An incredibly easy read, full of little anecdotes and simple-to-remember guidelines, it's an excellent book for anyone who's interested in improving their communication skills. After all, without effective communication you can't get too much done - you're limited by your own constraints, be it physical or mental or time or whatever. It's also filled with ways to improve your leadership skills and general people skills (technically, that's all "communication" but whatever).
Highly recommended. I love books you can easily pick up for a quick glance and pick up a few useful things. Make shitting educational!
Yes yes it's been too long. Maybe I've been too scared to face my thoughts, my reflections. Maybe I just haven't had time, running around desperately making this wonderful life of mine work.
Responsible citizenship
So let's start with being a good Malaysian. Save our judiciary (oh dammit requires a Facebook account). Ok this one's good too. Check it out, e-mail the dude, sign the petition.
Moving on to being a good Earthling. Join the protest against Burmese (Myanmarese?) tyrannical crackdowns. According to my Dad, 50 years ago Burma was ahead of Malaysia. HOW TIMES HAVE CHANGED. That's what 20 years of military dictatorship does to your country.
Just to add to that note, Sri Lanka was ahead of us 50 years ago too. Now's what happens when civil war doesn't end. The Philippines were ahead of us 30 years ago (in fact, even ahead of Japan). Now's what happens when corruption is rife, and military coups come by every so often. Are we fucking lucky? Hell yes. We have it so damn good here, we have to compare against the best in the world to get upset.
Of course it's no bed of roses, but we're actively making things better (start with that petition). And we generally fight hard against overly dumbass behaviour. So, so far so good.
Life's a stage...
... and the stage is my life. In a nutshell - Tunku's over, rocked. Next up, Rose Rose I Love You (blog here). Yay, first supporting lead role! Name on postcard!! KICKASS!!!
Possible Christmas event at a shopping mall, to be confirmed in a week or so. Little dance sketch at the end of this month, which I'll find out more about soonish. Possibly stage managing a KLPac production in Dec. Possibly directing a short play I wrote, in 6 months; more info when 1) the play's written and 2) I know more.
Helping out The Oral Stage with setting up auditions for their 2 forthcoming productions (a triple-bill in end Nov and The Illusion by Pierre Cornielle in mid Dec) and managing their people database. I so love that kind of data. The Illusion's audition will be this Saturday, which should be an interesting and fun day. Interested, e-mail people.theoralstage@gmail.com to book an audition.
Their auditions last weekend was most enlightening. It was posted on kakiseni and sent out to friends of TOS, with a reasonable turnout. Some of the characters that turn up, wow. It's quite an experience sitting on the other side of an audition table. After the event, I went nerdy on the results and seems that 67 was quite a key number. - Percentage of people who booked auditions from the number of contacts: 67%. - Percentage of people who turned up for the audition after booking: 67%. - Percentage of people who can possibly act from the turn-ups: 67% (by my generous estimate).
Invaluable experience, in terms of both sides of the table. I understand better why people can be hesitant about open auditions. I also see better what works and what doesn't work as an auditionee. Funnily enough, the person who irritated me the most was not the person who rambled pointlessly like he loved the sound of his own voice, but the person who took too damn long to do everything. Tell us about yourself: 3 minute answer (avg time being 1 min). Perform your monologue: 1 min to start it, 1 min to restart it, can't remember if I stopped him after 3 mins. Perform the readings: 1-2 mins to start each (of 3) readings. Do improv: 1 min to prepare, 1 min to restart. Holy shit fuck off my stage!
Another interesting point is feedback. I've been dying to give some feedback on what they could do better, but I'm reserving it for people with the initiative to ask. So far, only a few people (who know me) have asked. C'mon, sure it's hard to hear that you sucked, but don't you wanna know how NOT to suck at the next audition?
Money makes the world go round...
... and my world revolves around making enough to sustain this journey of mine. To be self-sufficient. To be able to shove it into someone's face and go - see, I did it, now go away and don't presume to tell me what to do!
Unfortunately, Tunku took a toll on my Agel and I've yet to get that engine running again. I've recently finished reading Timothy Ferriss' brilliant Four-Hour Workweek, and I'm so inspired. Been scrounging around for ideas for an automated information business, anyone with potential ideas and a desire to be more in this life give me a yell.
But thinking about all this people database thing, I've just been thinking about having some kind of actor's database here. A one-stop destination for actors, directors and producers to find each other, something superior to what kakiseni currently has. It would maintain good, clean records that ensures a certain standard to the applicants. No more "I'm a singer... for the tone-deaf club". Could it work? Not financially, but as a service for the community. Hmmm must test.
