Beam Me Up Scottie

Volume

For Full Moon aka C and XY _ I was feeling a little down after work today but this cheered me up. It was fun. You would have liked it too.

Let There Be Light

It’s all been about seeing the light this weekend even though there has been very little of it.

When I woke up on Sunday morning, it was dark with the gathering of heavy grey clouds above me. The raindrops pattered softly against my window plane. My gas heater hummed ever so softly in unison with it. The reverberations of the first trains deep down in the underground below started to vibrate through my building block. At 5 minute intervals my room started to vibrate a little, but I am use to it. My hair was still a bit damp from a late night wash and I brushed it away from my shoulders over my ears and turned to my side to stare out the window. I lay like this for a long time, listening, breathing slowly and trying to recall the dream I had last night. I turned over once to take my phone but there were no professions of everlasting love on it so I took this picture instead.

In my dream, I am driving into the twilight. It is snowing lightly. It is autumn. I can’t be sure that it is because the roads are covered in snow, but I get a sense that it is, strange that autumn snow may seem. I am not sure what type of car it is, but it seems like a big car, an MPV of some sort but with luxurious beige leather coverings. It is firm but comfortable and I like sitting on it while driving. There is someone beside me. I am not sure who, but I get a sense of it as well. Periodically, he puts his hand on my knee and gives it a bit of a squeeze as if to reassure me. Couch is playing on my player. I am not sure which song but it could be Gegen Alles Bereit. I think I have been listening to too much Couch in my another life out of the dream. But it is still the perfect type of song to listen to while out on a drive. In actual fact, I don’t drive but in this dream I was driving. Not the type of driving we see in sitcoms where the actors pretend to bob up and down with a digitalized back drop behind. In my dream, I was really driving. I was holding the wheel, changing gears and feeling at home doing it. In the dream it all came so naturally. Again, it must be too much real time lunch conversations about learning to drive. The window of the car is ever so slightly down and I can hear the whoosh of cars as they whiz pass us. Everything around us is covered in soft cotton balls of snow. I am driving quite fast, but the snow flakes seem to be falling in slow motion on my windscreen disaffected by the speed of life. The sky has my favourite evening hues. Dark blue on top gradating into pinkish orange hues below. I haven’t seen these hues very often since autumn crept in on us. At 4pm it gets dark, like some one is gradually turning the dimmer down and then everything turns dark by 4.30pm. The whole twilight process is skipped. I’ve been missing the twilights. The road ahead is long and I can’t see any end ahead, only the twilight drifting downwards, like a falling veil in the wind. I just keep driving and driving.


On Saturday night, I rushed down to catch the candle light concert in St Martins-in-the-fields. The New London Soloist Orchestra was playing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons together with some other pieces including my all time favourite, Bach’s ‘Air’ from Orchestral Suite No.3. I did not have very good seats. I had a seat hugging a column and lots of people in front of me. My head was lop sided in the direction of the column till my neck was strained and my tongue and saliva were drifting south with my lop side. It’s the type of look my dog has when he doesn’t understand me. The rest of the time, I just looked up at the chandeliers or closed my eyes and listened to the orchestra play. Still, it was cathartic. Soothing strings under candle light in a historic church.

This evening I managed to catch a Housing Exhibition, ‘On the Threshold: The Changing Face of Housing and a photographic exhibition,’Twilight: Photography in the Magic Hour’ at V+A.


It was interesting to see MVRDV’s Berlin Voids model at the exhibition. It’s the type of thing you see in your books while you were still in archi school and you give it a second take because it gives you a vaguely familiar feeling.


