Song of a Reformed Headhunter

It was a good idea to travel elsewhere while visiting Singapore. GH and I flew to Hong Kong on August 13 for four days, and then to Bali immediately for another four days. Four days are not really enough time to visit both, but that time was all we had. Visiting these two places one after another accentuated their differences for us. Hong Kong I remember for its crowds. The streets and the trains were crowded throughout the day, even as late as nine pm. Causeway Bay, where we stayed in a boutique hotel, felt like a real neighborhood, different from the downtown on Hong Kong island and from the fancy hotels in Kowloon, though not far from both on the efficient MTR. Hong Kong was well-organized, but organized in a seemingly more haphazard way than Singapore. It had the energy of private enterprise, not the predictability of Singapore's large-scale government planning. A colossal integrated development like Marina Bay might not ever happen in Hong Kong, but people initiative would e...

TLS August 22 & 29 2008 from Clive James's review of Joseph Horowitz's Artists in Exile: How refugees from twentieth century war and revolution transformed the American performing ar ts : Not even the basket cases could honestly say that they had fallen among Philistines. They had fallen into a larger competitive market than the one that they had been driven out of, and even if they failed in it they would have liked to succeed. * Some of them felt limited by the indifference of the audience to anything labelled as art, but there was always a minority audience for that. There was a minority audience even for Schoenberg. On a world scale, Schoenberg's audience . . . is still a minority today, but most of the minority is in America, where minorities are larger. * European and American culture have always been a two-way interchange and to talk about either of them exclusively is like trying to cut water with a knife. Joseph Horowitz says that Stokowski's dream of a dem...

Time almost up, Ravana climbs the tower to survey Rama’s army ranged at him, a sea of fur, teeth, claws, and seething blood ready to dash against daybreak, or smash the stronghold of the demon king, and save Rama’s beloved Sita, the loyal queen. The play is almost done, Ravana thinks, the silly ploy to catch the girl, the sweet talk to fool her he’s ravenous for sex, the sub-plot to give Rama’s monkey spy run of his private rooms—all to entice the jealous lover to the jailor’s island. Ravana checks his irony, relief. He can still smell her fear when his hand clamped over her mouth. Her voice, rejecting him, rings in his ears a distant temple bell. Even the monkey’s conscious courage throbs beside the immense calm of his great heart. And when Rama runs his sword through him, the demon king, the kidnapper, the god- killer, and realizes who Rama is— Lord Vishnu, the Preserver, nothing less— the human coming into the divine will strum and strum the raga down the blade. Ravana shivers sligh...