Doing Nothing

Just how hard is it to do nothing?

I recall an episode from Spongebob Squarepants: Spongebob's cousin Stanley Squarepants came visiting, and wanted badly to do something. He tried out a whole slew of various jobs (what they were I couldn't remember, I think it went along the lines of being a waiter in Mr Crab's shop.) In all his preoccupations he did not last long; rather, he didn't even last – within a matter of time he proved incapable of doing anything. But as I've said, he wanted badly to do something. So Patrick – who always give the keenest advice – suggested a most ingenious solution: why don't you trying doing nothing? Now that – ladies and gentleman – is no mean feat. Doing nothing is by itself as difficult as doing any something. And so the poor cousin, resigned, went to a couch, and began his new occupation of doing nothing. Before long rivulets of perspiration had started flying in all directions (as it always does in cartoons), he fidgeted as if ants were biting his ass, and his face which by now had turned blue scrunched up quite grotesquely.

He finally relented, with a most desperate cry: I can do nothing right. (aww poor thing…)

Oh see this:

Patrick: Looking for your call, huh? (examines Stanley) What are you good at?

Stanley: Nothing.

Patrick: Nothing at all?

Stanley: Yep.

Patrick: Interesting. Let's see how good you are. Nothing.

SpongeBob: That's perfect! You can do nothing better than anybody! All because you're the master!

Patrick: Come with me. First, sit down on this chair. Hear it. Empty your whole thoughts. Clear your mind. Nothing.

Stanley: I must clear my mind. Nothing. (Stanley is nervous. he hears Patrick's clock ticking and sees Patrick making a weird face) Nothing. No!

Patrick: So you're not following my instruction to be immobile, huh? Leave, my brethren.

Stanley: Can I try?

Patrick: Leave!

Stanley: I can do nothing right.

 

Not anybody can do nothing, can feel at ease stoning or liming at home, mind free from all thoughts and reverie, and just live in the most biological sense – breathe, sleep, eat (if that itself doesn't take too much of an effort), shit. It is today I tried doing that, to rid myself of any work at all, and for a day to live like a living amoeba does. To liberate myself from anything that goes beyond what a living thing would do. I fathomed I should just lie in bed and sleep through the day. But that was more difficult than I thought – getting into sleep is by itself a skill. To remove yourself from consciousness by consciously trying to remove yourself from consciousness is by itself a paradox, so it need not be mentioned that in reality it's impossible. To will oneself to sleep requires great discipline doesn't it? A discipline of the mind to STOP THINKING. The more you think of sleeping, the less likely you are to. So I lay on bed for god-knows-how-many-hours pretending to sleep, convincing myself that I've gotten rid of my consciousness. But my eyelids betrayed me. You know you're only truly asleep when you find it hard to life up those lids of yours. If they flip open almost without a struggle or the few moments that gather for itself morsels of energy to accomplish such a feat, you know you can't be sleeping.

I grew desperate. Now I'm like spongebob's cousin. I CAN'T EVEN DO NOTHIN'!

On hindsight it is probably the guilt that comes with doing nothing that gave me so much trouble. You know you're supposed to be doing something. Something constructive, something that would help this world progress a teeny weeny bit forward and which would justify your existence and the CO2 you breathe out. There's a list of 'to-do-list' waiting for you on your desk, yet ironically 'doing nothing' is one of them for today – and the top priority. What now?

I consulted a particular someone. And in his own way he sorta enlightened me – he says: Well, it's fine if your existence today doesn't have help the world move forward at all, as long as your doing nothing doesn't regress the progress that the world has thusfar made.

Makes perfect sense, I think.

Cheers to doing nothing on the sunny afternoon of 8 November 2009!

Tell me about happiness.

If happiness is the dial on the oven,

Will it go round and round and not overheat?

If happiness if a rubber band,

Will it stretch on forever without snapping?

If happiness is water,

Will it flood the moon after flooding the earth?

If happiness is a fountain pen,

Will it write till the last pulp runs out?

If happiness is a quadratic graph,

Will it ever have maxima too tall to be seen?

If happiness is a trampoline,

Will it bounce off an elephant?

If happiness is a bottle of air,

Will the bottle ever implode?

If happiness is a map,

Will it bring you to the furthest place imaginable?

I don't know about happiness, and what it does,

Or how to find it (because I don't)

All I know is that I've got lots of it now,

and I'm finding no cap to seal of the bottle.

I'm the happiest girl on earth,

so long as the Gift from God is here with me.

Concerto Extravaganza’09

Concerto Extravaganza

By students of the conservatory piano faculty

NUS Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, 25 October 2009， 7.30pm

This year's concerto extravaganza returns with a fantastic five, a dazzling smorgasbord of piano concertos that once again showed us promising talents from the conservatory. It was a night of exquisiteness, fire, colours, romance, blues and jazz, putting together a whole spectrum of experiences that stretched us beyond our own kites of imagination.

With an air of elegance, Young Artist pianist Zhang Aidi opened the night with Chopin's Fantasy on Polish Airs, Op.13. Its sombre opening spelled of dignified grandeur, a sonorous tone that was well projected and sustained throughout. Most beautiful were the lyrical, expressive melodies that were not merely played, but seemed to sing with a voice of its own. Supported on the 2^nd piano by Year 1 student Jonathan Shin, it was on the whole a calculated yet elegant performance that ended in exuberant brilliance.

A drastic shift of mood was to come as Year 4 student Immaculata Setiadi swept away the residual air of elegance with her tempestuous passions in Lizst Concerto No. 2 in A. The concerto opened with a meditative beginning of deep introspection, gradually escalating in tension, power and force that finally consumeed the whole hall, turning the stage into a cauldron of fire with tongues of flames licking away. Immaculata's small physique proved to be a total deception – the strength she possessed in drawing out deep sounds from the piano was beyond all measure, immense. This, coupled with the equally powerful orchestral reduction played by Bertrand Lee, spoke of fierce alacrity and fiery passions. The most memorable parts, however, was that of the softest section, especially those in the beautiful higher registers where the music was dissolved into a powdery sparkle that at once transformed the piano into a glowing (chime/celesta) One word to summarize this extremely focused rendition: awe-inspiring.

If Lizst's concerto gathered dark clouds on stage and culminated in torrents, Cesár Frank's Symphonic Variations was the rainbow that followed. Year 1 student Jonathan Shin's playing explored wide spectrums of both colours totemic of French pianism, engaging the orchestral part played by Zhang Aidi in a continuous evolution of ideas. It was a bitter-sweet piece played with touching sincerity – from the tormenting wails of Orpheus in the beginning, to the exuberance of pure bliss in the end. There was restraint in liberation, and freedom in control, a rather oxymoronic rendition that left deep impressions.

The second Chopin concerto of the night was the second and third movements from Concerto No.1 in E minor Op.11, performed by Year 3 Student Azariah Tan. While certain melody lines could be drawn out with richer tone projection, the overall delicateness of the second movement romance-larghetto was reminiscent of tender caresses and sweet caramel. The third movement Rondo-Vivace saw deft turns and good phrasing of melodic lines, and an upward movement of sound that was fully alive and dancing, a sound that never was stale or lethargic.

The finale saw the concert hall transformed into a jazz bar with Year 4 pianist Khoo Hui Ling came revving up the stage with Gershin's Conceto in F, replete with voluptuous tunes and seductive smiles (literally) that lured the audience's hearts. Supported by last year's piano concerto competition winner Akkra Yeunyonghattaporn, the adagio con moto was a soulful rendition of jazzy blues and lilt, featuring a surprising variety of keyboard techniques and the fun spontaneity of jazz. The allegro agitato roused much excitement in its distinctively rhythmic theme and arresting motifs, driven by a strong momentum constantly propelling the music forth. Above the pulsating rhythms was Hui Ling in a drunken stupor, intoxicating the audience with her sense of freedom in sound and soul.

It is in the yearly concerto extravaganza that one becomes ever more convinced of the fine pianism that the YST music students possess. This is on top of their ability to emote the most subtle nuances of emotions, to create gravity-defying moments that bring audiences to experience a whole new level of understanding in musical expression. Congratulations to all pianists of this brilliant extravaganza, and here's wishing them the best of luck in the upcoming piano concerto competition!

Staring at a truckload of migrant workers from the top deck of an air con bus at 7.03AM

And then I saw them. My eyes met theirs, that were looking up from below, seemingly seeing me looking at them and yet unseemingly so. I didn’t smile, they didn’t smile, and we simply sat staring as if both were lost in reverie, as if both saw something that each other would never be able to read.

They were all dressed in uniform, a pale blue straight down uniform that gives them their identity as belonging to some certain company they worked for without really knowing what they were working for. Every morning before sunrise they would awake from their bed – which wasn’t really one, just a simple thin mattress that lines a hard wooden board maybe –with the aches from yesterday’s toiling, then realize that they were back in reality in their coldly warm and humid dormitory which they share with roommates. A very cosmopolitan dormitory it is – some came from neighbouring Indonesia, some from further away Bangladesh, some probably didn’t even have a place they ‘came’ from – for most of their lives they had been travelling from city to city in trucks and lorries changing uniform from uniform, but always toiling, toiling, toiling. The only thing they had was themselves, and so it was the only thing they could sell, and would sell. Back at home their families were waiting from their remittances – wives for grocery money, children for school fees.

At the back of that truck they sat, legs crossed, knees slightly raised for economy of space. They didn’t need much space, they were used to being packed like sardines – they probably came in sardine cans that floated across the ocean to bring them where they would find work, and God knows how long they had to scrimp just to get into that sardine can, or how much land they sold. The middlemen – or agents, so to speak – charged exorbitantly for an admission into these cans. They all knew that these middlemen were pocketing more money than they deserved, but had they a choice? The prospect of a payslip that reads a figure five times higher than they would have seen back at home was enough to make them squeeze their way in to the cans with any means they could find.

What happened after they have come out of these sardine cans depended on luck really. Some were given the job they were promised, some were not. Those who were lucky were transferred into another sardine can, where they would eat and sleep and dream of their homeland every night after a day of hard work under the blazing sun; those who weren’t were simply sardines out of sardine cans, at once rendered lost and directionless.

