Spring craze

So we've done it. First proper trip of the year (work-related excursions to various corners of Europe are always wonderful, but they don't really count...) and 11 glorious days in Syria it was. There are numerous tales to tell and lots of photos to share, which shall follow soon.

For now, I'm looking at this week's diary with four concerts and four plays in 7 days. This is when you know you're truly and wholly back in London, I guess. At least, at the moment there's almost as much sunshine here as in the Al-jazeera desert.

Barbican, week two

Six days later, now in better physical shape and newly recharged by a quick trip to Berlin, I went back to Barbican with M for another pre-show dinner at the Riverside cafe. As with last week, I now noticed the 'other audience' roaming in the foyer - a lot of them wearing exquisite pearls, quite a few elegantly pearl-clad, gingerly sipping their overpriced red wine. This was not 'our' crowd today as we were here to see Pied Piper and they, Parsifal (third act) in concert with Valery Gergiev. We recognise a few friends across the hall and wave to them. I point out to M a riotously-dressed woman in her 60s in scarlett-framed spectacles and her tall, younger companion who looked like an incredibly masculine gypsy. Vivienne Westwood and her Austrian husband, Andreas Kronthaler. Were they here for the hip hop or for Wagner? We managed to amuse ourselves for a full five minutes with the guessing game (the answer was the latter). The LSO concert, as always, started at 19:30 and our opera-loving friend looked on at us with great confusion, from the door across the foyer where he was just about to get in to the concert, as we were not making any attempt to gather ourselves and enter the hall: 'Are you not going in?!' 'No' - we shouted back - 'we're going to see hip hop dance instead.'

And what a show it was. The re-setting of the classic Pied Piper story in the nameless underbelly of contermporary metropolis plagued by ASBO youths was ingenious. The synopsis, divided cleverly into 'chapters', seemed to fit the thrilling choreography (which really favours and befits the episodic narrative as much as classical ballet does) while also making a nod to the medieval literary origin of the story. Kendrick Sandy, the Piper and godfather of the company, Boy Blue Entertainment, clearly inspires so much in his young apprentices and presides the action with unshakable authority. The most virtuosic parts were often left to the youngsters, though, who were capable of doing the jaw-dropping acts with such effortlessness that we cheered and shrieked as spontaneously as the young crowd around us (M had come straight from work in his City suit - for once we really stuck out in the sea of hip-hop audiences). The really breathtaking moments, though, came at the end with the Charming of the Kids scene. Onto the stage came bouncing a score of real kids - we're talking 6- to 10-year olds here - of such a wide range of ethnicity that their mere presence presented a portrait of contemporary Britain right there. And they all bounced and danced and swinged and then did all sorts of gravity-defying things with their limps and on their heads. A lot of 'awwww's emanated from every corner of the theatre. In the final act, 'The Piper's Training Camp' (here's Naughties East London's unique contribution to the tale), they were united with the rest of the cast in a show of disciplines as much as technical brilliance. Isn't this the real morale of this production? The programme states that Boy Blue Entertainment's aim is 'to encourage youth to embrace dance, while teaching them discipline and team building and exposing them to performance and storytelling'. The thought that this company, and this enraptured audience, happily spent the same evening alongside the Wagner die-hards who were just as emotionally moved by a completely different experience, filled me with joy. We might be walking out of a building in the heart of what is now officially a doomed industry, but arts will continue to transcend our otherwise mundane lives, and because of that, this city will never die.

Barbican, week one

First Friday of March (this has been a month accentuated by travels and health problems - but I'm determined not to let either get in the way of catching up with these notes), 7pm. After two bed-ridden days, I was ever so relieved to be interacting with the world again, in the way of hearing a crowd-alluring programme (Rachmaninoff second piano concerto, Tchaikovsky's sixth symphony) with the LSO. But right now, the impossibility to relief myself was the pressing problem - I expected it to be a popular concert but I had never seen the queues for the ladys' loos at the Barbican so long. I ran upstairs to the balcony level. The size of the waiting crowd there was even more daunting. It suddenly occured to me that the ones located in the Riverside cafe would probably be a safer bet now that the concert was almost about to start. I was right, but as I ran across the foyer to reach them I also realised that the queues had bot looked like a typical LSO audience. Now I know they've got a wonderful marketing department working very hard to reach out to new audiences, but surely all the hoodie-donning, bright-haired youngsters with their smooth, rhythmic moves in every step were not here to hear Rachmaninoff?

