liberation tastes like this

I am a journals junkie.

Hanging out at JSTOR recently, I typed "Cello" in search and came up with many many articles it got me excited I went on to look up other random composers. So now I have about 99 articles on stuff ranging from Suzuki strings teaching to vibrato to Debussy Grieg Brahms Dvorak etc etc.

I am hard pressed to read all of them but for now I shall contend with reading Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. It is the kind of book you have to mull over sentence by sentence and you need a lot of time, space and quiet, which now I have, thankfully.

compendium-ing

I did the geekiest thing today and compiled encyclopedic entries of most composers (of cello music). It's part of the whole getting out of school thing; since I didn't use the library as much as I should (I dislike the cold and there are always too many people and has this unhealthy mugging vibe).

So I now have a file filled with composer biographies in sheet protectors that make me appear somewhat anal or obsessive compulsive. Have you ever noticed how there is a disproportionately large number of composers with last names starting with "B"? Bach Barber Beethoven Bloch Boccherini Brahms Bridge Britten Bruch. In the Asian context, this might mean that if you have a last name starting with B, like Boey or Baey or Boo or Ban, you might just have an entry credited to you in Grove Music Online.


Such is the full time occupation of slackers. But it was strangely satisfying to see the end product of many hours. Amidst the heat. (Is it just me or is Singapore experiencing some sort of humidity heat wave?)

and so it is

It seems so surreal now that it's over but this is the official end of all the exams in 22 years of my sad and sorry student life.

Goodbye thick and overpriced textbooks that only look good on the shelf
Goodbye hours of photocopying in the cold that gives me unofficial qualifications as a photocopy shop assistant
Goodbye studying in coffee joints and thick-skinnedly ignoring their 'No studying between X and X hours' signs
Goodbye thick dusty files of notes lecture slides newspaper articles press releases
Goodbye analysis of policies and bills and acts
Goodbye running out of pen ink halfway through exams
Goodbye running out of paper halfway through exams and having to flag an examiner and wait for him/her to meander through aisles to get to you before someone else does
Goodbye shaky tables that demand you stick a rubber under one leg
Goodbye odoriferous unwashed bodies of strangers sitting next to you in the sports hall with the musty air of countless sweaty bodies and panicky minds that came before
Goodbye time-wasting before a 5 pm paper

And so many other things about exams that I hate but have come to love (in a masochistic way).

Oh. Goodbye compulsive blogging before exams.

Welcome, life of the slacker, waking up not knowing what to do, having to make the arduous decision as to whether to watch House or Veronica Mars first, compusively You-Tubing, roaming the streets wondering where my next meal (or new husband) is going to come from, and back to more DVD watching, macbooking, facebooking, Baileys coffee drinking, playing with children, (the cello gets a break for a while). The life, indeed.

Those who are in need of entertainment and/or company, don't hesitate to call.

bricked out

Halfway through teaching the Korean student (let's call her Shimmer), she gets a call from her mum who called to make sure I didn't leave before she got back. I was momentarily overwhelmed by ominous foreboding but being pretty much clueless about what that was about I dismissed it and resumed the business of rearranging Shimmer's bowhold.

Then the door opened and Shimmer's mum edged in, holding on to a painting that was one and a half times as tall as her, hovering at the door way wondering how to move the picture in. (Shimmer's mum is an art curator, so buying paintings that cost tens of thousands of dollars is apparently a regular business). I was expecting something earth shattering like the punk rock piece or the football-size crumpled chewing gum wrappers sculpture made of fibreglass. Instead it was a pretty non-descript one-colour-different-tones piece of sand-covered wood, shaded to form 3 dimensional bricks. Something like the one below.



Non-descript at first sight, but upclose and personal, it is breathtaking because of the way the shadows are painted. The artist, Kim Kang Yong, apparently collects sand, spreads it across the canvas, then shades in the shadows from left to right, without first drawing a sketch. And it's so geometrical and dimensional at this point my vocabulary breaks down because I don't know how to describe art, I only understand the feeling of being captivated, of seeing different perspectives from different angles, so I was flitting around it, sitting down, looking at it from above, seeing it from the sides, because at each spot a different shadow popped up, and you saw a different space, a different brick, and a different feeling behind bricks at different positions.

I can't believe I'm waxing lyrical about sand on wood.

