'Shock and awe' may be the specific words that the U.S. military has decided to use to designate particular aerial campaigns of destruction in Iraq, but I felt similar emotions while watching the University of Cambodia's talent show last night. (And with less debilitating side-effects, though hopefully as long-lasting.)
'Shock', in the sense that the kids pulled it off. They put on the show, a four-hour show, and it was entertaining and heartfelt and amateurish and wonderful. Khmer traditional dance, Khmer love songs, western rock songs, a fashion show featuring casual and formal clothes -- all were included, to the delight of the Cambodian audience, who showed their appreciation with suitably rambunctious applause and indicated their boredom in another typically Khmer way, by talking incessantly through whoemever happened to be trying to get their attention.
'Awe', in the realization: They're just like me.
This is an emotion I've felt again and again, in Japan and Cambodia, and its resiliency, its ability to sting and prod me, may have something to do with how brainwashed we are back home. Led to believe that other people in other lands are fundamentally different.
Don't get me wrong.
Khmers and Japanese most certainly ARE different from westerners, in ways both comical and profound.
But FUNDAMENTALLY different?
I don't think so.
Watching the exhausted performers after the show, most of them in their late-teens to early twenties, I was struck by how, well, familiar they seemed. Smiling contentedly for celebratory photos. Laughing. Letting off steam. On the radio western pop played, and I heard the familiar refrain of the song that seemed to haunt my final year of high school, 'What's going on'. (You know the one: "I said hey -- what's going on...') While it played, and as I watched the students smile and pose, smile and pose, I felt a weird little inadvertent time-slip take place, as if I was the main character in Vonnegut's SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE, the one who bops back and forth between various incarnations of himself.
Where was I? St.Catharines or Phnom Penh? How old was I? Eighteen or twenty-nine? Were these Canadians or Cambodians? Did I matter?
Shock and awe. I'm surprised more people haven't piped up about the inappropriateness of using a word like 'awe' to describe an action that decimates people's existences on impact.
If destroying human lives via mechanical means needs a slogan, well, I guess it works as well as any other. But 'awe' should be reserved for sunsets, or the milky way, or Dr.Phil's luminescent dome. It shouldn't be utilized to highlight how well metal can destroy flesh.
I know that war is sometimes necessary. I know that casualties are inevitable. I know that bombs work.
But I also know that those students I watched last night, disciplined in their work then released in their enthusiasm, were part of some kind of small, incremental legacy. For when I was three, four years old, those same students' parents and families were living (or not living) through the Khmer Rouge era. They were a part of a nationwide mass slaugther. And now their kids, only twenty years later, were celebrating after a Sunday afternoon talent show, in the centre of a city that lay deserted only two decades before. They had more in common (in some fundamentally light-hearted and human way) with my Grade 13 Drama class that put on a play than with their dying and imprisoned Cambodian brethren of a generation past.
That means something.
Something worthy of the words 'shock' and 'awe'.
Monday, May 23, 2005
Saturday, May 21, 2005
WHO THE HELL IS MARILYN MILLER?
Who the hell is Marilyn Miller?
I haven’t the foggiest.
It’s her name, however, that is scrawled on the title page of Junichiro Tanizaki’s Some Prefer Nettles, an old Japanese novel (in translation) that I picked up at a used book shop here in Phnom Penh.
This edition of the text was published in 1968. This was pre-Scott, possibly even pre-Pauly Shore, though I’d have to check on that one. My parents were twenty. George Lucas was figuring out if his award-winning student films meant that he had some kind of a career as a filmmaker. Vietnam was heating up, and Cambodia was in the beginning stages of being torn apart. A long time ago.
And there was Marilyn. Alone at her desk, perhaps, or riding a bus, or waiting for the chicken to cook. Japanese literature was not that popular in the west thirty-five years ago; she must have been literate, educated, possibly even a teacher. Perhaps she had been to Japan. She might even have spoken Japanese herself, though that, too, is somewhat unlikely.
I love finding books with inscriptions on them from real, ordinary, sloppy and wonderful human beings. I bought a book awhile back by C.S.Lewis about religion, his favorite topic, and there was an inscription on the cover page, and I googled the name and lo and behold, the bearer of that name was a preacher out in Utah. (I felt like emailing her, to tell her that I have a copy of a book that she read in the mid 1970’s. Could be fun. But I worried that she might try to convert me, and so I resisted the urge. (And, come to think of it, this was the same bookshop where I picked up my other-inscribed book, too. Perhaps there are entire bookshops devoted simply to books that have hand-written inscriptions on their cover pages. I could spend days in a bookshop like that, reading the messages, imagining their lives. Not just days – I could spend my whole life in a shop like that.)
I’m not sure why pen-and-ink inscriptions from ordinary folk hold such a strange spell over me. Perhaps it’s because books are so personal; for a brief period of time, but an honest period of time, are thoughts merge with the author’s. We become literary hermaphrodites, for lack of a better word. We write our name, usually in pen, sometimes in pencil, on the front page of a book, and it does…something. Something solid. What, I don’t know. But it makes us feel part of something solid and real and concrete.
