Tiu

Oh, it makes me wonder how boys can be so dense. No. Like, seriously. So dense it’s funny. So funny, I’ve got ‘Young Hearts Run Free’ stuck in my head and I’m singing it with a vengeance.

On the weekends it’s ritual that boyfriend and I spend time together since we don’t encourage ourselves to meet up during the week. Friday night, we were going to do a movie and dinner but I was working all day and still recovering from a hangover so we cancelled the movie and instead went for a late dinner. After that, I wanted to do something fun. Ferris, wheel, stargazing, check out a band, something that didn’t involve alcohol. I insisted, in fact, but he was too pissy and stressed from work and his life sucks so much so we headed back to his place to have an early night since I’m meeting his dad’s family today. I lost a good few hours of sleep from all then tension and now he’s out having breakfast with a ‘complicated friend’ because he was gonna go out with her last night but had to cancel instead because my schedule freed up. I had no idea about any of this. Cibaitontoloukucingmakengkau.

So recap, boyfriend was lame on Friday night and is having breakfast with another girl before dragging my ass to meet his family for the first time. He’s all like, kissing me and being cuddly saying, “baby, the good news is you can sleep in now!” Sleep in? SLEEP IN?? Who the hell is sleeping in at a time like this?? I’m blogging about how dogok he’s being from his laptop. Geram sial!! He should be taking this other chick to meet the family, THEN I’ll sleep in. No worries for me! Damn fool got his priorities all fucked up. I look like crap, I’m cranky from sleep deprivation, it’s gonna be an awesome first impression.

But I always get mine. Before we got back to his place last night I stopped by a convenience store and got myself a care package to cheer myself up: a jelly cup, temporary tattoos and a bubble toy. In exchange for a pathetic, un-fun night, I convinced Damien to let me tattoo him.

He now has Chinese characters on his back that say ‘Mei Ing Gui’ or ‘beautiful English (white) ghost’.

Take that, white boy. Take it.

Cardboard Afternoon

All ready and set for
your government-approved lifestyle?
Child released into the wild,
there’s danger on!
Beware of the tigers
who will shred you with their ivory claws,
and lick your gashes
as they feed on your syrup.

When it’s all over, stop crying.
Look to the skies for fire -
you’ll make it home, to one -
built of brick, not straw.
Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin
shall they break you in!
Brace yourself
against the winds,
stand yourself, a sturdy rock.

Don’t trample on the grass.
Walk with it.
Now you’re free from what
you were birthed to be
and we can make it out of here alive.

- Nadira Ilana, 2004

Relevant much.

Teleportation Devices for Great Greed

Myself, Pasquale Heredia, Tarah Carey, Sascha Heredia and Dave

Okay, I lied. By, “I lied”, I mean that I haven’t found a place yet and I’m blogging but first film-related award calls for it!

Last Friday was the Queensland New Filmmakers Awards (QNFA) Night 2009 and we took home the Radio School David Copping Memorial Production Design Award! What a mouthful. The award is for Pasquale Heredia’s period short film, ‘The Last Breath’. I wasn’t totally sure that we’d get the award but I knew that we stood a grand chance considering it was a short film with a limited budget set in 1940-something England during wartime, in a sanitarium. That and the team nearly died from exhaustion because we had to prolong the shoot after the studio caught fire on the first night of shooting.

In turn for appearing at QNFA, I’ve missed out on the Malaysian Film Festival held in Kota Kinabalu. As if I didn’t have eat myself inside out about getting torn in between, it seems I got called by one of the organisers of the Malaysian Film Festival to be a guest. URGH. But got to give acceptance speech on stage in Australia. URGH. Mati aku. It’s okay. Tahan. God is great. Blame the scientists for not coming up with a successful teleportation device yet. Damn you AirAsia and JetStar, your cheap airfares are no match for the sands of time, you do not work miracles after all! Concede! CONCEDE!!!

Limbo is a dry cunt

Until I stop sleeping on someone’s couch and find a place of my own, I’m not blogging. I’m so frustrated, it’s put me into creative constipation.

So till I get my own space, I’m going to be quiet lest I say more stupid things. *hrmphh*

Yes, I’m back in Brisbane… how was KK? Like that lorr:

My grandfather, the one eyed photographer

Lolo giving me the stinkeye

Lolo (grandfather) used to always bring a camera with him whenever we went out for family dinners. Sometimes it would get on lola’s (grandmother’s) nerves and she’d scold him for stopping us for a photo. The truth was it became that it wasn’t lolo if he didn’t have an automatic film camera on him and I’m glad he never picked up on digital photography. He never showed us his photographs once they were developed and we never persisted to see them although we knew he had them developed regularly. To think that in the world of digital consumer cameras, people would round themselves on playback mode after the first shot and never develop any pictures.