They could curse and swear at the middlemen who went away with all their money and breached their promises, but they would remain stuck in the double bind that would not allow them to return home. There were some government agencies they could go to, they heard. They went, returned with a stack of documents in a language alien to them, forms they hardly knew how to fill. The pangs of regrets hit them hard in the face, as they thought about the land they had lost, the families they parted with and were still waiting back at home in quiet solitude for the first stream of hefty remittances they were promised.

Once they thought it was either do or to die, and so they chose to do. Now they discovered it was after all a game between the lucky and the luckless, and their own fates lie not in their hands, but the hands of people they hardly know. Hard work usually pay off, but sometimes are futile when slings and arrows of outrageous fortune are hard on their heels. People who would not care less about their destiny, people who would be indifferent to their own dreams, people who would not give a shit about how they lived their lives.

Studio Class with Dr Hecht

Yesterday's studio class at YST concert hall with Dr Hecht was simply awe-inspiring - and that by no means is an understatement. To see the fruit of labour - irregardless of how some appears sweeter than the others - of these pianists on stage, to hear such a spectable of sounds and divine music like honey-suckles to the ears, and to witness what in my opinion has proved himself to be the greatest teacher (that I have met) teach is beyond all measure and language, amazing.

So it started first with two four-hand pieces by Mozart, performed by Year One students, then there was six-year-old Rin which her unbelievably expressive sonatina (you've got to really hear it to believe it), Jonathan's colourful Symphonic Variations by Franck with Dr Hecht playing the orchestral reduction, Hui Ling's voluptously percussive Gershwin with Akkra's awesome support on the second piano, Schumman's Carnaval (the entire thing), Abigail's divinely immaculate Lizst and Akkra's solo as finale.

For the first time in my life, I teared so badly during a performance- just watching all of them belt out melodies after melodies, harmonies after harmonies that tugged my heartstrings so hard I could hardly feel them anymore at the end of everything. The more I thought of the hours of practices each one of them had to dedicate, the more I imagined the effort that goes into every note, the more I recalled what it really means to give in one's best, the more I teared. Abigail played her Lizst 27 times in public, Dr Hecht ran through with her the piece for over 300 times. This is what perfection - and I mean perfection in its most perfectly literal sense - takes. This perfection and precision that atheletes have sought, Formula One racers have sought, musicans have sought, all who strived for excellence have sought. We're not talking about being ordinary here; it's about being extraordinary, in Dr Hecht's words.

But by that it does not necessarily imply a comparison to external agents, the yardstick is in yourself - how much of your potential have you made use of, how much dedication you have given to your craft without always anticipating a proportionate return or reward. It's about being the best that you can be, and the knowledge that the best, is always yet to be. But we strive, and strive, and strive, and we never give up as long as you still believe in what you are doing, as long as the faith still goes strong within yourself. And it isn't always easy.

Being a musician is a demanding task, and being an excellent musician who can do more than just producing strings after strings of vibrations is no easy feat. This I have realized long ago, through my experience of trying to be a good musician, or at least to be someone worthy to be called that at all. (though of course realizing this hardly brings you any further if it does not translate to action) It is sheer peservearance, determination, focus, precision, on top of a passion for the instrument that one hopes to be proficient in. No doubt talent and some god-given gifts probably comes into play too, but that remains as a bonus, much like a cherry topped upon the acme of a cake; definitely not the cake itself. The baking of the cake itself requires a big heart that treats every vibration and sound with tender loving care, each motion with passion, each round of applause with humility. It is a heart of pure sincerity for the instrument that gives you a voice of your own, for the composer is expressing his own voice through you, for the audience who are lending you their ears.

Then I recall myself spending hours on the piano, repeating one bar or one phrase over and over again to inch closer to the ideal sound, and how sometimes the drive to perfect it dips after a while, only to be revived again when I am reminded that it is not impossible to achieve (often through listening to recordings or watching other pianists play). So often have I allowed skepticism to eat away this determination: why am I even doing this at all? Who's going to appreciate the effort you place into perfecting every sound? Perhaps no one can even hear your intent at the end of the day? These questions are by no means mine alone; I'm pretty sure all musicians do question themselves at one point or another. It was yesterday that I realized no audience can ever fully appreciate the effort of the musician; more often do we bring with us critical ears that judge the end products while being rather blind to what went behind the scenes. A wrong note spills ink over an otherwise perfect soundscape, and send us grimacing at... perhaps the inadequacy of the pianist's technique? A memory slip becomes an unforgiven mistake that can possibly undermine the whole performance, and sometims does so much psychological damage to a pianist the stage seems more like a battlefield sometimes where there is no place for inconsistency - at least in the world of professional pianism.

So at the end of the day, after all the applause has died down, the only person who can truly appreciate everything that went on on stage would be the pianist himself. He lives in the moment, in a gravity-defying zone, each microsecond planning, anticipating, pre-hearing, executing, visualizing... so much goes on behind what appears to some as mere finger jabbing. And how exquisite a performance can get! Everytime I hear a good performance I am more convinced of an external world of beauty and perfection out there, that relativism or constructivism is really a self-consolation for not being able to gain access to that world.

And all these apply not only to music, but to everything in life that we hope to excel in. This does not mean that we have to put ourselves in a pressure cooker forever and expect excellence in everything we do - sometimes this becomes so tiring it destroys all motivation to hold any expectations at all. But once you see a goal set, all you need is focus, direction, drive and a big big heart to embrace all the challenges that come your way.

Play every tune like it's the last tune you'll hear on earth, live every day like it's the last day you'll live on earth.

A reply to Matt

Just two days ago I was talking to my 10-years-old little cousin, chit chatting about school and the latest cartoons he’s watching. And we went on to talk about facebook (and I was actually surprised he knew what facebook is about at his age), and how another 6-year-old cousin of mine is on facebook too, and me being the big sister tried to warn him about being cautious in adding friends online, nagging to him about cyber wellness… then I asked him: why would the 6-year-old cousin of mine need internet at home? Why would he even need to use it? And he said, there’s e-learning! And to think I thought e-learning is a thing for older students past primary school. Evidently I’m wrong. Then I looked back at the days when I was a six-year-old kid. Nuts I knew about computers and internet; I probably didn’t realize what the word ‘internet’ meant. All I could recall was teacher teaching us to operate the ‘paint’ program (which no one really uses today) and myself drawing a lion on it. Or the class busting aliens on the screen with every arimathic problem solved. No e-learning (not every had a computer with broadband at home then), no facebooking, no twitter, no blogs…

It’s amazing how times have changed (and I risk sounding too ‘old’ saying this). Kids nowadays are exposed to computers and the internet when their milk bottles are still dangling from their mouths, before they could even read or write properly. I personally find this extremely dangerous given the complexity of the world wide web along with its hidden dangers that even parents may not be aware about. That aside, the world wide web is a very exciting place no doubt – extremely dynamic, vast, brimming with possibilities. Things on the screen catch our attention, and more easily so kids’ attention – what with all the online games like audition, maple story, diner dash… the eyes of our little ones remain glued to the fascinating moving pictures and fanciful sounds on the monitor. It’s increasingly hard to get them to sit down still to read a book, or to listen a story or two. They’d rather do that with their Gameboys or Playstations. Of course that doesn’t apply to everyone (or we really need to worry); just an observation I seem to get more and more frequently.

So in that sense our generation grows up in a world cluttered with an electrifying smorgasbord of information, pictures, sound, action. While information is only a click’s away, and while multi-media gives learning much more variety, they too impede our learning – in the sense that it dilutes our concentration and focus. I’ve experienced this first hand, as many others would probably have too – the world wide web has so much information all fighting for our attention it requires good discipline and judgement to sieve out information. Take the simple case of doing research on the topic ‘elephants’. Google it, and you get 11,300,000 search results. Yes we’ll only look through the first two pages, but chances are, we’ll open numerous tabs all at once in a bid to get a most comprehensive picture of ‘elephants’. And we go on to scanning through the same – or else similar - information repeatedly, cruising among tabs all at once. With a book, it would perhaps be easier to stay focused in the content one’s reading, freed from repetitions, distractions, and irrelevance. The drawback, of course, is that one has to find time to find the relevant books.

And for teenagers, it’s quite difficult to bypass the routine motion of ‘checking emails and facebook’ to get to the core of whatever assignment that needs to be done with the Internet. Time’s wasted, focus declined.
There’s a lot more information out there, at the same time a lot more distractions. Perhaps this will give an idea of how a teenager can spend his/her day:

6.00am: Rise and Shine (more often ‘Rise and Whine’)
7.00am – 3.00pm: At School
3.00pm - 4.00pm: Drags lethargic body back home

4.00pm – 10.00pm:

Switches on the computer
Checks Email
Gets tons of Facebook messages and updates
Reply facebook messages one by one
Finds an old friend’s facebook link, adds her, views her pictures, chats with her
MSN (usually with 5 convo boxes running at the same time)
Twitter about how much homework there is for the day and how crazy the teacher is to give such a tight deadline
Google on a topic for project work, sees a flashing online ad with news about the latest gossip about celeb XYZ
Clicks on the link and takes a few minutes to read about XYZ
Decides to google up on XYZ
Then blog about the astonishing news about XYZ

10.00pm – 2.00am
Realizes it’s already 10pm, unpacks bag, dig out piles of homework for the day and other
overdue assignments
Can’t stand the fatigue anymore, decides to ‘chiong’ in school next morning, or copy answers from friends

Again, I risk hasty generalization by doing this, and it’s not to say that this is how teenagers today spend their day every single day, but yes that’s how distracting the Internet can get. At the end of the day, after hours of furious typing on the computer and flooding our senses with new images, new information, there is hardly energy enough for us to sit down, free our minds from all distractions, and hold a book (I mean books – not textbooks) in hand to truly read in peace. And our books lay quietly waiting, collecting dust in the shelves.

Even I myself had (and sometimes still having) the difficulty to find time to read. That sounds like a typical excuse yes, for it’s always possible to make time for what you consider worth doing! But there are so many priorities at the back of your head beckoning you to see to them just so you can strike off yet another item from your agenda, activities like reading has taken a back seat. Which is why I have left so many books unread, and so many others unfinished.

