I just unearthed this article which appeared in the 4th October 2005 issue of the New Sunday Times, in a column entitled "My perfect weekend". I was interviewed by Intan Maizura.
Livewire arts activist and marketing communications consultant, Vernon Adrian Emuang is hard to pin down but INTAN MAIZURA manages to halt him for a tete-a-tete.
Picture by HAMSIAH ABU BAKAR
FOR THOSE OF US NOT IN THE Arts circle, the name Vernon Adrian Emuang, 44, might probably elicit a `blur' reaction. Others may remember him for his wacky turns as Jeffrey Ong's sidekick eons ago on the now defunct TV3 IT offering, Cyberwave. But that's not to say he's been dormant. This lively Sarawakian just does not know the meaning of the word `stop', furiously and actively working behind the scenes, on a number of projects. He is presently involved in KL Sing-Song 2005, the first ever regional singer/ songwriter conference and workshop in Malaysia, which incidentally is produced by his own company of eight years, Artsee Networks.
"I was also recently involved in Yasmin Ahmad's Sepet, helping to negotiate and secure sponsorship for the premiere as I believed a lot in the film - it's a powerful film in a very sweet way. I wanted to support it so when I discovered it was going to be released, I got very excited and came on board," explains Vernon.
He has also been busy helping out RTM with voice-overs and scripts for a documentary series called Malaysian Food Discovery, of which there are going to be 26 episodes in all. "I don't go out on the shoots but I do go through the footages. And then I write the script and subsequently do the voice-overs."
It's been a long time since he has had any breaks, let alone a weekend off but Vernon definitely knows what'll make his weekend perfect.
"It would be one where nothing has been planned and I am in a foreign place, where nobody speaks English so I can't really communicate normally with anybody and everybody is a stranger. Of course, I would have at my disposal enough money for a decent meal and to probably catch a bus or taxi somewhere, anywhere.
"It would be one of those days where I'd wake up to a bright sunny morning, in another place that I'm not used to. Maybe Tokyo, Paris, Canberra - I'm a city person! It's not familiar but neither is it completely strange. I'd just walk out onto the streets where I'd have to use my wits to get around, but the people are friendly, of course.
"I'd start off by looking for a decent breakfast which would have to include bacon and eggs - I don't know why - and lots of fruit. I'd then look for interesting cultural and art places to head for, like a gallery or something. Nothing would be planned; I prefer to stumble into things because I get enough of having to keep to schedule when I'm at work!
"In fact, that's how I stumbled into the Picasso Museum in Paris and the Louvre, also in the city. A saxophone player who was playing inside this cavernous porch - basically the portal of a castle - caught my attention. The sound was amazing and I just stood there for half an hour just listening. I didn't know where I was really and after half an hour decided to move on. I moved out of the portal into this courtyard, which was huge and barren with just sand. I thought, 'Oh, this is interesting, it's a castle'. The next thing I knew, I walked into this area with all these pyramids. It was the Louvre. I still remember this moment.
"Looking for deodorant in Tokyo was also exciting. I still remember it because it was quite an adventure looking for it. My bags went missing on a flight to Tokyo where I was supposed to meet some clients on the day I arrived. I had to resort to using sign language. Every time I asked for deodorant, they kept pointing me to the most expensive perfumes! "I've had that kind of experience before and it's quite refreshing because you're challenged a little and you have to slow down to communicate, so you have to slow everything down to understand what's going on.
"When I was growing up, weekends meant church in the morning with my parents, then a family breakfast. That was fun. We'd trundle off to the Section 14 market (in Petaling Jaya) and buy stuff - all the hawker food and then come back and the whole dining table would be scattered with hawker food still in their wrappers. We'd have to forage through them to find what we wanted. I also used to do a lot of things with my brothers (I don't have sisters), whether it was cleaning the house, or helping my mum with the baking.
"A perfect weekend could be with my family whose company I enjoy, or it could be alone or even with friends. I guess as long as there's no set programme, it would be perfect. Wake up, have breakfast, do anything that comes to mind and just let things move along. Unrushed, unplanned, and where surprises just keep popping up.
"If I can go to bed that night thinking, 'oooh, what a great day and it wasn't even planned', I would have had a great weekend. I just love that whole idea of serendipity with all the happy accidents that happen."
