Archive for March, 2010

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Malaysian must be in search of a good meal. Malaysians will travel far and wide at any time of the day or night to find the best and tastiest dishes. I’ve known people who would drive for three hours on a Sunday out of town to go to a coffee shop in another state because that coffee shop made the best noodle soup. While the Brits might go on pub crawls, my pal Kenny Mah over at Life for Beginners tells me that he and his friends would go on food crawls, going from restaurant to food stall to cafe over an evening to eat different courses of their meal - and more!

So is it any surprise that when Malaysians discovered blogging a mass of food blogs sprung up!

What impresses me about these food bloggers is that they have the self control to set up their cameras to take photos of the food with loving care before tucking in! When they go out for meals together, it must be an amazing sight when they whip out their arsenal of high end digital cameras and start clicking away. The results I must say are almost pornographically mouth-watering…

Here are some that I’ve been enjoying - and salivating over. (To find others, simply check out their blogrolls which will reveal a whole new world of food.)

A Whiff of Lemongrass - a delicious blog by an accountant, would you believe, who writes beautifully and goes under the moniker Lyrical Lemongrass. She is of mixed parentage which means she has a wide cross-cultural taste. Based in Shah Alam, a suburb of Kuala Lumpur, she and her husband make a feast of their lives wherever they are, taking luscious shots of their meals with a pretty serious camera.

Precious Pea - a Malaysian based in Melbourne (we get around, you know), she blogs about her two passions, dogs and food, as well as sharing some glimpses into the people in her life. I enjoy the fact that this isn’t purely restaurant reviews and that we can get to know Precious Pea’s life a little bit. But the food photos are again the highlight!

Dad, Baker & Chef - The title says it all. He’s a dad and he bakes lovely cakes and desserts for his family and friends. Click on this pic of the dessert he made for his wife and girl friends who came round for a meal and swoon - at the food but also at his loving generosity and creativity. What a guy!

Photos: from the food bloggers’ respective blogs, with thanks

Some friends and I met up for dinner the other evening at Tukdin, a Malaysian restaurant in the Paddington area.

It was recommended to me by Zaharah Wan, aka Kak Teh, so it was a great bonus that she and her husband Wan Hulaimi, aka Awang Goneng, the bestselling Malaysian author of Growing Up in Trengganu could join us to introduce us to what turned out to be their “home from home”.

We were also joined by my good pal, Ingrid Beazley, blogger and co-editor of Dulwich OnView, the online magazine of the Friends of Dulwich Picture Gallery and my partner, web designer Angie Macdonald.

We did a podcast review of the restaurant and also got the opportunity to meet Tukdin, the man himself. Check it out via the player below.

You can subscribe to the Fusion View Mobile Podcast by clicking on the “Subscribe with iTunes” button - it’s free and new episodes will be downloaded automatically to your iTunes application.

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If you’re tempted by our review to try Tukdin for yourself, the address is 41 Craven Road W2 3BX Tel: 020 7723 6955. Please mention Fusion View if you do.

After some setbacks, I’m back podcasting with a new Mobile Podcast format that takes advantage of Ipadio’s live phoneblogging & mobile upload facilty. I hope that bringing audio blogging to Fusion View will stir up some different, spontaneous energies around this blog as I bring you conversations, interviews and audio impressions while I am on the move and out and about.

I’m also planning that 2010 will be my year of being creative and active. There’ll be podcasts on the arts, writing, culture. I hope to share my walks in and around London and restart my series on My Local London. You may also find some future mobile podcasts created on the run - literally! - as I bring you along while I run…

Although some podcasts will be live by mobile phone, others will be via pre-recorded mp3s but my aim throughout will be to keep it as “live” and spontaneous as possible…

I hope you’ll join me on my journey!

You can subscribe to the Fusion View Mobile Podcast by clicking on the “Subscribe with iTunes” button - it’s free and new episodes will be downloaded automatically to your iTunes application.

Anna Sayburn is a journalist and online editor at the British Medical Journal. She also blogs at Dulwich OnView (which is how I got to know her) and her two blogs, Work in Progress and Bloomsbury Bluestocking, while working on her first novel. Now that’s true dedication to the craft of writing - which is why I wanted to introduce her to you all here on Fusion View who love words, writing and reading.

Here is our interview:

What is your novel about and what inspired you to write it?
The novel seems to be about things that have been buried - buried bones, buried secrets, buried treasure! I first got the inkling of an idea for it when I walked to Canterbury last Easter, with my husband Phil. Long walks seem to be very good inspiration for writing. Lots of the things and places we came across on the way have found themselves into the plot.

