IMAGI-MENTAL

2010-10-29T21:15:00.000-07:00

2010-10-29T05:42:00.000-07:00

2010-10-10T05:57:00.001-07:00

2010-08-13T22:56:00.000-07:00

'Please don't give me a ticket, I am arranging for my car to be toed (sic)',
for Urban Still Lifes (With Mops and Brooms)

2010-08-13T08:15:00.000-07:00

2010-08-09T06:43:00.000-07:00

2010-08-04T22:04:00.000-07:00

2010-08-03T07:42:00.001-07:00

2010-07-30T01:46:00.000-07:00

2010-07-28T09:48:00.000-07:00

2010-07-27T07:55:00.000-07:00

2010-07-25T21:56:00.000-07:00

2010-07-15T19:26:00.000-07:00

2010-07-13T21:07:00.000-07:00

2010-07-12T19:05:00.000-07:00

2010-07-12T18:51:00.000-07:00

2010-07-11T02:01:00.000-07:00

2010-07-11T01:36:00.000-07:00

2010-04-28T06:21:00.000-07:00

Found this while going bleary-eyed doing research. Made my day.

2010-04-24T08:09:00.000-07:00

2010-04-07T05:33:00.000-07:00

Whaletown had no whales today.

Perhaps the six hours on the V/Line weren't as fun or as productive as I would've liked, but taking the bike out to the great blue yonder is something I'd want to do again. And again.

I like cheap thrills

.

2010-04-05T05:49:00.000-07:00

"The rooster of lust, the peacock of wanting
to be famous, the crow of ownership, and the duck
of urgency, kill them and revive them
in another form, changed and harmless."

[Rumi]

2010-04-03T02:54:00.000-07:00

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2010-03-30T21:34:00.000-07:00

I don't know why I constantly dig holes for me to fall in. I know that they're there, and they're hard to climb out of, and when I'm in one everyone's invited to do a quickstep on my head. But they're there and I want to know what's on the other side of that goddamn rabbithole goddammit.

2010-03-29T05:56:00.000-07:00

2010-03-27T18:45:00.000-07:00

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright,
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire in thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, and what art?
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand, and what dread feet?

What the hammer? What the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb, make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright,
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

[The Tyger by William Blake]
[Tiger caught in tropical storm (Surprised!) by Henri Rosseau]

2010-03-25T08:28:00.000-07:00

[Projective Cities, AA]

2010-03-24T12:07:00.000-07:00

Lost in between Edward W. Said, the Hotel Sphinx and the unsolved murder mystery of a family member long gone can I find what I'm looking for. I'm obsessed but the confluence remains muddy.

2010-03-24T09:57:00.000-07:00

It's on cold lonely mornings like these that I stay wide awake and ruminate. Like a cow after a day on a toxic green pasture I finally stop grazing and digestion begins. It comes like a sharp knife clearing away the mess releasing a condensed rare instance of clarity that comes fleetingly and does not last because it will soon be tainted by sleep. And once sleep comes clarity fades and one wakes up the next day to a day of grazing on an mountain constantly moving uphill like an artificial slope on an escalator.

2010-03-24T07:28:00.000-07:00

Intuition beats intellect every time. At least in my perfect world it does.

2010-03-21T23:06:00.000-07:00

2010-03-10T00:34:00.001-08:00

I think I've just found my true vocation.
Is it weird to want to draw love letters to cities you've never been to?

2010-03-03T16:38:00.000-08:00

2010-03-03T15:45:00.000-08:00

As much as I want to love being where I am, in a well-ordered, culturally invigorating city with little laneways and everything within walking distance from everything else, I feel claustrophobic.

I shouldn't be saying this as a student architect and/or urbanist but I want my car back. I want to drive aimlessly on elevated highways, gaze upon city skylines, get lost on ring roads and sleep in the backseat while my parents drive like a vehicular lullaby. Give me a gas-guzzler in the place of trams, long winding boulevards in the place of grid city roads, and maybe (just maybe) Manly beach instead of St. Kilda.