‘Twilight’ was good albeit a bit small scale. But it was something I simply couldn’t resist. Hand fetish aside. Twilights count high on my list as well. My favourite work was by Bill Henson. It was of an image of a girl. Only her face and part of her open shirt and breasts were illuminated by the evening lights. I liked the colour of the evening bouncing off her skin giving it a ghoulish green tint, but what struck me most was the single tear streaming down her face. It glistered brightly in the dim light and looked so three dimensional I almost wanted to wipe it away. Next favourite was Philip-Lorca diCorcia's works. It is a difficult task to capture evening or night images which is why I have recently been fixated with learning about the Fuji Natura Classica camera. I want to capture that evening light. Every time I take an image of the twilight, it never comes out as I had seen it or as I want to remember it. I want to get it right.

The Volume light/sound installation in the V+A courtyard by Massive Attack Producer Neil Davidge and band member Robert Del Naja was closed because of the rain. I will head down again soon to catch it.

There was another exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery that I wanted to catch called ’In the darkest hour, there may be light’ but I wasn’t in the mood for art. Sometimes I am not in the mood for it and sometimes I don’t understand it. A super size plastic replication of a half peeled potato could also be art.

My bets for the rest of the month are:
The Photographic Portrait Prize at The National Portrait Gallery
The Turner Prize at Tate Britain
In the Face of History: European Photographers in the 20th Century at The Barbican Centre

The house was so silent tonight. I could have walked around in my CKs but of course that would have been a silly idea. I would freeze my A$$ off.

Instead, I flipped through ex-house guest’s copy of Murakami’s Norwegian Wood sitting on my shelf and came across this.

There was light.

Pardon my language.

Nagasawa said to Toru, ‘Don’t feel sorry for yourselves, only Ar$eholes do that.’

I am driving up the road. I am in control, just me and my somebody and we are driving ahead into the twilight.


Summer, June 2006_Evening light from my bedroom window

25 Minute Walk

23 November 2006

My heart finally came crashing down to planet earth from lala land on Thursday morning. Its meteors scattered the planet and washed the grounds with my sadness. I wasn’t getting on that plane headed to Portal. In fact, the plane had left by the time I saw its trail of white flush streaking the grey sky of Hyde Park as I walked to work.

I stopped taking the tube this week. The potential delays and rumoured strikes were too much to face early mornings with my hectic work schedule. I would rather walk for 25 minutes through the park to the bus stop to take a bus. In general, train delays and evacuating the train mid route seem to be the norm for Londoners. They take it in their stride as a part of life eventhough I still curse and swear.

Round the Bend
Little New York Back Alley
Entrance to Park

The Lake Side



The Pavillion
Out of the Park
The Imperial College of London
The Underpass
The Bus Stop

On Player_'London'_By The Crystal Method

In Search of the Gardens of Paradise

On Saturday Morning, I went in search of instant karma. Actually, I wasn’t intending on something as momentous as that at all. All I really wanted to do was to slowly savor a bowl of oat crunch with fresh organic milk followed by a hot cup of Chai Latte while reading a whole week of e-mails at my own pace. For once, this would be a real treat for me because I have either been gulping down my breakfast or not taking any before work. There wasn’t even a drop of milk, organic or inorganic left in the house. There are some days where everything goes wrong. This is one of those times where I am going through a rough patch. On days like this, even the smallest magnitude of events that do not go your way are multiplied by a gazillion times. There is a saying about the redundancy of crying over spilt milk and probably more so for milk that never existed in the first place. Regardless of it all, I have been crying over spilt milk for the larger part of this week.

Something unpleasant happened at work this week. Actually a string of unpleasant things happened at work. But the main event resulted in the cancellation of my Portugal trip. I spent two sleepless nights measuring the implications of going on the trip and not going on the trip. It was a matter of leisure/ friendship/ money on one side and a matter of pride on the other side. I chose Pride and taking responsibility for something that I was partially responsible for.

