, I am refreshed by Encik Kamaluddin's frankness in saying what is on all our minds: that the sodomy charges against him are absurd and that this is a show trial.

His cheekiness reminds me of Antares. His tired sarcasm (or is it feigned resignation? I can't decide) reminds me of Patrick Teoh.

Poem for our time

2010-02-03T02:22:00.005+13:00

Word art by Latif Kamaluddin, written a few years ago.

Jan Verwoert

2010-01-21T06:18:00.002+13:00

I like the way Mr Verwoert writes about art. From his article Standing on the Gates of Hell, My Services Are Found Wanting:

Standing on the gates of hell, my services are found wanting. For I cannot give you what you want. What you want from me, here, on the gates of hell, is to open the gates and let you in. But I cannot do that. I don’t even see why that service should still be required. Because you have already passed the gates. You are inside. You live in contemporary hell. You inhabit the hell of the contemporary. And now you want me to perform the rite to confirm your passage? And give you reasons for being in there? I’m sorry, I can’t. To grant you a license to be where you are does not lie within my powers. Thus powerless I remain, standing on the gates of hell, observing what passes and sharing my observations with you.

Passing the gates of hell, you get everything you ever wanted. And everything you wanted is all you are ever going to get. Nothing more. Just that. Exactly what you wanted. Everything included. In hell. ...

I wish more art writing, especially n Malaysia, could be this way: writing that is so obviously inspired, earnest, confident, open, clever (I don't mind showiness sometimes), energized... Imaginative.

Precocious Eleanor Catton

2010-01-19T21:24:00.004+13:00

Thrice now in bookshops I have tried to pick up Eleanor Catton's much-hyped first novel, The Rehearsal, and each time I have not been able to get past the second page. The dialogue seemed painfully contrived and showy.

And yet, her latest short story Pawn Broken, set against the New Zealand gold rush, makes for an impressive read.

Victoria - the word alone was a promise, exultant, queenly, and wrapped around that triumphant syllable - ore.

By the end of the story, you will discover that the title holds a double meaning.

Christina Poblador's perfume bar

2010-01-19T03:40:00.012+13:00

The Singapore Art Museum is currently celebrating art from the Philippines and by far the most engaging work is Christina Poblador's Halimuyak ng Ma-i. It is a display of the various perfumes Poblador has created to evoke the culture, history and her memories of the Philippines. Yes, a very ambitious project indeed, and Poblador is only in her early twenties. She even crafted the glass decanters herself. Behold, how exquisite:

This one's called Wasted Youth. A sweet-smelling scent, it tells the story of the poor children who sell jasmines to help their families earn a living. Hence its sad title:

The perfume titled Gobyerno (Government) is kept in a decanter depicting the struggles of government. The two figurines on top show the precarious nature of governments:

This one had to do with families. The scent was a mixture of sweat and vinegar to remind us of the sacrifices we make for our families:

More perfumes:

Why do Malaysians like putting eggshells on the tips of their mother-in-law-tongues (lidah jin)?

2010-01-07T04:58:00.003+13:00

Umberto Eco, Lists, Love & Infinity

2009-12-29T03:43:00.004+13:00

...lovers who took great pleasure from the fact that "they often had more than one tongue in their mouths"...

Umberto Eco writes about infinity in The Drawbridge's latest issue, themed First Love. In his piece Infatuated with Armies of Angels, he characteristically connects different ideas, toying with theories and romancing his readers. He writes about his current pet topic, 'lists', and how they suggest infinity, and how Love is a means of expressing the infinite. In fact, I wonder if this article in The Drawbridge is an excerpt from his new book, The Infinity of Lists, which I have not read.

Readers of this blog will know that I love making lists... For some reason (Umberto could probably tell you why), listmaking is such a comforting and fun exercise.

Stuff I'm digging at the mo

Outrageous Fortune back episodes

Emily Perkins

Sam Hunt

Alistair Te Ariki Campbell poetry

Being at home with family, ferns, moneyplant creepers, Malaysian street food, durian

Off The Edge magazine

Making sketches

1000 piece Jigsaw puzzle

Citronella oil as mozzie repellant

Shaun the Sheep

Robert Downey Jr as Sherlock Holmes

Bookish news

2009-12-28T21:37:00.006+13:00

Yippee, the holidays means I get to read even more than usual. Here are some NZ book news.

