Through the camera obscura

lucentstreak @ 2011-05-02T19:31:00

2011-05-02T11:30:34Z

lucentstreak @ 2011-04-29T20:11:00

2011-04-29T12:10:37Z

My We, Louie Cordero, 2011, Singapore Biennale

Quite fun, actually.

lucentstreak @ 2011-02-11T10:25:00

2011-02-11T02:25:33Z

There is so much win in this that I cannot start to explain. For one, I deeply mourn the loss of MTV Unplugged - to me, I just miss the time when musicians can hold their own and offer different versions of the recorded pieces.

lucentstreak @ 2010-11-13T10:44:00

2010-11-13T02:37:51Z

There are some movies that you go in just to enjoy the visuals, the writing and the acting. Some - just have music to sell their movies and I am sold even before I step into the theatre.

lucentstreak @ 2010-11-11T22:35:00

2010-11-11T14:29:27Z

lucentstreak @ 2010-10-28T13:27:00

2010-10-28T05:27:18Z

"There is just no such thing as anyone’s real personality. Personalities are the product of the initial feelings or attitudes someone takes up and the needs of the situation they find themselves in...and, for that matter, the initial feelings themselves are the product of earlier conflicts of that sort. There is a dialectic of personality, just as there is dialectic of history (and it’s just as unpredictable)."-- Jeremy Wolfenden

what the?

2010-07-14T05:39:55Z

I write like
Vladimir Nabokov

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Do I honestly sound like, "Lolita, fire of my loins" etc etc?

lucentstreak @ 2010-07-14T13:36:00

2010-07-14T05:33:25Z

I write like
Chuck Palahniuk

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I smell a con on Craigslist

2010-04-25T21:08:09Z

So I was accommodation hunting - this caught my eye.

Hello,

Thanks for your interest and i assure you that you will enjoy staying in my apartment, the apartment is located at 233 Bleecker St New York,
NY 10012 and the price is $65/night: $1200 for the chosen dates (3weeks) and you need to pay 50% ($600) + refundable security deposit of ($250) the total will be =$850. The $850. is to secure or hold the apartment for the chosen dates while the balance of the rent will be paid on your arrival/check in time.

You can reach me for more question and details on how to pay the deposit then i can commence with the booking and reservation, there is
a receipt of payment and booking confirmation that will be issue out to you as proof of payment and booking.

From Me

Hello N,

Thank you for your prompt reply! (It's about 4 am here).

I'm fine with that. Could you please let me know how I might make the deposit? I'm currently located in XXXX and the only feasible way seems to be paypal? I would be happy to make the full payment through paypal.

I do have a pay pal account but i have a temporarily problem with my pay pal account so i can not accept fund, i assure you that you will enjoy your stay in my apartment.

You will need to transfer the deposit via Money Gram but i will forward you an agreement and booking form to fill the form and return it with payment, you will meet me on your arrival face to face so that i can give you the keys of the apartment and show you around.Once i hear from you i will forward you the agreement and booking form.

At least, that was until I did a brief google and found out that 233 Bleecker St is actually - here or more accurately - this

lucentstreak @ 2010-04-25T23:40:00

2010-04-25T15:39:45Z

East Village it is. But what is the east and west border of Alphabet city?

lucentstreak @ 2010-04-14T22:43:00

2010-04-14T14:43:14Z

Spent the day with tvjames and night_child80. It's been a long while since I have seen them but each time, the conversation always seem to flow - no matter which side of the pond we have been. I don't know what I have done in my last life but hell, to be with them is to know that no matter what - they are still there. Finally getting down to documenting some of the books that I read. Or books that I regard as seminal texts to life.

Dear world

2010-03-20T02:14:02Z

I need a beta-reader

Fanfiction.net apparently likes taunting me with 50 pages of beta readers and no one replied. In particular - people familiar with House M.D.

Looking for people who are kosher with grammar (I tend to jump tenses), punctuation and characterization.

Yes, this is what I do when bored.

lucentstreak @ 2010-02-23T17:36:00

2010-02-23T09:36:42Z

I know I haven't been around that much

2010-02-15T11:42:55Z

It's Chinese New Year so Happy Chinese New Year to all of you out there.
For some strange reason, 2010 doesn't seemed to have started till CNY passed. I'm not sure why the time lapse but let's put it this way.

