| date: | 2012–2020 |
| preliminary remark: | A selection of my Facebook posts about arts and cultures. |
This post (in Traditional Chinese) written by the Taiwanese broadcaster Shifang Ma (馬世芳) highlights the absurd working condition many Taiwanese face in the cultural sector.
Ma is forced to choose between forsaking the copyright of the radio program content he single-handedly conceived and created, or ending his contract with Alian 96.3 Radio Station.
Ma is a leading light in all matters pertaining to popular / folk music in the Chinese speaking world. As one of the translators and the chief editor of the Taiwanese edition of Bob Dylan’s The Lyrics 1961-2012, he is also well versed in English songs. He has published several books presenting notable English and Chinese speaking singer-songwriters; part of the material of which came from interviews done during his broadcasting career. It is absurd that he would have no legal access to his intellectual property, or no right to contest any modification / redistribution / etc. of his works in the future.
Note that this situation is different from, say, an Ubisoft concept artist working on Assassin’s Creed as a collectivity. The radio station is a platform that provides technical support and a venue for broadcasting Ma’s works. He is not collaborating with anyone else to accomplish a bigger project.
In my collection is a special stamp paying tribute to the French contemporary artist Sophie Calle. Special, in that, well, she is still alive.
Some may call Calle a photographer, others a writer, I would deem her a conceptual artist because in my opinion, her idea surpasses her ability to execute these arts. Not that she is incapable of making art in the traditional sense of the word — she actually possess decent mastery of her technique — but that her concept is so great that eclipses her technique. Her work published in the 2003 book Douleur exquise (Actes Sud) which mixes photography and narrative is an interesting read.
Calle won an artist grant in 1984 to embark on a 92-day journey to Japan. At the end of this journey passing by the Trans-Siberian Express from Moscow to Vladivostok, she planned on meeting with her French lover in New Delhi, India. Upon her arrival at the hotel, she was left with a message that her lover had called. While waiting by the telephone to reach her lover, she imaged the worst possible scenarios that could had happened to him. In the end, she found out that he had fallen in love with someone else, and the conversation lasted barely a few minutes. Up until then, these hours spent in waiting by the phone was the most painful moment of her life.
On her return to France, in order to palliate her heartache, Calle asked people, one after another, to tell her their most painful experience, and she in exchange told them hers. She only stopped her project until in this retelling the story she no longer felt painful — by then she had collected 36 stories in 3 months. These stories form the basis of Douleur exquise.
The design of the book itself is an example of exquisite craftsmanship. The French — and similarly the English — edition is hardback bounded with grey cover and the 3 edges beautifully gilded with shimmering red. The Traditional Chinese (Taiwanese) edition, on the other hand, uses the red throughout the cover design with silver gilding. (The cover colour for the Traditional Chinese edition was chosen by the artist herself.)
The first part of the book exhibits photographs taken during her journey leading up to the abandonment. The second part of the book is the re/telling of her/other’s suffering along with a related photograph. On the left side of the page is the narrative of her suffering juxtaposing with other’s on the right side. In retelling her story, she reformulates sentences, leaves out details, so that her story gets shorter and shorter, and the printed words fainter and fainter to the point of being eventually unreadable. 20 years later she ends up describing this heartache ‘banal’.
Among the 36 stories she collected, death of the love ones and breakup of a romantic relationship are the top two most painful experiences her interviewees have lived.
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Sophie Calle: Douleur exquise (Actes Sud, 2003)
Sophie Calle: Exquiste pain (Thames & Hudson, 2003)
蘇菲．卡爾：《極度疼痛》（大家出版，2014）
Celebration of women wouldn’t be complete without mentioning Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929). It was based on two lectures given at the University of Cambridge on women and fiction, which Virginia turned into an eloquent essay arguing in favour of women’s (then limited) access to artistic endeavour and education in general in a traditionally patriarchal society.
I was about 15 years old when I first opened this book, and having a particular pride for being well-read, I was soon daunted by the list of female English novelists Virginia enumerated in the first paragraph:
- Fanny Burney
- Jane Austen
- Brontë sisters
- Miss Mitford (Mary Russell Mitford)
- George Eliot
- Mrs. Gaskell (Elizabeth Gaskell)
Of which I knew only 4 (Brontë sisters count as 3)! Moreover, this essay was written by someone who had no formal schooling and whose intellectual erudition was primarily the result of self-education.
Royal Mail didn’t seem to have paid hommage to England’s beloved women writers with particular stamp issues, beside the 2013 set of stamps featuring Jane Austen’s 6 novels, and the 1980 set of stamps commemorating Emily and Charlotte of the Brontë family. I have in my possession a UK stamp featuring a portrait of Virginia Woolf, which was part of the series to commemorate the 150th Anniversary of the National Portrait Gallery in 2006. There was also a Romanian stamp of Virginia Woolf issued in 2007.
P.S. I think A Room of One’s Own was the first text I read in English (with Traditional Chinese translation on the side 
). Not an easy introduction to English literature, but I enjoyed it.