About 12 or 13 years ago, lolo lost vision in his left eye to a botched operation and continued to take photos up till recently when old age finally started to claim him. He doesn’t carry his camera around anymore and it really isn’t quite the same. The smirk on my face in the photo above just shows how clever I thought I was then. I used to credit myself for picking up writing and photography myself when little did I know how much of what I thought stemmed from my initiations were actually passed down to me. I only discovered recently that lola has been keeping a diary for years when I started when I was 7 myself. It only occurs to me now that lolo and I too have something in common. After all those years, it’s only this year that I’ve ever seen any of the photographs lolo has taken.

After studying film, learning to use a DSLR and analysing the shit out of photographs… if anything has changed the way I look at photography, it has been New York and lolo’s photos. It was great that a simple automatic film camera managed to capture so many invaluable moments when now, thousands and thousands of bucks are spent by amateur photographers to capture perfect images which have been photographed a million times. It occurred to me then, my grandfather with one eye took photos with an unobtrusive camera and got every thing, every moment that the rest of my family let slip through their hands. He never aimed to be a photographer, he just took pictures and he has so many good ones. Never mind the aperture or metering, shutter speed or focus, the man who never said much during visits said it all with his camera, with his photography which spoke, “we were here” and that’s a great way to make a photo.

My grandfather's stepmother

For now with the creative phase I’m at, I would want my pictures to say, “you didn’t see what I saw.” Lolo’s photo album is only a small fraction of his life. It’s hard that after a while, some old people stop talking about their life stories and I’m terrible at getting them out of him. It frazzles me. He’s a quiet man in his late 80s now and it’s awful to miss someone who is still around. Maybe one day I’ll figure him out or maybe I won’t but I’ve surrendered. At least there are is photos.

I’ve been playing around with a friend’s dad’s Nikon F and I’m happy with the results so far. These pictures are for my lolo, who doesn’t even try:

Lolo

Trollers

The Birch and the Sky

<3

Revenge of the claw

Today is drama day because my bed’s too hard to sleep in. I want to pick fights and throw things at people with a big-assed smile on my face. You would think you didn’t know me at all. Rarrarrarrrghh!!

God, idols, death, immortality and tampons.

Beware the strings on the hand of God puppeteered by men for we are His machines.

If it were true that our relationship with our parents reflects upon our relationship with God, it makes me think that perhaps people who have never before been religious, find religion later in their lives because they miss their parents. How else does someone aged find someone strong and perfect of higher authority to discipline them and reprimand them for their sins? Sometimes I think it’s the easiest ways to come to terms with one’s guilt… the things people seek to find inner peace. I wonder how I can feel so certain about my spiritual beliefs. It’s been 11 years since I understood how I felt about religiosity and I still feel the same way now. Maybe one day I’m going to prove myself wrong too. I wonder what kind of person I would be by then.

Lately I’ve been on a creative speel of sorts. My mind is a whirlwind of thoughts of my next project, my best friend Melina’s dad just lent me his old Nikon F from 1959 and I’m having a blast. I almost never want to go back to digital again. I can’t help it, it sounds so pretty and it feels less fussy than a DSLR for the kind of photography that I like. I almost regret that I have to go back to Australia next week. I’m having fun being back in my hometown. I feel like I’m learning a lot and if I’ve felt like writing again because of Ani DiFranco:

“I’m gonna pull out my tampon and start splashing around” – Swandive

The next best thing to inspiring written word has to be offensive written word. I love it.

Michael Jackson’s memorial is now over. I wonder how much longer people are going to continue to talk about his death. I wouldn’t want to know what it was like when Elvis died either. I’ve been paying attention to people’s reactions and to be frank, as much as I respect everyone’s grieving process, some people are just complete morons. I hated having Twitter because most people never have anything interesting to say. There’s this coin where you’re supposed to respect everyone’s points of view but really, some people are really dumb. Having a Twitter account was just setting myself up to see into the minds of a lot of dumb people. As if Facebook wasn’t bad enough. At times like these, everyone has their respective methods of mourning but no matter who, I just don’t think people should forget the courtesy of there being a period of time where you just don’t say too many negative things about the person who has just passed. In mourning I believe that half of the grief is a commemoration of universal life and the other half is for the one lost. There is no question that respect is due for our fates are all the same.

I’m starting to collect all these landmarks in my life like 9/11 or the death of Benazir Bhutto and it’s things like these that make me feel older rather than my birthday. I do wonder what it is that makes a death different when the person is attached to so many immortal works. I have to admit, as an ambitious person, it does make me want to try harder just for the sake of finding out.

When the king died

Michael Jackson died recently. Now whenever someone dies I think of that scene from Ex-Drummer when Dries was asked where he was when the king died. We all remember where we were when we hear news of death because it is then that we remember that we are alive.

When Michael Jackson died, I was asleep. Damien texted me, “wtf Michael Jackson died” to which I responded “woaaahh moment”. He replied “I know. Remember where you are and the boy you like ” and I was like, “zzzzz”. I fell back asleep and dreamt of him. When it became light, mum knocked on my door and I yelled “yaaa I know ma, Michael Jackson’s dead.” She freaked out because I have this uncanny ability to know about nearly every current event occurring round the world just as she is about to mention. Sometimes I think it’s because I am a head taller that I can see what’s happening before she can. Sort of like a giraffe, for I have little other explanation to this phenomenon. In this case, my mum would be a zebra. To testify to my increasing height, I hadn’t seen my friend’s mother since high school and she said she couldn’t recognise me. It wasn’t that my hair was shorter, it was that I had grown taller. I don’t understand how that would change the way she identified me as I shook her hand but it was cute and there you go.

That day, mum stayed in bed all day watching CNN, crying and I couldn’t see anything wrong with it. She had reason to be sad. Myself, I chose not to try and understand why I my heart felt heavy for no physical reason at all. The more I did, the sadder I knew I would be. I didn’t know how two days on there was still ‘news’ about a man who could no longer do anything ‘new’. They say the coroners took his brain to learn more about his mind but if they wanted to find out more about how to be a good Michael Jackson, they should have extracted his heart too and kept his soul in a jar too. I’ve been in denial of being sad about it myself because there really isn’t anyone quite like him and there will never be again. They say ‘poor Michael’ as though it was a pity he died more than it was any imminent phenomenon to the King of Pop. I’ve liked his music but never religiously but my admiration comes from how there are some things you just know are good without argument and that’s saying something. The sad thing is at least John Lennon had Yoko Ono when he was shot. Michael Jackson was so talented that people stopped being entertained by him because even he couldn’t top himself. It was like “yeah, Michael’s just writing another international hit song and dancing like a legend, whatever.” Maybe it’s why he did all that crazy shit. It’s not like his music or dancing ever worsened even with age. It’s not like he always sounded the same or needed to change, he was great the way he was as a performer and a philanthropist. That’s what I took from his death anyway. Whether he was a pedophile is invalid because I never knew him personally.

This year has been the year of weddings and funerals, ironically. At least four people I know got married this year and two have passed away. There was also Natasha Richardson, David Carradine, Ed McMahon; John Travolta and Kirk Douglas respectively lost sons and Farrah Fawcett lost her battle with cancer. Soon, so will Patrick Swayze for he’s already saying goodbye to his family. In addition, 2009 will also be the year of swine flu (as Addamski put it, the past tense of a flying pig, now don’t you think we’ve seen everything?). Someone at Urbanscapes, held in KL over last weekend, contracted swine flu from a trip to Indonesia which I find strange if Indonesia only has two reported cases as cited on the WHO website. As to yet, out of the 55,000ish reported cases, there have been 238 deaths. It’s silly but it’s taken me this long to look it up because ’swine flu’ just sounds absurd after the ‘avian flu’ and H1N1 sounds like R2D2. Imagine how screwed we would be if we named AIDS ‘chimpanzee flu’. Try taking that seriously.

When Dries was asked where he was when the king died, I thought of all the first things that people do after they learn of a person’s death. The day that Michael died Google search engines crashed from too many people searching his name because no one believed that the king had died. As far as the world was concerned they could have watched him sing songs on Youtube all day and never have known he ever went anywhere. It wasn’t that Michael Jackson died that moved the world, it’s that they simply knew he died. When the king died, two people who loved me thought to tell me before telling anyone else. When Michael Jackson died, I was alive and asleep in bed.

The Last Breath Receives Nomination for QNFA

I don’t have any pictures because they’re in my hard drive in Australia but here’s the good news anyway! The Last Breath, a QUT graduation short film directed by Pasquale Heredia just got nominated for QNFA for best production design. QNFA is the Queensland New Filmmakers Award organised by the Pacific Film and Television Commission. The short film was set in a sanitarium in 1940s, wartime England. I was production designer for this short but I can’t in any way receive full credit for this feat so Pasquale, his brother Sascha Heredia and wardrobe designer, Marianna Tigani along with me, are up for nomination. Sherlyn Hii, assistant production designer, also did a stupendous job which deserves mention. The funny thing is I’m competing in the same category as the woman who was the production designer for my short film, ‘Dream Cradle’ and she was brilliant. The award ceremony will be in August.

So yeah, my first award nomination for a role in a film. How exciting. ]=)

The Happiest Wedding in Melaka

The Happiest Wedding in Malacca from starranise on Vimeo.

My Uncle Fuad got married last month to the darling Farrah. My family is from Sabah and the ceremony was held in Farrah’s hometown in Malacca. When I got to the house that day, I was still recovering from surgery (bet you’re so sick of hearing about these gums) and I was running around a house I didn’t know and battling between other videographers and photographers to get shots of people I didn’t know. To add to that, my mic wasn’t on because my touch screen isn’t working so I had to shoot without audio. Fortunately my uncle is a visual artist and asked for something experimental anyway so I just whipped up this video and put it to a couple of great songs and this was what was played later at the wedding reception in Sabah.