Archive for December, 2009

Christianity built some amazing churches and cathedrals in this country and it’s these places we tend to visit when we tour the UK. But the myths and legends of pre-Christian Britain are also fascinating, though sometimes overlooked. Traces of this mysterious time remain around the UK in the form of standing stones, the most famous of which is Stonehenge. I remember reading an excellent book Albion, a guide to legendary Britain which evoked this mythological landscape brilliantly. Unfortunately, this title is out of print but you could try The Enchanted Land: Myths and Legends of Britain’s Landscape
- its blurb says: “Ancient folklore is bursting with tales of the land; legends revolving around its hills and mountains, caves and hollows, and springs and wells. Such stories tell of how these physical features first came into being - be it to hide an errant knight or the direct result of a local giant’s feral rage. These tales add a richness and depth to local history throughout the land, and the repeated appearances of monsters, fairies, ogres and spirits make them a delight for all ages.”

These ancient customs and beliefs went underground for 2,000 years when Christianity came to dominate and the people who practiced the old ways of worship came to be known as pagans. The word pagan is derived from the Latin paganus, meaning country dweller but somehow became associated with all who were non-Christians, with an implied negative meaning.

Now, it looks like more and more people in the West are turning back to the ancient animist religion, drawn by its focus on nature and the earth and all its bounties, according to this BBC report:

My favourite legend, I think, is the story that brings together Christianity and the ancient pagan religion at one of the most sacred spots of ancient Britain, Glastonbury. Joseph of Arimathea is supposed to have brought the young boy Jesus to the UK. After the crucifixion, Joseph apparently brought the Holy Grail back to Glastonbury and buried it there. In pre-Christian folklore, Glastonbury is Avalon, and the entrance to the Underworld. Glastonbury is also bound together with Arthur , a pre-Christian mythic hero who was Christianised into the one we know today with the round table and the knights, and the quest of the Holy Grail (a magic cauldron in the ancient myth). It’s all a bit of a muddle but that’s part of it’s fascination for me - the themes of a messianic figure, resurrection and return and a quest for a holy vessel blur across pagan and Christian boundaries and underline for me our very human need for spiritual renewal whatever religous form that need ultimately takes.

Posted via web from Fusion View Lifestream

I’ve blogged a lot in the last few years about the decline of the publishing industry and how that is making it tough for novelists - especially new and budding ones - to get their works published in the traditional book market. But here’s some good news. Apparently, the one area for writers that’s booming is playwriting. According to The Guardian, “The amount of new writing produced by mainstream, subsidised theatre has more than doubled in the last six years. Many of these plays have opened in large theatres, with impressive ticket sales.”

So if you’ve been having a hard time getting your novel accepted by book publishers, maybe now’s the time to switch to writing plays.

I wonder how easy it would be for a novelist to change genres so radically. I think I’m a novelist to the core - or at least, a prose writer to the core - but I’ve also had a go at writing plays. At one time, I absolutely loved Tennessee Williams. I saw as many Williams’s plays as I could on the London stage as well as on film. I read them all and devoured biographies and letters. It was probably as much the drama and tragedy in his own life that drew me to him as his plays themselves. So, inspired by the poetry of his American South, I picked up my pen in drizzly, ol’ London and tried my hand at playwriting.

It’s quite a differenet discipline from novel writing, with the focus on dialogue and creating the drama, tension and story through the interaction of spoken language. I loved the challenge but I’m not sure I was any good at it. My stage directions were much too verbose - rather like the descriptive narrative passages you get between the dialogie in novels, strangely enough! And I included way too much detail about motivation and back story in each bit of dialogue rather than trusting that the actor and director to put their interpretation into what I had written.

Also, I found it a challenge constraining the story to a few, tight locations over a short period of time - Williams’s plays all take place in a house or apartment, building up a sense of claustrophobia - as I wanted to caper around all over the place and over a long time span, rather like a movie or the novels that I eventually published (which take place in London and several locations across Malaysia, over a time span of 10 years and more).

I had no idea how I would try to get the play publicly performed, even assuming that I managed to polish up the incompleted first draft into any semblance of readiness. Whereas there are books like The Writers Handbook and The Writers and Artists Yearbook that tell you how to get your article, story or book published in print media, it didn’t seem so easy to find out how you go about submitting a play to whoever you needed to get it to in order for it to start it’s journey towards performance. To be honest, I didn’t actually investigate it very deeply as I knew that playwriting was nowhere near a strength of mine!

I wonder also how easily a novelist would adapt to the teamsport that is theatre. We’re used to being The Author, the sole creator of the story, the sole writer of the words. Some novelists have a really hard time accepting feedback from their editors even once their manuscript has got past the various hurdles and been accepted for publication. How much more difficult would we find it taking in feedback from the director, the producer, the actors and more! And working on rewrite after rewrite - and having to face your precious words changed or improvised upon during the rehearsal process ….! Would we adapt and enjoy the creative or collaboration or would we flounce off in a huff?