2010-03-01T20:40:00.001-08:00

2010-02-25T17:08:00.000-08:00

Temporarily homeless, sans hot water and living with the threat of a looming four figure bill for the installation of a new hot water system in its place. Fifteen plumbers and counting!

2010-02-19T01:15:00.000-08:00

The outside world is hard enough as it is without me making things difficult for myself.

2010-02-17T03:14:00.000-08:00

2010-02-16T02:05:00.000-08:00

The people closest to me know how annoying I can get when I take up a new hobby. And right now, in the spirit of the Lunar New Year and all things metaphysical and Chinese, I've been reading up on astrology and the dodgy science of birth signs. I admit that I've actually been into this for a while now, because it's fun and silly and terribly interesting.

So, based on what I've been reading in the newspapers and astrology blogs (some of which have deliciously fob-worthy english) the Year of the Tiger is going to be a relatively good one for a constantly terrified little Rabbit like me.

I love the simplicity of categorizing people into types (or animals) because it just makes it easier to understand people. And it's always fun to imagine them with floppy ears, or stripes, or a pair of wings. I guess if you can perceive to have cracked that person's personality, it just makes talking to them easier. And you won't have to feel so bad if things become awkward because hey, maybe he's a Rooster. Or a particularly obnoxious Dragon.

2010-02-15T02:21:00.001-08:00

It goes without saying that I'm already starting to miss being home, and I haven't even left yet. It's been a good five weeks, with ups and downs and surprises in between. I'll be going back to Melbourne a little bit older, and not much wiser, but maybe with a little more razzmatazz. Just a tad.

Count in the next two years and I'd have offically lived half of my entire life abroad. Twelve out of twenty four. Melbourne's nice, and not terribly exciting, and that's probably my fault for staying in too much and not actually bothering to get out of my stereotypical circles often enough. Give me a few more picnics, parties, and sponsored trips to Sydney and I'll come back a happy boy.

2010-02-14T06:13:00.000-08:00

The Reunion Dinner.

2010-02-14T05:57:00.000-08:00

The funny farm is always funny in its own decrepit way. I go for the dogs.

2010-02-11T06:08:00.001-08:00

Actually, deep down, I'm just really scared.

2010-02-10T03:41:00.000-08:00

We had our annual little reunion yesterday.

It's been five years since we've left high school and we're all (almost) grown up. Accountants, auditors, lawyers, bankers, entrepeneurs and the still-budding architect caught in between their newly-learned rat race realities. Not everyone was there of course; people are still MIA abroad and unfinished, and others working till the wee hours paying their dues.

Even the way I'm reminiscing reminds me of how old we really are. Old enough to know that those carefree days are behind us, but young enough to know that our best moments are yet come. I hope we still get to see each other when we start getting married, having children and complaining about how expensive university is when we send ours abroad to live their own dreams.

Suspended realities of what comes next. Still in denial, but heck I've still got two years.

2010-02-07T08:26:00.000-08:00

I am way too domesticated for a 22 year old.

I stay in all day, drive out only to stock up on facial wash and lens solution and tau foo fah, and spend the evening getting measured by a seamstress for new shirts at my grandmother's. In hindsight maybe I should've opted for the mandarin collar on the cotton batik print.

Just give me lots of money and I'll be content on being a lady of leisure for the rest of my life.

2010-01-31T11:08:00.001-08:00

Moongoop.

*

Parallel sketchblog?
I could learn to live with a little less clutter.

Hop on over and tell me what you think!

2010-01-31T08:24:00.000-08:00

Turning 23 and I can feel a quarter-life crisis on the way.
I am blessed and cursed with an overactive imagination.

(And a penchant for melodrama.)

2010-01-31T08:01:00.001-08:00

2010-01-31T04:16:00.000-08:00

I have waaaay too much time on my hands.

It's Academic! from Muizz Adam Nazmi on Vimeo.

