Archive for the 'Culture & Society' Category

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

Christianity built some amazing churches and cathedrals in this country and it’s these places we tend to visit when we tour the UK. But the myths and legends of pre-Christian Britain are also fascinating, though sometimes overlooked. Traces of this mysterious time remain around the UK in the form of standing stones, the most famous of which is Stonehenge. I remember reading an excellent book Albion, a guide to legendary Britain which evoked this mythological landscape brilliantly. Unfortunately, this title is out of print but you could try The Enchanted Land: Myths and Legends of Britain’s Landscape
- its blurb says: “Ancient folklore is bursting with tales of the land; legends revolving around its hills and mountains, caves and hollows, and springs and wells. Such stories tell of how these physical features first came into being - be it to hide an errant knight or the direct result of a local giant’s feral rage. These tales add a richness and depth to local history throughout the land, and the repeated appearances of monsters, fairies, ogres and spirits make them a delight for all ages.”

These ancient customs and beliefs went underground for 2,000 years when Christianity came to dominate and the people who practiced the old ways of worship came to be known as pagans. The word pagan is derived from the Latin paganus, meaning country dweller but somehow became associated with all who were non-Christians, with an implied negative meaning.

Now, it looks like more and more people in the West are turning back to the ancient animist religion, drawn by its focus on nature and the earth and all its bounties, according to this BBC report:

My favourite legend, I think, is the story that brings together Christianity and the ancient pagan religion at one of the most sacred spots of ancient Britain, Glastonbury. Joseph of Arimathea is supposed to have brought the young boy Jesus to the UK. After the crucifixion, Joseph apparently brought the Holy Grail back to Glastonbury and buried it there. In pre-Christian folklore, Glastonbury is Avalon, and the entrance to the Underworld. Glastonbury is also bound together with Arthur , a pre-Christian mythic hero who was Christianised into the one we know today with the round table and the knights, and the quest of the Holy Grail (a magic cauldron in the ancient myth). It’s all a bit of a muddle but that’s part of it’s fascination for me - the themes of a messianic figure, resurrection and return and a quest for a holy vessel blur across pagan and Christian boundaries and underline for me our very human need for spiritual renewal whatever religous form that need ultimately takes.

I had my hair tidied up yesterday and it looks much chic-er than the rather lanky, unkempt look I’d been sporting in the last few weeks until I managed to find the time for the trim. I’m told it’s sort of Demi Moore-ish (in the movie Ghost) so I’m quite pleased.

But if you look at it another way, it’s possibly also John, Paul, George and Ringo-ish. We went to the Beatles to Bowie exhibition today at the National Portrait Gallery and I felt a little bit self-conscious as I gazed at the photos of the Fab Four in their early days, while my own reflection from the glass frame gazed back at me. I’ve got a mop top, yeah, yeah, yeah…

It was fascinating to see their evolution over the 9 years or so of the 1960s, starting off with their mop top look and ending with lanky hair, beards and Yoko on the threshold of the 1970s. They were a band for only around a decade - and what a decade! - but they have come to dominate pop music in an iconic way even now almost fifty years after they first formed.

Bowie crops up from time to time over that decade, looking clean cut and non-descript for the most part. He only comes into his own in 1969 with Space Oddity and the uniquely odd persona of Ziggy Stardust. With him, the weird and wonderful 70s had begun!

The 70s were not my era - for hair or anything else. I couldn’t carry off long-ish hippy hair - it just looked oily and manky, draped down either side of my face. It was also they decade when I was a teenager. Ugh. I could do without re-living the pimples and moods…

But then I have to say, I’m glad I wasn’t a grown woman in the 60s - all the female pop icons of that time had impossibly feminine hair: Dusty Springfied with her bouffant beehive, some like Lulu with curved helmet like page boys, others with long Rapunzel tresses. Only Twiggy had short hair - and even shorter dresses!

I love my short mop top hair - so, hurray for the modern day and Demi Moore who made it OK for us girls to look like the Beatles!

