What if nothing is as complicated as this?

Scattered Photos in my Phone #1

  

One of my Chinese friends whose childhood was spent with government coupons for food and other basic staples said, he would never queue for food. Agreed. But, this is my one significant food queue last year: The Breakfast Club, SoHo. Fortunately, d**n good breakfast food. We ordered pancake, breakfast burritos, the full monty, and their coffee. Meanwhile, their interior directly brings you back to Breakfast Club, the movie (1985), with late 80's and 90's trinkets on the wall. I have 90's as the worst decade with visual image in my memory, but somehow it creates comfort. I am currently listening to 311's Amber in a loop and the song describes the restaurant's vibe: as simple as Ska beats coupled with wooden tables and stools, messy, colourful mementos.

Discipline and Punishment 2.0

What do three or four stars in Goodreads or Rotten Tomatoes tell you? Do you buy rating system? Well, to point out the obvious, of course it helps you to get a feel of something, whether the product lives up to the name. For example, Haruki Maurakami’s The Strange Library may sells well due to its author’s fame and the fact that most Strange Library books are sealed with plastics in bookstores so you cannot peek at how disappointing the book is. (I am not a Murakami fan. I am not disappointed, but it is disappointing for his fans).  

I never buy public ratings for books, movies, restaurants, because I have peculiar judgments.  But, what if the ratings are related to safety? For example, Uber taxi app that will automatically pop up the driver’s rating when you are ordering a car. Well, I kinda trust this. Like I trust airbnb’s rating. So, I do not negate the use of rating in this sense. Aside from its functions, however, it itches me how rating scrutinizes service provider to influxes of users’ opinions. But, don’t all businesses work like this? When I saw the Uber taxi rating, I imagined what if I got rated on-line or publicly for every single task I got in my workplace. With my face and name in it. I wouldn’t like it. Then, why do I like the Uber taxi rating?

One day, I participated in this workshop. Their objective is to practice how to be innovative social problem owners and to design the results into prototypes. The people are great. Most of the participants and mentors are doers, practitioners, and they are used to get requests from clients to design their products based on user’s experience so it will satisfy the users, us, those who could buy, those who make the rules and what is good & not. The participants were divided into several groups. We then got couple of days to define a social problem that we would solve, one day for research and prototype designing, and one day to finish our prototypes.

The teams were very creative. Several social problems they chose are: the lacks of Jakarta waste management, Jakarta government’s plan to manage informal food vendors that causes most of the vendors cannot sell from their usual spots, how to locate our lost items, etc. Interestingly, the solutions to most of the problems are to make the elements visible. For example, for the “lost items” problem, they would like to put something that could be detected and located with your devices (obviously). Another example is to list, rate, and locate the food vendors so we could detect where they are since they will be strolling around, not in a fixed area. Look, both people and object could be located!

No one objected when rating food vendors. However, when a group proposed an interactive device in museum space that could detect which paintings that you like, people suddenly felt uncomfortable. Why? Isn’t the idea the same? To instantly detect and announce what you like, to cut social interactions to infer your favorites, to cut the context why people like something at that particular time, etc? Why do we put CCTV for our babysitters and watch it from our iPad in the office, in non-challant manner, while we do not like being observed? Is it a matter of different social classes?

I could get the idea of Airbnb and Couchsurfing, for example, because the rating is reciprocal. With food vendors, babysitters, etc. it is not reciprocal. Of course, they could give their own “ratings” of the users or employers through words of mouth or other tactics. But, doesn’t it bother you just a bit to see how technology becomes more and more intrusive rather than liberating? If you have any examples of non-intrusive technology or product design, please let me know (I will browse IDEO site as well). On the other hand, we could argue, through all of the money they get from good rating, technology could be a liberating tool to succeed, and it gives a “measurable” steps: more stars mean more customers (?). 

Aside from the benefits for you and for the service provider, what do you feel when you give out stars on the people we could lurk at and decide their narrative of quality for public? Practicing our minor power at least? Surveiller et Punir, Discipline and Punishment 2.0.

