Somtow's World

Climb Every Mahler.... (now in Thai and English)

2012-01-20T23:51:00.000+07:00

The following is (more or less) a note I put on my facebook account about four hours ago. Even in a few hours, the response has been heartwarming ... enough to thaw my depression out quite a bit. Now I am asking the readers of my blog the same questions ... on a regular day dozens of people read this blog, and when I touch a controversial subject, it leaps to thousands ... can this outreach translate into something beautiful and powerful ... like a Mahler symphony?

As all of you know, Mahler is one of my lifelong obsessions. And so it was that, before the dawn of the 21st century, around the year 1998, I made a promise to the late HRH Princess Galyani Vadhana, shortly after the Thai premiere of my "Mahajanaka Symphony", that one day Thailand's musicians would be able to play all of the Mahler symphonies. To make this happen I had to found a whole new orchestra, the Siam Philharmonic, which has gone through an incredible rollercoaster of an existence. The twin climaxes of the orchestra's existence, I think, were first when we did Mahler 9 together and Stan Gayuski, a member of the NY chapter of the Mahler Society, told me I could keep Leonard Bernstein's baton which had been last used to conduct the same work. The second climax was when the orchestra performed my music in London and for the first time our classical musicians were viewed in Europe not as curiousities, but as peers. The orchestra played absolutely brilliantly in London, under awful circumstances.

The London tour was an artistic triumph, but a nightmare in almost every other way and as a result of it our foundation's deficit has skyrocketed, I've been in a depression for about four months, and there is a moratorium on opera production until we can pay down the deficit. I am also personally in very bad shape after having to do things like put three days of an entire orchestra's London hotel bill on my own credit cards.

And yet, I simply cannot stand by and watch the Siam Philharmonic Orchestra, which has achieved so much whilst running on fumes over the last ten years, stagnate and stall. This is why, trusting on faith alone, I have decided to put the Mahler program back into action. Mahler is what the SPO does best - it's what it's known for - and we are already exactly halfway through the Mahler canon, having already performed Nos. 3, 4, 5, 7, and 9, many of these performances to amazing reviews.

I'm going to bring back the SPO with one of the greatest of all symphonies, Mahler's Sixth, about which Alban Berg once said "It is the ONLY Sixth - even considering the Pastoral." It was also HRH Princess Galyani Vadhana's favorite Mahler symphony.

The Siam Commercial Bank is generously providing the venue for this performance for free on February 16th. But I must find the wherewithal to pay the orchestra.

The Bangkok Opera Foundation itself needs every baht it can raise for important projects and to lower its deficit. The Mahler project is my personal labor of love: my love for Mahler and my love for the princess, who made classical music in Thailand possible. Therefore I, not the foundation, must be responsible for it. I am keeping a drawer of cash in the house and paying for the Mahler Project out of this drawer.

I've been asking some of my friends to sign up, or upgrade, their memberships in "Gustav's Angels," the small group of friends whose contributions keep the Mahler project afloat. They all donate 5,000 baht at a time, rising up the nine rungs of angels until they reach the status of Cherubim and have sponsored nine symphonies. If I had 100 such people, I could fund the entire project. So far four people have pledged to up their memberships: Karen Schur-Narula, Raksak Kananurak, Michael Proudfoot, and my mother. 96 more angels or angel upgrades will get us past Mahler 6.

But it's also true that if every single one of you facebook friends and followers of my S.P. Somtow page were to give me a mere $20, I could fund the entire rest of the Mahler Project. Ditto, if only 20% gave me $100. Or if 10% gave me $200. I think the picture is clear. If everyone who read this blog on one of the "days of controversy" gave me $1, I could put on an entire symphony.

It's time for me to find out whether having thousands of facebook friends - and thousands of readers of my blog - means something in terms of being able to realize one's dreams. Will I be able to find support among the people out there, between the true friends, the stalkers, and the simply curious - enough to support something beautiful which makes the world in some measure a more beautiful place?

This isn't exactly like Lot and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. If my facebook friends and blog readers don't come through — if I don't find "ten righteous men" — I am not going to rain down brimstone and viruses on your accounts. It is however a bit of a test of whether "facebook friends" or "followers" are really a meaningful thing.

Well, if after reading this note you are moved to become an angel, you can just click on the links right on this page. Gustav's Angels have special perks; VIP seating, and this time around we're giving away free CDs of some of SPO's previous Mahler performances. If you want to give a lesser amount, you can as well.

Furthermore - in Thailand, bank transfers are usually more popular ... so, Somtow Sucharitkul, Siam Commercial Bank, 0013513547 is the account. This is an account I'm only using for the Mahler staff. I don't want the Bangkok Opera to accidentally spend the money on other things so I will hold it until the last minute.

If you do decide to help, do leave a comment (death threats or abuse won't be approved of course) ... so we can all see the power of the net at work. Your name will be in the program book of course, if it arrives in time.

In a few hours on facebook I raised enough to pay for 2 violinists. I still have a month, and despite the vicissitudes I've been through I still believe in the redeeming power of music.

For those not able to come to the concert, I will post the entire thing so you will have a ringside seat.

Thanks to all of you.

And also, feel free to share this post with friends and music lovers.

ผมได้โพสต์ข้อมูลนี้เป็นภาษาอังกฤษใน face book เมื่อไม่กี่ชั่วโมงมานี้และได้รับการตอบสนองอย่างอบอุ่นซึ่งทำให้ผมคลายกังวลเป็นอย่างมาก ผมจึงขอโพสต์ข้อความเดียวกันเป็นภาษาไทยในบล๊อกของผมซึ่งตามปรกติมีผู้เข้ามาดูไม่กี่สิบคนยกเว้นเวลาที่ผมมีเรื่องที่ต้องตอบโต้หรือแสดงความเห็น จึงมีผู้เข้ามาเป็นพันๆ

ข้อมูลของผมจะกลายเป็นความงดงามอันทรงพลังเช่นเดียวกับมาห์เล่อร์หรือไม่ขึ้นอยู่ที่คุณ...

ใครๆ ก็รู้ว่าผมคลั่งมาห์เล่อร์มาตลอดชีวิต เพราะฉะนั้น เมื่อต้นศตรรษที่ 21 ประมาณปี 2541 หลังจากได้มีการนำเสนอซิมโฟนีพระมหาชนกซึ่งผมแต่งขึ้นเพื่อเฉลิมพระเกียรติพระบาทสมเด็จพระเจ้าอยู่หัว ผมได้ทูลเกล้าถวายคำมั่นแด่สมเด็จพระเจ้าพี่นางเธอเจ้าฟ้ากัลยาณิวัฒนา กรมหลวงนราธิวาสราชนครินทร์ ว่านักดนตรีไทยจะสามารถเล่นซิมโฟนีทุกเพลงของมาห์เล่อร์ได้ในวันหนึ่ง เพื่อให้ฝันกลายเป็นจริง ผมจึงก่อตั้งสยามฟิลฮาร์โมนิคออร์เคสตร้าขึ้น วงดุริยางค์ของเราผ่านร้อนหนาวมาพอสมควร ความสำเร็จขั้นสุดยอดครั้งแรกเกิดขึ้นเมื่อเรานำเสนอซิมโฟนีหมายเลข 9ของมาห์เล่อร์ สแตน กายุสกี้ผู้แทนสมาคมมาห์เล่อร์นานาชาติซึ่งเดินทางมาชมจากนครนิวยอร์คให้ผมอำนวยเพลงด้วยบาตองกายสิทธิ์ที่วาทยกรผู้ยิ่งใหญ่ลีโอนาร์ด เบิร์นชไตน์ ผู้ล่วงลับไปแล้ว ใช้อำนวยเพลงซิมโฟนีเดียวกันนี้เป็นครั้งสุดท้ายในชีวิตวาทยกรและในที่สุดได้มอบให้ผมเป็นกรรมสิทธิ์ซึ่งผมสัญญาจะเก็บรักษาไว้สำหรับวาทยกรที่เหมาะสมในอนาคต ความสำเร็จครั้งที่สองคือวงออร์เคสตร้าของเราได้เดินทางไปบรรเลงผลงานของผมณ กรุงลอนดอน ซึ่งนับเป็นครั้งแรกที่นักดนตรีคลาสสิคไทยได้รับการยอมรับในยุโรปในด้านความสามารถในมาตรฐานโลก

แม้หนทางของเราจะไม่ราบรื่นเสมอไป แต่ผมทนไม่ได้ที่จะเห็นความมานะพยายามของเราต้องสดุดหยุดลง โดยเฉพาะในขณะที่เราเดินหน้าไปแล้วถึงครึ่งทางในการนำเสนอมาห์เล่อร์ครบวงจรตามที่ผมตั้งปณิธานไว้ การบรรเลงซิมโฟนีหมายเลขสาม สี่ ห้า เจ็ดและเก้า ได้รับการวิพากวิจารณ์อย่างเต็มภาคภูมิ ผมจึงจะนำสยามฟิลฮาร์โมนิคมาพบท่านอีกครั้งด้วยผลงานอลังการที่สุดในบรรดาซิมโฟนีทั้งหมดของมาห์เล่อร์ ซิมโฟนีหมายเลข 6ซึ่งเป็นเพลงที่สมเด็จกรมหลวงโปรดที่สุด ในวันที่ 16 กุมภาพันธ์ 2555 โดยธนาคารไทยพาณิชย์จำกัด มหาชน เอื้อเฟื้อให้ใช้ห้องประชุมมหิศรเป็นสถานที่แสดงโดยไม่คิดค่าใช้จ่าย

มูลนิธิมหาอุปรากรกรุงเทพซึ่งเป็นองค์กรเพื่อการศึกษาโดยไม่แสวงหาผลประโยชน์ จำเป็นต้องหาทุนทรัพย์เพื่อจัดทำกิจกรรมตามเจตนารมรณ์ในการปลูกฝังให้ประชาชนคนไทยโดยเฉพาะเยาวชนเข้าถึงสังคีตศิลป์และวัฒนธรรมในระดับนานาอารยะประเทศ แต่มาห์เล่อร์เป็นโครงการส่วนตัวที่ผมรัก เป็นความรักของผมที่มีต่อมาห์เล่อร์ ความรักและเทิดทูนบูชาที่ผมทูลเกล้าถวายสมเด็จกรมหลวงฯผู้ทรงเป็นพระมารดาแห่งดนตรีคลาสสิคในประเทศไทย เพราะฉะนั้น ผู้ที่รับผิดชอบโครงการนี้คือ ผม นายสมเถา สุจริตกุลไม่ใช่มูลนิธิฯ ผมจึงมีกล่องรับบริจาคทุนการผลิตมาห์เล่อร์ไว้ที่บ้าน ค่าใช้จ่ายทั้งหมดของโครงการมาห์เล่อร์จะมาจากกล่องนี้

ผมได้ขอร้องให้เพื่อนๆ ลงนามรับเป็นผู้สนับสนุนหรือยกระดับสมาชิก ‘เทวทูตกุสตาฟ’ ซึ่งเป็นมิตรสหายกลุ่มเล็กที่สละทุนทรัพย์สนับสนุนโครงการนี้มาโดยตลอดเทวทูตของเรามี 9 ระดับตามตำนานดั้งเดิม เริ่มจากขั้นแรกสนับสนุน 5,000 บาทและจนถึงผู้สนับสนุนระดับ Cherubim สูงสุดสนับสนุนซิมโฟนีครบ9 ครั้ง

จริงอยู่ที่เพื่อนในเฟซบุคและผู้ติดตามบล็อกของผมบางคนสนับสนุนเพียง20 ดอลล่าร์ ประมาณ 20 % ให้ 100ดอลล่าร์ 10 % ให้200 ดอลล่าร์ แสดงว่าถ้าทุกคนที่เข้ามาอ่านบล็อกของผมในวันที่มีเรื่องสำคัญๆ สนับสนุนเพียงรายละ1 ดอลล่าร์ มาห์เล่อร์ 6ก็จะไปได้อย่างสวยงาม ถึงเวลาแล้วที่ผมจะทดสอบว่าเพื่อนเฟสบุคจำนวนพันๆและผู้อ่านบล็อกผมอีกจำนวนเท่าๆกันมีความหมายในการช่วยให้ฝันของผมกลายเป็นจริง ผมจะพึ่งใครได้บ้าง... ในบรรดาเพื่อนแท้ ผู้แวะมาเยือนและผู้ที่เพียงแต่อยากรู้ จะมีใครบ้างช่วยเกื้อหนุนในการสร้างสรรให้โลกของเราสวยงามยิ่งขึ้น โปรดอย่าคิดว่าถ้าไม่สนับสนุน ผมจะตัดคุณออกจากเพื่อนหรือบล็อก ผมเพียงแต่ต้องการทราบความหมายที่แท้จริงของเพื่อนเฟสบุ๊คและผู้ติดตามบล็อกของผมเท่านั้น

หากคุณอ่านแล้วเกิดความซาบซึ้งอยากเป็นเทวทูต โปรดคลิกลิ้งค์ด้านขวาของหน้านี้ เทวทูตกุสตาฟได้รับสิทธิพิเศษที่นั่ง วี.ไอ.พี. และรับซีดีการบรรเลงผลงานมาห์เล่อร์ในอดีตของสยามฟิลฮาร์โมนิคออร์เคสตร้าเป็นอภินันทนาการ นอกจากนั้นนามผู้บริจาคจะปรากฏในสูจิบัตร หากส่งมาไม่ล่าช้ากว่ากำหนดปิดเล่ม

ผู้สนับสนุนที่พำนักในประเทศไทยโปรดโอนเงินเข้าบัญชีที่เปิดพิเศษสำหรับโครงการนี้โดยเฉพาะชื่อบัญชี สมเถา สุจริตกุล ธนาคารไทยพาณิชย์จำกัด เลขบัญชี 001 351 3547ทั้งนี้เพื่อกันไม่ให้เกิดการสับสนกับบัญชีมูลนิธิฯ

หากท่านมีความประสงค์จะสนับสนุน โปรดเขียน comment มาด้วย (การขู่เข็ญหรือใช้วาจาไม่สุภาพเป็นการไม่สมควร) เราจะได้เห็นว่าเน๊ตมีพลังเพียงใด

เมื่อไม่กี่ชั่วโมงมานี้ ผมได้รับเงินสนับสนุนเพียงพอสำหรับค่าตอบแทนนักไวโอลิน2 คน แต่ผมยังมีเวลาอีกกว่าเดือน แม้จะต้องฟันฝ่าอุปสรรคผมยังเชื่อในการฟื้นคืนชีพของพลังแห่งดนตรี

หกท่านไม่สามารถมาฟังคอนเสิร์ตได้ ผมจะโพสต์รายการบรรเลงเพื่อท่านจะได้ชมอย่างใกล้ชิด

ขอบคุณทุกท่าน

สมเถา สุจริตกุล

S.P. Somtow, Witchfinder General

2012-01-06T23:09:00.002+07:00

Official Coat of Arms of the Zoe Katholike Church of St. Papinian of the Darker Angels

I had a dream so bizarre I decided not to write it down. But when I don't write them down, I forget them. It's a way to avoid facing whatever message may be concealed therein.

But four days have gone by and the images still haunt me. So, I have to write it down after all.

I dream that I was an official hunter of witches and that I had found a way to trap my prey. It is to hang human torsos upside down from a tree branch as bait.

Presently the witch comes crawling along the tree ... she is covered in a black cloak which appears to be part of her, not a garment. From the next of the cloak, her head should emerge but instead it is the head of a serpent. A monstrous serpent - the head is like a human head.

The lure works because the serpent slithers down the torsos, looking for the head to devour. There are no heads but instead there is my sack, in which I trap the witch.

Finally I am able to strip off the witch's hide which is that garment-like black leathery mass. I put it on and it erects a huge jagged hood around my head, protecting it from view. In my dream, I see myself only from behind, so once the hood is up there is no sign of my face visible. I am completely enveloped in the witch's skin.

A voice says to me, "You have been given the privilege of hunting this witch because you seek your inner self. You have been allowed to sacrifice these people, hanging their torsos on this tree, because they are the cost of your self-knowledge. You have hunted the witch and may now wear her skin as your own."

***

So there it is. What the hell does it mean? I'm afraid to think, but this is the longest that a dream has refused to be pushed back down into the subconscious ... without being written down.

My Birthday Address to the World

2011-12-29T15:09:00.001+07:00

Today will mark my 30th year as a 29-year-old. Next year, I will probably drop the pretense of youth completely; five cycles is a momentous time in the Buddhist world view, and perhaps will finally be the time to grow up.

