Published
November 26th, 2007
in
blah, hands-on thinking |
4 Comments »
| If you think I must have heard that question for thousands of times in my life, you might be right. Ask me to confirm the number of times.
Hi. I’m Tintin.
Oh, really? Where’s Snowy?
(laughs, as though it’s the smartest question on earth ever to be asked by a human being.)
So here, all of you precise surveyors of the Hergé heritage: I’ve found my Snowy.
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Her Ruangrupa dads call her Mentos, but that’s only because they didn’t think of me when they found her.
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(How could they forget me!)
Snowy continuously scratched, and Ameng continuously tried to convince me and Sari that it’s just her attitude as a dog having grown up without an adult dog role model.
The dog has only been playing with cats. And human perhaps. In fact, she even also tried to imitate me speaking her name. Men, pause – for clarity – tos, and so on. She would lick her lips for the first syllable, pause for clarity, and lick her lips again for the second syllable.
By the time I thought she would finally made it to say her name, she would scratch again.
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One night, I and Sari couldn’t hold it any longer. I thought that if Snowy kept scratching herself, she would start to develop eczema or something like that. Whether this was reverse logic or not, I don’t really care. It was 2AM, and after failing to find a hair-dryer and a decent towel, we decided that we would bathe her anyway.
We did. Ameng visited us in the bathroom.
We toweled her as much as we could, and encouraged her to run around to let her fur dry. Inside the gallery only, though, not outside where she usually likes to play.
Sari said that she smells good. Sure. She had a lot of dirt on her fur before.
A few minutes later she paused from her running, sat down in front of us,
and,
started scratching again.
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See, Ameng said. It’s just her dog-ish attitude.
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Published
November 26th, 2007
in
hands-on thinking, jogja |
No Comments »
| There is a certain wave in Jogja that tells motorbike riders when a traffic light is about to turn green. This wave is very practical when it’s sunny and very hot, especially around the gates of the old walls surrounding the palace area.
It is a unique experience of sound (and obviously sight) to pass through these gates. When you close your eyes while passing through Plengkung Gading (a.k.a. Plengkung Nirbaya – the closest gate to this studio), for example, it would sound a little bit like this:
… ee – oo – ee …
And when the traffic light turns red, the whole experience of passing through the gate would sound somewhat like this:
… ee, k, oo – oo – oo – oo – oo – oo. oooo, wheeeeee …
This is as close as possible to what I think it sounds like. But written language is limited. Pictures speak more:
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| I wonder how the Bajaj, Jakarta’s most noisy vehicle, would sound when passing through these gates. Perhaps we would hear a lot of swearing, or perhaps no one would even want to be around. A standard Bajaj heard from the inside would really hurt your eardrums. A standard Bajaj going through a standard gate, that might help you reach deafness faster.
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No, this is not the noisiest view. I went up to the roof of Plengkung Gading, and found that the ditch between the wall and the outer buildings were all covered with concrete already. |
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What I found there was quite a long and hot pathway (especially at high noon) with quite interesting views. Mostly of garbage.
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Forever uncollected, uncollectable garbage.
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And others.
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Last night, when I biked back to the studio after Mas Landung’s birthday dinner, I passed by this famous Plengkung Gading again. I was very tempted to go up and see whether youthful couples would have ritually converted the space into something more suitable for nomadic romance.
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But well, it was too dark, I was too coward, the wind was too cold, the bike too expensive, and the bed too comfortable.
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