THE INVISIBLE (LAYERS OF THE) CITY: KAIDIE’S ROUGH GUIDE TO THE EXOTIC FAR EAST #3.
Erratum: ‘I was confident that I could …’ on the left hand corner here at the bottom should read ‘I was confident that I could outrun this person/any one, not because I run fast (Dear Readers, we have been there before, several times), but because I knew that if I kept going, stubbornly, silli-ly, I would, eventually. So I did.’ This sentence should alternatively say, ‘I was confident that I would not run ahead of my bloody sentences and would finish them the next time before I publish anything’. There you/I go.
TO KAIDIE’S SPONSORS FOR THE MEDECINS SANS FRONTIERES RUN, THANK YOU VERY MUCH INDEED! from all of us.
Dear Joy, Kian Chow, Jon, Miss Nim, Kal, Horst, Wee San, Chutha, Sarah, Omar and Chin Hwee,
How are you? We hope you had a good weekend.
1. We would like to say THANK YOU very much indeed for having made a generous contribution to Kaidie’s participation in the Friends of Medecins Sans Frontieres charity race. Thanks to you, in a matter of only 2 weeks, £110 was collected under Kaidie’s name.
2. Because of your financial blackmail, Kaidie had sworn to ‘not let you down’, ‘do her very best’, ‘keep going’ till she ‘drops dead’, ‘reach the finishing line while thinking of you for 10km’, and so on.
3. However, all that promised, much has happened in the last 10 days, that has left us a little baffled. Kaidie had a tumble while practising her run all-too-eagerly, and subsequently, suddenly disappeared, 1 week prior to the race. There had been several conflciting reports of her being thereafter, in and across Lives 3.0, 2.0, and 1.0. There had even been suggesions that she had ‘moved on’ to Lives 4.0 or 43.2. At the meantime, Kailives has emerged, to keep up appearances in Kaidie’s absence.
4. Whilst we were wondering/pondering which space-time dimensions restless Kaidie has relocated or transmigrated, we also found a map of Kaidie’s very own version of the run route, which left us worried if Kaidie would ever complete the stipulated 10km! To add to the cacaphony of signals, we received a note from a ‘Good Pirate’ on the very morning of 14 March, hinting in a somewhat coded manner that Kaidie would be ‘released’ for the run.
5. Today, we received a set of photographs from Cadam, Dadam, and Eadam (THANK YOU ALL VERY MUCH INDEED!) The 3 Nondoners were taking a walk in Regents Fark and caught the race. “I whipped up my phone to take photos of the runners because I was so irritated that they blocked the roads and spoiled my Sunday walk,” Cadam cries furiously. Dadam adds, “But I recall Kailives’ plea for help to locate Kaidie, and knowing Kaidie’s shapeshifting talents, I took pictures of the Banana Man and the Naked Man in the run, thinking that either – or both – might be Kaidie in disguise”. “I was looking out for a 3-month old crawling,” Eadam says.
6. Examining the photographs, we ask: Who is this out-of-focus many-headed person? Is this Kaidie or Kailives? Or both of them in the same space-time? What did they say to each other on their reunification? Or did they distribute the workload and did 5km each? And which route(s) did they take? The official Friends of Medecins Sans Frontieres run route, or the one Kaidie had drawn out? Did Kaidie/Kailives complete the run, or did they disappoint you, their sponsors?
7. Keen to find out nothing but the truths, we went back to Regents Fark this morning and combed through the area. After several seconds, we found a shoe tag 264 near the ducks’ pond, and Kaidie’s certificate near the giraffes’ dwelling! Then, squatting at Kaidie’s email, we were also sent a set of timings of the run, telling us that a ‘Kaidie Nondon’, aka ‘264′, has completed the run at 53 minutes 20 seconds, which translates at an approximate 11.3kmh. Out of the 82 girls who ran the 10km race, Kaidie ranks 16.
8. Suffice to say that we are relieved. So Kaidie/Kailives/either/or/neither/nor/both did not take your money and run off, but did run to the finishing line. Amorphous and reality-flexible as she is, she still has some old-fashioned virtues of sticking to her promises.
