In Tune

Just back from the concert hall with a concert featuring very palatable helpings of Ravel and Mozart. Got to hear Le Tombeau de Couperin live for the first time. I owned a version of it on vinyl back in the last century and it was one of those records that taught me how to appreciate classical music. The SSO did one of my favourite pieces justice this evening, I must say.

Odd thing: I've known since owning the aforementioned record that it began as a piano composition and the piano version comes in six movements. Yet I've never heard it. I'm about to set that right by going on a youtube hunt. Wish me luck.

Postscript: Gosh, with regards to the standard repertoire you can get just about anything on youtube. It took me less than ten seconds to track down quite a few piano versions of Ravel's wonderfully luminous and elegiac music, and I lulled myself to sleep last night listening to Angel's Hewitt's beautifully rendered version. Loved the second movement particularly (one of the two bits not orchestrated, so not heard by me before.)

A Breath Of Fresh Air

The haze we've been suffering in this Far Place in recent days, a product of forest fires in nearby Indonesia, lifted today, prompting Noi and me to pop out this afternoon for the cup that cheers and two splendidly out-sized curry puffs from the nondescript little teh tarik place just round the corner from Bussorah Street. Then we ambled on to one of the many purveyors of exotic fabrics along Arab Street to get some material for a baju to be donned by Noi when she attends nephew Afiq's forthcoming wedding celebrations, leaving instructions with her tailor, who's resident on the same street, as to how to fashion the garment to be. There was just time for another quick cuppa, basking in the warm late-afternoon air, before it was, Home, James, and don't spare the horses.

So we didn't really do anything at all very much, and had a fine old time while we were at it.

On This Day

It seems today is National Poetry Day back in the UK. The whole business of having 'Days' for various causes and the like is, of course, fundamentally silly, but anything that reminds the population at large of how much enjoyment there is to be found in poetry - reading, writing, listening to it - is a good thing. I'm not suggesting everyone should take up encountering the stuff as, mysteriously from my point of view, there are those who genuinely don't get it and I don't think anyone should force them to. But I reckon there remain lots of folk who would have their lives considerably enhanced through acquiring the taste, even if it's just for a couple of writers they can get into. My old mate Tony was a huge Ted Hughes fan, but I don't remember him referencing a single other poet in all the time I knew him.
 
My latest enthusiasm in this line is for the work of Alice Oswald. I read her wonderful collection about the river, Dart, a year or so ago and it hugely impressed me. She struck me as a bit of a kinder, gentler Hughes in her way, which is a bit of a superficial summary but will have to do for now. I finished another, more recent collection from her, entitled Memorial, last week and, whilst I don't think it's quite as immediately appealing as Dart, it confirmed for me her gifts. Memorial takes us into the world of the Iliad. It's a sort of loose translation of Homer, reminding me of Fagles at times, but reduces the epic to a series of pithy killings of one victim after another. Unpleasantly, but necessarily, violent. Powerful stuff.
 
I also read Manohar Shetty's Living Room. This was one I just picked randomly from the shelves when I was 'spending' the book tokens I was given back in September for my talk on poetry at the Literature Seminar. (I feel obliged to buy poetry with the tokens for some reason.) I'd never heard of him before, which is not entirely surprising as he lives in India and his poetry seems intended at least in the first instance for a local audience. Nothing earth-shaking, but highly competent, and easy to understand - which even for someone with a taste for baffling obscurity like myself is, sometimes, a welcome break.
 
Now I'm a few poems into Julia Copus's The World's Two Smallest Humans. Bought this on the strength of the cheerful title and because she's won a couple of awards. Yes, not very deep of me, I know, but I enjoy 'discovering' names new to me in this way. So far, so good: lots of variation of style and subject matter even in just a few poems which means I can't quite pin the lady down yet - and I suspect she'd be pleased to hear that.

Moving Pictures

It speaks volumes for my old-fogeyism that I get mildly irritated at those talking heads shots they film for the telly in which the talking head is filmed not talking directly to the screen but from an angle, as if addressing someone other than the viewer. Why do they do that? And don't get me going on those that film from more than one angle and keep cutting between shots!

And now they've come up with another way of over-complicating the viewing experience. I was watching a gory little number about some serial killer on the esteemed Crime and Investigation channel when I realised that the various talking heads although being filmed head-on appeared to be gently spinning. Then I figured out that it was the background they'd been filmed against that was moving ever so slowly from left to right. Don't ask me how they got the background to move, because I don't care; I just wish they wouldn't.

By the way, the channel in question was advertising its forthcoming Serial Killer Sunday. You couldn't make this stuff up, could you? (Though the fact I was fairly glued to the screen for the particular episode I was viewing doesn't say much for my character, eh?)

For Themselves

Surely nobody spends quite as long staring at a painting, or looks with so intent a gaze, as the artist in the act of creation? The primary audience for any creation is the creator. And I sometimes get the feeling that for certain artists their primary audience is quite enough, thank you.

And that's enough about art, for now at least.

The Inexplicable

Something I forgot to mention about my Gallery Night experience, indeed something which has been a constant of my experience of each and every night so far, was the extremely powerful general sense I had of something being conjured, a wisdom and beauty if you will, far beyond what you might reasonably expect of any eighteen-year-olds. No, that's patronising. The age is irrelevant. Just far beyond people anywhere, any age. In the case of almost every individual artist there was something, a single work at the least, of which I felt: Now where did that come from? Surely not from the frail human vessel on hand to present his or her work?

