About the Arts

Tradition, tradition

>> Friday, November 20, 2009

Traditionalists are sometimes the most hypocritical of people. We Christians preach a gospel of grace and we pride ourselves of being free from regulation. "Look at them", we say "They pray five times a day and put so much emphasis on outward appearance and veiling". But how different are we from them? Whether to veil or not to veil. Whether women are allowed to speak during service. Whether drums are allowed during singing. Hemlines low enough so as not to 'stumble' our brothers in Christ. These very issues that seem so petty have torn churches apart. Since when has religion been about form and not substance? Ask ourselves first whether we have been ministering to the poor and neglected, whether we have been seeing to the needs of the abused and jaded amongst us. Christ always told us to extract spirit and principles from the law instead of taking law for law's sake. For example, when his disciples were picking grain on the Sabbath and the Pharisees scolded them, Christ said that the Sabbath was for man and not the man for Sabbath.

The Bible says 'man looks at outward appearance, but God looks at the heart'. But how many times have we looked at outward appearance? How many times have you heard an aunty say "This boy is smart, but it's a shame he doesn't study hard", or "This girl is so hardworking, what does she see in that boy", or "that boy only knows how to waste his parents' money"? Gossip goes on and on about other families. That woman is too overbearing, that man is lazy, bla bla bla bla bla. Must we look down on people because they migrate or have decided to attend another church? When will we have a kingdom mentality about things? We all still worship the same God! How many personal conversations have we had with the subjects of our speculation? How can we sound so authoritative about people we hardly know?

I have learnt that man is more than the sum of his abilities. I would know that because I've spent most of my life being taught to be defined by my abilities. "Wah, Crissy can bake brownies, can play the piano, can cook and clean, can draw and speak well, she can do this and do that. Crissy learned to read at age 2 and a half and will become a successful rich architect!" Big fat freaking deal. I was never happy pursuing all those things anyway. If anything, the more I learnt the more depressed I got. The empty praise never satisfied.

The joy, I finally realized, comes from the relationships that I share with others. It comes when I teach my students how to sing a Michael Jackson song and we're happily plinking and plonking at the piano. It comes when they tell me about their hopes and their little sibling squabbles. It comes from long conversations at the mamak. When will we stop talking about each other and instead talk to each other? If you believe the speech of others, I can be either portrayed as a slanderous, gossipy, touchy emo bitch or a self-sufficient do-gooder hardworking saint. What will you believe?

If only people would just look up for a moment. Look up from the muddy mess of legislation and look at the heart.

“I wept recognizing that no one was perfect, and that if we expected to be loved for all our imperfections, why are we so reluctant to accept and forgive the imperfections of others?”

Yasmin Ahmad

Monthly Info

>> Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Sorry guys, I will have to alienate you for a bit because this is strictly feminine information.

Good things are always meant to be shared eh?

Monthlyinfo.com is a great website that allows you girls to keep tabs on your menstrual cycle, because we all know we're too lazy to count the days with pen and paper. The site predicts your next period and saves you the hassle of guessing. It also tells you all the information you need, from your ovulation period to the standard deviation of your cycles. And to top it all off, it comes packaged in a pretty colour scheme of pale pink and olive green.

So go make your lives easier and start an account at Monthlyinfo.com.

Howling at the New Moon

>> Sunday, November 8, 2009

If you know me, you would know that I vehemently hate the Twilight series. Okay, to give some credit to Stephanie Meyer, the plotlines are quite interesting. But... those interesting plotlines are squandered by clumsy writing, paper thin character development and terrible vocabulary.

A writer's job is to help the reader become immersed in the world that is unfolding in the pages, and Ms Meyer does a fantabulous job at distracting us with phrases like "quarter-sphere concave side down" to explain just a simple set of contact lenses. No wonder her books are so long. Brevity baby! Whatever happened to editing?

Anyway, Kristen Stewart's horrible wigs aside, there is one redeeming grace about the movies. And that is Taylor Lautner!

Who is especially adorable when he's kissing Taylor Swift. Could there be anything more adorable than Taylor squared? And is it just me or are those shorts really short?

Oh well. I have just conned you into reading another blog post that's really about me winning movie tickets. I'm so evil I should be locked in a room, forced to read the entire Twilight series consecutively which would scar my intellect permanently.

恶梦

>> Saturday, November 7, 2009

There was dirt everywhere. My mother was covering a grave in the garden, filled to the brim with the broken bones of corpses. My father was packing as my sister stuffed a pillow with the murder weapons.

