once there was a bunch of people scared of a lot of things. they could perceive that their bodies were soft, that it breaks, splits apart, and unknown liquids flow out of them. they were aware that their bodies were in fact, full of fissures. holes, where some things enter, and some things depart.

it did not matter before, when drawing lines were a little less important. and where morphing and moving were part of life. but when it became more urgent to stay in one place and make that work, lines began to take root. they began to have names, rituals, ceremonies, heroes, lores and processes. they became so fat that it was possible to have pockets of anarchy, sarcasm and despair pock-marked within them.

these people lived in such a time. a time of lines, and deferrence to difference. the hallowing of stories and tales was an important way to preserve the sanctity of lines, and contain the messiness that lines create.

the mermaid is one such story. she swims in acknowledgment of untamed female sexuality. her voice - the capacity to legible communication - is woven with seduction at its core, with power to destroy the communal respect for lines. her naked breasts glisten with wanton disregard for the convention of undergarments and metal corsets entombed by lace and needles. she thrives in a mysterious world, unknown to man and his land. the fantastic and phantasmagoric.

and appears when men are most vulnerable, most out of his safe and comfortable universe, where he consciously sail to seek the edges of lines currently known.

but the most fearful of what is female, the biggest monster to the impermeability of lines, is her vagina. it is constantly reproducing mysteries; wetness, blood, womb, human, decay, life, orgasms. in logic as yet unchoked by machinations.

so these people masked it in the form of a fish. instead of legs, she has a fish tail. she cannot walk, or gape her legs and visually demonstrate her puissance. there are some fears so large that you cannot give them a name, or a description. because even to utter would be to empower further.

the mermaid is a nod, begrudging, fearful and in awe, to a might that flows around life as they currently knew it. and how she transforms in time, is how the servants of lines learn how to tame her.


---
do you remember how it feels like
to lose concentration
in a phone conversation
that stretched so long
about nothing and everything?

such careless intimacy
is a great privilege.
---

watched flower in the pocket by liew seng tat last week. mainly because i caught one of his shorts a couple of years ago and was blown away by his weird sense of narrative and perspective. can't remember what the short film was called, but it featured a grandmother's fantasy and active desire with an old love - a young boy (starring seng tat himself) wearing a communist beret. they pranced around - she in her existing embodiment as a coquettish old woman, and he as a nubile smiling young man - and then have sex together. he goes down on her with a pure and satisfied smile. lovely! a very wonderful story that is at the same time humourous, light and moving.

so i was all ready for another brilliant film, and flower in the pocket didn't disappoint. the story centres around two young boys and their father. it's quite a simple tale, but as with his previous short, it's really the relationship between the different characters that drew me in.

the first half of the movie slowly unwraps the things that these two boys do - at school, not completing their homework, playing around drains, forming new friendships by bullying and being bullied, tasting food, shitting, cleaning, sleeping - all the minute mundanity of life coloured through intimacy. it's full of tangible silences that sutures the whole story together. each character is rich and complex without falling into a stereo/archetype, and are revealed through interactions with the spaces they inhabit, the relationship they are de/constructing with each other, needs and desires, and best of all, minimal drama.

the younger boy - mah li ohm - speaks no malay, and a know-it-all classmate, maria, translates every single sentence that their bahasa malaysia teacher utters perfectly to him. even then, miscommunication happens, as he tried to tell a story about "keluarga saya" from his drawing of himself and his brother, mah li ahh. maria thought it's her name, and asked why his drawing of a boy has a girl's name? the intricate and chaotic linguistic landscape of the country is presented through such small moments - which was quite refreshing for me after two marathon days of cinta and mukhsin - which brings up sepet and gubra. they were all good cinematic stories about malaysian life, love, cultural and raced heterogeneity, but got a little predictably soapy after awhile. i loved sepet when it first came out. it presented outright the kind of differentiating assumptions we carry and enact through everyday life - mixing of chinese music with arabic calligraphy, scholarships given on race-based NEP quotas, the destabilisation of borders through peranakan identities etc. but when orked came out again in mukhsin, and the romantic, nostalgic and rose-tinted treatment given to play, poverty and conflict, i got a little weary of festive-seasoned advertisement moments.

