BOOKED

should i talk about the US presidency? do i have the right to? i fucking well have. since the US is so intent in running the whole bloody world over, all of us have a stake and interest in whatever is happening in the US and we are all affected by who the US president is. i really wish the US make it a law that all the world population should be eligible to vote for american presidency.

we all know that the main candidates are mcCain and obama and come this november either of them would almost certainly (barring any unfortunate mishaps like mcCain kicking the bucket before november or osama get shot by some crazy racist) be the next president of the world , er...i mean the US of A. but do you know that there are other candidates to choose from?

but first let me say my thoughts about these two main candidates and why i will not vote for any of them (given a chance). when obama clinched the democratic party nomination the first thing he did and which offended me greatly was this. the fucker went and suck jewish lobby dicks! i watched his speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on the CNN with horror, here is a guy doing his damndenest to lick jewish boots and gabbing about how evil iran is, and jerusalem will be the eternal undivided capital of israel. now, i as a muslim like all muslims consider jerusalem- where the dome of rock (as Sakhra) is- is the third holiest city of Islam (after Mecca and medina) and this single statement from this half black half white pretender to the US presidency makes him my mortal enemy.

now don't get me wrong. i'm no racist. if i see a group of blacks fighting a group of whites i would probably root for the blacks and i have absolutely nothing against jews per se. some of my most admired writers (eg isaac bashevis singer) filmakers (eg coen brothers) or painters (eg arshile gorky) are jews. although i intensely hate the current jewish vice president dick chenney that idiot who shot his friend while on a hunting trip my choice for presidency is in fact a jew! (more of that below).

obama can yak and gab about the need for change and all that but i couldn't give a fuck because i know he will be sucking dicks just like the rest . it would be just talk. and so we have this mcCain guy as an alternative. firstly he is very proud that he is a vietnam war vateran and had not wilted under the terrible prison life in vietnam. he showed heroic courage and proved that he is a man of substance. but here's the thing. for me, i am on the vietnam side! so he was my enemy! i was against american inteference in vietnam before and am against any american inteference in the world today. and he is a warmonger. he was a key architecht of 'the surge' in iraq and if he wins there will be more killings and slaughter in iraq and afghanistan.

you see, the US is just a bully. they will prance and kick sands into small people of the world but have no balls to gamble anything when it comes to the big boys. russia can piss on their heads as they are currently doing in georgia and china can too. and as such i dearly wish the world has a more balanced super powers to keep the US in place. so in short mcCain the warmonger is another big NO for me. so who's left?

al goldstein of course!

i only came to know about al goldstein 'candidacy' very recently. a couple of weeks back i discovered another good pirate selling all these 'arthouse movies' imported from china. those same exact DVDs that I usually buy at tom dvd at Lido in Beijing. there are all these european films like the great volker schlondorff's adaptation of the gunther grass' novel 'the tin drum' etc. and i was flipping the dvds in the documentary section and picked several volumes of the excellent BBC art series the private life of a masterpiece when i saw a copy of PORN KING. with a title like that who could resist and i was not dissapointed. this is a very hilarious documentary of al goldstein the famous publisher of SCREW the worst smut magazine in the world. but it turned out al goldstein is a vary fascinating personality.

here is a man who defends free speech to it's absolute limit and have led a very colourful and tumultuos roller coaster life with ups and downs that is more than could ever be experienced in ten lifetimes of an average person. he has written an autobiography I, Goldstein: My Screwed Life which is very favorably and entertainingly reviewed by his ex director of the SCREW magazine that now works at NYT which you can read here. who says pornographers are not intelligent people eh?

and that is not all, he now has his own blog. and what a blog it is! his postings are laden with expletives and maniacal rantings . compared to him our local badmouth blogger the malay male looks like a pussycat. in his latest posting dated august 21 under the title "Any old jew cunts out there?" his first sentence was this; I have eaten 7000 pussies in my lifetime...now with a sentence like that it goes without saying that this guy is a somebody and he WAS a somebody before and is trying to be a somebody again by offering himself to become the president of the united states!

and he certainly has a very good platform. to start with he is all for free speech. and he is against all wars..who could argue with that eh? and he was spot on about hilary clinton. in his youtube posting he said this about hilary...i would rather suck bill clinton's cock...and on bush ...george bush is our president, he's a retard who is killing americans in the middle east, i hate him...and bearing in mind that he's a jew and jews are eternal victims of racism, he is realistic and has a sensible thing to say about racism...humans should be allowed to hate anyone they want... and on iraq....america must stop being so militaristic and stop trying to settle everything with a punch...you can see all for yourself here.

he seems to have some remarkably good points. admittedly he is the ultimate lowlife but that should not be held against him. afterall i really think that a scumbag is exactly the right kind of person to be the next president of the united states.

i read the news today, oh boy
About a lucky man who made the grade
And though the news was rather sad....