Anyhow, going through old entries and nabbing this from lightningspark, my dear LJ friends if you're still reading. I will answer this because I missed out on it the last round

1. What is your favorite word?
2. What is your least favorite word?
3. What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
4. What turns you off creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
5. What sound or noise do you love?
6. What sound or noise do you hate?
7. What is your favorite curse word?
8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
9. What profession would you not like to do?
10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?

I believe a version of this exist on Inside The Actors Studio</s>

1. What is your favorite word?
Vernacular.

2. What is your least favorite word?
superiority - The notion disgusts me

3. What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?

Waves crashing and my toes dug deep in sand; wooden piano and the tonality of the notes it produces (I sort of can tell the difference; gaining new knowledge - random or otherwise; admission of that all is not perfect but willing to work on it; cello or strings.

4. What turns you off creatively, spiritually or emotionally?

Intolerance, Ignorance, Hubris, intellectual wank; rhetorical questions posed in an effort to gain standing; backstabbing; emotional drama. People who mistake tolerance or patience for submission.

5. What sound or noise do you love?

Baritone voices; moderated speaking voices; waves crashing; the sound of glasses clinking softly; unforced laughter; wooden pianos; Babies gurgling;

6. What sound or noise do you hate?

People when they are in helpless pain or grief (wailing or otherwise)- there's a tone in them that never cease to jar something in me; People who don't know how to moderate their voice and seemed to think that raising their voices is a way of getting to me. The sound of a coffin tossed into the incinerator - the final sound of the coffin leaving the gangway. The sound of glass shattering.

7. What is your favorite curse word?

Last December, the office passed around a quiz to the birthday people's most used saying and I did not know better except to ask my cubicle mate who promptly answered with a straight face, "Fuck."

8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?

I dreamt of being a lawyer, journalist and a curator when I was 5 or 6 and slowly over the years, crossed out the first 2. What would I have loved to attempt - a photojournalist perhaps, a theatre actor, a singer, uhmmm....being a philanthropist even.

9. What profession would you not like to do?

An economist, a banker, a bureaucrat, property lawyer, journalist and teacher.

10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?

Naomi Watts had the best answer for this... but for me, I guess.
"Your work is done - have a scotch and just kick back."

Michael Cunningham on Joan Didion - What it is to live in our times.

2010-02-09T05:35:55Z

While sitting around with a facemask plastered on me

2010-01-17T12:46:41Z

The new iphone comes with some perks - I know people bitch about the camera and all but seriously, it is the best camera phone I have so far - especially since my last phone's camera was next to naught. Anyhow, hopefully it helps me.

I know this entry kind of makes no sense other than "Hi, see my camera phone". It's just a random entry on a Sunday night before I plunge into the week again. Whimsical even.

Hm.

One thing to be thankful for

2010-01-14T12:26:52Z

Thank you, keleos for that delightful holiday gift.

Things happening near my end of the world

2010-01-14T08:48:06Z

From Rachel Leow

Malaysia is in the news again for the usual reasons: nine churches firebombed by radical Muslims in the last week, on account of a rising controversy over the use of the word ‘Allah’ by Christians. A Catholic weekly paper, The Catholic Herald, was ordered by the government to cease publishing its Malay-language edition until the courts resolved the question of its use of the word ‘Allah’ to mean the God of the Christian faith. The question was resolved in High Court, which ruled in favour of the Herald. A week after the ruling, nine churches were torched over three days. Molotov cocktails were involved. The High Court ruling has been suspended pending appeal.

This semantic quibble can seem baffling to non-Malaysians, but the sad truth is that the event is wholly explicable within the context of Malaysian social dynamics. It seems to me that the trouble arises out of a potent (Molotov) cocktail of two factors: 1) the troubling relationship that exists between ‘Malay’ and ‘Muslim’ in Malaysia, and 2) the relationship that this hybrid ‘Malay-Muslim’ has with the rest of Malaysian society. First, some thoughts on the word Allah; then, on the Molotov cocktail of Malaysian society.

In the Beginning was the Word

First of all, it should be made clear that there are at least two words for ‘God’ in Malay (apart from, you know, the 99 names of God): Allah, and Tuhan. The first is from Arabic: a Semitic word for the divine, combining the definite article al- (the one) with the root word -ilah, meaning ‘god’. The root ilah can be compared with the Northwest Semitic el of Elohim, the Hebrew word for divinity.

The second and probably older word in the region, Tuhan, seems to share a common etymology with the Austronesian word atua, or te atua in Maori, meaning god (no particular one – the Maori were broadly animist). The link isn’t surprising. Malay is a member of the Malayo-Polynesian language tree, and many other linguistic commonalities run throughout the region: Indonesian, Micronesian, Polynesian and Philippine languages are all relatively closely related. Tuhan probably also has something in common with the Malay word tuan, which roughly means lord or master (as in, Joseph Conrad’s Tuan Jim, or Lord Jim).

