For anyone who's been watching, apologies for the protracted lapse in postings...we've been away from our 'office' for some weeks, where all we could download were bedbugs, sea-lice and sandflies (on beautiful, picturesque Tioman Island).
We're now settled in Petaling Jaya, in the suburbs so to speak of KL --- a large room with attached toilet/bath and grid-ironed balconey, right close to Gudang where we'll be doing our 'residency' (without the resident part).
Our part of PJ is mostly middle-class Chinese, attached townhouses and a few bungalows...
Like most of suburban KL, the area's a dizzying cosmology of seemingly randomly-numbered streets that continually prods the mid-brain into functioning as a kind of roulette-wheel-cum-divining-rod in order to find one's bearings, which we're not very good at, really.
Eg.: We live in Damansara Jaya on SS 22/29...generally using the garden exit, we negotiate the back-alley (charming old-school variety: longkangs (open drains) on either side with concrete-slab bridges to back-doors; walls with overhanging bougainvilla, mouldy-moss and mossy-mould, skin-colored geckos, sputtering drain-pipes [by which you can divine wether someone in the corresponding household is showering, washing cutlery or just wasting water]) and emerge on SS 22/41...to get to our Starbucks we hang a left on SS 22/11 by the Petronas gas station, then straight, duck through a subterranean passage under the highway (SS 21/64) and then voila! we're in Damansara Utama. Cross SS 21/62 (parallel to SS 21/63) just a few feet of dirt and grass and you pass SS 21/60 (I have no idea where on earth SS 21/61 disappeared to) and head straight through a back alley, and you're on SS 21/1A, which is this, here, where I'm writing now.
Anyway, the good thing is we're right near SS 22/47, which is where Gudang is. That's the other direction from SS 22/11, in Damansara Jaya proper.
We've been staking claims on our new hood by steady footwork and constant by-the-minute map consultation. There's a nearby mall, thank god! (by which you can surmise that we're becoming typical KL-ers) which we hit up each morning at Kopitiam's...wicked curry laksa and STRONG ice kopi. There's surprisingly good makan (food or eats) in the vicinity, including a Hakka noodle house where we had amazing stewed duck with lotus root last night. Not quite the paradise pirate-DVD mecca that Sungai Wang plaza is, but we can get exotic fare nonetheless, consisting mostly of 'erotic' foreign entertainment (you know, 'French' cinema --- very arty).
All to say that moving here is a welcome break from central KL and Bukit Bintang. B.B. is like a really intense girlfriend that tastes really good but after a while it's hard to keep up and she's kind of expensive anyway.
They'll miss us at the guest house. Things were getting a little dodgy anyway after subjecting some unsuspecting fellow guests to an impromptu screening of a John Waters film (A Dirty Shame). Things started to feel slightly uncomfortable after the bit where Tracey Ulmann does this trick with a bottle of Evian, and I have no idea how the Chinese equivalent of "I'm a cunnilingus bottom' --- spoken ad infinitum throughout the movie --- would have translated for our Cantonese audience.
After some time, though, we began to get familiar with the internal community of B.B. Guest House. There were the young turk triad pimps always watching TV with their shirts off. Half-body tattoos and understudied slouch. We watched a Thai kick-boxing movie together...one half of the pair was a Tamil-looking Lothario who spoke perfect street Cantonese --- I think I was the more amusing curiosity for him, being a non-speaking specimen of indeterminate Cantonese-Hokkien extraction.
The turks run a stable of rather run-down prosties old enough to be their moms. A trio, I think, who shared the same room next to where we'd drink our gin and tonics (Pulau Tioman duty-free) while watching Akademie Fantasia (Malaysia's answer to 'American Idol'). We'd see them sadly loitering in the alleyways on our way back from Jalan Alor.
Anyway, we started to notice more curious transactions happening at the front of B.B., including a suspected sighting of a new species of dyke-pimp (running younger and sexier girls) sporting short spiked hair, nerd-chic black-rim glasses, black vest and chained wallet.
Then there was Andy, the Lebanese pro fighter ex-Olympian boxer turned hair-stylist and make-up artist. Andy is 'stupid' for chocolate (his description), consuming up to five servings a day in his Montreal-era prime (1976, I think that was) and constantly negotiating with his coach --- under threat of mutiny --- to get his daily rations or else! Apparently, the Lebanese coaches at that time ran their athletes on a Dickensian ration of porridge and peanuts.