Showing posts with label In The Media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label In The Media. Show all posts
Monday, 7 January 2008
Thursday, 13 April 2000
Quoted In Asiaweek
The article below appeared in Asiaweek's From Our Correspondent: Enter Here
Websites offer convenient access to the Kuala Lumpur arts scene
By SANTHA OORJITHAM. The original source is here.
Kamil Othman, head of creative multimedia at Malaysia's Multimedia Development Corp., is a theater and movie buff -- but he's too busy to search the newspapers for information about what's on where. A couple of weeks ago, a friend told him about KuLture, a web-magazine about the arts in Kuala Lumpur (www.kulture.com.my). Kamil visited the site, found some international art films being screened at the Mid Valley Megamall and a theater production (Four Men and a Woman) on stage at The Actors Studio, and headed over.
Without KuLture, Kamil wouldn't have known about these shows: "Websites are useful for special interest groups," he says. "I open my e-mail every day so this just takes one additional move." Launched in June last year, KuLture is the newer of two sites devoted to the arts in Kuala Lumpur. The first Malaysian arts website, www.artseefartsee.com, started up in May 1998. Both have fuelled--and benefitted from--a boom in the arts scene. Arts enthusiasts welcome both -- and say there is room for even more.
"I wanted to bring together the three loves of my life -- the Internet, marketing communications, and the arts," says Artseefartsee founder Vernon Emuang, a Malaysian actor and performer. In the early 1990s, as creative director at Bozell PR, he designed free websites for Dramalab and the Five Arts Center. After leaving advertising, he decided to start the country's first weekly website on the arts "to demonstrate to the arts community how critical electronic media is in communicating economically, efficiently and speedily." He started out with 30 subscribers and now has about 4,000 on his e-mail list. The site gets over 15,000 hits per month.
KuLture was founded by a couple of expatriates -- journalist Jenny Daneels and urban planner Barbara Camus. "There is a lot available in the Kuala Lumpur art scene, and we want to make it more accessible," says Daneels. After 10 months, they have 1,000 subscribers and their site receives 100 hits per day. Inscribe Webmedia helped them design the site and they have sponsors: Novartis, Boh Tea and the Alliance Francaise. On April 11, they launched a new design (following an online survey in November last year) and announced that they were incorporating. They've hired a website manager and now hope to attract advertising revenue. Access to their webzine and subscriptions to their e-mail list are free.
Both sites offer listings of what's on (music, theater, films, dance, and art exhibitions), reviews, links to regional and international websites (for similar listings, arts festivals, etc.), live forums for arts discussions, and directories of other arts and culture publications and institutions. Both websites send out e-mail alerts. KuLture offers a classified section where subscribers can offer to buy and sell things like arts-related tickets and instruments. And it has a glossary of arts terminology.
The arts websites took advantage of a growing audience, says Krishen Jit, founder of Five Arts Center: "There's been an appreciable change in the size of audiences in the past five years -- and especially in the last year. And the websites also gave us some sense of world-wide exposure, which has never happened before. We get visitors from Australia, the U.S. and Britain who knew about us because they had read about us on the website."
Five Arts Center's Jit says Artseefartsee has "warmth and coziness" thanks to founder Emuang's "intimate relationship with artists Š and sense of who they are and what they are doing." KuLture, he says, "is looking in from the outside, not participating and not involved. Perhaps they may not have passion, but they have very useful knowledge and objectivity." Both need to expand, he says, and there's room for more such sites: "These are both mainly Kuala Lumpur-based and in theater, for example, they focus on English-language theater. There is a niche [to be filled] outside Kuala Lumpur and in other languages." Emuang, for example, has helped the state-funded Penang Arts Information Center to set up a similar website (penang.net.my/arts) and e-mail list.
The arts community uses both KuLture and Artseefartsee, although their audiences overlap somewhat. "We use both avenues because we want to reach a lot of people and we don't want to miss anyone," says Lim Ee Lin, an arts administrator in Kuala Lumpur. "They are free, and they offer an additional web presence as well as their e-mail lists." The print media tend to "pick and choose" which arts events they cover, says Lim. The websites, in contrast, "offer the whole range, concentrated. It's an opportunity for people to find out what else is happening, to plan their schedule. And people do take note of their reviews."
The best way for both sites to keep their subscribers, Lim believes, is by providing "regular updates and useful information and services." What do audiences want? "I wish it could expand," says KuLture subscriber Kamil. "There are not enough in-depth reviews; they are more like announcements." KuLture's founders say they are expanding its content, but the number of reviews which it can commission will depend on its commercial viability.