A day in the life- the beatles


i only got to know about the death of richard wright, the keyboardist of pink floyd from a small comment, in a guardian blog - just an aside really - by one of the guys discussing about the death of the american writer david foster wallace a few days back.

like many of you i was saddened by david foster wallace's suicide . although i'm not unfamiliar with his name , i am completely ignorant of how good he was as a writer. i've never read any of his works and so the sadness was more on an intellectual level. but richard wright was completely different.

the moment i read that little oh by the way, richard wright died today in that guardian blog i had a lump in my throat and i wanted to cry. here is a band that is my all time favorite, that has given me so much listening pleasure , that has produced some of the most amazing rock music the world has ever known and now one of the key members is gone forever. it is as if one of my loved ones has passed away.

i came to discover pink floyd music a long long way back when i was in my late teens. it was the dark side of the moon - perhaps their most famous album and arguably the best rock album ever . the first time i came to know about the band was through a now defunct local music magazine fanfare but didn't actually bought the album until i was in matriculation college and i've never stop listening to this album even to this day. i've probably listen to this album thousands of times. but an interesting aside; one of the band members -nick mason the drummer i think it was - surprisingly mentioned in one of their video albums the making of the dark side of the moon released recently (2003) that he has never in his life listened to the album in it's entirety.


over the years i've collected all their studio albums ( and some lives and videos) from the earliest the piper at the gates of dawn (1967) to their last the division bell (1994). i remember the second album (after the dark side of the moon) that i bought was relics and i was completely drugged out by careful with that axe eugene. it was the tail end of 'far out, man' days and i was firmly on this side of the fence although i'm proud to say that i've never touch any drug in my life. pink floyd music was and is drug enough for me. in those days like today you can devide music lovers - like anything else- into those with eclectic taste and those who listen to assholes like cliff richard.

there was this art house cinema near where i stayed during may matriculation days that used to play all sort of art house movies like padre padrone , decameron and many others and one of the movies i went to one wintry night was live at pompeii and i was spaced out by songs like a saucerful of secrets and decided there and then to collect all their albums which i managed to do in time. around the same time or perhaps a bit later i used to listen to a sydney radio station 2JJ (two double J) at night. I would have listened in the day time as well but for the fact that i stayed far away down south in tasmania at that time and i could only get the sydney reception in the middle of the night. and so i listened to this great deejay george wayne - amazing that i can still remember his name after all these years- playing all the great prog rock songs by the like of king crimson, genesis (peter gabriel era), hawkwind, yes and the rest. and the thing i remember about him was that he always played echoes (pt 2 here)from meddle - which really spaced me out.

i could go on and on about their albums , how completely 'spaced out' their atom heart mother is, and so is the album wish you were here and animals and the wall and even their later albums are far superior than most of the rubbish that we get these days. i may be still stuck in the brain addled days of the seventies when it comes to music but the sad fact is they don't make this kind of music anymore. today we are barraged by hip hop rubbish and three minute ditties by silly girl singers and i'm nostalgic for those spaced out days and the ultimate spaced out song is none other than the great gig in the sky from the dark side of the moon a song composed by richard wright ...and sadly now rick is gone. i miss him dearly already. RIP

today is a black day for malaysia. my heart missed a beat when i received an sms at midnight informing that more people were arrested under ISA last night. in addition to RPK, now we have teresa kok and a few others including ANWAR!!! thankfully anwar was not on the list according to the latest malaysiakini and staronline report this morning. even so, this is a very distressing news. not that i'm an admirer of any of these people including anwar but to use ISA when you lose an argument is downright criminal, shameful and and and ...word fails me.

dollah badawi was on record stating that 13 is his favorite number and today is sept 13. and he chose the date well to do this shameful thing. one need not wonder why none of the UMNO goons who started, incited and stoke up the racial issue were similarly arrested. but i say this. no one should expect a stupid leader to do a clever thing. it's a fact that stupid people will do the most harm in anything. and it's our collective misfortunes to have a stupid leader. but who's the stupidest? WE the people are of course! we (well, not me, but the majority of you) chose these people to be our elected representatives and govern the country. so as they say, we deserve what we get.

