Torn and frayed in Manila

Murphy’s pub quiz

At my time of life, you reckon that your life’s achievements, slight though they were, lie in the past, so I greeted the victory of the D’ Melting Snowflakes in Tuesday’s Murphy’s pub quiz with unalloyed joy. Balance is all in a pub quiz team and, purely by happenstance, we managed to arrive at a perfect blend of skills and ages for the question. Winning a pub quiz may not be much to crow about in some people’s books but I’ll take it with pleasure.

Chess

There is an excellent review article on the greatest board game here. One could talk about the relationship between chess and its mini-version, life, for ever of course, but here are a few quotes from Sally Feldman’s article.

First, a depressing one, from the front line:

The event [the Iraq Chess Federation’s annual tournament] was especially significant since the influential Shia clergyman Grand Ayatollah Sistani had only just announced his belief that chess should be “absolutely forbidden”. And this is in the country where the modern game is believed to have originated – at the court of the Caliph Haroun al-Rashid in Baghdad ten centuries ago.

Then, an inconvenient truth: most of the best players have been Jewish. The article looks for a deterministic solution:

One explanation might be that chess is a remarkably adaptable, portable game, and therefore well suited to the dispossessed, the exile, the refugee, the prisoner.

But there are plenty of those around the world, so I prefer a more obvious answer, Jews are smarter than the rest of us, at least when it comes to chess.

Then there is this nice little anecdote:

John McVicar, the former train robber, recalled that when he was in prison he always looked forward to the conviction of tax evaders, spies and financial fraudsters, because they’d give a better game of chess.

Indeed. I’ll add a little of story of my own, which is that a couple of nights ago some friends and I were discussing the late film director, Stanley Kubrick. When I looked him up, I found that:

Kubrick's father taught him chess at age twelve; the game remained a life-long obsession…. [while in his teens] Kubrick supplemented his income playing "chess for quarters" in Washington Square Park and in various Manhattan chess clubs.

Funnily enough, Frayed and I stayed in Washington Square last Christmas and she bought me “Chessica”, a computer chess game (she’s not IBM’s Deep Blue, but she can easily dispose of me) from one of those same clubs).

Anyway, if you have an interest in the wonderful game of chess, do have a look at the article (and pay a visit to Washington Square one day).

The beautiful hoax of Joyce Hatto

Joyce Hatto: Fooled you!

I have learned pitifully few life lessons, but I realized long ago that honesty really is the best policy; not just because it is morally right, but because it makes life so much simpler.

Imagine being someone like Benjamin Abalos, having to defend a life so entombed in lies, deceptions, and trickeries. What a nightmare. I wonder whether the chairman (as he was so courteously called during last week’s senate investigation) has any idea what really happened in his life, or whether his recall of events has been supplanted by “the story”, the implausible cleaned-up tale he has to trot out to inquisitive senators and journalists.

The problem with lying is that its perpetrators think of it as an event, whereas it is really a process. Lies are sociable—tell one half-truth and somehow you end up having to back it up with second and a third and pretty soon you are the disinherited offspring of Hungarian nobility on the run from a barroom murder down in Mexico.

Most liars and fantasists get found out in the end, but some give the gullible public a run for their money. Take Joyce Hatto, a minor British classical pianist, and her husband, William Barrington-Coupe, known as Barry. He was the owner of a small classical music label and a minor technical whiz who, like most uxorious husbands, wanted to give his wife what she craved. The story of how Barry managed to turn obscure pianist Joyce Hatto into one of the internet-driven sensations of the classical music world was beautifully laid out in a recent New Yorker piece.

Joyce and Barry were getting on in years (one of the key features of Joyce’s legend was her age—she was a septuagenarian when most of the recordings credited to her were supposed to have been made) and somewhat embittered by the musical establishment’s lack of recognition of Joyce’s talent. It’s not clear exactly when Barry realized he could take recordings of other obscure pianists and dress them up as Joyce’s work but it seems the deception began as “patching”, i.e., inserting passages from other recordings to cover up the deficiencies in Joyce’s renditions. From that little lie grew the Hatto industry, nearly all of which had no Hatto input at all.