I’ve never been put to the test in that way so I don’t know how I would deal with it. I hope of course that I’d rise to the team occasion. But would I?

What do you think? Have you written plays or switched between playwriting and novel writing? I’d love to hear how you handle that team side of things!

Photo: thanks to Gil Searcy from flickr.com (CCL)

via news.bbc.co.uk

We are so relieved that we hadn’t planned to travel anywhere this holiday season - the whole of the UK is frozen and it seems that the Continent and the north east of the USA are also locked in the weather’s icy grip. I’ve been watching the news reports of all those people stuck at airports and also traumatised by the Eurostar breakdowns (reported as due to the “wrong sort of snow” by Channel 4) - ooh, I really feel for them. What a hideous way to start the Xmas festivities!

We’re planning to spend the next few days snug at home. We have a full fridge and freezer, lots of wine and chocolate as well as a stack of books and DVDs. I’ve brought down some duvets and knitted rugs to the living room so we can sprawl on the sofas cosily. I also plan to catch up with some blogging and social networking on my cute little netbook - which I’ve worked out how to use while lying down!

Wishing everyone a happy holiday season - and to those who are trying to travel to friends and family: the very best of luck for getting to your destination as soon as possible!

Posted via web from Fusion View Lifestream

Every so often, at Xmas time, a friend of ours who lives in New Zealand sends us the latest Topp Twins CD. What Twins? The Topp Twins. They are, well, twins who do a double act of country music and comedy and they are absolutely hillarious - and absolutely talented.

This year, our friend sent us the DVD of their movie, a documentary covering their 30 years in entertainment. If I was to give the elevator pitch to who they are, it would go something like this: yodelling, lesbian country & western comedy twins from New Zealand who are also activists for nuclear disarmament, lesbian & gay rights, Maori land rights and cancer awareness and whose act includes “characters” such as a couple of hard-drinking men’s men, society ladies and holiday camp leaders.

Yeah. Kinda difficult to categorise…

But they seem to have the knack to unite their diverse audience of rednecks, high society types, farm folk and city lesbians and gays and are considered NZ’s national treasures.

I think it’s a combination of their toe-tapping music, hilarious performances and warm, affectionate good humour even when touching on political subjects - and their ability to carry their audience along with them so that everyone is just so busy having a good time, they forget the differences that might divide them. But you can analyse it till the cows come home: at the end of the day, I reckon it’s because they are simply a hoot! See for yourself in the following videos:

The Yodelling Song

The Spoon Song

They have an official channel on Youtube at: http://www.youtube.com/user/ToppTwins

So, thanks, Trisha, for this year’s fab Xmas present!

I had my hair tidied up yesterday and it looks much chic-er than the rather lanky, unkempt look I’d been sporting in the last few weeks until I managed to find the time for the trim. I’m told it’s sort of Demi Moore-ish (in the movie Ghost) so I’m quite pleased.

But if you look at it another way, it’s possibly also John, Paul, George and Ringo-ish. We went to the Beatles to Bowie exhibition today at the National Portrait Gallery and I felt a little bit self-conscious as I gazed at the photos of the Fab Four in their early days, while my own reflection from the glass frame gazed back at me. I’ve got a mop top, yeah, yeah, yeah…

It was fascinating to see their evolution over the 9 years or so of the 1960s, starting off with their mop top look and ending with lanky hair, beards and Yoko on the threshold of the 1970s. They were a band for only around a decade - and what a decade! - but they have come to dominate pop music in an iconic way even now almost fifty years after they first formed.

Bowie crops up from time to time over that decade, looking clean cut and non-descript for the most part. He only comes into his own in 1969 with Space Oddity and the uniquely odd persona of Ziggy Stardust. With him, the weird and wonderful 70s had begun!

The 70s were not my era - for hair or anything else. I couldn’t carry off long-ish hippy hair - it just looked oily and manky, draped down either side of my face. It was also they decade when I was a teenager. Ugh. I could do without re-living the pimples and moods…

But then I have to say, I’m glad I wasn’t a grown woman in the 60s - all the female pop icons of that time had impossibly feminine hair: Dusty Springfied with her bouffant beehive, some like Lulu with curved helmet like page boys, others with long Rapunzel tresses. Only Twiggy had short hair - and even shorter dresses!

I love my short mop top hair - so, hurray for the modern day and Demi Moore who made it OK for us girls to look like the Beatles!

Photo: of Demi Moore from hairfinder.com, with thanks
Photo: of The Beatles from the exhibition website, with thanks

Youtube can help you hit the big time. It’s official.

