A Most Wrenching Piece of Music

While I was climbing my way up the higher-learning stairs, I stumbled upon the fact that I might not be able to graduate. Thus, like any other students, I panicked. Ran around like a lunatic with no friend to turn to except for my computer. There I began to nurture my writing skills. I found release in them, by re-interpreting the incidences in my student life to within my stories, and making them disappear by solving even the most difficult dilemmas. But in real life, it was not so.

I continued to scrounge around for relief, or maybe something that might help ease my impending doom. I discovered Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings. 

I decided to play it when my roomies were gone and I was all alone in my room. For one, they would not understand. Luckily that suitable day came, and I was free to play it as loud as I could. 

When it began, I could not hear it at all. It seemed to materialise out of the air, and began to arch upward, reaching toward something, only to pushed back by another invisible force. It was less struggling and more like trying to stand up inside a quicksand that slowly sucks one in. But then all throughout the piece, one continually tries to stand up, pushing gently upward, with that invisible force still pushing in the opposite direction. 

When the strings finally rally around that invisible force, the resulting sound was almost shocking, weeping and angry at the same time, like someone saying "Here! Take it! Isn't this what you've wanted all this time!?" Said with tears, anger and force, the words simply fell flat on emptiness. We are left on a musical limbo, before the struggle began again, but with less force, as if the music finally relented to that invisible force. It even died away to a whisper.

But what a whisper. 

P/S: It was fortunate that I was alone listening to this - I cried buckets. And no - I made it through, I graduated.

Let me tell you about: Gail Carriger's Soulless

A few months ago I saw a shocking pink title on a  book spine. It had an octopus on it and the title SOULLESS on it. That got me wondering - was it another book that should remain out of my life or a keeper?

It should have remained out of my life, because I can't get enough of it! And it's not everyday for me to stumble on a story that was unfolding in the most interesting way. Let me tell you about it.

Alexia Tarrabotti was half-Italian, soulless, and worse, a spinster. The unholy trinity of sin, apparently, when you're in the turn-of the 19-century Britain. Alexia is no run-on-the-mill heroine: aside from nearly irrepressible desire to chase down the truth, she packs a mean parasol. Yep. Parasol. Not umbrella, a highly pimped up parasol. There are big differences between - oh heck, just Wikipedia it.

The world where Alexia exists accepts the existence of supernaturals, namely the vampires and the werewolves. Some even become government officials. Humans who desire to be one of these supernaturals are warned, though; not all survive the turning. However, our heroine is an entirely different entity. She has no soul, as the book trumpeted at the cover. What does that have to do with anything?

Well, everything apparently. Her condition means that she nullifies the supernatural powers of these supernatural beings. And that is where her problem really begins. One night at a private ball, she accidentally kills a vampire - and with the wit of a proper Victorian lady, falls down and faints swoons.

From here readers are introduced to the first werewolves - Professor Lyall, a Beta, and Lord Maccon, a new Alpha. Not your normal werewolves, they're neither drop dead gorgeous (New Moon, anyone?) nor friendly. Just 'civilised'. After all, that's the most important virtue anyone, supernatural or human, must have to live in London.

I am thoroughly entertained by this book. Alexia and Lord Maccon provides most of the meaty conversations, with a very, very - how should I say this delicately - loud vampire and a friend whose hat-sense needs some serious reboot time running around in the background. They all are a winsome bunch, if I should say. And I am looking forward to the next story in 2010.

Celebration

Yep. I'm talking about Madonna, that ageless mutton. I should be very lucky if I had her level of stamina when I hit 50!

My first encounter with Madonna was when I was still a young, impressionable teenager of 13. A friend bought a cassette and I happened to see the cover. It was a heavily made-up woman wearing very skimpy negligee. I thought nothing of it and played the cassette.

I didn't like the first track, and fast-forwarded it to the next track. When the next song began, I slowly savoured the lyrics, the slow-paced music, the guitar works. It was refreshing, it was new, and not to mention sensuous. Top it off with 'Bedtime Story' and finish it off with 'Take a Bow' - I was captivated. Totally captivated. I ended up borrowing and playing the tape for a week.

Much later, I found out that this singer, whose voice charmed me, was once a seemingly wayward artiste whose fore never seemed to extend beyond overt sexuality and total debauchery.

However, in retrospect, I realised how smart this woman was, and how she dared to push the envelope for performance art in an era where artists were mostly cowed by their contracts. Not saying that there were none, but as far as I am concerned, Madonna was a prime example of artists pushing and breaking boundaries. Not only in songs but also in video-making. She elevated it to an art form. See below.

Madonna dared, in an era where sex and the like was hidden behind doors, to showcase sex as an integral part of her art, and not to feel ashamed of it. Which is why I think her music is as fresh it is now as it was back then. You might not agree but there's the comment button free for you to abuse. Meanwhile, I'll just kick back and listen to the double CD CELEBRATION.

Life in Narration

I always felt a need to write since I was very young. Maybe because I did not talk a lot back then. I was an introvert (still am) and always had my attention somewhere else.

My very first output was a poem, of all things. The memory was sketchy at best, but all I could remember was how very surprised I was at that piece of work. Surprised, because I was a very bad English student. I loathed the subject, or more precisely, the teacher.

Back to the poem. It had something to do with a swan gliding across a tranquil lake before stopping under a bough beside the lake. It could have been around three stanzas at most, and I remember thinking to myself, 'What in the world had just happened?'

A few days ago I saw a newspaper article lamenting the existence of Twitter and SMS and how they could spell the end of novels, short stories and the art of narrative. Life nowadays wants everything to be short but leaves a great impact. Ours is a generation that relies on speed, no matter how it comes about.

Storytellers and poets used to hold important social standings in the society across the history. When newspapers came about, they were replaced by reporters who more or less had that kind of gift, the gift of narration, albeit a bit terse and impersonal. (Objectivity sans emotions, or something like that.) Now, the writer continued, with the advent of Twitter and SMS, it destorys the urge to narrate the reality around us and replace it with several near-unintelligible words and symbols as such:

W8 4 me @ d stre! C wat I mean?

I really miss the days when the postman came and shove the postbox full of letters. Penpals were the object of envy back then. Someone you barely knew actually took the time to sit down, get pen and paper, and start writing about what he did that day to how the dog bit off his shoe.

My father once bought a typewriter - an Olivetti machine - but he rarely used it. Every time I sat in front of it, I imagined myself a writer and began typing away, taking pains to get the spelling and grammar right. Not because I wanted to practise my English, but more out of necessity - when you spelled the words wrong, there was no UNDO button. That also meant you'd waste the ribbon and paper.

Stories came out of the typewriter like nothing I have read before. Whenever I pulled the paper off the typewriter and read what I'd laboured upon, I questioned myself inwardly - Did you really write this? - then went off to play.

To be continued...