    

She tries to give a confusing smile as she likes Murakami but hates this book (or is it because she is cold from Edinburgh weather?) Where are the stars to be clicked? Would be easier than figuring out this puzzling smile! :) 

Kafka’s Remarkable Letter to His Abusive and Narcissistic Father (from Brainpickings)

In Indonesia, we consider family is the ultimate nuclear group where children could find refuge and support. We also assume that seniors would be taken care of the children, and babies from young family will easily find support from the grandparents, if not from babysitters. Our social policy also hinges toward the assumption that every individual has a familial safety net. When that's not always the case. With this thought, we tend to be dismissal with policies that could cover individual's interest. We do not imagine a differently-abled person or a senior walks out of their home alone. There is no such thing! Since we assume they have family. We assume they have a nice, decent, non-abusive family. Hence, we do not create infrastructure for individual people. Instead, we promote that marriage will give the solution for better life (since you'll have a spouse and children who take care of you). We also glorify communal value, when not all people feel comfortable in social bonding. Meanwhile, I have always believed that detachment from social life is important as well, to respect individual thought, privacy, and empowerment. 

Brainpicking just shared Kafka's letter to his abusive and narcissistic father. Good entry to de-romanticize family.  Not all family is nice and glam as our new order Posyandu ad. The spectrum of "abusive" is not necessarily physical, but broader and more delicate than that, as what Kafka wrote below:

"To you the matter always seemed very simple, at least in so far as you talked about it in front of me, and indiscriminately in front of many other people. It looked to you more or less as follows: you have worked hard all your life, have sacrificed everything for your children, above all for me, consequently I have lived high and handsome, have been completely at liberty to learn whatever I wanted, and have had no cause for material worries, which means worries of any kind at all. You have not expected any gratitude for this, knowing what “children’s gratitude” is like, but have expected at least some sort of obligingness, some sign of sympathy. Instead I have always hidden from you, in my room, among my books, with crazy friends, or with extravagant ideas… If you sum up your judgment of me, the result you get is that, although you don’t charge me with anything downright improper or wicked (with the exception perhaps of my latest marriage plan), you do charge me with coldness, estrangement, and ingratitude. And, what is more, you charge me with it in such a way as to make it seem my fault, as though I might have been able, with something like a touch on the steering wheel, to make everything quite different, while you aren’t in the slightest to blame, unless it be for having been too good to me.

This, your usual way of representing it, I regard as accurate only in so far as I too believe you are entirely blameless in the matter of our estrangement. But I am equally entirely blameless. If I could get you to acknowledge this, then what would be possible is — not, I think, a new life, we are both much too old for that — but still, a kind of peace; no cessation, but still, a diminution of your unceasing reproaches."

#NoRaisins

One Week Before the Tropics: Sunday

In one week, I will fly back home to the country with thousand suns. Winter, meanwhile, is approaching here in Edinburgh. I already forgot how cold Scotland could be. I had packed my winter jackets and boots aside, but alas, I reached in and took them out. On Sunday, I strolled around my favorite path to Stockbridge. This is a lovely and charming alley with houses, except they feel like a back alley (or is it?). The yellow car and few pastel houses gives a hint that there are the front porches. Near to this alley, there is a street with independent galleries and vintage shops, also a male specialty grooming boutique (thank you capitalism for enlarging your market to bearded metro lumberjack who needs frequent aloe vera treatment, for pressuring them to groom, equal pressure for all genders. Amen). Emerging from this alley, you will emerge to the "main street" where the Stockbridge Sunday market is. However, the small stores, cafes, cheesemongers, bakeries, and arrays of charity shops on the street is also a pleasure for the wanderers.

For now, I wouldn't mind a SUEDE concert, Dent May gig, few feel good movies, or Carl Sagan's Contact

George Kimble in "Geography in the Middle Ages" wrote "The first medieval maps included only the rectilinear marking out of itineraries (performative indications chiefly concerning pilgrimages), along with the stops one was to make (cities which one was to pass through, spend the night in, pray, etc.) and distances calculated in hours or in days, that is, in terms of the time it would take to cover them on foot." Since we will not do what we are told, between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, the map became more autonomous. There is less Twedledee and Twedledum that gives you options how to operate from one place to another, they "simply" describes the places or dots. You are free to connect the dots HOWever you'd like.

But see, we do not like being free, or to ameliorate it, we turn the narration of spatial disposition to "informed choice". That's how TripAdvisor and Lonely Planet win. They separate narration of making space from the map and give you stories of how to appropriate space, JUST IN CASE you need it. 

