I’ve been a fan of Mothers News for awhile now. I can’t remember how I found out about it. The internet that I love is so different from the way corporate-owned social media works. I have nodes, fixed points of reference that I keep going back to (favorite writers or creators, but also sites like… Read more
This is an exercise adapted from Ivan Brunetti’s Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, basically a master cartooning course in the form of a slim book. The chapters are divided into weeks, 15 in total, with exercises and assignments each week. The first is ‘Spontaneous Drawing’, which contains this gem: Exercise 1.3 Pencil out a grid (or… Read more
Zedeck scolded me for taking limes from the tree without permission, but I felt not a hint of remorse. If there’s one thing fruit trees can teach you, it’s abundance. When the durian tree in our backyard was in season, there was too much fruit everyday. We went around on bicycle giving them to everyone… Read more
The Mary Oliver poem from the previous day’s drawing led to this one, specifically, the line ‘you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves’. If someone had asked me straight up, ‘what do you love?’, I probably would not have said ‘cute animals’. Drawing seems to call forth… Read more
Here is Mary Oliver reading the full version of her poem, “Wild Geese”: ~ Antid Oto – italian for antidote – was one of Leon Trotsky‘s earliest pen names. I also love the Malay word for it: penawar. A few months ago, I started taking regular walks and making drawings afterwards as a way to deal… Read more
While facing a difficult project, a notebook can be an imaginary friend – a way for the mind to talk to itself so it can find out where it needs to go. The way cannot be found by thinking, only by making. I owe so many of these ideas and methods to Lynda Barry’s books… Read more
I love the romance of rebellion; I could drink the beauty and glamour of courage for days. But lately, it hasn’t been enough. I don’t think it ever was, for me. I’ve started to think about resistance as slow, banal, steady work – stitch by stitch rebuilding, reworking, remaking. Jahit in Malay means ‘sew’, jahat… Read more
The hashtag #KitaLawan appeared in February, after Anwar Ibrahim was convicted of sodomy and sent to jail for the second time. In the beginning, I saw both #KitaLawan and #KamiLawan being used, which was interesting. ‘Kita’ and ‘kami’ are collective pronouns meaning ‘we’, but the latter is closer to ‘us’ – an other, i.e. a… Read more