The decision thus made still resulted in me breaking into tears every time I thought about it. In my last blog entry, I wrote about the places I wanted to visit at that point in time. They match the ‘X’ annotations as Rome, Portugal and France. Thus revealed, you can understand my disappointment. While many people have chosen to go to Spain, I had wanted to go to the lesser know places of Portal and Lisbon which glazed the magazines of Wallpaper. I have not had the chance to travel with a big group of people before other than a trip to Bali 10 years ago and I am tired of constantly traveling alone. Good company and shared memories are hard to come by or coordinate and I did not know that the trip meant so much to me until I had lost it. When do you realize the consequences of something until it is too late? I think that is how human beings are. On the other end of the spectrum, when do you even know if the resultants of your sacrifices are worth it.

I was not only filled with this sense of loss, but the grief also resulted from the fact that you know you could have avoided such a dilemma in the first place. It is the type of feeling I had when I was still a kid and I had just gotten my report book back for the year and needed my parent’s signature on it. On my way home, I would drag my feet through the muddy running fields where I’d spent too much time playing and keep wishing I had studied harder and watched less cartoons just for a few days or hours.

When the incident happened, I had the immediate urge to talk to someone, but as I went down my list, I realized that there was no one to talk to who understood me well. L was in Shanghai. W and the rest of my friends were in Singapore sleeping and I wanted to keep them in happy land. At that point, I immediately plunged deep into what felt like some desolate utopia, like coming out of a coma and realizing that every single living being on the planet had disappeared and you were alone in your decision making.

The impact of actions and consequences has been weighing hard or my mind. On Monday, the whole office watched Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth.’ It was a sobering experience about global warming and our near Armageddon landscape in 50 years time where the melting ice lands will result in the flooding of major cities around the world. More sobering is the fact that we are the cause of our own decline through industrial emissions and also the only solution to our future survival.

Early week, I met bag man on the train again. I have met him on a number of occasions on the tube. He is very old, about 70. I can hardly see his face because his head is always perpendicular to his body, as if his neck is permanently broken. He carries a trolley bag with him and his clothes and large jacket are monotone from layers of dirt which have nullified their colours. He wears a large pair of brown boots which are two sizes too big for him. He smells and his head is covered in sores. Everyone avoids him like the plague. So I did the opposite and stood right in front of him and bravely ceased breathing for the length of my journey. After a while, he took out a plastic bag and unfolded what looked like a half eaten piece of chocolate. I wondered what happened to him and how he ended up in this state? Did he regret the consequences of his actions and behaviour in his younger days and were these the result of his current state? My heart ached while watching him pick at his crumbled chocolate bar. I wanted to pass him the 5 pounds I had left in my wallet but I thought maybe he didn’t really want sympathy. He wanted someone to understand him.

I remember telling this to someone before. I don’t need your sympathy, I don’t need a solution, I just need a hug and you to understand. And the truth is no one understands and you cannot expect everyone to. Human emotions are too complicated for one human being to fully understand another. We all settle our own problems and we carry the weight of our own burdens. That’s what being an adult is about.

So, on another consequential breakfast-less morning, I packed a single chocolate truffle as a reward, a magazine, a bottle of water and other essentials and went in search of my own salvation and sanity at the legendary Kyoto Gardens in Holland Park.

Finding one of the entrances to the Park was not so difficult even with my dismal sense of directions. I hate reading maps because I can’t tell left or right or right from left or up from down but I remember places from the sense it gives me if I have ever visited it once before. If you led me into the deep dark forest I could get myself out but if you showed me a map I would never be able to take you where you needed to go. Once inside the park, I felt a little lost and scared. There was hardly anyone in sight and I could not see beyond the trees which closed in on me. The path was muddy, laden with slippery leaves and the sweet rotting scent of a rapidly degenerating autumn. I came to a cross road with a small pond with a statue of some old dude on a chair in the middle of the pond. It didn’t make sense to me at all. An old dude on a chair in the middle of the pond? In any case, beside the pond was a map. I could tell left from right only because the outline of the side profile of the old dude in the pond was printed clearly on the map. Take the route on the right of the statue then a left at the first turn.


