Moonshine KL, originally slotted for February 2nd 2006, has been postponed indefinitely due to complications with DBKL. Argh.
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Monthly Archives: January 2006
The Moon Was Shining
5th January, 2006. I finally stepped in the reopened No Black Tie; the original No Black Tie was where I went for my first gig on the 8th of September, 2002. (What happened to Flatline? Well last I bumped into them I got free beer, so big deal if they’re not gigging.) Most of 2003 was spent going to gigs in gay bars. Yes, nobody else would let rock bands play, so in the daytime, the stage rocked. 2004 was a more acoustic year, with the Starbucks Music Series, and Paul’s Place in Uptown, Petaling Jaya. 2005 marked Paul’s New Place in Old Klang Road, and I’ve not been to Paul’s New Place in any year other than 2005.
Aminah had a most haunting voice. She was accompanied by Reza on guitar (also the organizer) and her brother, Salim, on percussion.
It was then Reza’s turn, and he crooned with the rich creamy smoothness of an R&B singer-songwriter. Man, if there was one (not-so-super) superpower I could wish for, it would be a voice like this. Ladies would queue up… no wait, they wouldn’t; they’d mob for a piece of me!
This one was a lot less smoky, with a balcony overhanging for a better view. They also had tables, compared to the old layout of rows of chairs and stacked tables. (Then again, it could be that one gig I went to that had it arranged that way.)
Plush Velvet had Izzy and Jeremy, with Izzy having quite a powerful, soul-cutting voice, and Jeremy providing lush jazzy chords and funky guitar fills to back her up.
Az Samad was back in town; how could you miss such an explosive performance? He is seen hitting what I presume to be Shelley’s precious Seagull. Later examination would reveal that he made scrapes at the bottom to aid his percussive guitar attacks.
Just when you thought he was already stellar, this supercharged, upgraded, acoustic fingerstyle guitarist drops by during Berklee College Of Music’s summer break to show us showmanship and live improvisation should be done.
Shelley Leong also shows remarkable improvement, or maybe it’s because she’s on grand piano instead of the usual acoustic guitar setup (which also showed improvement the last time.)
Shelley Leong and the Jazz Odyssey had one of those fusion jazz ensemble jams; when Shelley did her grand piano jam, it could only remind the jazz-unenlightened Albert of one band – The Doors.
Az used a sand bottle as a glass slide! (I now resolve to find a glass bottle; the glass slide sounds much sweeter than a metal slide anytime.)
Yee Meng on open mike, on a Taylor. (Somehow, none of the performers before this got such nice, brilliant lighting. Or maybe the Taylor *cue sound of awe* has a spotlight dedicated to it.)
Rhapsody does a short open-mike stint, too. Amazing diva-ish voice. I think the picture could show you the amazing amount of projection she has.
For more pictures, head on down to Ed‘s version with more of my pictures.
Edit 31st January 4:36 PM:
Moonshine KL has being postponed till further notice due to problems with DBKL.
Then again, you could just head over to the next Moonshine:
Who: Azmyl Yunor, False Opus, Stonebay, The Sofa Sessions, Rizal Hefni
When: 2nd February, 10pm
How Much: RM 20
Where: No Black Tie 17, Lorong Mesui (off Jalan Nagasari), Kuala Lumpur (03-21423737 for bookings)
Yeah yeah, you know the drill, I’m going.
Happy (Chinese?) New Year!
This is so majorly procrastinated it amuses noone. At least most of these aren’t last year’s pictures. While all of you are going, “Happy Chinese New Year!” I release them “Happy New Year!” pictures.
I was at Shelley’s for New Year’s Eve 2005 to New Year’s 2006, at Cheras, atop a hill, where we could see fireworks, have a barbeque party and drink from her parents’ winery products. 😉
Marshmellows, when melted on lamb, look like rosebuds.
From the balcony, beware the hot pit below!
This was the wide view.
About every shot was using a shutter speed of 15 seconds, F5.5, manual focus at infinity, ISO 50.
Okay, so it might’ve been a bit too far…
KL Tower goes down in flames.
The fireworks almost reach the top of the Petronas Twin Towers!
Swallowing it.
Fear not kids, this isn’t the work of terrorists.
They needed bomohs to rain all this smog down. The entire day, 31st December 2005, it rained heavily, to clear the skies for the night.
I have to say, the neighbors had far more funky fireworks.
At least near enough, that is. So I’ll be in town on Independence Day, so I could do them experiments with fireworks.
Love Me Butch’s Video
Download this video. Now.
Love Me Butch – Hollywood Holiday
This video way beats anything I’ve ever seen on MTV, as far as emo-punk bands go. (Screenshot stolen from Reza.)