Both words have been in use in Malay, more or less interchangeably, throughout its written history. Even on the famed Terengganu Inscription Stone (Batu Bersurat Terengganu), which is the earliest extant evidence of Islam on the Malay peninsula and dates to around 1303, the word ‘Allah’ appears three times, and the word ‘Tuhan’ twice.

Malay, Muslim, Same Diff

What has animated the whole controversy is the claim by the ruling government that the word ‘Allah’ is something especially Islamic, and by extension, exclusively Malay. The trouble comes at “by extension”. Under the Federal Constitution, a Malay is defined as a person who 1) is born to a Malaysian citizen, 2) professes to be Muslim, 3) speaks the Malay language, 4) adheres to Malay custom, and 5) is domiciled in Malaysia. Here’s the important part: Malay citizens who convert out of Islam are no longer considered constitutionally Malay, even if they were born to a Malaysian, speak Malay, adhere to Malay custom and live in Malaysia.

This bizarre, calcified mess of legal status, religion, language and ‘custom’ is almost entirely a product of colonial governance. The definition comes from a Land Reservation Act from 1913, which the British passed in an attempt to delineate which people should benefit from state land protectionism. But over time, the definition proved both politically expedient (the British gained a lot of colonial mileage out of professing to be looking after ‘the Malays’) and psychologically central to Malay self-perception (‘the Malays’ came to see themselves as a coherent cultural entity). The result is that today this definition is no longer only politically useful; it has become true for many Malays, and it is what their sense of identity rests on. And that identity is geographic, linguistic, cultural, and yes, religious.

Malay-Muslims vs. the World

The second factor is the relationship of Malay-Muslims to the rest of Malaysian society. One might ask: why is Islam such an important element of Malay identity, given the other four constitutional components?

The answer here, I feel, is demographic, and one can see that by comparing Malaysia with Indonesia. Indonesia has always been much more racially confident of itself than Malaysia, even though at times this confidence has led to terrible tragedies. Across Indonesia, visible ethnic minorities remain minorities, and are today often deeply assimilated. The Chinese population, to name the usual suspect, is small — only about 3-5% of the population. And Indonesian Christians, I’ll add, have no trouble using the word ‘Allah’:

In contrast, Malaysia is a much more heterogenous society, with ‘Malays’ making up around 60% of the population, ethnic Chinese somewhere around 25 to 30% and ethnic Indians, mostly Tamils but also some Sikhs, around 8%. This has led to a certain amount of racial insecurity. Over the decades of last century, various Malay groups have made various sorts of overtures to Indonesia in order to try to tap into the demographic advantages of Indonesia’s enormous, ethnically Malay population. The ejection of Singapore from Malaysia in 1965, it has been argued, had in part to do with fears over the large number of ethnic Chinese in Singapore that would become part of Malaysia, while the inclusion of British Borneo into the Federation in 1963 was arguably an attempt to beef up the ‘ethnic Malay’ numbers. In the 1940s, a group of Malay nationalists almost managed to negotiate Malaysia into sharing Indonesia’s independence when the Japanese Occupation ended: a thwarted vision of “a nation that would consolidate a hundred million brown peoples into a single Republic of Malaysia” (Taufik Abdullah, 1997:257).

But the fact remains that Malaysia has always been more interested in hooking up with Indonesia (and other regional Malays) than vice versa. Today, Malay Malaysians are on their own, in a very multicultural Malaysia. The proximity of multiculturalism, I think, has created a lot of incentive for Malays to differentiate themselves, and to hang on tightly to those differences. And in Malaysia, of the five constitutional elements of ‘Malayness’ I listed above from the 1913 definition, only two remain which are not now widely shared by all Malaysian citizens since Malaysian independence in 1957: Malay ‘custom’, and Islam.