This birthday is in some ways a low point in my existence, in others a definite perihelion.

The low points: for all intents and purposes, I'm bankrupt. The opera, which has been at the heart of my struggle for culture in the region, has been bled dry. Opportunity seekers have flatlined the golden goose, and artists who owe their careers to what we did for them are hemorrhaging away. I begin the 60th year of my existence much as I began when I came back to Thailand ten years ago ... empty-handed.

For the first time in decades, my Christmas tree stands covered with lights and mementoes from friends living and dead ... and without a single present at its base, because no one has had time to buy any, or money for that matter. We've all been too busy battling various incarnations of darkness. Indeed I've officially announced that my household will delay Christmas to Epiphany, the last day of Christmas, January 6 ... perhaps it's even more appropriate as the day the wise men finally arrive and give their gifts. Wise men are few and far between these days and if they don't show up by January 6, I'll understand.

My suffering is but a pale shadow of what the city and the country around me have endured this year. Natural disasters, weird governance, and as the year ends, a panicked attempt by extremists to turn our Buddhist, Middle Way world into a Manichaean warzone.

Yet this dark moment in my life is also a moment of supreme optimism. It is like the moment of maximum tension in the development section of a sonata, because it is at that moment that you finally beginning to realize that you will end up coming home.

This year, my music had artistic triumphs in London and California. This year my adopted son made a major breakthrough as a composer. This year Trisdee became a national celebrity as people in Thailand started to realize his international credits are "the real thing". This year I saw my adopted son Johnny in California, his natural habitat, for the first time in a decade. This year I stood in my two other "homes" - Europe and America - and tried to assimilate the traumas and triumphs of each - and realized that my three cultures are so deep inside me that they cannot be unravelled.

This was also the year in which the orchestra of young people I built up made incredible strides, played impressive performances of real symphonies, made a CD, and was accepted into competition in Vienna. Of course I still have to raise the approximately 5 million baht it will take to get 50 young musicians to Europe but still, this is an amazing step for young serious Thai classical musicians.

It was the year in which I finally came to terms with the darkness and light of my five years at Eton, and in which the school invited me to compose a new opera for the amazing resources they have ... which will bring to fruition a process which really started at the school, where I made my first attempts to compose an opera more than forty years ago.

We are inching towards Epiphany now ... but there are still no Christmas presents and I am still wondering how I will survive the next few days.

I still believe in the mythic view of the universe: the hero's journey, the war between the dark and the light, and that my purpose in life is to rescue princesses from dragons, though the princesses come in more and more outlandish shapes as I grow older. In myths, the fate of the entire universe always ends up resting on the shoulders of one man. This is true whether the myth is Christianity, Batman, or Heracles. One is told often enough that reality "isn't like that" but I seem to recall that when I was 10 years old, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the total destruction of the human race did appear to hang on one person's decision. Is is perhaps supremely arrogant for us to believe that as individuals, we have the ability to change the world. Nevertheless, without such beliefs, the world would never have changed.

I do begin my Fifth Cycle Year at a particularly dark moment. In 2011 I pushed the envelope very very hard. The envelope appears to be torn, and I don't know how to mend it yet.

But there is a reason that we celebrate Christmas, the rebirth of light, on the darkest night of the year. There is a reason that angels visit us only when we have reached the bottom of the bottomless pit.

Epiphany comes on Friday.

Oh and here is the link to where The Nation has named me on of Thailand's international top 40....

Somtow makes Thailand's top 40....

Requiem for the Mother of Songs

2011-12-23T12:24:00.000+07:00

After three years I finally completed work on my REQUIEM FOR THE MOTHER OF SONGS, written in memory of HRH Princess Princess Galyani Vadhana, and yesterday the Department of Cultural Promotions at the Ministry of Culture agreed to co-host the world premiere at the Thailand Cultural Center. This work requires over 400 performers, is about 75 minutes long and is I believe the first setting of an entire Latin liturgy by a Thai composer; it's probably also one of the biggest concert works composed by a Thai in scale and length. However I hope it will be appreciated for its moments of inner stillness and intimacy as well as its huge gestures. I'm working now to cast the seven soloists. Festa Musicale in the Czech Republic is contributing over 100 choristers to join the vocal forces in Thailand. I'll soon be sending out a letter to choirs and university music departments to ask for their cooperation.

The initial inspiration for this work came to me in a dream in which I saw a vision of the princess, who devoted her life to classical music in Thailand. I call her the patron saint of classical music in this country.

I thought the work would be done in time for a memorial event shortly after Her Royal Highness's passing, but the piece grew and grew and became a compendium of my life's work, using all of the techniques I learned over the 50 years in which I've been composing and performing my work. It also attempts to find solutions to the central riddle of my cultural identity by forging a link between the Thai and western sensibilities. So for the first time I'm integrating my post-serial past, my post-romantic present, and my roots in Southeast Asian musical dialectic.

I hope that putting together this production, which will be a climactic moment in my life's journey, will also be a path toward conciliation and a way in which many disparate elements of our musical communities can come together.

Since the princess passed away, there has been a kind of strange darkness in our music communities — people unable to find their way, arguing over trivialities. I hope with this work to find the doorway in the labyrinth, to help us find our collective way back to the light.

My Requiem has been the subject of rumor (and even attempts to hijack it by slapping together other requiems) for many years. But now the score is a physical reality and a vocal score will soon be available for downloading.

I hope my friends will all join with me to make this tribute to HRH Princess Galyani an event to remember.

To All Extremists

2011-12-17T15:32:00.000+07:00

Rhetoric is ratcheting. A big-time general and a big-time parliamentary bigwig have both stated publicly that those who dislike the law should leave the country. Now, I never realized that "disliking" something was in fact illegal. In fact, "sinning in one's heart" may or may not be offensive to God, but laws against thinking are neither viable nor enforceable.

Acting on one's thoughts in another matter. But in between the total freedom of thought and the constrained freedom of action, there is an area which seems quite murky, and that is speech. While I still can, I would like to use my rapidly declining freedom to address the extremists of every color who seem to want to hijack our national discourse.

I would like to appeal to the ultra-extremists of both stripes in this country. Both of you are strident but minuscule minorities in a country in which most people truly believe in the Middle Way, which is the very core of Buddhist philosophy.

To the ultra-royalists who would enforce extreme penalties for the slightest infractions of the letter of the law, completely ignoring the purpose for which that law was created, I would say this:

You may legislate obedience, but never love. We live in a country in which a genuine and almost limitless love for their revered institutions exists in the vast majority of the public. This love did not come into being because of any law. Your desire to enforce that love, however good your intentions are, has the potential to gnaw away at the very thing you want to preserve.

No one will dispute your desire to protect the things which most people in this country fervently believe in. No one will mind if genuine threats or attacks are severely punished.

But your Orwellian idea of putting an electronic spy in every home and of inflicting major penalties for dubious. politically trumped up, or ill-substantiated infractions is an idea that will clearly have the opposite effect from the one you intend.

Please take a look at the history of Siam and remind yourself that our monarchs have often been at the forefront of progressive thinking. Remember that it was King Chulalongkorn who abolished compulsory prostration. And remember most of all the content of our present king's birthday speech in 2005. The speech showed that he is a true visionary and really sees the big picture.

If you truly love your king, please listen to him, and have the courage to implement his wise and far-seeing advice.

Otherwise, you might want to move to country that more closely approximates your view of how things should be run. I refer of course to North Korea.

To those extremists on the other side, the ultra-revolutionaries who would sweep away everything we hold dear and substitute a completely egalitarian society ... those extremists whom the other extremists see on every street corner, but which I suspect are relatively rare ... I would say this. Get real. It doesn't work. History has shown us over and over again that it doesn't work.

There have been a number of populist revolutions against monarchic systems — against Louis XVI and the Czar of Russia and so on. In every case, well meaning ideas that sounded wonderful when expounded by philosophers foundered on the realities of human nature. Such revolutions resulted, not in utopia, but in reigns of terror in which nasty dictators seized power and bloodbaths ensued.

On the other hand, the constitutional monarchies of Western Europe, which took a lot of time to develop, have emerged as some of the more successful democracies in our history.

If your desire is a more perfect democracy, I implore you to work within the democratic process. Otherwise, you might want to move to a country which more closely resembles the kind of place that Thailand would be if you were actually to have your way and sweep everything aside. I refer, of course, to North Korea.

As I have said before, the Middle Way is the cornerstone of Buddhist philosophy. When I look around me, I see that most people here have an enduring love for our institutions, and a distaste for extreme positions. I agree with the government that excessive discussions of LM reform and/or bomb threats are detrimental to tourism and to the country's international image. I myself am hosting hundreds of choristers from Europe in July, who are flying here at their own expense in order to enjoy our country and to have a good time collaborating with our artists. Some have expressed worry. I've had to do a lot of damage control, reassuring people that this is still the lush, friendly paradise of their fantasies.

The path to reconciliation is through the center of the jungle ... sneaking around the issues is not a short cut. To find the light we must face, acknowledge, and forgive our own inner darkness.

The extremists of both sides have one thing in common. If we were actually to implement their plan of action in full, there would be no need for them to move to North Korea. This country would be North Korea.

Johnny Spencer - America's "Ah Kong"?

2011-12-16T11:13:00.002+07:00

There's been much talk in Thai circles about Johnny Spencer, a white supremacist recently prosecuted in Lousville, Kentucky for publishing a poem on the internet that "threatens to assassinate President Obama."

I read the poem. The guy's a sleazebag. Yet, though I myself, as one of those non-Anglo-Saxon non-whitebread U.S. immigrants that have polluted the purity of his utopia, might well be the object of Johnny's hatred, or in his ideal universe be at the receiving end of his bullet, I am troubled by this prosecution. I too have written poems and they have often been about issues that mean something in the real world. I hope I'm a better poet than Johnny, but I must acknowledge that even a lousy poet must have some kind of crippled muse. But what I believe is that while nations have a certain right to deal with threats, attempts to destabilize, and verbal incitements to social chaos, they should not be allowed to fetter the imagination. Crimethink shouldn't be a crime.

Mr. Spencer, it seems, decided to drop his first amendment-based defense of this case and simply to plead guilty. That is a pity because a supreme court decision on this would really show us the real American of 2011. And that would be a weathervane for our whole world, which, for some time now, has been drifting away from enlightenment.

Judge Whalin had ruled earlier that this poem did not fall under the protections of the first amendment because an "average citizen" could clearly view it as a threat to the president. As an "average citizen" myself, and one who voted for Obama, and will almost certainly do so again, I have to admit that I did not "clearly" see a threat in that poem. I saw a troubled mind, a sick fantasy, someone in need of psychiatric counselling.

Which brings us to the parallels that are being seen in the Ah Kong situation. Those parallels do exist, but is also instructive to look at the differences.

Similarities:

• violence has occurred. Mr. Spencer didn't shoot a congressman, plant a bomb in Oklahoma City, or massacre a bunch of Norwegian students. Ah Kong did not lob hand grenades in Rajprasong. But these allegations of hate speech are happening in a time when people are panicking and ready for scapegoats.

• conspiracy theories abound and infect every side in the discussion.

• an issue of freedom of expression has come head to head with the need to protect a head of state and what are perceived as core societal values.

Differences:

• What Mr. Spencer wrote is out there for everyone to see and judge. No one except the court has seen the content in question in the Ah Kong case, leading everyone to speculate that this content fits exactly their own theory of the situation.

• Mr. Spencer has admitted writing the poem, and apologized to the FBI about the implied threat, whereas outside observers have so far not been convinced that this old granddad did anything at all.

***

Are the critics of the U.S. right to bring up this case as an example of American hypocrisy? Well, yes, comparisons are absolutely fair game and there is plenty of hypocrisy to go around — the U.S. is a democracy in which the Supreme Court and a few "hanging chads" preempted an election, a country that condemns "cruel and unusual punishment" while happily torturing people off-shore, and so on. Anyone who thinks America is perfect is blind.

But the reality is that the comparison doesn't entirely fit. It fails the "average citizen" test. I don't see any concerned average citizens clamoring to release or condemn Johnny Spencer. Johnny has elicited mostly apathy in the U.S., whereas this Ah Kong case is argued about with incredible passion — a passion fueled largely by rumor, since even the recent public statement by a court spokesperson did not actually reveal any facts; it merely stated the opinions of the judges as though they were facts. Alas, Thailand has shifted away from the paternalistic mind-set. Kids don't always do what they're told. They do grow up despite one's attempts to infantilize them and keep them in the fold. All government officials need to realize that our taxes pay their salaries, and that they work for us — we don't work for them.

It is possible that if all the facts were actually laid before the eyes of the "average citizen" that the passion would be abated somewhat? Is it possible that one day those who run this country might trust its citizens to think for themselves, and trust that they may hold a variety of opinions and yet still coexist?

***

But now ... back to the issue of fantasy. Let's not talk about bad poetry but instead about great art. I think that the following quote from the prominent science fiction writer Yevgeny Zamyatin is absolutely appropriate to our times:

True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.

Insofar as Johnny Spencer took responsibility for his own words, and accepted the real world consequences of his dreaming, he must be allowed, in his own way, the stature of an artist. A crap artist to be sure, but an artist all the same.

Thailand's Achilles Heel

2011-12-15T12:15:00.003+07:00

I began this blog on the 6th of December and haven't reedited the opening to match the actual date. I would like to write something safe, optimistic, and forward-looking, but I find that all I can produce is ambiguity. Within all this, perhaps, we can find a few nuggets of hope.

Yesterday was the 84th birthday of the King of Thailand. To Thais, the Seventh Cycle is a major milestone, a confluence of two magical numbers — the twelve-year cycle of the Asian zodiac and the mystical seven. Every numerological resonance of felicity, fortune, and prosperity is implied in the confluence of those two numbers with the number 9 (as in King Rama IX) which for Thai people, owing to a linguistic coincidence, also represents the word for "progress" or "a step" — meaning forwards.

Yet this day of rejoicing, which Thailand celebrates in a sense as its own birthday as well as the birthday of its monarch, has come at a time of turbulence in our society. It is a time when our national and cultural identity is uncertain and when idealogues of many colors are trying to hijack the agenda. Many hide their true natures under the generic, knee-jerk-generating themes of democracy, love of country, national pride, love of our king, and so on, but in fact all of the above do not preclude us living in a viable twenty-first century pluralistic society.

It has been a time of great personal darkness. I've returned from my first visits to the UK and the USA in years (in one case, decades.) In London and in California, I was compelled to face the fact that I have a powerful sense of belonging to both those cultures and for the first time since my ten-year sojourn in Thailand I have been torn. I believe I'm experiencing a full blown version of those identity crises to which artists are particularly prone, and indeed which often form the very core of our creative impulse.

My personal identity problem however, is a pale echo of the crisis this entire country is facing. I think this country goes through one of these crises about every thirty years.

Instead of worrying about extremists like Mallika or her counterparts on the other side, those radical revolutionaries who want to burn down everything, I think it is worth considering what an average, thinking person in Thailand probably feels.

I think the average person here has great veneration for Thailand's institutions and would strongly want to resist any attempts to destabilize or overthrow them. This hypothetical average Thai person feels, I am sure, that his very identity as a Thai is inextricably woven into a certain cultural fabric and that Thailand's institutions are essential to that fabric. Therefore I feel, along with the average, non-extremist citizen, a great deal of love for this entire system and tend to want to overlook any peccadillos.

I also think that that same average person feels very uncomfortable at the idea that a cancer-ridden old man would be sentenced to twenty years in prison on evidence that is, let's face it, rather flimsy, after being allowed to mount a pathetic defense. Thus, again, as an average, non-extremist citizen, I am alarmed that such a thing could happen in this country, a country which most people living here view as a relatively free and open society.

Maybe the evidence isn't flimsy, but we'll never know, because our paternalistic system deems us not responsible enough to see the evidence and make up our own minds.

As an average citizen, I am alarmed as well at the warlike noises being made by legal societies and by government officials about the need for even more spying on our electronic lives. It looks very frightening and to an outsider it must look like we are rapidly descending into a North-Korea like madness. But read between the lines and it ain't necessarily so.

You see, amid all this censorial rhetoric, which I believe to be largely a posture of self-defense, there seems to a hidden a statement which in its way is utterly revolutionary, and I'll quote the Bangkok Post's reportage on this which states that a certain committee has made the following statement:

"wrongdoers should be separated into two groups: those with an intent to topple the monarchy and those who act with ignorance. The former should be prosecuted according to law while the latter encouraged to have a better understanding."