How are you finding the writing process?
Slow! I’ve never tried to write anything of this length before. I work as a journalist, so tend to think in terms of 350 words for a lead story, 1000 words for a feature. I’m aiming for 80,000 words for the novel. It seems an awful lot and it’s hard not to get daunted by the sheer scale. But when I actually sit down and write, it’s fine and I enjoy it. I tend to write the bones of the plot quite quickly, then have to go back and fill in the detail later.

Do you have a routine or a particular approach to the writing process?
The main challenge is to find a stretch of time when I won’t be interrupted and force myself not to do anything else! I can write for about 2 hours before I need a break, and I think I start writing rubbish after about 4 hours, so I try to stop then. In an ideal world, I’d get up early, write all morning and go out for a long walk in the afternoon. In the real world, I go to work, come home, make dinner and then switch on the laptop for a couple of hours before bed.

How does it compare to writing as a journalist or blogger?
The scale is the main difference. Plus, of course, it all has to come out of your own head, as a sustainable story. Making a coherent plot is a real challenge. I’m surprised how much I’ve enjoyed that bit. I do summaries of each chapter, and I’m about 5 chapters ahead in terms of plotting, compared to what I’ve actually written. But the time frame so different. I’ve no idea when I’ll finish the novel, while journalism and blogging are both pretty instant hits. I’ve always written fast and I tend to do blog posts in lunch hours or spare 10 minutes here and there. For the novel, I need at least a couple of hours, or there’s not much point starting.

What do you enjoy about blogging in contrast?
The immediacy of blogging is great. I can think of an idea, write it up, find a photo and post it in less than an hour. It couldn’t be more different from writing the novel. It’s also a great excuse to put off writing the novel! In fact, I’ve started a second blog, BloomsburyBluestocking, just to have more space to witter on in a non-professional manner. Trouble is, writing is addictive and the more I write, the more I seem to want to write.

Photo: Anna Sayburn, from her blog

I went on long run a few weekends ago and decided to leave my iPod behind for a change. It was a lovely sunny day and the birds were tweeting as I stepped out the door and I thought, wouldn’t it be lovely to listen to sounds of spring instead of to the techno music that usually powers me along! I hesitated for a moment, worried that I might get bored or lose the energy to carry me through my 10k (6 mile) run. Would I be able to keep going for an hour without music?

A few years ago, a number of friends recommended meditation to me as a way to relax, de-stress and clear one’s head. I liked the idea of Zen - with its associations of beautiful Buddhist gardens, wise souls contemplating eternity and a peaceful loving kindness approach to life. I had pictures in my mind of raking a sea of gravel around islands of rock, contemplating apple blossoms against an azure sky and facing adversity with a wise twinkle in my eye.

The trouble was that I could not sit still for long enough. I tried different ways to meditate and each time, I’d give up after a few sessions. The easiest was downloading some meditation podcasts from iTunes where a guru with a calm and sensuously relaxing voice talked you through the different stages of meditation practice, punctuated occasionally by the “ting” of a lovely bell. It was fairly pleasant as I sat in my darkened study, trying to picture a candle flame being still. But I’d get restless and the single candle flame would light up into bright city lights. Or I would feel rested momentarily but when I got up again, it was as if the stillness had never been.

Then I joined a Buddhist meditation class meeting once a week after work. I’d rush there in a fluster and join the others, shoeless and perched on cushions while the teacher led us through the meditations with reassuring loving kindness and calm, dinging on a singing bowl from time to time. Again, it was pleasant enough and I was really impressed by the Zen-like nature of the teacher and the other experienced Buddhists. But after a few sessions, I found the more religious aspects of the practice like chanting and the codified concepts not to my taste and it was difficult to prioritise going to the class - it reminded me too much of bible study and hymn singing but with tunes I didn’t know…

I respect the values of mindfulness, being present, loving kindness, detachment, recognising transience and change and so on. But it’s the doctrinal side of any organised group that I always have difficulty bonding with. So while I’ve carried on reading and learning where I could about philosophy and spirituality in a Buddhist as well as other contexts, I haven’t pursued formal Buddhist meditation since those classes.

I started to think about these attempts at meditation that sunny day as I trundled along, heading to a big park in the next suburb to mine. Without music pounding in my ears, I had been listening to the sound of the breeze, the singing of the birds and the rustle of leaves in the trees. I was aware of cars passing by, the voices of kids, people talking as I whizzed by them. I felt the warm sun on my face and body and was consciously trying to maintain a good running form - tail tucked in, shoulders straight, head and back upright, feet landing mid-sole and not ahead of my chin, pushing back with the balls of my feet. I was aiming to breathe rhythmically from the bottom of my lungs, keeping one eye as always on my heart rate monitor to make sure I was not over- or under-exerting.