or maybe it's because the protagonists had different ethnicities. i could relate a little more to a poor chinese family from somewhere near jinjang than i could to a middlish-class malay family from an unnamed but beautiful kampung. even though i have encountered both, i experienced them from a different positionality in raced identity. either way, it's really good to have more diverse takes to a complex reality.

so anyway, back to flower in the pocket. they were befriended by a tomboy malay girl, ayu, who gave them "glamour" names so she could more easily pronounce them - azman abdullah and azmi abdullah. and the beauty of priorities in childhood is presented by a simple "boleh" - quick assent for the convenience of knowing. ayu called herself atan and claimed the male identity to be able to play with them easier, but shed this simply when she brought li ohm and li ahh back to her place for lunch one day. when the two boys found a stray puppy, she cycled home and put on a helmet and gloves to be able to continue playing with them and the haram puppy. there is no hysteria, high-tension, drama or sudden change in background music. it's just a mellowed, routine negotiation of identity in constant flux and reenactment. very wonderfully done.

the father is a man withdrawn from life and his children, presumably because his wife left them (he tore her picture and tried to swallow it at the later part of the film), and works with mannequins together with a malay man, mamat, who has a strong physical and emotional bond with his wife. the tale evolves to his gradual awakening of his children's existence and his subtle and awkward demonstration of love and care to living things surrounding him.

the second half of the movie, when the story centred more around the father than the children, got a little too silent at parts. the small moments that reveal a lot more than is narrated gulfed question marks that weren't too titillating. maybe it's because i know the actor - james lee - who played the father. so i couldn't suspend my disbelief as well. or maybe it's because his character was focussed on interactions with inanimate objects, spaces and stillness. not sure, but it can't be easy to sustain and fold a story well without resorting to tried-and-tested techniques of contradictions, subtlety and drama.

either way, i'm going to try and get a copy of this film on DVD. it's something that makes me feel all wobbly and smile when thinking of film-making in this country, and the tentative steps we're taking to capture slivers of our life in this time. right down to the blurring out of the puppy when azan was sounding the background, and the bleeping off of "melayu" when li ohm asked to tear a page off his exercise book to wipe his bum after he had a poo :) hopefully, they'll do something about the uneven sound throughout the film before releasing it on DVD.

gush over!

there is usually something hiding behind the buildings that was just a moment ago, merely new; now, looking more and more like a maze i have to clamber through. big waves, the colour of deep seas, will stretch impossibly high to engulf any notions of sky. they are always heavy, always with unknown depths, always a painfully beautiful greenish colour, and always, always, coming closer. i am sometimes with people, friends, or ghost friends remembered from a long time ago. and all  ebulliance of novelty and adventure would be framed by these waves. i cannot swim so well. but i never drown.

---

notes on a scandal attributes too much obsessive compulsions to unarticulated sexual desires. but the contradiction of gaze and innocence was beautifully done.

---

i feel very tired today.

if only she was an imaginary personality...

orchestra

i saw monochromatic women and men
slowly take their seat
and place their instruments in varying
gestures of affection
on their laps;

with wind and strokes and pauses
the murmuring begins.

i closed my eyes and let
the keening colours swim inside me in
slipping streams of yearning;
a cup of silence lets the girl in gold
stride in
then her violin
sings.

the man in his coat gesticulates
as wildly as the flecks of sweat that
flies across the space between us
like a graceful ballerina
committing suicide.
or so i imagined.

how did the music know
when to bow
and when to show
a centre of attention?

what instinct do the leaves possess
to huddle when it's time to flower?

or is it merely a kind of wisdom
to adhere, sometimes,
to a manic stick that's wielded?