Then it dawned on me: Pied Piper had arrived in EC1. This was the hip hop dance show that took Theatre Royal Stratford East (if ever you want to visit a venue where watching the audience themselves can be just as fascinating as whatever's on stage, this is it) by storm last year and went on to win an Olivier. The savvy theatre team at Barbican obviously spotted its potential immediately and pocketed the transfer that were now drawing full-house crowds that were demographically as different from the loyal LSO audiences as possible. And as a result, I only narrowly avoided floor-wetting public embarrassment. This is how every major multi-disciplinary arts venue in the world should be run, I said to myself, except the fact that they'd do even better to upgrade the lavatories (I don't want to seem to have a morbid obsession about this, but the typically awful national standard of British plumbing is always epitomised at busy arts centres and West End theatres). I made a mental note to book ourselves for Pied Piper as soon as we got home.

Got an adaptor?!

Anecdote #1: in the summer of 1997, after finishing high school, I did a four-month stint at the Shanghai office of an Australian engineering firm before coming to the UK. McDonalds and KFC, both enormously popular then as 'high-end Western food', were just starting to become affordable for most urbanites, and Starbucks hadn't yet arrived (there are, naturally, dozens in central Shanghai alone now). There were 5 of us in the office - they have considerably expanded over the last decade but these were early days. So, 2 expats from Sydney: one with a decade of various China stints behind him already, the other, the big boss, a relatively new arrival; plus 3 Chinese. One of my daily jobs as the office assistant (essentially, receptionist plus interpreter) was to make the 7-minute hike to the nearby Hilton hotel to buy lunches for the Aussies. And for four whole months, day after day, the orders remained the same: a ham-and-lettuce sandwich for one, and a tuna sandwich for the other. The little cafe at Hilton was the only place where you could buy such things back then, and each sandwich cost 36RMB (to give you some context, my monthly wage was 2000RMB, which was considered very good for a job like this). On my way back to the office I'd pick up a box lunch for myself from one of the many street-stall holders - typically rice, one meat or fish dish, one vegetable dish, all freshly made and piping hot. It cost 5RMB, or 6 if you want an additional meat dish. When I returned to the office the big boss would cast a quick glance at my lunch box and proceed to devour his sandwich. Finally one day, I was curious enough to save up and ordered 3 sandwiches at the Hilton instead of 2. As I carefully munched throug the soggy ham-and-lettuce concoction I thought, hell, this fuss was not worth a whole week of my usual lunches, and why wouldn't he just try the local fare once - just once? A whole decade later, when I return to Shanghai I would often meet friends for a drink at the lobby bar at the same Hilton hotel. The same little cafe is doing a roaring trade now as the number of expats in the neighbourhood have rocketed in the intervening years. I sometimes wonder if they've ever tried a local box lunch (which now, admittedly, probably costs 8 or 9 RMB instead, the equivalent of about 70p) during their entire overseas posting.



Anecdote #2: two summers ago, I went back to Shanghai for my annual business trip. I was due to meet with some friends for a quick bite at a neighbourhood restaurant one Saturday afternoon, except that the neighbourhood in question had been going through the my home town's trademark weekly makeovers so thoroughly that I couldn't find our rendez-vous location. As the area was lined with restaurants and bars I pushed open one of the doors thinking I could just ask someone for direction. I immediately did a double take, because I'd stepped into the Alternative Universe to the street that I was in a second ago: I'd walked into an Irish bar. Alright, being a seasoned traveller I'd seen Irish bars in the most unexpected places, but still this one had something other-worldly, almost hypnotic about it. You've got your usual pool tables and the big-screen with the looped repeats of that week's Match of the Day highlights, and, and... I finally (two seconds later) realised: as always, it's the people who really defined the place. All four of them. Middle-aged male expats, each sitting at his own table, slowing picking through a plate of very suspicious-looking steak pie and mushy peas, staring at the big screen with no expression on their faces. They looked like they'd been sitting their forever, that this was an infinite meal of universally transportable Irish (?) staple food. I wondered what the chef (who was probably a local Shanghaiese) thought as he/she made the mushy peas, the locally grown, in-season fresh peas being a wonderful Shanghai speciality. Having established the fact that neither any of the Irish pub-lovers nor the lone waitress knew about the place I was looking for, I stepped back into the street. There were at least a dozen restaurants lining the same street, offering specialities from various parts of China (the concept of 'Chinese food', like 'Indian food', being the ultimate misnomer), all filled with boisterous customers who seemed to be having a very good time.


