Slowmix 1 – SPARRING

Slowmix is an online multimedia mixtape series, consisting of things I like or find interesting. It’s performative, but not in the way I associate with social media, more like when you want to impress someone you care about. It’s partly ‘do you see how cool I am?’, but equally, trying to get closer by sharing something small and personally significant. Each mix has a name, which doesn’t indicate a theme, just a vibe.

This week I made you a slowmix called SPARRING with: Susan Sontag, John Berger, Ole Kiatoneway, Boonlai Sor Thanikul, Common Malayan Wildflowers, Miharu Koshi album covers and podcasts about masculinity.


To Tell A Story

This electric conversation between Susan Sontag and John Berger took place in 1983. Both were renowned writers of fiction and essays. They had quite alot to say about visual culture, which makes them interesting to artists. Sontag wrote On Photography, and Berger is most famous for the TV mini-series Ways of Seeing.

Here, they face-off about storytelling, the moral responsibilities of the author, and the effects of new technologies on art. It’s the exact opposite of a hot take – a timeless conversation. As in, useful and energizing no matter what decade you tune in. Yes, there will be decades after this one, and in some small way, this video reinstates that crucial reality.

The way they talk to each other is thrilling, almost erotic. The quality of their eye contact! It’s like an instructional video on how to listen, pay attention, respond and disagree – remedial class for those of us with internet- induced communication damage. Outside the reactive spaces of social media, differences and disagreements are not bullets, but seeds that burst forth, scattering the ground with possibilities.


The Black Pearl vs The Iron Twin

This is a match between Ole Kiatoneway “The Black Pearl from Andaman Sea” (blue corner) and Boonlai Sor Thanikul “The Iron Twin” (red corner), narrated in English by Phet-tho of Sitjaopho Muaythai. [Update: unfortunately the narrated video was removed, but I’ve replaced it with the original fight video with commentary in Thai]. Both were master technicians of Golden Age era muay thai during the 80s to mid-90s.

In my mind, this Ole-Boonlai fight will always be paired with the Sontag-Berger conversation. Their poise, grace and skill, embodied as total presence in the face of each other, makes my heart race. They help me name a thing I aim for, and search for in fighting when I don’t encounter enough of it in art: not virality, but virility.


Names, or how do we know what we know?

Here is what Common Malayan Wildflowers has to say about its use of names:

The scientific or Latin name of each plant is given immediately after the common English name, because the Latin names do not vary from place to place as the common names tend to do. For this reason it is recommneded that the Latin names should be used in preference to English or Malay names even though they may be more difficult to memorize. Many Malayan plants do not have well known or long established English names. Malay names are often very well known but they are usually given only to plants which are locally of some economic importance, such as food or medicinal plants, or to plants with some magical significance. 

The book was published by Longmans in 1961 (i.e. four years after Malaya’s independence from British rule, 2 years before the formation of Malaysia and 6 years before Singapore separated from Malaysia) under their Malayan Nature Handbooks series. It’s written by M.R. Henderson and illustrated by Juraimi Samsuri. There’s no additional information about the author or artist.

How do we know what we know?

A scientist friend recently told me about a species of shellfish that’s been consumed locally since the late 1800s, but has yet to be described by science, i.e. yet to receive a Latin name. I can’t say more at this point, because the ‘discovery’ of any ‘new’ species is a major scientific event and I don’t want to scoop my friend.

I know many of the plants in Common Malayan Wildflowers by sight, and I love the book most for its beautiful, homely botanical colour paintings. The names, however, disturb the order of my world. For example, it lists ketumbar jawa as ‘Stinking Shareweed (Eryngium foetidum)’ whose ‘leaves when bruised give off a strong smell like that associated with stink-bugs’, whereas I know it to be a delicious and fragrant edible similar in taste to coriander. Another example: I noticed a plant with fleshy leaves and pink flowers growing in the garden this year, and identified it on Google as Surinam spinach. The book calls it ‘Sea Purslane (Sesuvium portulucastrum)’ and gelang laut, because it’s ‘found always near the sea, both on sand and in tidal mud’.