9. However, we do not know where they have next run off to. Wherever they are now, they must have gone in a hurry, for they had left the shoe tag and certificate behind (perhaps deliberately, as she did her glove).
10. If you are reading this, Kaidie/Kailives, please use the dustbin the next time.
Dear Sponsors, we do apologise for having to step in and speak on Kaidie’s behalf, but we wish to say THANK YOU once again, for making this generous donation for a worthy cause. It was a tiny gesture on Kaidie’s part (and she might have distributed her workload with Kailives anyways), but your donation helps people to get the medical attention that they need . Please do not forget to continue to support the work of the Medecins Sans Frontieres (while we clean up Kaidie’s acts).
With much gratitude,
From all of us.
Dislocating Kaidie: ONE OF KAIDIE’S GLOVES FOUND AT ST PANCREAS STATION! AND OTHER SIGHTINGS. HAVE YOU SPOTTED KAIDIE IN THE PAST 3 DAYS?
Kaidie has been missing since 3 March. Referring to the Nondon A-Z, I scoured around Nondon in my kickscooter tracing some of Kaidie’s hangouts such as Regents Fark, Pings Pross, Lupus Street and Faker Street.
Finally, at the St Pancreas Station, I spotted one of Kaidie’s gloves on the ground. Which sets off a loopy chain of questions:
Where could Kaidie be? Why has she disappeared? Has her fall at Fuston Road made her take a reality check and decide to transform herself into thin air? Have her wound cuts become infested with onionringworms and ticks and moulds and ingrown toenails that her body became eaten away by the new foreign invaders and she was left to die young at DAY 80? What has she fallen head-over-heels with, that has imprisoned her heart (has she got any?) and soul (does she have one?) and physical being? Has she been mugged/kidnapped/murdered/raped/mutilated/slashed/burnt/crashed/hacked into, and had her dislocated limbs strewn all over the Hackney marshes and mixed with the stuffs that are to go into the Olympics Stadium, or has her supersized brain with multiple plugins shredded into pieces by the vultures encircling this sceptred isle? Has she become disoriented from her oh-so-anti-linear derives? Has she lost her bearings after the batteries of her GPS Garmin Etrex went flat? Kaidie’s Facebook wall is a wall of silence- is it because she has hit the wall? Or banged her head against it? Has she gone into hiding? What is she hiding from? Has she found the object of her quest, the Meaning of Life 3.0, and spontaneously combusted in the Holy Mother of All Climaxes? Has she hit jackpot of g-spots of ‘THE truth about what in the bloody world this is all bloody about’, and choked herself to death in her self-congratulatory pants/sighs/porksqueals of orgasmic delight? Are the satellites able to detect Kaidie’s whereabouts? Where has she gone? Has she left Nondon? Has Nondon the metropolis devoured and crippled her? Has Kaidie died (and become just ‘Kai’)? Has she given up her impossible quest? Has she chickened out? Has she concluded the experiment with what she had already known, that is, that there is no such thing as ‘A/The Meaning of Life’ (3.0, 2.0, 1.0, or 4.0, or 44.3 etc, for that matter). Has she been sucked into the offline world of Life 1.0, or that of the online metaverses in Life 2.0, and stopped travelling to-&-fro in the chaosmos of Life 3.0? Is she still in the amorphous space-time of Life 3.0 at all, or has she shapeshifted into an earthly avatar in Life 1.o, or an e-Orlando in Life 2.0? Has she given up Life 3.0, given her extreme impatience ? How can we continue with this? Shall we conclude and wind up the experiment of Kaidie’s Life 3.0 already, more than 900 days ahead of schedule? (Whoo-hoo! I punch my fists in the air.)
And of course, not to forget other pertinent questions such as: Where is Kaidie’s other glove? What can one do with 1 glove? Can you hear the sound of 1 hand clapping? Can you swear the hound of 1 glove slapping? Did Kaidie deliberately leave 1 glove behind? Is it a Hansel-&-Gretel cookie trail?