Sam Hunt, Sam Hunt

has just been interviewed by Kim Hill. You'll know by now that he's one of my favourite poets. Bask in his ebullience and that famous laugh. If you're hungry for more Sam, he appears on Kiwi FM's Radio Wammo breakfast show at 8.40am sharp every Friday, in a segment called Sam Hunt's A Little Something For The Weekend.

Karl meet CK, CK meet Karl

Our man CK Stead has written a short piece about his travels abroad in the latest edition of Booknotes (download here).

Emily Perkins

I am in the thick of The New Girl, having been wowed by her masterpiece Novel About My Wife. Perkins also has an article published in the latest Booknotes, on writing from different points of view. May I add that her first person voice in Novel About My Wife is perfect (might blog about this at a later time).

Pecha Kucha

Pencil this in for 12 February 2010. Fourteen speakers, including CK Stead, Emily Perkins and Michelle Leggot (our former poet laureate) will have 20 seconds to talk about each of the 20 images they've picked out to share with an audience. Beyond that, I've no idea what's in store, but it's got CK, and it's cheap, and it's accessible. Shed 12, 91 Wellesley St, Auckland, from 8pm, $10 door sales.

Books and the supernatural

2009-12-23T15:04:00.009+13:00

Have just gotten my mits on some books I've been meaning to read for a long time:

Ripples by Shih Li-Kow - a short story collection

Lions In Winter by Wena Poon - more short stories, featuring Singaporeans

Growing Up In Trengganu by Awang Goneng - looks good and has a nice cover to boot

I still find it strange that when I am in New Zealand, surrounded by family and friends who do not believe in spirits, I lose that sensitivity to the supernatural world. If I am spooked, I blame it on a horror film I'd seen. However, as soon as I am back in Malaysia, it is so common to refer to spirits as if they were real people. I find myself thinking that my grandmother still hangs around the room she used to sleep in.

Flipping through Malaysian novels in the bookshop, I came across lots of stories with witch doctors and superstition... If South America has its magic realism, we have our pontianaks. Rani Manicka's The Rice Mother and Preeta Samarasan's Evening Is The Whole Day both have ghosts in them. The supernatural is as real to us as anything else.

I know of some readers who do not enjoy the magic realism of writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Haruki Murakami. Perhaps they think that the magic is there only to exoticize a place further and render it unfathomable, mysterious, and therefore appealing to the Western reader. Or perhaps these readers are fatigued by the seemingly pointless twists and turns (annoying deus ex machinas?) of a magic realist plot.

I wonder if there will be a similar 'pontianak/spirit fatigue' with Malaysian novels. It's probably a moot point, nothing to worry oneself about. Malaysians love eating up stories about the folllowing: how someone gained or lost his wealth, how someone's marriage fell apart, and how the spirit world plagues us. It's obvious that our stories of the supernatural are told for our own entertainment and not so much for 'the Westerners'. I think these stories are here to stay.

Rangitoto in Summer

2009-12-18T22:49:00.004+13:00

Just a little something I painted for the holidays. Ah, Rangitoto. "Bloody Sky". I love that you are right there, a familiar silhouette, a muse for books and poetry, a place to explore and daydream in whenever we get sick of the City.

Happy Holidays, everyone!

Speedway

2009-12-01T16:15:00.003+13:00

When the weather's right, I like to go to the Speedway. I love the atmosphere, the various little routines (like the guy who constantly has to powder the starting line), the crashes...

Sprint cars with grunt

Masked men

Whoops!

Three opinions (mine and others)

2009-11-28T14:33:00.010+13:00

On Witi Ihimaera's recent plagiarism debacle

Reading the Maps has come up with an opinion piece titled Plagiarism: What Ihimaera could learn from Eliot. Basically, the writer says that the Witi issue has been debated wrongly. First of all, those wanting to defend or attack Witi's plagiarism have not discussed the instances when literary borrowing is allowed. The writer insists that, as in the case of TS Eliot's The Waste Land (which I have not read, nor have I read Witi's The Trowenna Sea), borrowing without acknowledgement is good if it builds on the context of the original source. Whereas in Witi's case, Witi has borrowed to make his own prose look pretty - hardly a collaborative effort & smacks of vanity.

The difference between the plagiarisms in The Waste Land and the plagiarisms in The Trowenna Sea is closely related to the different intentions of the two plagiarists. Eliot has appropriated the refrain of Spencer's 'Prothalamion' because he wants to make the author of The Faerie Queen into one of the voices in the large, discordant chorus that is The Waste Land; he does not want to assimilate Spencer's verbal felicities, but rather to present them to the reader alongside his own.

