Cartography can be really frustrating

What an amazing thing it is to stand in the dusk and watch land forming. The Big Island, Hawai´i, is volcanically active, and the signs of lava flows are not hard to find. Especially when the lava has run straight across the road, cutting it off. Then one can trek a short distance across the cold, jagged lava that spewed from the ground a couple of decades or so ago, and see the red glow of fresh, hot lava pouring over the coastline, and the steam plume rising as the lava hits the waters of the Pacific below.

I imagined that the human figures standing silhouetted against the steam plume had to be a team of cartographers. The younger ones happy that they were being kept in work, redrawing the government maps. The older ones sighing that their life's ambition to chart the islands accurately was being forever thwarted.

Writing Society exercise, November 2006

Kamppi

Movement, keep on moving, mêlée, throng;
The bustle passes as it starts again.
A thousand people hurry. Eyes don't meet,
Except to judge the distance in between.

A short man, anorak and moustache, pulls
His luggage on its wheels, and just behind
A girl in tight blue jeans strides sweetly through
The crowd, swigging her Pepsi on the go.

Two tiny tots in pink boots, hats, and gloves
Press fingers up against the café glass,
While five boys buzz their flying saucer up
And down, get in the way, and kick the walls.

Beside them all a suited businessman
Sips coffee, briefcase resting at his feet;
A woman with a pram sits anxiously
And scans the bus departures board for times.

A waitress in black apron bends and grips
Four half-full glasses and an empty tray;
A salesgirl at a stall hawks liquorice;
Three more thrust perfume samples at thin air.

An older lady with a single pole
For Nordic walking passes by the queue
That fidgets silent by the cash machine;
A couple with green matching backpacks chase.

Movement, keep on moving, mêlée, throng;
The bustle passes as it starts again.
A thousand people hurry. Eyes don't meet,
Except to judge the distance in between.

A van, a skip, and lots of boxes

We are almost out. Removal day approaches. The removal boxes are packed with costumes (walking tree, pantomime cow, assorted ferrets and weasels), props (handcuffs, papier mâché foodstuff, medieval weaponry), and backstage gear.

We don't need to lug set pieces up and down the flights of steps to the attic again, or worry about who is living in the bed. Maybe. Fingers crossed that our eclectic collection of am-dram paraphernalia fits in the new place.

Getting all operatic

Two ingredients for a good evening at the opera:

1. Charming, sophisticated company (pictured, demurely swigging a small but classy bottle of wine).

2. A pantomime donkey making an exit on a fly wire. Excellent. Thank you, Dario Fo (directing Rossini's 'The Journey to Reims' at the Finnish National Opera).

A passion for a Passion

Does one ever fully recover from the emotion of theatrical performance? I cross-refer in this to Anna MR's blog entry on roles of theatre past.

In my 'current past' case, it was 18 years ago today, on 24 November 1988, at the Warwick Arts Centre, that we had the opening night of our university stage production of JS Bach's St John Passion in English. The performance was touted as the British stage première, being most often done as a concert piece in German. It was a semi-professional gig, as most of the soloists were fully fledged professionals on the opera and concert circuit. I was part of the dramatic chorus, a tight-knit group who wove choral harmonies into the action.

The show was a personal first in two other ways. It was the first theatre piece that I was in that was reviewed, and positively, in a national newspaper (The Sunday Telegraph, if I recall). It was also the first time on stage, in dress rehearsal, that I found myself with real tears flowing.

Back in the present, I have just this week, courtesy of Amazon, taken delivery of a CD of a recording of a different English language version. I have not listened to this music for many years, but had not heard three bars of Part 1 before remembering my tears at the end of the crucifixion scene ("It is finished"), and realising that the performance was still in me. Somewhere. An echo in time maybe, but very, very real.

A Tritina

North winds blow

With Arctic gusts outside, by kissing we
Would insulate our lusts for times we'd part
And find ourselves at home, alone again.

At midnight, curfew came and yet again
The eye-high snow betrayed the storm that we
Ignored, intense, in love, playing the part.

For, sharing warmth, we could not think to part.
Reflecting ice with heat, we burnt again.
The one I never speak of made us we.

Years on, in dreams, each night, we part, again.

Sex, sex, and more sex (not)

Tracking statistics show that someone in Hong Kong came to 'A bit of Bruce', typed in the search words 'sex' and 'video', and left. Presumably unfulfilled.