In many ways, it was like meditating, really. Taking care of posture is a big thing in meditation practice. As is rhythmic, deep breathing. And being aware of the sounds around you, being present in your whole body and whole mind. Up till that day, running with music had been calming and slightly hypnotic, rather like listening to chanting or drums, I suppose as you meditate - and I think that’s why I’ve really been enjoying running in the last year. But on this first long run without music, I was experiencing a different calm and different rhythmic hypnotic state - the rhythm came from my own breathe and the pace/ drumming of my own legs. I really loved it! And, yes, as it turns out, I did get through my 10k run - and completed it in 1 hour 8 minutes, which is a pretty good pace for me.

I realised then that there are different ways to meditate. I remembered reading about the Marathon Monks of Japan who run 40k a day for 100 days as part of their spiritual practice. And the martial arts of the East are also ways of meditating, with their emphasis on breathing, posture and stillness as well as being grounded in Buddhist philosophy. It seems obvious, really, that you can find meditation is movement as well as in stillness. But I suppose with meditation classes and teachings focused around on stillness and sitting and martial arts and running training focused on physical skillsets, it takes a little longer to make the connection.

So I am going to run to the sounds of the suburbs for the next little while and see how I get on. I may be along way from Nirvana but I rather like the thought of running my way there…

Photo: thanks to Allard One from flickr.com (CCL)

For every person who loves Twitter and other forms of social media, there are those who don’t see the point of it. Why should I be interested in what some blogger or twitterer had for breakfast, those people would say. Who needs to know moment by moment what someone is up to?

Well, here’s one Twitterer that’s out of this world - literally - and whose updates might be worth getting moment by moment. Soichi Noguchi is an astronaut at the International Space Station and he is sending pics and videos to Twitter and Youtube of the view from outer space. You may not need to know what he had for breakfast but I’m rather glad that he’s sharing the view from his office…

The Youtube video above shows the flyover of Madagascar.

You can follow his Twitter stream at http://twitter.com/astro_Soichi and see his Twitpics at http://twitpic.com/photos/Astro_Soichi.

For my previous blog post on other astronauts who have been tweeting, see Tweet me to the Moon.

Photo: thanks to the NASA website

For much of last year, I was not as healthy as I would have liked to have been. The main reason was being too busy. Too busy to exercise properly, too busy to eat sensibly… But as the year drew to a close, I made a conscious effort to clear my schedule and to identify the things that enhanced my life rather than just doing things ‘cos I had to do them or ‘cos I was obligated to others. There were two key themes that emerged - I wanted to focus on being creative and active.

Over the Xmas period, I was glad for the time out to recharge my batteries and think about how I was going to make sure these two themes could underpin 2010.

Creativity for this year means: making sure I have time for blogging and creating online media such as photos, podcasts and video. What I love about blogging is that my blog is a blank canvas on which I can create anything, using the people I meet, the art I see, the films I watch, the books I read, the thoughts that may pass through my mind. I love how I can use it to connect with people by inviting them to share their stories or views on the blog or by writing up an event that I’ve attended or pondering more deeply on a conversation I may have had with someone. It’s also a fun way to capture quirky or interesting images that have caught my eye and to play with making videos or podcasts about the world around me.

Being active this years means: picking up on the running that I’d started to enjoy last year but had not had time to improve on. Not being very athletic at school, I had never thought I’d enjoy running but taking the time to build up my stamina and speed over the last few months, I’ve really come to thrive with it. I’m still not very fast compared to other people and I still can’t run for much more than an hour - but for me, it’s been a real breakthrough! As a result of running - and seeing my running improve over time - I’ve become more aware of the need to eat more healthily as well as generally looking after my health. And being fitter means that I have more energy, feel more cheerful and positive (especially important through these last long dark winter months!) and more alert and creative!

One of the things I used to be rubbish at was making sure that I ate healthy portions and at regular intervals. Here’s an example. I’d have lunch around 12.30 and then not eat again till dinner at 8, by which time I would be grouchy, tired, headachey and generally unbearable. Then, at dinner, I would eat way too much because I was starving and I’d feel stuffed for the rest of the evening, storing up all that weight to make me chubby over the next few days.

So what to do? The answer is to snack with healthy snacks in between the main meals, which has the advantage of making sure I have a regular supply of good fuel so I’m not running on empty and also of making sure I don’t wolf down excessive amounts at meal times. One of the best snacks I’ve discovered so far is roasted pumpkin seeds. Apart from being packed full of good stuff that helps with depression, cholesterol etc, they are also pretty tasty when they are roasted.