It's buried pretty deep in there, and the rest of it is all very confrontational, but this statement is actually telling us what the average citizen wants to hear.

Because the average citizen would support fully and vigorously the suppression of actual, serious attacks against Thailand's sacred institutions. And that is the same average citizen who is appalled when the law is used against those who have no such intentions, who simply say or do something that pushes the buttons of some over-zealous whistle-blower.

If the law were in fact to be applied according to its actual intent, and not according to some tenuous interpretation that extends to things that do not remotely threaten our institutions, there would be no need to rewrite or reform it. There is simply a need to clarify the intent and narrow down its application to cases that genuinely threaten our national security. However, if anyone is going to be able to interpret it any way they want, to misuse it for political gain, or to try to take out an enemy, our average citizen will not be happy.

My optimistic assessment is that underneath it all, there does seem to be someone asking for common sense to prevail. And to be honest, once common sense prevails, it'll all be over.

****
An hour after posting the above, I saw the photoshopped image of Ambassador Kenney's decapitated head on the internet. This kind of thing can only damage the cause espoused by its perpetrators. It is precisely the kind of thing that "average citizens" find offensive. It certainly tempers the optimism I felt after finding the nugget of hope in our official pronouncements earlier today. In such moments I fear that national reconciliation is slipping away even as some of us try so hard to understand all points of view.

Retraction....

2011-12-06T15:31:00.000+07:00

Last week, my dear mama told me that no less a figure than the leader of this country had attacked me as a crypto-yellow-shirt on the red shirt channel. I said in this blog that I had no proof of such a thing, though of course I found it flattering. However, my sister has sent me the video in question and my attacker is a far lesser being than the prime minister.

Nevertheless, what it proves to me is that everything one says is liable to massive misinterpretation, distortion, and regurgitation in another form. This is one of the exciting things about our evolving open society....

Refocusing

2011-12-03T08:49:00.002+07:00

I had a wild day yesterday because I went to Nation TV to do a show about Steve Jobs. Not that I knew him personally, but I guess they wanted me to talk about the mystery of creativity. They are doing a ten-part documentary about him for Nation TV which included a highly entertaining panel discussion plus a session of sound-bites.

While at the Nation, I bumped into a number of journalists who have all been (to one degree or another) outraged by the Mallika scandal, but I had already decided not to pour more fuel on the flames because, after all, isn't this woman bound to self-destruct after a while? And if the democratic party chooses not to follow my sensible advance, won't it only have itself to blame if it becomes collateral damage to Mallika's spectacular political self-immolation?

The people at Nation-TV said to me, "Let it go ... there are real issues to be discussed. Issues such as corruption, the weird machinations behind the Thaksin 'pardon', the increasing tendency for people to abuse lèse-majésté laws for their own political gain, a serious discussion of whether Yingluck's regime is actually doing the things we all hoped it would do ... these are real issues whereas the mouthings off of a madwoman are not.

Still, they also told me things that got me rather irritated. For instance, someone working in the offices of the party's upper echelons told me that Mallika's has dreamed up a conspiracy theory in which this "evil red shirt reporter" ghost-wrote my blog and hoodwinked my innocent self into being part of a huge "red shirt plot." This is an amazing idea for two reasons: that particular reporter's personal ideology, which he has the professional courtesy of leaving out of his reportage, is in fact that of a centrist democrat. I never even met this reporter in my life until yesterday when I ran into him at the paper's headquarters. The second reason is that the idea I would need to have someone ghost-write something for me in English, is patently absurd and shows that the woman hasn't bothered to figure out who anyone is before shooting her mouth off.

But taking the cake is the fact that Mallika, after being confronted with her unethical behaviour by her bosses, reportedly went on another witch-hunt the next morning, filing a police report to try to have the satirist tweeter, NotMallikaBoon, arrested for satirizing her. I don't know whether it was under Thailand's "criminal libel" statutes or whether she was alleging something even more outlandish like "identity theft" - but she clearly thinks what was done to her is illegal, or ought to be. I don't know why it would be impersonation, unless K. Mallika doesn't understand the word "not".

Now, the use of satire as political commentary has a venerable history. Aristophanes lampooned Socrates, but I haven't ever heard of Socrates trying to have him arrested. I don't recall Tina Fey being served with a warrant for imitating Sarah Palin. If you are in the public eye or are a "public personality" in anyway, you must accept that the public is not unanimously going to like you. Ridicule is indeed an important part of "being famous" and indeed celebrities are judged harshly if they do not accept satire with equanimity.

Khun Mallika is has professed admiration for China, for that country's ability to shut off Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube. (Mind you, I was in China for a week and had no trouble accessing any of those services form my hotel room.) Perhaps she also admires China's ability to imprison dissidents and send people to reeducation camps. Thailand is behind China in many, many ways, but not in the matter of intellectual freedom. And all citizens, red, yellow, or chartreuse, need to resist the idea that we should slide further backward. It is patently not her party's policy to curtail anyone's freedoms to that extent, and her actions therefore make her a traitor.

Well, let's leave it at that. The woman is not a worthy adversary.

What else has been going on, apart from my endless depression about the state of the country, the opera, and my personal life in general? For these weightier matters, please give me another day or so....

Enemy of the People - Part Two

2011-11-29T15:08:00.004+07:00

As people who read this blog know, I have been attacked in the past by people on all sides of the political spectrum. I believe that is an inevitable consequence of trying to see the world in a balanced way, and of trying to understand people's motivations without being blinded by the oversimplified blandishments of any political party.

I've read certain on-line rants of K Mallika Boonmeetrakul - sent as public messages, as well as seen one of her recent television interviews. What we seem to have is our own homegrown Sarah Palin/Michelle Bachmann type ... but an infinitely more dangerous one because her statements undermine her own party's view of itself as the party of intelligent, liberal-minded and forward-thinking people, and insofar as her tweets appear to come from a party spokesperson and not be clearly marked as her personal opinion, they give an extremely embarrassing impression of our country to the international community.

On her television interview she suggested that our country should become like China, and ban facebook and youtube. I wonder if she remembers the last time Thailand tried to ban youtube, and how it backfired and got mud all over this country's face. The idea that China is somehow a golden model to be followed on this issue is an abomination. It is only one step from banning youtube to putting people like me behind bars, like the Chinese did to Ai Weiwei and countless others. If K Mallika thinks we should become like China in that regard, she should move there.

Thailand has, by and large, been an open society since the 1973 student protests — something which has NEVER been true of China. There have been numerous attempts to turn the clock back, but no one has yet found a way to reverse the flow of time for long. They can only delay the inevitable for a time. The most recent assault on our freedoms began in earnest in the Thaksin administration and under the guise of law, but subsequent governments have not improved the situation.

K Mallika's public tweets are not the harmless ravings of a lunatic precisely because they have the appearance of being endorsed by the democratic party. They are extremely harmful. The foul language that she has used in public tweets to address some of the more thoughtful members of the red brigade do nothing to help the democrats and everything to reinforce the conventional wisdom that the democrats are dismissive and elitist.

Today, I sent a note to K. Abhisit, the former prime minister and leader of the opposition. I would like to quote some excerpts from this letter.

"All the intelligent supporters of the democratic party are going to leave in droves if this woman Mallika continues to spout her nonsense on twitter - on an account that clearly bears the democratic party's name and which everyone assumes to be the mouthpiece of the democratic party. Many already have. You must not underestimate the damage she has already done. ... The sorts of people who are leaving are precisely the sorts of people you most want to have as supporters ...

"PLEASE come out with some kind of semi-official dissociation from her statements or any hope of the democratic party being viewed as a beacon of hope, liberalism and intelligence is doomed. Everything you have worked for is going to be shit. We all want to restore this country's international image and this woman is going to reduce this country's credibility further. Better still, you should publicly and clearly fire her."

The opposition leader sent me a response that suggests something will be done about the Mallika problem, but a statement which came out just now from the party spokesperson doesn't really go quite far enough. Probably the very best thing K Mallika could do if she genuinely loves her party, and genuinely cares about the reputation of this country, is to apologise publicly, take responsibility, and graceful step down from her post.

This isn't really about the democratic party's reptutation. It's about the way this country is perceived and the way it perceives itself. K Mallika is a young woman who could use some time off to think and reflect about what she has unleashed. She has plenty of time in her life to grow and learn and become a valued player in our political system, but that time is not now.

Somtow - Enemy of the People

2011-11-23T10:16:00.000+07:00

It appears as though the honeymoon, such as it was, is being shelved for now. People seem intent on choosing sides, intent on declaring the red or yellow nature of their souls.

And people such as I, who as artists tend to zero in on moral ambiguity, and to hold that mirror up to the world, will tend to be forced into pigeonholes not of our own making.

Yesterday my dear mama called me to tell me that I had been singled out for criticism on the red-shirt channel by no less a figure than the leader of this country. I haven't seen this footage, but if true it would certainly be a sad case of curing the symptom rather than the disease.

However, no one has dragged me off to the gulag as yet, so I'll continue to call it as I see it.

This morning, the papers are full of the announcement that the cabinet has withdrawn its special amnesty paper which would have made a mockery of the annual royal birthday amnesty by creating Thaksin-specific rules. This could mean many things, depending on the level of paranoia one wishes to imbue it with. Here are three possible theories:

(a) They decided to put the interests of the country first for a change. (the Polyanna theory)

(b) The entire thing was a cleverly calculated mini-drama staged in order to have an excuse for Thaksin to address the nation in tones of piety and humility (his letter saying he wouldn't "accept" a royal pardon) and indeed, the yellow-shirts played into their hands by immediately planning a rally, then, humiliatingly, having to un-plan it. (The Machiavelli theory)

(c) They read my blog regularly and do whatever I tell them. (The fantasy theory.)

Of course (c) is essentially flippant but opinion has been clearly divided between (a) and (b). There is also the dumb luck theory: that everyone bungled it and the Thaksinites just happen to benefit ... which is conceivable, though unlikely. I don't believe the Thaksinite management, well-fueled and expensively advised as it is, misses much.

Examining the cynicism which seems to motivate all sides of this war to achieve control over "all this" is very discouraging.

Not the Best Timing

2011-11-16T12:17:00.002+07:00

I was in a taxi yesterday and the taxi driver was glued to the radio news. It was being reported that that new rules were being added to the regulations for the King's Birthday amnesty, an event looked forward to every year by jailed criminals in Thailand who hope for an early release. The radio reported that a small, secret cabinet meeting had been held and the rules had been changed so that those convicted of corruption would be eligible for amnesty.

In the past, the big annual royal amnesty has excluded drugs or corruption cases.

A special provision was also added allowing those over sixty, with less than a three year sentence, to receive amnesty.

The Prime Minister was conspicuously absent from this cabinet meeting, citing travel difficulties and saying that she had no clue what had been discussed, according to this morning's papers, which I have been reading to confirm whether I had merely misheard the radio report.

The papers added that officials were removed from the room when this matter was debated and that the official press release omitted details, so one is not entirely sure where this news is coming from.

Such blatant obfuscation can mean only that such a ruling is intended to benefit only one person, though one questions how that person can receive an amnesty at all when he hasn't even been to jail yet.

The rehabilitation of Thaksin is an important aim of this government but I would submit that this is very lousy timing. We're in the midst of a national disaster right now and the prime minister isn't looking good.

If Thaksin is to have a warm, fuzzy rehabilitation, not a fractious one that will set off more riots, I think that he should simply go to jail for a while. It need not be a long time, it could be just symbolic. And you know that jail for a former PM isn't going to be about eating cockroaches and lying on concrete floors. Nosiree! "Egalitarian" is not a word that applies in a Thai prison!

For years now, his media handlers have been playing the Gandhi-Aung San-Mandela card — the noble freedom fighter leading the disenfranchised toward democracy. It's not a description that bears much resemblance to reality, but going to jail would lend it a lot of credibility. Those three great human rights leaders did go to jail — for years at a time — because of their beliefs. (Of course, corruption isn't a belief per se, but by the time the handlers get through with it, it could be.)

A few days in jail and people will be eating out of Mr. Thaksin's hand, and his opponents won't be able to say much without seeming ungracious.

There is no need for legislation disguised in general terms that "happens" to give him amnesty. No need for secrecy. As soon as even one day in jail is spent, the moral high ground becomes accessible ... with some difficulty, but that can all be smoothed out with the right spin. Once that high ground is within reach, a "special case" amnesty for one person can be possible without juggling around with His Majesty's birthday amnesty, which is intended to help thousands of unfortunates rebuild their lives. Indeed, making the birthday amnesty be about one person will ruin the entire thing.

It is rumored that Mr. Thaksin pays $1 million a month to a lobbyist firm in New York. I'm a lot cheaper, and I think my advice is better.

How cheap am I? Well, you can start by appointing me Minister of Culture!

A Fork in the Road - A Cockroach on the Lawn

2011-11-14T05:39:00.000+07:00

In this morning's dream, I am part of a big tourist expedition to parts unknown, There is a fork in the road ... or rather, there are two pathways from the main road which will join up later on. I take the first path and suddenly discover that I am alone; everyone else has decided to take the later branch. But I soon reach my destination, which is a vast Cambodian temple ... it looks like Angkor Thom, except that it is weirdly lit, the huge divine stone faces glowing in an odd golden-yellow, as though they thenselves produced light. But as I look at these incredible ruins I realize I am alone. I need to find the others,

Eventually, I do. They did not see any ruins. They only want to get back home. We are thousands of miles away from the city, however. Eventually they cut across swampy ground, slashing tall grasses with machetes, to reach where I am. Strangely enough, they do not really notice the temple.

I look back and say, "Civilization is nearer that you think." Because behind the temple, where I came from, I see a road that is clearly Sukhumvit ... though a section perhaps far out from where I live.

If we go there, I tell them, we can get home. But none of them follow. I end up reaching the main road with only Top, the boy who went to California with me recently, and with Antoine, the tenor who got into undeserved trouble with the immigration authorities in London.

So we are standing there and I still hear their voices. "You'll never get a taxi home." But a taxi pulls up. It's red and black and Top and I get in, and I tell the taxi to take me to Sukhumvit Soi 33, and then to take Top wherever he wants to go ... as I look back, I see that Antoine is still waiting ... he doesn't seem to notice that his ride has come and gone....

****
So I take a brief nap and wake up from another dream. I am master of a huge estate with big fields and the whole place is infested with cockroaches. I declare that there will be a cockroach hunt. I send people out into the fields and they run along the open fields with beaters, making the cockroaches flee from their hiding places, then others of my gang spray them with DDT.

"This is amazing!" says a commentator. "This will really bring in the tourists! Call the ministry of tourism and put out some PR for the cockroach hunting season!"

Later on, I am trying to explain to two maids why the cockroach hunt is so beneficial. But they do not understand me. One of the maids, in particular is a bearded lady, whose sideburns make her resemble an ape. She in particular has difficultly understanding me.

I bring them out to the fields to explain, but we discover that the cockroaches, in death, have turned into white jade, purest nephrite such as was once considered the noblest color of jade in China.

****

It seems that I am living in a not quite normal universe, made weird by this incredible jetlag which I simply cannot shake. I walk up and down all night long and in the day I sleep at unpredictable hours, unable to do anything productive or to meet anyone.

A general malaise is in the air because no one knows how long the flood will last, or whether anyone, in government or otherwise, will actually do anything or know anything. Though my street is still dry, the shortages in the grocery stores are bizarre. There is, for example, no soda at Villa Market, and only the most upscale brands of water, but the foie gras section in frozen foods is just crammed. We will know what side dish to have with your uncooked Mama noodles when the waters finally come to our street.

I do not remember dreams ... who does? ... but these are extraordinarily vivid and brightly colored, and despite their idiosyncratic qualities seem to actually be trying to tell me something. The first dream tells me that the fabulous world of myth is but a stone's throw from the mundane path — could the others but see it — which they do not.

The cockroaches that turn to jade seem connected with the jade cicadas which for thousands of years in China were buried with the dead as symbols of rebirth (they have this very long cycle of dormancy and then appear to be born out of the earth itself so it is a natural symbol.) I collect archaic jade so this seems to be a metaphor that my perfervid brain would automatically cook up.

People cannot fail to notice that I've been blogging every day for the past few days. This is what insomia does....

Time's Winged Chariot

2011-11-12T06:23:00.000+07:00

I don't smell the fœtid odor of the "fine and private place" quite yet, but I am more conscious that it lurks around the corner. Today, Jay is 20 years old. He's probably asleep right now, as it's 3 am and I have just woken up (I cannot shake this persistent jetlag).