And if you ask me whether I’d prefer books to reading on the net, I would – without any hesitance at all – tell you: books. Nothing beats holding tangible book in your hands, feeling the texture of the pages, fingering the corners, smelling the soft papery wafts from old and new books (they do smell very different), and hearing the flipping of the pages. You know you’re not holding a mere bind of papers in your hands - you’re holding the voice of somebody who has something to tell you.

And there are practical reasons for loving hard-copies (be they books or not) – it’s much easier to highlight information and do quick scans across the page when you don’t have to scroll up and down unlike reading on the computers, it’s less straining on the eyes, it’s much easier to annotate and doodle whatever comes to mind.

And that’s why I’m still insisting on the traditional way of taking lesson notes with pen and paper, writing all my essays, poems drafts on paper, pen cruising freely on sheets upon sheets. And letter-writing remains a once-in-a-while thing to do for my friends overseas. (I really do enjoy the notion of opening up envelops, unfolding the paper inside and folding it back again after reading; the best thing is that you can feel and touch the very same piece of paper the author felt and touched) It somewhat accentuates the human touch.

This in a way goes for listening to records I guess – being able to hold a record, open the cover and put the CD into the player AND most importantly living in that musical experience by listening through the whole record (rather than in drips and draps as in downloaded music), is simply incomparable to downloading digital music. I recall the days of phonographs, cassettes and VCRs quite fondly, now that I remember how I used to love the sound of cassettes clicking into the right place in the player…

I hope I don’t come across as this old grandmother reminiscing about ‘the past’ as if I have a very long past before me… they’re really just a short 16 years.

全球化时代的中国外交

昨天到国立大学听东亚研究所所长郑永年教授的讲座《全球化时代的中国外交》，终于听到了这位资深评论家的精彩讲述。一直以来都只能在报章言论版上期待着他的言论，昨日有幸在现场听这位大师授课，实在获益匪浅。

虽然课题主要围绕着中国外交，郑教授的着眼点实际上是中国的内部发展，毕竟一个国家的内、外部事态是相互牵扯的，也可谓唇亡齿寒。中国如今走的外交战略是开放式的地区主义（Open Regionalism)，与美国和欧洲的外交理论不一样。策略上是有自己的性格，但始终还没有完全形成自己的独特理论。每个国家在与他国交往的过程中都会走出一套属于自己的理念；中国的外交理念未形成不是大问题，关键在于它不能全盘照搬美国理念。国际关系美国化会对中国造成致命的伤害，因为外就关系本续和国家本身的地域政治形成，服务国家利益。将外交理念美国化会使愚不可及之举措。但幸好这目前为止没有发生过，中共是坚持了开放式地区主义的外交方针——但问题也随之而来。

关注视线的狭窄

中国开放，意味着外部因素容易影响中国的内部事态，对内部结构造成威胁。最近的新疆乱象、西藏问题都反映了这一事实：美国一直以来都借着民族问题在背后玩的政治游戏，为中国外交设下不少棘手的圈套，使原本单纯的内部民族问题国际化，益炽了一边倒的国际政治批评。

所以难怪中国在新疆、西藏问题上注入了过剩外交精力，形成了外路导向为主的外交政策，而且真正关注的外交问题太狭窄，忽略了其他同样值得关注问题。

应走以内陆为导向的外交政策

现阶段的中国内部社会结构是极为不稳定的，中共仍对于绵亘不断的内部问题应对不暇。无论是内政的腐败问题、官民对立、社会保障福利网的不健全、贫富差距，都无时无刻对中国的内部社会结构造成不可忽视的威胁。中国自身有贫民民不聊生，却对非洲的资源无限慷慨。无可厚非，中国作为一个崛起中的大国必须担当起国际责任，以自己的丰厚财力助发展落后的非洲发展经济，体现出负责大国的形象。但中国是否过早地承诺国际领导？中国本身的内部社会结构如此脆弱，风行草偃。在这种情况下对外过于友善，对自家问题的重视程度贤得不对称，难免会激怒国内人民，结果只有其合法、权威性受到侵蚀。

一个大国若只有在经济上的成就，缺乏有效解决内部问题的能力，难以称之为‘大国’。以这个标准为基础，现今的中国似乎还没有达到‘大国’的阶段。事实上，中国经济上仍然是依附于人，自身内需不足，须靠外国市场，其中最大的外国市场便是美国。可见，中国还没有做好担负国际领导权的准备，实际上离这个目标还是挺远的。过早承诺，或过分承诺（over-commitment)只会导致中国队内外事务的处理不周；外不成，内不就，两头不讨好。

因此，中国应该先发展好、巩固好内部社会结构，才能确保可持续发展，在国际舞台才能以真正‘大国’的身份参与国际政治。

经济需为外交服务

自改革开放，中国在吸引外资这方面做得相当成功，是因为外交为经济服务。这虽然带有强大的经济效益，但经济优势没有被转化为战略优势，两者处于脱离状态，对中国外交而言是严重的致命伤。因为中共把经济发展视为终点，其外交战略重点一直是经济。为了经济，要在外交上确保区域稳定、要吸引外资、要致力和她国签署经济特区协议．．．对周边邻国的活动一概不太理会，更不愿牵涉到无必要的政治麻烦。因此对于被朝鲜的核武运动，中共似乎持有姑息的态度，朝鲜一天不犯中国，中国就不加理会；一切以经济为中心。今天朝鲜对中国不加以理会，也是因为中国本身对朝鲜的影响力、制约能力并不足以让朝鲜担心或在意，反而是美国在此问题上政治影响力较突出。北朝鲜问题其实为中国提供了很多施展国际影响力的机遇，但中国始终没有把握好；美国和朝鲜仍是核武戏剧的主角。

不仅是朝鲜问题，缅甸问题也是如此——这也许可视为中共外交的上的失败，也是外交为经济服务的必要结果。中国现阶段需要做的是‘外交为经济服务’到‘经济为外交服务’的转型。但一个大国的外交总是错综复杂的，说起转型谈何容易。但这并不是不可能的，如何在开放状态下把经济优势转为战略优势是中共亟需深入探讨的问题。

外交重心不在亚洲

中国实行开放是地区主义，首先就应该对亚洲开放，毕竟东亚是近邻，也是正在崛起的一个重要经济中心。亚洲对中国的战略意义重大，中国若忽视东亚将使自身的一大损失。不仅是亚洲，中东、俄罗斯等地区都是值得中国外交的密切联系，但中国的外交视线狭窄的问题再次显现出来，目前的外交精力仍是集中在几个表面上显眼的问题上，自然忽视了很多其他外交潜能。

问与答

问答时间时观众（大部分是中国学生）都积极提问，提问时间显然不足以满足观众的好奇。郑教授在讲座结束后于我们进行觉亲切的交流。问题超出课题范围，涉及到民族问题、民族意识、民主建设，但他都一一耐心解答，给予很全面地给予答复。

讲座之前，就在报章上阅读到教授的《中国模式能够被围堵吗？》，当时就有一些疑问：所谓的中国模式具体上是一个怎样的模式？中国模式与西方模式是相对立的吗？郑教授解释道，中国模式事实上就是开放式模式，它的开放性性质很难和任何其他的模式产生正面冲突、对立关系。西方世界哪怕想方设法要围堵中国，也不会成功。从前的苏联模式容易被围堵，是因为它是关闭式的一种模式，处于封锁状态。他国对其模式稼上自己的理解和假设的过程中容易创造对苏联局迫害性的解读，所以苏联模式最终被列强围堵。但今日的中国不同了，走的是开放型道路，无人能阻挡。

又有人问，这代中国领导人是否有足够魄力和实力来实行政治体制改革？这也是我一直想问的问题，毕竟很多人都在关注这一事情。郑教授的答复有些出乎意料；他说，中国在实行政治体制改革之前，应先搞好社会体制改革，不能操之过急，否则适得其反。因为国家的社会内部结构并不稳定，再此时搞政治体制改革只会威胁中共的领导权威，治丝益棼。果然，中国眼下的内部问题——包括教务、医疗、养老等社会保障尚未办好，社会结构脆弱。一个彻底的政改很可能威胁整个现有的社会结构。中国的社会改革要成功，起码要等多二、三十年；看来政改只能处于ＫＩＶ状态了。

艺术、文化的新生代与新声带

最近写了一篇文章给《联合早报》的言论版，果真在九月八日的报纸上登出来了。 因为版面上的限制，编辑修改了原文许多，以下是最初的原稿！

艺术、文化的新生代与新声带

陈智羚

邹璐在言论版的“艺术人才引进和本土文化建设”具体地反映了一个是在深刻、同时让人担忧的事实：本地的古典经典音乐观众群正在消失，逐渐让位给流行文化中被商业化的流行音乐。三十、五十年以后，新加坡也许会面临一个‘艺术真空’的未来，完全抛弃具有庞大艺术价值的经典音乐——不仅是华乐，连西方古典音乐也可能难逃被流行音乐完全取而代之的命运。

这并不是夸大其词。走进任何一场古典经典音乐演奏会，就不难发现观众席中的年轻人、学生寥寥无几，成年人和外国人居多。尽管学生享有不少票价优惠（如新加坡赛马博彩局的艺术津贴学生集体购票，可通过学校利用新加坡赛马博彩局的艺术津贴，以补贴票价总值的60%），年轻人的耳朵难以离开似乎较‘酷’的流行音乐。就是古典音乐会，也得加入一些‘流行’曲调才行——记得不久前听过一场古筝演奏会，观众只有听到周杰伦的《菊花台》才兴奋起来。

确实，现在任和对文化典雅、博大与源远流长的描述已沦为装饰且不切实际，一个cool字便能吸引眼球。年轻人与它产生距离感，也许纯属自然。但是，我们这一代年轻人是否尝试着深化我们的文化积淀？还是已让流行文化彻底代表自己得文化灵魂了呢？我们是否把流行文化的商业化成功误认为具艺术价值的艺术承载体？

若果真如此，这现象意味的是思维的简化、艺术文化的排斥、精神资源的匮乏。‘新加坡沉闷感’即将降临。

就如邹璐在文中所说的，流行文化中的流行音乐是消费文化：不用费心，即用即丢，“好比可乐与汉堡”。它们也许在某种程度上代表着新时代人的主流品味，但对于人类文化、艺术的升华和进展少有贡献。全球化带动的商业繁荣造就了消费文化的成功，在令郎满目的主流文化中，人有更多选择的余地，包括选择抛弃传统艺术文化。

