Archive for Treats
Academy of St. Martin in the Fields & Joshua Bell
June 14th, 2010 music, theatre
I don’t know how to talk about a musical performance but this is the absolute most bestest of the top best performance I have ever attended. It was exciting! It was beautiful! It was damn hot! If it was a man, it would be Robert Downey Jr. First day was hotter than second day but still hot. It makes me want to misspell hot to emphasize how hot it is.
12th June
Beethoven Coriolan Overture, Op 62,
Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in E minor, Op 64
Beethoven Symphony No 7 in A, Op 92.
13th June
The Marriage of Figaro (momentarily bored)
Beethoven Violin Concerto in D, Op 61
Beethoven Symphony No 4 in B flat, Op 60
Celeb sighting: gssqwho very kindly told me that there is very little difference between cheap and expensive because the acoustics for Esplanade is very good unless I am of the hardcore type.
11 and 12 / Emily of Emerald Hill
June 14th, 2010 theatre
1. 11 and 12
There is something not theatre about this piece of theatre. It feels too preachy and I think the blah-di-blah-blah on religion/spirituality, peace, tolerance is not particularly insightful and is almost tipping to being annoying (but never actually goes that way). A show shouldn’t be tipping towards being annoying, shouldn’t feel preachy even though it has a message/moral. The pieces of rugs as cloths is good idea but that’s unimportant to me as an audience. I want a story.
What didn’t work for me was perhaps the way the play is structured. Right at the start, we were told how by a gentle narrator that the source of the conflict is due to a change in rituals. Then, we see this conflict escalate, we see drama, fighting and killing, but we don’t see the discussion, the argument, the rationalisation to revert to 11 (times they repeat a prayer), which to me, is important to understand the conflict and to resolve it with the audience. Telling us the answer right at the start creates emotional distance and trivialises the arguement which I think made it difficult for me to appreciate the show. The narrator is a problem too. If the writer has to address the audience, I would prefer him to stick to the start and the end, leaving the characters to do all the work of story-telling because that’s theatre. A film can have a narrator, a book, a radio program because for films, books, radio shows, it can be first person and I can enter the mind of another person. For theatre, I am watching the goings-on onstage so I would prefer that the audience be addressed as little as possible.
2. Emily of Emerald Hill
I was curious about the show: I have never seen a one woman show and I didn’t know how it would work. Emily is a simple story of a strong, astute woman who knows what she wants and gets it – with some sacrifices in the way. I was surprised to find out Casey Lim did the multimedia for the show and I am very glad they pared down the multimedia (that’s what they said in the post-show dialogue) because he can really go nuts with the stuff and distract it from the performance. The script was well paced, well-structured and easy to follow. Margaret Chan had a powerful presence and she really commanded the whole performance effortlessly. Not any one moment did the stage feel empty. I told a friend after that it reminds me how much I miss good local theatre, even if all they talk about is HDB flats and coffins. I love seeing acting done well. It captures you and transports you to another place while you are in your seat.
Those Who Can’t, Teach/Gatz
1. Those Who Can’t, Teach
It was funny (great lines!), entertaining, touching (wept buckets) and it restored me to my good mood. Later, however, I thought there were too many messages in the play (which resonated with the audience the night) about NIE, about scholars being teachers, teachers as role-models, about good students, bad students, about over-worked teachers. It seemed to me, a mouth piece than a story of the character’s lives.
There is a POV that I think is outmoded ie, academic success = success in life and somehow the characters seem to expect it.
The one who comes to mind most is someone who at his 25th reunion seemed stumbling along as a seventh grade teacher, so his income was one of the lowest in the study, and instead of being a famous writer he was just helping his seventh grade students write their own papers. It was true he had a nice family and enjoyed sailing, but I didn’t think anything of him. And when it came time to re-interview him at 75, he was leading the most wonderful life and it was a function of, for 75 years, having done everything right. He still was neither powerful or rich, but he lived in a lovely family compound, which he largely built himself. He was devoted to teaching his grandchildren sailing, he had a perfectly wonderful marriage and the inside of the home was beautiful, both from tasteful decoration but also the piles of laundry that reflected the harmonious living together of three generations. Read more
2. Gatz
I didn’t know it was going to be a 7 hour show experience. I might not have bought tickets if I read the sistic website carefully. I bought show tickets more than a month ago and by the time the lights darkened and Mark Barton (as Nick Carraway) began reading the starting of The Great Gatsby in a very old office, I thought, hang on, I know this book. I like the slow build up of activity. He begins reading it, doing the voices of the characters in the book. Gradually, the people in the office begins to do the things as described in the book, saying the lines. It surprises Nick but he continues. By the start of part two, the office setting has faded from my mind and I am watching Jay, Daisy, Tom, Josephine, Nick, Wilson and I completely believe them all.