It’s the same reason we inscribe books to others, to put down in print our love and our friendship and our goodwill. Recommending a book to someone, inscribing a book to someone, implies that we have considered the contours of another’s mental landscape, and judged that this book will somehow find a home on that psychic plane. Which is why it’s somewhat sad to find an old book in a bookshop bearing an inscription – a birthday gift, or a Christmas one, or a graduation present. The receiver has read the book, presumably, then sold it. Nothing wrong with that. I guess. But does the givee realize this is what happened? That something chosen with, if not love, at least attention, was, at some future point in time, discarded, traded for cash?
Stupid thoughts. I know. But still. We can only be in one place at one time, but the books we’ve read, the books we’ve taken in the taxi and on the boat and inside the detention hall, they can travel. They can glide. Almost forty years ago a woman named Marilyn Miller bought a book, and forty years later, I hold it in my hands. I smell it. It retains its power. That means something. I don’t know what, but it does. I feel this to be true, and I believe it.
Is she still alive, this Marilyn?
I hope she's out there.
I hope she’s had a good life. There may have been heartache: lost loves, broken children, cancer. I suppose that’s inevitable. She may still be alive, somewhere in the American Midwest, or in a retirement home in Newfoundland, or on a cattle farm in western Australia. Even as I write these words, she could be watching television, cooking dinner, arguing with her second husband, who she doesn’t love as much as the first, no, but he is better in bed, she’ll give him that much (grudgingly). She may even be beginning to read another book, and she might even be writing her name in the same clean, legible script on the title page.
And who knows?
That very same book could somehow end up in my hands one day.
Or in yours.
I haven’t the foggiest.
It’s her name, however, that is scrawled on the title page of Junichiro Tanizaki’s Some Prefer Nettles, an old Japanese novel (in translation) that I picked up at a used book shop here in Phnom Penh.
This edition of the text was published in 1968. This was pre-Scott, possibly even pre-Pauly Shore, though I’d have to check on that one. My parents were twenty. George Lucas was figuring out if his award-winning student films meant that he had some kind of a career as a filmmaker. Vietnam was heating up, and Cambodia was in the beginning stages of being torn apart. A long time ago.
And there was Marilyn. Alone at her desk, perhaps, or riding a bus, or waiting for the chicken to cook. Japanese literature was not that popular in the west thirty-five years ago; she must have been literate, educated, possibly even a teacher. Perhaps she had been to Japan. She might even have spoken Japanese herself, though that, too, is somewhat unlikely.
I love finding books with inscriptions on them from real, ordinary, sloppy and wonderful human beings. I bought a book awhile back by C.S.Lewis about religion, his favorite topic, and there was an inscription on the cover page, and I googled the name and lo and behold, the bearer of that name was a preacher out in Utah. (I felt like emailing her, to tell her that I have a copy of a book that she read in the mid 1970’s. Could be fun. But I worried that she might try to convert me, and so I resisted the urge. (And, come to think of it, this was the same bookshop where I picked up my other-inscribed book, too. Perhaps there are entire bookshops devoted simply to books that have hand-written inscriptions on their cover pages. I could spend days in a bookshop like that, reading the messages, imagining their lives. Not just days – I could spend my whole life in a shop like that.)
I’m not sure why pen-and-ink inscriptions from ordinary folk hold such a strange spell over me. Perhaps it’s because books are so personal; for a brief period of time, but an honest period of time, are thoughts merge with the author’s. We become literary hermaphrodites, for lack of a better word. We write our name, usually in pen, sometimes in pencil, on the front page of a book, and it does…something. Something solid. What, I don’t know. But it makes us feel part of something solid and real and concrete.
It’s the same reason we inscribe books to others, to put down in print our love and our friendship and our goodwill. Recommending a book to someone, inscribing a book to someone, implies that we have considered the contours of another’s mental landscape, and judged that this book will somehow find a home on that psychic plane. Which is why it’s somewhat sad to find an old book in a bookshop bearing an inscription – a birthday gift, or a Christmas one, or a graduation present. The receiver has read the book, presumably, then sold it. Nothing wrong with that. I guess. But does the givee realize this is what happened? That something chosen with, if not love, at least attention, was, at some future point in time, discarded, traded for cash?
Stupid thoughts. I know. But still. We can only be in one place at one time, but the books we’ve read, the books we’ve taken in the taxi and on the boat and inside the detention hall, they can travel. They can glide. Almost forty years ago a woman named Marilyn Miller bought a book, and forty years later, I hold it in my hands. I smell it. It retains its power. That means something. I don’t know what, but it does. I feel this to be true, and I believe it.
Is she still alive, this Marilyn?
I hope she's out there.
I hope she’s had a good life. There may have been heartache: lost loves, broken children, cancer. I suppose that’s inevitable. She may still be alive, somewhere in the American Midwest, or in a retirement home in Newfoundland, or on a cattle farm in western Australia. Even as I write these words, she could be watching television, cooking dinner, arguing with her second husband, who she doesn’t love as much as the first, no, but he is better in bed, she’ll give him that much (grudgingly). She may even be beginning to read another book, and she might even be writing her name in the same clean, legible script on the title page.
