Development / Pembangunan.

No bike rides, no sponge-taneous field trips, no trendie-friendly event coverage for the entire month. I think you know why...

Well, here are some notables that happened since my last real-life update.

My grandmother cooked some nice food for my 'family' during the Merdeka weekend. I requested her to cook Air Beyh for us, which is a unique syrup concoction made out of pandan leaves, ginger, seedy-looking things, cinnamon and sugar. I think this is the best ordinary drink in the world. Like... something I'd like to swim in, hot or cold.

Sans lovely scent.

Ramadan bazaar-hopping is quite overrated. I think I've been to enough bazaars last year. The only bazaar that's new to me this year is the one at SS 18 Subang Jaya. There is one stall that sells jacket potatoes [or potato jackets?], which I like a lot. Rice bores me; cereals and soy milk are now my bowel's best friends, but I do enjoy occasional doses of kuih keria, kuih jongkong, kuih lopis... but only if they are REALLY good.

The one from Bangsar.

There was one weekend when I was in the city to shop for new clothes, and naturally Saturday's the day when everyone is out, especially the fashion ridicules. I am not just referring to the trendies but also teenagers of the late-adapters who... just look amusingly absurd. I could've photographed them for my very depressing I Got Shot but... hey. You know how the European street style blogs are, where the subject would be standing in a modern corridor or bricked alleys or a bike track in a park, in overcast weather? If I am shooting someone here, the background would either be a fluorescent-lit shop lot, a shopping mall façade or something that's ugly and distracting. This is the biggest challenge I face when I want to photograph someone.

Well, my original point I was trying to make on being in the city to shop for new clothes is to introduce to you a kind-of new shop at Pavilion called Matériel. I discovered this shop quite by chance; I was doing some research on Scandinavian denim brands and one of them was Göteborg-born Dr Denim Jeansmakers [recently inherited the Best Denim award from Nudie and Acne, by Sportswear International]. The shop list tells me that the brand sells through two shops, one of them Matériel. I've never heard of this shop and it's in Pavilion?!

Plain-looking.

Looking highly inconspicuous, and even more so with the opposing Topshop flooded with trying-to-bes. But! There is a semi-decent variety of deconstructed blouses and tunics in black by... er, some brand from Helsinki, simple denim and unconventionally-tailored shirts by Fifth Avenue Shoe Repair [!], New Zealander urban street clothes by Federation, not-too-inspiring uniform for the casual society from J.Lindeberg, and a sizeable choice of jeans by Dr Denim. Though, their basic raw jeans is the only item I bought [perhaps because it's the cheapest trouser-item sold]. It would be great if the shop sold some nice shoes and accessories. But for now, let us all do minimalist avant-garde for a change [and not washing our jeans for half a year]!

Lastly, for randomness' sake, I have two descriptive pictures of what happened at the RaNtAi [however you capitalise it] event at Jaya One, on the last day of August [which I proudly cycled to (special greetings for Hani who is the first person in the world to identify me as Linolumixa)]. Two amusing sights are as follow...

Chiptuner and his Gameboys.

Tee hee hee.

Things like these should happen near where I live more often.

[Pseudo-] Typographic shot of the moment:

No turn-up.

I had a buka puasa meal at my club [first time I had a buka puasa buffet in half a decade] and this one reserver didn't turn up at all. I wonder why.

Aaaaand... song of the moment.

Under the Water It Glowed

Eluvium

My Mac on psychedelics.

iTunes Visualiser - first variation.

iTunes Visualiser - second variation.

Jelly.

The third picture reminds me of a drawing of a cat by Louis Wain...

Psycho kitty.

Delightful, yet terrifying. The new iTunes visualisers are just that.

And also: New Windows ads = WTF?

iPods?

A: What do you think of the new iPods?
Q: I think nothing of it. I think nothing of portable music players.

Q: "Eight and a half millimetres thin".
A: Metric!

Q: I like Hanna better than Jon.

A: I've never liked any musician that has been featured as an album art on any iPod ads.
Q: Good! Hope it stays that way!

Work philosophy.

Words of wisdom.