There are many ways to know a thing, to order and organize the world.


Haircuts

I want to know who else Youtube recommended Miharu Koshi’s Swing Slow (1996) album to. It’s a great downtempo album.

Parallelisme (1984) I didn’t enjoy so much. The *look* on this album cover, however… I sent it to Boon, who’s been cutting my hair for over a decade. He got excited, and that became my first post-lockdown haircut.

Maybe I will try out all her album cover looks.


The man in me is killin’ me

I had a dream about hunting down an enemy. I was in a room, searching for them. There was a large oval mirror in front of me. I looked into it and as the view panned left in my dream, I saw reflected in it a man sitting to one side, at the back of the room. He was tall and heavyset, wearing a white shirt and long pants, and glasses. He had slightly wavy grey hair. I had never seen this face before but I can remember it even now. I realized with a shock that I was the hunted, not the hunter. He stood up. The urge to run was overwhelming, but I knew I had to face him. I turned around. He held a large knife, and stabbed me in the chest with it.

These podcasts are about men and I found them illuminating. Good medicine if you need it.

The Mythic Masculine #12 – Courting the Undefended Heart – Boe Huntress (Thirteen Queens)

The Mythic Masculine #7 – Thriving Life & A Prayer for All Men – Pat McCabe (Woman Stands Shining)

The Mansal Denton Podcast #031: Tyson Yunkaporta (Pt 1) – Aboriginal Teachings: Rites of Passage for Men, Community, and Personal Agency

The Mansal Denton Podcast #032: Tyson Yunkaporta (Pt 2) – Becoming One With Nature and Listening to Her Wisdom

Gone to look for my body #3 – I saw a mountain

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10 Dec 2017 – The hallway to the kitchens is thick with people and the smell of boxing oil. I’m not fighting tonight, but feel as anxious as I would at an art opening: I’m smiling too much, overly aware of being tall, and compensating for it (to whom?) by darting furtively along the walls, like a rat.

I hear my name, and see kru A.’s hand raised above the crowd in that familiar gesture when he calls me over to him to start training. He’s almost naked, except his hips, which are wrapped neatly in dark red cloth, secured with ropes running over the front and back. His hands and arms are armored in rope up to the elbow. He’s about to perform the ceremonial wai kru to open the event tonight. We both glance down at his body, shining with oil and sweat. ‘It’s hot!’ he says, laughing. ‘You look… you look… good!’ I stammer back, feeling like a rock star just said hello to me backstage. I wonder if I should hug him or ask for a selfie, instead I blurt out ‘Uhh, I’ll see you later!’ and scurry away, mouthing ‘Sharon, you idiot’ to myself like a dazzled 16 year-old.

I find the corner where my teammate V. is waiting to face her first fight. Fear and ebullience hits her in alternating waves, closer and closer together, like labour contractions. ‘Whooaahh, I feel alive!’ she whoops, followed immediately by ‘Oh shit. I need to pee. Why do I need to pee again? I just peed 2 minutes ago!’. I laugh and hold her hands and massage her shoulders, glad it’s her and not me, but envious too.

The familiar snake music drifts over, and I sneak into the ballroom where the stage is. It’s just starting. Kru A. is in the middle of the ring, hazy in the spotlight. When he moves he seems bound and unbound by the sinuous sound – now pulsing, now liquid – and above, or perhaps, below it all, stillness. His face is drawn inward, as if looking at a point far inside where the people watching can’t go.

After certain movements, he nods his head slightly, as if to himself. They’re enigmatic and weirdly articulate, those nods. Appraising. So the sun might nod to a mountain, or a wall, or a tomb, or the edge of a meadow, as it moved across them. A tiger might nod like that to a king, before it decided to eat him, or walk away.

His complete presence in his body makes me suddenly aware of my own. My back straightens; I take a breath. Another. My eyes come back into my face – I realize they’ve been floating about like holographic projections on the lam. My attention follows, sliding into focus, sweet and sure. The sense comes back into my sinews.

He raises his arms, fists outwards, and his torso arches like a tongue of light. I feel the beauty undoing me, the beginning of tears.