Frankly speaking, given that she is merely an object of experiment, we would not much care if Kaidie is dead/alive, but it just seems slightly irresponsible of her to simply evaporate, given that this month, Kaidie has also been scheduled to appear in several events. The first one comes up in a couple of days, on Tuesday 9 March 11:30am at Nondon College of Communication, and on Sunday 14 March, Kaidie is supposed to run for Medecins Sans Frontieres at Regents Fark. I have also been informed that during Kaidie’s absence, there has been a fresh donation by ‘Miss Nim’ for Kaidie’s run. (On Kaidie’s behalf, THANK YOU MISS NIM!!)
At the meantime, Kaidie is nowhere to be found, yet. There has been sightings here and there. Some are cryptic, others seem plausible. Like a Rashomon conundrum, can any of these be verified? Who is telling the truth(s)? Can we conjure up Kaidie’s dead ghost to enlighten (or scare) us? Have you spotted Kaidie in Nondon in the past 3 days? Have you spotted Kaidie outside of Nondon in the past 3 days? Any other clues? Write in and help find the missing person please! There will be a mystery reward.
Now I am slightly flummoxed – what if we cannot find Kaidie in time? Must I exercise executive power and cancel all events? Or, should/must I find someone to impersonate her, as if nothing has happened? Would YOU like to take over Kaidie’s avatar, for a change? Wanna swop? Shall we barter trade or play chess at the beach?
DOUBLETHINK: CONTRADICTORY IN TERMS
One of Kaidie’s guidebooks in Life 3.0 is George Orwell’s 1984, for several reasons. Like Life 3.0, the city of London is the novel’s mise-en-scene. In Orwell’s universe, reality is seen through an inverted lens, where the Ministry of Defence fights permanent wars, and the Ministry of Love (I love this- ‘miniluv’) operates through the mechanism of fear. That deep parallels can be drawn with our reality today can not be emphasised enough. And, like the notion of doublethink, Life 3.0 embodies contradictions without contradiction, with no apology. Like Smith, Kaidie is an experiment; while Smith’s choices may seem limited compared to Kaidie’s in Life 3.0, like Kaidie, Smith contrives to seek spaces within which he could exist/live/be. Orwell’s depiction of Smith’s process of torture through to reeducation and final love of Big Brother, is so slowburning that the final inevitable explosion – or, more accurately, implosion - resembles fingernails scratching a chalkboard, largo, breaking in the process and the small sharp bits scratching and incising the pink raw skin where the nail once was itself, a procedure so calculated and clinical as to be chilling, heartbreaking, repulsive and devastating as it is sublimely beautiful, a la Pasolini’s 120 Days of Sodom, Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange or a Gould’s rendition of the slow movement of the Emperor concerto. Yet another reason why 1984 resonates with Kaidie is of course, how it has been said that the circumstances of one of her previous lives was ‘Orwellian’.
DAY 54: RE-STARTING NONDON, AGAIN. A TASTE OF NONDON TAP WATER INSTANTLY TRANSPORTS ME BACK TO THIS REALITY.
Shall we sit on this, or chew it?
A taste of Nondon tap water, and being just an other anonymous ‘other’ in a large city of others, tells me that I am back in this reality, in Nondon.
Happy to be away and enjoying an other city when I am away, happy to be home when I am home.
