Out

Euro 2008: Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground. Ouch. Well at least I didn't stay up to watch it live.

We went out with Fi Fi & Fa Fa this morning to a performance of Scrooge by the Little Company, the sort of children's branch of the Singapore Repertory Theatre. Aimed at six-year-olds the musical was resolutely un-Dickensian - the set looked like something from Sesame Street, as did a number of the puppets (cleverly) employed as spirits & the like - yet the basic story survived. The great stories are like containers into which we pour ourselves.

Dickens is so familiar you tend to forget how strange he is. Is Scrooge in any sense believable? The question is irrelevant. In him we recognise ourselves, and that's enough.

Planning

One of the curious features of modern times is the notion of a life lived around, or rather directed by, goals. It seems these are necessary in order to be effective. This rather begs the question of the point of this effectiveness. I suppose that effective individuals might be seen as somehow improving the quality of life for those around them, but in my experience this is rarely the case.

There is much to be said for ineffectiveness. I always feel sad when I'm told I'm efficient, sort of damned with faint praise. Fortunately this (the accusation of efficiency) is an increasingly rare occurrence. As far as I can, I write down as much as possible at work so I don't forget things. This is sometimes mistaken for efficiency. Actually it's survival, which is, I suppose, the full extent of what I might be said to plan for.

And now I plan to get some sleep.

Celebrity

This time last year Noi and I were engaged in preparations for a visit to England, and a rather jolly time we had there. This year we'll be travelling only as far as Malaysia. However, I have to admit to feeling some small relief at escaping being deluged for a month by the so-called 'celebrity culture' which in recent years has swamped the land of my birth. I was reminded of this the other day by a couple of items in the paper about famous young ladies (famous to others, I'd hardly heard of them) who it seems are messing up their lives by ingesting a number of substances that wiser heads might recommend flushing down the toilet, and being involved with gentlemen who would be better positioned at the end of an extremely long barge-pole. I'm afraid media coverage of this kind of thing is pretty much wall to wall in the UK to the point of inescapability. It's difficult to understand why anyone might find it interesting, except for the sad realisation that rubbernecking wrecks on the highway is obviously something of a primal instinct.

I suppose the most disturbing feature of all this is the almost complete absence of compassion towards the foolish but unfortunate young people who find their miserable lives gleefully dissected and rubbished here, there and pretty much everywhere. Yet despite all this I'm told that a lot of people actually aspire to lives of celebrity. Why? It surely can't be for the readies. You can make your fortune without it becoming a matter of public interest.

My guess is that for many people the idea of living in public is tied in with a notion that such a life is somehow more valid, more vital, more real, than the inadequacy of ordinary being. At one time I suppose we got by on the idea that God was watching us. Now we need an audience of millions.

Playtime

Enjoyed lunch today with Reuben, Jordan & Luke from Year 6 who've completed their IB exams and are looking slightly shell-shocked, generally relieved. We dined in style at the stalls near Eunos MRT station and talked about a number of subjects, including the reading of plays. This was oddly coincidental since the last time I went to the library (the one at the Esplanade), on the evening of the Zainal Abidin concert, I borrowed four plays and have read them over the last week or so. My play-reading technique is brutally simple: go at speed and try and get as close to real time as possible. If I like a play, note it for a slower appreciation in a utopian future in which there is time to read whatever I want or, better still, go and watch it performed (assuming I haven't seen it already.)

I'd already seen John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation (here in Singapore, done by the Stage Club) and that helped in reading because I don't think I would have followed it in terms of how it might look on stage otherwise. Enjoyed it, but found it a tad narrow in social terms despite its attempt to bridge those degrees.

Preferred reading the other three: Stoppard's Arcadia, Frayn's Copenhagen (both wonderfully TOK-ish in the best sense of that coinage) and Brian Friel's Translations which I've had in mind to read since my niece, Kate, did it for 'A' level in the UK.

I'm struck by the fact that all four are, in a sense, plays that explore ideas. Isn't it strange we should use the stage as a space to do so? Perhaps the important thing is not so much the exploration of ideas in itself as the fact that when we do it on stage it's something we are doing together in a world that is otherwise dangerously fractured.