"Go pack" said my mother. It was strange how in the midst of such gruesome work, she still managed to sound so.. maternal. I packed my brown messenger bag with a basic set of clothing and my iPod. I went downstairs. "I don't think your iPod will be necessary dear" said my mother. How could she be so calm as we were fleeing a murder scene?

Gadiy's familiar black-hooded car came round the bend of the road and I rushed out of the house even as my family was in cacaphony. My mother was speaking to a suspicious neighbour, trying to suppress the inevitable police report.

Gadiy hit the accelerator and headed for the mall. "You're not involved in the killing" he said "everything should be alright". After walking around the mall for awhile, we headed back out and drove down a ramp. I found myself suddenly thrown out the car and dangling off the steep ramp with only my grip on the railing keeping me from plummeting to the road of speeding cars below. Gadiy helped me up and soon we were on our way. We drove to Sarah Ong's house at the edge of USJ 3 to get my luggage. As we went down the main road separating USJ3 and USJ4, we found that police cars were all over the house. Somehow Sarah Ong's house had become the scene of the crime instead. The car broke down a little way past the junction and we had to step out of the car. A large male officer in shades, t-shirt, jeans and a big gun stopped us and told us that they were looking for suspects. Another female officer that looked like a school teacher asked us where we were going. I told them that we were students from Taylors and we were just trying to get back to Subang.

Somehow they bought our explanation and let us go, so we continued walking to Subang. On the way, we met my grandmother, who was hawking food by the side of the road. I asked her what she was doing, and she said that she was working here. She was also working at Machines in Sunway Pyramid. "But don't you live in Ipoh?" I asked. She said yes, but it was such a long journey back that she slept on the floor of Machines at night instead of travelling back to Ipoh to sleep. She said that the hours were long and her legs got really tired but she was getting used to it. I asked my grandmother if she had no more money, and my grandmother said that she did have money but it was always good to make some more. I spoke to my mother and asked her if my grandmother could stay with us, but my mother said that Po Po was my uncle's responsibility and she really couldn't afford to take up any more.

Gadiy and I took the train to Jalan Sultan Ismail where my prototype housing project was built. I showed the security guard my identity and I told him I was the architect for this project. So he told me that the unit closest to the lobby was not occupied and that I could stay there. So Gadiy and I stayed there for the night. The next morning Gadiy had to go to work and it was so jammed, so he took the monorail instead of driving. I was the architect, so I knew the layout of the project very well.

And then I woke up.

That was my super freaky dream last night where my family committed murder, my grandmother worked in Machines and I lived in my fictional prototype housing project which I am working on right now. Oh gosh my project is driving me crazy and is messing with my subconscious. Or as Sigmund Freud would say, my id and ego that are suppressed by my superego during everyday life have come to the surface in the symbolic form of dreams.

Right Kee Ken?

Spring Awakening

>> Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Musical theatre is awesome lah! I'm a sucker for anything with dance and song. Like Hairspray! I regret that I can't sing or play anything decently :(

I guess a lot of people will say that I should be thankful for the talents that I do have. I'm really talented in doodling when I'm bored, giving ice-queen stares that make you shrivel and die, and uh, eating spicy food.

But you always want what you can't have. Why God, why?!!!

Oh well, I shall be a happy spectator. Hehe.

I just spent the past week at Pavillion promoting Macs and iPods for Mac + iPod Discovery Week. It encompassed the full range of human emotion from envy (from those rich kids buying macbooks), to fatigue, to joy, to discouragement (from talking to calculative rich uncles that enjoy putting salespeople down).

Maybe I'll blog more thoroughly about it later, but for now I wanna share with you one of the ads that were playing on loop during the event. The song is 'New Soul' by Yael Naim and it was so infectious that we were singing 'lalalalalalalalalalalalalala' for long after our work hours had ended. The next laptop I buy after this one konks out will definitely be a MacBook Pro 13 inch!

show & tell

>> Tuesday, October 6, 2009

This is a window of a shophouse near Heritage Row. We were walking around KL as part of our FINAL YEAR, FINAL SEM studies.

This is Gadiy at the steamboat/surprise party that Ee May hosted.

This is Ee May and her father.

This is a preliminary model of our current project; prototype housing.

This is a typical Sunday lunch.

This is the 'kids' table at mooncake festival dinner. The adults are on the porch. And that's my cute round grandmother.

This is our super candle. We arranged the candles in a row and lit the left end, allowing the flame to pass from on candle to another until it reached this melting, flaming mess.