And who knows?
That very same book could somehow end up in my hands one day.
Or in yours.
Thursday, May 19, 2005
THE UNGRIPPABLE BEANBAG
Nobody ever told me how tough life is. Nobody ever pushed me down onto a slightly-ratty but still-plush beanbag and handed me a Flintstones glass of ice-cold lemonade and said: "Life is actually pretty tough, kid, so you better get a grip."
I'm not blaming anyone. That's what you get for having great parents, a comfortable life, four walls and three square. You are provided with a foundation. Most people don't even have that. It's just that the foundation often has cracks or holes that can't be filled. Then you have to dig deep and grib the beanbag and hang on. (You ever try gripping a beanbag? It ain't easy.)
Have you seen Spartan, with Val Kilmer? (I don't mean 'with' Val Kilmer, meaning sitting beside him. I mean, he's in the movie. Though if you did see it sitting beside him, that would be cool, too.) It's a thriller written by David Mamet, which will mean everything to some of you and nothing to most of you.
Mamet is a playwright, screenwriter, director. He creates his own language and his own world in which that language operates. Kilmer plays a Secret Service agent whose job it is to protect the President's daughter. She is kidnapped. His job, quite simply, is simple: Get the girl. Find the girl. At one point, when 'all is lost', as they say, he acquiesces. He abandons his mission. A woman close to the daughter implores him to continue. When he excuses himself by saying that it's not his job anymore, it's 'their' responsibility, she cuts him short: "There is no 'they'," she says. He had a mission -- to find the girl. He hasn't accomplished it. End of story.
It's a smart and witty and brilliant film. At its core lies what is at the core of most of us -- our sense of self, of what we must do, and the inevitable obstacles that lie in wait to thwart our plans.
The truth is, there are a lot of 'theys', and none at all. In the end, there is you. There is what you are putting out into the world. 'They' will not help you. All we can do is accept responsibility, as hard as that is, as fruitless as that is, and move on. Move forward. When you find yourself blaming 'they', 'them', 'the boss', 'the wife', the battle has been lost. You have forgot your mission. You have acquiesced. For even if by some stroke of Satan there is a 'they', it is irrelevant.
Only you can live through your life, and only you can change it.
(And I sometimes hate getting advice given to me, so take all of the above with a grain of salt. But sometimes it's nice to know that it's not just you -- everybody else thinks life is really, really tough, too, so remember that. Remember that the cool guy in Starbucks tapping away on his laptop who seems to have it all together is just as scared shitless as you are. He is. I swear.)
In that spirit:
Seek, above all, for a game worth playing. Such is the advice of the oracle to modern man. Having found the game play it with intensity -- play as if your life and sanity depended on it. (They do depend on it.) Follow the example of the French existentialists and flourish a banner bearing the word 'engagement.' Though nothing means anything and all roads are marked 'no exit', yet move as if your movements had some purpose. If life does not seem to offer a game worth playing, then invent one. For it must be clear, even to the most clouded intelligence, that any game is better than no game.
-- Robert S. DeRopp
The Master Game
If an unusual necessity forces us onward, a surprising thing occurs. The fatigue gets worse up to a certain point, when, gradually or suddenly, it passes away and we are fresher than before! We have evidently tapped a new level of energy. There may be layer after layer of this experience, a third and fourth 'wind'. We find amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own, sources of strength habitually not taxed, because habitually we never push through the obstruction of fatigue.
-- William James
Why should we be in such a desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
-- Henry David Thoreau
If you don't change the direction you're going, you're likely to end up where you're headed.
-- Chinese proverb
Man is not the sum of what he has but the totality of what he does not yet have, of what he might have.
-- Sartre
If you come to fork in the road, take it.
-- Yogi Berra
I'm not blaming anyone. That's what you get for having great parents, a comfortable life, four walls and three square. You are provided with a foundation. Most people don't even have that. It's just that the foundation often has cracks or holes that can't be filled. Then you have to dig deep and grib the beanbag and hang on. (You ever try gripping a beanbag? It ain't easy.)
Have you seen Spartan, with Val Kilmer? (I don't mean 'with' Val Kilmer, meaning sitting beside him. I mean, he's in the movie. Though if you did see it sitting beside him, that would be cool, too.) It's a thriller written by David Mamet, which will mean everything to some of you and nothing to most of you.
Mamet is a playwright, screenwriter, director. He creates his own language and his own world in which that language operates. Kilmer plays a Secret Service agent whose job it is to protect the President's daughter. She is kidnapped. His job, quite simply, is simple: Get the girl. Find the girl. At one point, when 'all is lost', as they say, he acquiesces. He abandons his mission. A woman close to the daughter implores him to continue. When he excuses himself by saying that it's not his job anymore, it's 'their' responsibility, she cuts him short: "There is no 'they'," she says. He had a mission -- to find the girl. He hasn't accomplished it. End of story.