It was a quiet, lonely walk. I knew I should be doing some serious thinking about a lot of things and the time would come when I would have to make more decisions, but not right now. I felt completely drained from the late nights and week that had just passed. Finally,a short distance along the first left turn, I came across the steps of the entrance to the gardens. There was a squirrel sitting still and silent beside the steps and I thought he was a statue as well but he ran off as I came closer. Walking up the steps, I came to a clearing with peacocks, a waterfall and a small bridge across a koi pond where the waterfall terminated. It was almost surreal. I sat down on a bench at the foot of the pond, took out my truffle and magazine. Elle Decoration Special Collector’s Edition. Everything was peaceful for a while and I let the truffle disappear slowly on my tongue, till I got to page 30, where Casa Da Musica was featured. It looked so cool in the picture and I was suppose to be there next week together with all the Alvaro Sizas which I would miss as well. Suppose to.


I left shortly after. Back home later that day. I spent the rest of the evening in my room. The sky was as dark as ever and I suddenly felt a violent loathing of Autumn. Why did such a beautiful time of year have to be so dark? I did a bit of yoga, watched a movie on my computer which momentarily gave me some distraction, then read a book that Full Moon aka C had given me called ‘The Adventures of Captain Underpants’ by Dav Pilkey. It brought me some relief as well and I stumbled into a fitful sleep after that.

This morning, I took a walk in the park after foregoing yesterday’s walk in search of lost paradise. The crowds of people were not a mirage. This brought my impatience up another notch and I wanted to do a road runner and bull doze everyone in my way. Back home again, I took a nap to recuperate and gather some strength for the long week ahead. I woke up in a daze from a bizarre dream of a violent argument with Flat mate LP and HL over some pints of ale. The sky was dark again. I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth only to realize that it was not morning.

Come bedtime, I did not want to go through another night of hiking through barren dreamlands. I decided to take drastic measures and call someone. I decided to do the unthinkable. I called my mummy.

I may be an adult, but sometimes, I still want my mummy. I still need my gas heating. I’m still too young and too weak to carry the entire evolution of the world on my shoulders. I still need a hug.

Post Halloween Perspectives II

Last weekend, Flat mate LP was in Venice and so Flat mate HL and I set out on our mini-adventure to the mega store to return the antenna which hasn’t done anything to improve our appalling TV reception. The good thing about London is that most shops are flexible and have a 30 day return policy for goods sold. I bet you could return just about anything from a rubber band to a Jacuzzi without undergoing a 1st degree interrogation.

In the last 4 months, I have not sat down to watch decent TV which doesn’t give me double vision after 5 seconds. And even though I have pretty much given up on TV and the fact that our TV set will ever be resuscitated, there still never seems to be enough time for everything else I need to do, including this blog entry which was suppose to be from 2 weeks back.

About 3 months ago, in my note book entry for Sunday, 13 August 2006, I wrote down the things that I hoped to achieve this year:

1. XXXXXX XXX
2. Memorize all the Cities on the Map of the Europe
3. Travel to XXXX,XXXXXXXX, XXXXX and around United Kingdom
4. Finish reading The Stranger on the Road to Emmaus
5. Start and finish The History of the World
6. Work related – XXXXXX XX XXXX
7. Work related – XXXXX XXXXXX
8. People related – XXXXX XX XXX XX XXXX XXXXX
9. Character related – XXXXX XXXX, XXXXX XXX XXXX XXXXXXXX
10. Bake the Ultimate Chocolate Cake

Evaluating this now, I am embarrassed to admit that I have failed in almost all aspects.

1. Tried but failed…so far
2. Started and located Santander, Lyon, Salzburg, Frankfurt and Cartagena on the map from my List of The 50 Best Cheap Getaways but went into perpetual sleep mode after 3 nights.
3. Varying degrees of success depending on how you look at it (excuses) although the pace is much slower then I though I could achieve them.
4. Started and Stopped.
5. Didn’t get down to even opening the cover.
6 and 7 are work related, no comment
8 is people related, no comment
9 is me related, even more so no further comment
10. Ate quite a few on the pretext of sussing out the competition but other wise haven’t even gotton down to getting a mixer or measuring scale.