The written word
Just finished Mitch Albom's For One More Day. Brilliant brilliant brilliant. It's my first Mitch Albom, and I finished it in under 24 hours (I think). Simple, poignant, tear-jerking. I try to apply it to myself, to see what lessons I can learn from it and be personally changed by it... but I just can't. There just aren't those moments in my life. I don't know lah.
Through a magnificent series of fortunate events, I landed myself with a freelance writing job... for a marketing e-zine. Pays amazingly well for a relatively short article - I just hope my marketing bullshitting skills are up to par. Done the main article, just gotta review a book called Leadership Brand. Life is good.
Working on a short script for production next year. Working on a musical for production... sometime in my life? Well the theatres are practically packed for the next 12 months so I suppose it'll have to continue on slow-motion. Anyway we'll see.
So I semi-recently wrote a tech article on Aggregators, and had to do some research on it. To cut things really short, check out Google Reader (it'd help more if you had a Google Account). Put in the URLs (links) of all the blogs you read, and it's a one-stop centre for all your blog-reading needs! Handy stuff... except that I've put too many in there and I can't keep up. :P If you've already added blogs as your Firefox as Live Bookmarks, fret not: check out this OPML exporter extension that allows you to export all those Live Bookmarks and then you can import them into Reader (or another Aggregator out there). If you don't know what the hell I just said last sentence, ignore it - your life won't be made better by understanding it, trust me.
Another funky thing I used recently was Gmail (excuse me - Google Mail)'s Vacation Responder. Now it's a brilliant thing to use at the office (thanks Tim Ferriss), and for e-mail addresses for specific functions. I used it for the Oral Stage auditions - it'd just respond to every mail answering FAQs or asking for the relevant info I needed. It's in Settings, the General tab. However, if you encounter problems using it, this thread will help.
Enough seriousness
Indeed. Couple of colleagues from Tunku performed for Reshmonu's MTV - The Way It Makes You Move. Check it out on YouTube. Pretty good video, looks like good production quality. Don't know about Reshmonu himself endlessly swimming.
Now THIS you have to check out for the cleverness of technology. Coolness.
My self-definition of Metrosexual:
Walking into Body Shop wanting to buy a loofah ("bath lily" in Body Shop talk) and walking out spending 10 times as much, with a moisturizer ("clarifying night treatment") and a mask ("3-in-1 deep cleansing mask") in the bag. Sheesh.
fin
Yeah I'm done. About bloody time eh. Quotes coming up!
Yes, a break in the chain of QotDs! 'Bout bloody time eh?
Tons of shit to put in, so this'll be long.
Tunku & Acting
Tunku's in the 2nd month of rehearsals now, with us meeting 5 times a week (6/week next month!) for 30mins breathing, 1hr dancing and 2hrs singing (with minor variations). It's quite a change from Broken Bridges - a more sombre, more mature play. In fact it makes BB look like a silly hee-hee-ha-ha affair (it wasn't, but the many laughing memories of it stay) - it tackled father-son relations, the whole subject of old-vs-new, morality of who decides what's better or worse, filial piety, responsibility, etc. This one, so far, handles racism, the responsibility of power, politics and playing the "good public image" game. Very VERY much focused around race and politics, which sadly are underdiscussed issues in this wonderful country that's so dominated by these 2 affairs.
I got myself a chance to work with Tony Pietra again on a series called Dark City. See the next blog entry about it, I'm in the episode called Death Row showing this Wed 10.30pm on Astro Ria (yes it's in Malay). I don't say a word but a previous entry depicted how I end up. Halfway through the show.
Also got to work with some graduates of Joe Hasham's recent Acting for Beginners on a film called Unsecured Loan. Don't know too much details as yet but currently no commercial release planned, with the intention of entering it for some film festival. The fact that this damn film happened at all is quite miraculous (if you're of that bent) - or at the very least, demonstrates the sheer power of intention. Julie (hat's off to you!) finishes class, wants to do a project with her coursemates; posts entry in Kakiseni's audition page requesting for: actors (preferably Joe's graduates), scriptwriters, production team. Yes, it also reads as: I don't got nuthin', let's everybody get together and see what happens. Sheer poetry. Coincidentally, I end up working with an ex-primary schoolmate. Again (Horizons last year).