It's a smart and witty and brilliant film. At its core lies what is at the core of most of us -- our sense of self, of what we must do, and the inevitable obstacles that lie in wait to thwart our plans.
The truth is, there are a lot of 'theys', and none at all. In the end, there is you. There is what you are putting out into the world. 'They' will not help you. All we can do is accept responsibility, as hard as that is, as fruitless as that is, and move on. Move forward. When you find yourself blaming 'they', 'them', 'the boss', 'the wife', the battle has been lost. You have forgot your mission. You have acquiesced. For even if by some stroke of Satan there is a 'they', it is irrelevant.
Only you can live through your life, and only you can change it.
(And I sometimes hate getting advice given to me, so take all of the above with a grain of salt. But sometimes it's nice to know that it's not just you -- everybody else thinks life is really, really tough, too, so remember that. Remember that the cool guy in Starbucks tapping away on his laptop who seems to have it all together is just as scared shitless as you are. He is. I swear.)
In that spirit:
Seek, above all, for a game worth playing. Such is the advice of the oracle to modern man. Having found the game play it with intensity -- play as if your life and sanity depended on it. (They do depend on it.) Follow the example of the French existentialists and flourish a banner bearing the word 'engagement.' Though nothing means anything and all roads are marked 'no exit', yet move as if your movements had some purpose. If life does not seem to offer a game worth playing, then invent one. For it must be clear, even to the most clouded intelligence, that any game is better than no game.
-- Robert S. DeRopp
The Master Game
If an unusual necessity forces us onward, a surprising thing occurs. The fatigue gets worse up to a certain point, when, gradually or suddenly, it passes away and we are fresher than before! We have evidently tapped a new level of energy. There may be layer after layer of this experience, a third and fourth 'wind'. We find amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own, sources of strength habitually not taxed, because habitually we never push through the obstruction of fatigue.
-- William James
Why should we be in such a desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
-- Henry David Thoreau
If you don't change the direction you're going, you're likely to end up where you're headed.
-- Chinese proverb
Man is not the sum of what he has but the totality of what he does not yet have, of what he might have.
-- Sartre
If you come to fork in the road, take it.
-- Yogi Berra
Wednesday, May 18, 2005
THE PEPSI GIRLS
I walked by them again yesterday -- the Pepsi Girls.
I call them that because they are the ones who line the streets at almost each and every corner, glumly sitting before an array of Pepsi and 7-Up bottles filled with what is obviously not any kind of soda known to man. Said substance is yellow and greasy and the glass from the bottles often catches the glare of the midday sun, snatches it, giving both the liquid inside and the bottles themselves a vivid, almost pristine glow.
(Notice I said 'soda' a few sentences back. Canadians NEVER say soda; only Americans do. Canadians just say 'pop'. And why is that? In the fifties, it was called 'soda pop', right? So why did the Yanks grab the 'soda' and the Canucks grab the 'pop'? Who decides these kind of linguistic rights? I'm trying to a be man of the people, all people, so I'm including both phrases here.)
No, gasoline is what's in the bottles. These little make-shift stands are where the motodops stop to fill up their bikes. (There are gas stations in Phnom Penh, yes, but they're usually for the big cars driven by the corrupt government officials.)
And usually, almost always, it's the girls doing the selling -- young girls, teenage girls, sitting under the hot Cambodian sun hour after hour, day after day, their heads wrapped in kromas to keep out the sun. (Does that actually work?)
I don't drive a moto. If I need to get somewhere, I just hold up my hand and a moto will stop and take me for a ride. (Both literally, and, sometimes, monetarily, too.) There's no reason on earth for me to buy gasoline from them.
And yet, sometimes I feel like giving them money. The Pepsi girls. Why shouldn't I? I sometimes give money to homeless people, beggars, wandering children. Why shouldn't I give a little bit of cash to these young ladies that are wasting their teenage years trying to support their families?
Living in a country like Cambodia is a test of one's altruism. A test of one's sanity, too. You can't give to everyone, so, if you are inclined to give, you have to choose. And even this process of deliberation, this conscious decision to give to person A but not to person B, to judge who is the poorer, the weakest, the neediest, this whole process sickens me, in some ways, gnaws away at my sense of self. These girls need an education; they need a future. They do not need a few stray dollars from a guilt-ridden westerner.
It is guilt that compels us, isn't it? Whether it's money for the tsunami-victims, or money for the Pepsi girls, it's all wrapped up in a big-red ribbon of guilt. I have what they do not; I am full while they are empty. This is not right, so I must give.
I will see the Pepsi Girls again. (I see them every day.) They're not looking for money from me; I don't have a bike, or a car, or any need for a bottle of gasoline, so their all-too-freuent glares at me are stares that they would give any foreigner. They are not looking for hand-outs.
But still, the urge. To prove that I'm a good person. To prove that I'm a caring person. To prove that I will give while others do not.
A human urge, yes, but a selfish one?
I'm not sure.
But I'm not sure that it matters, either.
Whether I give or not, whether my coin greases their palms or not, the Pepsi Girls will still be crouched on their plastic stools tomorrow, or the day after that, or a week from now, or a decade from now.