不能抵赖，一个国家的主要文化底色虽然是由商业繁荣塑造的，在吵杂商业文化中穿梭的艺术家是装饰，容易被人忽视。但他们是一种现实，也是一种反思。他们他们是象征着理性，承载着人类的文化遗产，背负着将之赋予新的生命力，以让它在历史的长河中永存。

我们这一代年轻人是否能确保经典艺术不被现代化的尘埃所掩盖？

作为一名学生和古典音乐爱好者，除了从小学弹钢琴，也在校内积极参加和艺术、音乐相关的课程辅助活动（CCA)。如今对西方古典音乐的情有独钟，也是多谢有学校的栽培、政府对鼓励艺术的不遗余力。新加坡如今仍存在能欣赏古典音乐或其它‘非流行’艺术的年轻观众群，其实在很大程度上得归功于课程辅助活动。新加坡大部分中学、理工学院、初级学院和其他高等学府都设有自己的艺术团体，包括华乐队、弦乐队、合唱团等学生组合。这些活动为学生提供一个很好的学习平台，在专业老师指导下学习弹奏乐器。

由此可见，这些校内艺术团体培养了一种艺术风气，更为新加坡艺术带来了忠实的观众群。而新加坡新一代的正在萌芽中的年轻音乐家，其实最初都是从课程辅助活动开始培养兴趣的。

可惜的的是，学校往往过于在乎学生在比赛赢取的成绩。艺术团体成为学校奖牌的收割机。该是时候让学校置开成绩不谈，诚心诚意地为学生提供一个有助于艺术熏陶的学习环境了。从学校课程辅助活动着手进行一个迷你‘文化复兴’也许可以为艺术培育出古典音乐、华乐等艺术的新生代和新声带。

3 Sept 2009

On the Evolution and Progress of Music

This article is the result of recent reflections on how music has evolved over the years in a way that historians can now demarcate various 'periods' according to the style that characterizes music in the particular era. Am nowhere near a musicologist, and certain premises or conclusions could have been ill-founded, but they represent my personal opinions nevertheless. Comments most welcomed.

ON THE EVOLUTION AND PROGRESS OF MUSIC

On the historical timeline of the past millennium, classical music’s progress has come far. It is hard to track the first origins that showed any discernable hints or characteristics of classical music as we know it today, but one could probably start with the Gregorian chants in medieval music, for the simple fact that it resulted in a most significant invention – a notation system ancestral to modern musical notation. That was one great leap that laid the foundation for musicians to come.

Then we had the Renaissance, which in 200 years gave way to Baroque era with its revolutionary group of intellectuals (the Camerata). And we zipped down the line through baroque, classical and romantic periods, and before long we were past the 20th century – and into the 21st century. The new modern age is one in which classical music no longer takes centre-stage, for we now share it with popular music that have the power to make people rock their heads till they can’t feel it on the necks anymore. Just look at Michael Jackson’s THIS IS IT concert – to be frank I was more interested in watching fanatical fans worshipping and screaming away, bordering on irrational hysteria. It was something I simply couldn’t comprehend, and all I could do was to raise an eyebrow in disbelief when I saw tears gushing out of their galled eyes as if someone dear just died in front of their eyes.

Classical music had its halcyon days. Ladies in corsets swooned over Franz Lizst’s virtuosity and charm (of both music and man), common people would jostle cheek by jowl to the stage for a glimpse of their favourite pianist on stage, and shower them with roses and kisses. Much like the fan-idol worship we have with pop music nowadays – funny how today’s ‘classical’ (with some faint fuddy-duddy connotation) could actually be yesterday’s ‘pop’.

A matter of representation

Back to the historical timeline. We are now in the age of what’s termed ‘contemporary music’ – contemporary because it is naturally contemporary for we who live in it at this minute, which means music historians many years down the road would un-term it to another name which only God knows for now. But I wonder, what character does today’s classical music take? Sure, there have been new movements that brought for us modernism, new complexity, polystylism (which encapsulates historicism, neo-romanticism, new simplicity and many more), and other avant-garde music. But does it in reality represent the spirit of the time (the zeitgeist, to put it more aptly) we are living in today? As it is I see music students today playing Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Ravel more than any contemporary music of our time. Perhaps I am limited by locality, by exposure and experience – but it is true that many find contemporary simply incomprehensible. The very characteristics of today’s contemporary music – dissonant pitch language, atonal, serialism, minimalism – are not pleasant to the ears, not even to most trained ears. Performing musicians struggle to maintain enthusiasm in such formless forms of music, and audience struggle to find meaning in soundscapes so abstract and nebulous. Without doing an in-depth survey and record of all programs of concerts happening worldwide, I can quite safely conclude that the general tastes of today’s classical music audience still lies in ‘music of the past’ by our very dear masters from the Baroque to the 20th century.

How does ‘contemporary music’ then represent the contemporary, when it does not win the favour of popular audience? We keep going back to the past; our favourite tunes and most heart-wrenching harmonies still come from the past. Without even diverging to the fact that pop music now seem to be more representative of popular masses’ tastes, and only confining the scope of this discussion to classical music, the fact of the matter is that dubbing these load of dissonance, eclecticism and polystylism totems of today’s classical music is highly questionable. Musicians during the days of Mozart played music of Mozart along side with music of Bach and past contemporaries, much like how we can be listening to both the Beatles and Kelly Clarkson/Avril Lavringe simultaneously today. People then looked forward to new compositions much like how youngsters today anticipate the new Simple Plan album. Mozart’s music (not discounting his counterparts of the same era in mentioning only his name) was representative of the classical era because it was a ‘fad’ then, because people’s tastes consciously or unconsciously tended towards court culture and absolutism, with its formality and emphasis on order and hierarchy. The style that emphasizes simplicity rather than complexity, of clear divisions between parts, donned with bright contrasts and colours (what we call the classical style) sprung naturally from that particular period. The culture that people live in at the point in time dictates the style of the music that comes to represent its zeitgeist.

Theory of Evolution

Which leads me to the question about how these unique ‘styles’ that have tremendous powers of cultural representation come about. Evidently, the drivers behind the progress of music are composers; they are the forces behind every new musical innovation. Yet the truth of the matter is, composers do not compose with the knowledge that their music belong to a certain ‘period’ in the history of music. The adaptation of any musical forms, or the popular use of certain musical ideas should be seen as a decision credited to the tastes of their contemporaries then. After all, composers (especially those before the romantic era) were often paid by patrons to compose back in those days – their music naturally had to appeal to their patrons’ tastes, sometimes at the expense of sacrificing their own preferences. There once existed (there still do, but as big) a market demand for compositions dictated by popular preferences, and composers were the ones who work to supply this demand. It is no surprise that they were perceived as craftsman whose statuses were no higher than a sculptor’s.

I am concerned, though, with the transition between eras with different musical styles. One must be careful to note that it is not musical periods that transit, but it is the style characteristic of the period that has the fluidity to evolve – musical periods are but tape-markings historians draw on the chronological timeline. How exactly did music progress and evolve? Do new musical styles spring up spontaneously? What gives the impetus for one generation of people to give up one set of cultural memes for another? Surely people living by the turn of the classical period didn’t just wake up one morning thinking, “Oh Haydn’s such an old fuddy-duddy. It’s time for wackier harmonies and hippier tunes!” The descent of the romantic style, I’m afraid, doesn’t happen that casually.

Darwin’s theories of evolution (incongruous as it may be, to be used in music) could provide some very useful analogies to this, in my opinion. There are in essence two ways in which species evolve, scientists posit – by gradual evolution (in which species evolve slowly and gradually over geological eras, over generations of countless inheritances), or by punctured equilibrium (here evolution takes a short cut, with species taking sudden leaps into another stage). The transition from the Gregorian chant could well be likened to gradual evolution, having lasted a good thousand years from the fall of the Roman Empire to the gradual shift into what we call the Renaissance period today. The transition from classical to romantic period, as we have seen, did not take its own sweet time. Beethoven (a character very much out of this world, really) came into the scene almost destined to trigger a revolution. Not only was he revolutionary in the musical sense, he completely redefined what it meant to be a musician, a composer, replacing craftsmanship with artistry. Imagine the surprise (and shock, no doubt) running through both musicians and audience alike when the Eroica Symphony was first premiered. Who’d have known then that this work would later be seen as marking the end of the classical era and the beginning of musical Romanticism? In this respect Beethoven could be considered the trigger of a punctured equilibrium in the evolution of music.

Where contemporary music stands now

We have with us now ‘contemporary music’ (remember I’m talking in the context of classical music, not music in general now) – which is hardly played or appreciated by classical musicians and audience alike today. It hence seems dubious that it should have the representational power to call itself ‘music of this era’. According to my observation (which is of course in no way speaking for anyone else), classical musicians – be they composers or performers – today seem to have begun a regression, a declension in terms of innovation. It is increasingly difficult for 21st century composers (of classical music) to create any deep impressions or convince people of the value their music presents. There are composers who return to romanticism or classicism (and we call that neo-romanticism/neo-classicism), and their music seems better received than styles that venture into uncharted and untested waters (like minimalism, for instance – I personally don’t see much value in a single chord being repeated endlessly for measures or minutes at length, though anyone is most welcomed to criticize my personal inability or incapacity to appreciate it).

So where does that lead us?

If present composers lean back on the rich bedrock of past musical styles, they can hardly be said to have made significant contributions to the progress of music. There is an enhancement or reinforcement of a past style of music, but hardly real contribution in terms of innovation – in my humble opinion, in the least. Perhaps composers are in the midst of searching, of testing unfamiliar waters, and all we should be doing is quietly wait. Perhaps we would experience a long period of stagnancy as in the medieval period. Perhaps another Beethoven would descend to trigger a radical change in musical tastes of the classical world today, or successfully develop a style of music that can both represent the 21st century culture AND appeal to popular musical tastes, such that people actually start playing music by modern composers, and go “Ooo this is new, and I love the sound of it!”, or even participate in the construction of this new style, a kind music that we classical musicians of the 21st century can call our very own.