Well, if that person returns for another go, they will find their own story.

Ha!

Getting a bit carried away

Last night was the Finn-Brit Players' 25th anniversary dinner dance, with an after-party at a local jazz club.

One of the stars of the show seemed to be my first-time-worn Stetson hat.

Words alone won't do.

Pictures on Flickr!

The kastike conspiracy

My Finnish is not as good as it should be, although I can sometimes get by in an emergency. However, I do know enough to occasionally eavesdrop on buses and trains, to find out what everyone is talking about.

It requires concentration on my part, and I have become startled to discover that many conversations that I tune into seem to involve the word 'kastike', meaning sauce or dressing for food.

So what's all this about? Either everyone in Finland is forever discussing gravy, or it's a secret code for "shut up, the foreigner's listening!"

Strange foods I have eaten (2)

Occasionally I get cravings for some of the stranger culinary delights that only seem to appear on shop shelves in Britain. I'm not talking about salt and vinegar crisps, which occasionally appear elsewhere. Nor Melton Mowbray pork pies and Wensleydale cheese, because I cannot consider those strange. Nor am I talking about the jellied eels and pickled eggs that you sometimes read about in dewy-eyed descriptions of the pubs of yesteryear, because I never fancied those much. Although I do sometimes get an unhealthy urge for pork scratchings.

But when I travel over to the UK, I usually come back with a jar of pickled walnuts in my bag. We had a walnut tree in the garden when I was a teenager, and the crop one season was big enough to keep us in pickles for years. The walnuts are pickled young and whole, including the outer skin and before the inner shell has formed. For best results, use the finest malt vinegar. Yum!

Strange foods I have eaten (1)

People sending photos of food to Flickr have made me consider some of the odd grub that must have passed my lips over the years.

I have already blogged on the wonderment of Bulgarian tripe. But near the top of the list must be banana ketchup from St Lucia. Mind you, with enough of their wonderful rum, one really doesn't care too much about the aftertaste.

Blue jeans

Although I spend the best part of my life looking like a slept-on pillow, I have some idiosyncrasies about clothing. Take blue jeans. In my view, they are a modern uniform that pretends to be rebellious but is in fact totally conformist. Don't get me wrong: rebellion and conformism both have their places. But we should be self-aware enough to realise when we are in one mode or the other.

However, I am thoroughly hypocritical and wear black jeans all the time. Shame-faced, as with fast food, I capitulate yet again to the brainwashed, stonewashed, commodity mass-market of convenience.

Writing Society, October 2006, revised

The fall to earth
(when dreams find out there is no landing place)

Eyes glowing with delight, she speaks of him:
Her handyman, her lover, and so kind.
On Sundays he will cook. How smooth is that?
The sound of pizza laughing fills my mind.

But girl, this vision, does he write you verse?
Or stand aside when you yearn to be free?
Does this Adonis own a cuckoo clock?
And hold you tight when you pop in for tea?

Lips drawing sensual breath, she dreams of him:
Her brave Renaissance stud speaks Spanish, too.
He'll buy her diamond rings. How cool is that?

That sound is dreams crash-landing.

Are tourists dumb or what?

As well as the heights of Mauna Kea, this summer's jaunt took in the Pacific coral reef off the western coast of the Big Island. We were only a maximum of a hundred feet below the surface, but it was clearly a different world down there, with the colours changing as the water absorbs the light from the surface.

The reef, to my uneducated eye, looked healthy. There were wonderful little yellow fish, called tang, and small shoals of snappers and butterflyfish cruising around. A couple of sea urchins crawled around on the bottom. And I tried to remind myself that coral is actually an animal, and not a plant as it can easily seem.

It was a fascinating glimpse into the life of things that we often only see in aquaria or on the plate at exotic restaurants. But at the start and the end of the trip, why oh why oh why did the submarine tour company insist on playing badly recorded sounds of Klaxons blaring and a voice shouting 'dive, dive' and 'fire torpedo'? Was this our war on coral? Do they think tourists are dumb or what?

That stage direction

The Winter's Tale is a schizophrenic play. Up until near the end of Act III, there is an unrelenting tragic narrative in the best tradition of Othello or King Lear: the misguided protagonist who does not see the error of his ways until it is too late. From that point on, the pastoral springs into action, clearing the path to redemption. At the end, Hermione, having reportedly died in the tragic cycle, is apparently magically brought back to life upon the fulfilment of the prophecy of the Oracle.