Lastly, in another play called Tari Canggung Hamidah. Yes, it's in Malay (eh my name IS Malay after all, innit mate?) and yes I do have lines in Malay, though thankfully few and straightforward. Thankfully because, even though I'd relish the challenge of upping my standard of Bahasa, the play runs in under 2 weeks. Yes, crikey bikey - 4th July at Shah Alam. Yes, wtf. It's for the Selangor Theatre Fest lah, so should be a good experience whatever happens.
Agel
A new product has come in for Agel from another network marketing company (starts with an S) and it absolutely kicks ass. Here's a quick video (2.5 mins) with the doctor who invented it talking about it. In short, it's anti-aging, a natural viagra, lowers cholesterol and is meant to build muscle. Watch it:
Or if you prefer it direct, here's the YouTube link.
Books
Jack Canfield's The Success Principles. Kickass compilation of most of the best books out there. Packed into an easy-to-read volume divided into 10-minute chapters with memorable quotes and immediate action steps. Highly recommended.
Paul Zane Pilzer's The Wellness Revolution (revised edition)is a great insight into an massively growing industry - what makes it especially great is that the 1st edition was written in 2002 and this edition was written in 2007, and updates the relevant issues that cropped up in between. Quite a number of chapters is US-focused, so doesn't quite make sense here. But his economist background and his experience and his brains (he's a damn smart fella) provides great ideas and perspective into upcoming opportunities in wellness. Exciting stuff.
David Deida's The Way of the Superior Man was a book I bought and read quite some ago, and for some reason (yes yes there's no such thing as coincidence) I recently picked it up again. Wonderful stuff lah, such
May 13th (read more) is a brave publication that really should be read by every Malaysian - it provides an almost factual account of what really happened, with its main crux the drive for honesty, accountability and mature discussion about possibly the darkest event in our history. Can be quite dry at times, as its biggest feature is the documents recently declassified (under the Official Secrets Act in Her Majesty's government), which contains communiques from diplomats and journalists at the time of the event.
The Malaysian Journey (buy from Silverfish; comments from Amazon) has been republished and is an excellent read. Rehman Rashid is wonderfully witty, erudite and perceptive, and his observations are truly enjoyable. He basically takes us through a journey of his life and of his country after quite some time away and talks about his experiences. Highly recommended.
I really should start writing proper reviews of these books. An idea I've been having is to write up reviews and post up snippets of the reviews with a tag, "if you want to read the full review, please contact me for details on purchasing it" or something like that. Has anyone tried/seen it before?
Writing
Writing for Malaysian Today has been interesting so far - my first article should come up next week (it's about social networking sites). Interesting because it's all so bloody new to me - how it works is that I'm meant to pitch a headline (The Power of Racism!) with a standfirst (The Ku Klax Klan did it. Hitler did it. Here's an ultimate guide for the supremacist who wants to wave a keris in Parliament!) to the editor, who then provides feedback and a deadline. Irony is that I usually shake my head at some of our headlines and now I'm the one who'll be providing them. Also, I've never 'sold' my writing before so yes, quite out of my comfort zone.
Asset Trader, on the other hand, has been wonderfully smooth sailing. Editor really likes my writing and it tends to be he asks, I provide and there's little extra work to be done. First print's in August, looking forward to seeing how everything comes out.
An idea I've recently been toying with is doing boardgame reviews. Seeing as I've become a regular at The Mage Cafe (next to Atria in Damansara Jaya, again mentioned here [damn I'm still doing the same damn things!]) and they've a massive supply of these games, why not? I'm thinking of designing some kind of system to review such that regular readers can follow and get to know a lot of the game (and decide whether or not to buy it) from the review. Any feedback?
China - battle for territories and connections between them. Strategic fun.
Puerto Rico - balancing the right strategies toward victory. Second-guessing what other people will do and playing that to your tactical advantage. Great fun.
Caylus - balancing the right strategies toward victory. Many many factors to take into account make this quite a brain drain to play.
Dis-X - simple rules but quite a lot of fun. A numbers game that requires you to calculate the ramifications of your actions far ahead to play well. I think... haven't discovered the nuances of the game yet.
Manila - very much a gambling game where every round hinges a lot on the dice. Good simple fun though.
HeckMeck (yes, also known as Pickomino) - no-brainer fun, very dice dependent.
The Great Dalmuti - a variant of Chor Tai Tee. Additional rules make it fun (in a silly way - loser has to wear a chicken hat and sit on the floor, that kinda thing). Ingenious - another Mensa game (Blockus being the other) which has simple rules but complex strategies. Good fun without being too mentally taxing.