Longing

Hamzah & Sharifah popped around last night on their way to a rather high-powered wedding involving one of those Umno guys whose names get in the news, sometimes for the wrong reasons. A banker is someone who gives you an umbrella when there’s sunshine and takes it back when it rains., says Hamzah, sagely, the voice of, sad, experience. Noi wants to encourage him to watch Downsize Me, one of those health programmes on Discovery Heath & Home which is available here on Astro.

They arrived just after I’d completed the second play through of the day of VW’s fifth. He was about seventy when he wrote this and I suppose it was generally thought then this might be the final symphony. Superficially you get a taste of the kind of serenity you hope that age and accomplishment might bring. But there’s something else in the music that shakes the stillness with an urge to voyage on and discover new territories. I hear a kind of yearning all the way through disturbing the glimpses of peace. The static, meditative quality you sometimes get in Messiaen is wholly absent. I think that’s because there’s always a tune carrying you through, and the tunes have to end, or turn themselves into new material. The triumphal moments are for ever in danger of dying away, to be replaced by further striving. It’s no wonder there were four symphonies to follow.

Earlier still, I completed five laps of the taman – looking to restore something of the fitness of my youth. Striving, longing; foolish but fun.

And it looks as if England may actually qualify for Euro 2008! Never give up!

Necessity

I had intended to devote part of the morning to a close encounter with Vaughn Williams’s fifth symphony – surely one of the most accessible pieces of music in the classical tradition of the twentieth century – but it was not to be. Oh, I played the music right the way through, and it sounded good on the sound system here at Maison KL, but Noi decided to engage me in conversation in the second movement when it would have been churlish not to listen, and once the conversation was over (it concerned what we needed to do around the house and what we needed to prepare this weekend ahead of coming back with a number of small children next weekend for a protracted stay, so it was of pressing importance) I found the music pushing me into an odd kind of reverie concerning someone who passed on a number of years ago, and the reverie, though supported by the music, left the music behind.

I didn’t mind any of this. It was necessary. There will be time to listen tomorrow. This afternoon and evening will be taken up with work. Again not unwelcome, and necessary.

Folly

I wrote this last night, but then found I couldn't get on-line at home. Browser issues have been suggested. So here it is, posted from another far place:

Pullman makes a comment in an interview somewhere about not writing for people who are stupid. He goes on to qualify this by pointing out that he regards everyone as prone to stupidity but possessing the ability to choose to think in an intelligent manner. He says something to the effect that we are split down the middle and can go either way. I find this a useful idea, corresponding to my experiences in the classroom teaching a wide range of abilities over the years. It also corresponds to my experience of my own stupidity and from it I adduce the following: we are a remarkably stupid species; theists & polytheists of all colours - Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists (are they atheists?), Zoroastrians, - agnostics, atheists, the lot. Really incredibly and, considering what we have managed to do to the planet, possibly terminally stupid.

The bright spot in all this is the ability to intelligently recognise our stupidity and, possibly, make amends.

For some reason, probably my own stupidity, I find myself unable to reply to recent comments made to From A Far Place. Autolycus has weighed in recently with two beauties, one under yesterday's entry that made me laugh immoderately but, sadly, cynically. The chief corrective to stupidity is, of course, humour, which is why the fools are so dangerous in Shakespeare and Erasmus praised them so effectively.

Dangerous Ideas

His view is that children should not be exposed to things that contradict what their parents have taught them. - This line appeared in today's paper in the course of an article about e-mails (well, one, I think) calling on Christians to boycott The Golden Compass because of Pullman's 'atheism'. It related to a chap who actually sounded pretty level-headed and open-minded about the movie itself, and His Dark Materials generally. His wife had read the book (probably just the first of the trilogy, I would guess) and found it unobjectionable so he was prepared to give the movie the benefit of the doubt - as I guess the vast majority of theists in Singapore will, if they're interested in that kind of film. But it was the line quoted above that still jumped out at me, despite its proponent's general air of rationality.

I suppose if we applied the sentiment involved to very young children, up to around seven or eight, it makes a kind of sense, but surely beyond that it loses all touch with reality. Does anyone honestly think we can protect children from ideas, no matter how pernicious they are? Doesn't life itself have a way of contradicting our best attempts to make sense of it? Would anyone want their children growing up unable to deal with the multiplicity of 'things' that are likely to contradict what they have been 'taught', and wouldn't preventing such exposure incapacitate them in this regard?

