grrrl

Girls | FOR NO ONE from FOR NO ONE on Vimeo.
See Hannah Hunt with her unworldly beauty in this Girls' video, Honey Bunny. Also, in Ryan lynch's side project, Dominant Legs. "Grrrl" playlist on my iPod

the best. review. ever

ever heard of twilight? the chain that gives vampire a bad name? read the review of its latest sequel here.

"Women want to be eternally worshipped by supernatural forces that fight over them while overdosing on praise from this world and the next. Men just want to get boned by sluts"

today was lovely, watched movies, played some music, blogged, re-blogged, blog-hopping. tomorrow we shall work to pay for days like today. le sigh.

eating animals

I have never been a huge (cow, pork, veal) meat eater. When my companion chose veal or rib eye steak, I’d prefer fish or chicken. Meat is hard to chew and personally I think it doesn’t taste as good as what most people say. Maybe this taste culture is because how my family eats. Coming from a near beach area in Flores, dad always, always chooses fish over any meat any time. He says fish is more healthy. I am not saying that this kind of habit is more superior. Sometimes I find him weird, because he would eat green bean porridge with rice. Yes, meshed in one plate. And, if the choices are between stewed carrot and fried fish, he’d go for stewed carrot. Ew!

One day, while waiting for my flight home in Changi, I bought two books: Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Eating Animals” and “The East, The West, and Sex: A History of Sexual Encounters” by Richard Bernstein. The first chapter of the latter book is “The Whole world as the White Man's Brothel. This book is more interesting, I thought. Moreover, there are several girl friends in my mind whom I’d like to discuss the book with (cough, sisie, cough...astrid k...cough). I’m used to pending my gratification for greater good, so I read the (literally) green book first.

Turns out, Foer has been messing up with my mind for the past week. The description is so vulgar and comes from different point of views (including from the owners of factory farmers). I eat animals (meat and fish), I’ve read the book, exposed to the facts and reasoning. It is foolish if you don’t change a bit after you know the facts. They say, you can wake a person up from his sleep with loud voice, but you can’t wake a person who is pretending to be asleep. 

During the past week, I talked to different people about eating animals, this is what they said: 

Me : Poor cow

X : It’s legal and excusable by the bible and quran to kill animals for food

Me : ...(Describing how factory farms operate)

X : It’s in America. In Indonesia, we treat animals better and with less chemical, thus we have thinner birds and cows.

Me : As an animal lover and almost self-acclaimed environmentalist, you should read this book

X (who has four pets) : No no no, please...

Me : Before you eat all that turkeys in thanksgiving, maybe you wanna read this

X : No thanks, I enjoy eating meat too much, I don’t want to ruin my Thanksgiving day. 

It is very hard to talk about it. It is easier to talk about feminism or politics to people. Foer says, it requires an elimination of taste memory, then we can constrain ourselves from eating (too much) animals. We defend our pleasure for taste so hard, we close our eyes how painful and cruel the process is for the animals.

Maybe I’m still in euphoric days. But I hope in the future I could care a bit about how things come to my plate. This includes food, clothes, equipments, anything I consume. But, wouldn’t life be hard if you have to think about ALL those things? And once I said, “If you oppose Nike but you’re still smoking near passive smokers, isn’t it contradictive?”

sex trade

"The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo", firstly read the novel because of its inevitable popularity, especially after the death of its author, Stieg Larsson. God bless his girlfriend and father who disputed Stieg Larsson's fortune.  A friend once declined to see the movie because she saw couples of people read the book in the same NYC metro. However, I joined the mass and bought the book. It was such a page turner then I bought the second title "The Girl Who Played with Fire" for my kindle. The second book is about trafficking, and found this quotation very true, on sex trade: "..Nor is there any other form of criminality in which social acceptance is so great, or which society does so little to prevent."

I talked to several guy friends,  and some of them admitted they visited Alexis at least once in the last five years (that's what they said). You could also ask your friends, have they used prostitutes, ever, in their life. Add that with what they call "entertaining clients" in business and government deals. Do they use women? There are a big chance that the women are trafficked, because, like what I remember from one seminar, "Nobody wakes up in the morning and decides that they want to be a prostitute."

I believe...

