so you may or may not have figured by now that i’m asian by heritage. which by the way, is also a more tactful way of asking someone where their face comes from. But anyway, when I read a post with the relaxing title of sunday morning conversation , I had an ‘aha!’ moment.

that kind of conversation is what i dread, not my ideal sunday morning conversation at all. maybe if i had been encouraged more, i would have flung myself head first into fine arts like i dreamed years ago. but the truth is we can’t do that kind of thing easily.

as illustrated in the comments section from the same post: “that’s why all us second gen peeps are in such a pickle. being exposed to the western world where creativity is encouraged and we have free choice about what we want to do in life, and being restrained by our asian parentals, whom have ‘brought us here for a reason and want us to have the opportunities they never had’. booo.”

god. story of my life.

well, the only great creative asian australian people i can think of right now who have a nice profile are luke nguyen and poh ling yeow, who both happen to be in their cooking guises on the telly. but they are pretty damn impressive people, and have real personable personalities. i don’t quite know how to explain, but their enthusiasm is wonderful.

as opposed to mine sometimes. some days i feel like i’m being pulled between my day job and the other things that i want to do that i want to collapse in a heap. the other week i helped organise a library seminar for seventy people, and then ran a meeting of letter writing club, held a zine making workshop for twenty kids, had band practice and supported gersey the night after they supported pavement.

yes it’s ideally what i want to do, but sometimes i wish there were more hours so that i could do a little typewriting and make collages in some sort of peace and quiet.

here’s a pre v day special photo for you. every time i’ve been back in ipoh, the shop window is still mashed full of soft toys. never changes. the pink bears up top look the most uncomfortable of all.

current list of preoccupations:

i only just discovered important things with demetri martin, although it is now into its second season. the show hits that indie kid note pretty well, with its awkward jokes, segue ways and songs, and if you’re demetri, even at thirty-six (!!!) that never gets old…

looking at elle magazine’s lit life blog. sorta book eye candy (including readers) and a tiny bit of spit and polish. a little bit smarter than the usual “hey, read this chick lit!” that turns up in women’s magazines, but not trying to be too smart either.

the 20×200 artwork collection – i recently ordered the william wegman limited editions and another of a detroit “feral house” as taken by james griffioen. i don’t have a lot of wallspace, but i love art, so what the heck. i’ve even had a dream where visited houses which had lines of framed artworks sitting on the floor, resting against their walls. if that’s not preoccupied…

i had my first sip of assam tea at a teahouse by the river. it could have been the huge sugarcube dropped into it, but assam is a whole load of other flavour to my earl grey tired taste buds. i was hoping twinings carried it in their range of teas for easy supermarket availability, but i may have to go to the specialty tea store in london court for it. how do i describe it? somewhat sweet and malty, best drunk with milk. the way i like it.

i started making videos with my digital harinezumi camera again. is there such thing as lo-fi digital charm? i have a lot of things i’ve shot on that camera, bits from malaysia, walks in the park, but never tried to edit them together. now’s a good time as any, right?

playing this cheer chen song over and over, which i realise has lyrics along the lines of this. i’m not really the persona who likes the soft toys pictured above, and hence descends into the soppy, but sometimes she really does write sad songs.

tomorrow is both valentine’s day and chinese new year, the strangest combination. good or bad, i’m looking forward to eating CHINESE NEW YEAR GOODIES. the cupboard is full of them, still sealed, only to be opened on the correct date…

i’ve been reading a bit of the Big Long Open Gash aka blog of model and writer sophie ward lately. one of her recent entries features a scan of an article on her from a magazine for prospective students, in which it gently puts the university experience in a warm glow, calling an arts degree an “old fashioned ‘classical’ approach”. “she wasn’t focussed on a career, but preferred to soak up knowledge and broadened her horizons.” having taken a similar approach at the same university she attended, how pleasant it sounds all those years after, but at the time it was mostly littered with my stubborn angst at wanting to learn everything and yet please everyone at the same time. namely, what job title are you going to have at the end? the very model of a liberal arts education. boom boom!

speaking of no brainers, i’ve had a small unsatisfying run of film watching lately. avatar was passable; perhaps if i had been viewing it with silly 3d glasses on i might have more superlatives to describe it. we viewed the normal version in a lovely art deco theatre, that also needs to replace the springs in its seats because boy did i start squirming three quarters of the way through. barely watchable, however, was terminator salvation. my father the action movie man, whom i credit with my teenage preference for bone crunching films, had already given it the thumbs down. and have you noticed already that both films star sam worthington?

i have a theory that acting is the only profession that can make him shut up and stand still, hence being perfectly suited. being motionless in a scene still requires a lot of concentration and processing, hence i’m a bit disappointed (maybe) when he turns up at tv shows talking like this.

part of a recreation of shophouses in the chinatown museum in singapore. some of the people interviewed as part of their collection of oral histories came from the same area of china as my grandfather, and even had a similar accent due to speaking the same dialect! with tiny rooms, housing sometimes five people, shophouses weren’t such ancient history for my mother either…

speaking of things in the past, i came across the issue of vice entitled ‘1994‘, which had me fooled as if it was a real archival copy from that year. it makes me think the spectre of that year influences most of my tastes. lisa carver? i read her autobiography, and have a couple of her old zines. and you know i have a big thing for zines in general. and my so-called life. and x-girl was an aspirational fashion label to me before i had any cash to buy any of their clothes.

which makes sense because i was only fourteen then. even if i was too dumb to find these things at that age, somehow they creep out of the past into the now and coax my aesthetic out. am i one of those people who think the nineties had more going for it in popular culture? then i think of flannelette and everyone’s shit long hair, and i snap out of it.