Either them, or their younger sisters.
Or, in time, their daughters.
The only real difference will be the shape and colour of the Pepsi logo gracing each and every bottle.
A trivial but strangely heartbreaking thought:
Pepsi's logo doesn't change all that often -- only once every twenty, thirty years, right?
Right now, at this very instant, for reasons I can't quite articulate but that seem perfectly natural and appropriate (to me), that little fact saddens me.
It saddens me a lot.
I call them that because they are the ones who line the streets at almost each and every corner, glumly sitting before an array of Pepsi and 7-Up bottles filled with what is obviously not any kind of soda known to man. Said substance is yellow and greasy and the glass from the bottles often catches the glare of the midday sun, snatches it, giving both the liquid inside and the bottles themselves a vivid, almost pristine glow.
(Notice I said 'soda' a few sentences back. Canadians NEVER say soda; only Americans do. Canadians just say 'pop'. And why is that? In the fifties, it was called 'soda pop', right? So why did the Yanks grab the 'soda' and the Canucks grab the 'pop'? Who decides these kind of linguistic rights? I'm trying to a be man of the people, all people, so I'm including both phrases here.)
No, gasoline is what's in the bottles. These little make-shift stands are where the motodops stop to fill up their bikes. (There are gas stations in Phnom Penh, yes, but they're usually for the big cars driven by the corrupt government officials.)
And usually, almost always, it's the girls doing the selling -- young girls, teenage girls, sitting under the hot Cambodian sun hour after hour, day after day, their heads wrapped in kromas to keep out the sun. (Does that actually work?)
I don't drive a moto. If I need to get somewhere, I just hold up my hand and a moto will stop and take me for a ride. (Both literally, and, sometimes, monetarily, too.) There's no reason on earth for me to buy gasoline from them.
And yet, sometimes I feel like giving them money. The Pepsi girls. Why shouldn't I? I sometimes give money to homeless people, beggars, wandering children. Why shouldn't I give a little bit of cash to these young ladies that are wasting their teenage years trying to support their families?
Living in a country like Cambodia is a test of one's altruism. A test of one's sanity, too. You can't give to everyone, so, if you are inclined to give, you have to choose. And even this process of deliberation, this conscious decision to give to person A but not to person B, to judge who is the poorer, the weakest, the neediest, this whole process sickens me, in some ways, gnaws away at my sense of self. These girls need an education; they need a future. They do not need a few stray dollars from a guilt-ridden westerner.
It is guilt that compels us, isn't it? Whether it's money for the tsunami-victims, or money for the Pepsi girls, it's all wrapped up in a big-red ribbon of guilt. I have what they do not; I am full while they are empty. This is not right, so I must give.
I will see the Pepsi Girls again. (I see them every day.) They're not looking for money from me; I don't have a bike, or a car, or any need for a bottle of gasoline, so their all-too-freuent glares at me are stares that they would give any foreigner. They are not looking for hand-outs.
But still, the urge. To prove that I'm a good person. To prove that I'm a caring person. To prove that I will give while others do not.
A human urge, yes, but a selfish one?
I'm not sure.
But I'm not sure that it matters, either.
Whether I give or not, whether my coin greases their palms or not, the Pepsi Girls will still be crouched on their plastic stools tomorrow, or the day after that, or a week from now, or a decade from now.
Either them, or their younger sisters.
Or, in time, their daughters.
The only real difference will be the shape and colour of the Pepsi logo gracing each and every bottle.
A trivial but strangely heartbreaking thought:
Pepsi's logo doesn't change all that often -- only once every twenty, thirty years, right?
Right now, at this very instant, for reasons I can't quite articulate but that seem perfectly natural and appropriate (to me), that little fact saddens me.
It saddens me a lot.
SHADOWS AND ILLUMINATION
Last night at my old school. Me, visiting friends. Friends, rehearsing. Watching the last of the students clean up their gear as they finished practicing for the first annual (?) University of Cambodia Business Marketing Students Fashion and Entertainment Show. (Or something like that.) A makeshift stage, 'L' shaped, occupying the centre portion of the upstairs conference centre. The lights, dim. The floor, cluttered. Empty Coke bottles. Paper wrappers. The remnants of Cambodian clean-up habits. Strange. Drink, eat, drop. A custom I've never gotten used to.
Elegaic. That's the word. A good word, too, I think, one of those words that makes me think that the English language does, in fact, have certain pieces of vocabulary that rival the depth of meaning and insinuation found in Japanese. Shining through the windows that lined the far wall I could see the random, shifting flow of traffic's residue; the glow from golden headlights cast their roving arcs across the contours of the room on an intermittent basis. Shadows, mixed with illumination.
Some students changed into streetclothes behind closed doors, behind my back. Behind: muffled, excited voices. In front: only silence. Emptiness. I felt both solitary and content. (Is one, in fact, dependent on the other? I'm not sure.)