Anecdote #3: this one is a more general phenomenon rather than an isolated episode. And I hasten to add, already, that the curious cases I'm trying to illustrate here are not confined to Westerners alone - far from it! Chinese restaurants over here, and other Asian restaurants to a lesser extent, have enjoyed steadily growing business as the number of Chinese students to the UK rose considerably in recent years. Among my own acquaintances who have emigrated from China, with a fairly wide range in both age and profession, it's not uncommon to hear someone delare proudly of possessing a 'Chinese stomach'. In some cases, even after years of residing in the West, they can't stand the sight of a plate of banger & mash, or the smell of an upmarket cheese platter (okay, the latter is more understandable). With the growing wealth back home, gone are the days when newly-arrived students all had to watch their budgets and most did a stint of waiting in local Chinese restaurants (as I did). For most new comers, their only reason for stepping into a Chinese restaurant is to have a table full of food (the concept of a formulated three-course meal doesn't exist in Asia), as they would back home, and many do so on almost a daily basis. If, for those in the UK, this is rather more excusable considering the usual alternatives being bog-standard British fare (no offence, but Pret sandwiches are a sufficient lunch option, not gourmet food), what makes me scratch my head as much as the Irish pub in Shanghai did is the fact that many Chinese who have made Paris or Milan their new home are just as oblivious/antagonistic to fois gras, prociutto or pasta (the real Italian ones, not spag bol). They'd have to be threatened with the possbility of severe bodily harm before succumbing to trying a plate of gourmet salad. And these are young people who have much less language barrier than their elders once did. I remember my amazement, soon after moving to the US, when I found out that there were thousands of first-generation immigrants who had virtually lived out their entire lives in the Chinatowns of New York, San Francisco or Vancouver, without speaking a single word of English or having any interaction whatsoever with the world outside of the Chinatown borders.



Of course it's entirely reasonable, and understandable, to maintain a close emotional connection to where you come from, which often is reflected in many mundane habits, such as daily diet. However, I find many modern expats' ardent refusal to learn to appreciate, let alone blend in, certain cultural and societal elements of their new surroundings bordering on the obsessional. This genetic lack of adaptability (for I have no better way of describing it) was, I suppose, once the norm for colonial occupants - think the British lords who carved out a little universe for themselves in many pockets of Asia in the 1920s, filled with quintessentially British air they managed to bring with them, or manufactured on location. But nowdays, this phenomenon seems to transcend nationality, race, class or age, and can be found in the most unexpected, sometimes bizarre circumstances (like my Irish pub encounter). You may say I'm making a fuss out of nothing, but I do wonder: in our day and age when globolisation is a given, when instant communication and mobility are taken for granted, should it not occur to those fortunate - and, more often than not, well-educated - enough to have the experience of living in a foreign land, that the capability to adapt is an important quality to be armed with. The HR-talk of 'skillsets' invades our individual and collective spheres often enough, yet if I were an HR manager, I'd make sure that every candidate up for a cushy overseas relocation (and they're almost invariably cushy indeed) has 'natural adaptability' on top of his/her CV. If you're to be a senior manager in charge of hundreds of local workers and can't be bothered to eat their daily lunch box like they do at least once, to find out what their living environs are like and where their childrens' schools are located, can you really be an effective leader? I don't think so.

As recent as one hundred years ago, it would take weeks for even the wealthiest to cross the Atlantic, months to get from one end of Eurasia to the other, journeys that now amount to a matter of three or four films (depending on their length) on Virgin Atlantic. Even with all the modern skylines that increasingly make Shanghai, Mumbai, Chicago or Frankfurt look like clones of one another, each new destination still has something unique to offer, usually in the shape of local delis, corner shops, independent boutiques, and above all, the residents who are the beating heart of the city in question. We were not all born with an innate adaptor when it comes to culinary preferences but we can, should, need to all make an effort to learn something about our new home, which in no way signifies abandoning our roots (some people's excuse, in case you're wondering). Try, for once, to turn your back on the known and the familiar, and eat/watch/do what your neighbours do - for what is the point of living elsewhere, and what shall life be without the seductive excitement of the unknown, after all?