无可奈何

今天在班上看了一部关于农民工子弟的纪录片，突然令我重新看待身边的很多东西。农民工之所以成为农民工，就是因为他们如三文治中的火腿夹在中间——不完全是农民，亦不完全是城市里的工人。他们的身份是有一个制度所决定的，这个户籍制度将他们捆绑于农村，想走出去的农民只能无可奈何地抱住‘农村户籍’在城里生活着。他们身处城市，辛勤地劳动着，城市人嫌脏、溅的工作他们都一一扛上了，为的就是寻求更好的未来。但换来的却是歧视、有色眼光，城市里的生活最终比农村里的生活好不到哪里。

他们的子女伴随他们到城里去，却没能享受到城市人享有的义务教育，就因为他们的户籍上写着不同的称号。就在繁荣北京市里，仍存在简陋得不可理喻的学校——没有完善的操场、更免谈实验室、电脑室等设施。课室中的桌椅高低参差不平、破旧得连修理都经不起。学校经费严重不足、师资偏低、学生家境贫穷更使家长频频拖欠学费。学校没有食堂，午膳时间时学生们排队领一个馒头、一个火腿肠、一杯白水。没了。全部算起每餐不到三元人民币。

看了叫人心酸。那不是一种单纯的怜悯之情，不是一种可怜与同情。只是在看着那些闪烁着无比求知欲的眼睛，与他们的环境及遭遇格格不入的那一幕让人为他们感到不公。再瞧瞧班里上课时竟有同学因为环境太舒适而呼呼大睡，一点都不珍惜学习的机会。难道真是要深切地或在他们的世界之后，才学会珍惜？
同人不同命，同命不同价。无可奈何。

If you'd be so kind.

SHAGGED. That's how I'm feeling at this very point in time. My butt's aching from sitting in front of the computer for close to 6 hours, writing foreword for the concert this saturday, formatting program booklet, calling up people from an endless list... And I imagine it expanding in circumference with the passing of every hour. Next in line will probably be stress pimples and teary eyes. But I'm still surviving. I always do.

Anyway, this is for all readers who happen to pass by my blog between today and coming Saturday. Do come support this Saturday's charity concert "Gifts from the Heart", the final concert I'm organizing this year for SPMF!

GIFTS FROM THE HEART
22 AUG 2009. 7.30PM. THE REPUBLIC CULTURAL CENTRE.

I'll be performing too, if that's of interest to you. But frankly, the program for the night won't fall short of being a scrumptious feast for your senses.

The pretty poster here should tell you that.



Do come, if the time proves convenient for you that night, and if you'd be so kind to support the cause, to support all who have put in much time and effort for this. It'll make me really really happy if I see you tag on the tagbox on your left to tell me you're actually coming.

Lullaby

Sleep, baby sleep,
Let not the wind wake your sleep.
Drift away, to the land of dreams
Where stars will shine like crystal phials,
Then go and catch the falling star
And run, and run to somewhere far
Where time’s chariot may never reach,
And lay to spring a winter’s siege.

Yet dawn and dusk shall pass the same
And morning mists will lift again.
Good morrow, says the glorious sun,
To wake all slumbers deep but young.
Eclipse its rays you may with lids,
But warmth perchance is hard to rid.

Sleep, baby sleep,
For the solace of night is here
And songs of stars alone you’ll hear.

Elation

I sit beside the boy. His uniform is starched white, nipped and tucked – his maid must have made sure it is always crease-free by ironing and re-ironing it every time the slightest movement creates wrinkles on it.

“Boy take out your spelling book,” said his mother, seated in the front seat. She is a middle aged lady, looking younger than women her age and certainly educated, with a bachelor in Biology and life sciences. She is no scientist, however. She is into education, apparently – in the Ministry of Education’s InfoComm department – that’s where they churn out lousy education programs to ‘enhance IT education’ – and is an educationalist.

The boy turns to his bag, unzips it, and with some difficulty drags out a torn and tattered jotter book.

“Ready?”

“Yes mum,” said he, flipping to the last empty page.

“Exhilarated”

“Yelping with joy”

“Running in elation”

“Delightful song”

They all mean the same thing. But it is at this age that children start learning synonyms. They are told not to use ‘happy’ in their compositions anymore, because all their classmates are using it and that makes it a bad word. Use happy, and you end up sad when you see your marks in the ‘vocabulary’ component, the adults said. Yet he never remembered words he learnt from those assessment books he slogged through.

He goes scribbling away, scratching his head as he recalls his memory of words that often confuse him. He fidgets, taps his fingers on the Pilot pen he is holding, looks out at the setting moon through the car window. It was an endless stretch of violet shades, blending in with the first light of daybreak. His mind identifies it as ‘pink’, and wonders if he ought to be using another word for ‘pink’. But he hasn’t got any, so he skips that thought and looks back at his jotter book.

Running in elaton elasion

At this point his mother turns back and abruptly snatches the book away from the boy, and on realizing what she always call ‘stupid mistake’, throws the book back at him and commences her ranting. “How many time do I have to repeat to you that ‘elation’ is spelt with ‘t’ and not ‘s’? Now what are you looking at outside? Look at me. Remember it is elat… - Ashley! – can you pay attention? Did you eat your medicine this morning?”

The poor boy has attention deficit. Or so his mother thinks.

He turns back and stares at her with vacant eyes, and proceeds to erase off his mistake. If only he had gotten that right, there would be a just a moment longer of tranquility in the car.

“Mum, can we travel to space with this car? To those pink clouds?” he asks, eyes transfixed at the morning sky.

His mum takes a quick glance at the sky, which she has seen for her past thirty years of life. Nothing exceptional, perhaps that’s what she thinks. She keeps quiet, worrying about her son’s spelling test.

“How do you spell ‘elation’ again?”

He keeps quiet, staring out of the car window and beyond.

“Ashley Kum are you listening to me!” bellowed the irritable young mother.

“E-L-A-T-I-O-N”

“Good. Spell it again.”

“Mum, can we travel to space with this car? To those pink clouds?”

“There’re no pink clouds in space, only complete darkness. Aren’t you afraid of the dark? You can’t fly to space. Now stop dreaming and spell ‘elation’”.

His eyes refuse to tear away from the beautiful expense of violet, orange and purple hues. He looks as if his mind can never leave the image of space with pink clouds. As if that’s the place he can find true elation.

Some words simply don’t fit into a moment in time. Elation is one, this morning.

Why is marijuana illegal?

That was the immediate question after reading Shawn’s article, which suggests that the two popular justifications – that it has negative health impacts and acts as ‘gateway’ to harder, more harmful drugs – are outright lies. I decided to google it up, and to my astonishment marijuana is indeed one drug that was banned without proper medical justifications. Sure, there were several medical complications associated with it, but the links remain tenuous. Here comes the question: why would the government make something illegal if this particular something brings little/no harm to society?

The banning of any items in society is a costly affair. Making something illegal isn’t just saying that it is illegal; It involves legislation, long bureaucratic processes and piles of paperwork, but that’s not the tricky part of it. The most costly part of any ban lies in its enforcement – which involves policing, campaigns to inform and educate the public, and on tap of all these, judicial costs to put on trial people who went against the ban. Billions of dollars have been spent on enforcing the ban of marijuana, and this begs the question of whether this is money well spent at all when it could have been directed to the provision of other public goods. And it’s not only a matter of money. How exactly does a government decide whether something ought to be banned or not? Will I wake up one day to find that the government has issued a ban on all chocolate consumption, and that anyone found possessing chocolate bars will be fined or prosecuted? (though I’m sure any such governments would be overthrown in no time with chocolate lovers aged 1 to 99 marching down the streets in protest)

The usual protocol for considering bans would first involve the examination of the negative externality that the good involved would bring, followed by the weighing of the cost of the ban against the possible benefits arising from it. But this clearly wasn’t the case when the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 was passed. It’s got to do with this guy named Harry J. Anslinger.
Anslinger was an extremely ambitious man, and he recognized the Bureau of Narcotics as an amazing career opportunity -- a new government agency with the opportunity to define both the problem and the solution. He immediately realized that opiates and cocaine wouldn't be enough to help build his agency, so he latched on to marijuana and started to work on making it illegal at the federal level.
Anslinger immediately drew upon the themes of racism and violence to draw national attention to the problem he wanted to create. He also promoted and frequently read from "Gore Files" -- wild reefer-madness-style exploitation tales of ax murderers on marijuana and sex and... Negroes. Here are some quotes that have been widely attributed to Anslinger and his Gore Files:
"There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz, and swing, result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and any others."

"...the primary reason to outlaw marijuana is its effect on the degenerate races."

"Marijuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality, and death."

"Reefer makes darkies think they're as good as white men."

"Marihuana leads to pacifism and communist brainwashing"

"You smoke a joint and you're likely to kill your brother."

"Marijuana is the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind."


And he loved to pull out his own version of the "assassin" definition:
"In the year 1090, there was founded in Persia the religious and military order of the Assassins, whose history is one of cruelty, barbarity, and murder, and for good reason: the members were confirmed users of hashish, or marihuana, and it is from the Arabs' 'hashashin' that we have the English word 'assassin.'"

The whole history of banning marijuana is an interesting case study of an unnecessary ban founded on unjustifiable justifications. Watch this video for a better idea:


It’s baffling. There are things that the government ought to ban, yet why has it spent unnecessary money on things that need not be banned? The negative health effects of cigarettes and tobacco are clear, yet no government on earth has laid any bans on it. And it isn’t difficult to see why. It isn’t the issue of individual rights and tastes, and it isn’t the matter of infeasibility. It’s simple economics –Tax revenues from tobacco amount come in billions – no government with any number sense would ban cigarettes and tobacco.

