Who Is Menjerit Dalam Myvi?

And why? This is an introduction to me and what I'm trying to do here.

Introductions are tough, huh?

In an effort to know where to even begin, I committed the mortal sin of “asking chapTGP”. For whatever reason, it told me quite a bit about my work on Youtube, my work in podcasting as well as (an incorrect summation of) my work for Pasca Sini. It got my birthday wrong by two days. And it had no idea that I was born in Kelantan, not Kedah. If I am to believe that the AI site (App? Programme? Bot?) amalgamates its information from the entirety of the public web, then the internet does not know me very well, which is fine, I suppose. I don’t think the internet having access to the entirety of me is a good thing at all. But chagTPP not knowing a whole lot about who I am and what I do does indicate to me that there is a big big possibility that the person reading this right now (yes, you) does not know a whole lot about me either. So in an effort to help you understand who I am and why I write the things I do the way I do on this here site, here’s a non-AI-generated introduction from yours truly.

But first! What is Menjerit Dalam Myvi? Well, it is a space where I (and we’ll get to my introduction in a minute) share (expound, sermonise, pontificate, explore, lecture, rant, rave, obliviate, opine, posit, go on and on about) (thank you thesaurus dot com) my thoughts, opinions, feelings and experiences within and about the Malaysian arts scene. Especially the realms of music, film, TV, theatre and live comedy.

Why Menjerit? Because more often than not, the experience of being in any independent Malaysian arts scene is incredibly frustrating. Anger-inducing, even. The powers-that-be don’t give a flying fuck about us, and we most probably hate their guts because it’s the right thing to do. Corporations cannot figure out how to make money off of us, so we are of no use to them, so we may as well not exist at all. And the audience, the dear darling audience, well, they’re in the same boat as us. They’re struggling too. They hesitate to spend RM50 on live show tickets, on an album, on a book, etc. The audience needs to decide whether to spend that fifty on being supportive of the artists within their midst, or being able to afford groceries come hujung-bulan-times. So I do like the idea of a safe space that is especially pro-shouting about what is frustrating about being in “the scene”.

And why myvi? Because I drive one. Have been driving one since 2015 (if I remember correctly). Will continue to drive one for the foreseeable future. And when this current myvi is compromised beyond repair, I’ll get myself (you guessed it) another frickin’ myvi. Because most of the people who exist within my tax bracket drive either it or an equivalent of it. It’s reliable, for-the-people in the way that nobody that drives a myvi is ever accused of being “rich”, and is a nod to Malaysians’ frustrating over-reliance on car-usage to get around – since mobility within and (even more so) outside the city is incredibly hampered sans personal-use vehicular transportation.

And now, me. What can I tell you? Yes, I was born in Kelantan, but I was raised in Alor Setar, Kedah, age 8 till 18. Growing up there, I never thought I’d be able to be involved in the arts in any capacity. I knew of zero living breathing artists around me, people who lived off their artistic endeavours. All those people lived in TV-land. They were not of the real world. They were fantasies that mere mortals such as I were only ever allowed to daydream about, and to never take such a life-path seriously, lest I be deemed foolish and delusional and deviant and irresponsible. And I didn’t want to be any of those things. I wanted to be the opposite: smart, reasonable, orthodox and responsible. So I never envisioned myself having any kind of presence in the (presumably extant) arts scene.

That is, until JUNK Magazine came along and changed my life. It was an affordable-as-hell monthly physical magazine (sold in MyNews stores) that had articles about the local independent music scene. It was a beacon of hope, telling me that a local independent music scene was happening just a mere 444 kilometres away in Kuala Lumpur. And it wasn’t occupied by people who anybody ever saw on TV. It was filled with just… people (mostly men, yuck). People who had ideas and put them out there for their small audiences to either like or not. Every issue also came with a CD of a collection of songs the editors were digging that month from around the South East Asian region. It was through JUNK that I learned of the existence of Hujan, Yuna, Bittersweet, Estrella, Oh Chentaku, Muck, Ben’s Bitches, The SIGIT, The Great Spy Experiment, White Shoes and The Couples Company, Monkey To Millionaire, and a whole lot more. It suggested to me that it was possible to make music and play your originals in front of other people, and they might even give half a shit. Rest in rip, Junk Magazine.