++++++++

rahmat harun stole the show on friday night when on top of his usual, magical grasp of the malay language in rhythm and taste, he lit up a self-confessed "balut" on stage. he recited 2 poems, read an open letter to benjamin zephaniah and even sang a leonard cohen song -- despite having being forbidden by the one who forbids forbidding. either way, he was in top form.

the first piece was about the multiple denial of identities that might be (have been?) labelled on himself. aku bukan... xyz. the only thing he confesses to being is a "bangsat", which he gleefully invites everyone present to name him as so. i've always thought bangsat was a bastard or asshole or something similar. but checking my little MPH dwibahasa dickie, apparently, it means "vagrant". i don't know if this is meant to be a cleaned up version for the populasi.

anyway.

his letter was on the spot. mocking the colonial traces of bejamin zephaniah's presence (a UK performance poet brought to KL by the british council), and stitching a relational version of malaysian reality through the various laws and surveillance practices when it comes to smoking ganja. afterwhich, he casually lights up what looks like a reefer (i sat right in front and sniffed like crazy, but couldn't smell the weed though) and read a poem about smoking up.

nice.

after the show, he literally left his mark by scrawling all over the walls in central market some rantings about forbidden to forbid and more love notes to benji.

i guess if you're looking for "artists", then don't expect them to take boundaries too seriously :)

then benjamin came on. and he surprised me by performing stuff that was almost all political in some way (and good on him, making lots of references to ganja along the way;)). i didn't think too much of his poems, but his performance was awesome. the beats and rhythm of his stuff was actually quite similar to rahmat's, which was odd, and got me thinking in various strange rasta directions. anyway, he was witty, his humour cheeky, his intentions earnest. one of the poems i liked most from that was was:

White Comedy
(from 'Propa Propaganda')

"I waz whitemailed
By a white witch,
Wid white magic
An white lies,
Branded by a white sheep
I slaved as a whitesmith
Near a white spot
Where I suffered whitewater fever.
Whitelisted as a whiteleg
I waz in de white book
As a master of white art,
It waz like white death.

People called me white jack
Some hailed me as a white wog,
So I joined de white watch
Trained as a white guard
Lived off the white economy.
Caught and beaten by de whiteshirts
I waz condemned to a white mass,
Don't worry,
I shall be writing to de Black House.

really got my mind flipping like when i was watched babel. thinking about where i am positioned in that discourse. strangely, nowhere. which got me thinking about racism in general. and the kind of annoyance i sometimes feel when racism as a violation only seem to apply when it comes to black/white. actually, the epicentre still lies on the white.

++++++++

supernova

such brilliance, it pierces the heart
of my eye;
i feel myself pulled to your
Excellence.

how could i question
the bringer of light,
the breather of life,
the blessed anchor of relevance?

i find myself hoping
to be drawn to your edges
so my hues can shimmer
as your shadow.

at least if i am marked as
black
as middle eastern
as muslim
as oriental
as japanese
as russian
as a threat of terrorism
or nuclear weapon
or simply a victim of mass exploitation
that you could save,
then i can have a name
that will echo.
even if mispronounced.

i found malay taxi drivers in cape town,
chinese lesbians marching in london,
burmese organic celery sellers in bangsar;
they appear like a magic trick

and i am left breathless;
under-prepared by Hollywood, Bollywood and Al-Jazeera.

supernova.
when will you implode?
and will you take me with you?

++++++++

then it was poetry slam at sek san's impossibly beautiful space on jalan tempinis. singapore vs malaysia. gosh, however will it turn out? heh. there were a few awesome things: the space, the fact that lots of people came to watch/hear poetry, lots of people doing poetry, hearing some new decent stuff , and best of all, poetry hooliganism.

it basically works like this. after some individual and collective performances by a few people, the slam starts. and there's a pool of poets reading their stuff, and a panel of judges giving their score at the end of each recitation. poets get eliminated until there's 3 left standing for a final round to decide which comes first.

i think i might have expected something like chow sing chi's lawyer show, where there's lots of witty rhymes in response to each other spluttering spontaneously in the air. but it was prepared stuff, not really speaking to each other. so i've heard some of the local ones before.

there is a difference between poetry to be performed, and poetry to be chewed on at each reading. or maybe it's just a different texture of appreciation. i wouldn't know. i guess it might be a little like shakespeare's stuff, where it works differently when performed and read (or even filmed). anyway, it seems like doggerels and limmericks are good for performance, humour works like a charm, and sex, as usual, sells. but then sex also, as usual, has varying degrees of resonance.

thick stuff can't really be performed i think. it's going to be hard to perform emily dickinson's stuff no? but on the other hand, symzborska might work. maybe it depends on the performer, the space, the audience.