...that the dots will connect.

java uber alles

Tamansari







Used to be a waterspring, water surrounded leisure palace for the first Sultan of Jogjakarta. He would sit on top of the tower to see his concubines chat, giggle, having a bath (voyeuristic much?). Sultan used "kenthil" flower to be thrown to one (or two, or three, or more, one will never know) of his mistresses as a cue that she's chosen for that night. The beds, the guide showed, were fixed and built on top of a flowing river, a natural air conditioner. Other beds had fireplace below them to keep the beds warm. Very rustic, Tamansari that you see today is a reconstruction from 1990s, imagination of the real one.

Today's function: tourist attraction, playing field for the local kids, home of the first cyber RT (RT 36 Tamansari) in Indonesia; it has wi-fi for the whole neighborhood, also video clip and pre wedding shooting location (err...among Bondan Prakoso and Darwis Triadi's favorite).


Ullen Sentalu







No doubt, the best museum in Indonesia. Lesson learned: leave museum and its maintenance to private owners. Also, there's a big chance that ladies will have a new hero after visiting Siti Nurul Kusumawardhani a.k.a the Ideal Princess' room.


Taman Pintar







Have you ever cursed the non-existence of public place in Jakarta? Too much malls? You'll curse even more knowing Jogja has Taman Pintar and Bandung has Taman Lalu Lintas.


Beukenhof Restaurant in Ullen Sentalu and Via Via Cafe in Prawirotaman Street (Jogja's Jalan Jaksa)






Sendangsono







According to Santi Nuri, this is where they got high in "3 Hari Untuk Selamanya" (Playing Float on the background).

Mom said, she almost married another man, and not my father. She would say, "If I had married that man, you wouldn't exist in this world. How would you feel?". How could I feel if I were not born? If I were not born, would I still be exist? It would be funny though if half of my personality from mum comes in the kid she would've had, if she had married that man. And half of my personality is in a waiting room somewhere in the solar system.

Somebody asked,

"Is it okay to have an affair with a married person as long as his/her spouse doesn’t know?"

I answered,

"Is it okay to corrupt your customers’ money as long as they don’t notice?"

Why do you need other people to perceive something in order to determine the value of your act?

new level of being non-judgmental

Real life dinner conversation tonight:

Me : She's a lesbian
X : No, she's not
Me : She has a girlfriend
X : For someone who believes in tolerance, you're pretty judgmental
Me : Whaddayamean? That she's experimenting?
X : Of course. You cannot say a girl who has a girlfriend is a lesbian. Because, you'll never know.
Me : Errr...

grey hunts

Pouring and roaring. The glistening street is now grey and clandestine. It roars in shriek, choked by their asphalt droplets. Demonstration flags are now damp, voices are low and vamped. Yesterday I inhaled black monoxide from an Isuzu Panther. For god’s sake, if you’re rich enough to buy a car, why do you even buy a dirty Panther? Yesterday, I inhaled urine smell. So vaporous it floated. I breathed with heatwaves from bridge to bridge. I listened to tired guitar songs from a daughter in a bus. My eyes were fed with orange peels littered by a man. The country is doomed. It crucifixes our senses with garbage. But then, when you have money, like how I did last night, I inhaled the aroma of frozen irish mochacino with shaved bland chocolate. I fed my ears with beautiful love story from the key-smith man. It was so transcendent, he said, comfort is an understatement. Street as a common product is now stale, air does not do us fair. But stories are told and we absorb, then buds of little joy unfold.

easy, breezy, beachy

When everything is f***ed up, all I need is good music. Here's my good music, March 2.0.11 version

Dominant Legs - "About My Girl"



Little Joy - "Next Time Around"

Little Joy is Fabrizio Moretti (The Strokes drummer)'s side project together with Los Hermanos singer/guitarist, Rodrigo Amarante, and Binki Shapiro.

March for Women

I took the pics when I visited Centre Pompidou

Ohhchannel

I am reading “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac. I bought the Penguin edition because it is cheap. But boy, ain’t that tapestry of roadtrips is too crowded to be squeezed into 200 something pages! Luckily, my determination is sheer because of this muy importante reason: it’s Johnny Depp’s favorite book (or one of). So, I’m pretty curious, what did he see from this book (ahem!).