Joyce and Barry skillfully promoted the recordings through an internet discussion group devoted to piano music, and before long Joyce Hatto became recognized for the outstanding pianist she and her husband always felt she was. The following internet review of a Hatto rendition of a Rachmaninoff piece was fairly typical:

… just magical, light as a feather, fluid, colourful, textures limpid as a mountain spring, tonally luscious, rhythmically alive and bright. A dream.

An irresistible review, and Barry and Joyce did not resist. In the last 10 years of Joyce’s life they churned out recording after recording, not so much plagiarized as simply stolen, and lapped up by credulous critics. After Joyce’s death in June 2006 the whole hoax, in the words of the New Yorker article, simply exploded. It’s a great yarn, I recommend the article, lengthy though it is. I’ll leave you with a couple of quotations from reviews of the same work by the same reviewer 15 years apart.

In 1992, in Gramophone, the critic Bryce Morrison found that Yefim Bronfman’s Rachmaninoff Third Concerto lacked “the sort of angst or urgency that has endeared Rachmaninov to millions” and that “Bronfman sounds oddly unmoved by Rachmaninov ’s intensely slavonic idiom. In the sunset coda of the Adagio his playing is devoid of glamour and in the finale’s fugue he lacks crispness and definition.” Fifteen years later, he wrote of Hatto’s release of the same recording: “stunning . . . truly great . . . among the finest on record . . . with a special sense of its Slavic melancholy.”

That’s a beauty.

Tag

Ages ago, I was tagged by cvj. I think the idea was to recount eight facts about myself, so here goes.

1. I was born in Nairobi .
2. When I was 6, obeying some primal urge, I took off my clothes in front of the girl next door.
3. When I was 16, I climbed out of the fourth floor bathroom window of my boarding school and slid down the drainpipe to watch David Bowie on his Ziggy Stardust/Aladdin Sane tour.
4. I used to deal American roulette and blackjack in a casino.
5. The a.word.a.day e-mail service once used a sentence from a book review of mine to illustrate a word (the word was “samizdat” and that was probably the only time I ever used it).
6. Frayed and I met when we were neighbours in an old Malate apartment building.
7. I’ve been told I sometimes laugh in my sleep.
8. I can’t leave the house in the morning without at least two mugs of tea inside me.

Most of the small circle of Manila blogs I visit seem to have already answered this one, so I don't think I'll tag anyone else -- let's hope a thunderbolt doesn't strike me.

Bono: the ninth power

Spiked has a wonderful Bono put down.

Alongside the eight most industrialised nations on Earth who make up the ‘Group of Eight’ – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the UK and the US, who between them represent around 65 per cent of the world economy – there was a ninth stately presence at Heiligendamm. It didn’t actually sit at the summit itself, but it did have ‘numerous sources at the negotiating table’, to such an extent that it felt like ‘we have the place bugged, because everybody tells us [what is going on]’, said the ninth power. It also held meetings with most of the world leaders, and severely chastised those who refused to meet it. When Canadian PM Stephen Harper said he was too busy to meet with the ninth power he was accused of ‘blocking progress’. ‘Canada has become a laggard’, the ninth power declared. It also passed judgement on the proceedings: its ‘satisfaction’, ‘relief’, ‘fury’ or ‘disappointment’ with the G8’s decisions hogged the newspaper headlines during the three-day summit (3). It effectively played the role of a second chamber to the G8, keeping a Lord-like watchful eye on what the Group of Eight Commoners came up with.

Who or what was this stately presence at Heiligendamm? It wasn’t a state at all, or even a pseudo-state like the Vatican. It was one Paul Hewson, better known as Bono.

Clarence Henderson, 1953–2007

Clarence Henderson, gonzo consultant, American music encyclopaedia, former hippy, Vietnam War radar sergeant, PhD writer for thousands, brother, loving husband and father, and the rock on which his family flourished, died of cancer at Makati Med on 12 February.

It is not easy to remember Clarence “as he was” before the sickness came, toyed with him for a year and finally drove him down last Monday. Physically, the cancer and the chemo changed him very much. He lost about 40 pounds and all of his hair and aged 20 years. Clarence went through quite a cool looking stage, when he resembled the older Dennis Hopper, but, that period apart, his physical deterioration was marked and unsettling.