For a few moments, less than a minute, I was alone in the conference hall. Dozens of folding chairs lined in rows. An empty lectern, looking forlorn, almost hurt. (No speaker would be coming tonight.) On Sunday, there would be students and parents and teachers and curious spectators, all eager to see the fashion, the skits, the singing, the dancing, but for now the room was empty. Almost expectant.
This is somewhat new in Cambodia, this random assemblage of young, untrained talent. So is the discipline that's required -- the practices, the repetitions, the sense of focus and intentness that I see in my old students' eyes when they go over their dance moves, one by one, again, one more time. They've never worked for anything before; they've never been pushed before. And they are responding. Elated.
I left the room. Soon the room would be completely dark. It felt like the last episode of some sitcom that has extended its expiry date for far too long, that final episode where the main characters leave their house/apartment/school behind, taking one last, lingering look at the place they called home.
I've always loved those episodes.
Elegaic. That's the word. A good word, too, I think, one of those words that makes me think that the English language does, in fact, have certain pieces of vocabulary that rival the depth of meaning and insinuation found in Japanese. Shining through the windows that lined the far wall I could see the random, shifting flow of traffic's residue; the glow from golden headlights cast their roving arcs across the contours of the room on an intermittent basis. Shadows, mixed with illumination.
Some students changed into streetclothes behind closed doors, behind my back. Behind: muffled, excited voices. In front: only silence. Emptiness. I felt both solitary and content. (Is one, in fact, dependent on the other? I'm not sure.)
For a few moments, less than a minute, I was alone in the conference hall. Dozens of folding chairs lined in rows. An empty lectern, looking forlorn, almost hurt. (No speaker would be coming tonight.) On Sunday, there would be students and parents and teachers and curious spectators, all eager to see the fashion, the skits, the singing, the dancing, but for now the room was empty. Almost expectant.
This is somewhat new in Cambodia, this random assemblage of young, untrained talent. So is the discipline that's required -- the practices, the repetitions, the sense of focus and intentness that I see in my old students' eyes when they go over their dance moves, one by one, again, one more time. They've never worked for anything before; they've never been pushed before. And they are responding. Elated.
I left the room. Soon the room would be completely dark. It felt like the last episode of some sitcom that has extended its expiry date for far too long, that final episode where the main characters leave their house/apartment/school behind, taking one last, lingering look at the place they called home.
I've always loved those episodes.
Tuesday, May 17, 2005
BIG WILLIE STYLE
I've finally figured out the reason why Shakespeare has frightened me so much. It's not the erudite vocabulary (though the words are certainly flowery and alluring), and it's not the convoluted plots that wander from here to there, through winding narrative backroads that loop in on one another (though they certainly do that, too).
No, the scary thing about Shakespeare is this: It's all conversations.
That's right -- it's the dialogue that does me in. (Even the all to0 frequent monologues are, in fact, dialogues, with the audience as co-conspirators.) And considering that ALL of Shakespeare's plays, (and all plays in general, for that matter) are dialogue, that means I either conquer my fears or head on over to the Judy Blume section of the library for once and for all.
Of course, I'm in a wounded state. I just made it through (barely) THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, mostly because a) I realized I hadn't tackled old Willie in a long, long, time and b)I saw a copy of the DVD of the new MERCHANT OF VENICE featuring Al Pacino as Shylock in the video store, and I want to see it, I do, but I also want to underSTAND it when I watch it.
Having finished the play, I can attest that I comprehended, tops, twenty, twenty-five percent of what went down. (It was only while reading the critical notes at the back of the text that I realized: Oh. This was a comedy. Somehow the jokes went RIGHT over my head.)
It's the dialogue, see.
In real life, we talk to communicate. As do Shakespeare's characters, of course, but they communicate in verse and in riddle, in poems and in parallelograms, it seems like, and I'll be damned if I can ultimately figure out what they're saying, to themselves or each other. It's poetry, is what it is, rich and full and evocative. It's not the way that people have ever spoken to each other in the history of the world, or at least in the history of EVERYBODY LOVES RAMOND. (Never seen it, heard it's good, r.i.p.)
But I guess that's the point. We go to the theatre, we go to the movies, for something more-than-life. We go to the theatre to see language elevated, to see life elevated.
Shakespeare's plays provide that. They hint at what life could be and might have been like, in a denser time.
They should be watched, I think, to be fully comprehended; they were meant to be performed, after all, not read. Right now Denzel Washington is playing Brutus in JULIUS CEASAR, and man oh man would that be a sight to see. (Included in the cast is Canadian Shakespearan great Colm Feore, who also played the bad guy in THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK, but don't hold that against him; I saw Feore performing CEASAR in Stratford, Ontario, during my second year of high school, minus the Denzel.) Reading the play is difficult enough; I can't imagine performing it, night after night. Then would be the time when Shakespeare's words came truly to life; then would be the time when you could appreciate, truly and deeply, what the words can and must do. (I can't imagine how Shakespeare is translated. I would LOVE to know Japanese well enough to read Shakespeare in Japanese. I'm tempted to spend the rest of my life doing just that -- studying Japanese more so I can understand Shakespeare in another, ulterior context, and I'm halfway serious about that. But maybe it's better I don't. There was a Japanese translator who committed suicide after trying to translate Faulkner into Japanese, so perhaps some things are best left a mystery.)