In modern times, some people have difficulty coping with this internal shift of genre. Expectations of naturalism are partly to blame. Yet structurally, as an exploration of the diversity of emotional life, it makes perfect sense.

I will miss Clown. One of the main reasons that I like him, I think, is his involvement at the turn of the tide. Antigonus arrives in Bohemia, is warned by a mariner about the creatures of prey, and is chased off and torn apart by one. Clown witnesses. Meanwhile, the baby Perdita is found and rescued by the Old Shepherd. Clown witnesses.

My favourite moments of discovery came when exploring how the change from tragedy to pastoral comedy occurred. In my view (no doubt to be contested, for indeed, there are contesters abroad), there are three key moments in the process of the change: let's call them tragic completion, pivot, and comedic beginning. After these changes to the unfolding dramatic structure, the symmetry of a concluding courtly romance is all but inevitable.

The comedy, in my view, begins for real when Autolycus enters, singing a bawdy song. Shakespearean tragedies have comic characters, but they tend not to be rich in bawdy songs.

The pivot, in my view, comes with the Old Shepherd's speech to Clown, his son, after Antigonus is gone into the storm and Perdita is found: "thou mettest with things dying, I with things newborn". That has to be a clear signal that the winds of change have been blowing.

The tragic completion, in my view, must be our friend the bear. Shakespeare generally implied stage directions within spoken text, so the ones that he made explicit are of significance. "Exit pursued by a bear", in its brutal savagery, seems to punctuate the end of the tragedy.

In our production, a vicious rumour had it that some of the audience suspected that the white, furry bear was actually a sheep. How wonderfully appropriate! The schizophrenic change from tragic to pastoral is then concentrated into one schizophrenic image of bear-cum-sheep. In one symbolic moment, the genre changes and salvation is guaranteed.

The winter's tale? The bear is it!

The Alexander Theatre

What a place! Too many modern performance spaces seem to be designed for cinema rather than live theatre. Aleksanterin teatteri is wonderfully traditional (1879) and has the works: wings, gantries, pulleys, flies, control box, ... the lot. It's a cultural jewel that the Finnish authorities should treasure more than they apparently do.

There is a surprising emotional warmth generated onstage by the theatre design, particularly on the extended apron covering the orchestra pit. The tight rows of red seats and the three levels of auditorium help, of course.

The depth of the stage ... my goodness! I first approached the space from the workshops behind upstage and it was like walking through a tunnel, with the proscenium opening out to the auditorium in the distance. Centre stage, things felt smaller but the audience still quite distant. At the forestage and extended apron, the power of the space was more apparent. One could just stand there and sing!

And the excitement, joys, and torments of our weekend with The Winter's Tale? Let it breathe. We'll tell the other tales anon.

The Winter's Tale

The butterflies in my stomach resemble the paw-beats of a bear chasing across a Bohemian stormscape. Exit pursued by. It is almost time. There is a show to do.

Break a leg, everyone!

Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

Showering in the dark

Sometimes life seems a series of small events. Today brought two tiny achievements, of significance to nobody but me.

First, I received some mail-order books from the UK. This is not unusual, but too often the books arrive not at the post office, but at a ridiculous little courier company that operates from an unsignposted depot on an industrial estate near Helsinki-Vantaa airport. They will not guarantee a time for home deliveries, and getting to their collection point is pretty much impossible. I have complained and complained. My heart sinks whenever I receive their delivery notice through my mailbox. This time, after a few days of mental preparation, I called to make arrangements, and was told that the package was waiting at my local post office. Hooray! Just a couple of minutes in the queue and now I'm the happy owner of Cassell's 'Chronology of World History' and a bunch of other goodies.

Second, I changed a light bulb! Yes, I know; how many linguists does it take, and so on. But this was the strip light in my bathroom that had gone phut at the weekend. Of course, I had no replacement, and work and rehearsals have meant no time to get to the shop. Today, I finally found time to buy and fit a new bulb, only to discover that the problem was in fact the starter. And the shops were closing. Fortunately, I have a friend in Espoo who is bigger than me on such household issues, and he had a spare. And there was light!

So now I do not have to face an icy trudge across an unlit lorry park to pick up a package, and I can bring closure to my five days of showering in the dark. Life is good!