My whole being is suffused with hopeless longing, shot through with a sharp prick of joy: light glinting off the peak of a mountain I will never reach. The grace, the self-possession. The total ownership of body. More than winning fights, more than anything, I want that; to earn that.

All through the evening and night, through the ups and downs of the fights, the afterimage of my kru lingers. A quick ride home, a hasty dinner. At last, in the quiet hug of solitude, I tell myself, then text it to the people I love: I saw a mountain today, I saw a mountain.

~

Gone to look for my body’ is a line from a song called ‘Weary’ by Solange, on her 2016 masterpiece album A Seat At the Table.

I’ve been wanting to write about training muay thai since last year, but my mind has always come first, and this was something I wanted to just let my body do. Then I realized I was stockpiling notes, feeling the wave of words come, and letting them break into foam, lost. I’ve been gone, standing on the shore, listening to the roar. Now I have its rhythm, and write my way to the return.

Part 1, Part 2

Gone to look for my body #2 – In sickness and in health

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My knee in March 2016

~

11 Oct 2017: I spent last week sick and denying it. When the fever started on Monday, I thought I would be back in training by Wednesday, and when it was accompanied by a dry hacking cough that kept me up for the next five nights, I was still stubborn enough to book class on Saturday, which, of course, I had to cancel.

My mind went strange places, including convincing myself that wellness was a matter of will. A real fighter wouldn’t let a cold stop their training, in fact, a real fighter wouldn’t have gotten sick at all.

In short, while my body was fighting a virus, I was fighting my body. The fever came and went. I was like an abusive lover, tenderly feeding my body vitamins one moment, berating it for not responding by instantly getting well the next.

It was the same when I injured my knee last year. The same mental tape. When? When will you be back to the way you were? And why? Why are you not healing the way I want you to, in the time that I need you to? Rehab exercises, turmeric, physio sessions, kinetic tape – what else do you want from me?

Hyper-vigilant and agonized, I counted the days of missed training, which turned into weeks, then months.

Today, it’s as if I never tore my meniscus, and besides a lingering cough, the recent cold is all but forgotten. My body has healed, in its own time, in its own way.

I will tell you a story about the mystery that exists between mind and body. Up to March this year – a full 12 months since the tear – I was still taping my right knee before class. My left kick had never been pretty, but it was worse now, because it’s not the kicking leg that matters, but the standing leg, the one that pivots. Tall Coach watches my left kicks on the bag, and how I frown and wince with each one. He asks if my knee hurts. I’ve been asked this before, by other trainers, and always answered no, because I don’t want to seem weak, or like I’m making excuses. This time, I stop and think about it. ‘No,’ I say, ‘There’s no pain, but it feels, I mean I feel… afraid.’ I’m laughing, sheepish. Tall Coach nods, silent for awhile, then tells me: ‘Your knee remembers the trauma.’ On hearing those words, a gap that had existed in me for a year closed, as surely as a key fitting into its lock. I felt the click, not in my knee, but my whole body. I turned back to the bag and executed a series of almost perfect left kicks, more beautifully than I’d been able to do before I got hurt.

It would seem that my knee had mended long ago, but there is so much more to healing than the knitting of flesh and bone.

I’m learning – and it’s hard for me, very hard – that to be sick or injured, isn’t some kind of moral failing. It doesn’t say anything about commitment or ability. It’s simply a thing that happens to bodies: to have a body, is to be ill or incapacitated sometimes. To not be optimal.

Even in the sick time, the body is speaking. The body doesn’t just exist during training, or for training, or for any of the thousand productive things I need it to do. The body’s suffering does not pit it against me. It IS me, in sickness and in health.

There’s a phrase in the Tao Te Ching that I often puzzle over. My understanding of it goes in and out of focus.

I suffer because I’m a body;
if I weren’t a body,
how could I suffer?

In the hardest moments of training, it’s my mind that searches for escape. Anything to occupy it away from the sharp difficulty of the present, be it halfway through a 5km run under the blazing sun, or the last twenty of 200 sit-ups. Usually a song will loop in my head (the chorus to Solange’s Losing You), or a phrase (You must free your ambitious mind, and learn the art of dying. – Bruce Lee). If my mind is elsewhere, maybe this body that’s suffering is not me.