I have forgotten much of the story now – I read it more than 10 years ago – and yesterday’s show brought back interesting memories. As I was watching it, I was also thinking how Gatsby reminded me of Darryl van Horne (Witches of Eastweek) and Brown (The Comedians). I remember quoting from the book angrily once, complaining about careless people, about working so hard for orgiastic futures and yet borne ceaslessly into the past. How angsty I was! I’ve outgrown the book. Nick was excessively judgemental of Daisy and Tom – they were no more careless (self-absorbed) than Wilson’s wife, Wilson, Gatsby or himself.
A Map Of Love (by Donald Justice)
May 12th, 2010 books
Your face more than others’ faces
Maps the half-remembered places
I have come to I while I slept—
Continents a dream had kept
Secret from all waking folk
Till to your face I awoke,
And remembered then the shore,
And the dark interior.
Hiromi’s Place To Be
May 10th, 2010 music
I love this album! It’s fun, it’s interesting, and incredibly impressive! I feel restored after a month of glumness.
IT Crowd S3
May 2nd, 2010 screen
I have been loving every episode of IT Crowd. I just saw S3E2 last night – the one were Moss kissed Roy. OH MY GOD MY OH GOD. This cracked me up: “I want to go back to being weird. I like being weird. Weird is all I’ve got. That and my sweet style.”
On Graham Lineham’s blog, he said they wrapped S4!
Short notes
Tempest
Liked how Stephen Dilliane did Prospero: watchful, yet tired and human. I like the interesting contrast: he, the human magician, controls everything on stage to get his revenge, yet, he is not drawn into the events: he’s outside, watching, observing, almost uninvolved. He’s suppose to be interested in revenge but it is almost as if he lost interest in it halfway through and he’s just doing whatever he’s doing out of curiosity. Also very much liked how the actors don’t ever leave the stage, they remain at the side, sitting quietly or reading – involved but not involved.
Dear Doctor (Film Festie)
I think the movie focused excessively on the goodness of the doctor – makes the person somewhat 2 dimensional.
Frisky and Mannish
Jim Smallman, the warmup was a little too angry for my liking. I liked his “things done while drunk” which was funny in an oh-my-god way. Most shows I’ve been, the audience were too polite to heckle but oddly he thought we were fully capable of heckling and warned he was ready to fight back. Frisky and Mannish’s school of pop was clever-funny. Songs were mashed up to bring out their true meaning: songs written while doped up (What if God Was One of Us), crazy stalker songs (Eternal Flame), sexy children’s songs (Wheels On The Bus), googling (replacing ’search’ with ‘google’), horror songs (Total Eclipse of the Heart), historical songs (No Scrubs as history lesson). Love the stalker songs and Songs Written While Doped Up (HILARIOUS!). They are so accessible I thought it might become a sing-along session but it didn’t. V funny duo!
Karl Marx on seeing Stalin
May 1st, 2010 radio
(from Old Harry’s Game)
Marx: You recognise me comrade?
Stalin: Your face rings a bit of a bell
Marx: I’m Karl Marx!
Stalin: Karl Marx…Karl Marx…no, don’t tell me…
Marx: You totally discredited Marxism. Have you no compunction for the misery you caused? Have you any idea how cold it was in the sodding museum library? I froze my arse off for years working on that theory! All that time! Wasted! I could have been dating women! Taking nice holidays! I could have learnt to play the saxophone!
Stalin: People always say that.
Bonds
April 13th, 2010 books, elsewhere
There is a passage in Couples (Updike) spoken by Ken Whitman,a scientist studying molecular events of photosynthesis, of his wife’s Foxy affair. Molecules have bonds, he lectured, observing that Piet and Foxy’s bonds were stronger than his and Foxy’s. Today, it struck me to wiki molecular bonds.
The strength of bonds varies considerably; there are “strong bonds” such as covalent or ionic bonds and “weak bonds” such as dipole-dipole interactions, the London dispersion force and hydrogen bonding.
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A covalent bond is a form of chemical bonding that is characterized by the sharing of pairs of electrons between atoms, and other covalent bonds. In short, the attraction-to-repulsion stability that forms between atoms when they share electrons is known as covalent bonding.
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An ionic bond is a type of chemical bond that involves a metal and a nonmetal ion (or polyatomic ions such as ammonium) through electrostatic attraction. In short, it is a bond formed by the attraction between two oppositely charged ions.
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Intermolecular forces are due to differences in charge density in molecules.
Poor Ken.
On Space and Time
March 12th, 2010 theatre
Marking off space in theater is a device for meeting the need to distinguish the watcher from the watched. In most traditions there is a circle or a stage or sanctuary or a playing field.
Plot measures time better than a clock does, but what could measure space? This is a hard question, because theater space seems to be much more elastic than theater time, and nothing serves the function of plot to give space a structure that is comparable to the beginning, middle and end of the time in theater.
From here