In addition to that, my musically-gifted childhood friends formed a band called Delude and started putting out original music on MySpace (the first single being “Hello, Future!”). And the scenesters in MySpace gave half a shit! I of course gave all of my shits. They were my best-friends, and they were making real, cool, original songs, together. And that was insane for me to witness. Like, they’re actually doing it! I wish I was included! I wish I still lived in Alor Setar so I could join them! By this point, my family had moved to Bedong, and I didn’t have a car yet, so I was largely cut off from my best-friends, a fact I was very bitter about when I was 18.

At 18 as well, I got into a Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) degree programme in Institut Pendidikan Guru Kampus Pulau Pinang. It was a five and a half year teacher training programme, afterwhich I’d automatically gain employment as a government school English teacher in one of the handful of public Malaysian primary schools (if your handful fits literal tens of thousands of schools).

While there, I got to be involved in some theatre. Besides the mandatory plays that we had to do that was part of our academic course (budak TESL kan?), I auditioned for an extra-curricular play Madam Mariah (one of my favourite lecturers) was putting together called Lela Mayang. At 19 years old, I got the part of Andak, the older brother of the titular Lela (who was played by a 23-year-old guy). And that’s when the theatre bug bit me (it’s hurt so good, baby). After we staged that play, I waited and bated all my breaths for a staging of literally anything else that I might have been able to audition for. I graduated in 2013. I was 23. It never came to pass. Big sad for me.

Even though I did not get to be in any more plays in my early 20s, I did manage to start me a Youtube channel. I was watching the likes of Ryan Higa, Craig Benzine aka WheezyWaiter, Phillip DeFranco, and Shane Dawson (ew) pretty much every day. I wanted in on that. So for my 20th birthday, when my father asked me what I wanted for my birthday (a question he had never asked before), I asked for a digital camera that was able to record video. I made videos first to help me with my abysmal speaking skills, then to fulfil a video assignment, then for fun. The fun ones I put up on Youtube eventually, as IniAnwarHadi, where a following started to grow. Back when Twitter was still Twitter and not a pile of steaming lizard shit, Lisa Surihani tweeted about a video I made talking about Ana Rafali’s win at that year’s Anugerah Juara Lagu, and suddenly my viewership jumped from fifty to literal thousands. This was an anomaly back then. We didn’t have the word “viral” to describe it yet. It was a strange thing to have happen back then, when there was no such thing as “social media marketing” yet (at least not in the form we know today). I was an early-adopter (and now, a complete has-been). Anyway, I got deeply depressed and burned out in like 2012 or something, and I stopped making videos as frequently, and eventually stopped uploading to my Youtube channel altogether.

In 2014, at 24 years of age I was absorbed into the Ministry of Education as a primary school English teacher. I got posted to SK Bandar Baru Perda, in the mainland part of Pulau Pinang. There, I further deepened my depression. I wrote short stories on my blog, and eventually wrote Malay rap songs as a distraction. I put up those songs on Soundcloud. I looked for plays to audition for in Pulau Pinang, but my searches more often than not came up empty. I missed being on stage so much. Oh, and a bunch of my blogposts were compiled into a book and was published by Rabak Lit. It was called Whatever You Say I Am + I’m OK. Did I mention that I was/am a huge Arctic Monkeys fan?

In December 2015, I got married to a singer-songwriter (here’s a hint: she’s NOT Taylor Swift). I was still a primary school English teacher, and she was an up-and-coming independent musician. Can I make it anymore obvious? She was a punk, I did ballet. What more can I say? Being married to an independent Malaysian musician gave me insight into the struggles that independent Malaysian musicians had to face. I spent more than 6 years married to her (again, she’s NOT Taylor Swift. Stop saying that!). We divorced July 2022. We remain divorced to this very day.

In 2017 I moved to Shah Alam to be closer to the national independent arts scene. It was also the year I was invited by my brother (Boy, who is also, as it happens, a boy) to join his band Pasca Sini as a guitarist. At that point, they had already had an EP out called Hardly Do I Find Myself Speechless, But You Have Rendered Me So. Moving forward, we would play live shows for various amounts of people, record another EP ((Everything) Looks Cooler In Japanese) and then an LP (Emo Department) . They were all recorded, produced, mixed and mastered by Shaheir, a friend of mine from the aforementioned band Delude. And then in 2022, I parted ways with Pasca Sini because I moved to Singapore because I wanted to see if I could get a screenwriting job in Singapore. Spoiler alert: I failed.

In 2018, I signed up for a theatre directing course at Revolution Stage, an independently run theatre space in Pelangi Damansara. Throughout my year doing that course, I directed 2 short plays and 1 long play. Doing the course, I also got to act in quite a few plays. I loved the acting part, did not love the directing part.