Photo: of Demi Moore from hairfinder.com, with thanks
Photo: of The Beatles from the exhibition website, with thanks

True to the fusion nature of this blog, after the last two Mondays sharing the bizarre world of Western opera, today I wanted to change gear to a more serious note and show this moving documentary about the dying art of Chinese Opera - just managing to keep alive in no other place than my homeland Malaysia.

The documentary summary says it all: “Chinese opera in Malaysia face another brink of extinction, not by heavenly super powers but simply by the lack of interest in the young generations to learn and explore the art. We meet a few of the very last Cantonese opera singers left in Penang and learn what makes them pursue and love the art and why they have accepted the fact that they might very well have to take the art with them to the grave.”

I regret to admit it but I suppose people like me are part of the problem. We are educated in Western music and arts along with other aspects of our schooling over here in Europe and lack exposure to Eastern styles of creative expression so start to drift away from our cultural heritage at an early age. Then later on, we find the tones and harmonies of Chinese music strange to our ears - and performances are rare or difficult to locate. I’m hoping that an aspect of globalisation is that Asian arts are rising in international prominence: think of “Farewell My Concubine”, the Monkey myths that have been made into series and dramas and also the Peking Opera making inroads into the West. China itself is increasingly influential globally in terms of the economy - and no doubt, this will lead to its cultural influence widening its reach, too. With social media and the internet as well playing their part in disseminating documentaries like this one and bringing Chinese opera and arts to a new online audience, I’m optimistic that Eastern culture will continue to thrive.

We’re trying to grow garlic in our back garden as fast as we can. Apparently, it’s the new way to make a mint (ha ha!) these days in China and if we could just build up enough tonnage of the stinky stuff, we could ship this new white gold across the globe for millions. Sky News reports that there is a belief amongst the Chinese that garlic can prevent swine flu and prices for the bulb have shot through the roof as a result. People are hoarding it as well, making the commodity even scarcer and thereby driving up prices even more.

You can also find out more via the following news report from New Tang Dynasty TV below:

This Garlic Fever makes me think of the Tulip Fever that gripped the Netherlands 400 years ago when the craze for tulips led to an overheated market in tulip futures and a single bulb exchanged hands for the price of a house! I blogged about a terrific book on that subject Tulipomania last year. Back in the 1600s, the tulip market collapsed one afternoon when a trader got up to sell and was met by a deathly silence as no-one responded to buy - within moments, everyone was selling and by the end of the afternoon, the fortunes of the traders and their investors had vanished.

So, come on, little garlic bulbs in the garden, hurry up and grow - we’d like to cash you guys in before the market collapses….!

Photo: from my own collection

My cousin Joanne is CEO of the Clean Air Network (CAN) in Hong Kong, an independent NGO that encourages the public to speak out about the health impacts of air pollution. She sent me CAN video above via Facebook the other day. It doesn’t pull its punches and made me feel asthmatic even just watching it!

I blogged last week about the idyllic fake English town, Thames Town, being built outside Shanghai to recreate for the aspiring Chinese middle classes the loveliness of an English market town. The purpose seems to be to escape from “loud and dirty Shanghai” to this fantasy of an English way of life. The clean air issues for the congested island of Hong Kong are no doubt repeated in the megacity that is Shanghai, with its population of over 8 million people. In fact, clean air is a vital issue for all cities around the world, not just in China. It seems to me that the answer to the hustle and bustle and dirt of Asian cities is not escape to an idealised suburban sprawl (which actually adds to the problem by adding more cars and concrete to the setting) but to address the noise, congestion and dirt by implementing sustainable policies.

Here in the UK, the hot topics of the century (pun intended!) are climate change and sustainable communities. There is a huge public drive towards clean energy, recycling, minimising our carbon footprint and livable neighbourhoods and cities. We aspire towards walkable environments, pavement cafes (weather permitting!), neighbourliness and community, safety and good health for all - places that people want to live in and can thrive in. Sure, there’s a long way to go in many parts of the country but the journey has started and even dirty old London has electric buses, electric cars and campaigns to encourage more bicycling and walking; recycling schemes; windmills on top of some buildings; green roofs and more.