Translation:

Like To Talk, Like To Work
- Good -

Like To Work, Lazy To Talk
- Get Bullied -

Lazy To Work, Lazy To Talk
- Useless -

Lazy To Work, Like To Complain
- Senile -

Lazy To Work, Always Skip Work
- Better Quit -

Lazy To Work, Like To Be A Pest
- Better Off Dead -

- Prof. Ungku Aziz.


Shot at a construction site somewhere in PJ, last year.

Wall•E sucks / blows.

To understand this review, you need to watch Wall•E first.

I watched Wall•E the other day with ten other people at a movie theatre somewhere near Jalan Dang Wangi. None of those people were below the age of twelve. None looked like PIXAR buffs, either. OK, so I chomped down my regular popcorn and for the first quarter, I am smitten with the Apple references [the iPod, the Mac startup 'chime', the Ping notification sound, how outer space looks like Leopard's desktop background (if that counts as an Apple reference) etc.] and how the animation behaved like it was filmed on a camera [especially with the focuses and aerial shots].

Again, for the first quarter, I cried [but only a little] seeing Wall•E roaming about the junk yard city by itself, doing its own thing by itself. I will definitely go psycho in a world like that. This is the part where the film asks the audience to sympathise [or empathise?] the little robot and settling down to see the way Wall•E does. Then came this... thing called EVE.

While Wall•E had an 'emo' disposition, EVE had the uncomfortable bitchy persona; both equally annoying. I wish the both of them could just cool it. And who said that Wall•E is the masculine character and EVE the feminine one? Just by their names and voices? Show me their reproductive organs! From Wall•E's urge to hold EVE's 'hands', there must be something to follow that, right? No, robots don't / can't fuck, and Wall•E didn't seem to have any porno videos to play on repeat to use as an example. I wonder what would Wall•E feel if it watches porn. Probably destroys itself to discover that it has nothing to call a 'private part'.

When I first saw the teaser trailer for Wall•E, I was really looking forward to... feeling like I received a revelation. Something to change my idea of existence.

I had no feelings for the Captain, nor EVE, nor Wall•E [after the first quarter of the film]. I think the Captain was being really fake about wanting to go back to Earth. He does nothing at all, wants to do nothing at all, and suddenly he wants to make the Earth green again, based on his research of Earth on a very advanced space-age version of Wikipedia?

And those 'humans' aboard Axiom. Living there for 700 years, the spaceship looks too brand-new to me. Wouldn't there be someone, some human, coming out as a renegade and form a rebellion? In real-life, there would be several revolutions within 700 years.

My impression of PIXAR's films went down since Cars was released [I've never seen Ratatouille]. I no longer find the jokes laughable [the sense of humour became less intelligent]. What made me love PIXAR is how they are so clever to animate symbols that represent feelings of light-heartedness, discovery and appreciation for the all the talent in Emeryville in a colourful world seen from a non-human perspective. Only certain parts of the brain can understand something when it is brought to a standard of a child's mind, and that's where their imagination and childish creativity get released and one forgets being an adult, going into a mode where you are in a different life and everything is new and intriguing again [like how kids see the world]. PIXAR does this very well, or rather, did.

Now that PIXAR is 'totally' under Disney [not sure if that includes creative control], their films are having lower standards. The idea for Wall•E came out way back, before PIXAR's first full-length film so this might mean that PIXAR had a really great story for Wall•E, but Disney wants them to be all unoriginal and stay within their guidelines. I guess PIXAR can't go against Disney on that. What a waste of weeks on rendering.

What Wall•E really lacks is a strong, deep story-line. PIXAR's stories always focus on the importance of emotional bond between its characters [like how in Finding Nemo, each character has a special connection with Marlin and Nemo] and how the viewers are able to relate to each character with ease. In Wall•E, there's no real hero; there are two different situations being played simultaneously - the Captain's struggle for controlling the spaceship, and the two lovebirds. I wouldn't cheer for the Captain, I wouldn't cheer for Wall•E.

The only thing that saved this movie is the animation that made everything looked more than realistic. If you take the basic story and replace the robots and spaceships with humans and normal geographical conditions on Earth, it would probably turn out to be an old-fashion Bollywood movie.

I think the most well-made PIXAR film is The Incredibles and Toy Story 2. While all of them [pre-Cars] I would give at least 8 stars out of 10, Wall•E deserves a mediocre 6.8/10.