The night starts here

today the plan was to start on an essay, at least 50 words of it which is 1/30th of the chunk, but the constellations were failing me. ended up indulging on the internet which hardly disappoints, best find of the day being ABC3D, a typography bomb of a book by a certain genuis of the name Marion Bataille:

last evening, J, KL, aka the alphabets, and i shuffled to the museum for a talk by Malaysian photographer K. Azril Ismail — Pudu Jail’s Graffiti: Aesthetics Beyond the Walls of the Prison Cells. there was much to take home from his research process since that was the bulk of his presentation — he paid respect to history and philosophy, and used web 2.0 methods such as “tag clouds” to define and refine his pictures. in that, being a photographer was a convergence of all his other roles as archaeologist, technologist, academic and artist.

this was my favourite, by way of berandaseni

a particular theme of the Pudu Jail graffiti that was especially poignant was that of memories (others included: love, death, faith, time). it gave me the idea of how prisons disallow the making of new memories, since one is trapped in a cage of time, having no freedom to create new experiences to supercede old ones. it’s aching thinking of how a harsh building can hold so many people that are really fragile broken recorders, replaying their old memories so vividly each day again and again, just to keep themselves alive mentally. these imaginations are their only escape from the four walls and yet they suspend them in a mind ritual. i once fell in love with how Orhan Pamuk wrote about Nabokov’s work: “… (he) brings this simple, self-evident idea into being with a fine lyricism, showing how the past and the present can coexist in a single sentence.” as the prison visuals played out, i thought them exactly that — the past and present, all coexisting in a single cell, albeit a very flawed present.

on a brighter note, there was news from J that Stars are set to perform in Singapore next year, “take me to the riot!” he said. turns! out! true! facebook first had the scoop and us being cavemen, were probably the last to know. never too late though and i would want no other way to start 2009! i had such a great time dancing to Death Cab (J and RJ were pillars holding the roof of the Esplanade), and Stars shouldn’t be any less awesome.

take me take me to the riot!