So for Hong Kong, Shanghai and any other city in the world whether it’s London, New York or my hometown of Kuala Lumpur, I hope very much that sustainability is or will become part of the DNA of their evolution. With people like my cousin Joanne (whom I’m very proud of, by the way) taking a lead in one such factor for sustainability in a major Asian city - and I am sure there are many other passionate advocates for livable cities around the world - I am optimistic for the future.

Looking at the images in the slideshow above (taken by British documentary photographer Dave Wyatt), you’d think they were snaps of a quaint English market town or a Dutch or German village. And you’d be wrong. The photos were taken in China. Shanghai, in fact.

Shanghai?

But where are the pagodas and curly slate roofs, rounded doorways, bright red paint and lavish dragons of old Shanghai? Or even the imposing, megalithic skyscrapers and roaring highways of new Shanghai, proclaiming here is a modern city of the East?

Well, this is Thames Town China. Its website says, “Loud, dirty Shanghai seems a far cry from the yew and plane- lined avenues and cobbled pedestrian-friendly streets of ThamesTown. Here the broad sun-hats of the Chinese workers putting the finishing touches to the development are the only indication that you are on the outskirts of China’s biggest city. Not in a posh commuter town in the stockbroker belt of a British city.”

The blurb goes on: “Residents can sip their bitter in a traditional English pub, “The Thames Town”, as children scamper across the medieval market square to a bilingual school, while red-brick warehouses form a commercial area on the waterfront. Developers are targeting British companies such as Tesco and Sainsbury to add to the authentic high-street feel so the town’s expected 10,000 residents can shop in true British style. There are sporting facilities and everything a town of its size should have.”

This is apparently one of nine towns in this area modelled on European market towns, including Dutch Town, German New Town, Nordic Town and Italian Town (with Venetian style canals!). Unnervingly, the website declares proudly that German New Town, was designed by Albert Speer, the son of Hitler’s favourite architect….

I find it curious that the aspirations of the rising Chinese middle classes would be to live in a mock-European setting rather than in surroundings inspired by their own heritage and perhaps re-modelled for the 21st century. I could understand the desire to live in modern houses with all modern comforts and facilities but it’s the recreation of Victorian or Tudor houses that are then modernized with fake modernized medieval streets that is odd in my mind. There is also the fantasy of what England is - or perhaps should be - like that seems straight out of an Enid Blyton book: lovely local colour down at the pub while The Famous Five and Secret Seven scamper safely in the market square.

Meanwhile, in the real England, Victorian terraced houses are pokey and dark, Tudor houses are impossible to upkeep because of Grade II listing, youths are knived outside pubs, others vomit and piss in the street on a Saturday night, the homeless sleep in the streets and cars clog up the market square and medieval streets.

Hmm, maybe we in the UK should all move over to China to the sanitized version of our towns…!

And perhaps that’s the point of these fake places. People can live the idyllic lives they imagine in “exotic” surroundings, without ever leaving home and without ever having to deal with the real natives of those “exotic” settings. Who needs reality when these days, money can buy you your dreams…

But having said all that from the cynical Brit part of me, being an Enid Blyton fan, there’s a part of me that fancies living in a fantasy version of Old Blighty! What about you? Would you like to live in Thames Town or Italian Town? Or what about if an Old Shanghai Town were to be built next to Surbiton just outside the real London?

Slideshow photos: thanks to DaveWyatt on flickr.com

One of the most interesting things about living in London is that history is all around us - often going back hundreds if not thousands of years. But I often tend to forget that history isn’t just about the great national monuments like Nelson’s Column or the London Wall and other tourist attractions. The suburb I live in in South London goes back to medieval times, I believe, though there are no visible remains of the Dulwich of that period. The current “settlement” arose in its present form in the Victorian times, created by developers out of fields and farmland for wealthy London businessmen and merchants who wanted to retire out of the smog-filled city to the countryside.