Witi Ihimaera's plagiarisms are both far less ambitious and far less noble than those of Eliot. Ihimaera seems to have borrowed attractive passages from other authors simply because they make his own prose seem more attractive. Rather than making some sort of original use of the passages he has borrowed - by juxtaposing them with dissimilar passages, for instance, or adding commentary to them - he has sought to insert them as gently as possible into his text. Indeed, Ihimaera appears to have 'tweaked' many of the passages he has appropriated, so that they fit more comfortably into their new contexts.

If Eliot is like the modernist architect who wants his building to bear witness to the origins of its materials, then Ihimaera is like the tasteless but conceited renovator who insists on painting over brick and plastering over iron fills.

Speaking of artistic borrowing, have you read Jonathan Lethem's 2007 essay, The Ecstasy of Influence? It is about plagiarism and it is plagiarism, since every sentence in Lethem's essay is a paraphrase of somebody else's work! It's all there in the footnotes.

On The Woolshed Sessions

Released a year ago, this album was recorded in an old woolshed in Takaka Valley simply because the acoustics of the woolshed were so damn good. So good, in fact, that the music evokes the landscape around it, no kidding. At the end of Sun Song, for example, what sounds like an e-bow over a guitar bringing the song to a close calls to mind the sun setting over yellow grassy plains.

There is the atmospheric track Waterfall, the delightfully playful Stringing Me Along and the sweet Only Your Arms... It's got those twangs, lilting guitars and drum brushes that I love. It's warm country music - life-affirming (with one or two hints of the darker side of life) and smelling of manuka bush, pampas grass and waterfalls. If I had to describe this album in one word, it would be sun-soaked. Perfect for summer.

Listen to filmmaker Gaylene Preston, the owner of the woolshed, talk about it here. Retailing at $29.95 at Real Groovy.

Speaking the words

Sam Hunt reckons it's a mistake to think of poems in terms of words on a page. For him, the written poem is, to borrow a musical word, the 'score' and the real poem is the one that is spoken. He writes:

Imagine looking at a score of sheet music and reading the notes without actually listening to the notes in your head - that would defeat the point. For me it's exactly the same with poems. - From Backroads

But then again, some poets absolutely kill their poems, Sam! Uh, I don't want to name them, but...

Often poets can murder their own stuff - I'm aware of that. Alistair Te Ariki Campbell murdered his stuff on stage yet he had the perfect ear - the words and the score he created are absolutely perfect. - From Backroads

Oh, okay.

Well, I do read poems out loud, but only when I'm the only person in the room! In front of other people, I'd be too conscious of my nowhere-accent. New Zealanders have variously told me I sound Canadian, South African, Russian(!) and have described my Malaysian accent as 'sing-song'. Hahaha!

Sam Hunt

2009-11-26T11:24:00.003+13:00

Here's another giant who walks the earth. Sam Hunt is arguably New Zealand's best known living poet. Not only that, he is a full-time poet.

I have just been given his latest book, Backroads: Charting A Poet's Life. It is a beautiful book which makes me think Sam's a lucky guy indeed, since writers don't get much of a say in the appearance of their books. Everything about this book wows me: the stories, the paper quality, the reproductions of typewritten and handwritten poems, and the lovely story about his beloved dog Minstrel.

Have a listen to a podcast of his musical collaborations here. I'd love vinyls of these recordings but apparently they are extremely rare. My favourite pick in this podcast is "Your body has no flaw" - it verges on the ridiculous, rather like Leonard Cohen's amusingly absurd women-worshipping poems.

Your body has no flaw - for now

You live outside the law...

Buttocks breast and thigh

Curved apples where I lie

Your calves another shore

Your body has no flaw...

And here's a delightful Sam Hunt radio appearance.

Baby steps

2009-10-26T19:57:00.003+13:00

The end of August marked the sixth month of my full-time art practice, so I took stock of how productive I'd been so far, tallying up the hours spent on various projects. This was not as hard as it sounds, since I note down my activities daily using a timesheet.

The timesheet is a concept I borrowed from lawyers. A unit of time is six minutes. This makes it easier to manipulate the figures using base-10. Hence:

Stretching watercolour paper, 5 units (half an hour). Writing an art proposal, 70 units (7 hours). Writing an exhibition review, 146 units. Attending an art opening, 10 units. Keeping abreast of art news & blogs, 5 units. And so on...