窃听

人性是一个好复杂的东西。
一层一层地将它拨开，才发现它不象洋葱般简单
善于恶好多时候原来是同一样的东西，
分不清也看不懂

谎言是世界上最沉重的包袱。
说出第一个谎言，便难免经意或不经意地说出第三个、第四。。。
陷入一个无底洞
直到坦率和勇气把我们从深渊揪出来
纸，永远包不住火
每一个谎言终究会有被彻底烧毁的一天
也许不是现在，也许在你有生之年都不会发生
但你的潜意识藏有一个精准无比的算盘，
你的内心深处心知肚明，
哪怕你那清醒的头脑选择完全删除此记忆。
但谎言的诱惑
有时实在难以抵挡。
但这永远解决不了问题，
只不过是将问题延期处置罢了。
这是一种自欺欺人的行为。

突然想，
如果有一种窃听器
能窃听一个人的内心世界
其杂音也许会覆盖一切。

Selling our souls to the devils

--- post inspired by today's econs lesson :) ---

BIG IS BEAUTIFUL. And it isn’t too difficult to realize this law actually governs both nature and economies. In nature, it’s about the survival of the fittest; the stronger preys upon the weaker, grows stronger and bigger and more formidable. Profit maximizing firms take over, form amalgamation, conglomerates to get BIGGER. To put it more plainly, it’s an amoebic phagocytosis; integration is the euphemism of such acts.

And we see it everywhere, don’t we? The MacDonald’s with its big golden M that shines through the night 24/7 and wins over hearts of all children by stuffing both food and toys into their mouth (aren’t kids’ meals the best form of bribery – MacDonald’s certainly know the key to education: start young). And just few days back, we have Yahoo! and Microsoft signing a 10year deal to join force in challenging Google’s dominance in the lucrative internet search and advertising markets (the showdown between bing.com and google.com remains to relatively unexciting up till now, however). Firms conglomerate and join forces to eliminate competition and rivals, extending their spheres of influence by expanding their locality. This is what Globalization is about, in the modern age. It’s the age of Multi-National Corporations; it’s about getting from big to bigger, from local to international.

Their tentacles (if it sounds insidiously dangerous it isn’t intended) have found their way across the globe, taking roots and growing shoots. But no where on earth have become so welcoming and hospitable to these MNCs, than in Singapore. Foreign firms are found in almost all sectors of our economy, with MNCs accounting for more than two-thirds of manufacturing output and direct export sales, and almost 80% of our whole economy. In her nation-building years, it was decided (by Lee Kuan Yew and Goh Keng Swee, among other founding fathers) that attracting MNCs is the way to developing our economy Singapore could not be self-sufficient; she was destined to be reliant and dependant on the bigger players in the international arena. So she put on her glossy lipsticks, mascara and blushes, all dolled up to lure. And we have to say that she had been remarkably successful in attracting the right bees, since then. And she sells her soul to the devils.

But we have the devils to thank, really. How else could we have progressed to become one of the most modernized, most livable, most ideal city in the world? Where could we have led our economy towards, if not to the devils who come and go like spring and winter? It is the general tendency of MNCs to pack up their bags and go elsewhere once the incentives to stay on have run their course. It’s all about profit maximization. To hold them we have to constantly maintain our relevance, our attractiveness. (why this sounds so much like desperate housewives I do not know).

Beyond that, Singapore has to piggyback on MNCs rather than being mere manufacturers that take instructions from them. SMEs must start to innovate and seek active collaborations, increasing knowledge sharing and thus developing a competitive edge. For one, MNCs provide the financial capital to fuel more aggressive expansion plans. For two, SMEs can tap experience of larger companies in terms of R&D and dealing with markets. This is happening for some local firms: S*Bio is one Singapore-based firm that has benefited from its relationship with a larger multi-national partner - Onyx Pharmaceuticals.

But it’s not happening enough, yet. We need to wrestle them, not head-on, but by shaking hands. Lest we lose more of our souls to the devils.

President’s Young Performers Concert 2009

President’s Young Performers Concert 2009
16 July 2009, 7.30pm @ Esplanade Concert Hall

Singapore Symphony Orchestra

DARRELL ANG, Conductor
MERYVYN LEE CHENG HUI, Piano
ANISA KUREISHI, soprano

When we talk about what children of ten to eleven years old would be doing at their age, playing a solo piano concerto with a full orchestra would almost certainly be off the list. A rarity it hence is, for eleven-year-old Mervyn Lee Cheng Hui who made his concerto debut with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra last Thursday. After all, stepping onto the Esplanade stage is a dream for all performers and artistes. Not to mention a solo appearance with the nation’s most important people seated amongst the audience.

It was to be a concert sprinkled with whimsical childhood innocence, dreams and fairytales, as SSO brought the audience back to their childhood days with Ravel’s Ma Mere I’Oye Suite (Mother Goose Tales). There was a pristine clarity in SSO’s rendition that night, creating a magical bubble of imagination that enveloped the hall; a bubble of innocent fantasies that was to remain undisturbed throughout. Darrell Ang’s conducting was confident and humble, spared from any superfluous motions and hyperbole. The result was a tender evocation of the inner child that resides within everyone present that night.

As the piano came on stage, one could only imagine young Mervyn backstage, witnessing the setup with accruing anxiety at the knowledge that he was to be in the limelight in a matter of seconds. ‘Nervousness’ would perhaps be an understatement to describe the psyche of a performer making such an epic debut. Yet it was with a weighted, grounded gait – unusual for a child that young – that Mervyn walked on stage, steady and somberly calm.

His Haydn Piano Concerto in D major was played with the panache of a seasoned performer, though of course were many intricacies in the music that needed more time for maturity to be married with skills and talents. The self-composed cadenza showed interesting harmonic shifts that renders it very witty indeed. Along with his encore piece - Telemman’s Prelude in G minor - it was on the whole a performance that exhibited an amazing level of composure and understanding in the subtle shades and nuances in music – a gift of extreme rarity for such a young performer.

This gift was to be shared by fourteen-year-old Anisa Kureishi, who sang a song of a child’s view of heaven in Mahler’s Fourth Symphony in G major with a voice of caramel sweetness. While the singing was expressive, it was a challenge to match the orchestra in sound projection. A very promising soprano Anisa is, nevertheless. The symphony was a long one that filled with numerous undulating passages, waves and spirals, ending finally with the long-anticipated return of the mirthful, child-like sleigh bells from the first movement.

The magical bubble enveloping one and all remains, despite the turbulent middle sections of the symphony that threatens to rupture it. Innocence was to triumph Experience in the very end, and the audience left enchanted by the story of princesses, beauty and the beast, gamelan, oriental pagodas, fairy gardens and the like. How young one can feel from flying these kites of imagination! All left the hall with a piece of their lost childhood recovered, walking into the night, which too was young.


Chan Chi Ling
20 July 2009

Kwayteowman's questions :)

This post is to answer kwayteowman's questions, which were pretty thought-provoking. So here goes:

On the point " if Singapore has adequate ‘hard power’ already, why not try injecting small doses of ‘soft power’, just to add a little colour that will make our political climate more ‘palatable’?":

1) What the heck for?

Haven't there always been concerns about Singaporeans being generally acquiescent and apathetic about politics? That it's increasingly more difficult to attract talents into the civil service? That the government has to use high salaries (and often hefty scholarships) as baits to hook up leaders of the top echelons in our country, to encourage them to take up a role in our political scene? I spoke to Dr Lee Wee Kiang (MP for Sembawang GRC) some time ago at a Kopi with MP session, and we were discussing about salaries of civil service leaders. He expressed a sentiment that would probably coincide with many working professionals in various industries today: The monetary gratification from working in the civil service sector is much less than that of working in huge privatized corporations. With his qualifications, he would have earned much more as a full-time medical expert, than as a full-time MP. When graduates return to Singapore in search of a dream career, a simple cost-benefit calculus tells them politics probably won't give them as full a rice bowl as they would have gotten elsewhere. Which explains why the government is stepping up to make salaries of civil service workers more competitive.

But this aroused discontented voices among Singaporeans who chose the myopic view that our government leaders are simply getting too much out of our taxes. Why do we need to use hefty monetary rewards to attract people into the civil service? Shouldn't our governing leaders be toiling on the basis of strong nationalistic sentiments instead? These questions have long been placed on the roundtable.

Tenuous a link it may be, this has to do with the political climate in Singapore.

Imagine a more colourful political climate in Singapore, where citizens actively stick their noses into the political scene, debating freely about how things should look like in Singapore; where they are actively engaged (because the gov recognizes the need to exert its soft power) when it comes to policy-making instead of the passive statistical surveys (which I myself seldom am a subject, and can't help but wonder where the gov gets their statistics from). That would most definitely empower more to voice up in a bid to refine policies, and encourage our countries' top brains and brawns to step into politics, for good.


2) What in your view is the role of the Government?

Woah that's a huge question that probably needs a thousand word thesis to address. But in a nutshell, I think that the government is the body empowered by the trust of the citizens (in the form of votes in a democratic system) to organize, delegate, plan and lead. More importantly, it has to represent the will of the citizens it is governing, and this extends to policy-making. While not every stipulated policy that passed the bill is popular, it does no good to the government if many of its policies are implemented in a coercive manner with little support from the citizens’ part. Which is why I believe in the Singapore government exercising soft power – not merely to make our political culture more palatable, but also to allow its policies to be moulded with preferences of the citizens kept in consideration, to win for itself more support and approval.

3) Why do we need a Singaporean Barack Obama? What needs fixing in Singapore? In comparison, do you know how broken and screwed up the US is? :-P

As history has shown us, every country needs a leader of the most prominent kind, a representative figure. Just like how a ship needs one captain to be at the steering wheel. All sorts and kinds of captains there are – there are those that would bother solely about keeping the passengers on board safe and sound, and probably forbids any activities of the slightest danger (like leaning against the railings to watch for whales, for example); there are those that would develop very amiable psychological bonds so that a highly convivial atmosphere ensues through the journey, and by the end of it the captain is remembered fondly; there are of course those that are careless enough to sink the ship, or be the first to abandon ship comes a raging thunderstorm.