In April 2018, I quit my school teaching job to figure out a way to do three things for a living: writing, acting and playing music. I did a lot of acting at Revolution Stage. I was playing and recording music with Pasca Sini. I didn’t know how to jobify my writing quite yet. In September 2018 came a job offer by a digital media company called Thelaki. It was a new digital media initiative by Media Prima Radio Network (then rebranded to Ripple, then Media Prima Audio or some bullshit like that), owned by Media Prima. Thelaki wanted me to write, produce and host Youtube videos for them. Here was a chance for me to get paid by making Youtube videos, and I took it. I lasted there a little less than 2 years, and I made 2 videos a week the whole time I was there. It gained somewhat of a following, but then I got burnt out again, so I left the group after my contract with them expired. A month or two after that, a management shift occurred, and Thelaki was canned.

The whole time I was there at Thelaki, I was still actively pursuing acting through Revolution Stage, and later at TheatreThreeSixty. I acted in a bunch of plays, and that was fulfilling to be able to do. I was also still consistently playing with Pasca Sini. That was very fulfilling too, especially when people started showing up to our gigs already knowing the words to some of the songs. That was sweet.

I also started doing improv comedy at the now-defunct The Joke Factory in 2018, Muzakir Xynll being the one responsible for inviting me to perform there. The show was called Making Shit Up (I know) and most of the time it was hosted by Harith Iskandar (I knowww), since he kinda owned the place and all. It was crazy nice to be able to consistently play the games that they played on Whose Line Is It Anyway in front of live audiences. It was also where the Pinball Monkeys (Muzakir Xynll, Farid Azmeir and myself) got to play our first handful of longform improv comedy shows. These shows were insanely fun to do.

Alright. And then 2020 came along, and we weren’t doing anymore live shows, were we? Pasca Sini hunkered down and finally recorded and released Emo Department. Pinball Monkeys also recorded a bunch of audio-only improv comedy sketches and put them up on streaming platforms, after living on Patreon for a while. We ended up calling that first compilation “Semua On The Spot”, and they’re big fun to listen to if you share our silly silly sense of humour.

After quitting Thelaki, I texted/emailed people I knew and didn’t know who were in the TV/film industry. I cold emailed my resume to a bunch of production houses. Most of them did not reply. However! My favourite local one (Redcomm) replied and let me write for a Disney Channel variety show called Club Micky Mouse. They liked my work on that show enough to offer me a contract to become an in-house writer at Redcomm. I was over the moon. I got to work at Redcomm baby! They made KAMI The Series, Istanbul Aku Datang, Gol & Gincu and 3R! Must be good! And it was. Relative to whatever else was/is being produced for Malaysian TV, it was/is top of the pops.

I owe the job to Lina Tan, the founder of and Executive Producer at Redcomm. She liked my work on IniAnwarHadi and Thelaki enough to take a chance on little old me, and I am grateful. To date, I have written on shows such as Club Mickey Mouse Season 4, SMK Seasons 3-5, Ex Aku Pontianak (where I was the headwriter), Kau VS Aku Seasons 1-2 (I was the headwriter again), Lagenda Puteri Qaseh Season 1 (again, headwriter), RIOT, and From Saga With Love Season 2. I am a screenwriter now, thanks to Redcomm. Am I a good one? Who knows. Am I a real one? I think so.

I mentioned earlier that I moved to Singapore in 2022 to try to become an employed screenwriter there, and I mentioned that I failed. That remains to be true. I spent my time there being a restaurant worker (a restaurant manager-in-training, to be exact), but after four months of restaurant work, hundreds of cold emails to Singaporean production companies, a handful of replies, and only one (1) freelance screenwriting job there, I called it quits and moved back to Kuala Lumpur.

I now make songs and release them under the moniker Awkward Pedestrian, and I have two EPs out on bandcamp under that name. I continue to consistently perform live improv comedy shows with the Pinball Monkeys aka Action Baby. And I write shows for TV as a dayjob.

So, all of the perspectives that I share on this here page comes with it all the preceding context. I have not made myself rich and famous through my creative endeavours. But I have been able to consistently and sustainably do fulfilling creative work. Throughout my years of trying to do this, I have gathered information, experiences and stories that would have been such a help to the 18-year-old Anwar who felt like his dreams were foolish and delusional and deviant and irresponsible. In my own little way, I’m trying to help that dude figure it out. And hopefully my dear reader, you too.