Recently, I’ve been telling my mind not to leave my body to endure the training on its own, to stay with it. What happens in those moments I haven’t found the words to tell. Not well, anyway. It’s a little like opening up more… bandwidth. A rush of information? Of sensation? I am a nut cradled in its shell, existing in inner darkness and in outer light, enduring, being one. I can’t do this for more than a couple of minutes.

If I weren’t a body, how could I suffer?

To train muay thai is to trace new routes, to know what it’s like when my shin hits my partner’s in a drill, or when Young Coach’s foot connects with the side of my head in sparring. It’s also to go over old routes, tracing the deep grooves of where the mind goes in sickness or suffering, as if seeing and knowing them for the first time.

laotzuleguin_tao_shameless
Lao Tzu – Tao Te Ching, An English version by Ursula K. Le Guin, Chapter 13

~

Gone to look for my body’ is a line from a song called ‘Weary’ by Solange, on her 2016 masterpiece album A Seat At the Table.

I’ve been wanting to write about training muay thai since last year, but my mind has always come first, and this was something I wanted to just let my body do. Then I realized I was stockpiling notes, feeling the wave of words come, and letting them break into foam, lost. I’ve been gone, standing on the shore, listening to the roar. Now I have its rhythm, and write my way to the return.

Part 1

Gone to look for my body #1 – Beginnings

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I went to a new gym today. When asked, I say I’ve been ‘doing’ (taking classes in) muay thai since December 2015, and ‘training’ (classes 3 – 5 times a week) since this year. In fact, I picked up kickboxing over ten years ago, when I came back from studying overseas, and again when I was 30, just before moving from the city to Port Dickson. I never took it seriously, but no one else took me seriously either. The closest someone got was a trainer who told me, offhandedly, ‘you could probably get pretty good at this’. He also, possibly in reaction to my stony suffering face during our 7am sessions, regularly asked if I was depressed.

Until recently, I’ve had trainers hit on me in every gym I have ever been in. This is not to say that I’m somehow extraordinary, rather that I suspect this is the overwhelmingly ordinary experience of women in gyms, martial arts ones or otherwise.

Now, at 36, no one hits on me. Or perhaps it’s because I’ve learned to take myself seriously. I’ve had to ask for everything I wanted in muay thai – better trainers, more sparring, the opportunity to fight, or simply to be left alone. Not long ago, someone (it could only have been a man) asked if English was my second language, because ‘you seem… kind of reserved’. No, I replied, my English is perfect, it’s that I want to practice punching this bag instead of talking to you.

Sometimes, especially when my body registers the very real difference in endurance between now and when I was 30, I wish I’d learned to speak my desire – to ask – earlier. But I don’t really regret. Part of aging is knowing certain kinds of learning only come with time, like wingseeds borne spinning down by gravity.

Still, I think a lot about how I look in the gym. Pink and green is a favorite color combination. Today, between the tight camouflage singlet and the loose camouflage t-shirt that I like to wear with my pink satin shorts, I chose the t-shirt.

A new gym means getting to know a new coach, his rhythm, his persona – who, really, he is. Martial art is full expression of the self with nowhere to hide, for both teacher and student. The first word ajarn J. said to me, as I took off my shoes at the door of his gym, was ‘welcome’.

I haven’t studied enough muay thai to be able to discern good teaching. I’m at the unicellular sponge phase, absorbing everything in the ever deepening water. But I know how I feel. Padwork with ajarn J. was like dancing with a great partner. I felt the joy bouncing off me, coming out in explosive little laughs, even as I gasped for breath. In three 3 minute rounds I learned an astonishing amount, which I will note here, in an effort to retain as much as I can in the sieve of my body and brain:

No skipping in the left kick, or left knee. An easy, sure step with the right leg is all it takes. Note the difference in balance and power.

My knees could be angled more, and higher. And then turned into a block, where I press my shin against my opponent’s upper thighs, while grabbing their neck with my opposing arm.