Thomas was the night-desk guy. A kind of bhoddisatva-type keeper of the gates, the only way I know to describe Thomas is the nearest sentient life could get to a sort of aquatic unpeturbability, his equilibrium always in balance and open to any type of human flow, including the criminal element (he's quite chummy-chummy with the pimps)
His very existence is prescriptive --- Thomas' life-investigation is the constant self-study of beneficient remedies for body and soul. I wish I had a mind like that! A late-night session conversation with Thomas typically runs like this:
A) The history of Malaya, mixing the historical-anecdotal and the mythical-historical, spanning Hang Tuah to Merdeka; B) Bird's nest soup, instructions on how to best maximize its tonic qualities (not to be consumed with spicy foods or alcohol in the same day); C) Chinese cooking; D) stories of how his wife left him after a gambling/drinking spree; E) stories of going on a Thomas-lam after his wife goes on the lam; F) leading to a recounting of his time spent hanging out with yakuza in Chiba; G) magic pills for curing genital warts due to Herpes; H) the principals of Tae Kwon Do; I) Shoa Lin Kung Fu vs. Tibetan Kung Fu; J) Mind over Body; K) Tibetan funeral rites and caskets; L) Ghost Stories
...all the while dispensing keys to guests, serving cans of Carlsberg (to us, usually), and gently enumerating his point with a filed-down razor-sharp fingernail on the pinky of either hand.
I've kind of paraphrased two or three dialogues, but you get the idea. Thomas also has the enviable talent of being able to doze almost sitting up in his swivel-chair, head just slightly cocked, without any of those knee-jerk ejections into consciousness when you rap at his desk, just a slow rising till sleepy eye-contact. One of these days I'll post a picture and you can bask in the well-being of his smile.
Anyway, I digress. It's good to be in PJ...KL was kind of getting to us. The more one circumlocutes this place, the more its dimensions are revealed to you. The big glitter jewel box that is Kl has its useemly side, its barbs and hooks, its human fallout and Faustian casualties. So you begin to get the impression of a necessary side-stepping, getting both near and far to the vortex that is its centre, as a form of negotiating its limits.
Like any big city, KL operates on a bedrock of sex and money, the fuel supplied by desire and ambition, constant transactions of bodies and power. It's an amped-up version of Jane Austen on steroids or cocaine. Sometimes it's very attractive (no, Mom and Dad, I am NOT doing drugs) and sometimes it's exhausting and repelling.
Maybe we get this impression just because we've been talking to so many people, and KL if anything is far from short of stories...some astounding and some quite frankly horrifying. Actually, add a little Stephen King to the recipe, framed within a very heterogenous belief system incorporating witchcraft and political intrigue, and you're getting close. People with power here are very powerful, and literally get away with murder. Beautiful people, especially women, are sometimes easily baited, though beauty itself is used as a kind of bargaining tool for lubricating 'business'. There's something a little predatory about how some things operate in this place, where success follows failure rate at a dizzying pace.
So it's like any other big city, except much more essentially 'de-regulated' (one of the things we really like, actually) and less polite and mercenary in its behaviour.
Plus, 'society' here is very small, and everyone knows everyone, or at least knows who 'everyone' is.
We've also been hanging out with people who operate very close to, or within, the power sphere. The art scene is exceedingly close-bred, which is both good and bad. Like anywhere, 'culture' is a stepping-stone bed-partner to money and power...not quite symbiotic and not blown-up enough to appear parasitic or all-out predatory, but it all grooves on 'talk' at opening functions.
Being a bit of a fish-bowl, we seem to be getting uncannily well-recognized, as the 'Canadian artists doing the residency at Gudang' (which most people we met, until a mere week ago, had hardly heard of). Plus, we've been getting asked 'who' we're being funded by! Really, we should be milking it and pretending to have terrible reputations, but we generally have to explain that we're simply free-floating entities without much of a plan or budget. We hardly know what we're going to pull off at Gudang...well, not exactly true, but so far it's pretty inconclusive.
So I hope I haven't freaked out any dear friends or family with frightening tales of the 'big city'...we've made great friends here and are especially glad to be working on new projects, and generating a lot of self-excitement in the process. We love KL, really! But it's especially nice to linger in its periphery right now, and Gudang couldn't be a better place for it.