With a historically high approval rating of a solid 65%, Barack Obama in my opinion quite fits the description of the second captain. (BUT only time will tell!) And Lee Kuan Yew probably the first. Both have their own merits, and I am not about to do a baseless (and meaningless) comparison between the two leaders. But as a matter of personal opinion, I prefer a leader who can engage the hearts of the citizens, such that his approval and acceptance comes from a belief in his capability to make things work. To achieve this, a fair amount of persuasion on the leader’s part is needed, and Obama’s been very skilful at that thusfar. Of course it is the results and efficacy of a government’s policy that ultimately counts, but confidence of the citizens’ in their leaders’ direction is equally important to realize any lofty plans. Perhaps for fear of a culture of demagoguery, Singapore’s leaders have remained the ‘clinical’ style of communication with citizens, principally lacking in passionate poetry. Which is fine, as long as our government remains efficient and effective in its governance. But is this all our citizens are looking for? Perhaps some of us a mature for a more passionately articulate leader who can persuade not only based on pure logic but also with charisma (though yes I’m expecting some disagreements on this point; there are indeed dangers involved in this), which makes our political debates/election campaigns less clinical, more reality-based than fact-based.

Singapore certainly appears to be in a much better shape compared to US, but that’s a different story all together. The quagmire US landed itself in has to do with the system and model in which the country has been functioning in, rather than its political culture, I’d like to think.

We don’t necessarily need a Singaporean Barack Obama, or a leader of the most prominent kind (a leader like Lee Kuan Yew is hard to come by, we must agree), but Singapore needs a quality team of leaders. In Singapore’s case, it’s more of team work than a one-man-pilot show.

At the funeral

The flames lick
slowly and lazily, eating away
the paperous sheets of gold and silver.
The hand feeding it likes to think that
every atom dissolved here
is every atom newly reforming
on the other side of the world.
If only there are more things to burn
besides these inane currencies,
thinks the hand.

As sons and daughters kneel solemn on knees,
grandchildren and friends take their place,
and the lispy monotonous chants
- stranger than the lips who muttered them -
fill the air,
the tongues of flame bow towards the only dead
hearkening with a longing that far surpasses
the plainly living.

A scene it is -
a long ritual with much fanfare,
table overflowing with favourites that shall never be eaten,
closed (but only some loved) ones come and go,
some paying their last respect as if there was a first to begin with.
This is a crowd that comes only in death,
as a sad, sad truth.

Blankly on the portrait the glassy eyes stare
of the father whom they know too well to even love.
So there are to be no tears.

Except the little girl who sits by the stove
- the precious little warm spot to be found nowhere else
in the vacantly cold parlour-
feeding the flames.
Who though was never very dear
to that man who now lay void of life,
recollects how that very man
once bought her favourite roasted pigeions,
patted her small head with his huge palms,
gave her a shiny necklace that has since been misplaced,
bid her to call on him whenever she could,
is now asleep forever in the stone cold coffin.
Upon that last thought she tears.

And there is no flame,
only flickers of tungsten orange
on the rims of the ashes,
dying,
dying
dead.

That's All You Need

That's All You Need

Music and Lyrics by Jonathan Shin & Chan Chi Ling

So often I have pondered,

How can we ever thank them enough – the mothers

who taught us about love

just by showering us with it

So often I have wondered,

How can we ever repay their kindness – the friends

who spurred us on with words

be they chidings or cheers or mirth

(Bridge)

And (what about) the many people

Who painted splashes of colours

On our canvas of life

Which would otherwise be dull as dull can get

The best way, really,

Is to carry the light

Passed on to you.

(Chorus)

You don’t have to be a clown to bring laughter

You don’t have to be a fame to inspire goodness

You don’t have to be rich to make lives better

You don’t have to be on the top of the world to be the light.

All you need is a little bit of love.

So often I have pondered

How can we ever repay in kind – the mentors

Who dared us to dream and kept us wishing

Upon the wishing stars so bright

So often I have wondered,

How can we thank them enough – the soul mates

Who saw our true colours shining through

And still love us for we are

(Bridge)

And what about the many people

Who painted splashes of colours

On our canvas of life

Which would otherwise be dull as dull can get

The best way, really,

Is to carry the light

Passed on to you.

(Chorus)

You don’t have to be a clown to bring laughter

You don’t have to be a fame to inspire goodness

You don’t have to be rich to make lives better

You don’t have to be on the top of the world to be the light.

All you need is a little bit of love.

That's all you need.

Come to "HEARTSTRINGS" music concert on 25 July 09 to hear this song! :)

More info found on arts.inspire.sg or on facebook!

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=104841643222

Musing about Singapore’s political culture: Is there a tastier recipe?

[Trust me I have absolutely no intention of transforming my blog into one of political commentaries. Being the new HACAS President just means poking my nose into some history and current affairs here and there, and this article here is for the brand new HACAS blog, which will feature a repository of all things weird and wonderful, including but not limited to intellectual discourse: hacasonline@wordpress.com Don't bother visiting for now cos there aren't anything up except this article. YET]

Musing about Singapore’s political culture: Is there a tastier recipe?

As a fact that seems almost ingrained in every school kid’s mind, we have our founding fathers to thank for the prosperity and stability we enjoy today. And I don’t mean that with any sarcasm, for there is no denial that we indeed do. Singapore’s nation building was no mean feat, and the means our founding fathers (namely MM Lee Kuan Yew and party colleagues) took to achieve this was first and foremost devising a political structure that would serve their objectives well. Instead of active construction, however, their efforts in shaping Singapore’s political climate could be seen as deconstruction. By that I refer to the ‘depoliticisation’ of power structure after the 1965 elections, stemmed from PAP leaders convinced that a city-state without natural resources could not afford the luxury of partisan politics. The paternal style of PAP’s governance was since then adopted, betrothing Singapore with a distinct political culture which fit into no simple category formulated by political scientists. Yes, our political culture is centralized, statist, pragmatic, rational and legalistic; but it is hardly what foreign critics often label as ‘authoritarian’ or ‘totalitarian’, in my opinion.

While I am not about to go into great lengths to justify why we are hardly so, I do want to point out the fact that Singapore is administered by bureaucrats, not politicians. We reject ‘politics’ – the kind of politics that connoted disruption and instability, characterized by demagoguery, factionalism and flamboyant fluxes. We free ourselves from inflammatory appeals to communal, ethnic or religious passions. In exchange, we are blessed with efficiency grounded on impeccable efficiency. Something definitely worth cherishing, especially when we see how some countries that blindly adopted western democracy wholesale have landed themselves in deep political quagmires.

But there is an opportunity cost for everything. For stability, we forgo the excitement of elections, as seen in the presidential elections in US that are so heavily peppered with scandals between political rivals and all the glam and glitz. For the sake of status quo, we forgo our rights to cast our ballots as walkover victories knock that vote out of our hands (37 out of 84 seats were won by PAP as walkover in the 2006 elections). For the sake of peace, we forgo the right to go on street protests (which may just be as exciting as it is detrimental to security – seeing how the Thais treat protests as a ‘national pastime’) and do up ‘mock-protests’ at Hong Lim Park Speakers’ Corner instead.

It’s not to say that I resent these little ‘excitements’ being forgone; in fact I would choose sustainable peace and stability over drama that is “all sound and fury, signifying nothing”. But there is in me (and perhaps some Singaporeans would agree) a secret longing for more excitement and liveliness in the local political culture.

That brings me not to an agenda on “how to glamorise Singapore politics”, but to the issue of hard and soft powers. According to Professor Joseph Nye of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, the secret to good leadership in today’s complex, networked world is “smart power” – a combination of hard and soft power skills in proportion to the varying situations that leaders find themselves in. Hard power is the authoritarian, coercive approach to leadership, with leaders using a combination of threats and incentives to achieve conformity. Soft power, which gives more consideration towards the thoughts and feelings of followers, seeks not to dictate but to attract, inspire and persuade.

President Barack Obama’s campaign was a manifest exercise of soft power so inspiring that when he won, people around the world joined the Americans in celebration. Singaporeans, too, were caught in the infectious joy for a moment. The result was the ineluctable comparison that goes only put our local political climate in a much less exciting light. While listening to Obama’s inauguration speech, I carried myself on a little flight of fancy – When will we have our very own Singaporean Barack Obama?

And then I thought about our national day rallies, which despite some effort on PM Lee’s part to inject humour, seems pale in comparison in terms of inspirational value. Much like placing plain oatmeal beside a sumptuous breakfast of bacon, ham and eggs topped with strawberry jam sandwiches. While oatmeal is healthier and promises better health in the long run, it certainly isn’t as delectable and appealing. And as we climb higher up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we find ourselves needing to go beyond mere staples for survival. We need finer tastes and richer experiences. This goes to apply to our political appetite.

I believe that leaders should not only work towards optimising efficiency, figuring and weighing out the best option for every decision as if it were a problem solving exercise, but also engage the minds and hearts of their followers. That will require not only good result slips, but some eloquence and poetry and persuasion as well. Singaporean leaders, it seems, don’t do inspiration; they do competence and reliability.

But these two shouldn’t be mutually exclusive. And if Singapore has adequate ‘hard power’ already, why not try injecting small doses of ‘soft power’, just to add a little colour that will make our political climate more ‘palatable’? In the uniquely Singaporean way, of course. Singaporeans would prefer nasi lemak and fishball noodles to the American breakfast of bacon, ham and eggs, I’m sure.

It is due time our local politicians (especially the younger generation that is taking over the baton in the near future) start cracking their brains for tastier recipes, with a good textural blend of the soft and the hard.

双城人

我们都是城市人，同时也是城堡人。

身在城市，心在城堡。

自筑的城堡。

城市是开放的，城堡时封闭的。我们的行为或许不受约束，心灵却受到禁锢。

自我的禁锢。

不是吧？想想在所认识的人当中，有几个能够交心？有多少回满是心事却找不到聆听的耳朵？有多少次是自己主动敞开胸怀和别人交往的？

多少城市人表面独立其实孤独。

不能怪。

这种城市怪象，说来是基于不信任所致。也许城市的生存太剧烈、太残酷，相信被人等于放弃竞争的权利和优势，信任的门槛于是越建越高，斩钉截铁，最后高入云端，可望而不可及。

所以城市人情愿相信奇迹，却很难相信彼此；所以理直气壮筑墙见堡，名正言顺标榜自我保护 ，反正防备不吃亏、安全不害人。

城市的奇迹终究没发生，彼此缺得天天应对，不难看见周围五彩缤纷的城堡在游动。人，面对面；心，背对背。

城堡建得越堂皇就越防备，人心也揪得越紧，孤独如影随形。

心灵像镜子，久不拂拭准蒙尘。据说古欧洲城堡半年住人不打扫，半年清洗不住人；我们的心灵城堡是不是也这样？

答案自己最清楚。

无论如何，心灵长久不晒太阳，要嘛在自闭中死亡，要嘛在低调中重生。或许更多时候，也不只会是什么时候，心灵会静悄悄地伸展枝丫一叶探路，偷偷地但野心勃勃地寻找光源，或者自由。

所以，是缝曾几何时长出来的花卉草木，名字都可以叫勇气。

不是吗？

Floundering by the river bank

They know not where to go. Or where this leads.

