‘The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains’. Something like that. (Ray Bradbury, Long Rain). Actually, I am dramatising, and also being unfair. It has been sunny for a few days.
I wanted to open a new document and start typing my blog; but I couldn’t resist opening the sacred folder called THE THING, and do the wordcount for all the chapters of my dissertation. 8500. Not too bad, actually, considering that the introduction, conclusion, summary, bibliography and references, appendices – all will take another 3000. And also considering that the chapters themselves aren’t finished yet. So I can easily go beyond 12000. I wish the content of THE THING was coming up to scratch though, which I doubt.
Yesterday I only wrote a couple of paragraphs, but read quite a bit, and it was the most exciting bit. I was reading about the role of oil exports in Russian economy, and whether or not it is suffering from Dutch desease. There’s a lot written, and very controversial and exciting. I was sitting there, on the ninth floor (literally on the floor, by the way), and puzzling why I hadn’t chosen it as a topic for my dissertation. If anyone is reading this who is thinking of a topic for something (anything), please, believe me: nothing you choose is too ambitious. It’s much better to choose an ambitious topic which really interests you and then suffer from there being too much for you to bear, rather than choose a small and boring topic, which you will soon exhaust (and which will exhaust you even sooner), and then sit down and sulk.
(Hahaha, so funny, Rishab has just received a letter with the following address on it:
Rishab Khanna
Flat 2/1, 15 White (!)
Glasgow
G3 8PE
UK London (!)
The postcode is totally random, but the ‘Glasgow-UK-London’ thing is classic. It reminds me of: my family and friends, who would ask me how London was whenever I returned after spending three weeks in Oxford; my niece, who I suspect still thinks that I’m studying in Oxford; and my Mum, who calls Scotland England, and when I correct her, says that it’s all the same.)
So we live, spending most of our days glued to the laptop screens. Even though the surroundings change (we study in the living room, kitchen, big blue room with the windows wide open and the precious sun coming in, Adam Smith Library, main Library, Offshore, Tinderbox, Beanscene…), we barely notice it, and the time flies fast.
I’ve finally finished War and Peace. I really loved it, though I skipped quite a bit. I really loved the psychological and ethical components, but not the philosophical one. However, I found in another book (Desmond Morris, People Watching) something which is so well connected with the whole War and Peace philosphical framework. Judge for yourselves:
‘…It is evident that even if mankind does possess inborn aggressive urges, they are hardly going to explain the occurrence of modern wars. They may help us to understand why we go red in the face and shout and shake our fists at one another when we are angry, but they cannot possibly be used to explain the bombing of cities or the mass invasion of friendly neighbours by dictatorial warlords… Self defence and self-assertion is one thing; mass murder is quite another. The savagery of violence in modern times can only be properly compared to the bloodshed witnessed when animal groups become hopelessly overcrowded… provoked by the unnatural conditions prevailing at the time’ and so on and so forth.
He basically dwells on the idea that people are manipulated through appealing to their allegedly inborn agression, whereas in fact it is our truly inborn cooperation that makes it possible to play whole nations off against each other. This proposition makes a lot of sense to me. I also liked what he said about there being a lot of individuals who do not experience parental love the way they are supposed to, all due to this ‘unnatural conditions’ of our time, and then taking it out on ‘parents substitutes’ – basically, on anyone who comes their way, hence all the senseless violence and things like that. This thought also makes sense.
Well, anyway, THE EVENT was going (sorry for the blasphemy) to Edinburgh last Sunday. We went to meet Rishab’s relatives, and to see a ballet (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/08/21/btballet121.xml). We saw: world premiere of Ride the Beast (choreography by Petronio and music by Radiohead), For MG: The Movie (the famous Trisha Brown and Curran) and Fearful Symmetries (Page and Adams). Trishna’s bit was something completely beyond my understanding (there were some people standing, running and lying, and instead of music were some very unpleasant sounds of a port town); and the Page’s one was spectacular. The music was fabulous; the anxiety of the violins and repetitiveness of the melody reminiscent of Michael Nyman to an extent. It was a kind of music to which you used to dance as a child, when you simply felt that you either dance, or die; so it seemed as if dancing to this music was a matter of life and death for the dancers.
Needless to say, it was Ride the Beast that bought me; it proved to be… OK. I loved what Petronio himself wrote about it: ‘Radiohead sail through genre and form effortlessly and passionately, and their music demands a physical response from me that bypasses reason. I have chosen the songs for various reasons: personal pleasure, their ability to propel, a desire to hit some peaks in Radiohead’s history, and ultimately their ability to shape a world I wanted to move these dancers through’. I especially like ‘a world I wanted to move these dancers through’. I didn’t think highly of the piece though; I think it was a very personal perception of Petroni’s, and it was very far from how I perceive this music. He put on Fitter Happier, Creep (acoustic), Hunting Bears, Idioteque and National Anthem (two genuine masterpieces). Fitter Happier opened the night, and it was quite interesting to watch; it rests fully on Yorke’s computerised voice, and I was curious to see how the dancers will dance to THE SPEECH; it is later on that some samples of sad and beautiful piano and other confusing sounds come in. When they started dancing, I held my breath; I thought, can it be? Can it be that now they will just simply go and do it, dance to Fitter Happier? Creep was too simplistic in my view. On hearing Idioteque my heart missed every other beat, as always; I figured out straight away that it was his favourite. One could tell. It is my favourite, too, though, so I might be biased. Petronio and the dancers could, to a certain extent, reproduce the despair and chaos that is present in most Radiohead’s works; however, as I see it, there were too many fussy movements, which I think are alien to R’s music. On the whole, I am dissatisfied once again. It’s like reading reviews on Ratchatcher; there is so much more to it, it’s so much subtler, and deeper, and more dimensional and meaningful.