I'll send a big shout-out once we get pictures up...
Kajin
We're now settled in Petaling Jaya, in the suburbs so to speak of KL --- a large room with attached toilet/bath and grid-ironed balconey, right close to Gudang where we'll be doing our 'residency' (without the resident part).
Our part of PJ is mostly middle-class Chinese, attached townhouses and a few bungalows...
Like most of suburban KL, the area's a dizzying cosmology of seemingly randomly-numbered streets that continually prods the mid-brain into functioning as a kind of roulette-wheel-cum-divining-rod in order to find one's bearings, which we're not very good at, really.
Eg.: We live in Damansara Jaya on SS 22/29...generally using the garden exit, we negotiate the back-alley (charming old-school variety: longkangs (open drains) on either side with concrete-slab bridges to back-doors; walls with overhanging bougainvilla, mouldy-moss and mossy-mould, skin-colored geckos, sputtering drain-pipes [by which you can divine wether someone in the corresponding household is showering, washing cutlery or just wasting water]) and emerge on SS 22/41...to get to our Starbucks we hang a left on SS 22/11 by the Petronas gas station, then straight, duck through a subterranean passage under the highway (SS 21/64) and then voila! we're in Damansara Utama. Cross SS 21/62 (parallel to SS 21/63) just a few feet of dirt and grass and you pass SS 21/60 (I have no idea where on earth SS 21/61 disappeared to) and head straight through a back alley, and you're on SS 21/1A, which is this, here, where I'm writing now.
Anyway, the good thing is we're right near SS 22/47, which is where Gudang is. That's the other direction from SS 22/11, in Damansara Jaya proper.
We've been staking claims on our new hood by steady footwork and constant by-the-minute map consultation. There's a nearby mall, thank god! (by which you can surmise that we're becoming typical KL-ers) which we hit up each morning at Kopitiam's...wicked curry laksa and STRONG ice kopi. There's surprisingly good makan (food or eats) in the vicinity, including a Hakka noodle house where we had amazing stewed duck with lotus root last night. Not quite the paradise pirate-DVD mecca that Sungai Wang plaza is, but we can get exotic fare nonetheless, consisting mostly of 'erotic' foreign entertainment (you know, 'French' cinema --- very arty).
All to say that moving here is a welcome break from central KL and Bukit Bintang. B.B. is like a really intense girlfriend that tastes really good but after a while it's hard to keep up and she's kind of expensive anyway.
They'll miss us at the guest house. Things were getting a little dodgy anyway after subjecting some unsuspecting fellow guests to an impromptu screening of a John Waters film (A Dirty Shame). Things started to feel slightly uncomfortable after the bit where Tracey Ulmann does this trick with a bottle of Evian, and I have no idea how the Chinese equivalent of "I'm a cunnilingus bottom' --- spoken ad infinitum throughout the movie --- would have translated for our Cantonese audience.
After some time, though, we began to get familiar with the internal community of B.B. Guest House. There were the young turk triad pimps always watching TV with their shirts off. Half-body tattoos and understudied slouch. We watched a Thai kick-boxing movie together...one half of the pair was a Tamil-looking Lothario who spoke perfect street Cantonese --- I think I was the more amusing curiosity for him, being a non-speaking specimen of indeterminate Cantonese-Hokkien extraction.
The turks run a stable of rather run-down prosties old enough to be their moms. A trio, I think, who shared the same room next to where we'd drink our gin and tonics (Pulau Tioman duty-free) while watching Akademie Fantasia (Malaysia's answer to 'American Idol'). We'd see them sadly loitering in the alleyways on our way back from Jalan Alor.
Anyway, we started to notice more curious transactions happening at the front of B.B., including a suspected sighting of a new species of dyke-pimp (running younger and sexier girls) sporting short spiked hair, nerd-chic black-rim glasses, black vest and chained wallet.
Then there was Andy, the Lebanese pro fighter ex-Olympian boxer turned hair-stylist and make-up artist. Andy is 'stupid' for chocolate (his description), consuming up to five servings a day in his Montreal-era prime (1976, I think that was) and constantly negotiating with his coach --- under threat of mutiny --- to get his daily rations or else! Apparently, the Lebanese coaches at that time ran their athletes on a Dickensian ration of porridge and peanuts.