If there was a Shakespeare. Many people think he didn't even exist, that the dude who wrote the plays was Marlowe, or the Queen of England, or an amalgamation of a dozen other playwrights. A new book by Hollywood lawyer Bert Fields is the latest in a line of texts backing up this claim.
I'm all for the discussion. Bring it on. Keep forcing stiffs like me to be interested in this guy, because even though it hurts like hell to read his stuff, and even though my brain feels tired and aggravated after a twenty-minute session with the words (and what words they are!), there is a resonance, an aftertaste, that promises better and longer feasts to come, if I endure a little longer.
No, the scary thing about Shakespeare is this: It's all conversations.
That's right -- it's the dialogue that does me in. (Even the all to0 frequent monologues are, in fact, dialogues, with the audience as co-conspirators.) And considering that ALL of Shakespeare's plays, (and all plays in general, for that matter) are dialogue, that means I either conquer my fears or head on over to the Judy Blume section of the library for once and for all.
Of course, I'm in a wounded state. I just made it through (barely) THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, mostly because a) I realized I hadn't tackled old Willie in a long, long, time and b)I saw a copy of the DVD of the new MERCHANT OF VENICE featuring Al Pacino as Shylock in the video store, and I want to see it, I do, but I also want to underSTAND it when I watch it.
Having finished the play, I can attest that I comprehended, tops, twenty, twenty-five percent of what went down. (It was only while reading the critical notes at the back of the text that I realized: Oh. This was a comedy. Somehow the jokes went RIGHT over my head.)
It's the dialogue, see.
In real life, we talk to communicate. As do Shakespeare's characters, of course, but they communicate in verse and in riddle, in poems and in parallelograms, it seems like, and I'll be damned if I can ultimately figure out what they're saying, to themselves or each other. It's poetry, is what it is, rich and full and evocative. It's not the way that people have ever spoken to each other in the history of the world, or at least in the history of EVERYBODY LOVES RAMOND. (Never seen it, heard it's good, r.i.p.)
But I guess that's the point. We go to the theatre, we go to the movies, for something more-than-life. We go to the theatre to see language elevated, to see life elevated.
Shakespeare's plays provide that. They hint at what life could be and might have been like, in a denser time.
They should be watched, I think, to be fully comprehended; they were meant to be performed, after all, not read. Right now Denzel Washington is playing Brutus in JULIUS CEASAR, and man oh man would that be a sight to see. (Included in the cast is Canadian Shakespearan great Colm Feore, who also played the bad guy in THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK, but don't hold that against him; I saw Feore performing CEASAR in Stratford, Ontario, during my second year of high school, minus the Denzel.) Reading the play is difficult enough; I can't imagine performing it, night after night. Then would be the time when Shakespeare's words came truly to life; then would be the time when you could appreciate, truly and deeply, what the words can and must do. (I can't imagine how Shakespeare is translated. I would LOVE to know Japanese well enough to read Shakespeare in Japanese. I'm tempted to spend the rest of my life doing just that -- studying Japanese more so I can understand Shakespeare in another, ulterior context, and I'm halfway serious about that. But maybe it's better I don't. There was a Japanese translator who committed suicide after trying to translate Faulkner into Japanese, so perhaps some things are best left a mystery.)
If there was a Shakespeare. Many people think he didn't even exist, that the dude who wrote the plays was Marlowe, or the Queen of England, or an amalgamation of a dozen other playwrights. A new book by Hollywood lawyer Bert Fields is the latest in a line of texts backing up this claim.
I'm all for the discussion. Bring it on. Keep forcing stiffs like me to be interested in this guy, because even though it hurts like hell to read his stuff, and even though my brain feels tired and aggravated after a twenty-minute session with the words (and what words they are!), there is a resonance, an aftertaste, that promises better and longer feasts to come, if I endure a little longer.
Sunday, May 15, 2005
YOU, TOO, CAN LEARN FROM A NUDE CZECH SUPERMODEL CLINGING TO A TREE
It's not often that a nude Czech supermodel clutches to a tree for eight hours while the aftereffects of a tsunami continue to ravage and torment the people and places that swirl and twirl around her precarious perch. If that were me, and I were a nude supermodel, clutching for dear life to a submerged tree on a completely submerged beach in Thailand, it would totally make me think about life a little bit.
(I mean, that episode of Family Ties where Alex's life-long friend died in a car accident and Alex spent the whole episode sequestered in a psychiatrist's office made think about life, too, but this was different. And I'm not saying that I haven't been a nude supermodel in the past; I'm just not one now. That period of my life is over, for better or worse. And I do have a slight connection to the world of fully-clothed supermodels, given that Linda Evangelista grew up in my hometown -- St.Catharines, Ontario-- and the street I lived on for eight years was called Evangelista Court, named after her family. So between my nude supermodelling days in the past, and the whole Evangelista-hometown-old street connection, I can totally relate the supermodel in the tree.)