Actually he's not asleep. He and Trisdee just walked into my office. They have been having dinner together at the late-night Sri Fa which is next to my house and which stays open very late. I think they tried to invite me, but I couldn't be awakened.

Now, they have gone to bed so here I am, trapped in this jetlag cycle, saying highly personal things to total strangers in the nebulous nowhere called the net.

Here's a video of me, Jay, Trisdee, and Jacopo fooling around in the recording studio at Assumption University.... I am not going to go back to attempting to create the vocal score/piano reduction of my requiem for Princess Galyani ... this took two years to compose, but doing the vocal score isn't taking that long except now I am stuck on the last movement where everything plays together for the first time ... the seven soloists, three choirs, orchestra, organ, brass band, etc etc.... aaaaah ... how to make it possible for a single pianist to get through a rehearsal? I don't know.

Stumbling on Chapman in the Eton College Library

2011-11-11T02:58:00.000+07:00

On looking into a copy of Chapman’s Homer

that might have belonged to Keats

by S.P. Somtow

They stood in Darien, little knowing how

A poet would allude to them long thence.

Their lives as metaphor remembered now

More real than real, intenser than intense.

They came; they conquered; now they’re gone. But I,

I too have held those pages, knowing Keats

As one might know the earth, or sea, or sky,

As pillar of my world. Against deceits,

And disillusions, and entropic fears,

Beauty and truth do blend a powerful potion.

My tired corpus piqued by time and tears,

I stand on Keats and see a farther ocean

Where Darien itself stands not, or ever

Silent, for the tide flows backwards never.

(with thanks to Michael Meredith for first reading Keats to me in the 1960s)

One of the astonishing things about my return to Eton in September was that I could finally physically connect with things that were only alluded to when I was a boy. Including this copy of Chapman's Homer. Of course, when Keats was my age, he had been dead for 33 years. My feelings when hearing Michael Meredith read Keats to us kids were probably not too different from the feelings Keats had when he opened this book. In particular, his rendition of To Autumn made my hair stand on end.

My own poem is of course a silly one by comparison, but I've been trying for years to prevent that venerable old lady, the Sonnet, from flatlining. Watch for my book, Sonnets About Serial Killers, coming out next year from Diplodocus Press (which is my own ... following another venerable custom, though I may have written the odd bestseller for a genuine publisher, for poetry (and even doggerel) vanity publishing is one's fate.

Aha! Proof!

2011-11-09T06:57:00.002+07:00

A picture is worth 1,000 words — but can it buy a few seats in parliament?

The above photo, from Reuters, of a Buddha image in the roots of a bodhi tree being swallowed up in the waters, is precisely the kind of image that can be exploited endlessly to shore up the bizarre theory I discussed in my recent blog — that the gods themselves are punishing the redshirts for an impious blood soaking ritual last year. (By the way, I learned by brief googling that the Guardian of the UK quoted my blog extensively as a a major authority on blood spatter — making me the political equivalent of Dexter.)

Its validity as proof is probably about the same as a photograph once shown me by the father of one of my friends at Eton and Cambridge, Mark Watson. The photo purported to show the footprint of a man and that of a dinosaur. I gazed at it (it was blurry) and wondering why the old man was getting so worked up. "If people coexisted with dinosaurs, what happened to them?" I asked him.

"What a silly question," he said, "they were all destroyed in the Flood, of course." Later I learned that the Rev. Watson had written a number of books on the subject. The Rev had a bit of an antediluvian fixation. I did wonder why dinosaurs hadn't been allowed on the ark, but I guess they would have sunk it.

I haven't thought about Mark in many many years, but I recently found a pic of him, in the same book where I found that polaroid of myself at the age of 22.

As a boy, Mark was as beautiful as a pre-Raphaelite angel. I wonder where he is, and whether his father wrote any more books.

But to go back to the Reuters picture ... do you remember how I described the Buddha under the bodhi tree about to achieve enlightenment, and the earth goddess driving away evil with water from her hair? Now the ones who subscribe to this theory will be shouting eureka, eureka as they crank up the machineries of political activism.

Still jetlagged out of my mind, I notice that it's almost 7 am and I should go to bed. I check ismyhouseflooded.com and find the disquieting news that my neighborhood's flood percentage has gone up to 20%, the highest it's been in a while. I check the Bangkok Post online and it tells me Bangkok will be "navigable in two weeks."

As long as the electricity remains, I will, too. And as long as the Evian holds out, as the markets are all out of any cheaper water.

Three Cycles Later • Views from the Golden Mountain

2011-11-09T01:34:00.000+07:00

My mother was emptying out some old stuff in storage and I found some interesting old photos including this one, a polaroid of my young self, probably taken by myself on an SX-70. I only owned that camera briefly because my uncle Thongthow wanted it really badly and he bought it off me a month after I purchased it while on holiday in New York.

1975 was my last year at Cambridge and also the year that I wrote this piece, Views from the Golden Mountain, at the request of Witaya Tumornsoontorn, for the Bangkok Chamber Orchestra (a precursor of the Bangkok Symphony.) I'd just returned from representing Thailand at the Asian Composers' Conference in Kyoto (at 21, I had been the youngest person there by about 20 years) and had my first real critical success with a violin sonata called Cemeteries. Witaya asked me to do a piece that would be broadcast on Thailand's Army TV station, and he wanted it to be "really shocking" but simultaneously "clearly Thai." In fact he asked me to adapt one of the melodies of M.L. Puangroi and indeed took me to see her in order to get permission to use it. Doubtless he was expecting some kind of "arrangement" of the tune, with a few nice slippery impressionist harmonies ... the kind of thing that Hans Gunther Mommer, the local imported classical music celebrity, was doing with Thai traditional tunes.

I took the piece in a completely different direction. I got the idea from standing in the windswept top of the Golden Mountain - then one of the tallest things in the city, though it is completely dwarfed now - and looking over the cityscape at twilight.

Starting with an eerie, quasi-serial texture of solo strings, flute and harp (the harp part had to be carefully written as Thailand only had one harpist in those days) the piece started by evoking a sort of quasi-Bartokian (or perhaps George-Crumbian) night-music and then out of the ghostly miasma there finally came the sound of M.L. Puangroi's melody, played on a khong wong like a half-remembered dream.

Well, the thing is, the two textures - post-serial and Thai - had never been pitted together before. There had always been the idea that Thai instruments would somehow have to be adapted (that is, retuned to a western scale) to blend with western instruments, or that western instruments would have to play Thai melodies with silly, illogical harmonizations. There had never been an attempt at synthesis in which each element completely preserved its own identity and aesthetic. That, you see, was shocking, and it was also "phid khru", meaning that it went against the handed-down teaching on traditional music and was therefore a violation of the ancestral precepts.

The piece was played on TV anyway, during prime time (no soap operas to compete in those days!) and M.L. Puangroi was reportedly pretty shocked (though later on she took it in stride). One viewer called the station to say that the music had got a dog to start howling outside and that he had thought it was part of the piece. Nop Sotthibandu, the famous Thai jazz violinist, said that ghosts of old Bangkok actually came out of the TV screen. The piece was, indeed, infamous.

And it was also a piece that could not exist without Thai-ness specifically, because later that year the piece was performed at the Asian Composers' Conference in Manila, and there was no khong wong. Instead, a gamelan instrument was used and it was not of course tuned in the specifically Thai way. The entire piece fell, to my mind, completely flat, which was embarrassing since it was played in front of several major world composers.

In fact, I said it was a lousy piece in front of a bunch of them. Jan W. Morthenson, well known Swedish composer, said "Don't worry, Somtow, we all have them." Lou Harrison, the perhaps much more well known American composer, said, "Nonsense, Somtow. It's a lovely piece."

It has not been heard since then.

Now, if musicologists follow the sequence of events properly, they will see that View from the Golden Mountain has turned out to a piece of huge historical import. What was shocking in 1975 is commonplace today. The fusion of Thai and western in musical forms has permeated to the level of pop music and film music, and no one would think of decrying it as sacrilegious or against traditionalism.

I was not in Thailand to see the revolution work out, however. After pieces like Views and the considerably more fully-imagined Gongula were done, and after Bruce Gaston, Dnu Huntrakul and I created more such pieces and battered ourselves against the walls of public ennui and critical vitriol, I burned out. It took me only about 3 years for me to pack up and go into the sunset ... literally heeding the traditional command to "Go west, young man." In a sense, all three of us "sold out" - the others heading towards the more profitable vineyards of populism and commercial music, I towards an even stranger future as a novelist.

The revolution took its own good time. It happened without any fuss, while our backs were turned. Today, musicians in this country do not even know that a revolution had to occur for them to be able to play and create music the way they can today. And that of course is the mark of a true revolution; once it has occurred, all memory of it should fade away. Or, as Karl Marx put it, "wither" away.

I myself will not step in that river a second time. I have said all I needed to say in that idiom and reinvented myself as a "kinder, gentler" composer.

But seeing this picture of my sweet, sensitive self, before I became corrupted by time and doubt, made me think of that piece again. It may be time to bring it back. I wonder if it would hold up.

I was looking for the score the other day ... I haven't found it, but I know it is around somewhere....

Top and Somtow's California Adventure

2011-11-08T10:25:00.002+07:00

A little taste of what we were doing last week ... fiddling while Bangkok flooded, I'm afraid ... but we're back now, and the water's still coming....

This footage is from Top's actual concerto debut, including the infamous string breaking and fiddle exchange scene.

This is a very very good omen. After all, the same thing happened to Midori at her first concerto concert!

Science and Myth: Avant le déluge

2011-11-07T06:58:00.002+07:00

By now, the people of Bangkok have realized that our city governor's ceremony to placate Ganga, the Goddess of the Waters, was at best a temporary fix. A lake the size of Denmark is still bearing inexorably toward the heart of Bangkok. Concurrently with the daily reality show of dogs rescued from rooftops, old people refusing to be moved from everything they've ever known, and boatloads of do-gooding celebrities, another, darker drama is happening behind the scenes.

Listening between the lines of governmental rhetoric, one hears the voices of those who have already written off the present — and are planning how they are going to get away with the aftermath. Groundwork is being laid for blame games. The déluge is being seen as a given, and political advantage has become the holy grail. This is not helpful, as over 500 people have now drowned or been electrocuted — a number vastly higher than the casualties of any of the various bits of political turmoil that have recently afflicted Thailand.

Incompetence, lies and deception have certainly played a major role in the way all this has been handled in the last month or so, but to put it all on the people currently in power would simply be inaccurate. Indeed, I have a certain amount of sympathy for our prime minister, who is, well, just out of her depth. A natural disaster could not have been on anyone's list of contingencies when the Thaksinites put her up to run the country. But the flood which is now at my doorstep is the result of years of complacency, recklessness, and failure to exercise any kind of foresight or extrapolation.

I've mentioned before that there's been a lot of bickering about which floodgates should be opened — and therefore who should be flooded first and by how much. The city and the state have each cited various one-upmanship laws; outraged citizens have been smashing dykes, hoping to let someone else get the worst of it all. Indeed, selfishness and self-interest seem to have come to the fore. The disaster has not brought out the best in us.

A brilliant inspiring speech about how everyone should work together for the common good, followed by thoughtful and consistent action involving all branches of government, would have clinched the deal for Thailand's first female prime minister. Regardless of which neighborhoods got submerged, such a course of action would have made us feel that we were all in it together and would have pushed the "proud to be a Thai" button. Whether such a course would have actually saved lives or businesses one cannot know. But people would have felt a sense of communal destiny. Not only did it have a chance of improving the situation, but it would have been good politics.

Now, the do-gooders in the news are compassionate citizens like Trisdee or our orchestra manager, Pongsatorn, who go out in boats all day long helping to hand out care packages (and even rescue dogs trapped on rooftops.) The army is getting a lot of good press, too, although the prime minister refused to declare a state of emergency, perhaps for fear they'd get too much power and stage a coup.

As the country-sized lake rumbles toward downtown, we have instead a new kind of speculation, one that is not about centimeters per hour, lunar gravity and tides, or predictions of precipitation. Rather, we have returned to our neolithic roots, and sympathetic magic is widely seen as the explanation for this disaster. What I am about to tell you is a theory advanced by sober, rational people who happen to live in a country which lies, as I've often said, at the uneasy crossroads of futurism and feudalism. In Thailand, people do believe in the power of science — and do consult their astrologer before undertaking any important task. And truth, you must understand, is the majority congruence of our individual private illusions. That is why truth can be as fluid as the water which is about to engulf us.

Here is the conventional wisdom amongst a growing segment of Bangkok's population. The emblem of the democratic party, which is, despite defections by radicals, the main bastion of those with yellow-shirted leanings in this country, is the earth goddess Mae Thorani (Sanskrit Dharani, cognate with the Latin word terra.) In Buddhist mythology, it is believed that when Prince Siddhartha sat beneath the bodhi tree to seek enlightenment, the evil god Mara appeared to tempt him. But the earth goddess appeared and, squeezing a fountain of purifying water from her hair, drove away the forces of darkness.

Now, it just so happens that, during the troubles last year, there was a nasty incident in which blood was spattered by red shirts at the democrat party's headquarters, in effect, polluting the sacred icon. There were a number of things about the incident that could be considered sacrilegious when viewed by those who want to see sacrilege. From that moment on, there were those who whispered that the goddess would exact some kind of vengeance.

Well, the red shirts are now running the country, and guess what? Here's the patron goddess of the democrat party, squeezing the cosmic waters to purify the country and dispel Mara's temptations and put Thailand back on the path of righteousness.

What seems to be as "fringe" as Sarah Palin exorcizing democrats in church becomes almost logical after you hear one of the true believers enumerate the evidence. The flooding, they will tell you, has hit red shirt-leaning parts of the country more than the almost completely democrat leaning south of Thailand — which isn't usually spared the annual inundation. They'll cite all sorts of facts to prove this hypothesis, facts one cannot argue with because one has never thought it might be necessary to disprove such a notion.

Okay, my friends in the west may laugh. But guys, check out that beam in your own eye ... think of the local governments in the U.S. seriously trying to legislate the teaching of mythology in science class ... I refer of course to "scientific creationism" ... a horse of the precisely the same color. Credulity knows no boundaries of race, gender, age, or technological advancement.

Here in Thailand we live in a society where the supernatural does not lurk in the shadows. It is mainstream. The theory I have just expounded above is unlikely to be true. But that it will seriously be believed, and acted on, is fact. And mythology has a way of becoming truth when enough people reiterate it. That is how religions happen, after all. And in Buddhism (which, strictly speaking, isn't a religion) we believe that reality and truth do not necessarily coincide. Buddha's philosophy teaches us that reality is in fact illusion ... that reality and truth are indeed in some sense opposites. And if reality is illusion, it follows that the better illusionist wins.

So you see, on top of the actual drama, on top of the political drama, a third drama is being acted out as well ... drama on the supernatural plane. And it is conceivable that this third level will ultimately be a greater influence on what happens after the waters recede than anything in the other two.

Now, whatever the theory may do for some people's sense of self-righteousness, it is another nail in the coffin for reconciliation.

Now, if *I* were prime minister, which I am not, I would forge a new theory — a new testament — out of the same raw material. There's more than one way to manipulate the data.

Why couldn't the earth goddess be angry at the entire country, which should be nation of brothers devoted to the common good, and be sending this biblical plague to force us all to get along, to turn aside the political differences and "love one another" again? And what if the facts and figures don't quite fit? Make 'em up.

I'll say it now just as I said it under the previous regime: I have always given the government great advice in my blog. However, the previous administration tended to take my advice about a week too late in every case. Their timing sucked — and they didn't win the election.

My advice to this administration is: never underestimate the power of a myth. With the right inspirational words, this potentially destructive supernatural force can be made to work in the government's favor. So get those handlers cracking and you'll come out of this like a goddess yourself.

But aren't we forgetting someone? What about the victims of the disaster? What about doing more to help them? What about more pumps, more food, more supplies? Better science? Less bickering?

What about it?

Reconnected Lives

2011-11-06T07:11:00.000+07:00

So ... I finally went back to California for a few days. Nine years have gone by. My old house, now taken over by my son Johnny, has been massively (and quite attractively) retrofitted as a kind of bachelor boarding house. My godson Håkon's band Desecrate has become famous. Harry's diner hasn't moved from Burbank and still is one of the only "sleazy all-night diners" to serve a decent steak complete with pancakes. Mostly, everyone's still there. But we all know you can't step in the same river twice...