When I looked at my results, I was disappointed because I always expect more from myself. After a while, I consoled myself with the fact that dealing to my art practice for an average of 4 solid hours per day was not so bad after all, given I was still trying to find my daily rhythm. It was also reassuring to know that a large bulk of that studio time was devoted to painting, writing & preparing proposals (all the proposals came to no fruition, but that's okay, I'm still learning).

The results also helped sharpen my daily goals. I now tell myself every day that I have to get over that 4-hour mark. This helps when the day starts to drag after lunchtime!

Here are some organizational tips that I find very useful

If something can be done in under 2 minutes, just do it immediately before you forget. The '2-minute rule' is especially useful when having to send brief email replies.

At the end of your day, plan for the next by deciding on 2 things to accomplish before 10am, be it making a telephone call or finishing a drawing.

Take note of the things you tend to do when you procrastinate. For some, it's attending to emails and surfing the internet (I'm guilty as heck). For others, it's going to the coffee shop on the pretext of planning in your diary.

OK so

2009-10-14T14:54:00.009+13:00

As much as I want to be as open as I can about art, I don't like art that is only about the art world. I have a great aversion toward insularity of any kind, be it in people, in religion, and yes, in art that is made for other artists to applaud at its own cleverness.

(I don't like films that are about film, for that matter. Festival In Cannes, a film starring Greta Scacchi, is an example of this. By contrast, a director like Tarantino references other people's films as well as his own but his body of work rises above simple fanboy discourse and, to me at least, his films offer interesting points of discussion about feminism. [Had to edit this part because I just remembered how the debate went exactly:] And to digress even more: I was listening to a friendly debate among friends recently about this. Somebody was pooh-poohing the idea that Tarantino is more of a feminist than Sofia Coppola has ever been (which is my take on the subject). Not that Coppola has ever claimed to champion feminism, but as only the third female director to be nominated for an Oscar, she unfortunately carries that torch. My friend said that Tarantino's pro-feminism is incidental in the way that Coppola is 'incidentally' misogynistic and the reality is that Tarantino merely displays a fetish, if you like, for strong women - the same way R Crumb has a fetish for big women. The use of the word 'incidental' was interesting.)

Sigh. It's very difficult to talk about art in this way. I feel as though I've painted myself into a corner. I guess the lesson is that one can't really talk about art, only around it. For instance, I don't know what the function of art is, I only know what I don't want it to do.

To change the subject

I like books immensely. Books present a welcome distraction when I'm trying to write art proposals. You can tell it hasn't been a productive last few days for me, hehe. Having just put down a CK Stead novel, Talking About O'Dwyer (not one of his best but engaging enough and generous toward its characters), and Yasmina Reza's novellas (brilliant, stylish, some might say too stylish but young people like myself don't mind that eh!), my next plan is to attack this pile of books awaiting my attention:

Tash Aw's Map Of The Invisible World

Nicolas Bourriaud's Postproduction - it looked interesting in the library & tiny enough for me to handle. Let's hope the translation is better than what I remember of his earlier book, Relational Aesthetics

Frank Sargeson's bio by Michael King

Janet Frame's autobiography - am looking forward to this one. CK Stead wrote an illuminating article about Frame here.

David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas - a few eminent writers have praised this but I don't know if I will in fact give it a try... It's been sitting on my shelf for months now

Lloyd Jones' Here At The End Of The World We Learn To Dance - another one I'm looking forward to

Mark Haddon's A Spot Of Bother

...Oh dear. These will take me into the new year, I'm sure.

OK back to work now.

I'm guestblogging

2009-10-06T09:00:00.000+13:00

for Sharon on New Zealand Book Month.

Two loving poems about fathers

2009-10-03T19:43:00.004+13:00

The first one is by Bill Manhire, who Lloyd Jones said is the best living New Zealand poet (I don't concur, as I have my own favourites). In Our Father, I love how he builds up a sense of height in the poem, from a child's foot to a child on his dad's shoulders to a tall pole out of reach. Parents are indeed larger than life.

Our Father
by Bill Manhire

On one trip he brought home
a piece of stone from the river,
shaped like a child's foot

and filled with the weight
of the missing body. Another time
he just walked in

with our lost brother
high on his shoulders
after a two-day absence;

and it seems like only yesterday
he was showing us
the long pole, the one

out there in the yard now,
taller than twice himself,
that still hoists

our mother's washing out of reach.