Can win, should win, will win

It's now a little over 24 hours before another batch of little golden statues are handed out to a tearful few in Tinsle Town. Somehow the Oscars have lost the unique sense of excitement over the years - not surprising, perhaps, when winners of the best picture from this century have included 'Crash' and 'Chicago'. Sure, the tradition was always to recognise the mainstream and the safe, the movieland equivalent of the largest common denominator. But wouldn't it be truly exceptional to have a best picture Oscar winner - the one big prize that everyone really wants, of course, the Golden Globes and BAFTAs being mere warm-ups - with a cast entirely devoid of established American/European names, and a story set in a landscape/cityscape neither within the national borders of the United States, nor in the world of hobbits?

In the year that Barak Obama is voted into White House, we've got it: I had been a little weary of the tagline 'The feel-good film of the year' claimed on every poster of Slumdog Millionaire (I suppose I firmly belong to the minority of the population for whom feeling good isn't the only purpose of going into a cinema), but thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. It's subsequently caused much controversy, and the headlining slogan for the anti-SM camp seems to have been 'Povery Porn', which I find hardly justifiable. What, to these critics' mind, should be the textbook method of depicting poverty instead? Or is it the very fact of ubiquitous poverty among the underclass in Mumbai is represented on screen at all, let alone in such dazzling cinematography, that angers them?

Apparently there have been protests in India against the film for such reasons, and this reminds me of what the vast majority of ordinary Chinese (who, at the time, had seen very little foreign cinema apart from the State-approved imports, this being the days before piracy and internet arrived) said about the early works of Zhang Yimou (Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern, The Story of Qiuju, To Live) and Chen Kaige (Yellow Earth, King of the Children, Farewell My Concubine). Why did they always have to tell stories about the endless struggles of the farmers against nature and their fellow men, the corrupted feudal lords and their persecuted underlings, the pervasive poverty and hopelessness of the common people that defined China throughout much of the 20th century? Couldn't they see that it wasn't right to portray this side of China to an international audience - especially since, as it happened, it was only these selected names whose works were always chosen to be screened at the important festivals in the West?!

I've rewatched these Chinese films since moving abroad and have come to appreciate their cinematic achievement without the nationalistic preconception anymore. I should like to think that it's not about me being Westernised - if anything, I've been watching far more Chinese films than I used to - but simply a change in perspective. I have not been to India, but I've seen most of Danny Boyle's previous works, and Slumdog Millionaire certainly carries a lot of his trademarks from the opening frame. It is also easily the most spectacularly shot and impressively acted (the three youngest children probably drew laughters, tears and swoons from many audience at every screening), with an entirely ridiculous but totally uplifting ending. (Takeshi Kitano, take a bow, for that brilliant dance sequence that Danny Boyle has stolen from Zatoichi.) It's not flawless, but then very few Oscar winners have been. The last time a film portraying a similar landscape and society was given the little golden statue was Gandhi in 1983, also with a cast full of faces largely unfamiliar to the Western cinema-goers (Ben Kingsley was hardly a household name then). Slumdog Millionaire deserves to win, and it will.

Golden Time for visiting some Golden Ages

Six thirty, Friday evening. I'm staring at a row of Jingdezhen porcetain (the prized variety produced in age-old workships in Jiang Xi Province, central China) in all sizes and shapes, all featuring the trademark blue patterns. These are all from the Ming Dynasty, and the designs seem to tend towards broad brushes and bold iconism rather than the more exquisite lines and figures from more recent centuries. I'm no porcelain expert but I can appreciate the striking craftsmanship.

This is not an exhibition on Jingdezhen, or China, or anything to do with China specifically. This is 'Shah Abbas - the Remaking of Iran' at British Museum, where the golden era of an endlessly fascinating culture, a remarkable chapter in the religious history of humankind is illustrated by calligraphy, paintings, etchings, carpets of all sizes, lamp holders from shrines, and - in the centre of it all and visible from any corner of the beautiful old reading room, images of the great mosques that were built under the patronage of the Shah in Isfahan and Mashahad. The collection of Chinese porcelain was but a fraction of the Shah's treasure trove - many a vase, bowl, and plate travelled up the Silk Road to be housed in the richer homes of the Shiite kingdom.