Settlers of Catan - brilliant game, there's a great reason why it's called a 'gateway' game. It's simple enough to entice non-gamers, yet complex enough to keep people playing past their 100th game. Quite dice-dependent though.
Hooked on boardgames man. They're so superior to video games in that 1) they usually require some brain power and 2) they require social interaction. I'm sure that the reason my mind has such an able grasp on strategic games was because I played boardgames when I was a kid (thanks Jee Koh). Parents, get some boardgames and start playing them with your kids! TV and videogames provide poor fodder for growing up! They might end up like me though.
Onto the PC (yes yes poor fodder but I'm grown up now, fuck off). There've been some interesting new stuff out - Supreme Commander, C&C3, can't remember what else. Been so out of the loop, haven't been playing much PC games besides the cybercafe usuals like Company of Heroes (which still rocks), Call of Duty 2 and Battlefield 2. In fact, what I'm currently hooked on are arcade games! Damn ridiculous, stuff from gamehouse.com like Fibre Twig (1&2), Alien Shooter and Age of Castles. Mindless nonsense but they're the most fun, aren't they? Not completely mindless lah... Fibre Twig requires & develops excellent pattern-matching and spatial visualisation skills, Alien Shooter... well, reflexes and hand-eye coordination, and Age of Castles... erm, stats, basic strategy and cause-effect measurement. And yes I'm still a fan of Spider Solitaire and Minesweeper.
Miscellany
On a whim, I decided to find out what the Sentul Link's all about. I've been passing it almost every day for the past year or so (it's just outside KLPac) and so, after a little exploration into Sentul, I took it. It goes straight onto Mahameru Highway, kickass! It comes out not far before the Jln Duta turnoff, the next turnoff after which is Sentral and Jln Bangsar.
The Sentul exploration, on the other hand, was quite an adventure. You'd think a left, left, left and left again would take you back to where you were, just some ways behind. That thought would be wrong again, again, again and again. I ended up in some serious depths of Sentul and at one point, got seriously scared. You know the point when street lights no longer function, it starts getting a bit jungle-y, houses start disappearing, it looks chilly... there's a bend ahead and you use the headlights and there's mist (and you're not on a hill)? Yeah that's when I went fuck this shit I'm retracing every fucking road I took at minimum 80km/h too. I tell you, there's loads of opportunities for adventure in KL.
And to conclude, Michael Jackson's Thriller, Bollywood style!
... you absolutely can NOT put it down. Last Tuesday, I decided to pick up Conn Iggulden's latest book, Wolf of the Plains. 'Tis a fine tale of the greatest Mongol of them all - Genghis Khan, lord of the grass (there's a lot of it in Mongolia). If you're not familiar with this excellent author, he did a tetralogy on Julius Caesar called Emperor (look it up on Amazon) as well as an awesome book with his brother called The Dangerous Book for Boys. Bet you're curious about what's in it already.
How kickass is this book? Ok I started it on a whim: to keep me company for dinner on Tuesday. Pages turn and turn... and it's 6am. I sleep till 11am, haul ass and get back to reading. I finish the book by 5pm. Every bloody chapter ends with a "ok one more chapter". Great stuff. It's exciting, it's enthralling, it's escapism at its finest - when you are completely taken to another world on a colourful tour with sights and sound foreign, yet you are so drawn in with the characters that the foreign becomes the norm. And when emotions are evoked by the reading, ah that's storytelling at its best.
I mean, take a nice, civilised, urban, educated man (yes, that would be me). Describe a battle where the fighter gets into 'the zone'. Adrenaline. Focus. Alertness. Heightened-ness. Bloodlust. You expect that man to relate? What the hell does a modern city-dweller know about bloodlust, about that gloriously short moment where your life hangs in the balance, subject to the whim of the falling arrow, the unseen dagger, the scything sword?
But I felt it. That need to assert my stand to life. That need to fight my side of the age-old equation of 'kill or be killed'. That call to my basest instincts.
I reached for the nearest weapon to hand. My meal ignored, I tested its balance, its weight, its feel. I allowed it to be an extension of my hand, allowed it to blend into my body, my mind, seamless. It became an extension to my will; and I willed death.
My hand dealt it all around me - accurate, swift, ruthless.
Quickly, the moment was over. I lay my weapon down, picked up my chopsticks and resumed eating.
I bought this book about 5 years ago, I think; and on a whim (for toilet reading, if you must know), I decided to flip through it again. It pulled me in instantly - I promptly finished it cover to cover again in a few days.