Usual for new or ‘new’ beginnings, I had a haircut. I had promised to not cut my hair for the duration of my life. So I have, and haven’t – alright I have HALF-KEPT my promise. Or half-broken it (Is a glass half empty of half full? Is a mixed-raced kid a ‘half’ or a ‘double’ in Japan??) I tried. I combed my fringe to the left, right, back, front, jedw**d style, amy whinehows style, and zz top style, covering my eyes, my brains, my nostrils. It just doesn’t quite ‘work’. After my easy bus dropped me at Faker Street, near the famous Museum of Fakes where Kaidie will one day be (if she cannot get a stool next to Jeremy’s auto-icon), I went straight to the local butcher, borrowed his (are there any women butcher in Nondon?) large knife, put my head on the chopping board, and chopped off the front bit. Then, I packed the hair that dropped to the floor and fed them to the pigeons in Frafalgar Square. Though already obese due to nonstop feeding by ‘kind’ Nondon tourists, they gobbled up my hair; I can see some of which sticking out between their teeth. Alas, my short absence from Nondon has made me forget that it is illegal to feed these winged rats. The cops tried to handcuffed me but fortunately the Save The Pigeons people saved me. They believed that I was a pigeon with my new haircut.
PS 1:
A quick update – and this goes to show clearly that I DO KEEP MY PROMISES. I had promised to run 155.0km to as a gesture to compensate the 1550km Nondon-Zurich-Nondon flight on 19 January. Since then, I had acted according to Rainold and his several terrific advice, by wearing comfortable cloths, and tried my best to feel positive emotions. I also gave myself no pressure, only pleasure. With the positive emotions and pleasures, I have covered more than 120km so far. I am currently trying to tabulate my results and will update you soon. So, I will say what I have said before, but I will say it again – WATCH THIS SPACE!
PS 2:
THANKS SO MUCH RAINOLD! I will have to come back to you to ask you how I could ‘be myself’ and ‘be a unique individual’, as I have been born with nothing. How could I be, then? I am rather puzzled and need some more advice on this, if you will!
DAY 45: KAIDIE’S ROUGH GUIDE TO WINTERTHUR (KAIDIE, THE TOURIST OF LIVES 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0, ENJOYING THE WINTER DELIGHTS OF WINTERTHUR).
Bonechilling winter alongside warm sunny sunshine with white snowcoveredeverywhere with art, music, sports, nature, animals, cats, good studio space, good food, and good wine puts Kaidie in certain good spirits in Winterthur. Allow me to list down some of the highlights of my residency at the wonderful Villa Straeuli so far, just so that we could pat ourselves at our backs and fronts and insides and outsides and bottoms and tops and laptops and armflaps and thighbacks. As I said before, Life 3.0 is a bloody good life, and, as I said before, envy me not, and as I said before, I said before. I have.
My very elusive happiness plugin came kicking in when I was running at the lovely Lindberg Hill, as I was happy to be back on my feet again, if ever-so-slowly. Running remains one of the best ways to have a swift panoramic introductory view of any city – across the local neighbourhood to the city central, hideaway corners not mentioned in any guidebooks (EXCEPT KAIDIE’S, THAT IS!) to pockets of nature, smiling back to 1 or 2 locals (out of the 100,000) who smile at you (probably because they are thinking, ‘who might this sweating, panting silly stranger be?!’ and yes looking slightly dishevelled as a visitor but literally close to the ground, one foot after the other.
Another reason for the joy was because my new travel-mate Mini, the Garmin navigator, finally found the Winterthur satellites and began doing what it is supposed to do! That said, it still is temperamental and fails to work consistently. IF GARMIN OR ANY OF ITS RIVAL BRAND IS READING KAIDIE’S TRAVEL BLOG, PLEASE HAVE THE COURTESY TO SPONSOR HER YOUR LATEST BESTEST MOST HIGHTECH NAVIGATOR. A lightweight one that also calculates heartbeat and distance preferred. Product placement guaranteed. Contact Kaidie NOW!