I suppose I was struck by the fearfulness inherent in the line. It must be terrible to made anxious by ideas contrary to your own. I do my best to welcome such ideas - they provide a useful corrective to my / our remarkable talent for complacent self-deception.

Muzak

We're valiantly keeping going on the exercise front: having paid our weekly visit to the gym last night we're targeting Thursday evening for a bit of a run. The fees have gone up at Bodycraft but we can just about afford it since we pay on entrance rather than shelling out for membership. It's a small place but generally it's easy to get on the equipment. Noi always heads for the treadmills (there are two) when we arrive and it's unusual for both of them to be in use.

Unfortunately the guy who runs the place has had the bright idea of installing small screens to show DVDs immediately in front of the running machines, and last night he decided to treat us to Ricky Martin in concert. Even the missus, who, like most of the ladies, possesses a soft spot for Mr Martin, balked at this, but neither of us felt like disappointing the owner regarding his new toy. It's incredibly difficult to explain to people who enjoy mainstream music why you don't want the stuff pounding in your ears (and your eyes, in a manner of speaking.) One of the great perils of attending workshops these days is being subjected to 'background' music which is supposed to establish some kind of mood. It certainly establishes a mood for me. A bad one.

Having said all that, I must confess that a few weeks back the music of choice at the gym was some kind of Elvis tribute CD (Presley, not Costello) and I loved that, which is odd as I'm not a great Elvis fan (Presley - I'm a major Costello fan, of course.) It featured a brilliant version of Suspicious Minds and the last track had Bono doing Can't Help Falling In Love in a very tuneful falsetto, and that's the big clue for me to track it down for purchase, which I keep forgetting to do.

If ever anyone is ever crazy enough to ask me to conduct a sort of management style workshop I'd have quite a bit of fun choosing supremely unsuitable background muzak. Offhand I'm thinking of The Clash, Sandinista, probably. It would blow my cover but: What larks!

Mastery

I first saw Zainal Abidin in concert around three or four years ago at one of the Expo halls in Singapore. There was a surprisingly small audience for a big name in Malaysian popular music, but I have fond memories of an excellent concert and of an incredibly assured voice - this guy can really sing.

So it was with a touch of trepidation amidst a great deal of anticipation that we set off for concert hall at the Esplanade yesterday. To our relief this time there was a substantial audience in attendance and, if anything, Zainal was even better the second time round. However, I did get the impression that he was struggling a touch vocally. Though he was never in any way 'out' - for someone who performs in essentially the rock tradition he is so melodically precise it's uncanny - I've never seen anyone drink as much water on stage, swigs from a number of strategically placed bottles of mineral water sometimes being taken between phrases in melodic lines. And whereas at the Expo concert his voice seemed to blow everything else off stage (and I'm talking about a pretty loud band) last night there were points when he seemed happy to let himself fade into the mix, sometimes deliberately holding the mike at a distance to do so. Somehow the sense of struggle (though I don't think this would have been apparent to many in the audience) leant the music an edge, a glorious uncertainty that I prefer to the relative dullness of complete assurance.

Another difference between the concerts lay in the bands themselves. The whole feel of the band used at the Expo was a distinctly rocking out one: in fact they indulged themselves in a somewhat incongruous medley of Police numbers, including Synchronicity 2. Last night was all Zainal originals with the 'world music', percussion-oriented vibe of albums like Gamal. The presence of master percussionist Hassan Steve Thornton (Miles Davis alumnus, no less) may have contributed in no small way to the richness of texture achieved, as did Zainal's own banging around on what was almost a full drum set placed centre stage. I've seen him play percussion before (on tv as well as at the Expo concert) but never so consistently throughout a concert.

Recommendation: Zainal is the obvious choice to headline a Singapore Womad. If last night's band played at Fort Canning the place would erupt. As it was a generally middle-aged staid Malay audience found themselves actually on their feet by the end - but the Esplanade is, sadly, no place to boogie.

Woke today to find out Norman Mailer has passed away. At university I had something of a 'thing' about him, and still regard Armies of the Night as one of the great books (can't say novels, because it's not) of the twentieth century. Mailer wrote at least one short, clever, appreciative piece on Hick Finn (still reading) and here it is.