By a bizarre confluence of destinies the World Fantasy Convention took place in the same city and the same weekend that I was doing a concert in a gorgeous church in San Diego. Meanwhile, producer David Giler asked me to meet my agent about possible movie deals for Vampire Junction and other long-ago classics. I suddenly had all the pieces of my life fall into my lap at the same time. In one week and within a hundred-mile range I conducted a symphony, autographed horror stories in a bookstore, breakfasted with publishers and lunched with agents, and generally had the sort of existence I should probably have had 20 years when I didn't have to drag my gout-ridden, corpulent corpus around with alternating bouts of excruciating pain and artistic ecstasy.

Dean Anderson, an enterprising and ambitious musician in Southern California, had set all this up by creating a plan to exchange artists between our two stables. He had just done a concert with our Sinfonietta in Bangkok and my visit to California was the "exchange" part of the deal, with a young soloist from Thailand trading off against two young soloists from Orange County. (Well, one Canadian and one Ukrainian, making it all very international.) Our soloist was 16-year-old Top who's assistant principal of the Sinfonietta and who had never done a solo concerto before, doing Mozart No. 3 and as all real musicians know, Mozart is the easiest composer to play the right notes and the hardest composer to play the notes right. So, it's a challenge.

In fact the opening concert was even more of a challenge than expected; Top's E string snapped in the first movement of the concerto prompting a dramatic game of swapping as he borrowed Dean Anderson's violin and Dean quickly switched violins with his assistant ... all without missing a beat ... and then during the excerpts from my opera "Mae Naak" I fell out of my chair.... all in all a wild return to the world of music in the USA (where I had not conducted since 1979.) Despite all the mishaps we received four standing ovations so I guess the audience must have liked the show.

In the meantime I was staying at the World Fantasy Convention which was an odd thing; I gave a reading from an unfinished fantasy trilogy, walked around the dealer's room, lunched with many friends I haven't seen for years, and in general had a strange flashback to around the late 90s because these people were still the same, just a little grayer and a little fatter. Still, had fruitful discussions about returning to the writing biz with people. But I'm not sure about it. I'm not sure about many things anymore.

It's been a period of reexamination. Returning to London reconnected me with my youth; returning to L.A. reconnected me with the middle period of my life. But I am not sure how the Third Act will play out now. These reconnections raise more questions and answer few of them.

I returned to a Bangkok that is slowly, inexorably coming under flood waters. My house is still dry, but Top's is gone; he and his family are going off to the north somewhere. I should probably escape as well, but there is so much to do here. If they don't cut off our power, I'm happy not to leave my house for a couple of weeks ... so much to think about, to plan.

Boulevard of Broken Dreams...

2011-11-03T23:27:00.000+07:00

Well no, I am not on Sunset; this hotel instead abuts on Citywalk, which is a Hollywoodised vision of what an urban fantasy would be, located on the grounds of universal studios.

I've got an extraordinary dream to tell you about, weirder even than my life. It's convoluted and recursive and brightly colored and it happened last night, causing me to wake up several times only to return to it.

This is how it began:

There is a gateway to another universe located in what looks like a box of kleenex. I put my hand in and I am sucked in through a passageway that deposits me in that world with an odor of freshener or hand-washing gel still clinging to me. Trisdee and Top have also come through this warp, but Trisdee now looks completely different, and I can see his real self lying in a corridor, asleep or unconscious in another plane of existence. According to my dream, I am sharing the dream with those two people.

In this strange new world I am being harrassed by my nephew Pub, who is dressed somewhat like "The Joker" or another comic book villain. Demoniacal laughter as he screams: "The secret formula of the universe! I must have it now! You will reveal it!" and I steadfastly refuse and say I do not know. Suddenly he claps his hands and four ninjas emerge from the dimensional kleenex box. They fight me and eventually they shoot me in the stomach twice. I collapse but feel no pain. The comic book villain laughs and I say to him, "I am invulnerable!"

We escape down some stairs and are in a subterranean alley in an underground city, the walls painted with vivid cityscapes in turquoise and bright purple. Top is behind me and in the distance, at the foot of another stairwell, a man is leaping in the air and speaking, sometimes rationally, sometimes using long incomprehensible words.

A professor suddenly appears to elucidate this, but first he asks me to translate the leaping man's words. I say it is a dream, and that the language is full of puns. The professor nods sagely and says, "James Joyce has a dream language too and often uses long words, portmanteau words such as dontcrossthelinesofhtestreetatall." I immediately see a street sign with that word on it and know that I am still in the world of dreaming. The professor obeys the sign, but has a wild silly walk so I realize he is not the voice of reason after all.

At that moment, Albert Einstein walks by and I call out "Alfred, Alfred," knowing full well that is not actually his name.

In my dream, I wake up and find myself trying to type up the dream on the computer. It is only as I type that I recall the beginning of the dream, with the secret formula and the ninjas. Trisdee stands over my shoulder correcting me, and telling me I am remembering the dream wrong and that I am leaving things out. "Look here," he says, "you forget the words 'koax, koax' which are in your dream even though they are nonsense."

"What do you mean, nonsense?" I say indignantly. "It is a quote from Aristophanes."

At this point in my dream, I wake up for real....

****

Well, this is the dream I had a day after an exciting week in which I reappeared in the fantasy and science fiction community after a ten year absence, conducted in America for the first time since 1979, introduced a young soloist to an American audience, and promised several small presses that I would return to the book biz one day....

The Einstein figure might be key. There is an Alfred Einstein, of course - he is he biographer of Mozart. And there is an Albert - the patron saint, perhaps, of science fiction who stands at the gateway between the magical and the plausible. It seems that I confuse the two.

As for the secret formula? I don't know what it is but I do know that a lot of people are trying to get it from me in real life.

This is my last morning in California, and perhaps I'll write a blog soon about the incredible experiences I've had this past 10 days, in both the music and the literary universe....

Watching the deluge from afar

2011-10-27T01:12:00.000+07:00

I am afraid that this image, reproduced from the Bangkok Post's website, is not a comforting one. I live in the Watana district of Bangkok and you can see it is calculated to be a rich turquoise zone ... i.e. it will be under about 9-20 inches of water. Although I prepared the house for a possible onslaught of 50 cm (about 20 inches) and therefore technically I am already prepared for the eventualities depicted herein, so far most predictions haven't been terribly accurate.

Meanwhile I'm being urged by all in Bangkok to hang on in California for a few more days, but worries about the situation in Bangkok may cause me to come back pretty quickly. We'll see how things go...

Trisdee, meanwhile, is in the thick of it as a flood volunteer. If you follow his tweets @trisdee, you'll get a lot of good info.

Not going gentle into that good night....

2011-10-23T03:15:00.000+07:00

Right. So, tomorrow I'm going back to L.A. for the first time in about eight years.

It's a remarkable confluence of all my careers. First I'm conducting two concerts with a local orchestra, the Montage Civic Orchestra, in two cities. Second, I'm appearing at the world fantasy convention at least briefly. Third, I am "taking meetings" and all you Hollywood people know what that means. There's even a remote possibility that the 25-year-old dream of a film adaptation of Vampire Junction might finally happen.

The Third Act of Somtow's Life is entering the final chase scene. I don't know what will happen. Will film, music, or novel-writing win out, or will there be some bizarre conflation of the three?

I guess we will know soon.

Siam Sinks

2011-10-21T15:27:00.000+07:00

I will just entertain you with this interesting example of Dave Brubeck on harps at the Siam Society ... since there's nothing to do now except await the deluge...

We are all sitting here worrying about whether our houses will be submerged in the next few days. It's foolish, I know, but I am sort of gambling on our street staying above water for a few more hours. Our papers give wildly contradictory reports - sometimes even within the same issue - and false alarms and panics spice up the general anxiety level from time to time.

It can take the kind of crisis that knows no political coloration to reconcile a fractured nation, and it can take a crisis to build a real leader out of a puppet. I think we are all hoping that both these things will happen. Many more people have died in the flooding than in any of these man-made crises of the last few years and perhaps this will put our world into perspective.

These are the things we all hope for, but at the moment, the prospects seem a bit slender. The PM won't declare a state of emergency though if this isn't an emergency, I don't know what is. Instead, a controversy rages about her Burberry boots. The choice of which floodgates to open is fraught with politics, because on this choice depends who will be flooded in Bangkok ... and Bangkok is divided not only geographically but politically.

When Yingluck became prime minister, there was a certain amount of optimism and hope in the air precisely because she has no track record. All she had to do was show an independence of spirit and we were all happy to give her the benefit of the doubt. A natural disaster can be a political godsend, bringing people together, occasioning inspiring speeches on unity ... she would not be the first leader to make political hay out of tragedy. But unfortunately she hasn't had any traction from this. Even the spectacle of her weeping on national television has not helped; the sexism of our public is such that when a male leader weeps, he can appear sensitive and caring, but when a female does so, she can appear flighty and weak. Alas, you have to play the cards you are dealt.

Superficially, she's in a similar position to Abhisit last year -- it looks like she's twiddling her thumbs while the pressure mounts. However, the details of the thumb twiddling are somewhat different. Abhisit dithered because he wanted to avoid a bloodbath; his political enemies needed a bloodbath in order to assert a moral victory. Yingluck's adversary is not a human political foe, but Nature Herself. And nature doesn't gain any political clout from the number of people who suffer or die. Nature isn't running for office. If Yingluck is really decisive, even if a lot of people don't like her decisions, she will gain in stature. But her choices are indeed the choices faced by rulers: who must suffer more for the general good? And this is not a choice that one faces when running, say, a large corporation. Which makes this a first-time moment. And I'm sure this fills reds, yellows, blues and multicolored shirts with trepidation (not to mention the rest of us.) The hand of God can't be deflected by a New York PR firm.

Meanwhile, Trisdee, with great civic sense, has been volunteering at Dong Muang Airport, moving sandbags and making care packages and what have you. He's made a lot of new friends and the number of his twitter followers has increased vastly.

Meanwhile I'm abandoning ship for a while, because I have two concerts to conduct in L.A. next week - plus the world fantasy convention - a strange bit of seredipity. It will be odd to be "home and not home". I'm slowly starting to look forward to it. It feels strange to leave in the midst of all this, and of course there is the chance that the airport would be underwater, but....

The big question is will I have a house to come back to, or will I be living in a very upscale fish tank?

"Our Ways Are Not Your Ways"

2011-10-08T16:27:00.001+07:00

I can't resist sharing this on my blog as it is I this it is something that penetrates to the very heart of what it means to be Thai. Always in a delicate balance between futurism and feudalism, with one foot in cyberspace and the other in the Stone Age.

It appears to be an official notification (with a government seal) inviting people to a special "water-driving-out ceremony" to be performed in order to help quell the flooding.

Now, the Emperor Caligula once went to war with Neptune, and staged a huge triumph in Rome where the soldiers carried heaps of seashells as trophies of the victory. However, not many people bought it. Indeed, Caligula was assassinated.

King Canute, 1,000 years later, had a better idea. He performed one of those "ruler of the waves" ceremonies, and when it didn't work, declared that no king was as powerful as God, and used it to teach his subjects a lesson in self-awareness.

1,000 years later, the City of Bangkok - after Rome and Britain the new center of the cultural universe - has been doing it too. Now the Governor of Bangkok is my childhood friend, but he didn't have the advantage of my Cambridge education. He only went to Oxford. So he can be forgiven for allowing this superstitious twaddle to be perpetrated under an official seal.

And who knows, it might even work! We'll soon see next year, when Bangkok survives the apocalypse and the rest of you guys are carousing with Davy Jones.

Cultural Misappropriation - Religious Anxiety?

2011-09-25T05:05:00.001+07:00

This happened on the night of the 16th but I'm just now getting around to posting it....

Last night I woke up sweating from a nightmare at 3 in the morning and it was so strange a nightmare to have on the eve of a big gala performance of my opera in London that I would like to share it with my friends....

So in this dream I am conducting a performance of Bach's St Matthew Passion in a church. It is a small church somewhere in Europe, with a steeple. I am doing it as a special favor, it is some kind of very special occasion.

Well, in the middle of the opening chorus (Kommt, ihr Töchter) pandemonium breaks out outside the church. There is a park there. A group of Muslims is violently protesting my performance. They are screaming that the music disturbs them and i have no right to perform it because it isn't my culture. A big guy dressed in some kind of chieftain or sheik's costume begins to argue with me. Finally I asked him what music he would prefer. I said I could do some Muslim music if he wanted I could sing a qawwali. (This is sacred Pakistani sufi-influenced music ... incredible stuff.)

The chieftain said "I'm North African. You're still wrong. You think we're all alike."

Nevertheless to please him, I start to perform a song by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan called Allahu. I enlist the help of one of the kids from the children's choir of Mae Naak.

"No, no," said the chieftain, "our music is tribal. With big drums." The entire crowd begins to pound on the drums, singing vociferously while I and the chorister attempt the transcendent ecstatic melismas of the qawwali.

And then I wake up.....

****

And you see this is intimately connected with a dream I had last month. This is how it went:

I am performing in an opera which takes place in the parking lot of a church in suburban or rural England. As I get to the last act, Stefan (the opera director) who is in the opera announces to me that he simply can't remember the last act and must go on stage with the score. I realize that I too have forgotten how the piece goes. However, I find an old airmail letter written in a meticulous hand in blue ink and I stuff it in my score so that I appear to be reading the letter during the scene, making it slightly more convincing.

However in the middle of the act I look out where the audience should be and I see a stone wall.

The final scene is a wedding and I play an Anglcan priest. I have got into my black cassock and when I come onstage, I see that here is another priest dressed in the gaudy green and gold robes of a Catholic mass celebrator. I wander through the pews trying to see who I am marrying while the other priest seems to get on with it. Eventually I reach the altar and get to work.

At the end of the opera there has been an audience after all, including my old friend J William Middendorf II whom I haven't seen in 40 years. To my absolute astonishment, he comments, with great earnestness, "It was 100% thin."

We go out into the parking lot as I wake up.

****
Both dreams are about performing, and somehow delivering something completely different from what was intended. Somehow, a church is involved in both dreams. Europe is involved in one way or another.

I find it all most confusing.... and this piece of art which is hanging from the side of a house in my old school (not there when I was there) seems to say it all. For many it is a miraculous creature defying gravity, jutting out over the precipice of ... I don't know.

But to me the sculpture looked like someone about to commit suicide.

Today I am having serious doubts about the world. It is something to do with my return to Thailand; I was only gone for two weeks, and I haven't spent more than a day or two in England in about forty years but coming to Thailand felt for the first time like it felt in the 1970s .... like I was leaving home, not coming home.

I've been here for ten years now, and I'm suddenly worried about whether my head has dented the brick wall or not. I suppose I shouldn't think about it too much ...

It;s 5:03 am. I think it will take a while to recover from this jet lag. And longer to get over the post partum of our huge UK tour.

Things of Darkness

2011-09-20T16:21:00.002+07:00

New wing of Music Schools at Eton

The Third Act of my opera Mae Naak is essentially one long exorcism scene. So we have been having an on-stage exorcism every day for about a week.

Yesterday, however, I had an exorcism of another ilk when I returned to my old school, something I have not done since around 1971. My visit to Eton at that time was curtailed when my former housemaster summoned me to his office and told me I should get going because my presence would disrupt the delicate balance of the school. This was, of course not really true, and no other teacher would have made me feel so unwelcome, and this is, I suppose, what the exorcism, forty years later, is really about.

My sojourn at Eton was extremely mythic in that I was literally caught between heaven and hell. Heaven was in a sense the school itself: the boundless opportunities, the resources, the unlocking of so much creative potential. This was personified most clearly in Michael Meredith, my tutor at Eton, who went out of his way to develop my artistic sensibilities. When I composed my first opera, Brand, Michael lobbied the school to have the entire ms. xeroxed (not a cheap thing in the 1960s) and shipped off to an opera house to be looked at. He was uncompromisingly critical of my poetry and short fiction in a way that always forced me to examine my motivations and become more honest with myself. There were also incredible friends, great music, art, drama, and literature all around me, time spent handling real-live mummy parts in the Myers museum, performing in a real opera in a theatre with an orchestra pit with a cast that included future world-class opera stars like Michael Chance, and so on. Then there were the trips to Glyndebourne that included dinner with Sir George Christie, being taken by Michael Meredith to Ian McKellen's live performances as Edward II and Richard II in London, visits to the school by such celebrities as the James Blades, one of the world's greatest percussionists, and so on. In the "heaven" part of my experience, my horizons were being expanded on an almost daily basis.