many are already and will be yakking and gabbing on this new arrests in all the political blogs and mainstream media with all kind of spins as usual. and a lot of these people have much better things to say than me on the issue. i therefore won't say anything more but i'll say this. it's not too difficult to wonder what gives the 'good' opportunity to our snail brained leader to act in such a shameful way and particularly in this time of political uncertainty leading to 916 date of anwar's takeover timeline. so i'll veer off into a slightly different thing.

consider the monkeys. when the first human beings migrate to the land of tanah melayu they would discover that monkeys were already here happily colonising all the tropical forests. so when the curly and crinkly haired negritos paddled all the way from the polynesian islands thousands of years and miles away to this land of ours they would find that the siamangs, gibbons, proboscis monkeys, the short tailed macaques and the pesty long tailed rhesus monkeys were all already here. and so if we want to bark and argue on the pandatang polemics (which i guess is the spark to this new ISA arrests) why then set the cut off point at the modern malays? why not start with the monkeys or the negritos of polynesian origin? because the negritos are backward and play no part in the history of malaysia, says some. but this is no argument. it's a historical fact that they are the first human migrants to malaya or tanah melayu.

the point is nobody should talk about pendatang anymore than talk about if one race is cleverer or stupider or looks more beautiful or uglier than the other. it'll only lead to one thing. more prejudice and disaster. okay, that's two things.

I'm currently reading a very readable travel book the golden Chersonese And the way thither by Isabella I. Bird which you can download a free e-copy here. this is a very fascinating book describing the malay states in the nineteenth century. what came clearly across is that the chinese were already the economic engine of malaya (at least in the west coast states of malacca, selangor and perak) during those days. the pony tailed chinese were busy with the tin mines, doing business in opiums and all kinds of merchandise and crowding the gambling dens during the night time. the malays were decidedly ugly in the eyes of this british woman traveller.

The way she put it , the malay men... looked superb in their red dresses and turbans , although the Malays are anything but a handsome race.

but there were no question that the malays were a civilized race (as she put it) and they were the ruling class, steeped in islamic religion and consider the british colonizers the 'infidel dogs' happily living in the kampongs and on occassions 'shooting the chinese' because 'they have no religion'. and the klings happy to work as servants. not much different than today in the broad sense.

ohmigod! (as paris hilton would say - i read that somewhere) i had a nasty dream last night! i dreamt my head went bald! eeeek!(as young silly girls would scream) , bald right in the middle of my head, as smooth as an egg but all around this bald patch my hair was still normal, jet black and not a single hair missing.

just before this i had a 'normal dream'. i was driving with a naked girl in the seat beside me. she is underage(ohmigod!- as paris hilton would say) and we were going somewhere to make love but the car stopped at a redlight and ohmigod! an old friend that i've not seen for years came over and opened the door and entered the car! what a downer!

i told my worse half about the dream- the one about the bald patch only, naturally- and she remarked that it meant i'm going to lose something. that's a rather unimaginative and obvious literal interpretation don't you think? i said, while inwardly felt slightly disturbed. i'm not superstitious by nature but one never know about these kind of things. in our culture, if you dream losing one of your teeth for example means one of your loved one is going to die. i've lost count dreaming of losing my teeth and so far none of my loved ones have passed away on account of this.

it's all subconscious and all that i know. it's all metaphysical innit? (as one of my old friends used to say) when he can't explain anything rationally. and so i tried to rationalize why i had this disturbing dream (not the one with the naked underaged girl - althought rationally this should be the one which should be considered disturbing). and i think i know why.

last night i was looking for my old 'life of brian' dvd but couldn't find it. and when i can not find my favorite movies , my solution this days is simple. just download it from ARES , a P2P software. and in one minor but funny episode of this great movie there was this old man among the rabble following brian , whom they thought was the messaih and shouting i'm healed! i'm healed...of my bald patch!

that's one explanation. another association could be this. yesterday i was reading bibliobibuli post (sept 7) about that book jewel of medina again and i kept thinking. this is amazing. how people can be so insensitive. i have a friend who is completely bald. not a single hair on his head now. smooth as a baby's ass and we are always careful not to talk about hairs when he's around. and that's just about a friend and on things which we should not worry too much about. even then we are extra sensitive so as not to hurt his feelings.

and here is a seemingly educated woman abusing Islam! completely ignorant of how muslims view how abhorent it is to put words in the prophet's mouth and writing fictional stuff about the prophet and his family. and i made my points known in the comments to bibliobibuli's posts on this issue . the first one i purposely made it very rude (in fear and censorship post 14 aug) and as expected and which proves my point, there was a deluge of comments from other commentators who got all riled up and offended by my comments (and seemingly oblivious to the fact that they are proving my point of having to be careful with people's sentivities especially when it comes to Islam).