Mentally and spiritually though Clarence was never stronger than during his last year, proving that a dark sense of humour has its uses. I honestly don’t remember him ever complaining or looking for pity. He was always optimistic and positive—it didn’t do him much good in the end, but it made life much easier for the rest of us. I have enormous respect for the way he lived out his last year; if I can do half as well when my time comes I’ll be happy.

Clarence was born in Indiana, of hillbilly roots, as he would proudly tell you. His fire and brimstone background no doubt accounted for his deep feel for American music, from the Carter Family to Mississippi John Hurt to Willie Nelson, John Lennon and the Grateful Dead. Clarence used to keep a group of us at work going with his activities as an e-mail DJ. Monday morning would start with something topical, say, “Stormy Monday” by T-bone Walker, and as the week progressed we would receive a lesson in musicology that might include some rare gospel or doo-wop, or obscure recordings from the Vietnam War era.

Clarence would only go so far though, grumbling in his more curmudgeonly moods that nothing good had been recorded since Blood on the Tracks. Clarence's goal was to be a famous writer and his rollicking life story is recounted in his unpublished autobiography Hillbilly Highway, which charts the passage of Clarence and his brother Paul through confused and turbulent America in the late 1960s and 1970s, ending in the heartbreaking description of Paul’s death from AIDS. Here is its prescient opening:

Life can seem incredibly strange when you really sit down and think about how much craziness you can survive, about how many things in life are unfair, about how life sometimes ends up brutally and prematurely, about how we’re probably all reborn somewhere up the road, and about how all that philosophical stuff doesn’t matter in the long run anyway.

Clarence is gone now and with him a small but vital part of 1960s America. Gone too are Clarence’s vast musical knowledge, his feel for a huge range of topics across the whole range of social science, his quick learning, clear writing, and his deep and constant love for his wife Daphne, son Ivan, and his daughters. He’s gone, but not forgotten.

Thanks for suggesting the clip Albert.

"Why do men stupefy themselves?" - Part 3

Barack Obama, US presidential hopeful, explains why he used to stupefy himself:

Obama writes about using marijuana and cocaine during his teenage years to "push questions of who I was out of my mind." [Wikipedia entry on Obama, quoting his book “Dreams from My Father”]

Ha, ha — “out of my mind” is probably right, but I’m not sure about the rest. That’s just so, Clintonesque.

But to be fair to the bright new and hopeful one, he has espoused the cause of Darfur, which no one else has much interest in — see the excellent post by Major Tom here. Good for you Barack.

"Why do men stupefy themselves?” – Part 2

Torn contemplates an evening without a drink

You would have to go a long way to beat the opening sentence of Carla’s comment yesterday but your road might just take you back to the start of "Enivrez-vous!" [Get drunk!], one of Baudelaire's prose poems:

One should always be drunk. That’s the great thing; the only question. Not to feel the terrible burden of time weighing on your shoulders, you should drink without respite.

Alas, I am suffering the agonies of “respite” at the moment, this being a non-drinking night, but least I am building up virtue points that can be squandered tomorrow night.

As for my point in my previous post about the history of the world being made by people in a state of inebriation, I think that, in the same spirit in which public figures have to declare their financial interests, they should also make public the state of their consciousness. The reporting of events might then go something like this.

Downing Street insisted it was not Mr Blair's (a bottle and a half of claret and a single malt) view that the violence in Iraq had been a disaster.

A spokeswoman (three vodka limes) said: "He was simply acknowledging the question in a polite way before going on to explain his view.

"To portray it as some kind of admission is completely disingenuous."

But BBC political editor Nick Robinson (four pints of extra strong lager) said Mr Blair's agreement indicated he knew there was "simply no point any more arguing with interviewers".

Readers could then decide whether they needed to reach the same state of consciousness to comprehend Mr Blair’s view or whether more was required to believe that the war had not been a disaster.

By the way, the picture at the top and the following piece of dialogue are from the great Billy Wilder movie Lost Weekend. I pinched them both from the erudite and well-written blog “Booze Movies: The 100 Proof Film Guide. Reviews, news, and features from the world of soused cinema”. Terrific stuff.