Memang gw agak telat ya melihat keseksian si Johnny Depp. Masak baru sadarnya tahun 2011, ini gimana sih Ovi? Thanks to The Doors documentary: “When You’re Strange” that made scream (inside the theatre, inside my heart): ‘Yaouwloh, naratornya siapa sih ini? Kok seksi sekali suaranya! Bahkan suaranya bisa ekting.’ Since then (in only two months), I’ve seen almost all Johnny Depp’s movies which I usually avoided in the past.

Back to “On the Road”. The lead character, Sal Paradise decided to go on a roadtrip across America with Dean Moriarty. The reason said Sal, ” …was not only because I was a writer and needed new experiences but because somehow, in spite of differences in character, he reminded me of some long-lost brother.” (quotation from page 13. Ketauan deh bacanya baru dikiitt).

The quotation rings a bell. I have a friend whom I usually see because s/he reminds me of my (for example) ex or someone I like or another friend that I seldom see. So, meeting her/him is not actually to meet that person. Rather, to reminisce other people. Intinya, gak ketemu orangnya gapapa deh yang penting dapet auranya. Kalo kata Jame, seperti menghibur diri dengan orang KW1. Snap!

A concrete example: my non-Chinese girl friend likes to go to North Jakarta to meet her Chinese friends. She enjoys meeting them, but somehow it reminds her of her Chinese gebetan yang tidak mungkin bersatu karena satu dan lain hal (alasan a la Pak Erte).

Do you have that kind of person in your life? Semacam channel atawa penghubung atawa cenayang atawa medium. You meet them because they are simply an extension of the one you actually aim to. This person usually is your mutual friend. Or, are you that person for somebody?


Ini dia biangnya, and it just won an award in Grammy 2011 for the Best Long Form Music Video


Johnny Depp reading Kerouac

Ohhcd

This is just a mandatory post so my archive will not lose February 2011 in its roll. Yes, I'm a bit obsessive like that.

Sometimes, you wanna throw bules out of this country

“Indonesian and logic do not correlate.”
“Why you guys pronounce vowels not like us, English speakers?”
“Indonesian girls always keep some pair of shoes under their office desks. Gee.”
“This superstitious thing called kerokan...”
“...and not to mention masuk angin. What incomprehensible crap is that?”
“You are dark, but yours is nice, unlike the negroes. You know, their palms have different color than their hands.”
“She told me that I gain weight yet still shoves me with her experimental cooking. Very Indonesian.”
"Spicy is not a taste. It's a sensation."
“You are exotic.” --> yang ini pengen gw lempar bukunya Edward Said.

character

“F*ck Valentine’s Day, Happy Chinese New Year” was the reddest sign in the hostel. A lady clad in bubbly thick black winter jacket sat down near a wide window. She sipped the tea out of the white cup. I drank their tea and it was all water, no bold flavor in that pity cup. But, she drank it well maybe because she put some sugar in it. She held a note and a pen, her hair was frizzy, ugly dirty blond updo-ed with black elastic. She looked at me and jotted something down. I glared at her, ‘Lady, what are you doing? Are you describing me and making a character out of me in your horrendous note?’ It was snowing outside and yes, people were attracted to put some black on their white. But, you don’t describe me lady, not with that curious eyes. I am not a character unless I grant you permission. I slurped what’s left in my cereal, made a bit of sound with the bowl and wooden table, and then gave her a hate stare.

Blessings and Shizz, etc.

Let blessings not be count
Though they come in pieces,
Only to make unevenness round
Be it on a naked man or Saint Mary’s kick
Warm womb or a thrown brick

Let blessings not be count
They’ll shock you bitter otherwise
A grand one astound
With a liquid of despise

Let blessings not be count
You’ll never get the exact amount
Coz shitty scatters like a fount,
You’ll be drown,
And you’ll never be found.

-the roller-coaster year, 2010-

What Do You Do?

This November, what do you do?



Look back grabbing frozen moments



Stand yellow on red pedestal



Refrain from passing through the red box

cont.

Blow songs recorded in the wind



My sour bubbles are cancerous yet marvelous



Bloat with soft rainbow balls



Stand on a height filled in my palms



Taste the blue and white cloud swirl



Sail to an island



Where we won’t be carcasses