Back to the point of this whole blog entry gathered from my conversations with Friday friend, KT after a particularly vicious day at work. Two important points he made to me, firstly, if I made a mistake or got a dart thrown at me, I shouldn’t continue being a walking dart board but pluck the dart out, evaluate why it happened and make sure it doesnt happen again. That is what learning is about. The second important point he made to me was that I could probably make lots of list and build as many dreamy castles about conquering the universe as I could but those lists didn’t matter as much as the things that I had managed to achieve outside of that list. Things which I hadn’t even counted on achieving.

A week ago, my estranged grandmother fractured her hip after slipping off the sofa, requiring immediate life endangering potential comatose state operation (and my mama was not able to explain why a hip operation had so many complications even though I think near-century age, high blood pressure and diabetes must have played some role.) Her accident has propelled our family into further debt of her already astronomical upkeep, but I feel that at least I can do my part. I am living entirely by my own means now, paying my own rent, still paying off school loans back home, insurances, taxes in two countries and hopefully doing my part for the family. It didn’t seem so much of a big deal then, neither was it apparent when I lived at home that Gas, Water, Electricity cost human beings money or that toilet paper didn’t grow out of cupboards. I may have been a grown adult but in actual fact, I was still a kid living off my parents who deserved a break from paying for 6 years of my tracing paper and balsa wood.

At times I seem to have taken steps back in the career zone but I am trying to see this step back as 3 steps up when I am ready to take the next step. I just have to remind myself that I have to be patient. The semi-invincible still need to brave the battlefields of tornados and well, darts, to achieve the extinction of desire and individual consciousness and that ultimate nirvana i.e. be whipped like a slave but still grit your teeth and continue pulling the plough but dream of freedom everyday till it comes. Which it will.

And well, there is London. Every weekend when I take my walks in the park, I am in awe of the beauty that exists in this world. I remember a letter I wrote to someone before I came to London. In it, I said I wanted to go to a place and lie down on grass that is not perennially wet. And I have actually done that, Ikea picnic mat non-withstanding.

Lastly there are little things about me. I recently rekindled my love affair with The Album Leaf after buying one of their albums a year ago when I heard one of their songs in the sickly sweet compilation of music from The OC. Its ok that I don’t like Damien Rice or don’t know popular song titles. W thinks ambient alternative indie folk/ rock is complicated. Sure,The Album Leaf, Couch, Mum, Mutemath, The Brian Jonestown Massacre and Portastatic don’t sound like band names but its my genre of music and its ok. Its ok to be complicated.

Essentially I know there are some things about myself that I can never change i.e. my nose still starts to drip when I take spicy food and I have bad (bad) (in all forms of the word bad) flatulence when I take excessive lactose based products but I am not about to jump onto the tracks just because of my atomic gas or that I failed my top 10 list.

Sometimes perspectives need to be negotiated and changed along the way, you give and take, you walk under glowing autumn shades and you weld your sword through the dark dungeon of monsters in the underground all on the same day. For now, I think I will trade the Title of Chocolate Cake Queen for the girl who likes peanut snickers bars.

Didn’t think I would ever wear one, but I got a half beanie cap from Covent Garden yesterday! And it wasn’t even on my list of essential ‘To Get’ items.


Lastly, I would like to announce that we successfully returned the antenna, but brought home a Christmas Tree instead. You think, maybe we could return that when we are done too?


On Player_’Prozac Vs Heroin’_By The Brian Jonestown Massacre

Untitled

We'll do it all
Everything
On our own

We don't need
Anything
Or anyone

If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?

I don't quite know
How to say
How I feel

Those three words
Are said too much
They're not enough

If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?