I should be urging all our like-minded friends to make Friday late-night museum/gallery visits a habit except then the places might well be packed as a result, and the peace and quietude that makes it so appealing to us shall be no more. OK, this is pathetic paranoia. Do go. A one-hour walk through a superbly-curated, gem-packed exhibition like this (and this city happens to excel on such things) on your way home is a splendid way to cleanse your mind of the working week and start the weekend on a gratifyingly high note. When we went to the Rothko exhibition at Tate Modern on a Friday evening it was actually possible to sit in the middle of the vast room of all the Seagram Murals and contemplate at them for 10 minutes without a busload of people blocking your view in every direction. Exactly how the Seagrams are meant to be experienced. Friday evenings soaking up Babylon at British Museum and Byzantium at Royal Academy followed, each mind-enriching and heart-elating. And if you feel smug enough about achieving such an intellectual feat after a non-stop, exhausting week, there's always the option to treat yourself to a nice dinner afterwards which shall be enjoyed all the more with your new-gained knowledge. Even if it's a simple matter of knowing that the best-known Shah had a predilection for top-quality Jingdezhen (and a lesser-known one for beautiful, beardless page boys... find out for yourself). Bon apetit.

The function of day jobs

I've been meaning to write a bit more about two of the three films we saw last weekend but, again, am only managing some proper blogging time on Sunday evening. In case you're wondering what the third one was, it was Woody Allen's latest, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which was deeply disappointing. Note to self: always pay attention to the second half of those key sentences in reviews. Similar views abound: 'Allen's most impressive work - from the last decade', 'A true return to form - compared with his other recent films' (or something to that effect). I should have known, as I should have thought more carefully about what these comparisons were made with: Match Point, Scoop, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Hollywood Ending, Anything Else - against this list, The 40-Year-Old Virgin could seem positively profound.

Okay, back to the topic. Tokyo Sonata (by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, hitherto chiefly known for a string of horror films) and Revolutionary Road (by Sam Mendes, which I already wrote a little about last week) couldn't have been more different in style, plot and tone, but for me, both conveyed an important and timely message: looking around us (or, perhaps, in the mirror), the modern metropolitans and suburbia are full of people whose identity are largely - or in the case of Tokyo Sonata's protagonist, entirely - formed through their jobs. Once that's taken away, either by accident or by design, they'll be at a loss as to what to do with their lives at all. Their so-called hobbies have either been eroded by, or subsumed to, the job itself; their social connections are built within the work context (unemployment can be an infectious disease that your friends want to avoid catching); they get up and, not knowing what to do, sometimes resort to the solution of 'mock-living' their previously cocooned, repetitive work-life (there are some really funny moments in Tokyo Sonata depicting this. Funny, that is, until the illusion is tragically cut short).

I often marvel at the fact that, working in the arts, I have the good fortune to be surrounded by people who are genuinely passionate about what they do for a living, in contrast with millions of others in the city whose chief drive in the context of work would include things like security and material gain. At a time when so many jobs are being lost daily - in arts as well as elsewhere - the need to take a moment to ask ourselves some of those fundamental questions seems more pressing than ever. The Noughties version of 'Who am I? Where do I come from? What am I doing here?' could well be 'Who am I? Why am I doing what I do? Is it mostly what I do, known as my job, that defines me as a person to people whom I call my friends and family? If that's the case, isn't it rather worrying, no matter if there's a recession on or not?'

I suppose a lot of people go through their lives without having figured out - or perhaps even thought about - what they really want from life or who they really want to be. A job is easily the most visible kind of identity, and naturally becomes the most expedient kind too. But perhaps we could all use a little bit of reckoning, of recognising that the function of a day job is precisely what we hate to think it is: something to pay the bills with. If you happen to really love what you do, so much the better; but it really doesn't equal who you are - the answer to that surely consists of experiences, qualities and skills that may well not get an airing during a lifetime's working hours. No matter how grand your job title, how impressive your professional achievements or how over-sized your pay package might be, strip these all away and are you - you the person - still there? If not, what's the point of keeping the bills paid anyway?