Their feet work round the rough rugged edges

of pebbles puny and boulders beneath,

hands clutching for weeds between fluvial, as

each tug inches them forth just a little more.

So soporific are the songs they hear

of the gurgling stream which currents do sing.

Their lids weigh them down, eclipses the sun

and make them blind. Trip then some will, and fall

while the rest trudge on, floundering like an

aimless flotilla in foggy darkness

to God knows where this river might lead them.

Schizophrenia, at 3:08AM

From the deepest slumber I awaken
And lay with eyes open,
Dreaming.
Lips in delirium, uttering
trivial twaddle in a haphazard stream
of consciousness

The mind wanders
far away from the home of the present,
into the vista of the past and the future
And in my dreams I saw
some baleful auguries
that startled me awake

With a shovel in hand I dig
a most remote alcove in the mind
and buried them there;
But still I would not sleep

So I lay thinking,
Thinking about thinking, about thinking this way and that
And with a certain alacrity I sew
A miscellany of shoes
of all sorts of shapes colours and sizes
and placed myself in them,
just to laugh
at how some makes me a ludicrous buffoon
with its inapposite fit
and just to smile
at how another would make me look absolutely gorgeous.
(That’s why girls spend a whole lifetime in shoe shops, you know.)

Some people possess more than one pair of shoes,
switching from day to day
with every change of mood, idiosyncrasy and weather
One day they realize – in a maelstrom of confusion –
That they had slipped into an embarrassing mismatch

Perhaps they cannot decide which looked better,
or perhaps they simply want
the best of both (or all) worlds.
So occurs this incongruity of a flirtatious stiletto on one foot,
And a coarse yellow mud boot on the other.

How people would have laughed to scorn
your carelessness;
the perplexity written across their faces
spells incomprehension, bafflement and
fear

You hear a faint click in the bony skull –
It is breaking apart like diverging continental tectonic plates.
Your breath quivers
Exhaling inconsistent streams of air
As you would have in an artic zone
Called HCJC LT 5

Your mind numbs,
And you see yourself from your other self,
See how two minds work within one brain,
Engaging in fiery battle of territorial conquer
Within that one faculty for space
so scarce
economics is uncalled for

You need no mirror to see yourself
All you need is your other self
to mirror your other other self.

Monkee Business

Been working on a series of articles on the Frankenstein Complex recently, chancing upon many more articles on science and technology that were really quite gripping; from robots to sci-fi to bioethics to transhumans to stem cells to... monkey business. A totally irrelevant article, but one that got me really thinking about mankind's most intrinsic human nature.

You've got to read it man.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/magazine/05FREAK.html?ei=5090&en=af2d9755a2c32ba8&ex=1275624000&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1118160068-1EGJuan4FJH1LooxHYd5/g&pagewanted=all

Most shocking conclusion:
Monkeys practising (almost by instincts, it seems) mankind's oldest profession.
And in case you're wondering what that is, it's prostitution.
Jaw dropping eh.
So that's where it all came from, those bestial instincts and urge to copulate? For a dime or two.

T’ang Quartet with Thomas Hecht

A review that should have been posted long ago but slipped my dory-ish mind!

T’ang Quartet with Thomas Hecht
Fri, 6 MAR 2009, 7.30pm
YST Conservatory Concert Hall

Not the best way to start a review to yet another astounding performance, but the news that T’ang Quartet founder Lionel Tan is taking an indefinite break from playing the viola due to worsening muscle strains does spell a loss of a spark that had kept the quartet going since 1992. He will be replaced by a promising student of his, who certainly has big shoes to fill.

T’ang Quartet’s panache was unquestionable in their performance that night, as they displayed thorough lucidness in their Haydn String Quartet No.66 in G major, Op.77 No. 1 “Lobkowitz”. It is one of Haydn’s final quartets, and that probably explains the peculiar modulations piled upon the usual courtly elegance (by means of queer and unexpected pivot notes especially in the middle sections of the first movement). Most interesting was the third movement, where the quartet entered with a startling clean start and progresses into a tiptoeing violin motif supported by a bass rhythmic pedal note. As discussed in previous reviews, classical works are sometimes so ‘starkly naked’ that there are hardly any opportunities to hide flaws. No place for loose powder to cover up your zits, in other words. And T’ang Quartet’s tone quality was remarkably clear and transparent.

Prelude & Scherzo, Op.11 by Shostakovich in a way foreshadows the ominous Schnittke masterpiece to come afterwards, with all the bleakness there was to draw from the thick mellow sounds of the octet. Intensity increased progressively, until it arrived at a placidly lonely middle section where the viola’s melodies were set against a background of cold metallic tone quality created by playing near the bridge. The second movement begins savagely fast and furious, followed by an hauntingly innocuous cello voice against a backdrop of random pizzicatos. Soon after a furiously percussive section breaks in, and each instrument was momentarily transformed into percussive zingo playing varying rhythmic ostinatos. The dissonance then intensifies like tongues of flames in a deep cauldron, rising upwards with each wailing glissando and finally dropped dead with the Shostakovich’s trademark abruptness in ending.

The night’s program culminates in a Singapore’s premiere: most intriguing and transfixing piano quintet by Schnittke. Grown out of a devastating moment in the composer’s life (the demise of his mother), the piece’s sorrow reverberates throughout through craggy microtonal shifts and almost tormenting dissonant clashes. The opening Moderato begins with a long piano solo, whose clearly defined frequencies contrasts sharply against the ambiguous microtonal strings. It is here that we come to appreciate the piano’s clarity, the well-tempered pitches that we have grown so used to. After trudging through the piquant harmonies came a unearthly waltz based on the name B-A-C-H (the note sequence Bb-A-C-B) subtly imbued within a mesh of tragic wails of the strings. The effect was startling, and one would have imagined a swamp of vile hornets dotting an empty canvas till no hint of white could be seen. These hornets were to stay through the third movement, where yet another imagery emerges: that of vehicles whizzing past at full speed on a insidiously deep and dark expressway – fast forwarded many times. The sense of loneliness and grief amidst lightning speed and guttural screams was enough to send one (me, at least) reeling back in horror. All was thrust into an abyss of emotional agony that sees no bottom.

The fifth movement was where Pianist Thomas Hecht drilled in every listener an earworm that would haunt even after that night. The same ribbon of notes – disarmingly simple and sweet – were sounded against a background of an irrelevant, elusive discourse in the quartet’s part, ending finally after a long awaited Ab major chord. The whole movement ends with a faint heartbeat and final expiration – of which deathly silence was to follow.

And it left us all stunned, in frantic search of the slightest heartbeat within ourselves.

9 March 2009

A book to read

a book to read

i Walk
down the aisle Of the library
feeling the cold breaths from above
kissing my skin, combing my fringe

these tall shelves
they loom over like a canopy
a forest of tomes, a labyrinth of books
its faint papery smell wafts
to my nose like a cacophony of whispers
hearkening me
to lay my fingers on their smooth, silvery spine

some books have colours so bright (flirtatiously so)
they oft draw beholders
whose eyes are ever so thirsty
for things that tickle lustily
and these beholders, in an orgiastic fervour, rip -
only to find inside placid empty snowy sheets

they are too bright for me, they blind me; and i see no evil.

some books are hard to read (deceptively so)
for their pages cling
stubbornly to the other end
as north glues south in loadstone land
yet as time’s winged chariot flies, its gusts swiftly blows
it wears the spine, tatters the sides so the pages show

all their sophistication, all the mystery – gone, gone with the wind.

There is one i know of
that hides itself within a chest
shut off from the world like a pearl in an oyster
except worse –
you chain yourself up in a padlock,
so no one touches you and you touch no one

but just you wait.
for i will learn, with immeasurable patience
to prick a lock.
I will unchain you, and i will read you.

The Outcast Nightingale

On the treetop perches a nightingale
Which beneath the silver light quietly preens
It loves itself as no one ever will
Though it has long lost its colour and sheen

At the buttress below party gathers
Dancing gigues and singing songs through the night
Here convivial and boisterous air stirs
Upwards and upwards it wafts to its hide

Yet how those melodious notes sting and prick
Like sea salt on a raw and open wound
Nowhere in the forest would feel so bleak
Than this thin rugged branch where nothing blooms

Once upon a time this nightingale sings
Her songs travel far and wide with the wind
Till she ate a caterpillar so jinxed
It set her throat on fire like a flint

Oh how she wailed and screamed her silent screams
That nothing hears except the flea that hung
At the feathers of her breast which shudders
As her heart from within tears asunder

Hwa Chong 90th Anniversary Dinner

My darling I plea to you to yield
to dine with me please on the field
fifty dollars is all I ask
to sit for a dinner on the grass

Perry! (hehe)

When an ant crawls up your leg

This is the kind of crap you'll write when your lit teacher is late by 15 whole minutes.

When an ant crawls up your leg

You can scream
hopefully the vibes blast their antennas
paralyze them forever so they would
lose their bearings
and go for bitter stuff instead of sweet

You can stare
at it and if you do so hard enough
it may burst into flames of orange red
like a matchstick
an alternative fuel, save the trees!

You can pinch
at its feelers with your thumb and index
see its hairy legs swimming in the air
swing it about
till it swoons and never makes its way home

You can jump
till it loses its grip on your leg hair
and if it still doesn’t perhaps you could
shave it all off
so it’ll slide like lizards on Nippon paint

You can drop
sprinkles of sugar on your leg and it’ll
stoop to taste, back it goes into its nest
bring hoards of friends
that’s when you jump into the pool, drown them

And somewhere out there
an ant is pray’n hard,
to queen almighty
that it may never by any chance
crawl
up the leg
of this poem’s perverse author