Lindberg is one of the 7 hills in Winterthur. From the top one can get a nice view of Winterthur. I also visited the other hill, the Bruderhaus Wildpark, and took some videos of my friends, which I will share in another posting. (We should be disciplined and distribute our pleasures, should we not, my Dear Readers?). Speaking of being on top, we also went up to the Roter Turm which also offers a nice panoramic view of Winterthur, at 483 m above sea level. The view is greatly enhanced with delicious white beers and even more so with the even more delicious Rieslings. Since we are at it, let us rub it in and make Kaidie a good food/drinks critic-cum-Rough Guide writer, by allowing her to add that the french fries at Irish pub Paddy O’Briens, just 1 minute 15.672 seconds walk from Villa Straeuli, was nicely heartchokingly fried. Devour with relish or eat plain. Thank god for the Irish diaspora! And while we are at it, thank god(s) for the Indian and Chinese diasporas too for our tandooris and wokwingfry chopped panda takeaways (vegan organic versions with black and white hair removed via brazilian waxing available on request) and singaporean (sic) flied lice. And yes, Swiss chocolates is not bad. Not bad at all. I would usually prefer dark (70% and above) chocolates, but Swiss milk chocolates is quite heavenly indeed. Cut thin, its taste is light but deep and sophisticated as well, and makes you want to buy up aaaaalllll the chocolates off all the Coop supermarket shelves – if only the CHF isn’t so frightfully high. To eat as breakfast, pair chocolates with strong espresso or a frothy cappuccino with mountains of chocolate shavings. For brunch, pair with rose champagne; lunch, with Riesling or Sauvignon Blanc; tea, with Merlot or Shiraz; dinner, with straight vodkas; finally finish off with a large supper serving of Singapore slings, which is most appropriate, since Singapore is said to have modelled itself on Switzerland. (So, how’s Kaidie’s food critic skills so far??)
But of course, Kaidie in Life 3.0 is civilised, cultured and terribly artistic. I was delighted to have been reacquainted with some of my old friends at the Museum Oskar Reinhart, such as Goya and his fish, Van Gogh and his Arles, Cezanne with lots of fruits and/or mountains, or both, and the brilliant El Greco and his Cardinal. This was just one of the many cultural institutions (including Villa Straeuli) set up by wealthy industralists of Winterthur. I also had the pleasure of attending one of the weekly Saturday morning music concerts at Villa Straeuli. The sonorous sounds of the cello and the double base illicit profound poignancy as it does pure, pure joy. (Such a contradictory combination/clash/conflict occupies a most powerful state of in-between, the same spot where the frigid subzero temperature sits alongside the warm sunshine, where a Boltanski installation, a Chris Marker film or a Glenn Gould rendition hits, and where Life 3.0 lies – ideally).
Coincidentally, Gould is quoted at an exhibition at the Fotomuseum, by Becky Beasley for her work Curtains (I) 2009:
There have been many occasions when I have recorded something and I have come into the studio at 10 o’clock on a Monday morning and really been in 16, not just 2 different minds, but 16 different minds as to how it should go.
Indeed. So go all 16 ways.
DAY 19: KAIDIE HAS SHAPESHIFTED TO A 157m SPONGE SO AS TO BETTER SOAK UP THE FESTIVE ATMOSPHERE.
How are you enjoying the festivities, my Dear Readers?
This morning I took a hard look at myself at the mirror. I quite like my current formation as a hamster – I quite enjoyed being a cockroach as well, both of which are fabulous for going undercover, but I am also exhausted of only being vertically-challenged all the time. (For instance, what in gods’ names gives short men the right to chat up short women as if they are godsends, as if I should be ever so grateful for meeting someone of a physical formation [sic] that I could crush with the tip of my little toe?! Kaidie is a 3rdlifer, for chrissake, and is adamantly against smalltownprovincial incest, inbreeding and any sort of breeding. Have you forgotten that Kaidie is a perfectly globalised cosmopolitan of metropolitan Nondon? Get out of my way shorties, let Kaidie mingle with all the other species, formations, forms, lifeforms and non-life forms out there.)
So, what should I become next? I pondered for a while… When in Rome, surely I should do as the Romans do. When in Nondon, surely I should do as Nondeners do. What better way to soak up the atmosphere than to be a sponge! But what size should I go for? A 1.57m kitchen sponge does not quite make a strong enough visual presence as a 157m one. So voila, I’ve made the transition. In order not to confuse you, my Dear Reader, for my continually refreshing renewals, renovations and reinventions, I created a diagramme for your kind reference. (My hamster formation is a few pixels, right at the left side of the diagramme, actually, can you spot it? ) As you can see, I have coloured myself in my favourite pink to try to add some neon glamour to the festive occasion. In addition, in order not to commit the frequent superhero fashion faux pas, I have dyed my square pants the same #ff02d8 shade as the rest of my body. Don’t you think this is a most fabulous getup for me to visit Frafalgar Square, the Nondon-I and the New Year’s Day Parade! How do you like it?