Hell, you see, was the house I was assigned to ... whose housemaster was the notorious D.P. Simpson. I don't really enjoy speaking ill of the dead but in this case I must. Simpson ran a Dickensian horror of a house which was an island of Stalinist repression within a universe which, despite a system of Victorian punishments such as flagellation and writing out lines of Latin poetry, was in its own way fiercely liberal and totally committed to a forward-looking style of education. It is in fact not possible, unless you were there, to imagine the atmosphere in that house ... Simpson thrived on belittling his boys, cutting down their egos, preventing them from exercising any creativity. He told me for instance I must remove all imagination from my writing if it was to be acceptable to him. Life in that house was driven by fear. I would never allow a child of mine to endure what it was like there.

On this trip to England to do the opera, I was delighted to meet the Harding brothers who were at that house with me. David Harding told me that some boys had been destroyed by the experience. David told me about one boy who snapped and ended up punching out Simpson; he has ended up in a bad way, with a terrible drug problem. Another boy, David Cruikshank, ran away from school. I was sad about this because I really liked and admired this kid. David Harding told me that David C. is now working with troubled kids. I thought that was very fitting and it showed me that he had turned the trauma into something positive.

I found myself fighting back in little ways all the time, which Simpson must have found intolerable. I got an email from Henry Ponsonby who was at that house with me recently and he said this: "I recall how your courage and endurance managed to beat the system". To me it was not about courage or endurance, however, but about sheer survival. (I once wrote a letter to the head master complaining about Simpson's repressiveness; naively, I believed that the powers that be would spring to my defence. They did not, of course. But I imagine it contributed greatly to Simpson's efforts to eradicate my individuality.)

Just how intolerable I was to Simpson only came to my attention when I returned to Eton this time and my former tutor told me things that could not then have been told ... for instance, that my former housemaster had lobbied (successfully) to have me denied admission to Worcester College, Oxford. He had, after all, written to my parents to tell them I was not Oxbridge material, and would not have wanted to be disproved (though my rather fine A level results must already have been pretty galling.) In any event I got a choral scholarship to Cambridge so the lobbying really was for naught.

As a child, you do not really know that the world you are in is not necessarily the way the world is supposed to be. Forty years later, I finally understood that other elements of the school did not approve of how Simpson operated, and I finally came to understand some of the complex politics that allowed such a person to be allowed to exist in a place that was otherwise so nurturing and so respectful of young people's individualities. I learned that Simpson's house was an anomaly and that such a place could not exist in the Eton of today and should not have existed in the Eton of the 1960s.

The Eton Choirbook, one of the most
important manuscripts
in the history of western music. It's in the
College Library along with assorted First Folios,
Gutenberg Bibles and other
"odds and ends".... today, boys may
to see and touch these Holy Relics.
Eton's not a museum - the past is all
very much alve.

Yesterday I arrived at an Eton from which the hellish element had been expunged. The current headmaster of Eton, Tony Little, was a friend of mine at Eton ... that in itself was remarkable. The brilliant Michael Meredith who taught me pretty much everything I know is still there and a person of great influence. Incredible resources - shiny new rehearsal rooms, expansions to the theatre, have been added. I got to do things I was never able to or allowed to do in the 1960s ... for instance, to touch and turn the pages of the 15th century manuscript The Eton Choirbook which is a priceless trove of English polyphony, to gaze into an authentic copy of Chapman'a Homer, to hold a real handwritten page of the Origin of Species in my hands, to gaze at the actual rehearsal score of Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream with Benjamin Britten's pencilled-in production notes.

Seeing Eton as it is now, run by people who I consider to be my friends, it is impossible to believe that this drama of light versus darkness would be played out today because I don't think that such a repressive house would be allowed to exist. Eton today is far more light than darkness, and with the Victorian punishments now being illegal, there are few dire threats hanging over the students' heads. And yet I have to say now, I have to admit the inadmissible: that I needed the darkness as much as needed the light. That was the epiphany for me yesterday. (It was Michael Meredith who taught us about epiphanies while deftly leading a group of us through the labyrinth of James Joyce's Ulysses.)

I understand now that I could not have written any of my novels or operas without drawing from the totality of this experience. Like Prospero, I need to say that "This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine." Even for these things, I find that I am grateful. In a sense I am more fortunate than Etonians today, who may not imagine being torn between such extremes. I managed to get both the "growing up in an idyllic fairyland" childhood and the "growing up in a hideous concentration camp" childhood combined into a single package. All of Eton, darkness and light, is an inextricable part of who I am. Yesterday I was finally able to accept this.

The 'Orror! The 'Orror! - Mae Naak in London

2011-09-19T06:57:00.000+07:00

History was made I suppose, on Sep 15, because Mae Naak at the Bloomsbury Theatre was the first performance of a Thai opera anywhere in Europe. The house was about 80% full but word of mouth must have been good because by Sep 17, the last performance, the house was completely sold out. We were juggling wildly trying to get last minute people in. The orchestra played their socks off and Nancy Yuen has never done the role more superbly. I haven't seen the official reviews yet (they might be a while) but the reception from the public was unbelievable ... the cheering, the curtain calls, the entire thing was quite a spectacle and for me particularly meaningful because so many figures from my youth were present, such as my tutor from Eton, Michael Meredith. Also friends from Cambridge like Geoffrey Thomspon and friends from Eton and Cambridge like Iain Little and Tony Little (no relation).

Tomorrow, actually going to Eton which will be very very weird indeed. The Dickensian horrors of my childhood are some of the darkest parts of my memories, but Eton was also in many ways profoundly inspirational and liberating. More news soon....

What we're doing in London

2011-09-13T14:57:00.000+07:00

There is a terrible crisis on a daily basis. The orchestra has been squashed into a miserable squat because we can't afford any more. The set didn't fit on the plane. One of our guest singers was deported by British immigration because they decided he had been in Thailand illegally - they were only "trying to help".

And yet the music our people are producing is incredible. It is amazing that our musicians, our orchestra has gained a foothold here in London. The door has opened and it can never be shut again....

The standing ovation in St George's Cathedral, with Lord Mountbatten there to hear the cantata which the Mountbatten Institute had commissioned me to compose with a British choir and a Thai orchestra was all tremendously moving. Although my life right now is mostly pretty hideous, such moments make me glad to still be in the world.

Special Sneak Preview for Readers of the blog only!!

2011-08-30T13:27:00.000+07:00

Yes ... readers of this blog may watch the entire opera Mae Naak by clicking on this unlisted youtube link. Thanks so much for all your support.

This is not going to be the final version of the production but it is provided so that my friends and readers can enjoy an opera they wouldn't otherwise be able to see without traveling to Europe ... or London ...

And now ... for tickets to the London premiere ... go to this website:

For Opera Siam information in general ... go here....

Thailand in Miniature: The Music Scene

2011-08-29T12:25:00.001+07:00

The classical music scene in Thailand is a perfect microcosm of the political miasma that reigns in this country, and it is instructive to look at both. From Mahidol we can learn many lessons about the beast that gnaws at the heart of this country ... though I must say that we will learn very little about music.

The can of worms that is the College of Music, Mahidol, was opened very very gingerly by me a few days ago ... not because one wants to upset any oxcarts, but because it is good to acknowledge publicly that a can of worms exists.

Since that day we now read that pupils and alumni of the school are madly petitioning in the good doctor's defense, which goes to prove what I was saying before: that Dr. Sugree's detractors and his supporters are equally vocal (though the latter clearly have a lot more money.)

All this is essentially the Thaksin story in miniature: great ideas, persuasive salesmanship, amazing showmanship, powerful personality on the one hand, and vacuous intellect, blatant disinformation, megalomania, and falling for one's own hype on the either.

And in both stories there are elements of hope as well as horror. Buried within Thaksin's highhanded authoritarianism, disregard for human rights and self-serving corruption were many good things, best of all the seed of an idea that this could one day be a land of equal opportunity and fairness in which the government serves the governed, instead of raping them.

And concealed within Sugree's curious fiefdom are similar grand hopes, such as the idea that Thailand could one day have a music conservatory that churns out Trisdees and Ekachais in every new crop of students.

I have to admit that when I read the news of Sugree's resignation, I composed an email which I intended to send to the president of Mahidol. In this letter, I suggested that it might be time for Mahidol to ascend to the next level and that they might want to talk to me about Sugree's job.

After I wrote this letter, I didn't send it, because I realized that if I ever considered such a post I'd have to give up my entire life: my composing and literary career, and my stewardship of the opera, the philharmonic, and the sinfonietta. I have managed to put together this country's flagship opera company, this country's most internationally reviewed symphony orchestra, and this country's most forward-looking youth orchestra with virtually no money, little government support, while suffering constant attacks and attempts at sabotage by various Salieri-like figures. Would I do a better job if I suddenly had all the resources that Sugree has at my disposal, or would it just be a distraction from the vision? In the end, I thought better of it. Manipulating bureaucracies is not something I do well.

However, a rumor that I had written this letter did get out and I've received numerous messages telling me to go for it. The messages are not only very very pushy but are full of vitriol about the infamous Dr. Sugree. Here is one example, from one of the most influential figures in Thailand's classical music scene, a person closely connected to the royal household: "But I do hate the thought of his poisoning the newly-created Thai musical world though. He is not just mediocre, he can be positively, evilly corrupting their minds and distort their views"

Nevertheless, I am resisting the urge. I do have a Messiah complex, but it is not so bad that I would be willing to actually endure crucifixion. Fantasizing about being crucified is about as far as I'll go.

In fact, here's the link so you can sign up for the pro-Sugree petition yourself. As with countries, so with educational institutions: people tend to get the kind of government they deserve.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/%E0%B8%A5%E0%B8%87%E0%B8%8A%E0%B8%B7%E0%B9%88%E0%B8%AD%E0%B8%AA%E0%B8%99%E0%B8%B1%E0%B8%9A%E0%B8%AA%E0%B8%99%E0%B8%B8%E0%B8%99%E0%B8%AD%E0%B8%AA%E0%B8%B8%E0%B8%81%E0%B8%A3%E0%B8%B5-%E0%B9%80%E0%B8%9B%E0%B9%87%E0%B8%99%E0%B8%84%E0%B8%93%E0%B8%9A%E0%B8%94%E0%B8%B5%E0%B8%95%E0%B9%88%E0%B8%AD/168462219896275

Now that I have reassured myself that it can't be anything other than a rhetorical statement, I might end up sending the letter after all. What harm can it do? Except, of course, to myself. And I do have that Messiah complex to feed.

Saint or Demon?

2011-08-27T09:08:00.000+07:00

I read in the paper last night that Dr. Sugree has tendered his resignation as director of Mahidol's College of Music. I do not believe everything I read in the paper, and it is certainly conceivable that this is not a "real" resignation but some kind of calculated gesture. However, the music scene is awash with speculation.

After ten years, it is perhaps time for an honest appraisal of the pros and cons of it all. I joked on Facebook about how Steve Jobs and Sugree should simply change places, but maybe it's actually not a bad idea!

The rumors of Sugree's unethical behavior, corruption, and malfeasance are legion but I am not here to discuss rumors. However, he is clearly an extremely polarizing figure and there are equal numbers of people who consider him a saint and to be the devil incarnate. An examination of who constitutes those numbers, however, shows an interesting trend: the members of the "devil incarnate" camp have a tendency to include this country's greatest musical and creative minds, and that such people seem conspicuously absent amongst the "saint" crowd.

I for one had extremely negative experiences as "composer in residence" in Mahidol ten years ago. I won't rehash those war stories here because it is all going to appear in Book 3 of my memoirs and I can promise it will be very juicy. Right now, however, I am still working on Book 1!

There is certainly a case to be made that this person raised awareness of classical music, popularized music education, and directed huge amounts of public money towards a hitherto neglected arena. There is also a case to be made for his activities being the single most destructive element in the classical music scene in this country, obstructing promising careers and hiding mediocrity behind impressive buildings. I honestly believe that both points of view have elements of truth.

I recently was asked to give some advice to the newly created Galyani Vadhana Institute and I explained my theory on how we can finally have a proper music conservatory in this country that can consistently turn out great musicians such as Trisdee na Patalung and Ekachai Maskulrat - the two finest Thai musicians of their generation and both people who had to reject the Mahidol mindset in order to forge real international careers.

I think there are three stages to the creation of a great conservatory from scratch. First, you must hire the finest, most inspiring teachers you can. You must use the fact that you have these teachers to get to stage two: the best teachers will attract the best students. Only then, when the human content of your conservatory is optimum, should you worry about building fine buildings and impressive halls. In other words, a great conservatory starts with great people, not with great buildings.

Although I did not add two and two at the time, it's clear that my philosophy is the polar opposite of that which motivated the Mahidol College of Music. In 2001, when I first went there, it was all about the building program. The college was being "grown" in the opposite order from my theory, meaning that it would be very attractive to bureaucrats and bean counters. but that the core value of a conservatory— the art itself — would take third place.

I make no comment about the validity of the opposing theories because it is perfectly clear that the theory I do not subscribe to has yielded the richest, biggest and most income-producing music school in the country. That is an admirable result for which, without any irony at all, I must salute Dr. Sugree Charoensuk.

Not An Open Letter to the Incoming Prime Minister

2011-08-26T23:09:00.000+07:00

Nah, it's not yet time to write one of my notorious open letters which invariably invoke scathing criticism from all sides of the political spectrum for their evenhandedness, use of reason and logic, bicultural comprehension, and long view of history.

I'm still guardedly optimistic about the future, more pleased than not about the prospect of a female prime minister, and more wary than not about the resumption of "politics as usual" in the near future. Of course, by a strict interpretation of the constitution, the accusation that Yingluck has been assisted throughout her campaign by a banned politician comes with evidence seen by all, from call-ins to press interviews given by her brother. Therefore the question of whether the prime minister in waiting will be red or yellow carded isn't actually about whether she cheated or not, but about whether the EC will have the guts to actually make a ruling based on what it sees rather than what it fears. If there is a similar case for Abhisit having cheated, we haven't really seen much public evidence, but corruption is so endemic that it would not really surprise people. A prominent member of the yellow shirts did tell that "dirty work was afoot" but wasn't very specific.

I was thrilled that upper-level members of both extremes of the political spectrum came to the premiere of the new production of my opera "Mae Naak", perhaps an indication that burning down shopping malls and seizing airports is not really what Thailand is all about.

However, an article by the very perceptive film critic, Kong Rithdee, in the Bangkok Post, did give me a bit of a start when it suggested a (perhaps fantasy) scenario of Chuwit becoming Minister of Culture.

Chuwit, a wildly popular figure especially amongst the young, ran a hilarious and high-profile campaign which ended up netting him five members of parliament despite the campaign being played for laughs. This is as much a measure of people's apathy and disillusionment with politics as it is of any political acumen.

In a later article by Kong Rithdee, he gives the incoming minister of culture all sorts of trenchant and perceptive advice.

I love the fact that a ministry of culture finally exists thanks to the lobbying efforts of so many people including such friends of mine as (then) Sen Kraisak, but I do wish the ministry of culture would move more quickly towards actually dealing with culture as that word is generally understood in the world. After all, our culture is one of our biggest selling points. Not just the "high culture" of temples and traditional art, but also the "low culture" of transvestite stage shows and wild shopping malls. All of this is culture. Whether it's good or bad is another issue altogether and "culture" and "morality" are really quite separate items. Legislating song lyrics or hemlines is not an appropriate function for a ministry of culture at all; it might more properly belong to a ministry of morality, or a ministry of uniformity, or even a ministry of zombies and robotics. Culture and morality are not necessarily bedfellows and in fact they may often be at odds. (Or is it just that in my past life I was Minister of Culture in Sodom and Gomorrah?)

Why This Dispute Won't End Quickly

2011-08-26T11:50:00.001+07:00

I present this series of maps to explain to my friends overseas why a tiny triangle of land on the edge of a cliff seems to have such earth-shattering importance for the Thai and the Cambodian peoples. The first map is from the 12th century. The Khmers are in red, the Thais are completely absent. In the next two maps, separated by a couple of centuries each, you see that the red is shrinking. There are many different colored bits and most of them are different city-states controlled by Thai-speaking peoples (using the term loosely to mean all the main branches of the Tai language family). Then comes the fourth map, 1809: the purple area, almost identical to the red area of seven centuries earlier, is Siam. None of present Cambodia is under Khmer control at all. Then comes an 1886 map. The yellow part is Siam.