Yes, for those not in the know, Love Me Butch is one of Malaysia’s finest rock bands. They mastered (somewhat progressive) nu-metal in their first album, with Syahrul doing a wicked emo vocal tone on the second album, flipping between wails and growls. They do it live too, without him singing offtune; a feat very difficult for any emo punk band.
Also, will someone agree with me that DJCS looks like the vocalist?
Journal Of Drinking Alcoholic
Let’s get it started.
Google bomb Journal Of Drinking Alcoholic.
Yeah. Link to Journal Of Drinking Alcoholic with that exact title.
Why Google bomb Paul? Because it’s an interesting experiment, to see if we Malaysian bloggers (and not spammers) are ranked highly enough by Google to have any effect.
Okay, also maybe because he tagged me. 😀 Though I must say, I was waiting for someone to tag me, as this meme did seem quite fun.
The Golden Rules:
1) write an entry of between 100-200 words, with these words have to be included once, and only once:
– I
– me
– blowjob
– grapes
– random
– power
– loneliness
– water
– robot
– blue
2) Out of the 10 words, you can only change 2 words.
I didn’t change any.
3) Your essay must make some kind of sense. if it�s not cool, then it won�t get published…
I watched Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle last night, and Dude, Where’s My Car? sometime this year. Harold & Kumar is sadly rooted in sober realism, despite them being less exemplary, in the quest for weed; other dude movies always featured dudes going all out for their girlfriends, e.g. Dude, Where’s My Car, Wayne’s World, Bill & Ted. The problem with H&K was that these two weren’t dudes just bumming around; they actually had ambition, proper job(s), a nice car, and not-too-outrageous gags. Even a Ben Stiller movie has better gags! Dude movies are meant to throw all sense out the window. They had weed; that could’ve been a bigger prop. The other dude movies had no weed, yet they elicited more laughs.
And yet, in a different view, it could be exemplary how politically correct the movie was. What with the black guy and the police and racism jabs. Almost every scene had a moral lesson, if you weren’t too stoned to notice it.
4) Send to 5 people.
I’ll send it to my mom, my dad, my paternal grandma, paternal grandpa and paternal grandma. See I’m such a family-oriented boy, I hear chicks dig that. Oh, you meant that those people have to have blogs?
My strange essay (exactly 200 words!)
Underground musicians and their listeners are a persecuted lot. Imagine attending a gig when men in power, dressed in blue arrest you for some random offence. They say black metal will be illegal. Problem is, they don’t know what black metal is, and arrested these hardcore punk kids anyway. And then some people just eating at a mamak nearby. Throw in the char kuay teow seller too. It’s no wonder we’re being sour grapes about it. Want to escape a summons, pretty lady? Give the man a blowjob.
Expect to pay two digits for mineral water and a phone call. Yes, the phone call that should be your right.
Know your rights and lodge a complaint! Do not go alone, or loneliness will be yours for hours at end while waiting for the inspector to come attend to you. They need to be badgered to do things, so go in a group. Trust me. You don’t have to go to the correct police station to lodge a report; they’re supposed to take it anyway. I would rather that the standard issue cop be a morally hard-coded, law-enforcing robot of justice, but we�ve spoiled them. Take the summons, you car-driving cheapskates!
Dye Dye Dye
So, 1 year and 3 months after a pair of scissors last touched my hair, my pure virginal black-but-shines-brown-in-the-sun hair of 22 years and 3 weeks was dyed.
My sister asked, “hey do you wanna share hair dye?”
I had the money and the intent, but never got round to dyeing my hair at a salon, but since she wanted to Do-It-Yourself, I decided that this would be the turning point. We bought bleach, hydrogen peroxide and semi-permanent hair dye.
My first attempt didn’t show much.
I think God didn’t want me to dye! Why won’t you let me dye?
It was cursed enough that walking about in the sun would never give me a tan; I could not change the color of my hair. Dammit.
I got more bleach and peroxide, and decided to go all out, walloping dollops to bleach the hair thoroughly. I never knew how tricky it was to aim at your hair in the mirror.
Various responses include “DUDE! WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO YOUR HAIR?”
It wasn’t till I was at a party that I met this hot chick with nice long hair and nice engaging eyes that I received my first compliment.
“I like your hair. It’s funky!”
“Wow thanks! That’s the first compliment I’ve had for this. What color is it?”
“It’s blue.”
Before this, I’ve had colleagues say, “eee why did you color it green? You should’ve colored it blue.”
Anyway, back to the hot chick. Turns out she was a friend of a famous lesbian.
“So, uh… by association, are you, y’know…”
She was the second femme I’d ever met in Malaysia. (First one here.) Well thank goodness there aren’t that many femmes in Malaysia. Potong stim, as we say. Makes me wish I was lesbian, though.