2010-01-29T12:37:00.000-08:00

We were upstairs with the best seats in the house, just behind the curtains looking directly backstage. They were shuffling their new breasts into tight lycra costumes, feather boas and endless boots. The men pulled down and changed their underwear between sets, not minding or not knowing that we had full view of them in their dressing room. The comediennes went on, teasing the crowd with sexual innuendos and flirty touches, mostly men, mostly Malay, mostly straight and not one minded one bit. A night out is a night out, however camp or playfully sleazy but who's to judge on taste in a place like this.

She spotted us peeping from above just before their set, and I gave a little wave to our Lady Gaga from backstage before she went on. She tipped her Kanye sunglasses and waved back.

2010-01-29T11:57:00.000-08:00

Hotel Delmano,Williamsburg NYC.

With Melissa and Lauren, my two homegirls starting out a new life in the Big City.

Relatively quiet night by NY standards. The place was charming, 60's music playing off the bartender's iPhone and drinks deliciously quiant; had egg white and absinthe, and it wasn't half bad either. And how gangsta is car service in New York? Getting picked up in a big black Escalade instead of a regular cab and riding down Marcy Ave at 3am with Jay-Z's Empire State of Mind blaring out the sound system. Epic little moments. Wasn't much, but I'm getting nostalgic again.

2010-01-29T02:22:00.000-08:00

The best architecture of the decade, as per mammoth.

Read it if you're interested in where we're going.

2010-01-29T02:17:00.000-08:00

2010-01-28T08:26:00.000-08:00

We spent the afternoon in Chow Kit the other day. We wanted to see the gritty, real side of KL free from charmless shopping strips and sanitized urban dreams paved in white marble and terracotta pavements.

Chow Kit is old KL, with new inhabitants. The market is still around, people still go about their daily business in reasonable grit and deferred dreams of a life not surrounded by hardship in our City of Mud. We felt like immigrants in an immigrant city. The police asked us whether we were Singaporeans, mildy embarrassed that we couldn't pass off as KLites.

You can disappear if you find the right places to live. Chow Kit is their area, with charming Indonesian-owned coffeeshops and night markets selling used clothes down the alley from five foot ways owned by transvestites. We saw one, her, standing in her window frame above, watching the remains of the Old City with one breast exposed to the city air.

I was there to ask questions, but I felt rude to intrude. So we sat and watched the new world go by. This is their city, not ours.

2010-01-28T06:02:00.001-08:00

I'm inclined to say something about the state of affairs here in Malaysia, but I can't help but think that I'm still a little too naive, idealistic and hopeful for my own race. It's a Malay problem, and it probably always has been. We're sensitive to the point of irrationality, too reactionary and too boxed in under the delusional umbrella of so-called religion that we fail to see common sense.

It's frustrating to see how pervasive and persuasive the influence of conservative Islam is in Malaysia. Sure, there are the outspoken, progressive types who call for understanding and pragmatism in the face of unrelenting modernity but there is a vast, unspoken majority that still views the world with skepticism and fear. Middle Malaysia, or rather the Malay Middle Class, is fractured. We are caught between the admiration and loathing of Western culture. We are schizophrenic and fear for our own cultural survival. We are paranoid.

We have to step back and really see who we really are in order to move on. It's worrying that we are still mired in these issues which in any other progressive country are seen as non-issues. But the reality is that Malaysia remains a peculiar social experiment, and one that is continually reacting with itself and fluctuating between states of progession and regression. We are a nation of immigrants, and we always have been, and the sooner everyone realises the futility of cultural dominance of one race over another the sooner we can move on and create something worthwhile together.

2010-01-28T05:27:00.000-08:00

Unfettered by position or posession.

2010-01-28T00:08:00.000-08:00

The UNHCR thing is getting nowhere. I think they're a little paranoid that I might trip and reveal sensitive information -- and rightly so -- especially when the welfare of the refugees is concerned. Perhaps I shouldn't have told them that I was doing 'research'. Hm.