More on maps: Thongchai Winichakul's "Siam Mapped: A History of the Goe-Body of a Nation", Collin Marshall's podcast: A conversation on ruins, maps, and the struggle for the future form of the city with Geoff Nicholson, author of "The Los Art of Walking", "Bleeding London", "Walking in Ruins", and "The City Under the Skin", and Michel De Certau's "The Practice of Everyday Life".

Me and You (Me)

I interpret this song as I talking to I when I'm down

On the Table

One of my favorite photo series in instagram is photos of food taken with flat angle, parallel to the table, which requires the photographer to stand up, on the floor. Or on a chair, if that should be the case. Asians, of course, used to be mocked for taking quotidian objects, ephemeral arrangement of food that is going to our stomach, and will be excreted anyway. But of course, like selfies, its value increased thanks to de Generes. And people may forget that van Gogh painted fruits. 

Well, if you also like to see photos of food from flat angle, Dinah Fried's new book Fictitious Dishes will elevate this pleasure by tingling your familiarity with classic literature. This is a cute and creative project that makes you think about the significance of food and drink description in toning a novel. 

For example, i just finished Kate Atkinson's "Life After Life". It is opened with German bakery scrumptiousness at almost the end of WWI, then it goes back to the home baked goods in an English countryside, scones with fresh cream, before the war. The next chapters contrast it with impoverished life in London during the war when Ursula (the protagonist) only had alcohol from her auntie's rustic, abandoned wine storage.

Anyone remembers Pramoedya's Minke who gets a package of nasi goreng and hot egg on a train, while he's "kidnapped" to be brought back to his father? Also, how the math genius Ms. Salander doesn't have time to eat but still Stig Larsson gives description of what she eats although it's almost nothing. Alright, but maybe the best description is live in Tarantiono's Inglourious Basterds, when Hans Landa chews that apfelstrudel. "Wait for the cream," he said patiently before eating it. 

Some of my favs:

On the side note, the last meals project is also a project to make food graphic by describing some of the famous death row inmates' last meal (pretty self-explanatory). What does last meals do? Is it to make death sentence more human or to see the inmates as humans? Does the last meal mediate our fear that the decision is irreversible thus making the inmate humans may remind us to carry the sentence humanely? Or the other way around, does giving them humane connection (good food, usually not provided daily in prison) makes us the representatives of better humans (the victims)? 

Let's save ourselves. Jump to the Mendl's cart! - Z to A

Dosen: Jadi, kamu liat itu ya film dokumenter yang namanya Star Wars
Saya:   Oke, Pak

*Pulang dan mencari film Star Wars di Youtube. Kok gak ada.
Ternyata saya salah mendengar. Judulnya Style Wars, sis.

Thirtieth

“Is this house haunted or is it just me?” asked my dear friend after seeing her socks lying down neatly on the carpet beside the bed. She did not remember taking it out last night. Looking at the chipped wall, elaborate carvings, stern wooden cupboards, this building did look old. In the name of Sherlock’s deduction, we just assumed the OCD friend took out her socks and put it nicely last night. I put out the red rosary from my mom, though. Putting in on the bed frame. 

I always opened the window few inches at night so in the morning the sunray would wake me up. However, today grey cloud hung in the horizon, raindrops ticked the window glass. Cole Porter’s Let’s Fall in Love from Midnight in Paris played from another friend’s laptop. He’s now lying down on the carpet waiting for us to rise. I liked Alanis Morissette's rendition in De-Lovely better.

We woke up pretty early this morning. For breakfast, we fixed English muffins with salmon, cream cheese, spinach, and poached eggs. The second course was banana pancake with topping choices of honey, baileys cream, vanilla cream, and Ben and Jerry’s chocolate fudge leftover. In the thirtieth of December morning, we talked about EndNote application, essays, scholarship monthly allowance, future jobs, basically as dull yet calming as the weather outside. Hot green tea then wrapped up our morning meal.