bibliobibuli had another post on the same book more jewel of medina kerfuffle (aug 30) and i made a polite comment to explain why good muslims are offended and there was not even one comment responding to mine this time. which i hope to mean that non-muslims and wog-muslims bibliobibuli readers now come to understand a bit why we are offended. (it could also mean they have stopped bothering to argue with me, which suits me fine as well). and this latest post by bibliobibuli 7 Sept re-emphasize the need to be sensitive to other people's feelings but this time there was no comments save one that bibliobibuli deleted. (most likely one of those spams). i can't help admire this bibliobibuli lady.

about this bald friend. as i say we are careful enough not to talk about hairs with him but we can sure talk about bald twats. we all think that is sublime. we are the bald brigade when it comes to that as opposed to many others who are hairy brigade. and that's another thing i was thinking about yesterday. there was another sept 7 post on bibliobibuli (nicely titled twit for twat) about a catergory 2 typhoon brewing in the UK about the banning of the word twat in children books.(hmmm talk about freedom of expression). we used to joke about this word. if you're on a TWA airlines( is this still around?) don't forget to ask the airstewardess for a TWA tea(TWAT).

and the last association (to my bald patch dream) was this joke that i recalled in this train of thoughts . it's about a bald parrot. there was a priest who kept a big african grey parrot as a pet. this parrot can speak and do all kinds of interesting tricks but one bad habit of this bird is that he likes to screw chicken. everyday when the priest comes back from his church he would find another chicken half dead , raped by the parrot. after this has been going on for sometimes the patient priest just had enough and warned the parrot. one more time of this and i'm going to shave your head bald. but the next day coming back from church there is another chicken half dead ravished by the parrot. the priest threw his hands in the air and said that's it. he shaved the bird's head as he threatened and said. i'm going to bring you to church tomorrow. no more screwing of chicken for you. and so, the next day the priest put the now bald headed parrot on a perch inside the church. and the parrot perched there watching the goings on. he noticed that everytime people come to the church the priest politely ushered them to the pews. if a lady comes, he ushers to one side, and if a man comes he ushers to another side. this went on for sometimes until finally one bald man entered the church. before the priest could say anything the bald headed parrot squawked, oh you ! come sit beside me. we're in the chicken fucker's group.

not exactly booker material but there you are. after all these (ri)bald associations no wonder i dreamt of having a bald patch last night.

Sometimes a good song sends you on a train of thoughts and brings back all sorts of memories. And such is the case with a breezy and a tad melancholic sounding song wonderful life to me.

Quite a while back I spent a year in a small college which is a part of the university of london in wye, kent a very small town near Ashford which would be familiar to you that use the ‘chunnel’ to go to france.

In those days there were no channel tunnel yet and if any of you want to go to france (via calais) you had to travel to folkstone which isn’t very far away. On several occasions - on Sundays - I drove to folkstone in my 600- pounds beat up crap brown vauxhall bomb.walked along the beach watching people and families enjoying the sea side or sometimes joined the fun looking at mostly useless bric-a-brac stuff if the day happened to have boot fairs there. On one of these occasions towards the end of the day and when the boot sale was about to end I came across a small still-life oil painting and this old gentleman almost begged me to buy it and I did buy it from him for around five pounds or may be ten at the most . he almost slobbered and thanked me profusely and said god bless you sir. It was as though he was getting rid of something bad but it wasn’t so. the painting looked quite pleasing with beautiful gauguin magenta colors and I still hang it in my house and remains one of my favorite paintings. It must be quite old as you can see hair-line cracks all over the surface of the painting - which was done on a wooden panel. On another occasion I met one of my college friends and his family and I remembered him pointing to a white surfaced cliff in the distance and asking : is that the white cliff of dover? He unfortunately passed away sometimes back. Had a massive heart attack while driving to office and simply died right there in the traffic.

i love boot fairs and antique fairs. most sundays I would go to nearby towns where the fairs were held. Maidstone, ashford, wye and rye. One time on the way to rye, I drove my car into the drain by the roadside. Couldn’t see the drain which was full of weeds. And a white gentleman stopped his car, shook his head, gave a wan smile and heaved the front end and i managed to bring the car back onto the road. He again shook his head, got into his car and drove away . On yet another occasion I was driving in the typical kent countryside along an empty lane with hedgerows on both sides of the road and suddenly a beautiful pair of pheasants flew out of the hedgerow and stopped right in front of my car. That was the first and last time I ever see live wild pheasants in my life.

