Here be dragons

 

As published in Off the Edge              

 

Anyone who has visited the older parts of Indonesia’s sprawling capital will probably have seen the historical Stasiun Jakarta Kota and noticed the striking difference between it and its Malaysian cousin, the Stesen Keretapi Kuala Lumpur.

 

Architecturally, Stasiun Jakarta Kota is remarkably uncomplicated compared to the splendour of the Kuala Lumpur station. Another obvious difference between the two is that the one in Jakarta is still very much alive with human activity (and waste) while the one in Kuala Lumpur is, well, quite dead.

 

But things were not always sepi at the Kuala Lumpur station. It was the main railway station linking the capital to the rest of the country from the early 1900s up until it surrendered most of its operations to the new Kuala Lumpur Sentral in 2001.

 

Today, other than to photograph its pretty exterior, the station is a dull place to visit.

There is an art gallery/mini-museum—established perhaps to snare the occasional pedestrian—but this also seems somewhat half-hearted. The gallery-museum is, at the very most, uninspiring except for one particular exhibit: A huge model of the original Sentul railway depot and workshop area.

 

Those of us who know Sentul only for its roti canai and the Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) might wonder, “Where the heck in Sentul is this? It’s is enormous!” A lot of it has given way to development, and all that is left is guarded behind walls. The famous KLPac building was in fact part of the facility, functioning as a saw mill for our railway lines.

 

Better known today as the Sentul Workshop, the facility has been the heart of our nation’s railway industry. It began operations in 1905 as the central workshop and depot for the Federated Malay States Railway (FMSR), which eventually evolved into the present day Keretapi Tanah Melayu Berhad (KTMB).

 

Until recently, the Sentul Workshop was home to generations of railway families who depended on employment at the facility. It was a huge establishment of 13 acres, and a busy one considering it was where trains were built, fixed and refurbished before they proceeded to serve commuters and businesses on the Malayan peninsular. It brought life to Kuala Lumpur, and to it Sentul owes its epithet: City of Locomotives.

 

Most of us are unaware of the facility’s significance. The very compound into which some of Kuala Lumpur’s middle-class waltzes for their dose of music and plays, was itself once a great war theatre. In 1944, the facility was destroyed by bombs dropped by the very people who helped build it—the British.

 

So vital was the function of the Sentul Workshop that Allied forces deemed it necessary to destroy the Workshop in order to paralyse the Japanese military occupation during the Second World War. Soon after the bombing, and after looting more than 5,000 locomotive carriages from the peninsula (they ended up in Indochina), the Japanese mission to create an “Asia for Asians” ended too. So, back came the British as we restored the Sentul Workshop to its important position in the Malayan railway industry.

 

The Sentul Workshop history is an important one, and likely to be forgotten. Like the Kuala Lumpur station the Sentul Workshop will also cease its operations when the new facility in Perak is completed, and the land on which it stands has been sold to a new owner.

 

But what will become of it? Will it serve as another community centre like the KLPac? Or will it stand in a grand lull, like Stesen Kuala Lumpur? Perhaps it will be “Bok House-ed” and replaced by a Disneyland of condominiums.

 

Whatever its fate, a group of young photographers feel its visual memory should at least be preserved. With permission from KTMB, photographer K. Azril Ismail and his students from the Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM) were able to photograph the last vestiges of the original Sentul Workshop.

 

Together with the KLPac, they are staging an exhibition in January to share a glimpse of the historic facility with the public.

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* Iron Dragons of Malaya on their official website.

 

how to make civil servants

 

1. crack 5 eggs into a bowl.

 

2. beat the shit out of the eggs until egg yolk and egg white become ~ one.

 

3. let egg mix settle in room temperature.

 

4. meanwhile, make tea and telephone close friend to gossip.

 

5. after 3 hours, hang up and heat a pan on low fire.

 

6. eat lunch.

 

7. pay bills at post office.

 

8. return to kitchen and check on pan. if properly heated, put egg mix into pan. make sure

no ants in egg mix.

 

9. fry egg mix for 7 minutes.

 

10. if mix is properly pancake-like, turn off fire.

 

11. put pancake-like egg thing onto plate.

 

12. use pizza cutter and arbitrarily slice pancake-like egg thing until properly severed.

 

13. civil servants ready.

 

how to make a Prime Minister

 

1. take a bucket and fill it up with water.

2. put bucket of water in the garage. make sure there is sunlight. 

3. let water sit for 35 minutes.

4. after 35 minutes, throw in a packet of carbon.

5. mix carbon in water with dead twig from the garden.

6. sprinkle some oregano into carbon water mix.

7. kick bucket hard until it falls over.

8. allow carbon water mix to spill completely.

9. Prime Minister will take form after 5 minutes of exposure to garage and sunlight.

10. when done, kick Prime Minister in the shin to make sure it is alive.

11. if alive, Prime Minister is ready.

 

don’t know much about Picasso

i secretly want to be an artist. i suppose anyone can be an artist since art is hell, so subjective. a white canvas … a blotch of orange paint … two fine vertical lines ~ art. selling at $23,000. a f***ed-up-Japanese-flag looking thing is high art up in this shit. hell, i can do that.i was with some friends the other day when one of them started to draw a portrait, Picasso style. sheesh, i thought. i’ve seen some of Picasso’s work but i don’t think i can identify a Picasso if i were to be put on the spot. Jesus … let alone to draw like him.

is “draw” even the word for it?

there were other pieces around the Picasso pieces i saw; by Goldsmiths students. they were very good.see what i mean?! Picasso amongst College art. who the hell gives a bloody damn if you’re Picasso? i mean, who the hell is Picasso if George the Anglican makes the same museum, floor, hall, wall, corner, frame …? then again, maybe it’s just me. i don’t know much about art. especially European art. art history. anything art. i don’t know much, so who am i to value Pica-man.

did Picasso go to Goldsmiths? shit.

i worked in this shithole once and one of the lady-bosses really wanted to know the name of a painting by that guy. the famous one, yea. Sunflowers, i told her without batting an eyelid. i was right. i knew which painting she was talking about, and its name seemed obvious to me. it was a blank shot but i came across knowledgeable. f*** that. i’ll draw a cat tonight and call my piece ~ Cat. shit. bet noone’d guess.

i also lived in a hole once. but i had enough walls to tape my art on. yea, i had art. i don’t know much about art … but i found art, bought and taped them up my walls. my walls matched my music and loveseat.

if i were to draw, i’d probably be like them: Bua, Morrison, Watson. that chap or chick whose pieces hang at the business center on the third floor, Block D. the mood, the style, the emotion. the ~ disfiguration. but i won’t use paint. i don’t know how to. one of my greatest weaknesses is skinny paintbrushes. pencils. i’d be a pencil artist. pencilist. penciler. pencilteur.

they’re called sketches, aren’t they?

“a rough drawing representing the chief features of an object or scene and often made as a preliminary study; a tentative draft (as for a literary work); a brief description (as of a person) or outline; a short literary composition somewhat resembling the short story and the essay but intentionally slight in treatment, discursive in style, and familiar in tone”

sort of. somewhat. something like that. vague. shadowy. obscure. incomplete. imperfect. unedited. but not vacant. not idle. not lifeless. there’s something sickly romantic about unfinished work, don’t you think, dear void?