And Shimmer's mum was obviously excited about it - that was why she called back: to make sure I was around to witness the art piece stripped of its plastic covering in its full glory, and then she said it cost US$25 000 I almost died. The cleaner was around to witness the unveiling, said she didn't dare to clean around it, and then tentatively fingered the sand.

Shimmer, on the other hand, wasn't that impressed. Maybe it's the jadedness that comes with having tons of art pieces strewn around the house, maybe she's only 13 and probably had other interests like TV, or maybe she was PMS-ing (but not in a bad way she said she was just tired). In a way I could understand the mopeyness - her mum said "We have to sell the TV, let's not eat today, let's sell everything in the house except the piano and cello and art".

Is that what you call living and breathing art? It was totally surreal seeing her rant on like that because I had this impression of Koreans being eminently practical people. Apparently not.

But I got my aesthetic fix and am no longer visually starved. Yay. (Oh my goodness I sound freaking deprived. Blame it on exams.)

splashing red paint

So in my parents' preparations to go to Tanzania, I figure it's much like preparing for their deaths *touch wood*. In their absence I have to figure out forms and more forms, where to get stuff, how to cook stuff, basically how to not die when they are not around, and it is an exhilarating whirl of excitement that is liberating, because I'll have the house virtually to myself many many days a week (though the package comes with all the housework but who cares, it will be magically done).

But I have to get past exams first.

on beauty

After 2 hours of trying to make myself heard over 10 cellos I have lost my voice (again), and I never knew how much I needed it until I remember I don't stop teaching until...next Monday. Mondays are Voice Rest Days.

Today I saw a stunning picture. Actually, make that 3 stunning pictures, like uncracked seashells among a bed of sharp rocks, the kind of photos that make you stop and stare, at the colours, the texture, the light and shadows. It made me want to find out about the person who took those shots, because I assume that in each published picture lies a fraction of the soul of a person, a part of the self that can appreciate beauty in unexpected places. I assume.

I know the person who took the photos, through many degrees of separation and then none, but the photos were so insistently stunning it killed me and I had to write about it. Imagine the sky, and then the sand and then the sea. There is an overdose of blue, and there are many shadows, and only shadows, dark outlines that help you understand what it is you are seeing, but it takes you a while to figure out the perspective.

There are no people in those photos, because people posing makes the camera a fake eye. These are shots of nature's movement.

"But since they are about nature, shouldn't it be nature and its creator you laud instead of the photographer?"

Yes, but there is the unexpected perspective that makes all the difference, and it has been eons since I last saw a nicely composed picture. Maybe I'm just aesthetically starved.

what I do before exams

Sectionals at the All White Girls School a.k.a SouthSea for the first time, and it was strange, coming from so many KoolPurple sectionals. For one, they did the 起立行礼坐下 (qi li xing li zuo xia i.e. stand bow sit) thing at which I was totally appalled so I told them not to do it. And then they were standing around at a loss. I felt bad for disrupting the ritual but it was too embarrassing. But the awkward moment passed, and then 2 hours of figuring out fingerings for the whole Borodin Quartet that I haven't played. They were really responsive though, and could be cued to silence, thankfully.

Bought Creative Inspire T10 speakers because my old ones died, and they are awesome. I played the Sibelius Violin Concerto with them and heard all the bass parts that were pretty much non-existent with my previous speakers. And choral music sounds great on it because you can adjust the treble-bass balance. I don't consider myself an audiophile, the new speakers were chosen because they were black, and looked decent enough; it's such a ear-cleansing experience.

Finished Nick Hornby's "The Complete Pollysyllabic Spree" - a collection of his book reviews in the Believer, and he is rib-splittingly funny it is hazardous to read his stuff on public transport because it not being able to laugh out loud, and having to settle for silently convulsing while trying to stifle laughter might just trigger a heart attack. At the beginning of chapter is a "Books Read" and "Books bought" list, and books bought are not always books read.

I bought Middlemarch about a year ago, and it is still sitting untouched, while I go a-whoring with other books (required readings not included). Am almost through "Speaking to an Angel", a collection of short stories put together by Nick Hornby (he's my flavour of the month), as a fundraiser for autistic children. I love short stories because finishing one story or more per bus/train/taxi ride gives such a sense of fulfilment and *pauses for effect* self-efficacy. The latter is essential to ageing individuals who lose confidence in its absence.

