Month: May 2015

Antid Oto #9: Totally Regular Neighbourhood

antidote06_web

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 this and this), and they lead me to other things, some of which become new nodes. It’s internet scaled to the human in me.

Social media feeds, on the other hand, turn me into a scroll zombie, an eyeball machine with a measurable attention span. The very architecture of the feed functions differently from the internet that feels like my home.

Anyway, Mothers News. I can’t remember who or what led me there, only that it became one of my online nodes. It’s a free monthly newspaper created by someone in Providence, Rhode Island. 5000 copies are printed, supported by subscribers all over the world, and also by ads. The ads, like everything about Mothers News, are strange and magical.

The drawing above is a rough draft for a kids’ activity book commission. I was past deadline, and stuck. There was nothing I wanted to do more than stay home and berate myself about it, but instead, I took a walk around my neighbourhood, Taman Toh Kee Kah. Somewhere below the buzzing worry, my inner eye could still register the shapes of plants, and bits of trash on the road, and squirrels hopping past on their electrical wire highways, and the deepening colours of the evening sky…

Walk, walk, walk.

I thought about how I was struggling with my other illustrated journalism project. I thought about how stupid it would be if I made a newspaper that only reported on the tiny circuit of my walk – one block of houses, down the hill to the main road and back up again. I’d record all the trash I saw, make portraits of the trees, do an impossible tally of the weeds. I’d document different gates – the old iron ones with their simple, beautiful, repeating patterns, the newer ones high chromed and generic. I’d survey the cats.

Walk, walk, walk.

I thought about how neighbourhoods were central to Murray Bookchin’s ideas of Social Ecology and Libertarian Municipalism. I remembered how much I loved Mothers News, and quite suddenly, I knew I had my idea for the kids’ activity book: a template for a Totally Regular Neighbourhood newspaper that they could fill in, photocopy and distribute.

I got home, immediately sat down to draw a draft, and emailed my proposal to the editors.

It was going to work.

I was glad I went for that walk.

~

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 with worry, procrastination, hopelessness, writer’s block, internet rage, and digital distraction. I’ll post a series of them here, one every other day, for as long as I keep making them.

Antid Oto #8: Today in Port Dickson

antidote005B_web

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 grids) in your sketchbook, enough to contain 100 small drawings. Now, spending no more than 5 seconds per drawing, let your stream of consciousness guide you, drawing whatever word comes to mind (do not stop to think about it). Examples: persons, places, objects, occupations, concepts, emotions, etc. You should, at the end, have a little system of pictograms. 

It’s both harder and easier than it sounds. Hard, if you tend to think about drawing as your hands driving a car, instead of receiving then transmitting ‘whatever word comes to mind’, as the exercise asks. Easy, because if you can let go, the images will come pouring out of your hand onto the page.

The effort is in the particular quality of attention that you need to hold yourself in to be able to do this. It has little to do with drawing skill, or ‘talent’ as we’re used to understanding it, i.e. making something look life-like.

When I did the exercise above, I was surprised at the images swimming in my head, all the little details of things I could remember, in the two hours that had passed since waking up, going out to breakfast and coming home to draw.

I want to practice this more, but I find it hard, because just before I sit down to do it, I feel as though I’m about to jump off a cliff. When I’m doing it however, it’s the easiest thing in the world, like breathing or being a note of music.

It’s just… that cliff!

~

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 with worry, procrastination, hopelessness, writer’s block, internet rage, and digital distraction. I’ll post a series of them here, one every other day, for as long as I keep making them.

Antid Oto #7: The Lime Tree

antidote05A_web

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 we knew in town – it felt like depositing gold in the community. Seasonal gold.

The nangka tree next to the front gate constantly produces. I made an artwork about it. We believe that the endless surplus of nangka has nurtured at least two generations of musangs and countless squirrels by now. I often find their poop scattered around the driveway near the tree.

~

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 with worry, procrastination, hopelessness, writer’s block, internet rage, and digital distraction. I’ll post a series of them here, one every other day, for as long as I keep making them.

Antid Oto #6: What do you love

antidote005_web

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 responses from different parts of the mind, or the self. Not only that, it makes us hear a question differently.

What would happen if a Q & A were conducted entirely via drawing? How bout a parliamentary session?

The other day I was talking with Zedeck about how the game Charades was an excuse for people who would otherwise never dream of drawing, to actually do it. We started to think about inventing other games that would sneakily compel people to draw.

This video compels me to draw. Sometimes I search it out on the internet, as if replaying a song I want to hear again. Bat and Hat by Becky James:

~

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 with worry, procrastination, hopelessness, writer’s block, internet rage, and digital distraction. I’ll post a series of them here, one every other day, for as long as I keep making them.

Antid Oto #5: You do not have to be good

antidote004A_web

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 with worry, procrastination, hopelessness, writer’s block, internet rage, and digital distraction. I’ll post a series of them here, one every other day, for as long as I keep making them.

Antid Oto #4: Imaginary Friend

antidote004_web

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 What It Is and Picture This.

~

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 with worry, procrastination, hopelessness, writer’s block, internet rage, and digital distraction. I’ll post a series of them here, one every other day, for as long as I keep making them.

Antid Oto #3: Penjahit/Penjahat

antidote003_web

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 means ‘bad’. Pen- is the suffix that turns them into nouns: penjahit is a person who sews, penjahat is a person who does bad things.

~

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 with worry, procrastination, hopelessness, writer’s block, internet rage, and digital distraction. I’ll post a series of them here, one every other day, for as long as I keep making them. 

Antid Oto #2: #KitaLalang

antidote002_web

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 ‘them’, is explicit when using ‘kami’. Thus, ‘negara kita’ means ‘the country belonging to all of us’, while ‘negara kami’ means ‘the country belonging to us, not including you/them/other people’.

The image of bright yellow lalang growing over a Barisan Nasional banner has hovered in my mind since 2013. It sometimes comes into sharp focus, but I’ve yet to pin it down. This was an experiment cutting lalang out of scrap pieces of yellow fabric – a patchwork of resistance, a loose web against an unchanging background.

~

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 with worry, procrastination, hopelessness, writer’s block, internet rage, and digital distraction. I’ll post a series of them here, one every other day, for as long as I keep making them.