And now comes 1873. The French and British have made a grab for territory formerly under Siamese suzerainty. And finally, in this 1873 map, there reappears something called "Cambodia" - a central hub for the Khmer-speaking peoples. It's the purple bit. Around 1904, more gets grabbed and the territory now known as Cambodia becomes more or less the shape it is today.

It is this hub, an administrative division of the French Empire, that will eventually become an independent country and a repository for the the dreams, hopes, history and identity that calls itself Khmer.

And the rump of what was once the Siamese Empire is now the repository of those same dreams, hopes, history and identity for the ethnos that calls itself Thai.

In reality, the DNA of those who built those two empires has long since mingled and every person who was born here doubtless carries some DNA of both. The people who built the temple on the cliff have been dead for centuries and no matter what language they spoke, it is almost certain that their descendants live on both sides of the disputed border.

I think that the best avenue of healing would be to start by acknowledging the trauma wreaked by the colonial powers in this region. Then, moving back through time, people can begin slowly to understand and forgive the past. Memories are long around here, but they are also flawed, and too severely distorted by zealots. Would it be wonderful to move on and get this behind us? No doubt. Will that happen? Doubtful.

A thousand years and an entire peninsula is being fought over by proxy with this tiny piece of land.

Cybergeeks!

2011-08-16T10:42:00.000+07:00

I haven't blogged for a month but it's not out of laziness; there's endless rehearsals, concerts, operas, and lengthy admin meetings and by the time I get home each night I am a zombie, a condition assuages only by sleep and the odd Zynga game.

In a few weeks, our entire team of somewhere around 75 people goes to England. There are a lot of things to prepare in order to perform Mae Naak in London, from orchestra rehearsals to placating the spirits. One of the most noticeable things about how we do things in Thailand is chaos, but it's not really chaos. It's actually heterophony.

Heterophony is the organizing principle of classical Thai music and it involves everyone in an orchestra simultaneously improvising on the same melody. Each person does his own thing and the melody somehow emerges even though everyone appears to be going in a different direction. It's the secret of how things seem to work in this country when they simultaneously appear not to be working.

So, we are in chaos now and yet the pattern is beginning to emerge.

Meanwhile, I was invited to a cybergeeks' panel. One can in fact watch the entire thing in youtube I understand. Here's the beginning of the ten-part series.

One of the oddest things about this was to compare it to a panel at a science fiction convention. Of course in my previous incarnation as an SF writer I did so many of those that I developed certain skills to a degree, but I've never had to do it in Thai before. And there was one very different thing about it. Although this panel (which was webcast) was about "the future", the panelists by and large, and the audience in particular, didn't seem much interested in what I think of as "the future" ... 10, 50, 100, 1000 years from now. They wanted to know what the next Intel chip was going to be like (and the CEO of Intel Thailand was there to tell them.)

Issues that form the meat of such panels at any regional SF convention, like the social consequences of virtual reality, didn't really hold their interest that much. Had the panel consisted of the likes of Gardner Dozois, it would have been a lot wilder.

And yet this did make me reflect on a far-reaching implication. Is it possible that young people here are simply not encouraged to extrapolate? The idea of extrapolation, familiar to every science fiction fan, is about taking one element, often a small one, and going as far as you can with it in a huge leap into the chaotic hyperspace that is imagination. Much crap is conceived by extrapolation, but it is also the birthplace of most of the important ideas that have driven civilization forward.

I've met a lot of young people here in the course of our work in music and also in our "Bach to the future" series of science and music camps where some of the most talented kids from divergent intellectual worlds are thrown together to see what sparks will fly. So I know that this country does not suffer from any lack of brilliant, creative individuals. There's also an abundance of self-help books around Bangkok bookstores about how to "turn your child into a genius." However there don't seem to be that many books on "how to teach your child to think."

I'd say that this actually should be the biggest item on the national agenda. A complete overhaul of education towards an emphasis on "how to think" would improve the country in countless ways - including putting an halt to the various partisan "mobs" of all colors that invade Bangkok from time to time. How could changing the educational system end political strife? You'd have to extrapolate to find out.

Mae Naak Cast visits the the ghost of Mae Naak...

2011-07-11T14:37:00.000+07:00

Mae Naak's Cast Visits the Shrine...

We've posted the visit on CNN iReport for all to enjoy....

Somtow

Puppetry - Day Two

2011-07-06T13:26:00.001+07:00

I read in the paper today that Thaksin may be appointed some kind of "trade ambassador" for Thailand and will be sent from place to place to make trade deals on behalf of the country, travelling on his Montenegrin passport.I also read that the case under which he was convicted will be reopened, and that in terms of cabinet appointments:

The final decision [on the allocation of Cabinet posts] rests with Thaksin alone," said a source from Chart Pattana Puea Pandin... (today's Nation)

They don't seem to be making a very good case for this incoming government not being run by Thaksin! This is probably not a good omen when it comes to predicting a coming storm.

I was told by a prominent member of an anti-Thaksinite faction (not the democrats) yesterday that I "shouldn't worry", because there's "more going on backstage than meets the eye." I'd really like to know what that is, but like the rest of you, I will probably have to wait.

There is quite a lot of goodwill right now, even among people who didn't care for the Thaksin administration, and a lot of hope. But such stories in the paper, even if untrue, do contribute towards a general "sinking feeling"....

We're all taking a deep breath....

Pinocchio Takes Command

2011-07-04T11:39:00.002+07:00

Let's see how the pretty puppet does her 'job' ... said one of my Facebook friends when I suggested that if PT makes a stab at its promises and doesn't play up the Thaksin angle too much we might have a bit of calm. I don't doubt that at the moment, we are about to welcome Pinocchio into government house. Thaksin has been answering questions from the press as though he had been elected, and Yingluck has been coy and not forthcoming. But what if that changes? What if the puppet wants to become a real girl? That would be the one factor no one has yet allowed for, because it is a complete unknown. Pundits can calculate everything else to the nth degree, but not the extent to which Yingluck could "declone" herself.

As a novelist I have to believe that people can grow, that societies can change, and that darkness can be dissolved into light. One of my foreign journalist friends wrote to me, "I can't really take sides, but privately I think this is a sad day, because violence has won." I would like to begin the day more optimistically than that.

Now that the Thaksinistas have an absolute majority (it would take 13 red cards to derail that, which is perhaps unlikely) it is perhaps time to look at the good things one remembers about their previous time in office, and to revisit the bad things as well, in the hope that we can have more of the former and preferably, none of the latter.

There are good things. Do you remember how long it used to take to get a passport or an I.D. card? The Thaksinite efficiency, the smiling bureaucrats who suddenly started to learn from the McDonald's customer service playbook, was a breath of fresh air in those days.

I was delighted, during the Thaksin era, to be put on a government committee working with extraordinarily gifted kids. It was a great idea, though it also made me see the mechanism of corruption at first hand. I left this committee after objecting to the 200,000 baht chairs (EACH!) that I was asked to approve for a new building that should have become a great showcase center for gifted kids. But this kind of thing didn't take away the fact that it was a great concept and very forward-looking and innovative.

The bad things came gradually. Freedom of the press started to go south ... not via the classic method of dragging people off to the gulag, but by misusing the judiciary and the laws that criminalize slander. And speaking of south, I don't suppose that Thaksin personally ordered the Tak Bai massacre, but this was a human rights shocker. The south didn't forget, and I don't think PT got many votes down there. Luckily, "drug lords" are not a voting bloc, because the extrajudicial killing of thousands of them to fulfill a drug war quota was just another symptom of an administration drunk with power.

As for corruption - well, the yellow shirts, rather thoughtlessly, made it their main cavil when they could have got so much more international sympathy by attacking some of the issues in the preceding paragraph. The corruption was of course monumental, but it looked like sour grapes, since previous governments were hardly shining examples of purity.

Unfortunately, the erosion of press freedom, the increased authoritarianism and the heightened corruption may have started in the Thaksin era, but they didn't stop later. And no one can deny that the well-funded Thaksinite PR machine has done a very fine job of pinning all these things on their successors.

If Yingluck is a puppet, then she is not an unknown quantity. After a honeymoon period, things will go wrong, probably in exactly the ways the pundits are already predicting.

But if she becomes a "real girl"? If this were to happen, all bets would be off and we could dare to hope for a genuine reconciliation.

Life will go on ... won't it?

2011-07-03T10:56:00.001+07:00

Tomorrow ... well, later today as it is getting towards midnight ... we'll know many things. We also won't know several other, perhaps more important things.

We'll know whether the Thaksinites have enough parliamentary seats to take over the whole shebang and remake the country in their own image, or whether there will be two to three weeks of hideous squabbling dragging in all sorts of - what are they called? - invisible powers? unseen forces?

People have enumerated the good and bad in the two main sides at length, and pundits of great wisdom and experience have come down on one side or another. Should neither side have enough brownie points, the army is also mobilizing, ostensibly to protect us from the benighted Cambodians.

I am almost certain that the following questions will not be answered no matter who gets to form the next government....

Can any government transform this country into one of inquiring minds, young people who dare to question, a country where innovation is rewarded instead of blocked at every turn, and where few people can see beyond the next few months, and no one thinks of posterity?

Will there ever be a proper educational system in this country where kids do not learn everything by rote?

Will the "standard bureaucratic bribe" fall below the oft-quoted 30% "off the top" for every transaction?

Will there ever be an election in Thailand in which votes are not bought and sold? I read in the morning's paper about several people being caught with stacks 100 baht notes all ready to hand out. I've read that this may be the dirtiest election held yet. If so, it is not nearly so blatant; it must have gone underground....

***
Last week, my fellow Distinguished Silpathorn Artist, Bruce Gaston, was hideously mugged for his iPhone and had to have 32 stitches, in some alley near his house. But weeks before that, he had called me up and said that while walking home, some people had been staring strangely, looking very threatening, and for the first time in the almost 40 years he's lived here he didn't feel like this was Thailand anymore.

I lived for years in what could be called a "bad neighbourhood" in L.A. I used to believe that in Bangkok one didn't have to take any of the precautions that one takes for granted in a large American city. I really believed that one can walk anywhere in this city and feel completely safe....

Yesterday the police came to my house. They're investigating, still, the death threats I received a year ago from somewhere in cyberspace. I was surprised that they were still doing so, but apparently they do take it seriously although I am sure the trail is very cold.

***
Early tonight I received an email from no less a figure than the Secretary-General of ASEAN, a friend of mine since my very early 20s. He said simply, "we are all on edge."

See you on the other side of the tunnel....

Since political campaigning is suspended....

2011-07-02T03:16:00.000+07:00

No one is allowed to "campaign" from now until the polls close, so I guess those airwaves that have recently been full of political ranting are now free for satirists like "Purakhanda" to point out the lighter side of it all.

Sometimes I think politicians should be banned permanently, and only satirists allowed to run the country....

Siam Sinfonietta at Work and Play

2011-07-01T01:03:00.000+07:00

Put together a little video showing our young musicians having the time of their lives....

The Nixon Gambit

2011-06-29T05:27:00.000+07:00

Let's forget for a moment about right and wrong.

Forget about injustices, perceived and real; forget about amnesties, forget about morality.

If one wanted to remain in power at all costs, what would one do?

Fearmongering about Cambodia worked pretty well for Nixon. I don't know if it was the factor that got him reelected despite the Watergate scandal, but it probably didn't hurt. A little Christmas bombing, a little misdirection that turns a lush, fertile, friendly little country into a den of evil, and you can have a ready-made bogeyman.

I've been told by several active yellowshirts that if Abhisit were to declare war on Cambodia, they'd come over in droves. I don't know how many droves there really are, but while I was having my weekly ultrasonic fat cell reduction treatment this morning I happen to catch the yellow shirt channel while channel-surfing and was amazed at how similar their rhetoric was to that of the redshirts. My author's paranoia began to smell an unholy alliance.

Walking out on the Cambodian talks in a huff is probably not enough to reverse the polls. It might behoove them to remind people that Mr. Thaksin once worked for Thailand's arch-enemy. I guess Montenegrins don't need a work permit in Cambodia. Then there's the simple, tried-and-true tactic of invasion.

And why stop at one little temple on a hill? Why not announce that Thailand's "territorial integrity" doesn't recognize the land grab of the dastardly European powers, and unilaterally declare that the 1904 border is Thailand? You'd get more than one temple ... you'd get Angkor Wat, and Laos, Northern Burma, Tenasserim, and Northern Malaysia for dessert. Nationalists will cheer.

Not advocating any of this, mind ... I seem to remember that the last person to do something of the sort started a world war. Just pointing out that when one is at war, one rarely votes out an incumbent.

He wouldn't would he?

Klassikal Kids in Haydn

2011-06-28T01:26:00.000+07:00

Just sharing a few moments from this weekend, when the Siam Sinfonietta went into the recording studio for the first time to produce an album of two Haydn Symphonies, Nos. 102 and 104....

The Gloves Come Off - Too Late?

2011-06-27T00:35:00.000+07:00

Our next prime minister....

I wonder whether someone on Abhisit's staff reads this blog, From time to time, I say something ... and shortly, someone seems to act on it. Maybe it's just that I'm ahead of the curve, or that everyone is saying these things.

Recently, I compared two campaign posters from rival camps, pointing out how the Abhisit poster was covered with detailed statements of policy and ideas while the Pheu Thai poster presented a simple image, making itself comprehensible even to illiterates. Shortly after that, I started seeing Abhisit posters with shorter, focused messages and more arresting images of the PM.

When the PM said he wanted to bring the red shirts to task for the day of arson, I happened to post (on my private Facebook Page) a link to Purakhanda's video which actually has translations of of what the red shirt leaders actually said, set to a somewhat over-the-top "hollywood-like" soundtrack, and said that if he wanted people to actually believe it, he needed to start marketing a clip like that. Sure enough, I am watching the democrat rally on TV (a few hours after watching a virulent anti-Abhisit hour of speeches on the PAD channel, so no one should accuse me of not looking at all sides ... and moments before Abhisit is about to emerge, this video plays dramatically. I wondered whether Purakhanda knew about it; he was probably not watching as I've heard he's out of the country.

Last night's speeches hit the right notes and for once showed passion. Today, the opposition is spending a lot of time dismissing it all as meaningless. Perhaps in terms of the actual numbers they are right. I had to watch the speeches on internet streaming; in a country like the U.S., a network like CNN would carry a major speech like this (from any major party) live in its entirety. Only 20,000 people were logged onto the internet stream as far as I know, and only about 15,000 people were there, if that. Afterwards, on the 11 oclock news, there were no really good sound bites from the speeches, and the networks were all over the fact that Yingluck had spoken to the Isaan and Northern electorate in their own dialect ... these were charming scenes certainly, if short on substance. And certainly her command of these dialects is a lot better than her English. But then again, English-speakers aren't voting.

Therefore if they want to get any traction from the speeches, they're going to have to somehow become more media-savvy overnight.

One disappointment was that the promised revelation of "Dark Truths" didn't really occur. I am sure there are plenty of Dark Truths to go around. I myself have heard many purported Dark Truths, some of which are very dark indeed, from people at only one or two removes from the supposed "center of darkness." But no one seems to really want to discuss what is actually in their hearts. And nor do I.

Still, there is a genuine chance that the gap will tighten and at this stage, seeing these polls may draw out all those who absolutely loathed the Thaksin period. Indeed, several prominent Yellow Shirts told me that all Abhisit has to do is declare war on Cambodia to get the yellow shirts clambering back on board.

Will I personally suffer under a Thaksinite administration? Probably not as much as some people. I'm not on any list of drug lords, nor am I a Muslim in the south - so I have less chance of being killed. When the Thaksinites first came on board, I thought they were great. But now, I guess as long as I mind my own business and don't fret about how we're inching towards some kind of slow erosion of our personal freedoms (this started in the middle of the Thaksin era but certainly continued intermittently after he was ousted!) I guess I'll survive.

Dark Truth? or More Obfuscation?

2011-06-22T21:19:00.000+07:00

As July 3 approaches, I'm getting more emails from friends overseas, asking me whether they should cancel their summer holiday in Thailand ... after all, there might be riots, killings, burnings of shopping malls, seizures of airports, and so on. I've told them to bring their tourist dollars regardless. After all, even during the worst moments of last year, the drama was only confined to limited areas. And if things do look dire, we'll need the tourist dollars even more.

