Mister Fantastic: "Mine's extendable!"
Invisible Woman: "Mine's invisible!"
The Thing: "Mine's as hard as a rock!"
Human Torch: "Mine's in flames!"
To mark my 26th birthday yesterday, an exterminator informed me that my TV room has been invaded by termites.
Thank you God.
17/6/2005
For some time now, people have been linking to my Banksy pictures without my permission (this and this and this for example) as their avatars, blog posts and whatnot. While it's great that people out there like the pics, I wish that they'd actually mention my website as well. The extra publicity would've been nice.
Having said that, I can't really blame them for not doing so. My life's pretty much descended into nothingness since I came back to KL. There's hardly anything interesting to blog about, and you don't get to bump into DJ Shadow on Jalan Alor or anything like that.
While not the happiest of times, my years in London is certainly a whole lot more fulfilling than any other period in my life so far. I think it was a combination of meeting the right people at the right time at the right place. While I could always travel to London for a vacation, I think it's quite simply impossible to relive those moments again. For all I know, I could've actually found a job there but end up feeling just as miserable as I do in KL right now. In a way, it was probably a blessing in disguise that I left London with a (relatively) good memory of the place.
When I first started my website I envisioned it to be a place where I could share my pictures of street art and music (that was and still is the idea behind my 'Stuff' section); blogging was never part of the plan. Then it seemed like a good idea to jump on the bandwagon, so I did, and it was interesting for a while. Here we are now in June 2005 and the only updates you get are me moping about life. Mope mope mope.
Which brings us back to the Banksy pictures. The point I'm trying to get across is that I've always envisioned shtikman.com to be a music/street art/photography website. But with the way things are going, it seems that my Banksy mini-site would be all that people will continue to visit my website for.
I've always thought about reviving my site by promoting Malaysian graffiti artists, but I find a lot of local street art, while technically sound, lacks originality, soul and conviction, particularly these pseudo-political ones that I've seen. I should take some pics and post them up; they really get on my nerves. One example is a Malaysian take on the classic Obey Giant, albeit with Dr Mahathir in place of Andre the Giant and 'Obey' replaced with 'Patuh', which is simply the Malay translation. I can't help but think that whoever the artist is, he or she has probably got their priorities in this order – 1)it looks cool, 2)it makes me cool and 3)it's breaking the law = it's vaguely political = it makes me a revolutionary. It's like, "Let's paint something on the wall! Yeah, it's cool, it's breaking the law! Oh, oh, you know what, say something political too! Aww rad, how militant is that?!"
That said, there're definitely a couple of pieces that I've seen that are quite nice (I never saw this one photographed by Michelle). There is this strange one that I drive past every day from work. Will bring a camera with me one of these days, but I would need to make a crazy emergency stop right beside the busy highway.
Has anyone seen that new Shakira video? What the f**k's she doing?! She looks like she's made of jello. Really hot jello.
When was the last time you listened to Endtroducing? Yeah, me too. That's why I'm putting it on right now.
That said, I haven't listened to Loveless, Mezzanine, Enter The 36 Chambers, The Bends, Dummy ...
6/6/2005
It's tough when you don't have anyone immediately around you to talk to. There are so many things that I need to get off my chest but it's hard to find someone who has an open-enough mind to not laugh off my opinions and thoughts, like, "Man, you don't know how lucky you are," or, "You're just talking rubbish."
I don't know how long I can stay sane before imploding from all the dinners with bankers, explaining to people what my masters degree was all about (read!), persuasions to play golf, lunches with wee politicians and meetings conducted in every Chinese dialect except the one I speak. And it's worse when people sneak in a phrase or two in English or Cantonese to try and include me in the conversation. Deeply embarrassing and patronising, however well their intentions may be.