Religion has therefore become a central marker of ethnic identity in Malaysia. And here is the nub of the problem. In the case of Islam, a religion that has historically spread with its carrier language, the Arabic language comes with the territory. It’s not so much that many Malays speak Arabic (in fact, I don’t know that many do), but rather that any connection to the Arabic culture and language should be, in Malaysia, only effected through Islam — which is in turn almost exclusively Malay. Two examples of this perceived special connection:

In the forties and fifties vociferous battles were fought over whether the Malay language should be written in Jawi (Arabic script) as it had been since Islam came to the region, or in Rumi, the Latin script. Opponents of romanization accused pro-Rumi writers of being kaffirs (infidels), saying that discarding the Arabic script was tantamount to discarding Islam. The Arabic script was central to Malayness.
Today, the word kitab, which means a normal ‘book’ in Arabic, is often used in Malay to refer to a specifically religious book, while secular books are simply buku, from the English.
Something similar is happening here with Allah. It may ‘just’ mean ‘God’ in Arabic, but in Malaysia, amidst these deep-rooted anxieties and questions of identity, it is so much more than a semantic quibble.

Allah, Tuhan, Same Diff

The frankly ridiculous claim, then, that only Malays/Muslims are allowed to use the word Allah, and that everyone else should back off and use Tuhan, certainly arises out of this ingrained defensiveness over what it is to be Malay. The claim that ‘Allah’ is somehow especially Islamic is disproved at least by the fact that the word itself predates Islam. Any argument that it has acquired ‘Islamness’ over time is furthermore disproved by the fact that it remains in use by Arab Christians today (and also by Indonesian Catholics). The dogged adherence to this claim by a small number of firebomb-wielding ultra-Malays is only explicable when we understand how sensitively most Malays are invested in themselves (politically or otherwise) as Muslims, in distinction to the other ethnic groups and religions in Malaysia. To be flippant: if Malays were really interested in being more ‘Malay’, they should in fact use the word Tuhan, which is much more ‘Malay’ for having deeper regional Austronesian roots, than Allah, which is, after all, an imported name for an imported God.

Abt the last post

2010-01-13T06:25:13Z

It isn't slash - as faeness kindly told me the difference between slash and ship. *duh!

I wish I wasn't so stupid..

Fan fiction.net and beta readers

2010-01-12T12:27:51Z

My entry obviously didn't go through and I lost the entire entry typed out on the iPhone.

In short, I am starving for a house fix, stumbled across fanfiction.net and got interested in writing fem slash. ( everyone has a first) Knowing myself, I have been shopping for a co-writer to work on a loosely structured storyline comprising of individual episodes. The search has yet to bear fruit but it has made me realiZe that i would need beta readers for whatever drivel I am churning out.

Now, I am interested in a sustained partnership with a small group of beta readers who know my style, my flaws and also be willing to provide me with constructive criticism without fear of annoying me. A healthy interest in House fandom would be a big plus as well.

If any one of you would be interested, please do leave a comment and how to contact address as I might be able to send something that resemble a brief structure and some loose writing

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

You and I

2010-01-11T15:26:40Z

You and I (2009)
Write me a letter and I will compile a mix CDR for you.

All you have to do is tell me a few things about yourself in the letter, preferably something personal – a memory, a secret, a compulsion, a habit, a relationship, an experience...

I will use this letter as the basis of my selection of audio material. The more detailed and specific your letter is, the more I can personalise your mixtape.

Months ago, I decided to help an artist out for his project and finally received my mix today. Even though we had mutual friends and had known each other long enough in each's previous job incarnation, I got to say it was still awkward writing the letter.

Anyhow, the mix came out and I wonder, sometimes if he did manage really peg the letter down.

Ash, "Walking Barefoot"

Raphael Saadiq, "Keep Marchin'"

R.E.M. "Begin the Begin"

Radiohead, "Worry Wort"

Dntel, "Life is full of possibilities"

The Knife, "Like a Pen"

Dirty Projectors, "New New Attitude"

Jose Gonzalez, "Down the line"

Humpback Oak, "If I go wrong"

Grizzly Bear, "Fine for now"

Meme-age (It has been some time)

2010-01-11T14:42:39Z

Yanked from newredshoes

If you could have me write a fic specifically for you, what would it be like? Fandom, characters/pairing, genre, plot elements, kinks (if applicable)... what's your ideal fic from me?

This deserves a post of it's own

2010-01-07T06:07:37Z

And the days go by...
Like a strand in the wind...
In the web that is my own...
I begin again
Said to my friend, baby...
Nothin' else mattered

Stevie Nicks. I don't care how old this song is or if Lilo had covered this. But seriously, it's one of those songs that I would love to be played during my own funeral. And there is no one like Stevie Nicks...

lucentstreak @ 2010-01-05T12:20:00

2010-01-05T04:20:23Z

We interrupt your usual boring reflections with...

2009-12-11T15:32:05Z

I went down, down, down
and the Q went higher.

Which song was this lyric from?