This next one is by earlier New Zealand poet James K Baxter who has a new book on the shelves 37 years after his death, a fresh selection by Sam Hunt. There is such love in this poem, as he describes his father's smile like 'a low sun on water'.

To My Father In Spring

by James K Baxter

Father, the fishermen go
down to the rocks at twilight
when earth in the undertow

of silence is drowning, yet
they tread the bladdered weedbeds
as if death and life were but

the variation of tides -
while you in your garden shift
carefully the broken sods

to prop the daffodils left
after spring hail. You carry
a kerosene tin of soft

bread and mutton bones to the
jumping hens that lay their eggs
under the bushes slily -

not always firm on your legs
at eighty-four. Well, father,
in a world of bombs and drugs

you charm me still - no other
man is quite like you! That smile
like a low sun on water

tells of a cross to come. Shall
I eavesdrop when Job cries out
to the Rock of Israel?

No; but mourn the fishing net
hung up to dry, and walk with
you the short track to the gate

where crocuses lift the earth.

What I've been up to

2009-09-09T17:56:00.015+12:00

Before...

After...

Painting

and scriptwriting, on the sly. Oops, that was a secret. Dialogue is hard. It sounds super fantastic in my head, but when spoken aloud... yuck.

Proposals, artist statements, proposals...

So much effort without knowing the outcome. I console myself with the fact that architects are forced to prepare proposals, too, but in a costlier fashion than artists!

Gardening and exercising again

after a long bout of sickness.

Immersing myself in New Zealand poetry and a bit of local history.

I'm a not-so-recent immigrant but am still trying to find a place for myself in my adopted country. New Zealand poems seem to help me understand the local psyche better than any history book can. I'm discovering how the older generation (Allen Curnow, Keith Sinclair, Jim Baxter) tried to carve out a cultural history for New Zealand. Their hang-ups about living in a remote country ("A country with no momentous present, but with a future," as CK Stead explains Curnow's take on the subject) is comforting to me, in fact, because Malaysia is going through an identity crisis herself. As far as Malaysian art and literature goes, we've only just started finding our own unique voice.

Speaking of which

Funny to think of a time when the "New" in "New Zealand" actually did mean "new". In those days, the pioneers, including the generation that followed, looked back to England for an identity. This act of looking back interests me greatly, for I often 'look back' to whence I came - the distance provides a tension that is useful in my creative life. Hence I completely identify with CK Stead's sentiment that "remoteness is not something our writers should deny or regret, but something to be acknowledged, and exploited as an analogue for the immovable tensions which are universal in human experience" (from his award-winning essay (wah, essays in New Zealand can win awards, ar?) For the Hulk of the World's Between written in 1961).

As for contemporary poets, I'm dipping into some Manhire, CK Stead and Sam Hunt whose lyrical evocations of the New Zealand heartland feel like a welcoming hug.

Feeling fresh again!

Spring, la la. Makes one feel young, la la. Few months ago, I was struck with a case of mild career anxiety. You know what I'm talking about. "I'm pushing thirty and what have I achieved? I may as well die glueing paper tole in the suburbs!" or something like that (for the record, I don't actually indulge in paper tole). But now I've got that fresh-out-of-art-school mojo back. I don't know how it happened, but it did.

Zesty Zadie

2009-09-07T18:23:00.004+12:00

I am totally chuffed that the brilliantly clever Zadie Smith has a collection of essays due out in November. This will sate my appetite while I await her next novel.

"When you finish a novel, if money is not a desperate priority, if you do not need to sell it at once or be published that very second - put it in a drawer. For as long as you can manage. A year or more is ideal - but even three months will do. Step away from the vehicle. The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer...

"...You need a certain head on your shoulders to edit a novel, and it's not the head of a writer in the thick of it, nor the head of a professorial editor who's read it in twelve different versions. It's the head of a smart stranger who picks it off a bookshelf and begins to read. You need to get the head of that smart stranger somehow. You need to forget you ever wrote that book.

"...After I read Alan Hollinghurst's magnificent novel The Line of Beauty, I met him at a dinner, and drunkenly I think I asked him how he got his novel to be so magnificenty. He said: "Oh; I left it for a long while. And then I tinkered with it. Five years, actually."

"That's the best piece of writing advice I ever had."