How do I know all this?

Dulwich has the good fortune to have a very knowledgeable local historian, Brian Green, who has written a number of books about the area when he’s not busy running the local art shop/ stationers. He gave a talk last weekend at the Dulwich Picture Gallery on Victorian Dulwich, which has changed the way I look at my little world around my house.

I tend to stride purposefully from home to the train station or bus stop and back again or hurry along to the local shops, not noticing much around me other than that I’m in a pleasant leafy suburb. After Brian’s talk and his brilliant collection of photographs ranging from fields and muddy lanes and a few grand Georgian houses (pre-1850s) to horse-and-buggies along the high street (late 1800s) and architectural details of terraced and semi-detached houses (as they are in the present day), I find myself looking at the houses and streets around me as if I were a tourist, ticking off in my head the various points he had highlighted for us. For example: ah, yes, there’s a Florentine style turret. And here’s a Victorian Gothic arch. There’s some Swiss hanging droplets. And some plaster heads and carved foliage - inspired by the Doge’s Palace in Venice.

These details were made available by builders in their catalogues to independent housing speculators looking to make a buck. The speculators developed clusters of houses (with a minimum of 6 houses per site) back in the late 1800s as an economic upturn fuelled a Victorian “buy to let” market. Aimed at the up and coming middle class family, the terraced houses in East Dulwich aspired to grandness within a modest budget.

But the market floundered as uptake of the properties did not meet initial expectations. The reason? Public transport to Dulwich was practically non-existent so the clerks and office workers targetted by the speculators didn’t come in their droves as hoped. It was only some decades later when the commuter railway was built in the wake of the Crystal Palace exhibition complex that this part of South London revived.

These days, we’re still cut off from the tube and it’s a hassle to get to and from London on the trains, with their ever reducing timetables, and on the buses, stuck in traffic endlessly along the Walworth Road. That’s the thing about Dulwich that we moan about - but it is also the thing that keeps this leafy “village” still village-like. So, while the Dulwich of today is home to both the wealthy and not so wealthy, at the end of our long days of slog in the smog-filled city we can still all enjoy feeling as if we’ve retired to the country for the night!

Photo of Lordship Lane: with thanks from ideal-homes.org.uk
Photo of Brian Green and me: my own collection

There’s been a lot of focus on blogging for business recently on this blog, largely due to the research I’ve been doing in the last couple of years for my business book, International Communications Strategy, so it’s nice to be reminded that most of the 170 million blogs out there are by ordinary people writing about their daily lives and personal feelings. It was the We Feel Fine project that was the big reminder - it’s a project led by computer scientist, Jonathan Harris, that explores “human emotion on a global scale” by harvesting emotions expressed on blogs whenever the words “I feel…” are found.

The emotions are gathered and sorted in different ways and shown in six “movements” - madness, murmurs, montage, mobs, metrics and mounds - which are essentially different visualisations of the data. You can see good feelings and bad feelings as well as the geographic location, age and gender of the person expressing those feelings. The project’s website suggests that this living artwork can offer specific answers to questions like: “Do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest?”

You need to launch an applet - which can take up to 20 seconds to load - in order to experience this amazing artwork. Click on the image below and it should take you to the We Feel Fine page: to launch the applet from there, click on the last sentence of the first paragraph (”We Feel Fine is divided into six discrete movements, each illuminating a different aspect of the chosen population. These movements are represented in the We Feel Fine applet.”)

I love the way the bubble of feelings cluster round the mouse cursor when you click on the screen in Madness - if you hover it over one of the bubbles, it will show you the location of the feeling and a brief idea of what the feeling is.

Then in Murmurs, you can see each latest feeling expressed somewhere out there in the world appear on the screen and if you click on the phrase, you’ll be taken to the blog. So “i feel so detached from everything i used to stand for” takes me to a blog post You Are My Brand Of Heroin - tonight is the night to let it go by xshadowsoflovex.

So how does this artwork make me feel? I feel more connected with the millions of people out there in the world.