Christmas in the windy Edinburgh started with roast chicken, parsnip, and carrots deservingly. We messaged the chicken with olive, salt, black pepper, and stubbed it with rosemary and thyme. She & Him Christmas album for soundtrack. Dessert was a selection of assorted mint chocolate and baileys chocolate in red and green boxes. Nomad travelers brought them for gift in exchange for shelters. Chocolaty palate then washed down with mulled wine, Sunkist oranges, cinnamon stalks, star anises, sugar, apple cider, and other spices drenched and boiled in red wine. The best flavor of course the drips you got when you squeeze the boiled, swelled, drenched oranges after the last sip of mulled wine in the pot. This was a recipe to anxiety since wine will lull you instead of waking you up for midnight mass. That called for coffee. The Sumatran coffee package was just an inch away but I thought 30-minute power nap was enough for Christmas mass prep. I tended to fall asleep in masses. The night went away and Christmas morning arose with pink ribbon-tied package in front of my door, with ear-muffs inside. Nice surprise. Lunch was chicken leftovers stir-fried with rice with the girls. The road was silent and serene, like I am Legend scene. End of December was always dreary, weary. 

I like my rogue allure velvet fading through the day

From color block to reddish stain

I like it the best at the end of the day

It’s saturating bold not a pinkish plain

Dry flowers gleaming glory

It darkens, their petals crispy

They don’t come as mild

Agile, then give in to the wild

Their fragility blooms

In gory colored flakes

Their youth is not born

It protrudes

from brightness that fades

Few days ago I bumped into my ex-student. She had graduated from college, then I asked her, what did she do. She was working for a drug company, researching for the cure for cancer. Then, she asked me back. I said, I was working for this organization in which Sri Mulyani was the Managing Director. She frowned and asked, "Who's Sri Mulyani?".

If that had happened during our debating class, she would've been given plenty of homeworks. But considering what she did for a living, somehow general knowledge was no longer significant.

Androgynous Clothing

Whiteboard interview with Yvan Rodic

W :

Having traveled and observed so many places, could you explain what you see as the connection between the environment people live in and the way they dress?

Y :

Sure. Well beyond any trends, there is a deeper factor that expresses the culture. An extreme example would be Scandinavia and Latin America. In Scandinavia, the culture is a very equal society, so you would have women who earn as much as men; they have high positions; they’re in the government; they’re emancipated, etc. It translates into fashion that isn’t sexualized. It’s very common to have an androgynous type of fashion. For example, brands like Acne – most of the stuff they sell is almost possible for both girls and guys to wear it. Scandinavian fashion has this big thing where people want to look good, but they won’t necessarily show a lot of cleavage, be too sexy and so on. Fashion is an extension and expression of culture.

What I Remember

Opulent eggshell door, beige leather seats,

striped strap with small black pen blotch

Two Nici stuffed animals, a sheep and a squirrel

Grey and white squirrel with fair smooth tail.

Bought one in Munich or Frankfurt initially for my luggage

As many trinkets were snatched in the conveyor belt,

I put it in your car instead.

No, it was your late mom’s.

The storage and what’s inside.

Some documents, sunglasses and a pack of envelopes

See, you were on that age to receive wedding invitations

Should be ready with envelopes

You crafted your own cable connector from the radio to iPod

You picked purple

Because I liked purple

And how you were annoyed everytime I used the mirror behind the sun shade

The garage, connected to the kitchen.

Where the plates, knives, glasses were

One crooked glass with dregs stain

The bar, drugs, your late mom’s keys collection

Photos of your nephews, nieces in collages

Toddler mat

All in the dining room.

Wind chimes

Your big screen TV because you loved TV. And big screen

Carpet and cushions

Wooden lounging chair

Broken organ

Family portrait

Beige sofas

The rooms

I remember too much

Your cats, I still have her colorful necklace

How she snuggled to me

Balinese blue mirror from Sukowati from our trip together on the outside

Graduation pictures

Manicured garden

It was gloomy, unattended, yet homey

It was refurbished, clean, yet abandoned

It moved with the age but stopped somewhere

Coexistence between past and progress

And where it stopped with mid flair

Revisited as weekend gathering

Secluded.

Perhaps those were the reasons.

My picture on the wall though

As vivid as

what I remember

as there is no outlet...

...let me just thank SORE Band for launching their new song today, which I could totally relate to. This is one sassy catchy song from the band and the lyrics are good too.

She and Him's Volume 3, similar sentiment:

excuse the cheesiness

Happiness they say is a circle flow

Depend it on no one else I know

but your charm rushed like melted snow

and it’s a joy,

coy, to resist a peck on your morning jaw

I wanna put Oliver Peoples on you

and pocket square too

The past year, I’ve been on a wayfarer

When it’s off, we’re farther

Space is good I know

Yet I wanna draw you closer and put on a show