WHAT a week it has been in good ol’ Bolehland! Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or a tempurung), the hype and noise leading up to the dissolution of parliament in the past few weeks was as annoying as a lone mosquito buzzing around one’s earlobes.

While I am deeply, sincerely, from the deepest recesses of my heart, annoyed and angry by the turn of events, my naive stubborn self wants so hard to believe that clarity and reason would somehow prevail, but, of course, it never does.

It’s all there, laid bare online and in the papers by pundits and professional commentators; it’s a dirty game indeed, and as citizens, its reaffirmation of the shallow and selfish so-called successive wannabe “leadership” by the interlopers who call themselves the “gomen” (or more aptly, the “caretaker gomen”) at the moment.

But enough of politics, let’s talk about my interesting days leading up to Monday’s announcement.

I guess you could say the ball started rolling for me on Thursday night when I was invited by free jazz saxophonist and underground music scene pioneer (and good friend, of course) Yong Yandsen to attend a new improvisation and interdisciplinary live performance series at new arts/performance space called Dou Houz in Jalan Panggong.

Jalan Panggong, if you didn’t know, is one of the recent areas in old Kuala Lumpur’s steady gentrification drive that slowly but steadily is expanding outwards.

Dou Houz is the latest cultural space to appear on the highest floor (which also gives access to its rooftop) in the row of adjacent three five-storey shophouses.

The first of these that I encountered personally as an artist was Findars – a collective made up of a group of like-minded visual artists and underground musicians – which also hosted a steady stream of experimental and improvised music series co-organised by Yandsen and festival founder (also voice artist) Kok Siew Wai under the banner of the Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film and Music Festival (KLEX) aside from art exhibitions, talks and experimental and underground performances.

A fallout within the collective saw it breaks into two separate entities – the now-defunct RAW Art Space (which maintained its top floor unit and carried on hosting KLEX and other cultural events) and Mou Tou (which took over the rooftop as an artist-run space and catered to the more bohemian underground community).

Scene politics aside, I love both spaces as I maintained good relations with friends in both entities since I knew the collective a decade before when it was based in Annexe Central Market, then Wangsa Maju, before finally settling long-term in Jalan Panggong.

In addition to these recently, Percussion Store (which shares its space with Saxophone Store) also began organising live and improvised music shows, which Yandsen and Siew Wai had been co-organising, and at which I’ve also had the pleasure of performing several times and recording in the past year.

What my digression here is leading to is the moment after the conclusion of the aforementioned improvised series’ debut when all of us – small audience included – were invited to check out the rooftop. I’m a completist and as I had already enjoyed the rooftop goodness of Mou Tou and Percussion Store at night, I had to check Dou Houz’s.

As I peered out from the staircase, it struck me how bright the night can be in old Kuala Lumpur on a Thursday night.

I finally completed the Jalan Panggong 360º panorama for my mind’s eye. While the westward panorama gave the wonderful vista of Masjid Negara in the distance with the elevated Pasar Seni LRT platform cutting across in front, when one turns eastward, you can’t escape the omnipresent pointed presence of the Merdeka 118 megatower skyscraper, now nearing its finishing touches, like some glorified panopticon figure in perpetual attention over the Klang Valley.

While I snickered at a friend’s comment that it looked like a massive classic mobile phone, the irony was not lost on me when the realisation dawned that the park once stood at its base – Merdeka Park – will be lost forever from subsequent generations.

The striking similarities between the constant debasement of history on the physical landscape by unnecessary developments and the continual debasement of our thinning trust in our institutions and national dealers is all too obvious, it hurts.

So, does one lose oneself in temporary moments like these on some Jalan Panggong rooftop, or keep one’s eyes and ears glued on local politics?

Frankly, it’s not a choice; pay equal attention to both, for the art of being alive lies in every moment, sweet, or bitter, or even bittersweet.

Give them bitterness come the ballots and symphony for their sins. – October 14, 2022.

* Azmyl Yunor is a touring underground recording artiste, and an academic in media and cultural studies. He has published articles on pop culture, subcultures and Malaysian cultural politics. He adheres to the three-chords-and-the-truth school of songwriting, and Woody Guthrie’s maxim “All you can write is what you see”. He is @azmyl on Twitter.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.