“Seems like just a few months since I was last here,” a friend says when the former Majestic Hotel (and, not so long ago, the National Art Gallery) comes into view. “We used to come here a lot, when it used to be, you know, really majestic.”

It is surprising just how much a decade of dereliction and exposure to the elements ages a building. Cleanup work on the site began in January; in the dark -- if one squints -- one may still see masking tape fixed to floors and walls, bearing instructions: ‘Cuci lantai lagi bersih’, ‘Lights here’.

Above, ceiling fans have lost their blades, and a colony of bats now inhabit the halls. Last Friday, two such creatures circled in the air, while opening night audiences for Don’t Look Back were led past a broken wedding banquet by a regal woman in a wedding dress. Her twin, it appeared, lay dead on the table.

To fully enjoy this extraordinary exhibit, brought to us by the efforts of the British Council and the ASWARA student body, one recommends travelling alone; Don’t Look Back was inspired by Orpheus’s quest into the underworld, after all, and his was a solitary experience. After receiving a ticket by the Charon-esque Thor Kah Hoong and listening to his grim admonition not to wake the building’s “many sleepers,” ditch your two companions. Do not ask where the projectors are, or where the music (by excellent contemporary composer Max Richter) is coming from. Rock the horse, examine the newspaper cuttings scattered on the floor. Approach the mirror when you see it and don’t be surprised when --

It is difficult to articulate dreamthinkspeak’s ‘site-responsive piece’, not only because it would give so much away, but also because much of the work is so tactile. Take your time, touch everything. When you happen on a chair-filled room, floor strewn with crackling leaves, you have to hold the pieces of paper sitting on the violinist’s stand to the light before you discover they don’t notate music, but are blank death certificates.

These death certificates resurface throughout the Majestic Hotel; you meet both Eurydice (the bride) and Orpheus (Nicholas Ang on the violin) at various points, but neither are as powerful characters as the space itself: a slumbering, dreaming Limbo, replete with servants silently going about their tasks. When such an underling instructs you to wait in a pitch-black corridor, your unease is already palpable: you dread -- but, at the same time, you eagerly await -- what the building has in store for you.

An individual experience of Don’t Look Back is designed to last just over 40 minutes; you may be forced to move on when you may not want to. When it is over, sleep on it and marvel at its intricacies the next day. “My father used to live at the Majestic Hotel,” another friend may tell you, anticipating her own 40 minutes in the place. Suppress the need to tell her about the mirror. - Z S

Don’t Look Back, directed by Tristan Sharp, featuring the talents of theatre veteran Thor Kah Hoong and students from the Akademi Seni Budaya dan Warisan Kebangsaan, runs till Sun 11, Feb 2007. Audiences enter at five minute intervals.

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Apple Trees & Honey Bees
Fri 2, Feb 2007

On their latest album, Klang Valley twee pop outfit Ferns frontman Warren has the infuriating habit of affecting a whisper-like quality in his singing. While an understated sound is in no way ignoble -- luminaries such as Canadian singer Leslie Feist and our own Jerome Kugan spring to mind -- it only works if the vocalist enunciates well enough to be aurally and emotionally legible.

Or maybe it’s just me. Being the kind of person that can, at times, be more enthusiastic about a song’s poesy than its musicality, I get upset when an artist obscures (intentionally or otherwise) his or her own words. The lo-fi style of On Botany (distributed by Singapore’s Fruit Records) makes Warren sound wheezy; in ‘Disaster Strikes Again’, he appears to sing the refrain with zero conviction, like a post-coital lover nodding off. As a result, much of the record slides by, sounding sickly sweet and cool but, ultimately, unengaged.

Bands performing live are a different matter: under such sonic assault, one doesn’t expect to hear what’s being sung -- instead, one harnesses the performers’ to surf the electricity in their audience.

Ferns, performing at Apple Trees & Honey Bees (with free bananas at the door), suffered from none of their record’s shortcomings; Warren, perhaps influenced by the rest of the night’s line-up -- Azmyl Yunor’s cowboy cries with The Sigarettes, Etc.’s Ben Harrison’s Anglo-rock grandstanding, Couple’s driving power-pop, and the progressive lushness of Furniture; all excellent -- uncharacteristically rocked out and jumped around.