From a lecture given by Smith to students at Columbia University in March 2008. The full lecture may be read in Believer magazine.

When all else fails

2009-08-09T13:19:00.006+12:00

Here's some boring technical information. To paint on watercolour paper that is less than, say, 400 gsm, it is best practice to stretch the paper before painting on it. This is so that the paper will not buckle when you paint on it - a smooth surface is often preferred for that professional look. Stretching paper involves soaking it in water, then laying it across a board, draining off excess water, and taping it down with specialised gummed tape. As the paper dries, it shrinks - and this is the tricky bit. You don't want the shrinking paper to tug your gummed tape off the board, otherwise the paper will dry unevenly. You want everything flat, flat, FLAT but so many factors can come between you and your goal of flatness.

Stretching watercolour paper the traditional way (with gummed tape) is a hit-and-miss affair. I get very stressed out with this part of the painting process. My latest effort was looking to be a disaster, with the paper buckling even before I finished taping it down! I managed to smooth it out again, but a few hours later, sure enough, the gummed tape was giving way.

This is the solution so far (and it looks like it's working!)... Stacks of heavy books (thank you, Complete Works of Shakespeare!), weights and G-clamps:

Julian's rules of etiquette and notes for living

2009-08-03T16:54:00.000+12:00

As I recall, they were:

1. If you bump into friends at a cafe, don't assume you can sit down to join them because you don't know if delicate matters are being discussed.

2. Food halls are great because there's no need to split the bill.

3. Yes, there are too many art openings every other week. If you can't make it to both your friends' openings, go to one and send apologies to the other.

4. Be kind to your body. Exercise everyday as if it is a way of life and not a punishment for drinking too many beers the night before.

5. If your studio is at home, go for a walk before starting work. When you return, it will be as if it's someone else's house and you won't feel the need to do the dishes when you should be working.

6. Walks are great because you can also relax your eyes by looking at far off distances.

7. Walks are also great because you can hear the birds. Why listen to an iPod?

This advice was dished out by Julian to a night class I attended, so they are not his exact words. I've only jotted them down in my own voice so I won't forget.

Julian's favourite things were read out by his brother at the funeral. Everyone laughed at "unexpected upgrades" but I had heard "unexpected upbraids"!

Rest in peace, Julian Dashper, 1960 - 2009.

Arrivederci, Kak Min

2009-07-27T11:53:00.004+12:00

The irreplaceable Yasmin Ahmad, 1958 - 2009.

Me love my watercolours

2009-07-24T08:38:00.001+12:00

One minute film reviews

2009-07-23T19:34:00.003+12:00

The Auckland Film Festival has swung around again. I usually ignore blockbusters throughout the year, saving up money to attend at least six items at the film festival. My favoured choices are the documentaries because they rarely return, even on DVD. Anyway, this year, money was tight, so I saw only three films at the festival (and hopefully one more this weekend). They were:

The September Issue

Why Anna Wintour would open the doors of Vogue's inner sanctum to documentary filmmaker RJ Cutler after she was brutally satired in The Devil Wears Prada - the gods of couture only know. But then as you watch this film, you sense that Wintour did it as a clever marketing ploy: she is perpetually smiling for the camera. It's a film that she can be proud of, too, because it is not just about the cult of Wintour/Vogue, but also a film about professionalism, passion and work ethic.

Grace Coddington, Vogue's creative director, serves as the perfect foil to Wintour's wintry persona. Coddington seems more down-to-earth, forgiving, looser, warmer; it is a revelation to see the both of them bristle against each other. As Coddington puts it, "I know when to stop pushing her. But she doesn't know when to stop pushing me."

These people know they're not taken seriously by a large percentage of the planet, yet they care, so so much, about what they do. As all my fellow artists know, that takes self-validation, belief, and supreme self-confidence.

Ponyo

Had to see this on the big screen. Hayao Miyazaki just keeps getting better and better. He never dumbs it down for the kids - or the adults, for that matter! His films are also educational. Imagine watching this movie as a child and learning about lighthouses, morse code, how a steamboat works, using a generator to power your house in the event of a blackout, how the people of a village pull together in the event of a tsunami, how to treat Nature with respect...