(On a side note, I wished that homosexual males will get the liberation to be dressed as they like, pink if they may, while straight guys would not, so that there is a distinction, and heterosexual girls would not harp on hot homosexual guys who they just assume are metrosexual heterosexuals. Makes it easier for people with lousy gaydar. Of course, this can only happen when we’re a lot less homophobic, to avoid discrimination.)
I once wrote an article saying how gawdy dyed hair was. This time, I took poetic license, as blue wasn’t a natural hair color, and I wasn’t trying to look blonde.
Now, enough of the pretense and drama. Show me pictures!
Unfortunately, the color turns out very differently in different lighting conditions, and sometimes doesn’t show, so it’s still best seen in real life. And so, with great deliberation, here’s a mugshot, which shows the color almost accurately, or as I’d like it:
Thanks to smashpOp for the 12x optical zoom macro shot using his Panasonic FZ5.
Thanks also to Leech (for technical support, and you are my purple-haired heroine), Davina (who has gotten a failed-blue-green and a bright metallic blue) as well as Jenifur (for the under-color, hidden style that I tried to copy).
So is it green or blue? Those who’ve tried to dye their hair blue but only bleached it till yellow or brown will find that it turns green. Still, the green, I found, was quite cool.
In various places, it goes from yellow-green, to blue-green, to blue-violet. I call it the Nokia 7110 chameleon color. (Remember that phone? It went from purple to green with dark copper in between.) It could also be called a fighting fish color. Yeah.
How do I get this, oh wise funky-color-haired Albert?
Bleach your hair by yourself, with a mirror. Do not seek help from anybody. Apply as sloppily as possible until hair has 1cm thick coating of bleach. Wash off after an hour, in case you’re as un-dye-able as me. Put loads of blue-violet dye until it slightly stings your scalp. (I did that the second round to avoid getting green again.)
Good luck, and show me how it goes.
What word comes before Enlargement?
Fill in the blank space:
_______ Enlargement
“What word comes before Enlargement?” has been my MSN nickname for a while already, to garner responses.
Girls mostly thought “breast” while guys thought “penis“.
However, it’s called breast enhancement (less crude-sounding) whereas guys like them large.
I was filling up a form, when I saw the word Enlargement there. Without looking at the word to its left, I already assumed that it was Penis. Not that I ever needed enlargement, thank you, but I get it so much in spam that it becomes etched in your brain.
I had a point, and it wasn’t that we all needed enlargement; it was that spam was so prevalent, we’d actually associate a word to a phrase we’ve read!
Every Man’s Dream
I dreamt that I was at TGI Friday’s at The Curve on Valentine’s Day 2006, and I had a few drinks and a big sundae with THE hothothot Hannah Sarah Tan. Then nosy cameramen from NTV7 poked their noses at us.
I never had such a vivid dream, complete with blinding sunlamps and three people seated (I assume they were producers who set us up.) It felt SO real, so intense.
If my dreams were any indicator of my future, I reckon that I’d appear on TV at NTV7, 12:15am (technically) February 14th 2006. Which means you set a phone reminder on 11:45pm February 13th 2006 so you have half an hour to get home and find a TV set. So if I already met Hannah Sarah Tan at the start of V-Day, I cannot imagine how much better the day can go. (I was rudely awakened.)
Treadshot-motion
And now, for part two:
I got myself some nice cardboard, and drew a rough sketch of the motion. However, I forgot to get a semi-transparent plastic sheet so I could make a shadowless ‘sky‘ for the Transformer to rest on.
Transformers Energon Treadshot test animation
(requires Macromedia Flash plugin)
This time, I was in Manual exposure mode, 1/50 seconds, F2.6, macro focus, ISO 50 and auto white balance. It took me 10 minutes to take all 45 frames. I did not do the multiple camera angles because this Transformer was so simple, it would be cooler done in one motion.
My previous, more elaborate attempt was here, with Transformers Alternators Meister.
You want more? I’m getting a proper tripod and hopefully, semi-transparent plastic tomorrow. This is just a teaser. 😉
They Mashed Up Again
YK, you will love this.
Black Smiths. Black Sabbath meets The Smiths.
Just like Beatallica (who plays Beatles songs in the Metallica sound, but sounding totally major-key), Black Smiths play The Smiths songs in the Black Sabbath sound, but sounding minor and Sabbath-like, thank goodness. Or at least I think they’re playing The Smiths, because I haven’t heard much of them, except The More You Ignore Me (though I recognize all the Black Sabbath riffs.) You get the Black Sabbath production sound and Ozzy’s grouchy singing. You can even download their entire album in MP3 format!