In fact, it is almost impossible to know what will happen AFTER July 3rd, although it is a virtual certainty that ON July 3rd, the Thaksinistas will get more votes than any other party, making Ms Shinawatra the most likely candidate for prime minister of Thailand.

Everyone is so confused about what might happen after that point that there's been an upsurge in omens, dream interpretations, and astrological pronouncements. Indeed, my driver, the normally very down-to-earth Boonchuey, admitted to me that he had consulted an astrologer about the outcome of the election.

"Well, my astrologer says that Yingluck will become prime minister," he told me, "but will only remain so for a few days, because something dramatic is going to happen after that."

It is interesting also to note that many people I know, especially young people, have told me they're voting for Chuwit. Why? Because his campaign is more entertaining, apparently. A number of members of my family are voting "No." I ask them why, when such a vote is probably, to all intents and purposes tantamount to a vote for a party they don't want in power. Their response is that they're too angry at the current lot even though philosophically more in tune with them.

Then, many of my young friends remember the Thaksin era for a certain improvement in the convenience of their lives — not having to wait in line to get a passport or an I.D. card, for instance. Not having been massacred at Tak Bai or extrajudicially shot for being putative drug lords, and being so used to corruption that they really don't see what the problem is, they are quite nostalgic about that period.

One of the most interesting polls in the last few days was the blind poll carried out in the northeast by Khon Kaen University. In this poll, people were asked given a series of policies announced by various parties, but were not told which party had promulgated which policy. They were then asked to vote based on the policies alone.

Based on this alone, the present government won by a significant margin, and the Pheu Thai party, which is leading in fact by a large margin in that part of Thailand, fared poorly.

It seems that, in the area of that poll at least, the electorate isn't very well informed, and may not have a clue what they're voting for. This is scary.

Since Yingluck refuses to debate Abhisit, there probably won't be any clear-cut choice between one set of policies and another. Instead, the propaganda war is getting more and more focused though it's clear that the democrats have woken up rather late to the idea that they might actually need to carve out an identity. For example, their newest campaign posters, instead of long lists of policies which clearly are not being read (at least by the participants of the above-named poll), now feature a simple declarative sentence: "I'll work for ALL our brothers and sisters — not for the benefit of JUST ONE MAN." Well, this would have been a great message a month ago, but it might be too late now. The idea of holding the a big pro-democrat rally right in the spot where the red shirts torched the mall finally shows a bit of chutzpah, though it can easily backfire.

However many moments of high drama the democrats produce, I think they're well aware that the numbers are not in their favor. The Pheu Thai party will win the most seats in the next parliament. However, unless they win an absolute majority, their seizing the reins of power is by no means assured.

According to an ABAC poll I saw this morning, if the election were held today, no party could form a government without the collusion of minor parties. This poll also shows a whopping 30% undecided.

Polls aren't that scientific, but in this country they are probably even less scientific than elsewhere.

Our options seem to be as follows.

(a) Someone wins an absolute majority and receives a clear mandate.
(b) No one wins an absolute majority and someone cobbles together a coalition.
(c) The judiciary decides that someone cheated and nullifies the results.

(d) The army stages a coup.

Since it's clear that all of those possible outcomes will piss off a sizable percentage of the population, it follows that a degree of instability is also probable.

Still, my friends overseas, have no fear. Tourists are always welcome here. Come and enjoy the sights and sounds of this exotic cultural hub ... and who knows, you may happen to witness history in the making.

My friends from European Chamber Opera were stuck in Thailand during the airport closure. Some panicked and left by bus and train, an arduous and exhausting journey that got them home no earlier than if they had stayed. My friends who stayed behind told me that loved the extra vacation and they never felt unwelcome. Some of them are here now, helping to plan our opera's UK tour. I asked them if they were worried. They said they'd seen it all before.

That, alas, is another risk. If street protests become just another feature of the landscape along with traffic jams and tropical heat, they will inevitably become less effective, and someone will want to up the tension level. Indeed, this already happened. Many are appalled at the red shirts' arson, but one must ultimately blame the yellow shirts as well, because when they went from weeks of friendly, picnic style protest to seizing airports and did not get properly castigated, they created for the first time an atmosphere in which illegal acts by mobs might be socially condoned.

Tomorrow promises to be a big day. There will be a rally for the democrat party in front of Central World, the formerly torched shopping mall. Pheu Thai have told the red shirts to avoid the area, meaning that should there be a disturbance of any kind, they can plausibly deny that they were behind it and even accuse such disturbers of being "fake red shirts." Meanwhile, the democrats promise to reveal some Dark Truth which would once and for all turn the mood of the electorate there way.

One wonders what Dark Truth (if any) will be revealed. I can imagine a few. For example, I have been told a "dark truth" by someone who heard it from an office in a certain PR firm in New York City which, if (a) it were true and (b) people believed it, actually would completely alter the dynamic of this election. I wonder if it's the one they'll reveal. Nah ...

"I want to be a conductor"

2011-06-21T17:52:00.001+07:00

Today I received an IM from a young music student which simply said, "I want to study conducting with you. I want to be a conductor. It's my dream."

I really wanted to help him, and to help other young people who have said the same thing to me over the last few years. It is not that surprising that he should ask me that question, because after all, my student, Trisdee, has become the most successful Thai conductor ever, measured by any standard that really matters, such as reviews by international critics, the ability to consistently be invited to perform with top orchestras like RAI and Royal Scottish, the breadth and variety of repertoire, the fact that he is on the client list of one of the world's top agencies, and the genuine respect of his peers and of orchestral musicians.

One may well wonder how it was that I taught him to do what he does, and how another young talented musician could be taught the same thing using some mysterious, secret "Somtow Method".

So to the young man who wrote to me today, and to the others who have asked me this many times, I have to say simply this: Conducting can't be taught.

One can teach the basic physical principles in about half an hour — how do you beat one, two, five, seven beats in a measure? How do you cue an entry? One can teach other things in a few weeks: what are the different techniques of playing various instruments? What technical terminology do you use to extract certain effects?

One can go even further and teach "how to look good on stage" ... beautiful posture, impressive gestures, domineering sneers and expressions of profound ecstasy. Yes, these things can probably be taught.

In pretty much all the music that musicians regard as classical or preclassical, i.e. the music of the great baroque composers like Bach and Handel, the music of Mozart and Haydn and indeed most of Beethoven, the use of a conductor isn't actually "authentic." In those days, there were no professional conductors per se. The composer himself, or someone he trusted, sat at a keyboard and kept time by banging out the chords. The idea of a separate conductor as a professional musician emerged during the early romantic era and only gradually evolved into the image of the tyrannical egotist who controls everything.

When a member of the audience asks "What does the conductor actually do," it is in fact a pretty relevant question because during most of the history of music, and during the creation of some of music's greatest masterpieces, there was no such thing as a conductor in the modern sense. That probably did not prevent performances of Mozart's operas or Bach's cantatas from being deeply affecting experiences.

The emergence of the idea of "teaching" conducting as a separate art comes even later in history than the emergence of conductors. Now, most conservatories have courses, and many people with degrees in conducting are churned out every year ... far more than available jobs. And indeed, since having a degree in conducting is not a valid criterion for getting a gig as a conductor, one wonders what the piece of paper is good for, except to get a job teaching conducting. So there is a self-perpetuating mill where those who teach have frequently not actually had real careers as conductors, and are turning out people who will in turn teach others.

Trisdee doesn't have a degree in conducting, yet he is represented by a top agency (Columbia Artists) and is currently the most sought-after Thai conductor in the world. How does he do it, and what is it in fact that makes one conductor sought-after and another not? I'd like to try to explain what I can. What I can't explain is part of the great mystery of creation. You'll have to take it on faith.

The traditional career path for a conductor in the European tradition was to begin in an opera house, as a repetiteur. As a repetiteur you absorb a huge amount of repertory, learn to deal with singers, who are generally among the most difficult of performers, learn to explain to people how it goes ... and then you start to get to take rehearsals ... and then you find yourself conducting one day. Conducting in the opera house is the best experience because there are so many variables, so many things to control, so many things that can go wrong, and so much meaning to hold in your head all at once. Once you learn how to keep an orchestra, singers, and chorus in line while they are all moving targets and simultaneously trying to act, conducting an orchestra alone is a walk in the park. My friend Fred Chaslin did these things, working for instance under Pierre Boulez at Bayreuth, and now he conducts regularly at the Met.

In Europe this career path is still possible, and many of the best conductors I know have taken it. And indeed Trisdee is the only Thai conductor who went this traditional route, starting as a repetiteur with Opera Siam at 15, continuing as head coach at the Netherlands Opera Studio, getting his first major gig with The Magic Flute in Thailand at 20 which then caused the reviews to pile up and eventually netted him the Rossini Festival, the RAI Orchestra, the Verdi Orchestra of Milan, and Royal Scottish and so on. It was the best hands-on training available to him.

In Asia and the U.S., there is not an active opera company in every single small town, so this career path is more difficult to undertake. Nevertheless it is still best to learn by observing and doing, and young conductors frequently take an apprenticeship of sorts: my friend Viswa Subbaraman of Texas for instance served a stint as Kurt Masur's assistant.

When I look back through the history of recorded music, and at interpretations that have truly influenced me or been life-changing experiences for me, whether on disk or in person, I find that those conductors who "do it for me" have something in common. They don't adhere to a "normative" system of "how to conduct." They do whatever it takes to make a particular orchestra do whatever it does ... and they know how to get that orchestra to do it. Furtwängler's vague gestures, Bernstein's ballet-like "acting out" and Klemperer sitting in a wheelchair and appearing to move only once every few minutes were all things that worked, but have little to do with how conducting is "taught". The most important thing about these interpretations is that they were interpretations; they had something unique to say about the work, and the means to communicate what they had to say. They shed light on the composers' work and also on our understanding of ourselves, our humanity. These great conductors didn't seem to care about looking silly or uncool. Sometimes the gestures they did seemed incomprehensible, and many were certainly unorthodox, but it didn't matter because the orchestra knew how to react to them.

So, to the kid who asked me whether I would teach him "how to conduct", I would say this: you can pick up all the basic skills just by keeping your eyes and ears open and watching conductors at work.

I would further say that you must respect four things:

1. You must respect the composer. He wrote the work. Presumably, he means what he says. It's your job to figure out why.

2. You must respect yourself. You have worked hard to achieve an interpretation of the composer's work. If you don't believe in that interpretation, no one else will.

3. You must respect the orchestra. You may not want to admit it, but they're actually doing the work. Recognize that and they'll go to the very limits of their abilities - even beyond.

4. You must respect the audience. If you talk down to them, if you look down on them, they will know. Without them you don't exist; don't kid yourself about that.

Apart from this, there is no "Somtow method." I merely open the doors. If they have the intellect, the ability, and the guts, my disciples (if they may be called that) will go through those doors on their own steam. If I helped them a little bit, I was able to do so because it was essentially already all there, inside them, ready to come forth.

So, paradoxically, the answer to your question is this: Yes, I can teach you to be a conductor … if you already are one.

Olomouc

2011-06-12T16:51:00.000+07:00

This is the morning of my departure from the Czech Republic. I will do a recapitulation of my journey, whizzing through the former territories of the Austro-Hungarian Empire on my way to Vienna and, perhaps to stop off at the grave of Beethoven if I have time. The last three days have been an orgy of choral singing, late-night discussions of the finer points of music washed down with slivovic and becherovka, and the consumption of several kilograms of raw meat.

Some of this raw meat is illustrated to the left. Though I rarely eat steak tartar, there is a particular restaurant here, the Moravian Restaurant, which has the tastiest raw beef I know of. The condiments are supplied separately so that you can mix up your own, but to me a little bit of salt, a large quantity of chopped raw onions and just a dash of the other half-dozen spices is enough to just highlight the high-quality Argentine meat. One wonders what people did in Austria-Hungary in the days before it was possible to kill a cow in South America and fly in the meat. Could this dish have been so delicious in those dark times?

Olomouc is a town that has special meaning to me because it was briefly visited by the two most important composers in my personal pantheon, Mozart and Mahler. Mozart came here at the age of 11 to escape a smallpox epidemic in Vienna, and composed a symphony (No. 6) while he was in town. The Olomouc theatre was the site of Mahler's first opera director's gig — he didn't stay long — and standing in the same spot two years ago to conduct an opera which perhaps Mahler also conducted here, Nabucco, was a very uplifting experience. This time I went to the house he lived in which is ornamented on the one hand with a memorial plaque, and on the other with some rather disturbing graffiti. The word "oxymoron" could well be applied to many aspects of these composers' lives (though not to their music.)

Although Mahler didn't have a very good time in Olomouc, there's now a bust of him just before the stairs of the Moravian Theatre, so presumably one must pay homage on one's way into the opera now. Mahler's struggles give me hope that once I'm dead, all the institutions which have given me so much grief will put up plaques of the "Somtow once defecated here" variety and appropriately sanitized busts will be located in strategic places.

Here's a photo of the kids on the first day (under 12s mostly) awaiting the results of the choir competition. A lot of screaming and crying. The last day, with mostly adult choirs competing, was a little more sober. The Singaporeans must have been happy as they scored several gold medals. Indeed, they rehearsed themselves silly (as did the Malaysians I think). The Asian choirs are always dressed to the teeth, whereas local Czech groups, particularly the children's ones, often just show up in matching T-shirts. I think it is a measure of the fact that Asia takes its invasion of Europe very seriously. The Singaporean choirs all, I believe, receive government funding. In terms of technical ability, discipline and choice of repertoire I think the Asians acquitted themselves well and impressed the local judges very much.

For sheer musicianship and penetration into the heart of the European choral style, though, one would have to give the edge to the Poles this time. Their performances of works by Bruckner, et al, were exemplary. Indeed one could not have asked for a better performance of Bruckner's Ave Maria than they gave, completely blowing away an already impressive performance by a Czech ensemble of the same piece.

By this time tomorrow I'll be in Bangkok. Wildly moving forward on Opera Siam's first European tour. Bemusedly watching the election and wondering how it will affect funding for the arts ... such as it is.

Here is a panoramic picture of the judges (except me, unfortunately, since I took the picture) sitting around after one of the judging sessions at the Moravian Restaurant. Jiri Klimes, the organizer of the entire shebang, knows what he likes and likes what he knows; we always therefore meet at the same restaraurant. Unfortunately the panoramic view of the camera couldn't capture the plate of raw beef in front of me...

Eye of the Hurricane

2011-06-09T14:19:00.000+07:00

Or calm before the storm ... whatever ...

I have had a couple of days without concerts or singing competitions, mostly in discussions with my hosts about the future ... discussions which, as is usual in the Czech Republic, appear to involve large quantities of beer. Not being a beer drinker, I can only gaze in bemusement at how much beer these Czechs are able to consume without so much as a gurgle.

In between our analyses of the finer points of the operas of Janacek, I am frequently asked about "the war" in Thailand. This, as usual, being the international media's distillation of everything happening in Thailand into a few brief images or sound bites, with the Cambodians' propaganda being clearly more effective internationally than Thailand's (I do not say that Thailand's statements are not propaganda. It's all propaganda, and it all furthers agendas that have little to do with that poor beleagured temple on the edge of a cliff. To learn what the ICJ's stance really is, it is best to read my mother's booklet on this subject, which has already gone back to press.)

Following the media in Thailand as best as I can, it looks as though Ms. Shinawatra's coronation is already in the works. As my analysis of two randomly picked campaign posters showed last month, they do have a much better sense of how to sell. The judiciary is already being lobbied to pave the way for judicial nullification by way of the perjury accusation ... a genuine dilemma for the Thaksinites since both a guilty and a not guilty verdict would have a negative effect. Some are claiming that 10 billion baht is "missing" from some vague "somewhere", though it seems that for 10 billion baht an election would be pretty cheaply bought ... I would be a little surprised if either party were to claim an absolute majority, which means that we may be back to Machiavellian back-room deals yet again.

Meanwhile, someone has obtained at least 100,000 signatures on a petition to return to direct royal rule. This seems largely rhetorical. But it is rather sad that so many have become disenchanted with democracy.

The media as viewed from a hotel in a mediaeval township seems more concerned with Congressman Weiner's wiener than anything else. I am proud to say that I haven't seen it. Perhaps I am the last person on earth not to have done so. I shall resist.

Today the choral competition begins in earnest, with a dozen Czech children's choirs slugging it out vocally in a place called the "Bohema Palace". I shall look forward to it as I am one of 3 judges appointed today (the bigger contests, tomorrow, have more judges.)