Well, I say roasted. But in fact, I dry fry them. Here’s how:

1. Heat a non-stick pan on the stove.
2. Pour some pumpkin seeds onto the pan - about enough to cover the bottom of the pan plus some. Do not add anything else: no oil, nothing.
3. Stir fry the seeds dry till they start to pop and jump around.
4. Take the pan off the heat/ turn off the heat when a few have started to pop, but continue stir frying. The reason for this is that if you keep the pan on the heat, it will be too hot and they will burn. The heat you’ve already got will keep popping the seeds so keep stirring.
5. They will make a lovely rustley sound when they are ready, which means that they have expanded and popped. They should look a mixture of green/ khaki/ brown.

You can eat them on their own like you might eat nuts. Or sprinkle them over salad - or even fruit salad. Or sprinkle them over pasta. They have a nutty flavour that goes perfectly in any of these situations.

When it comes down to it, it seems to me, it’s the little things that make the difference. When I’m feeling down and overwhelmed and exhausted and plummetted into an existential crisis, it’s most likely that I’m have a low blood sugar moment and when I’ve had a healthy snack, it’s amazing how I seem to perk up and life all seems worthwhile again! It’s the same with the running - just having a go and then making it into a habit and before too long, I have more stamina and feel more energized. And as for blogging, it helps me take notice of the people and world around me and makes me curious and thoughtful - and perhaps a little bolder when it comes to making a connection with someone I might not otherwise get to know.

I wouldn’t say that pumpkin seeds have changed my life, but they certainly have helped me make the changes I want to make.

Pictures:
Painting, thanks to seeminglee from flickr.com (CCL)
Runner, thanks to Hamed Saber from flickr.com (CCL)
Pumpkin seeds - my photo

Over on Sharon Bakar’s blog recently, she bemoaned the fact that Malaysians still did not seem to be reading. This has been a long-time issue for Malaysians as far back as I can remember. Many of us are good at business, finance, engineering, IT etc but not so many of us are world-class writers. The local publishing industry is small and focuses mainly on business and self-improvement books rather than fiction or literature. The market just isn’t there.

There appeared to be a glimmer of hope in the last few years with the rise of litbloggers in Malaysia - people who love books and reading and who blog about their passion. Many are also published as well as aspiring writers. They gather regularly in Kuala Lumpur (KL) at book events and also in writing groups, some hosted by book-lover extraordinaire herself, Sharon Bakar. But for all their literary and intellectual abilities, this seems to be a small group who, while well-respected, are not generally treated to events of pomp and circumstance with corporate sponsorship and the recognition of celebrity status - eg. in the same way that in the UK, there’s the Booker Prize dinner which is covered in the press as well as on TV.

In contrast, I’ve noticed in the last year or so that bloggers have been getting the star treatment in Malaysia in a way that seems to overshadow the book writers. Last year saw the launch of the regional Nuffnang Blog Awards to honour the best bloggers in Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines and Australia . It was a glitzy, black tie affair held at a fancy hotel, apparently modelling itself on the Oscars and was even covered by the Malaysian terrestial TV channel NTV7.

Kenny Sia, who won Best Entertainment Blog, leads the Blog-Rat Pack, with his personal blog rated as the no. 1 blog in Malaysia by the global blog ranking service Technorati. He has become a celebrity through his blog which then launched him into other high-profile roles eg he was invited to be a panellist on the Malaysian X Factor like web TV show, Malaysian Dream Girls, alongside other A list celebrities. He has been named as one of the “Top 20 under 40” influential people in Malaysia by print magazine KLUE.

Nuffnang continues to play the role of star maker with its Project Alpha web TV series, which is “the first Online TV Show unveiling the real faces behind Malaysia’s Top Bloggers”. According to the blurb, “The show will take audience into various sneak peeks of bloggers’ lives, who they are, how they live, what makes them tick and where they derive their inspiration to capture the attention and interests of millions of online readers on a daily basis. The show will also try to uncover their darkest secrets which they keep hidden from their readers.” Kenny was one of the stars in Season One and the measure of the show’s success is that Season Two is now underway.