Forget what we're told
Before we get too old
Show me a garden that's bursting into life

Let's waste time
Chasing cars
Around our heads

I need your grace
To remind me
To find my own

If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?

Forget what we're told
Before we get too old
Show me a garden that's bursting into life

All that I am
All that I ever was
Is here in your perfect eyes, they're all I can see

I don't know where
Confused about how as well
Just know that these things will never change for us at all

If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?



Chasing Cars_Snow Patrol

Silly, Bonfires, Bento Boxes + Dragon’s Breath

The intermittent booming of fireworks sounded outside my bedroom window all night even as I crawled into bed at 1am last night.

There was a foggy mist of smoke and a faint scent of burn as I walked down the streets homewards after watching Guy Fawkes Day fireworks opposite Battersea Park. I decided to be a bit silly and wear my lazy oaf button. The skinny bear lazy oaf character was coloured in horizontal stripes and I was wearing a horizontal striped jumper for our night out of fireworks viewing.

Before the fireworks display, we had planned on going to gastro pub The Phoenix for dinner and drinks. The Phoenix is part of the group of gastro pubs owned by Rupert Clevely (ex-managing director of uber chic Veuve Cliquot). I have only been to one of his pubs before this, The Builder’s Arms which I liked because the English Pub deco is given a mod-twist. I think the new generation of British must like this too as the constant crowds attest to their popularity.

First stop, The Phoenix smelt like the top end of a fire place and was too crowded and noisy. Next stop, The Cooper’s Arms. I’ve been here before for a hurried meal of their award winning bangers and mash and I knew what to expect. I had bangers and mash again because they were out of steak and kidney pie. The bangers were a let down this time as they were not as crispy on the outside as they should be and the mash too luke warm for my palate, even though on the whole it still rates as an above average bangers and mash.



After dinner we walked towards Battersea Park and nested ourselves among photographers along the road facing the park and waited for the fireworks. The fireworks were nice, but not particularly spectacular. Still, it was very pleasant to just stare out at the dark sky and watch blooms of colours bursts before your eyes for a whole 25 minutes. At one point I realize I had let out a sigh. Its nice to be silly sometimes and its nice to do simple things. We ended the evening by finally going to a Clevely pub after all, The Builder’s Arms.

This week, work was very busy with datelines up till 9pm on Friday night. Hopefully the waters will be calmer for a few days till the next wave comes in. The Circle and District lines were also constantly down which entailed a frantic walk through the park to get to work one morning. Mid week, wild fairy child Flat mate LP packed my lunch for me. When I opened my pseudo bento lunch box of rice cakes, everyone had a good laugh.


The temperatures have finally dropped to single digits, the clocks have been turned back an hour and I do not seem to mind the cold as much as I mind the sun setting at 4.30pm.

This week, I also started wearing gloves. In my hurried futile effort to combat the cold, I bought a pair of wool autumn gloves that were not particularly fitting because I have small hands even for ‘S’ size. They fit everywhere up to the thumb but there is a bit left over on my other four fingers. I have not worn gloves since I was a kid and I forgot how it was till I tried tying my sneaker laces and locking the front door of the flat. My ability to gauge space and mobilize my hand movements have been effectively retarded by the use of gloves. On the tube on the first morning of my glove adventure, I spent 30 seconds trying to flip the page of my book. I could have taken off my gloves and turned the page then put on my gloves again, but I think the time taken would have equaled the process of flipping the page with my gloved hands.

The sudden cold has also allowed me mutant super natural ability to breathe long breaths of smoke from my mouth. While out with ex-house guest I did my Bruce Lee gung-fu stance and demonstrated my new found ability to let out a healthy gush of dragon breath. He was not particularly impressed and only rolled his eye balls at me. His super natural powers are obviously way inferior to mine if he can only manage the common eye ball roll. Spastic. Silly you.

On Player_’Set The Fire to the Third Bar’_ by Snow Patrol