Reading gerontology notes is giving me an acute awareness of my mortality; it's sweet. Sometimes I need to be reminded that life is, to quote Michael Cunningham, nothing more than a temporary inconvenience.

wisps of smoke in the dark

After a while, after getting acculturated to the whole theatre business again, it doesn't seem that bad to be spending loads of time hanging around backstage, waiting for the lights the mics the spaces to be sorted out. Victoria Theatre is quite a cozy place, the backstage is spacious and dark enough to promote unrestrained self disclosure, because when we can't see the other we picture them in our mind, our ideal of who the other person is.

Esplanade's backstage is too bright, too much white light, cold, sterile even, the floor squeaks. Here the stairs are narrow and spiralling, the floorboards are so scratched I derive no satisfaction from poking a hole in the floor. We walk two storeys up, on stairs that have spaces that your foot might slip in if you are not careful. But even if you tread slowly, the upper levels are colder, quieter, dark and airless. You avoid the non-lit areas, because they seem too foreign, like a heavy sigh of a country burdened with history.

You turn, at strange corners that lead to new places. One narrow door leads out to the walkway that can only accomodate one person, balanced five feet off the ground. The place where the production people sit and smoke and wait.

Smoke. It still has the strange magnetic effect on me. The throbbing headache that refused to go away vanished in a puff, when I went out and partook of the communal smoking sessions, those that happen once every hour, at least, much to my relief. I don't smoke, I just passive smoke, and the knot in my head unravels. The day I cut my hair I was wandering around at Holland Village and was suddenly taken by the compulsion to sit by the road and light up.

It is the most unholy thing to blog about, but it came so unexpectedly, incomprehensibly, that I had to remember it, (for future psychoanalysis purposes... or not.) I told most people I met on that day about the strange urge, in the hope that it would go away after people dismissed it as ludicrous. But it would not.

And it's still there. Now that daily I am enveloped in a cloud of second hand smoke that stains my clothes and hair, it feels like I'm home. If I were one to believe in past lives, I would attribute this to having been a chain smoker previously.

But I don't.

Today a line in the play popped up in my face, during the blank moments where there's just acting and no music. Neo Swee Lin says, "...why cranes fly, how children are born, why there are stars in the sky..." This, the play says, is what lends meaning to life, without which life would be "mere futile nonsense". That is true, especially if one believes in some Higher Being involved in nature and creation. But for Singapore, (this being Spotlight Singapore), whose gods are economic development and pragmatism, the lines though meaningful, rang false.

But nations are said to be imagined communities, so maybe it isn't so bad that the play is based on what some individuals imagine the country to be.

migratory birds

So some people are playing for the Spotlight Singapore in Moscow thing, and my weekend nights were burnt for 4 hour rehearsals in which we played maybe for about one hour and spent the rest waiting around watching the play and eating Polar puffs (and getting fat).

But the play is interesting. It features malay kampung boys, ice kachang, a peranakan woman, russian doll lookalike, random people in business suits skating around on airport trolleys. Some musicians are wheeled in on airport trolleys. Snow is transacted, of the powder form, not the slush or hailstones. We have our own snow in the form of ice kachang - the ever wannabes.

Migratory birds continue to fly, no matter what philosophers are born amongst them - is the play's mantra.

A violinist said, "This play is about cultural essentialism", with considerable certainty, because of the depiction of cultural stereotypes - what we consider Uniquely Singapore. But I thought there was slightly more to it than that.

Singapore is a country of migrants, and we jetset; the wanderlust remains insatiated, or maybe it's because there is nothing to hold us to this place. Even if philosophers are born, they might not be appreciated by the Powers that Be, especially if they do not fancy sitting in Parliament in white. We hold on to particular cultural icons for purely symbolic purposes because we need representation, because those who represent us are washed out white, because we have no identity.

On stage, the majority of the actors are Malays, the Chinese plays a Russian, and another plays the Peranakan, also known as 'Others'. Putting minorities on stage gives them a voice, an importance, but this importance is staged, ultimately unreal, and we ship over a fiction to Moscow.

I haven't watched a play in ages. Ivan Heng's direction is great, he gives significance to what might otherwise be something even emptier, a shallow representation of the lame cultural symbols of what we think of as Uniquely Singapore. But watching it two times in a row, it left an unpleasant taste of hollowness. The ending was one of hope, no doubt, but what the entire thing reflected was a vapid reality straining at the edges to hold itself together.