Petra Nemcova was on Larry King Live yesterday. She's the aformentioned nude supermodel who survived the tsunami while her fiancee, a disarmingly ordinary looking guy, perished. While watching the show, I was struck by her goodwill, her attitude, her positive view of life, her tenacity. Since most supermodels I've ever seen have been stuck-up bitches, I was blown away by how damn, well, nice she was. After every question taken from the callers she would smile genuinely and say: "Thank-you very much for your question." That sounds simple. It is simple. But the simple things are often what we humans leave behind in our race towards the more important stuff in life, like flat-screen TVs and the latest version of the I-pod.
And then I was struck by why and how I was struck. She was civil, polite, generous with her answers and her insights. After one caller asked a roundabout question that seemed to take forever, Larry, being 74 and cranky (despite being married to a gorgeous blonde Mormon) was clearly pissed, asking repeatedly: "What's your question, sir?" But Petra (I can call her that cuz we're tight) had alread heard the question, had been listening, and she answered, clearly and sympathetically. Maybe her nonchalantly generous attitude stems from her miraculous survival, or from the fact that she grew up poor in communist Czechoslovakia. I felt a little bit sad to be moved simply at how nice a person was, because it implies that most of the people around us aren't that nice on a daily basis, which I know not to be the case, but sometimes we forget and neglect how commanding sheer and unadorned pleasantness can be.
The tsunami (which Cambodia was thankfully spared the effects of) was a horrendous event that has already seemed to fade from our collective memory after the, um, tsunami-like wave of generosity it generated in the days and weeks following its onslaught. So many people's lives have been eradicated; so many people's fates have been thrown to the wind. We will never know why some lived and others died. What we learn from this is what we choose to, I guess, and supermodel-Petra learned to take each day as it comes -- to live it, with laughter.
Sometimes the things that disarm us are unexpected. Sometimes even beautiful people surprise us. I try to learn something every day, and what I learned from Ms.Petra's attitude yesterday was: It's okay to be polite and friendly and compassionate to strangers (even those on a phone). You don't have to be cynical and cranky and a prick. It's somewhat cleansing to realize that we have the capacity to be good and kind and decent in ordinary situations when we want to. If we want to.
(I mean, that episode of Family Ties where Alex's life-long friend died in a car accident and Alex spent the whole episode sequestered in a psychiatrist's office made think about life, too, but this was different. And I'm not saying that I haven't been a nude supermodel in the past; I'm just not one now. That period of my life is over, for better or worse. And I do have a slight connection to the world of fully-clothed supermodels, given that Linda Evangelista grew up in my hometown -- St.Catharines, Ontario-- and the street I lived on for eight years was called Evangelista Court, named after her family. So between my nude supermodelling days in the past, and the whole Evangelista-hometown-old street connection, I can totally relate the supermodel in the tree.)
Petra Nemcova was on Larry King Live yesterday. She's the aformentioned nude supermodel who survived the tsunami while her fiancee, a disarmingly ordinary looking guy, perished. While watching the show, I was struck by her goodwill, her attitude, her positive view of life, her tenacity. Since most supermodels I've ever seen have been stuck-up bitches, I was blown away by how damn, well, nice she was. After every question taken from the callers she would smile genuinely and say: "Thank-you very much for your question." That sounds simple. It is simple. But the simple things are often what we humans leave behind in our race towards the more important stuff in life, like flat-screen TVs and the latest version of the I-pod.
And then I was struck by why and how I was struck. She was civil, polite, generous with her answers and her insights. After one caller asked a roundabout question that seemed to take forever, Larry, being 74 and cranky (despite being married to a gorgeous blonde Mormon) was clearly pissed, asking repeatedly: "What's your question, sir?" But Petra (I can call her that cuz we're tight) had alread heard the question, had been listening, and she answered, clearly and sympathetically. Maybe her nonchalantly generous attitude stems from her miraculous survival, or from the fact that she grew up poor in communist Czechoslovakia. I felt a little bit sad to be moved simply at how nice a person was, because it implies that most of the people around us aren't that nice on a daily basis, which I know not to be the case, but sometimes we forget and neglect how commanding sheer and unadorned pleasantness can be.
The tsunami (which Cambodia was thankfully spared the effects of) was a horrendous event that has already seemed to fade from our collective memory after the, um, tsunami-like wave of generosity it generated in the days and weeks following its onslaught. So many people's lives have been eradicated; so many people's fates have been thrown to the wind. We will never know why some lived and others died. What we learn from this is what we choose to, I guess, and supermodel-Petra learned to take each day as it comes -- to live it, with laughter.
Sometimes the things that disarm us are unexpected. Sometimes even beautiful people surprise us. I try to learn something every day, and what I learned from Ms.Petra's attitude yesterday was: It's okay to be polite and friendly and compassionate to strangers (even those on a phone). You don't have to be cynical and cranky and a prick. It's somewhat cleansing to realize that we have the capacity to be good and kind and decent in ordinary situations when we want to. If we want to.
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