The only thing I found uncomfortable was a scene involving a mother driving recklessly. So un-PC, yet Miyazaki gets away with it! :-D

Big River Man

This is the story of Martin Strel, an endurance swimmer, as told by his son. The film documents Strel's swim along the entire length of the Amazon river, an expedition that leads to strange events... I don't want to give it away. Suffice it to say that this is a very engaging film about its gregarious, crazy, obsessive subject - a man who sets tremendous physical goals for himself while sticking to a diet of whisky, beer and horse burgers. Strel could easily have been a subject for a Werner Herzog film. 'Nuff said!

For past reviews: http://thesoundsinsidemyhead.blogspot.com/2007/07/film-festival-short-reviews.html

Vikram Seth writes the sequel to A Suitable Boy

2009-07-04T16:11:00.004+12:00

Hooooray!

I spent the most part of my fourteenth year reading A Suitable Boy. I think this was the book that made me wish I was Indian. At the time, I tried learning Hindi via friends and made all my friends in the hostel call me 'Chattopadhyay', after a character in the novel (they settled for 'Chatto' for short).

A Suitable Girl will see Lata, the 19-year-old heroine of A Suitable Boy, who suffered the efforts of her mother attempting to find her a suitable husband during the first book, now a grandmother, searching for the right match for her grandson. To be published in the autumn of 2013, publisher Penguin promised that Seth would "bring the action of the narrative up to the present day, encompassing some of the enormous social and economic changes India has undergone in the last 60 years".

The art doctor

2009-07-02T18:29:00.008+12:00

After catching mild 'social disease' last month, I am keeping a low profile on the art opening front because of the flu. I know it sounds paranoid but I've already suffered the seasonal flu and it wadn't purty.

I recently read an article in the New Yorker about art conservator Christian Scheidemann who is charged with preserving contemporary works of art. Dirt, latex, doughnuts: you name the material, he's worked with it. Sounds like a thankless job, but he goes about it with admirable enthusiasm. Where he can, he will preserve the material properties of an artwork, but if decay or imperfection is inevitable, he sees it as being part of the work's narrative.

What strikes me most about him is that he does not shake his head at artists who make work using materials that are not durable, and these artworks often sell for a lot of money. An outsider could easily dismiss this as irresponsibility, and maybe it is, but Scheidemann's main concern is the integrity of the art work. For example, on Damien Hirst's pickled shark which has recently been replaced due to rapid deterioration, Scheidemann says,

"What he did with the shark was not very smart, but the artist is always right... I think we would have tried to plastinate the shark - to exchange the bodily fluids with resin. But maybe that's too subtle for him. It would be a totally different work. I think he's more interested in keeping it difficult for a while."

Such insight and discernment! Even some owners of artworks don't show as much sympathy.

I think artists have a responsibility to make sure collectors know what they are buying into. This includes letting them know (if possible - and within reason) if you expect watercolour paper to yellow sooner than expected because you stretched it with heavily chlorinated water, or painted on it with non-archival substances. Or if you use latex, let them know that its stretchiness will not last forever. Etc etc.

When Scheidemann was studying art history and conservation, he had to study the back of paintings, "and could actually discover graffiti from 1448, and see the fingerprints of the artists, and see the first tests on the back side, and how it was done, and what the challenges were for the artist, and what they had in mind". This made me think, what if some gallery like the Met decided to hang all their paintings back to front? How fun! What stories would we find behind those canvases?

Christian Scheidemann runs Contemporary Conservation.

Poem of the Week: Carol Ann Duffy

2009-06-16T16:53:00.007+12:00

How it makes of your face a stone

that aches to weep, of your heart a fist,
clenched or thumping, sweating blood, of your tongue
an iron latch with no door. How it makes of your right hand
a gauntlet, a glove-puppet of the left, of your laugh
a dry leaf blowing in the wind, of your desert island discs
hiss hiss hiss, makes of the words on your lips dice
that can throw no six. How it takes the breath
away, the piss, makes of your kiss a dropped pound coin,
makes of your promises latin, gibberish, feedback, static,
of your hair a wig, of your gait a plankwalk. How it says this –
politics – to your education education education; shouts this –
Politics! – to your health and wealth; how it roars, to your
conscience moral compass truth, POLITICS POLITICS POLITICS.

That was "Politics" by Carol Ann Duffy. This is her first poem as Poet Laureate & is being discussed here. Someone mentioned that she shouldn't have given it a title so that the reader slowly realizes it is in fact about politics.

Duffy often comes up with evocative imagery, but in "Politics" I think the rhythm lets it down somewhat; it gets a little clumsy towards the end. Perhaps that's the intention, to let the poem descend into incoherent, diced beats.