Also, 3 different counters for the jab or punch – a teep to the lower lead leg for the jab, right teep for the punch. Sweep the jab with the right hand while sweeping the lead leg with your lead leg to throw the opponent forward. Sweep inside the punch and hook the back leg with the lead leg…? Damn, I can’t remember the sweeps.

I’ve never been able to do spinning back elbows with any kind of conviction. I mean, I know the move, but today I learned this: to apply the technique… you have to keep your eyes open. I was closing them at the moment of impact. This is what progress, and a good teacher, means in muay thai – realizing the split second of what the body is doing.

He kept distracting me, little flicks of his hand, pointing to the door, to the ceiling. I fell for it every single time. After the experience of keeping my eyes open during the spinning back elbows, something snapped into focus. I locked onto ajarn J.’s eyes, and entered a pocket of calm­ for maybe 20 seconds. In that pocket, no fear, no real effort or striving for the right technique. Just a pure focus in the moment and the other person facing me. It was… something I have been trying to achieve. I knew it intellectually – I experience flow regularly in art making – but my body had not known it in muay thai until then. The body does not go into the pocket because the mind wills it. No, that’s the difficulty – it’s a letting go, not a striving.

How do I extend these 20 seconds? This is the meaning of practice. Months, perhaps a year, for 20 seconds. Meanwhile: failure, defeat… and joy.

~

‘Gone to look for my body’ is a line from a song called ‘Weary’ by Solange, on her 2016 masterpiece album A Seat At the Table.

I’ve been wanting to write about training muay thai since last year, but my mind has always come first, and this was something I wanted to just let my body do. Then I realized I was stockpiling notes, feeling the wave of words come, and letting them break into foam, lost. I’ve been gone, standing on the shore, listening to the roar. Now I have its rhythm, and write my way to the return.

All Ur Narrative R Disrupted

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On 8 Sept 2016, a reporter from Malay Mail Online contacted me on Whatsapp. He’d gotten my contact through a friend I trust and respect. He wanted to do a story about political art, focusing on the contradictions when artists collude with the establishment despite making anti-establishment artwork. When I told him I live in Port Dickson, he suggested an email interview, to which I agreed. This is what transpired:

1) This reporter did not write to me from an official MMO email address, but a personal one.

2) He sent me a series of basic questions, to which I replied in detail, with links that I contextualized and summarized.

3) When I requested that he be specific in his questions, he stated he had no specific questions to ask.

4) I replied that the generalist critique would have to address how every human on earth is currently compromised by power and capital, because ‘art, like journalism, or medicine or international aid, is not separate from the social conditions that produce it’, that such a conversation was beyond this interview, and once again requested specific questions to respond to for the purposes of his piece.

5) In a one-two of self-justification and professional insult, he defended journalism’s complicity in the status quo because it is more ‘relevant and accessible to the common people’ than art.

6) I told this reporter that if he had no specific questions, I had no more to say. He followed up with a question about my position on commercial galleries to which I replied at length. He also asked for my permission to quote, which I gave, indicating that the entire email exchange was on the record. I have attached these emails in full at the end of this post.

7) Zedeck, my partner, upon reading our emails, felt outraged on my behalf, and posted a rant on his Facebook detailing our exchange. I did not stop him from doing so. He does not name the reporter, but identifies him as being from the Malay Mail Online. This is Zedeck’s post:

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8) The reporter identifies himself in a comment on the post, and over the course of several hours, posts a series of insults, gendered slurs and veiled threats. He scolds Zedeck and myself for revealing what he deems a ‘private conversation’. In fact, earlier, he referred to our interview in a Facebook post (now deleted), giving me credit for being an artist who cops to her middle class privilege, ‘something you cant say about the rest of em sadly’. This is the post:

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9) He exchanges private messages with Zedeck and posts the screenshots of this actual private conversation on his Facebook. This is the post:

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10) Overnight, he deletes the comments he left on Zedeck’s original post.

11) As of writing, he is threatening us with a police report and legal action.

