Tag: Petaling Jaya

Categories
Songwriting

Lyrics of (There Were) Many Ways To Get To You

Let’s recap on what I’ve set out to do in my personal time during this rather long overseas business trip.  Catch up with old friends, checked.  Become a male model for a female lingerie shop … OK, that wasn’t planned but I did promise my friend that I will blog about it.  Gosh, what was I thinking?!

Finish reading a non-fiction book, checked.  Write a music review, checked too.  Wieke and I didn’t manage to practice on our 5-song set but I did manage to write a song, which is good.  I have been staring at my unopened guitar case for the entire week wondering if it was a mistake to bring my guitar with me.  I mean, I am not on holiday, am I?  My second song written for this year and though it is way below my one song per month target, I am happy that I still can write a song as and when I put my heart and soul onto it.

I can’t say too much on how I was inspired to write “(There Were) Many Ways To Get To You”.  All I can say is that it is inspired by a real life story shared by one friend of mine.  As we were staring out into the darkness in the city of Petaling Jaya, a song was born.  This brief hiatus in songwriting has injected fresh variation into the way I craft a piece of music.  A little bit of seeing how Wieke musically rearranges my songs, a little bit of hearing the comments from my old friend (and now my new vocal coach!) Jason Seet, a little bit of paying attention on how others do unplugged, all seem to converge into a pool of new ideas ready to be tapped onto.  And here are the lyrics for the first cut of this new song of mine.  My 157th song if my count is correct.  And yes, it is as always dark, and depressing.  Sorry!

(There Were) Many Ways To Get To You

There were many ways to get to you
Many days right next to you
Now these doors they disappear
Now that I can see so clear

That I can’t fly, cannot hide
From this demon deep inside
You disappear from my life

These words you left behind
Black and white here they are
Since the day you said goodbye

There were times when I held onto you
Times I could not comprehend
Now that I still hold onto
All that you have left behind

I stare into darkness
Looking at the headlights
The pulse keeps on moving
I surrender to it all

The light forms an image
A face I once knew
The dance of the signals
I’m lost in my thought

(after chorus)

There were many ways to get to you
I wish I am by your side 

© Wilfrid Wong 2008 All Rights Reserved

Categories
Diary

I Picture Myself As a Surfer

In as much as I wish to follow closely the exciting world news these days, I feel isolated working in a city out of my home country.  Having to face a relatively large group of people – that if to double count the country of birth and of work, they whom literally come from all continents of the world – the interaction and the so-called rollercoaster politics is enough to make me forget about the third debate of Obama versus McCain.  Almost.

Menara Axis – where our workshop is – is merely a stone throw away from the hotel I am staying in.  Yet on the first day of work, my colleague and I were trying hard to figure out how to get to the other side of the highway.  Very much like The Amazing Race (see pictures above or click here for the slideshow).  Looking back, after spending the past four days trekking those concrete jungle trails, it is really not that harsh.  Just that, there is no zebra crossing (actually I told my overseas friends not to trust the zebra crossing here with their lives), no traffic light for the pedestrians, and we simply have to watch out for the motorists as we enter the mini-intersection above the highway.  The experience reminds me of that one time (and obviously last time) I was trying to take a public transport from PJ to KL via the new transit railway.  No wonder there are so many cars here in Malaysia.

You know how it is like that you are aware that something big and exciting is coming you way and you thought with all that you have seen and done in the past, you can do it.  Yet when that something big and exciting hits you, you have a challenging time trying to remain standing.  Imagine yourself on the surfboard with the blue sky as the backdrop.  Perhaps because no two waves are the same, the surfers love what they do waves after waves.  Perhaps to those who sunbath by the beach, looking at the surfers and the waves, it is just another surfer, another wave.  And to me, as the ‘surfer’, in these couple of days, I see crucible moments.  One day I may look back, at a particular juncture in life, and say, “I am who I am because of those particular days.”

Passed the halfway mark today and four more working days to go in help handling this workshop, I am so looking forward to a restful weekend.  I wish to catch up on what I planned to do.  And my plan has not been carried out as planned, yet.

Categories
Jamming Session

Weekend Drive-Up Jamming Session Inside PJ Hilton Hotel Room Ended Up Performing for 2 Long Lost Friends of Mine from My UK Days

I have yet another theory.  Ordinary events don’t get stuck in my mind.  Extraordinary events do.  I love to seek out opportunities to do something crazy, if circumstances permit.  To make my life a bit more memorable.  For instance, that one time after my buddy Sam and I got our miserable laughable bonus, we impulsively headed for our breakfast at The Fullerton and spent what seemed like more than S$40 for a hotel breakfast in our home land.  The power breakfast, as we called it.  No local does that.  Unless you are very rich.  At least we weren’t.  At least I am not (can’t say the same for my friend now that he is a big shot).  And that probably is the most memorable breakfast I had ever had to date.  It is out of proportion.  It is laughably ironic.