Websites offer convenient access to the Kuala Lumpur arts scene
By SANTHA OORJITHAM. The original source is here.
Kamil Othman, head of creative multimedia at Malaysia's Multimedia Development Corp., is a theater and movie buff -- but he's too busy to search the newspapers for information about what's on where. A couple of weeks ago, a friend told him about KuLture, a web-magazine about the arts in Kuala Lumpur (www.kulture.com.my). Kamil visited the site, found some international art films being screened at the Mid Valley Megamall and a theater production (Four Men and a Woman) on stage at The Actors Studio, and headed over.
Without KuLture, Kamil wouldn't have known about these shows: "Websites are useful for special interest groups," he says. "I open my e-mail every day so this just takes one additional move." Launched in June last year, KuLture is the newer of two sites devoted to the arts in Kuala Lumpur. The first Malaysian arts website, www.artseefartsee.com, started up in May 1998. Both have fuelled--and benefitted from--a boom in the arts scene. Arts enthusiasts welcome both -- and say there is room for even more.
"I wanted to bring together the three loves of my life -- the Internet, marketing communications, and the arts," says Artseefartsee founder Vernon Emuang, a Malaysian actor and performer. In the early 1990s, as creative director at Bozell PR, he designed free websites for Dramalab and the Five Arts Center. After leaving advertising, he decided to start the country's first weekly website on the arts "to demonstrate to the arts community how critical electronic media is in communicating economically, efficiently and speedily." He started out with 30 subscribers and now has about 4,000 on his e-mail list. The site gets over 15,000 hits per month.
KuLture was founded by a couple of expatriates -- journalist Jenny Daneels and urban planner Barbara Camus. "There is a lot available in the Kuala Lumpur art scene, and we want to make it more accessible," says Daneels. After 10 months, they have 1,000 subscribers and their site receives 100 hits per day. Inscribe Webmedia helped them design the site and they have sponsors: Novartis, Boh Tea and the Alliance Francaise. On April 11, they launched a new design (following an online survey in November last year) and announced that they were incorporating. They've hired a website manager and now hope to attract advertising revenue. Access to their webzine and subscriptions to their e-mail list are free.
Both sites offer listings of what's on (music, theater, films, dance, and art exhibitions), reviews, links to regional and international websites (for similar listings, arts festivals, etc.), live forums for arts discussions, and directories of other arts and culture publications and institutions. Both websites send out e-mail alerts. KuLture offers a classified section where subscribers can offer to buy and sell things like arts-related tickets and instruments. And it has a glossary of arts terminology.
The arts websites took advantage of a growing audience, says Krishen Jit, founder of Five Arts Center: "There's been an appreciable change in the size of audiences in the past five years -- and especially in the last year. And the websites also gave us some sense of world-wide exposure, which has never happened before. We get visitors from Australia, the U.S. and Britain who knew about us because they had read about us on the website."
Five Arts Center's Jit says Artseefartsee has "warmth and coziness" thanks to founder Emuang's "intimate relationship with artists Š and sense of who they are and what they are doing." KuLture, he says, "is looking in from the outside, not participating and not involved. Perhaps they may not have passion, but they have very useful knowledge and objectivity." Both need to expand, he says, and there's room for more such sites: "These are both mainly Kuala Lumpur-based and in theater, for example, they focus on English-language theater. There is a niche [to be filled] outside Kuala Lumpur and in other languages." Emuang, for example, has helped the state-funded Penang Arts Information Center to set up a similar website (penang.net.my/arts) and e-mail list.
The arts community uses both KuLture and Artseefartsee, although their audiences overlap somewhat. "We use both avenues because we want to reach a lot of people and we don't want to miss anyone," says Lim Ee Lin, an arts administrator in Kuala Lumpur. "They are free, and they offer an additional web presence as well as their e-mail lists." The print media tend to "pick and choose" which arts events they cover, says Lim. The websites, in contrast, "offer the whole range, concentrated. It's an opportunity for people to find out what else is happening, to plan their schedule. And people do take note of their reviews."
The best way for both sites to keep their subscribers, Lim believes, is by providing "regular updates and useful information and services." What do audiences want? "I wish it could expand," says KuLture subscriber Kamil. "There are not enough in-depth reviews; they are more like announcements." KuLture's founders say they are expanding its content, but the number of reviews which it can commission will depend on its commercial viability.
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