I'm sniffing out a brief for Major Project, 1.5 years early, because I feel unproductive and guilty that I haven't yet joined the rat race while my friends are killing themselves starting out their careers in accounting and law. I feel that it's the responsible thing to do - design something for the people back home, the people who really need an architectural intervention to survive. I don't see the point in thinking about buildings for people who couldn't give a damn, or for the sake of individual or political vanity for something like Major Project. So fellow Malaysians, screw you, I'm doing something (hypothetically) for the immigrants and refugees. No, I won't get funding and very limited political support but I'm young and idealistic -- and for my forseeable academic future, it doesn't matter.

I just hope those at the HQ can trust me on this and let me in. For now, here's a link to video of which I can't embed on the site on the situation of Burmese refugees in KL, and two others on what's actually happening in the city as we speak. It's deplorable.

1. Unreported World - Jungle Shanty Town (Click)

2. Malaysian immigration officials implicated in human trafficking

3. Burmese refugees rounded up and sold in Malaysia

2010-01-27T10:26:00.000-08:00

At the risk of coming across as an insufferable aesthete, I'm putting down onto pixels my KL Nights Summer Reading List just so I can steel myself for the coming lonely nights ahead as I crawl into bed and read my eyes out.

1. Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, Niall Ferguson
2. The World is Flat v.3.0, Thomas Friedman
3. Far Eastern Tales, W. Somerset Maugham
4. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
5. Body2Body: A Malaysian Queer Anthology, Various Writers
5. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
7. Lolita, Vladmir Nabokov
8. To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee

Out of the seven, I've finished No. 1 and No. 5, started on four of them and am two-thirds through No.4 just because I like the font size and it fits nicely in my hand.

Maugham is fascinating but a little tiresome, Friedman has been hijacked my Mama and Kundera is only there because I needed a book to exchange with Body2Body as one of the pages had been conveniently scissor-snipped - deliberately, I suspect, midway through a Shanon Shah story mentioning the whole Anwar fracas in 1997. You sneaky censors, you.

This is by no means an exhaustive summer list. The 14-year old and I kept relaying Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man in the car back in Melbourne on our family seaside jaunts to Phillip Island and the Great Ocean Road. Middle aged expat college professor is sad over death of gay lover, gains cute boy stalker, shows up at delusional fag hag's house for a dinner party for two in the evening, goes out for drinks with said stalker followed by brisk skinny dip in ocean, then kills himself. Not exactly the most difficult book in the world, but at least the film looks promising.

2010-01-27T09:47:00.000-08:00

My cousin is getting engaged. She's 22, and seven months younger than I am.

Her twin sister texted me earlier tonight to call me over to Tok's, telling me to come quick, it's a surprise she said. And I was. Pleasantly. It was extremely sweet of them to break the news to Tok, gingerly, and by proxy. It was sweet.

Talk soon went to proceedings, what should be done, how long should it be and what would come next. We are not big on weddings, not anymore. The Family has seen its fair share of extravagance, heartbreak, quiet ones, necessary ones and ones done in private on foreign shores away from the prying eyes of gossip and judgement. Our generation is wiser to the divorces and compromises of the elders, and we don't make such a big fuss anymore. We've become pragmatic. We know better. We don't know anything at all.

2010-01-27T08:56:00.001-08:00

I want to see myself as a well-read, intellectually sound individual with enough sense to shun political rhetoric, who is willing to fight for human and civil rights and actually make something of myself in this godforsaken world without offending anyone too much. Extra points if I manage to look dashing doing it.

And then I turn on my iTunes and listen to La Roux.

Oh well. One shouldn't take oneself too seriously.

2010-01-26T21:08:00.000-08:00

An ode to a good friend, who's going through a rough patch.

Chin up, conehead.

2010-01-26T20:21:00.000-08:00

Dan Flavin. Monument for V. Tatlin 1. 1964.

MoMA. 11 West 53rd st, between 5th & 6th Ave.

A fluorescent skyscraper, quietly sheathed in Russian constructivism.

Cold war Americana?

