MORTALITY

Real mortality reached right on to the campus last week. Sobering.

And fictional mortality has woven its threads across the week, too.

1.
On one of my bus-rides, I finished Salvation of a Saint, another novel by Keigo Higashino. I really like this guy. His writing (no doubt aided by a top-notch translation) is as cool and smooth as silk, and by posing a knotty, slightly creepy problem, he effortlessly reels you in. "The solution is ingenious, bordering on preposterous," notes this reviewer, "and Higashino's skill clearly lies in contrivance rather than characterisation -- but the process of deduction is fascinating." I'd agree with that. I'm still not that keen on the condescending scientist who "helps out" his police buddy, though, and here's another reviewer who shares my antipathy.

2.
Having wanted to experience butoh ever since I first came across the concept, I was rapt to attend Taketeru Kudo's solo performance of A Vessel of Ruins at the Damansara Performing Arts Centre.

Clawed hands; knock-kneed legs; curled-under toes; convulsing, jerking, twitching limbs; scrabbling, scratching hands; staring eyes: all these are the hallmark of butoh. It's weird. It's disturbing. But it's fascinatingly beautiful.

As the performance progresses, the dancer is by turns a corpse, an animal, a prisoner, a madman, and a madwoman. Throughout, he demonstrates an extraordinary athleticism (especially given that he's 49...)

He starts off in a ragged loincloth and mummy-like head wrappings. His right wrist and left ankle are bound with ropes. This is "the paradox of bones", with the mummy starting to breathe beneath the tombstone. The next part is apparently "the struggle between the ape and the man", but the tread and the swinging tail said "cat" to us, not ape... "The ruin of words" sees the dancer talking, but the words have lost their shape "and are decaying". "The rigid man" sees the dancer "left at the place where everything was burnt... Until the big catastrophe." This is the bit with the pounding, distorted, industrial sound effects. The dancer careers from side to side, crashing into the hanging metal sheets. Eventually he picks up the spotlight, turns it briefly on the audience, and carries it away, leaving the stage in darkness. Slowly cables string themselves geometrically across the space.

Then "the light falls on the abandoned garden". A "lady of light" enters the space, where now "even the ruins have faded away". Despite her gold face and feet, however, she is but the caricature of a lady, and quite, quite mad...

It's bizarre. It's counter-intuitive. It's iconoclastic. But I'd very much like to see more of this genre. It gets under the observer's skin, because it seems to come from right under the performer's skin. His stain-streaked, sweat-covered, white-powdered skin...

Moving on...



3.
It's European Union Film Festival time again. Our first was Silence. This starts as the protagonist's quest for quiet -- relief from the constant noise that is part of the urban environment -- and morphs into a quest for roots, home, the past.

It's set in Ireland, so the scenery is exquisitely beautiful. And the sounds -- now your attention is focused on them -- are lovely too. The wind, the sea, the rain, the song of the bird. (And how ironic, in a film about silence, that you can clearly hear the noise of the film next door.)

More poignantly, the central figure's dilemma is very familiar: home ties you down ("we're not trees, needing roots"), and yet home never leaves you, and you'll always miss it. Humans cannot both stay AND go.

Already in remote territory, Eoghan meets a lad who loves his little island home (although "there's not much to do"), and wonders about the recordist's nomadic, self-exiled life. Hearing about North America, South America, and Berlin, he volunteers that he's been to Blackpool, and it was very different...

Eventually Eoghan arrives back on the tiny island where he still owns a disintegrating house. Many have died; many have left. There are a host of voices on the wind, "voices of the past -- not voices of history, but voices of the unspoken past that doesn't make it into history".

These voices are always with us. It is part of the human experience to live with the dead -- with the sedimentary layers of the built environment all around us, and our memories of people and places. And inside us, always, the unassuageable, bitter-sweet ache that is our unrecoverable childhood home.

We've never been to this part of Ireland, but I couldn't help but recall that cold winter holiday on the Dingle peninsula back in 1992.









4.
Immediately afterwards, we watched Dreams of a Life (though personally I'd have thought the UK should by now be excluded from the EU Film Festival...).

This is the story of a beautiful, highly mobile woman who dies at home, and is not discovered for another three years. Here the lack of roots -- and the isolation she apparently inflicts on herself as a result of some trauma or pile-up of traumas -- equates to anonymity and vulnerability.

Because it does not have all the available sources at its disposal, the movie remains a series of questions. We don't know why she died. We don't know why she remained so long undiscovered. We can only peck at different pieces of an incomplete mosaic: the early death of her mother; the somewhat feckless character of her father; the incomplete education; the thwarted dream of being a singer; the curious mix of trust and distrust; the chameleon-like qualities that made it hard for a personality to emerge in retrospect.

I found the movie neither "searing" nor "dangerously self-serving". I found it a reasonably honest attempt to reconstruct what we know -- inconsistencies and all.

You certainly come away with the desire to reach out... We are so very finite, and mortality is so very universal.

5.
Immortality, on the other hand, is what you think of when you experience a Beethoven concert. This week, the overture to King Stephen, the Violin Concerto (played by the Armani-supported, blog-hosting Ray Chen], who kindly gave us two encores), and Symphony No. 6, the renowned "Pastoral".

With a programme like that, the house was unsurprisingly packed. Even former PM Mahathir was there...

A lovely conductor, Gabor Takacs-Nagy, from Hungary, took us in warm and friendly fashion through the programme (and, with his VIP audience in mind, deftly transformed a compliment to the orchestra into a plea to not stop the funding...).

And the music -- now over 200 years old -- was magical. The overture was new to me, but I've been listening to the other pieces since my days as an undergraduate and young professional, when I owned a "stereo" handed down by my cousin, and a few vinyl records to play on it.

CHEESE DESSERTS

1.
This week brought my first experience of frozen cheesecake. Strawberry. Pretty OK. I guess you have to wonder what is to be gained by freezing a cheesecake... The different texture, I suppose. Which definitely stops you wolfing it.

2.
And we also got our first taste of a hot new craze: Hokkaido baked cheese tarts. They are pretty good, I have to say. Very creamy. Eat with care.

3.
Ben's macadamia cheesecake sundae brings a different twist to the cheesecake theme. It's a crumb base piled with vanilla ice-cream, chunks of cheesecake, and caramel sauce, and topped with candied macadamias.



OTHER THINGS

-- Heading back to Milkcow for some awesome retro. Yes, those ARE Maltezers...



-- Trying out the just-moved Peter Hoe Cafe (excellent chicken and mango salad), and indulging in a scented candle from the Peter Hoe shop.



-- Spotting that the shrine (whose twists and turns never fail to intrigue), has changed colour again (or at least the horizontal bit has). And the rock has acquired a garland...