For Your Consideration is a regular feature published on the first of each month (published on the preceding Saturday if the first is a Sunday) that lists some of my “picks of the month” in reading, music, moving pictures, and something random. These aren’t necessarily new or trendy picks, but they will be things that I hope you will find worth your time!
Round two!
Read This: Maidenhair, by Mikhail Shishkin
“If you don’t write down what in fact happened, Papa says, everything disappears and nothing remains, as if it never was.”
I’m only halfway through Shishkin’s enormous tome, but it’s certainly living up to its massive billing so far. Peter and an interpreter stand between asylum-seekers from Russia and the supposedly greener pastures of Switzerland. Through a series of interrogations and fantastic detours, stories upon stories detailing numerous atrocities (truthful or fictitious, or perhaps both?) are tried and tested by the two protagonists. Against this political narrative, Maidenhair is a study of the workings of literature and a complex investigation into the value of stories and storytelling. But just to say so alone would be selling it short. It also tackles themes of epistemology, of history and the flow of time, of the absurdity and simple beauty of living, and of far too many things to fit into these 200 words or so. Nonetheless, I can say without reservation that the sentences and stories unfurl in the most delightful manner, for it is as translator Marian Schwartz puts it: “Each time you read it–not necessarily the whole thing, but even parts of it–you will discover new treasures; they’re buried on every page.”
Listen to This: The Next Day, by David Bowie
The cover of The Next Day presents us with its main proposition. The white square over the iconic “Heroes” cover is a form of erasure, and the title suggests a new beginning. Yet, traces of the original cover remain, and in fact, allow for such an interpretation in the first place. (No erasure is ever complete if we recognise it.) It is this use of the old to create the new that characterises The Next Day. Musically, it draws upon Bowie’s rich discography, making new meanings out of old parts, eager to start a new fire. The questions here seem obvious: How does a figure as popular and artistically significant as Bowie break new ground? How does the next day, both fundamentally new and yet inevitably and irrefutably marked by the last, actually proceed? The question of the next day is the question of David Bowie, of artists, and of us. The Next Day is an album about time, about our condition of being inextricable from the ghosts of the past (which so doggedly resist erasure), about our continued pursuit of the new in the old, and about the nature of change; because most of all, The Next Day is the question of where we are now, how we got here, and how we continue to be.
Watch This: 《钢的琴》 (The Piano in the Factory), directed by 张猛 (Zhang Meng)
I rewatched Zhang’s gorgeous picture last week. It is an aesthetic pleasure of the first magnitude, a brilliant combination of visual and audio design, choreography, and photography. The performances by Wang Qianyuan and Qin Hailu are worth mentioning; and I fell in love with the music the first time I watched the picture. The Piano in the Factory is a portrait of human relationships shifting gracefully between absurdity and realism. In a way, Zhang plays it safe, employing a fairly formulaic plot (father assembles a band of misfits in an audacious attempt to construct a piano from scratch in order to win the heart, and therefore the custody, of his daughter in light of an imminent divorce) that seems targeted at maximising the film’s box office appeal. Yet, all of its little quirks–its narrative structure, its use of music, its unnatural vibrancy–disturb its otherwise conventional premise, and the film comes together in spite of or perhaps because of these quirks. Much as in the assembly of the titular piano, the pieces fit together even if they shouldn’t, and it is thus that it finds its moment, its space, and its stage.
Bonus of the Month: Othello, production by the Singapore Repertory Theatre
“Who would not make her husband a cuckold to make him a monarch?”
Opening at the end of this month (26 April, to be exact) in Fort Canning Park, Singapore Repertory Theatre’s latest Shakespeare in the park project is a take on Othello, which may make for a strange background for a picnic, but that really all depends on the company, doesn’t it? I’m considering a picnic myself, and who knows, we might see one another there.
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