~

I want to make clear that I believe these events are reflective only of the actions of one individual and in no way representative of the Malay Mail Online and how they operate.

This exchange is still ongoing and no doubt will blow over – if it hasn’t already! – to be replaced by some other social media storm in a teacup. Personally, I am deeply irritated at having to spend my limited human time on a ridiculous spat, which creates nothing of use but more clicks and views that drive up Facebook’s valuation.

I have the highest regard for journalists and their work. Having tried my hand at independent journalism, I appreciate the craft, labour and difficulty in navigating the ethics and moral positions of reporting on other people – especially in these times, when anyone may disrupt your narrative even before you’ve had a chance to construct it.

The power of forming a narrative about the world and other people is a huge one to have. For better or for worse, the internet has given each of us a bit of that power, turning all of us into potential independent publishers. I bless the internet everyday for this reason, and I do my best to use it well. Who knows how long it will last.

If anything good can out come out of this kerfuffle, here is a commandment to everyone, and my fellow artists especially. Do with it what you will:

Write before you’re written about. Write about yourself, and if you can, write about your friends. Do not wait for other people to tell the narrative. Create a body of work and context around yourself that you can refer others back to when needed. Always treat journalists with respect, but a healthy dose of skepticism. Question their agendas. The good ones are here with a specific job to do, the bad ones can harm and misrepresent you. They are not your friends, and they’re not meant to be.

~

This is documentation of the email exchange between myself and the reporter:

 

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email05

~

Image: Detail from Local Fauna linocut series, 2016.

Animals! Animals! Animals! Prints! Prints! Prints! (in progress)

Here is a taste of what I’ve been working on for the past few weeks, in a little attic studio at the top of Hotel Penaga, where I’ve been artist/parasite-in-residence since mid-May.

These linocut illustrations for Zedeck’s ‘Local Fauna’ story collection have been in progress for two years. I checked the date of the very first sketch I made, and it was 2 Dec 2014:

rainmakerfrog_sketch

In 2015, we pasted the first 10 linocut designs that I finished on bus stops around Jalan Pudu, and later some of them were collected in Little Basket, the new anthology of Malaysian writing published by Fixi Novo.

Now, I’m at 20 linocut designs, and we printed editions of all of them! There is no part of these prints that my (and Zedeck’s) hands haven’t touched. We pulled them by hand, with pitch-black oil-based ink on handmade Thai mulberry paper, and a ton of elbow grease. Both ink and paper are beautiful. I caught myself wondering if making linocuts was just a way to show off the raw beauty of those age-old materials… you get weird thoughts during the long hours of printmaking.

So we are doing an exhibition! It’s at Run Amok Gallery in Georgetown, which is an art space and collective run by friends we love. It opens tomorrow. There are 20 linocuts, and we’re selling some editions to raise funds for a book. Yes, we are making a book, tentatively called ‘Local Flora, Local Fauna’. It will have 50 animal stories and 25 plant stories by Zedeck, and each of them will have an illustration by me… so 20 linocuts down, 55 to go…

Here are some of the prints in the exhibition. Interested in buying a print? Email info AT runamok DOT my for the full catalog. We’re taking international orders too. 

Update 25 July 2016: The full catalogue of prints is now online. Please visit: http://runamok.my/localfauna/

01localfauna_mustachedmacaque 02localfauna_firecrackercrow

03blocalfauna_terrapin
04localfauna_mudskipper 05localfauna_obligationworm

 

Maybe after all the prints are gone we will finally be able to get some sleep? Until the next round of printing…

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Ten Things I Want To Write

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1. Ten Weeds and Ten Thoughts On Revolution

2. On Turning 35

3. How To Look At an Art Exhibition

4. Thoughts On Boxing: The First Time I Sparred

5. Mother Tongue, Daughter Language

6. How I’ve Been Using Readlang to Study Malay

7. Ten: Ten Friends and Ten Things They’ve Learned By Doing A Thing for Ten Years

8. Thoughts on Boxing: Hurting and Getting Hurt

9. Thoughts On Boxing: Fear

10. On Hearing My Own Voice

(Blinking cursors)