I blogged awhile back about Malaysian singer songwriter Zee Avi, who was discovered by an L.A. music agent, after she uploaded a video of herself performing a song in her bedroom and now has a record deal and is touring music festivals around the world.

Now, a commercial director from Uruguay Fede Alvarez has been offered a US$30million deal from Hollywood after uploading a short sci-fi video “Ataque de Panico!” (Panic Attack!) onto Youtube:

And the short apparently only cost him around US$300…

Too good to be true?

Well, apparently, global blockbuster District 9 director Neill Blomkamp (also a commercial director) got his big break after his viral short Alive in Joburg got him the chance to work with Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings). That partnership eventually led to Blomkamp’s chance to make the feature length version of Alive in Joburg, which became District 9.

You can watch the short below:

The magic seems to work for videos that have a scifi theme or lots of special effects/ explosions. However, I wonder if any budding Woody Allen’s have had their Youtube flicks picked up by the big studios….?

The other evening, we went to The Mag pub in our little corner of South London for some live music. It was an event organised by a ukelele band so I wasn’t really sure what to expect. As it turned out, while the ukelele band entertained the crowds in the downstairs part of the pub, we discovered that some guitarists in the upstairs room were playing my favourite kind of music - acoustic folk/ rock! So we ended up spending most of the evening upstairs, toe tapping along to some great country/ folk music and getting a taste of Nashville in South London.

There was Doc King , who played a tiny “parlour” guitar - but the sound he made was amazing - ranging from folk to Irish ballads/ church songs reworked with an Indian sitar flavour and Spanish style melodies. And John Atkinson, who sang ballads with lyrics like “All I got is heartache and a hard-on” (!) and was like a Hank Williams on skid row.

But my favourite were Fran & Mike, a true-blue acoustic rock duo, whose sound was smoky and deep and rich with just two guitars and Fran’s terrific vocals. I have to say, I felt like a such groupie as we stayed for most of the gig and then I went up to them to tell them how much I enjoyed their music and to buy their latest CD The Road That You Believe In. I’ve been rocking away at home ever since!

You can listen to some of the songs from the CD on their MySpace page at http://www.myspace.com/franandmike

True to the fusion nature of this blog, after the last two Mondays sharing the bizarre world of Western opera, today I wanted to change gear to a more serious note and show this moving documentary about the dying art of Chinese Opera - just managing to keep alive in no other place than my homeland Malaysia.

The documentary summary says it all: “Chinese opera in Malaysia face another brink of extinction, not by heavenly super powers but simply by the lack of interest in the young generations to learn and explore the art. We meet a few of the very last Cantonese opera singers left in Penang and learn what makes them pursue and love the art and why they have accepted the fact that they might very well have to take the art with them to the grave.”

I regret to admit it but I suppose people like me are part of the problem. We are educated in Western music and arts along with other aspects of our schooling over here in Europe and lack exposure to Eastern styles of creative expression so start to drift away from our cultural heritage at an early age. Then later on, we find the tones and harmonies of Chinese music strange to our ears - and performances are rare or difficult to locate. I’m hoping that an aspect of globalisation is that Asian arts are rising in international prominence: think of “Farewell My Concubine”, the Monkey myths that have been made into series and dramas and also the Peking Opera making inroads into the West. China itself is increasingly influential globally in terms of the economy - and no doubt, this will lead to its cultural influence widening its reach, too. With social media and the internet as well playing their part in disseminating documentaries like this one and bringing Chinese opera and arts to a new online audience, I’m optimistic that Eastern culture will continue to thrive.

We’re trying to grow garlic in our back garden as fast as we can. Apparently, it’s the new way to make a mint (ha ha!) these days in China and if we could just build up enough tonnage of the stinky stuff, we could ship this new white gold across the globe for millions. Sky News reports that there is a belief amongst the Chinese that garlic can prevent swine flu and prices for the bulb have shot through the roof as a result. People are hoarding it as well, making the commodity even scarcer and thereby driving up prices even more.

You can also find out more via the following news report from New Tang Dynasty TV below:

This Garlic Fever makes me think of the Tulip Fever that gripped the Netherlands 400 years ago when the craze for tulips led to an overheated market in tulip futures and a single bulb exchanged hands for the price of a house! I blogged about a terrific book on that subject Tulipomania last year. Back in the 1600s, the tulip market collapsed one afternoon when a trader got up to sell and was met by a deathly silence as no-one responded to buy - within moments, everyone was selling and by the end of the afternoon, the fortunes of the traders and their investors had vanished.

So, come on, little garlic bulbs in the garden, hurry up and grow - we’d like to cash you guys in before the market collapses….!

Photo: from my own collection