and other things now recently in the past, conan o’brien’s tonight show run. i’m downloading the entire last week and watching it chronologically, and then i will do… something.

another picture from singapore, a christmas window at takashimaya. imagine the bear’s chest rising and falling in slumber…

i bought the ticket back in september last year, so it was a long wait for to see david sedaris. finally, january arrived! i’d not been inside his majesty’s theatre before, and it was a small but beautiful old theatre, the way they should be (make note to stare at the ceiling). i had very little sleep the night before, so found myself resisting the urge to nod off early on, but to his credit, sedaris is a humourous and engaging writer, even if reading off a piece of paper. i soon perked up. he obviously enjoys going on book tours and meeting people, a notebook and pen kept in his left hand shirt pocket to record conversations of note. and a wide smile meets applause at the end of each reading of a story…

by the end of the night, it felt like a big good natured family inside the theatre, joined by a love of writing and reading.

by the way, can somebody please convince my mother that keeping a few plants in a room isn’t bad for you? it started in malaysia whilst she was talking with my aunt, and for me the enjoyment of a some greenery outweighs the tiny amounts of co2 exhumed in the night…

taken in singapore.

okay, so big news is i made a date for the letter writing club, set a venue and even made a flier. so if you’re in perth and you want to get together for fun in a pretty cool zine/art shop, then mark down february 5th in your diary. we’ll be having meetings every first friday of the month after that. here’s the facebook event page…

spent the afternoon trying to write an artist promo blurb but really ended up blasting their cd and looking up other people’s press releases. and as such, it has led me to the conclusion that i will one day be reborn to form a bitchin’ girlfriends band such as beaches. cos as a lady in this life, i don’t have much luck with forming ladies ensembles.

and on current peeves, i like to bring my baggu sometimes to the supermarket. but everytime i try the self checkout at woolworths, the girl with the swipe card will have to rescue me as my “own bag” doesn’t please the computer program. this guy thinks the retarded machines only like the green eco woolworths bags, and this other guy says it happens at every woolworths. uh, self checkout still requires a helper?

last night i also missed out on the injured ninja/french rockets split 12″ launch. this is why i probably should have gone. i ended up watching control on tv and pottering about at home. i had great difficulty distinguishing the fictional ian curtis from the real, archival one. not a bad directorial debut, and spookily shot in black and white, which is how joy division exists in my mind, their promo photos being mostly monochrome, like their artwork. a sign of the times then…

maybe i should shoot more b&w pictures…

sorry for my absence – i have indeed been away over christmas and new year. i offloaded seven rolls of film to the developers yesterday as a result. this photo was taken outside the smokehouse in the cameron highlands of malaysia. their scones (pronounced scoooooones in that part of the world) were maybe the best i’ve had. i think there should be a ban on the gluggy heavy scone universally, and more of the soft, easily digested type. devonshire tea is so simple, but an enjoyable luxury when done properly. there were also quite a few old tudor houses up there in the mountains, a legacy of colonialism. sometimes i had to wonder if i was in asia, or hiding out in england…

i haven’t been one for resolutions, but there are a few things i want to do this year, seeing this is my first entry for 2010:

open a webshop (maybe one that looks like itis). i found a few old things while in malaysia that i would like to share…

run a monthly letter writing club

eat healthier (and try to drink tea without sugar, except coffee, which i can’t handle without two sugars and vietnamese coffee which must have the condensed milk or else i might as well not bother)

make two more zines

continue helping out with the perth zine collective

give my whole camera collection an airing, or else find new homes for the ones i don’t use

er, post more blog entries

a photo from the weekend, while we took a break from recording hopefully what will become the band’s album. we are all hot, sweaty and tired. can you tell? all i know is that i dig the psychedelic flare.

right now I am in the Perth Cultural Centre, sitting under a white tent at the zine collective stall, on a day that is already well fulfilling its promise of thirty-seven degrees celcius. the wifi here is good, gladly, and I have a small supply of iced tea in a flask, steeped overnight in anticipation.

Saturdays tend to be quieter in terms of people traffic, but I don’t mind if only the occasional person has a browse. Mind you this heat has really kept the people away this time…

by rhe way i finally learnt how to make Vietnamese coffee, with the four piece drip filter and the packet of trung nguyen I found in the grocery store full of plastic housewares, cooking utensils, rice cookers, scales and ice shaving machines. the sweet coffee with condensed milk reminds me of kopi in Malaysia too, old tastes that feel familiar.

I need to find a new cooking goal. maybe not so much the cakes and biscuits which I can usually make more or less successfully, but real meals.

after I’m back from holidays in early January I’ll fund some new tasks for myself, not just food related…

i watched the documentary girls rock recently, initially for the carrie brownstein factor, and because if i were 8-18 and living in the us, i’d be hassling my parents to let me go to summer rock camp. maybe if i had inspiration like that, i’d have had a head start on the things i’m only doing now…

i spent my weekend mostly at the markets in town, sitting at our collective zine table. i like this new methodology of using my time, although on Saturday I forgot to bring something with me to do, and after I finished reading one of ianto ware’s zines, I was kinda searching for something to do inbetween. Sunday I wisened up and brought maybe too much stuff, but I made a ‘what are zines’ flier to give to the uninitiated, and wrote a couple of letters. fliers were photocopied, and letters sent, and Russian fried bread filled with blueberries were eaten!

I need to find out the name of this food. the fried part taste reminds me of chinese haam chim peng – except there’s usually yellow bean paste or red bean inside for our versions.

I also want to find the fabled banh mi thit, but I’ve never seen Vietnamese places selling them here. only rice paper rolls, in terms of cheap lunch food.

enough food talk or I’ll be looking for a midnight snack.