Still, there are a lot of clever, enjoyable lines in there, like "makes of the words on your lips dice/ that can throw no six" and "of your gait a plankwalk". In other words, every mincing utterance (I imagine a knife 'dicing' up words) does not profit anyone, and every step taken advances only towards doom.

I also like how insincerity is described as a "dropped pound coin": mere lip service, a token gesture.

Mechanics of the thing

2009-06-15T21:45:00.005+12:00

Left: "Music for John Cage"

...I can see the rain come down outside just a few feet away from my desk. I've been sitting here all day trying to work out the composition for my next painting. It's like a puzzle of my own making that I complicate further with every move I make. I fancy myself a knight on a chessboard, zigzagging to wherever it is I'm going! Towards a moving target... I am loving the process! I love knowing that I enter this maze of discovery on my own terms; that I move like the knight, doggylegging and detouring with purpose. I feel so lucky to have this, everyday.

Cover Crazy

2009-05-27T15:25:00.012+12:00

Notes from the recent Auckland Writers & Readers Festival (I love how they include the reader in their festival heading):

On New Yorker Night
...with Hendrik Hertzberg, James Surowiecki, Judith Thurman and Rhonda Sherman. As I expected, it was a fawning session where Aucklanders got a chance to be charmed and bedazzled by these superstars of journalism. I quite enjoyed it. If you were expecting something meatier, you should have gone to the other events that were dedicated to just one author.

Only one thing stuck out sorely, and that was an audience member at the front who was very eager to ask the first question, only to embarrass the rest of us by plugging his own book to the panel. Hertzberg responded kindly by suggesting the person advertise his book on Amazon and get friends to write good reviews for it. The person in question, though well-spoken, was very long-winded. He seemed oblivious to the increasing annoyance of the rest of the audience. It reminded me to never expect other people to be as enthusiastic as you are about your own creation - market it tastefully (I guess that's what agents are for)!

An Hour With Lloyd Jones
I learned a lot about the writing process from this event, as LloydJones proved to be a humble and generous speaker. He said that the most important aspect of a novel is its voice, because it must be a voice that the reader trusts and is willing to follow anywhere.

An Hour With Tash Aw
With his books displayed everywhere at the moment, Tash Aw's session was very popular. I couldn't help noticing what a decent person he is, as he filled up his chairperson's (writer Paula Morris) glass with water before his, even though she had her own bottle of water. He spoke very well, and fielded even the most inane question from the audience with an interesting answer. Judging from the responses I overheard, the audience was satisfied and impressed.

Notes On The Book Covers Above (Images taken from Fourth Estate/HarperCollins and Guardian)
Mr Pip's latest paperback incarnation featuring cut paper artwork was designed by Petra Börner.

The above version of Tash Aw's latest book, Map of the Invisible World, is not available in New Zealand, as far as I know. We only get his paperbacks & this delicious design is the hardback version. The map image was reproduced courtesy of The Map Room, Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam. This is their website & it's a veritable goldmine for Dutch colonial maps! Gorgeous.

This is not an art review

2009-05-07T13:48:00.006+12:00

When I see the name Lindy Lee, I think 'photocopies' because of works like these.

But her current show at Roslyn Oxley9 has no such thing. Instead, there are lots of works on paper where she had burnt holes in the paper. (I couldn't help noticing the marketing device on the price list: she lists 'fire' as one of the materials in the descriptions of the works; the exhibition blurb links fire to Zen philosophy and dragon lore.)

There are also bronze works attached to the wall. She had flung molten bronze onto the floor - the way Max Gimblett would fling paint, I suppose, after much meditation - and cooled them.

To be honest, I don't buy the blurb. It says, "The mark that results encapsulates the totality of the universe – the sum of all conditions, which underlie the creation of ‘this’ moment". It's a little far-reaching for the work.

That said, I kinda like the show. It's not interesting, but it is comforting, somehow, the way the interior of an old church would seem comforting to an atheist. I'm not sure if the work itself believes in order, maybe not, but the marks are very ordered and there is a pristine quality to the show.

Channelling Andreas Gursky @ a Sydney grocer

2009-05-06T10:54:00.000+12:00

Streaming Stead

2009-04-27T19:13:00.002+12:00

A year ago, I wrote about an inspiring lecture I attended by my favourite New Zealand writer, CK Stead. Today I found a video of that very lecture. Enjoy!!