When I told my band manager Selrol that I was planning to bring along all the band equipment from Singapore and practice with Wieke in Malaysia over the weekend, her response was, “No shit!”.  Uh-huh.  Everyone thinks that I am nuts.  OK.  I can be nuts some time, because I can.  So I have weighed my gears.  Close to 70kg of equipment that filled up the entire car boot.  And I had to align them carefully so that they all fitted nicely.  So what exactly did I bring to PJ Malaysia with my car (in the order of importance)?

  • Cynthia the bassist and backing vocalist
  • My Les Paul Deluxe electric guitar
  • Cynthia’s Warwick bass guitar
  • Wieke’s Yamaha acoustic guitar
  • A heavy acoustic guitar amplifier
  • My huge guitar amp and effect processor, VOX ToneLab LE
  • A 12-channel mixer
  • 2 microphones and 2 mic stands
  • Handheld recording device, Zoom Handy Recorder H2
  • Cables, lots of cables
  • Clothes and other stuff
  • A laptop to store recorded materials from the handheld device

After that horrifying experience with the Malaysian Custom, I was worried that they would tax my close to S$10k worth of used gears.  But they didn’t inspect my car.  Phew!  At the hotel lobby, I was asked twice: Are you the wedding singer?

I love Facebook.  I really do.  Thanks to Facebook, my two long lost friends Kah Lok and Kenneth turned up at my hotel room (last seen more than a decade ago with zero contact since then … I remember that one bus terminal scene with tears in my eyes).  And we performed for them, inside our PJ Hilton hotel room, with the studio set up.  Like real!  Like how we are going to perform in The Heeren this November.  We played a song, we took a break and chatted.  I love the intimacy between our band and the audience.  I am inspired.  While Jason is aspired for online broadcast, Cynthia is aspired for public performance, I think I have found my own aspiration: private performance.

All five of us surprisingly got along really well.  We’ve had so much fun.  And that is another story to tell.

Mental note: Write to Ovi by Nokia and suggest that they should display the captions and titles within the slide show.

Related Blog Entry: Yet Another Road Trip, Yet Another Small Step Towards Our Goal

Categories
Travel Blog

Photos From My Petaling Jaya Road Trip – Of PJ Hilton, The Curve, And More

PJ Hilton

After my rather unexpected encounter with the Malaysian Custom, my next challenge was to locate “PJ Hilton”.  I had no clue how exactly to get there.  It’s been donkey years since I worked in Petaling Jaya and how the whole place has changed!  There are new flyovers, streets turned one-way, new shops spawned from nowhere, and already humongous shipping malls duplicate into twice the size.  This interesting satellite city of Kuala Lumpur has officially gained a city status just two years ago.

Photo captions from left to right: (1) A slice of Petaling Jaya, (2) PJ Hilton, (3) View from the hotel room

Truly a weird feeling not sure if some of you could relate, pieces of memory of the street layout that I was once so confident in negotiating from one street to another seems to have vanished in thin air.  I have zero recollection on where is where in PJ.  OK, I do have a vague idea that PJ Hilton is along the Federal Highway but how to get to the highway?

New Paris Restaurant and the Curve

Photo captions from left to right: (1) New Paris Restaurant at SS2, a must try! (2) interesting dish with champagne braised chicken that has a sour taste served with balls of water melon!  Say what?! (3) Finally, “The Curve” signboard after a 2 hours drive … the return trip was barely a half-an-hour trip.

Fortunately, what we humanly not possible to accomplish – in my case, the revival of my faded memory – technology made possible.  Nokia Map is a great tool, though I must say the screen size of my N95 is a tad too small.  It is pretty much like a computer game to me.  There is an icon marked as my destination.  And there is this blinking cursor telling me where I am via the global positioning system established between my tiny phone and the far away satellites above me.  All I need to do is keep driving till the blinking cursor coincide with the target icon – in theory.

The Curve at Petaling Jaya

Photo captions from left to right: (1) “The Curve” is a new shopping mall with little stores along the middle of the street, (2) TGI Friday!  I wonder if they will return to Singapore one day, (3) There is … Cineleisure at “The Curve”!

And because I do remember and know some of the landmarks and eating spots in PJ, finding them in my phone is relatively easy.  Getting there, took time.  At one point, after going round and round in circle and Cynthia and I were excited to see that our car was finally heading directly to the new shopping mall “The Curve” only to realize that it was a dead end blocked by another highway.

Also unexpectedly, I have decided to call up my good old friend Catherine and her husband whom I met back when I was working in Mauritius.  Their daughters are so cute!  And they have grown up so much.  Amazingly adorable they are.

My friend Catherine and her family at PJ