Editing the Kakiseni Story by Kathy Rowland

In July 2001, Puvan Selvanathan, the architect and arts enabler, hosted the launch of the online arts website Kakiseni.com at his restaurant/bar/film club/arts-haunt, The Stonor Centre.

Under the watchful eye of the Petronas Twin Towers, over 80 guests enjoyed plenty of free beer and  celebrated the creation of the e-magazine, as these things were called back then.

We created Kakiseni as a place to promote the thing we both loved and believed in, the Malaysian arts scene. At least, that’s how Jenny and I -- being young and earnest at the time -- explained it to people.

Kakiseni quickly became a one-stop site for the arts community and the public. Our event listings developed into the most comprehensive and detailed one in the country, functioning as a much-needed bridge between the growing arts scene and a public eager for culture.

Our weekly articles, written by some of the most talented writers in Malaysia, gained a hard-earned reputation for being critical, intelligent and challenging. To date, there are over 1,300 of these pieces -- personality profiles, previews, interviews, reviews, analysis -- archived on the site.

But generating content takes time and money and lots of it. Both of which we continued to supply for the past seven years, against all the logical rules of running an organization.

Which is another way of saying that the website has not been self-sustaining.

While the past year has seen an increase in our traffic and subscriber list, and the number of readers per article has tripled, we have been unable to generate sufficient income to pay our full-time editorial team, or our many contributors.

Faced with the stark choice of either reducing our expenditure or shutting down the website altogether, Jenny and I have made the difficult decision to suspend the weekly articles and editorials until we can find a way to finance them again. We can no longer subsidize the cost of running the weekly articles.

Which, let us emphasize, is not the end of kakiseni.

The events listing continues, and indeed will gain visual prominence on the site – it is after all the content which generates the most traffic. Juliet Jacobs, our Events Editor will continue to upload events, working like the proverbial Asian woman in a sweatshop - long hours, inferior equipment (no iMac for you, baby!) and very little pay - just so our dear readers will be able to cloak themselves with the trappings of cultural sophistication.

Other functions of the site -- the Auditions and Notice boards, the Online Arts Director, the Polls and the Editors Recommendation  -- remain operational. These are community resources we are committed to providing.

The kakiseni blog, blogged by the blogger Zedeck Siew, formerly known as the Kakiseni Associate Editor, will continue to be blogged upon. His attempts at humour are generally more successful than ours. Really. As he won’t be getting a red cent for his work, we respectfully ask that you spare him some change or beer the next time you see him. It’s for the arts.

The famous kakiseni reader comments -- where some of the most erudite discussions about art, culture, politics, race, sex and piano seats have taken shape – is open for business as usual. We hope that readers continue to air their views and contribute “user generated content”  (to drop a buzz-phrase from the past, say, 2006) to the site.

The 7th Annual BOH Cameronian Arts Awards and the 2nd Kakiscript Competition are scheduled to go ahead and we’re already gearing up for both events, with stress levels at a comfortable 0.3 factor at the moment.

Producers of theatre, music, dance and musical theatre shows, please contact Viji Nair, our Judges Liaison and Office Nazi in time to be judged for the Awards, lest the stress factor jumps into the double digits.

For now however, we present you with our final issue, a whopping seven new articles. 

Eva McGovern recently left her job at one of London’s leading art gallery’s to conduct research in Malaysia. She writes this week’s feature article, Travelling without Moving, a review of  Abdul Multhalib Musa’s Twist.

Rachel Jenagaratnam, whose recent reviews for Kakiseni have already won her admirers, proved that a little bit of dengue fever can't keep a good art critic down. She also reviewed Twist  in a piece entitled Big Art and Little People.

Reading two erudite pieces on the same show by young writers formally trained to think and write about visual culture is a rare pleasure we hope you will enjoy.

We asked Junji Delfino the jazz singer, composer, writer and ICTer to give us a first persons’ account of the early days of jazz music. Her It Don't Mean A Thing If It Ain't Got... Jazz is a piece of local art history that is both a celebration of music and entrepreneurship and a lament for what we’ve lost.

Readers were quick to post praise for Shanon Shah’s play, Air Con directed by Jo Kukathas and Zalfian Fuzi on the website as soon as the play began its all too short run. Read Yasmin Martin’s review, of Boys and Breath Mints and let us know what you thought about a play that is perhaps more current and topical than even ICT thought it would be.

For the first time ever, we are publishing two articles in Mandarin. The first is a piece by Koh Choon Eiow, a potted history of Mandarin playwriting in Malaysia, entitled One Perspective of Malaysian Chinese Playwriting. The second, written by Dr. Wong Oi Min, is a review of Ping Stage’s F.A.M.I.L.Y.

We hope our many Mandarin-reading readers will enjoy these pieces. We’ve provided a translation of Koh Choon Eiow’s piece into English. If anyone wants to volunteer a translation of Dr Wong’s piece, translate away.

Thank you for staying with us – for the last seven years, and over the course of this unusually long editorial.  We’re no longer young, nor earnest, but we still think artists are important. We hope you’ll continue to be a part of Kakiseni’s future – we won’t have one without you.



Kathy and Jenny