2010-01-26T19:57:00.001-08:00

2010-01-26T19:30:00.000-08:00

2010-01-26T18:58:00.000-08:00

The Yale Center for British Art had the most amazing collection of exquisite botanical 'paper mosaics' when I visited in November. Here's a little excerpt from the accompanying book:

"Mrs. Delany and her Circle explores the life, world and work of Mary Delany ... (she) used her craft activities to cement bonds of friendship and negotiate complex, interlinked social networks throughout a long life passed in artistic, aristocratic, and court circles in Georgian England and Ireland."

2010-01-26T12:44:00.000-08:00

This is Johnny. He is the cutest damn Telomian dog on the farm.

He also gets an erection and clambers his slobbery self on me everytime I visit.

2010-01-26T12:41:00.000-08:00

It's trendy (and therefore, a little passe) to be green I know, but I have an inescapable fetish with things growing on roofs. These shoots are gorgeous.

At the Sungai Buloh plant nurseries.

2010-01-26T12:33:00.000-08:00

PJ old town market. Shopping with Tok.

Yes, I have a fleeting obsession with the macabre.

I blame it on True Blood.

2010-01-26T12:26:00.000-08:00

2010-01-26T11:27:00.000-08:00

2010-01-26T11:08:00.000-08:00

pre-loved.

17hrs Chicago to Washington D.C.

JFK.

2010-01-26T11:00:00.000-08:00

Day 1. On the shores of Lake Michigan. Who wouldn't fall in love with that skyline?

2010-01-26T10:53:00.000-08:00

In terms of cultural and complete sensory impact i.e. 'The Attack of the Great American City', New York beats Chicago hands down. But Chicago comes off as the prettier, slightly less fiesty brunette with a crumpled, starched office shirt with pencil skirt to New York's shabby rockstar strawberry blonde. It's neater, more civilized and has that Lake Front. And the elevated train tracks aren't half bad either.

2010-01-26T10:46:00.000-08:00

I can't get over the fact the America has, hands down, perfect natural light. Granted, it was a sunny day in Chicago, but it's wonderful how a simple, unnoticed chasm up in between the skycrapers on a nice day can result in ... this.

Must be the shine of capitalism, mirrored off the Sears.

2010-01-26T10:34:00.000-08:00

Weekend in Connecticut.

New Haven. Yale vs. Harvard. Louis Kahn. Wesleyan. Mystic. Getting totally out of it.

Boston.

2010-01-26T10:13:00.000-08:00

To say that I walked a lot in New York is an understatement. You can't avoid the crowds during the day, but when night falls the city is a different creature. This was taken from the Empire State building, nearing 10pm on a weeknight. I practiclly danced my way in through the invisible queues and barren lifts up to the top.

I wander when I travel, and in New York I travelled alone. To be free to roam the night like a jungle cat, sauntering and slipping between the shadows of SoHo and Chelsea, from Union Station and 14th Street to the shores of the Hudson, is perhaps one of the greatest pleasures of going solo. It's lonely, but if you look for company, you'll find it. Like that journalist from Columbia in Greenwich Village, with his occasional friend from the New School.

We stopped to ask for directions, they led the way, I followed. We saw things, we did things, things past our bedtime in the subway platforms with hoodies pulled up, we left and went back to our dorms.

Things happen in New York if you look, and look closely, observe and when you feel lost, stalk. Stalk with your 12x optical zoom, click and you've captured an indiscriminate moment of someone else's day. And you become part of that person's day, and perhaps by association, of the city itself.

2010-01-26T10:00:00.000-08:00

2010-01-26T09:42:00.000-08:00

Wheeling into New Jersey, between dusty factories and the early rising masses of the greatest city on earth.

Manhattan at dawn, on the train. Perhaps one of the greatest little moments of my little life.

2010-01-26T09:40:00.000-08:00

2010-01-26T08:44:00.000-08:00

It's not a cliche to say that New York really is the greatest city in the world. It is. THE. City. It might not be home, or where I've spent the better part of my life for the past three years, but New York seems to accept you unabashedly, unequivocally.

That is, of course, until you run out of money.

I blame this on the lack of imagination of the view from my bedroom window.

I miss Manhattan, but it's good to be home.