Thomas was the night-desk guy. A kind of bhoddisatva-type keeper of the gates, the only way I know to describe Thomas is the nearest sentient life could get to a sort of aquatic unpeturbability, his equilibrium always in balance and open to any type of human flow, including the criminal element (he's quite chummy-chummy with the pimps)
His very existence is prescriptive --- Thomas' life-investigation is the constant self-study of beneficient remedies for body and soul. I wish I had a mind like that! A late-night session conversation with Thomas typically runs like this:
A) The history of Malaya, mixing the historical-anecdotal and the mythical-historical, spanning Hang Tuah to Merdeka; B) Bird's nest soup, instructions on how to best maximize its tonic qualities (not to be consumed with spicy foods or alcohol in the same day); C) Chinese cooking; D) stories of how his wife left him after a gambling/drinking spree; E) stories of going on a Thomas-lam after his wife goes on the lam; F) leading to a recounting of his time spent hanging out with yakuza in Chiba; G) magic pills for curing genital warts due to Herpes; H) the principals of Tae Kwon Do; I) Shoa Lin Kung Fu vs. Tibetan Kung Fu; J) Mind over Body; K) Tibetan funeral rites and caskets; L) Ghost Stories
...all the while dispensing keys to guests, serving cans of Carlsberg (to us, usually), and gently enumerating his point with a filed-down razor-sharp fingernail on the pinky of either hand.
I've kind of paraphrased two or three dialogues, but you get the idea. Thomas also has the enviable talent of being able to doze almost sitting up in his swivel-chair, head just slightly cocked, without any of those knee-jerk ejections into consciousness when you rap at his desk, just a slow rising till sleepy eye-contact. One of these days I'll post a picture and you can bask in the well-being of his smile.
Anyway, I digress. It's good to be in PJ...KL was kind of getting to us. The more one circumlocutes this place, the more its dimensions are revealed to you. The big glitter jewel box that is Kl has its useemly side, its barbs and hooks, its human fallout and Faustian casualties. So you begin to get the impression of a necessary side-stepping, getting both near and far to the vortex that is its centre, as a form of negotiating its limits.
Like any big city, KL operates on a bedrock of sex and money, the fuel supplied by desire and ambition, constant transactions of bodies and power. It's an amped-up version of Jane Austen on steroids or cocaine. Sometimes it's very attractive (no, Mom and Dad, I am NOT doing drugs) and sometimes it's exhausting and repelling.
Maybe we get this impression just because we've been talking to so many people, and KL if anything is far from short of stories...some astounding and some quite frankly horrifying. Actually, add a little Stephen King to the recipe, framed within a very heterogenous belief system incorporating witchcraft and political intrigue, and you're getting close. People with power here are very powerful, and literally get away with murder. Beautiful people, especially women, are sometimes easily baited, though beauty itself is used as a kind of bargaining tool for lubricating 'business'. There's something a little predatory about how some things operate in this place, where success follows failure rate at a dizzying pace.
So it's like any other big city, except much more essentially 'de-regulated' (one of the things we really like, actually) and less polite and mercenary in its behaviour.
Plus, 'society' here is very small, and everyone knows everyone, or at least knows who 'everyone' is.
We've also been hanging out with people who operate very close to, or within, the power sphere. The art scene is exceedingly close-bred, which is both good and bad. Like anywhere, 'culture' is a stepping-stone bed-partner to money and power...not quite symbiotic and not blown-up enough to appear parasitic or all-out predatory, but it all grooves on 'talk' at opening functions.
Being a bit of a fish-bowl, we seem to be getting uncannily well-recognized, as the 'Canadian artists doing the residency at Gudang' (which most people we met, until a mere week ago, had hardly heard of). Plus, we've been getting asked 'who' we're being funded by! Really, we should be milking it and pretending to have terrible reputations, but we generally have to explain that we're simply free-floating entities without much of a plan or budget. We hardly know what we're going to pull off at Gudang...well, not exactly true, but so far it's pretty inconclusive.
So I hope I haven't freaked out any dear friends or family with frightening tales of the 'big city'...we've made great friends here and are especially glad to be working on new projects, and generating a lot of self-excitement in the process. We love KL, really! But it's especially nice to linger in its periphery right now, and Gudang couldn't be a better place for it.
I'll send a big shout-out once we get pictures up...
Kajin
posted by Kajin 'Jah Goink' Goh at 5:44 PM