It was great. Even at KL Jam Asia, where a no-smoking policy seems to discourage other forms of rebellion, I couldn’t help stamping my feet. After it was over, I got my own copy of On Botany -- and, being expectant, went home to put it on. It had been a nice night, and I nodded off halfway through the album. - Z S

Ferns was chosen out of a nomination list of over 1,700 bands to make Rolling Stone’s 25 Best Bands on Myspace list. Couple also made the cut.

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The Kuala Lumpur Initiative to Criminalise War
Mon 5, Feb 2007

For a week before the opening of the Expose War Crimes - Criminalise War International Conference & Exhibition (organised by the Perdana Global Peace Organisation, led by Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad in his new incarnation as international stateman for world peace), anyone driving down Jalan Tun Razak would have seen the iconic image of Abu Ghraib’s hooded prisoner, enhanced with digital blood splatters and jagged strips of red and neon green, emblazoned with the caption: ‘For the first time in Malaysia LIVE TESTIMONY by the Man in Hood at Abu Ghraib. ALI SHALAH shares the truth about his torture.’

(Incidentally, while Ali Shalal Qaissi, the advertised feature at the conference, was hooded and tortured by electrocution at Abu Ghraib, he is not the man in the famous photograph. Profiled on the front page of the New York Times on March 11th, 2006, Shalal’s claim was challenged by Salon.com, an online publication; a week later, the Times noted the error in its initial report, quoting Qaissi himself as saying that he was not the man in that specific photograph -- although he still maintains that he was photographed in a similar situation.)

To some extent, the conference expressed ideals with which an average liberal would not differ: war is bad, torture is abhorrent, children and innocent civilians should be protected. During the opening session, however, it was hard not to notice that the crusaders for peace were, at the same time, highly selective about what they saw as constituting a war crime. Past atrocities that were mentioned included the bombing of Dresden, but not the Holocaust. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Iraq and Vietnam featured prominently -- quite noticeably, however, Cambodia and Bosnia were referred to only in passing, and I do not recall Rwanda being discussed that morning. From the outset, the conference was geared to focus on conflicts that involved the United States, Britain and Israel.

Speakers included Cynthia McKinney, a former member of the US House of Representatives, and Canadian economist Professor Michel Chossudovsky (both have publicly suggested that the Bush administration had prior knowledge of the September 11th, 2001 attacks) -- but the opening session’s most colourful speaker was Dr Leuren Moret, described as a geoscientist, radiation specialist and whistleblower at a nuclear weapons facility in California.

Clad in a shalwar kameez, the attractive Dr Moret walked to the podium to musical accompaniment -- an Enya-esque tune with lyrics that went “Hiroshima ... depleted uranium.” In her speech, Dr Moret talked about the “Warrior Mother Spirit” that strengthened her during her travails, and of declining SAT scores in the US, which, according to her, correlates with the increase in nuclear facilities. Through Dr Moret, the Jews were finally alluded to -- though not in the context of the six million murdered by Nazi Germany but, rather, as part of the Zionist-British economic empire attempting to depopulate the world through the use of depleted uranium.

The culmination of the conference was the setting up of a War Crimes Tribunal that would indict war criminals in absentia. The organisers are considering international members for the tribunal -- ironically, among those considered are Ramsey Clark, the former US attorney general who served on Saddam Hussein’s defense team, and provided legal counsel to Slobodan Milosevic. Clark’s humanitarian record includes defending Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, a Rwandan Hutu implicated in the massacre of 2,000 Tutsis in a church complex in Mugonero on April 16th, 1994. The tribunal’s legal counsel, Matthias Chang, is no less dubious: his books on the Zionist conspiracy for world domination sit alongside proven fraudulent texts such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. That Chang is a Chinese Malaysian quoted widely by institutions like the British People’s Party -- a right-wing political party in the UK committed to white nationalism -- was only one of the many paradoxes connected to the conference.

“Kuala Lumpur has become the peace capital of the world!” declared Cynthia McKinney, at one point in the proceedings.

Applause. The 2,000-strong audience at the Putra World Trade Centre -- decorated with rainbow peace flags, along with signs bearing hippie-style slogans like ‘Peace Not War’ and ‘We Love Peace’ -- signalled its approval. - Gabrielle Low

The Expose War Crimes - Criminalise War International Conference & Exhibition ran between Mon 5 - Wed 7, Feb 2007. An exhibition related to war crimes will run till Sun 11, Feb 2007.

Gabrielle Low is a member of Five Arts Centre and a frequent contributor to Kakiseni.