Director of Skoob Books and gossip merchant extraordinaire, Thor Kah Hoong can hold you captive to his endless yarns about everyone you would have wanted to have lunch with. Perhaps it comes from being cooped up all day in a secondhand bookshop, with its musky smell and broken spines and millennia of collected wisdom waiting to be unleashed.

Thor, who now specialises in playing mean dads in movies like Spinning Gasing and Paloh, started doing theatre (and winning awards and bans) while still at university in the early 70s. He became an instrumental force in the 80s with his play Caught In The Middle. Featuring middle-class characters who cussed in all four major languages, the play captured Malaysianness the way Perempuan, Isteri dan Jalang captured Sofia Jane’s legs. So, Thor knew and worked with many others who during the 80s rescued English theatre from a National Culture Policy-sanctioned oblivion. Caught In The Middle, besides spawning two sequels, also united the founding members of Instant Café Theatre, and practically paved the means for Malaysians to laugh at ourselves.

In 1993, Thor started his love affair with Skoob Books. Since last year, the bookshop sits at the bottom of Menara Mutiara Majestic, PJ Old Town, from where Thor writes his kicking, wise-cracking column for The Star. While the bookshop used to be in Brickfields, I dropped by occasionally (not often enough), and had always found myself snickering as he recounted petty – but long-standing – misgivings between members of the arts fraternity in those days. And the scandals the man knows!

It was heartwarming to hear about the good old days; that is, before everyone took out restraining orders on each other. Makes you wish our artsy uncles and aunties will come back and shake hands and make our little arts scene scandalous again.

In 1998, Thor staged Brickfields Now and Then, a collection of his monologues about growing up in this part of town now famous for its Indian food, blind masseurs and prostitutes who couldn’t make it at Bintang Walk. But the play takes place in the 50s and 60s, when all that was available for corruption was the Lido Cinema, and the idle minds of a pre-pubescent boy on the verge of becoming a professional raconteur.

I had found Thor’s stories candid, funny and moving, in the way that it reminds us not so much what we no longer are, but what we still are. Thor tickles out the humour and unearths the irony from this blemished land in a way that makes them quintessentially Malaysian yet deeply universal.

Brickfields… Now & Then runs from Mon Aug 16 to Sat 21, 2004, at The Actors Studio Bangsar. On Sun Aug 22, he presents Lost Luggage & Stages, another series of anecdotes based on his first forays into theatre (including the play that got banned by Lee Kuan Yew), as well as that time he had to stand-in for his boss at the UN Olaf Palme Commission on Nuclear Disarmament, held in Tokyo. He might even play it by ear and ask for a topic from the audience. Here’s a tip, ask for the stories behind Caught In The Middle.

Refined Colors: Industrial light and magic

Dumb Type is not coming. But one of their members is.

Dumb Type, a Japanese dance group specialising in the seamless integration of multimedia and performance, came to Istana Budaya last year. Their sheer ingenuity, their varied emotions expressed through so much digital interventions – they were mindblowing. KL arts practitioners who saw them were ashamed of their own attempts at multimedia till then. Some swore: Never again will we dare multimedia. Unless we can get hold of these gadgets, dammit!

Well, Takayuki Fujimoto, one of the members of Dumb Type, comes to KL this time with a nifty lighting contraption. It employs minimal equipment, a computer and LED lighting, and offers limitless possibilities and colours to lighting designers. Together with dancer-choreographer Kosei Sakamoto from Monochrome Circus, two more Japanese dancers and two Malaysian dancers, they are presenting a dance titled Refined Colors on Sat Aug 21 (8.30pm) and Sun Aug 22 (3pm) at MCPA Theatre, Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall. Their funky lights and lithe bodies will be used to recreate Malaysian sceneries. Just in time for our Merdeka Day parade too.

There will be a free workshop on the LED lights after the performance on Sunday.

KL World Poetry Reading: The Finance Minister’s verses

Factory workers in Malacca aren’t the only ones trying to get in touch with their inner sasterawans. Members of the Finance ministry in Putrajaya are now being put to the task as well. They will be reading their poems this Thursday at their Multipurpose Hall. Check it out if you wanna know what miracle moves within their souls. Will Pak Lah write an ode to Kuala Berang?

Have you heard about the KL World Poetry Reading forum, or Pengucapan Puisi Dunia KL? No? I thought so. Organised by the Dewan Bahasa & Pustaka as well, with invited poets from Belgium, Indonesia, UK, Canada, Finland, India and Mexico, this low-publicity forum was happy to receive 50 participants in total, including 17 from Malaysia. No one I asked had heard about it. But hey, it is free! Or, to put it better, kindly sponsored by DBP. When I called DBP and asked for an online itinerary to which I can direct Kakiseni readers, they said it will only be launched at the Official Opening Ceremony on Monday night, the day before the forum begins. This makes it as useful as Malaysian road signs that appear only at the split of junctions.

Started in 1986, and held biennially, the KL World Poetry Reading is celebrating its 10th Anniversary this year. One of its objectives is: “promoting poetry as catalysts to efforts towards world peace and humanity.” It won’t figure to tell them that poetry has never stopped war or inhumanity before, but has more often been used to promote just such. And that it might be more worthwhile to promote poetry as the war the individual makes against humanity, and poetry as the fading ambers at the last campfire of the world, around which huddles the remnants of humanity.

The forum runs from Mon Aug 16 to Fri Aug 20. The following events are open to the public:

Tue Aug 17
9am: Keynote Address by Indonesian poet Goenawan Mohamad (Banquet Hall, Dewan Bahasa & Pustaka) (By the way, Goenawan is launching his book of selected poems at Valentine Willie Fine Art, Bangsar, later at 8pm)
8pm: Poetry Appreciation Programme at UiTM – Poetry Reading and Poetry Song Rendition (UiTM, Shah Alam)

Thu Aug 19
5.30pm: Putrajaya Poetry Reverberation – Poetry Song Renditions by M. Nasir, Ramli Sarip, Ahmad Ramli; Poetry Reading, Reverberation of Five Continents; Cultural performance/Poetry Reading by Members of Finance Ministry (Finance Ministry, Putrajaya)

Fri Aug 20
9am: Keynote Address by National Laureate Datuk A Samad Said (Tuanku Abdul Rahman Hall, Malaysian Tourism Centre)
9.30am: World Poet Forum – Panel: Germain Droogenbroodt (Belgium), Choman Hardi (UK), John Weier (Canada), Zakaria Ali (Malaysia), Sonya Servomaa (Finland) and Giribala Mohanty (India).

Just so you know: For five days, our international motley crew of poets will be put up at Mutiara Hotel, taken to DBP, UiTM, Malaysia Agricultural Park at Shah Alam (where they will explore the animal park and read poetry), Finance Ministry at Putrajaya (where they will cruise around the Putrajaya Lake and do spontaneous poetry writing), Malaysian Tourism Centre, and finally, to the state of factory poets (where they will be given a ‘Poet’s Tour of Melaka’).