and it was while driving along this kind of lane one day during a summer vacation on my way to work as a part time strawberry picker that I first heard this lovely song wonderful life by black on my car radio. The weather was fine, the countryside was beautiful and I was on my way to gorge myself on strawberries as big as my fist and try to make some pocket money on the side so that I can travel and visit the louvre and go to venice and black was singing a beautiful song on the radio….it was a wonderful life…

And with money saved from picking strawberries (another story) and working as a bingo club door man (yet another story) I bought a package deal and took a trip to florence and venice with a short stop in lucerne switzerland and visited the famous monastery in asissi italy . Crossed the channel on one of those channel ferries from dover (or was it folkstone?) to calais and traveled all the way by bus through switzerland to italy. on the ferry met an old indonesian man with a young girl of may be seventeen or eighteen years old whom he claimed to be his daughter. She looked forlorn and positively depressed . the man said he was bringing his daughter to see paris before sending her to study in a university in malaysia. While I was talking to her daddy the whole of the crossing she just stayed away looking out to the sea with her hair blowing in the wind but didn’t look at all happy or looking forward to see paris, the romantic city.i did not get to find out what bugged her.

And in the monastery in asissi I took a photo of myself with a priest.st francis of asissi was said to be so happy living a monastic life that he even talked to birds. But monasteries evoke loneliness and melancholy in me and I couldn’t help recalling a very good short story "The miraculous Cairn" by Christopher Priest about a priest who did a very bad thing to a young and very fat girl. This story was featured in GRANTA 7 Best of young British novelists. i guess not many people hear anything about this writer anymore but Granta 7 was very spot on on many of the others as the writers featured in this Granta 7 went on to become very big names in the british literary scene now. salman rushdie, ian mcEwan, william boyd, julian barnes graham swift pat barker martin amis were all featured in this volume.

and i first get to know about this great literary quarterly from one of those boot fairs. i bought my first copy (Granta 14: Autobiography) from ashford british rail car park boot fairs all for ten pees all those many years ago. i still keep this volume although it is all tattered and all pages came loose now. over the years since i've collected almost all the granta volumes now.

and in florence everyone gawked at michealangelo's david but one old lady lamented that she couldn't visit the uffizi because it was closed on that day. I made a small mental note that i had to visit the uffizi ...and the prado and the hermitage one day. these are the three remaining greatest museums that i've not yet visited.

i 'm by inclination a loner although i'm not averse to company. books and paintings suit me fine and i'm happy surrounded by my books. they are my true friends.

and in venice while everybody was milling about in front of the doge's palace i asked one guy who happened to be a french tourist who refused to speak english how to get to the peggy guggenheim's palazzo venier dei leoni where i saw henri rousseau's surprise! For the first time there. ( several years later I saw the same painting in france somewhere). i like this painting so much that i used this picture for my wallpaper for many years until i changed it to a still life of old books by an unknown italian painter a few years back.

it's difficultt not to run and hide. i've been running and hiding all my life but one just can not hide and run away from oneself . everything considered i'm not too unhappy with my lot and this song , a sweet and happy song sometimes feel a tad melancholic as all good romantic songs are. if i can sing i would sing this song to a nice girl and i imagine she would be happy , perhaps shed a drop of tears or two and perhaps if i'm lucky she would shed more than just tears...but i'm thinking bad thoughts again...so i'll stop here...

.

***

Wonderful life

by Black

Here I go out to sea again
the sunshine fills my hair
and dreams hang in the air

Gulls in the sky and in my blue eyes
you know it feels unfair
there's magic everywhere

Look at me standing
here on my own again
up straight in the sunshine

No need to run and hide
it's a wonderful, wonderful life
No need to laugh and cry
it's a wonderful, wonderful life

Sun in your eyes
the heat is in your hair
they seem to hate you
because you're there

and I need a friend
Oh, I need a friend
to make me happy
not stand here on my own

Look at me standing
here on my own again
up straight in the sunshine

No need to run and hide
it's a wonderful, wonderful life
No need to laugh and cry
it's a wonderful, wonderful life

I need a friend
oh, I need friend
to make me happy
not so alone.......

Look at me here
here on my own again
up straight in the sunshine

No need to run and hide
it's a wonderful, wonderful life
No need to laugh and cry
it's a wonderful, wonderful life

No need to run and hide
it's a wonderful, wonderful life
No need to run and hide

it's a wonderful, wonderful life
wonderful life, wonderful life