So Malaysians may not be reading books but they certainly seem to be reading blogs. My take on the rise of celebrity bloggers there is that bloggers connect with Malaysians as Malaysians. There’s no attempt to polish their English or to write in a literary way - they just write in their own voices, as Malaysians, and that is what gives them a strong connection with their readers. Their fans identify with the bloggers - their sense of humour which is typically Malaysian, their interests, their daily lives. In contrast, novels as we know them today are really a Western art form, dominated by native English speakers from the UK and US, with prizes created in the West catering to a Western taste. The West defines what literature should be. So for Malaysian writers trying to break in to that field, it is bound to be much more challenging than for writers who are comfortable working within those defined parameters. Similarly, for Malaysian readers, it can be challenging to sit down for hours on end reading about stories and people that do not speak to you or even have you in mind as an audience written by people who don’t have any real connection or feel for what your experiences might be. In my view, it’s not surprising then that bloggers have taken hold of the Malaysian imagination in such a big way.

The other thing is that there is Nuffnang taking a very active role in making the blogging stars. They are an ad/ PR agency matching blue chip global brands such as Sony, Adidas and the like with bloggers as a way of marketing those brands. There’s money in them thar blogs, so to speak. I’m not aware of any similar sort of business taking an interest in writers and in fact, the general refrain I hear (and not just from Malaysian publishers and writers but globally) is, there’s no money in books.

Here is a trailer for Project Alpha Season One:

So, is blogging becoming the new art form for Malaysians? Are the bloggerati the new literati? Should the rest of the world take the cue from Malaysian bloggers and start recognising and celebrating bloggers as the new influencers and new creatives for today’s generation?

What do you think? Have I missed something in my outline of Malaysian writers as the poor relations of Malaysian bloggers? Please let me know, especially if you have personal experience of the writing and/ or blogging scene in Malaysia.

Photos: Sharon Bakar, from her online page
Kenny Sia, thanks to KLUE

When I was younger, Doris Day’s music was always considered by the “cool” crowd, sickly sweet, sentimental and suitable only for mums and grannies. Her persona didn’t help - golden blonde, perky, wholesome and virginal even while playing opposite Rock Hudson in those risque and cheeky rom coms of the ’50s. You were not supposed to be a Doris Day fan if you were an aspiring intellectual back in the rough, tough ’80s.

But now that I’ve given up being pretentious, I can shout it out loud to the golden daffodils and whoever else might be listening: Once I had a secret love… and it was Doris Day.

As it turns out, I’m not the only one. The new musical about her life, Sentimental Journey, was packed the other night with Doris Day fans - mums and grannies, gay boys and us. The thing is, though, the mums are now women my age as opposed to women my mother’s age as they would have been back in my youth! It looked like they had all come for a girls’ night out, leaving hubby home with the kids - there were gaggles of them, singing and swaying along to the songs.

Like Mama Mia and other recent musicals created around pop songs, Doris’s songs were strung together like fairy lights along the narrative chain. They came every few minutes, taking us from her birth as Doris Kappelhoff in Cincinnatti, Ohio to her present day retirement in Carmel, California. While this “and then” form of narrative thrust did not make very good drama, there was hardly ever a pause between songs so you could just give in to the sway and caress of the songs. Sally Hughes, in the lead role, has Doris’s perky athletic build and approximates her crooning style of singing to a tee. The rest of the cast of four played all the other different characters with gusto and somehow managed to give the impression of a cast of hundreds! And they all did a variety of American accents pretty well. By the time Doris appeared in her Calamity Jane outfit and drove a wagon round the aisles, whip cracking away, the crowd was in heaven, gasping in delight at her outfit, clapping and yee-ha-ing away to the song…

I have to tell you about the theatre, too, which I think contributed to the lively, relaxed atmosphere. Usually, when you go to a show in London, you stick to the group or couple you’ve come with. But this evening, we found ourselves chatting to a number of people and got the sense that others were also making new friends. The Wilton Music Hall is the oldest music hall in the world. Built in the 1850s, it saw vaudeville style shows, classical music, opera and variety acts as well as the first can-can act in Victorian times. Over the years, it was a Methodist mission hall and a rag warehouse before being taken over by a charitable trust whose main objective is to restore it to its former glory. And it really does need restoring. The walls are peeling and decrepit and the decorative carvings are faded and chipped. There was a slightly Gothic air because of this in spite of the bright lights and cheerful crowd. And that was all part of the magical charm of the evening. Many people were here as much to experience the music hall as much as for the show itself!

Sentimental Journey is on at the Wilton Music Hall until Sunday 04 April 2010.

Photos:
Doris Day, thanks to Little Blog Too
Poster, thanks to Wilton Music Hall website
Wilton Music Hall, thanks to Tower Hamlets Archive, via NZorgan.com

These days, my hearing ain’t what it used to be - especially when it comes to lyrics of pop songs. This video illustrates hilariously what can become of beautifully crafted lyrics when misheard by an old biddy like me.

Take it away, Joe Cocker…