BIRNAM: You don’t approve of drinking?
NAT: Not the way you drink.
BIRNAM: It shrinks my liver, doesn’t it, Nat? It pickles my kidneys, yes. But what does it do to my mind? It tosses the sandbags overboard so the balloon can soar. Suddenly, I’m above the ordinary. I’m confident, supremely confident. I’m walking a tightrope over Niagra Falls. I’m one of the great ones. I’m Michelangelo molding the beard of Moses. I’m van Gogh painting pure sunlight. I’m Horowitz playing the “Emperor Concerto.” I’m John Barrymore before the movies got him by the throat. I’m Jesse James and his two brothers. All three of them! I’m W. Shakespeare. And out there, it’s not 3rd Avenue any longer. It’s the Nile, Nat, the Nile, and down it floats the barge of Cleopatra.

“Why do men stupefy themselves?” – Part 1

Tonight I have selected a topic on which, modesty aside, I can claim a degree of authority, on account of my long and careful immersion in it over many years.

The question at the top is the title of an essay by Tolstoy. It’s not one of his better works, but I always loved that title.

It’s a good question. And why isn’t it given the attention it deserves in university departments of philosophy, psychology, and sociology? It seems to me one of the central questions of existence.

I find it weird that our histories, philosophical studies, and newspapers act as though all the actors were stone cold sober, whereas in fact we know that many human activities take place under the influence of some drug or other.

I don’t like Tolstoy’s moralizing tone, but he did get it right here:

The consequences must naturally be terrible, admitting the fact, which must be admitted, that the guiding activities of society—political, official, scientific, literary, and artistic—are carried on for the most part by people in an abnormal state: by people who are drunk.

And nowhere more than in Britain.

Drug use and alcoholism (in the charmless modern phrase “substance abuse”) are addressed in newspapers and universities of course, but in wholly negative terms: “he took to drugs to escape the misery of his home life … after getting sacked she took to the bottle … drugs helped him forget about his insecurities”.

There’s something in all that, but drinking and taking drugs is also fun. Where is that in the literature? Here’s Bob summing it up as usual:

Well, ask me why I'm drunk alla time
It levels my head and eases my mind
I just walk along and stroll and sing
I see better days and I do better things

Go Bob! (The terrific movie “Drugstore Cowboy” also did a good job of showing that drug use is not all shivering junkies searching for that last vein.)

In fact, stupefying yourself seems not so much good or bad as innate. The British novelist Will Self once said something along the lines of: if you burned every poppy plant, razed every distillery, and destroyed every vineyard and marijuana plant, people would just climb the nearest hill and roll down it, just to experience the thrill of being “out of it”.

So why the silence?

________________

This post was prompted by the death this week of Fiona Jones, a former British Labour Member of Parliament, from "alcoholic liver disease". Jones was one of the bright young MPs elected in the Labour landslide of 1997.

Her career, it seems, began to unravel almost from the moment she was pictured at the left shoulder of Tony Blair on the steps of Church House in the triumphant aftermath of Labour's election victory. For Fiona Jones, that heady photocall in 1997, when she appeared with her leader and almost all 101 of her fellow women Labour MPs, was the zenith of [her] political journey.

The “unraveling” of Fiona Jones is clinically described in this Guardian article, which ends in a chilling fashion.

By the end, she was just drinking and sleeping, nursed by her husband and her two sons, now teenagers. "It sounds odd, but sadly we had got used to that kind of thing," he says.

Fiona Jones was two months younger than me. So if you feel inclined to berate me for glorifying alcohol and drug use, don’t bother. I have plenty of personal experience of the damage booze and dope have done to my generation. All I am asking for is some acknowledgement that: (i) human beings are “stupefied” for much of the time, and (ii) we are not that dumb—in addition to their many and well documented negative effects, drink and drugs bring great pleasure to many people. I am also interested in a serious discussion of the central question: (iii) why do men stupefy themselves?

To be continued at opening time tomorrow.

Mother-in-law

I paid my first visit for a long time to postsecret today. As usual the postcards there made me feel alternately uneasy and amused. Of the latter variety I offer this, though I should perhaps make it clear that I am lucky enough to have a very nice mother-in-law who bears no resemblance to the one below: