Monday, January 23, 2006
1/23
Even though I got off to a really late start (didn’t get back to Cyberjaya from our weekend away until early afternoon), managed to complete another 10 pages of the bibliography this afternoon. By tomorrow afternoon it should be done, & I’ll move on to reading the printout of PDP for the last time before sending it off to the publisher. I’m sure there’ll be a few more little tasks to do after that but presumably nothing major. I need to spend less time looking at little letters on Microsoft Word, as my eyes are puffy and weary even after a weekend offline.
More props to Geof Huth, who read one of the appendices of the book (“Code Works”) over the weekend and sent over some helpful insights from Schenectady. Also, some correspondence back and forth with Sandy Baldwin, who—among his many talents is mastermind behind West Virginia U’s Center for Literary Computing—may very well pen a Forward to the thing. We’ll see…
For those of you who are following the saga, Aleatory is doing fine thanks to the pink liquid antibiotics, and we very much enjoyed our outings in Kuala Lumpur, which included attending an artist’s talk by Kok Siew Wai at R.A.P. (Rumah Air Panas) gallery in the Ayer Penas neighborhood. As mentioned before, one of my colleagues at MMU, Sau Bin, is one of the coordinators of the gallery, and coincidentally he recently met Siew Wei, who has just returned from several years living in upstate New York, and invited her to show her work and speak there. It wasn’t an easy place to find, far off the tourist maps, but we’re glad we made the effort. Siew Wei graduated from Alfred University (where Amy had a residency last year), and also from SUNY-Buffalo’s Media Studies department, where she was a student/acolyte of our friend Tony Conrad. So, beyond our shared interest(s) in experimental art in general, there were some finite personal links as well. For about 90 minutes, Siew Wei showed some footage of performances she had given and exhibits she had taken part in, and talked about the vibrant communal and collaborative spirit of the arts/artist networks upstate. Her motive, in part, I think, was to try and kick-start the same type of spirit here, where the scene seems to be at least a bit disorganized and there is not a lot of institutional support for fringe forms. Well, we enjoyed meeting her, and were sorry we couldn’t stay for the second talk, by Wing (Lim Kok Yoong), who had just returned from England, but the children were getting antsy & it was quite hot in the gallery, which was of the bare-bones/d.i.y. variety. We met a few of the locals, who were quite friendly and engaged, including a Butoh dancer, Lee Swee Keong, who invited us to a private performance he is giving later this week.
The other art high-point was our trip the next day to the Islamic Arts Museum, which is an incredible place, with a remarkable collection of art of all sorts (books, ceramics, weavings, jewelry, etc. Ever since my first visit to the museum in 2001, I’ve been very inspired by Islamic visual artists through the ages, the way they (literally) use many thin-lined frames in their work, and balance word and image, to mention just a couple of the aspects of the work that appeals to me. Serendipitously, the special exhibit on display was titled “Rhythm & Verses” (Irama & Puisi), which featured folios of poems from the 16th-19th centuries, some mind-blowing works for sure. I’ll have to write more about this visit, but not tonight…
Otherwise, I also checked out the “raw” music night at No Black Tie—a great jazz bar in KL—but was surprised that the music was actually not jazz at all but rather more like punk (which would have been much better if it wasn’t so run-of the-mill/retro). I’d seen an ad for the event on a website, which mentioned that a painter would be beside the stage making abstract paintings during the music, which led me to believe it would be more like an “outside” or improve jazz-jam, but instead a very loud and smoky atmosphere. Group names like “They will Kill Us All,” “Teenage Glory for the Wasted” should have been clues, perhaps, but the other groups had more ambiguous titles like “KL Post-Harmonic Quartet,” Akta Angkasa,” and “Rina Shukor ‘n’ Nasir Taff.” I hung out for awhile, sitting as far from the PA as I could, nursing a bottle of San Pellegrino, writing some observations. Siew Wei, who I’d mentioned the event to, had come with another fellow who was at R.A.P. & we commiserated about how the event didn’t match our expectations. But any night out in KL is cool, so who’s complaining!
Well, obviously I’m back online, tired eyeballs & all.
CF
Even though I got off to a really late start (didn’t get back to Cyberjaya from our weekend away until early afternoon), managed to complete another 10 pages of the bibliography this afternoon. By tomorrow afternoon it should be done, & I’ll move on to reading the printout of PDP for the last time before sending it off to the publisher. I’m sure there’ll be a few more little tasks to do after that but presumably nothing major. I need to spend less time looking at little letters on Microsoft Word, as my eyes are puffy and weary even after a weekend offline.
More props to Geof Huth, who read one of the appendices of the book (“Code Works”) over the weekend and sent over some helpful insights from Schenectady. Also, some correspondence back and forth with Sandy Baldwin, who—among his many talents is mastermind behind West Virginia U’s Center for Literary Computing—may very well pen a Forward to the thing. We’ll see…
For those of you who are following the saga, Aleatory is doing fine thanks to the pink liquid antibiotics, and we very much enjoyed our outings in Kuala Lumpur, which included attending an artist’s talk by Kok Siew Wai at R.A.P. (Rumah Air Panas) gallery in the Ayer Penas neighborhood. As mentioned before, one of my colleagues at MMU, Sau Bin, is one of the coordinators of the gallery, and coincidentally he recently met Siew Wei, who has just returned from several years living in upstate New York, and invited her to show her work and speak there. It wasn’t an easy place to find, far off the tourist maps, but we’re glad we made the effort. Siew Wei graduated from Alfred University (where Amy had a residency last year), and also from SUNY-Buffalo’s Media Studies department, where she was a student/acolyte of our friend Tony Conrad. So, beyond our shared interest(s) in experimental art in general, there were some finite personal links as well. For about 90 minutes, Siew Wei showed some footage of performances she had given and exhibits she had taken part in, and talked about the vibrant communal and collaborative spirit of the arts/artist networks upstate. Her motive, in part, I think, was to try and kick-start the same type of spirit here, where the scene seems to be at least a bit disorganized and there is not a lot of institutional support for fringe forms. Well, we enjoyed meeting her, and were sorry we couldn’t stay for the second talk, by Wing (Lim Kok Yoong), who had just returned from England, but the children were getting antsy & it was quite hot in the gallery, which was of the bare-bones/d.i.y. variety. We met a few of the locals, who were quite friendly and engaged, including a Butoh dancer, Lee Swee Keong, who invited us to a private performance he is giving later this week.
The other art high-point was our trip the next day to the Islamic Arts Museum, which is an incredible place, with a remarkable collection of art of all sorts (books, ceramics, weavings, jewelry, etc. Ever since my first visit to the museum in 2001, I’ve been very inspired by Islamic visual artists through the ages, the way they (literally) use many thin-lined frames in their work, and balance word and image, to mention just a couple of the aspects of the work that appeals to me. Serendipitously, the special exhibit on display was titled “Rhythm & Verses” (Irama & Puisi), which featured folios of poems from the 16th-19th centuries, some mind-blowing works for sure. I’ll have to write more about this visit, but not tonight…
Otherwise, I also checked out the “raw” music night at No Black Tie—a great jazz bar in KL—but was surprised that the music was actually not jazz at all but rather more like punk (which would have been much better if it wasn’t so run-of the-mill/retro). I’d seen an ad for the event on a website, which mentioned that a painter would be beside the stage making abstract paintings during the music, which led me to believe it would be more like an “outside” or improve jazz-jam, but instead a very loud and smoky atmosphere. Group names like “They will Kill Us All,” “Teenage Glory for the Wasted” should have been clues, perhaps, but the other groups had more ambiguous titles like “KL Post-Harmonic Quartet,” Akta Angkasa,” and “Rina Shukor ‘n’ Nasir Taff.” I hung out for awhile, sitting as far from the PA as I could, nursing a bottle of San Pellegrino, writing some observations. Siew Wei, who I’d mentioned the event to, had come with another fellow who was at R.A.P. & we commiserated about how the event didn’t match our expectations. But any night out in KL is cool, so who’s complaining!
Well, obviously I’m back online, tired eyeballs & all.
CF
# posted by chris funkhouser @ 6:45 AM 