there was also a lot of suspicious singing or humming of tunes going on in this performance poetry thing, or at least at the slam. it worked for the travelogue thing done by the trio, but was ingratiatingly irritating by the solo-ists. i guess music and words crafted for tempo and rhyme is quite close to each other. i could see both benjamin's and rahmat's stuff work as spinal chords of songs.  but humming? hmm

part of the rules is that audiences get to snap their fingers if they get bored, and stamp their feet if it gets really boring. so we did. a herd of hooligans at the back, clicking our fingers, booing the judges, calling for mutiny... it was fun!  it was really good sport of the poets to not be ruffled by the crowd, and take it in stride. it must be awful, having your creations disrupted by an audibly unappreciative audience. it would kill any sense of self-confidence (for me at least). so i have deep respect for the bravado, the humour and the confidence it takes to go on stage and be assessed by a bunch of idiots.

heh.

i loved the fact that poetry hooliganism could happen. with so much vanilla and nursery school caution in the air, a jibe can do so much.

it's been awhile since i blogged. not for lack of thoughts, or questions. but maybe lack of time, or attention to move closer to this space. i've just spent some time thinking about sexuality, re-presentations, spaces, censorship and control. it's been mind-bending, and a little exhilarating. but i'm not at a space where there are any answers, or new questions even. pinning down some thoughts.

representation in terms of cinematic gaze and spectatorship is different from representation online, where the capacity for spectator to agitate the representation through re-presenting by adding content (comments, posts, pictures etc) is present, simply because of the space. so how does scopophilia figure when it is consumption of particular blogs (for example?). even if the reader is a 'lurker' and never adds to the content, does its potentiality do anything? arguably so i guess. because the person who represents is aware of this. and the construction of this fragment of reality is coloured by this knowledge. no?

what's been interesting is a return to questions related to embodiment that i kinda left behind a couple of years ago. i thought about phenomenology, arguments about reality, discursive representations, textual embodiment and movements that it compels. if i read a poem, and it moves me, can i distinguish between an emotive movement to an embodied one, when all that i know about the world and myself stems from embodiment? how is it possible to be moved without the body? but what does this mean when i chat with some unknown dude in IRC who uses 'male' textual signifiers, but whose embodied identity is in fact, constantly unstable or unknowable? and how does this change in something like second life, where avatars and 3d thingamagics further concretises imagined reality? teledildonics?

a question i asked at the panel was, how does one have sex in digital spaces? where a lot of silences demands for a deliberate engagement of imagination to construct reality. but at the same time, there is a knowledge that some of this is fantasy, unreal.

i dont even know if there is a point to asking these questions. or it's just another one of those masturbatory exercises. not to negate the pleasures. it's fucking fun to push my sensibilities out of the window. but i guess the inner 'activist' in me is asking for a practical point.

i keep returning to censorship. all these arguments for it. it seems so hard to talk about it without going back to censorship of female sexuality. how to enter into the debate of civil and political rights without losing the particularities of being hailed as 'female', but without calling myself into invisibility as a 'political dissident'? i've read through 5 different articles, all rich in information and analysis. but i didn't find one thread or analysis that made my heart go thump. it's either seen as a gendered impact, appended to censorship justified through morality and decency, or how real is the harm that is propounded through arguments of pornography = violence against women. feels like something is missing. something that plonks the whole thing smack bang in the centre. not as an oddity, or by the way, or 'special'.

i've thought myself into a rut again.

crap.

---

saw some cool music videos last night through British Council's Antenna project. Woof Wan Bau was a featured director, and he had quite a cool repertoire of moody, evocative videos that had a little more conceptually thickness than most of the eye candy i lap up when there's nothing else on telly. quite a privilege actually. to be in KL, knowing about this event, having the transport to go there. it was free; not only free entry, but i got a pack of cool stuff, t-shirt, a drink, some small cute food thingies that came in trays, heard an interview with Jason Groves (who also had a hand in the animation for Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy), watched Eclectic Method (official remixers of U2 apparently) do their thing.... all in all, felt like a bizarre alternate universe kind of experience.

kinda nice that more and more stuff seems to be happening in the city. an opening of spaces and appreciation of all things artsy and fancy. i dont know if i've been sleepwalking all these while, and it's always been here. very possible, since i have only lived here for a relatively short period of time. but either way, i'm liking it. more poetry readings! more videos! more indie shorts and documentaries! more questions in the midst of crap!