Now I know that much, probably all, of what was on display was derivative, openly so. The little write-ups that 'explained' the artist and what they'd been up to name-checked the influences with glee. But that really doesn't matter. It still didn't alter the strange power of the works I've got in mind. They did what they were trying to do, to this viewer at least - or, possibly, perhaps even likely, they did something they weren't necessarily trying to do, at a conscious level, at all.

When we see this kind of thing going on in those we label 'genius' it's easy to recognise because there's so much of it. But I reckon there's a little bit of it in all of us and a good deal of the excitement and satisfaction, sometimes intoxication, of making art lies in the fact that we are aware of that when we do so.

I'm reading the first volume of Ian Bell's biography of Dylan, Once Upon A Time - The Lives of Bob Dylan at the moment. (My follow-up to the RVW biog.) It's obvious to me that there's simply no rational explanation we can give to how the distinctly unpromising (and, frankly unpleasant) nineteen-year-old fairly hopeless hopeful turned himself into the Voice of a Generation (in around about eighteen months) before going on to greater things - and, what's more, and here things get really spooky, KNEW he was going to do so. The irrational explanation I offer is that he opened himself to his daemon, his bargain for salvation, I suppose. And it worked, big time.

Some Explaining To Do

One thing I wasn't able to do at yesterday evening's Gallery Night was to stand and look intently at a work for a long time. It was just too crowded to do so. That felt like something lost, but not irretrievably so. The artists' work will remain on display for quite some time to come. And being able to hear the artists' own commentaries on their work in some ways made up for the lack of concentrated gazing possible - hearing someone talk about what they've done always seems to intensify the piece for me. The same is true of poetry, and other literary forms, and music.

That begs the question as to whether the commentary, if available, becomes part of the work. I think it does - another blow against the idea of some kind of artistic purity. Even if the audience for an art-work chooses to finally ignore a given commentary it still, in some way, mediates response. I don't think you can read Pound's In a Station of the Metro in the same way once you've read his comments upon writing it, strange and oddly unrevealing as those comments are.

An artist's silence has the virtue of engendering some degree of the enigmatic, assuming a work is not entirely transparent, but I think the enigmatic is in danger of being severely over-rated. The wilfully enigmatic inevitably suggests a desire for something more akin to self-promotion than communication, and that spells death to art.

I suppose we get the best of all worlds when the artist and the critics have done their best to explain it all and it remains gloriously inexplicable.

In The Gallery

Over the last three of four years the annual Gallery Night at my place of work has become one of the highlights of my year. Yesterday's was no exception. Noi and I had a splendid time viewing the various paintings and work in other media essayed by our talented Year 6 Visual Arts students.

Actually talented doesn't really do them justice and is a mealy-mouthed tepid way of trying to capture the exuberance, energy and sheer joie de vivre of what they get up to. Even the dark, angsty stuff - plenty of that, of course, and rightly so - seems full of vim, somehow.

The great pleasure of Gallery Night itself is getting to hear the practitioners talk about their work. I made it my business this time round to listen cunningly from a distance, usually when they were addressing their peers. That way you get the unfettered version, not trying in any way to impress, just to communicate - invariably with great urgency and passion (a much abused term in these parts, but one that's appropriate in this context.)

I can think of at least one of those whose work we viewed last night as more than capable of pursuing a career doing this sort of thing. But what is far more obvious to me is how much more these youngsters will make of their lives in terms of depth and meaning if they keep up such work even if it's just for themselves.

Madness

Switched on the telly to watch a bit of news before going to work this morning only to catch a visibly upset President Obama speaking angry good sense about gun control in the States following the latest mass shooting, this time in a college. Felt sad, both for the dead and over the fact that, as he knows only too well, his words will make no difference. Already, it seems, he's been accused of 'politicising' the tragedy.

Later in the day a colleague, who's spent quite a bit of time in the US, came to my desk, looking very depressed, to ask if I knew why Americans cling to their guns as they do. I could have given quite a long explanation of the historical and cultural background of the Second Amendment, but I didn't. In the light of raw, repeated suffering the words would have been empty.

A Bit Of Humanity

We found ourselves at Peninsula Plaza this afternoon as we needed to get some documents stamped by a lawyer who has his office there. He resides on the top floor so whenever we go we get to view quite a few of the shops there. The majority on a couple of levels seem to have been taken over by folks from Myanmar and Thailand. I'm not too sure of their nationalities since I'm going off the shop signs which generally don't employ the English alphabet.

There's a particularly strong smell once you get to the third floor caused, I assume, by the substantial number of vegetables on display in any number of shops. It's by no means an unpleasant smell but distinctly 'foreign', to these nostrils, that is. I'm guessing that for a lot of people there it smells very much like home, if they consciously notice the odour at all, of course.

The shops at the lower levels seem to be aiming at a younger clientele. At one point we passed quite a number of shops selling guitars and other musical paraphernalia, and there were a couple of shops selling distinctly funky t-shirts. I was tempted to buy one featuring Arctic Monkeys, but decided I've got enough t-shirts already. I did buy a pair of shoes, however, my usual Clarks, which the Missus bargained for with typical ruthless efficiency, despite the fact they were already dirt cheap.

We also bumped into an old friend, Azman, whose tailoring business happily is still going strong there. He had a hand, as it were, in the trousers for my wedding, if you really want to know. The trousers are still good, by the way. I reckon he's seen a few changes to the shopping centre in the years he's been there. I suppose it might be seen as having gone more than a little down market - which I suppose is why I felt so at home there. The place felt human, for want of a better word.