* PS THANK YOU my Facebook friends Breda and Vassili for your kind advice! *
* If YOU have any suggestions as to what (and when) I could become next, do SHOUT!*
Kaidie finally meeting her match in Nondon.
ARE YOU A LONDONER? ENTER QUIZ NOW! LONDON QUIZ 1
Of course, I would love to meet all of you out there, and most of all, YOU, yes YOU! But please understand that I can’t quite do that, much as I would love to (yes, believe me, for real). So the best space and time where we can come together is here. FILL THIS UP AND SUBMIT TO KAIDIE, NOW! There are several different quizzes. Do complete them all! And you can fill up as many as you wish. I will publish the most interesting ones! THOSE WITH THE BEST ANSWERS WILL WIN A SPECIAL, SECRET PRIZE FROM KAIDIE!
cforms contact form by delicious:days
WHILE FLYING ACROSS NONDON, I DECIDE TO BE A CATFISH IN MY NEXT LIFE
Flying across Nondon with my friends from one of my previous lives.
Finally, I reach the ground and find myself, as well as the other version of myself, in East Nondon. I begin to surreptitiously follow the other version of me, who is in the middle of a Janet Cardiff audio tour.
DO YOU THINK KAIDIE SHOULD CONFRONT HER OTHER SELF (WALKING KAIDIE IN EAST NONDON), OR SHOULD SHE (FLYING-BUT-SOON-TO-BE-ALSO-WALKING KAIDIE) JUST SECRETLY FOLLOW HER (WALKING KAIDIE) AND SEE WHAT SHE’S UP TO UNTIL SHE NOTICES? HOW DO YOU THINK SHE (FLYING KAIDIE, WALKING KAIDIE) WOULD REACT IF SHE SEES THE OTHER? WHAT SHOULD SHE SAY TO THE OTHER? SHOULD SHE SMILE?
UPDATABLE GLOSSARY: LONDON, NONDON, NON-LONDON
The world has more than One London, including the one 'so full of Stink and darknesse', and - get this - London BEFORE London (?!?)
GLOSSARY/ WIKI ABOUT THE UNIVERSE OF KAIDIE / LIFE 3.0, AND THE THEATRE OF CHARACTERS (ongoing). SEEKING DEFINITIONS AND MULTIPLE+ALTERNATIVE DEFINITIONS! CONTRIBUTE NOW!
VARIATIONS OF LONDON:
* London, UK:
* London A-Z:
1) Contribution by reader KathyMartens 12/12/2009: ‘Something that ALL Londoners carry! Hallmark of a Londoner. If you don’t own one, you’re not a Londoner.’
* Nondon:
*Londoner:
1) Following KathyMartens’ definition, one that carries an A-Z.
* Nondoner:
1) Question from Michiko 12.12.2009: Is Kaidie the only inhabitant of Nondon?
* Virtual London: project by CASA at UCL; other digital versions of Londons
* At least 12 Londons in USA:
* Little Londons all over the UK, and Serbia, and Jamaica:
* Quite a few Londons in Canada:
* ‘London’ according to Patrick Keiller, Will Self, Woody Allen, Rowling/Potter, Loach, Gilliam, Neil Gaiman, Dickens, Wilde, Woolf, Kureishi, Rushdie, Hitchcock and Bond – James Bond:
DO YOU HAVE A FAVOURITE VERSION? HAVE YOU YOUR OWN VERSION OF LONDON TO SHARE WITH ME? OR, ARE THERE COPIES OF YOUR CITY OUT THERE? HAVE YOU YOUR PERSONALISED VERSION OF YOUR CITY?