more more more!

all blogged out.

just before new year, went for an acoustic gig at NBT (no black tie). it was a lovely evening, meeting up with people i haven't seen in ages, hearing good music, lalala, and so on.

then hisham rais got on stage. purportedly for a 'stand-up comedy' act.

it might be me, cause you know, feminists have no sense of humour, har har. but i really failed to see what was funny.

he got on stage, earning the space and audience through sedimented influence on local politics or through the benefits of KL's narrow circle of People. i dont know. it's an assumption. either way. he's got the mike and a captive audience.

so dear old hisham started by poking fun at the number of NGO activists in the place, looking like sad nuns with no sex appeal. then at dodgy gender bender women, whom he later claimed to be nonsensical vegetarian lesbians. both were quite funny actually. but then after speaking about the sorrow of saddam's hanging, and a typical recasting of enemy lights onto bush, he launched into an attack towards Malaysia's familiar migrants.

first nigerians are "black, stupid" and worst of all, "ugly". "banglas" are hand-holding effeminates. indonesians are something or other. it was a little painful to concentrate.

surprisingly, lots of people boo-ed and hissed, asking him to get off the stage. malaysians are nice people no? we rarely have the self-conviction to boo. and we'd rather stab peoples' eyes out in more intimate and polite environments. *ahem* anyway, a significant number of people boo-ed. when he carried on and the organisers didn't kill the mike etc, the boo-ing lost its enthusiasm and people switched off instead. there were claps and laughter too. from the back.

other than that... it was really hard to accept. at the end of the day, how is it possible that a person is able to gain a stage for spewing racist, sexist, heterosexist, god-knows-what-else kinds of offensive statements based on dodgy identity politics? if you're a comedian, apparently, everything is acceptable.

afterall, the prerogative of the fool is to say the evident (or something like that la according to shakespeare). sometimes this is the role of humour. to poke out nervous laughter and embody the current social tensions, diffused through irony, parody or whichever tool of the art.

maybe it's just a question of bad craft? that it'll be funny when hisham actually learns to improve his presenting skills and tighten his punchline timing etc. tapi..tapi..tapi.. tak kelakarlah. no matter which way you put it, saying nigerians are black, ugly and stupid is just really fucked up. even if you try to save it by putting down another race closer to home as being even bigger morons. and the point being...?

it's hard enough for anyone to be heard. people are clamouring from the margins, fighting like their lives depended on it, for a cebisan cuping telinga. i mean, hisham is almost a warrior in this respect, having fought hard for spaces to be heard. he's not a buddy of the political system. but...

i dont know. i'm not sure what he's trying to get at. i like laughing at myself. i like the thought of laughing at ourselves. but i really object to doing it at someone else's expense. especially if the someone else doesn't have the same kind of access to spaces and language to defend themselves in return.

then there is this other dude called the malay male who's rapidly becoming a soopah star blogger. i decided to check him out after a friend told me she enjoyed his stuff. it was interesting for awhile. i liked the liberal usage of profanity to get his point across. his shameless dishing out of moral judgements to all living and non-living things is quite refreshing for a nation used to side-stepping, self-qualifying, in-other-words, maybe, on-the-other-hand speak-ers.  his random propagation of violence and shameless self-indulgence are.... uhm... i dont know lah. after awhile, it's just another ranty man ranting away at how right he is and how everyone else can just piss of and die.

oh great.

how i do love the internet for enabling such a wonderful space for such original thoughts. look at my own wanky blog. it's a wonder how we all haven't just imploded, pissed off and died.

( Men 'buy' Viet wives off bridal parades in small-town coffeeshops )

i watched 'ali g' posing as a dude from kazakhstan a couple of weeks ago. he went to a dating agency, and started spewing his usual inappropriate dialogue, poking fun at all kinds of sterotypes through his embodied exchange.

how would one be able to poke fun and render ridiculous bridal shows like this? it already seems a little sci-fi. maybe i should write an email to ali g and ask him to pose as a vietnamese bride.

platypus save us all when ali g starts to be quoted as a potential subversive actor.