27 January 2020 (Schubert Festival with OSM)
We regard Schubert as an essential bridge between classical period and romantic period.
Schubert for much of his life works in quasi obscurity …
Kent Nagano, at the pre-concert talk on 27 January 2020
Bach is the only composer who wrote perfect music … His genius is a miracle.
Kent Nagano, at a pre-concert talk held in Montreal
The first cantatas is about the majesty of God; the second is about the simplicity of us, it’s very human.
Very difficult too. So the angels are the best singers.
Bach is one of the most difficult composers to sing, partly because he doesn’t care if it’s difficult. He tends to treat a singer as an instrument that doesn’t breathe, the phrase can be very very long.
Andrew Megill, at a pre-concert talk held in MOntreal
I don’t understand what the fuss is with the number of polygons. When rendering a scene, do you not just bring a book or two, sit and wait 2 minutes, 4 or 9 hours, for the rendering to be done?
I finally finished watching Disney’s feature animated films released during the period of time commonly referred to as Disney Renaissance (1989-1999), plus all the sequels / prequels I could find in the library.
I know I will probably offend some people but still want to leave a note for myself. […] I honestly don’t think very highly of Disney’s stories, which almost always turn into romances that fail to be cogent and ends with a kiss. Nor do I pretend to know why a nation that has denounced nobility is so enamoured with stories of princes and princesses, or why such universal cliché (‘happily ever after’, ‘love will conquer all’) is so popular to a target audience that includes children.
Maybe it’s a cultural thing, or maybe me and entertaining blockbuster just don’t go hand in hand. These stories are hardly ever funny enough to tempt me. I tend to like stories that take a harsher and more in depth look at humanity. As a child, I was really moved by Grave of the Fireflies (Isao Takahata, 1988), a graphically powerful animation with very little dialogues and no gratuitous comic relief; it is definitely the second most significant film watching experience that marked my childhood (the first being the viewing of Castle in the Sky (Hayao Miyazaki, 1986)).
On the positive side, the visual of Disney’s feature animated films is always a splendid feast to watch. Movement is fluent, expression precise. I particularly want to note the perfect integration between 2D drawing and 3D scenery, a technique in use since the production of Beauty and the Beast.
I don’t think Disney’s direct-to-video releases are worth of one’s time to watch, for the visual quality is poor, not to mention the story tends to be even worse than the original. […]
The impulse to listen to Schubert is always strong when I am oppressed by the cosmic sadness that has always been the heritage of humankind.
The earworm that has repeated countless times in my mind since I first heard it a week ago appears to belong to the Southern Appalachian musical tradition, brought to North America by Anglo-Irish immigrants. Now it becomes clear why I need to only hear it once to perceive its shared heritage with the folk tunes prevailing in the British Isles, to which I have developed, over years of listening, a notorious addiction.
Yes, this is an earworm to me, but a very pleasant and tempting one. It seems that the earworm effect varies from individual to individual, depending on how one’s cerebral network is wired, and my brain chances to deviate from a typical brain which can be tormented by commercial jingles or intrusive, repetitive melodies. I cannot recall any instance of haunting tunes in my mind that has not afforded me tremendous pleasure. Whether ‘badly composed’ music has no potential to stick in my head I know not for sure, but I am quite convinced that none of my ‘demon tunes’ — Greensleeves, Winter is Gone, Bushes and Briars, Loch Lomond, etc. — would normally be described as annoying or irritating nuisance (they are probably not the most frequently reported catchy tunes, as none of them is listed on site such as http://earwurm.com/ or mentioned in the studies I am aware of).
An introspective self-analysis of my subjective experience shows that, the reason why my brain can be so tempted by the melodic contour of a folk-song and its modal harmony may be accountable by the fact that I was introduced to a pentatonic scale commonly used worldwide whilst still a child and my subsequent exposure to folk songs based on the same scale, without knowing the musical detail of course, may have reinforced memories of that melodic character and fostered a peculiar sensitivity to anything sharing similar tonal pattern. This tempting hypothesis I cannot possibly verify, let alone prove; I am expecting neuroscientists to delve into the depth of our mysterious mind.
A live performance of Peter Lawson’s arrangement by King’s Singers:
This melody is not collected in Cecil Sharp’s now classic songbooks of Appalachian tunes of English origin (1917, 1921), but a similar tune appears in the songbook Slave Songs of the U.S. (1867) edited by W.F. Allen et al. It is numbered #104 under the title ‘The Good Old Way’ and attributed to a certain Mr. G.H. Allan from Nashville.
The textual difference and melodic alternation make me unable to recognise the second song to be similar to the first, beside that they both use the same anhemitonic pentatonic scale (the first starting on E (4-6-9-11-1) produces the interval sequence <2, 3, 2, 2, 3>; the second starting on F (7-10-0-2-5) produces the interval sequence < 3, 2, 2, 3, 2>). Not sure in which mode these songs are composed.
LINDA’S ARTWORLD 