Farewell to a Legend

Rest in peace now Michael, your work here is done.

Painting by Chagall - The Weepies

Nice summer song...

Father's Day - The Living Years

Mysteriously this song somehow ended up in my MP4 player - don't remember adding it. I first heard it on Radio 4 on the way to school in mom's car - I was Standard 5 then and half awake in the Mini Minor. The dee jay (one of the old schools e.g. Alan Zechariah or someone like that) introduced it in such a way that I still remember it today. But then, the song didn't have much meaning for me - being a kid without a care in the world except for UPSR exams

I listen to the song again and it has become powerful now - now that I've gone through the trials and heartaches of relationships with the people dear to me. Especially since it's Father's Day, this song somehow screamed 'Hear me!'. Life suddenly seemed too short for grudges and resentments.



The Living Years - Mike and the Mechanics

Every generation
Blames the one before
And all of their frustrations
Come beating on your door

I know that I'm a prisoner
To all my father held so dear
I know that I'm a hostage
To all his hopes and fears
I just wish I could have told him in the living years

Crumpled bits of paper
Filled with imperfect thought
Stilted conversations
I'm afraid thats all we've got

You say you just dont see it
He says its perfect sense
You just cant get agreement
In this present tense
We all talk a different language
Talking in defence

Say it loud, say it clear
You can listen as well as you hear
Its too late when we die
To admit we don't see eye to eye

So we open up a quarrel
Between the present and the past
We only sacrifice the future
Its the bitterness that lasts

So don't yield to the fortunes
You sometimes see as fate
It may have a new perspective
On a different day
And if you don't give up, and don't give in
You may just be o.k.

Say it loud, say it clear
You can listen as well as you hear
Its too late when we die
To admit we don't see eye to eye

I wasn't there that morning
When my father passed away
I didn't get to tell him
All the things I had to say

I think I caught his spirit
Later that same year
I'm sure I heard his echo
In my baby's new born tears
I just wish I could have told him in the living years

Say it loud, say it clear
You can listen as well as you hear
Its too late when we die
To admit we don't see eye to eye

If it's very painful for you to criticize your friends - you're safe in doing it. But if you take the slightest pleasure in it, that's the time to hold your tongue. Alice Duer Miller

Nelayan

Kala jala nelayan penuh, di hari-hari cerah nan jarang,
tongkol tampak bermain, mengisar pelangi nan pipih.
Kau lihat matanya: angkuh, namun sesat jua, dalam remang.
Kembalilah, kau ingin berkata. Kembalilah dari sedih

Kala laut gelap gamang, lesat punduk gelombang
mengangkat perahu tinggi, seringan anak panah peri
Kala kau terbang, semua airmatamu 'tuk sekarang,
kecuali beberapa yang, mungkin, untuk esok hari.

The Music's Always There With You

Lately I've rediscovered music in my life. She was an old friend that disappeared for quite awhile till we caught up - it seemed as if we lost no time at all.

It started when my parents (mainly mom) who'd put up with my sulking and put me through piano class at the age of 6. She used to pretend to be able to play a few notes on the piano and fool me into thinking she could (haha she's funny my mom)

I had a great teacher, Miss Diane GK Tan or 'Teacher' as I'd called her who tutored (ahem 'tortured') me all the way till I was 15. We still keep in touch and through her I even met up with an ex-piano classmate in London (whom I re-caught up with after 20 years). In school simultaneously, somehow I got appointed school pianist in the afternoon session and continued on my 'career' in the morning session in upper secondary school. Ask me to play the 'Negaraku', 'Malaysia Berjaya' and the CBN school song and I would mysteriously know how even if I haven't played it for 20 years. The fun times was with my best girl Angie who was leading the school choir at the time and we used to go through the drills of choir competitions. Then there was a short spell with Miss Diane Lee who tutored me through PC but because of the pressure of STPM, I stopped. I went off to uni and it was a long before I even had the desire to touch the piano again.



It was in the autumn in Umea and the cold, dark winter which led me to rediscover music again. The Swedish university I was in had excellent music facilities and it was not long before I found several good pianos to play on. It was a blessing that I was placed in a host programme where my mentor (Lorentz Edberg) was a music teacher at the school. I also had a 'sister' student in Valeria Graffeo, an Italian exchange student who was just as crazy and brilliant in music as Lorentz was.



I also spent an amazing winter/spring semester in the 'Skapande musik'(i.e. Creative Music) course with a group of normal, unassuming Swedish (and a couple of international) students.











Imagine coming to school every day just to play and make music with people who loved exactly that - it was decadent, it was hedonistic and it was too good to be true. Mostly I was impressed with the level of talent they had here - Swedes really do know how to get creative. To allow you to get a taste of how versatile these people are, please see some of their personal pages:

(all genuine music)

Malin Ernestad
Buns and Beans
Kapten Kid
Mates of Mine

And thanks to my fellow course mates, I have discovered the joy of music creation. 100% inspiration and almost all playing by ear - although I knew the chords and the notes, I discovered that one didn't necessarily need theory to create music. It was a new way of learning music which all my years of classical training didn't prepare me for. Now I can truly appreciate music form - which was a result of the complement between inspiring my right brain to create music and my previous left-brained piano training.

The skapande musik programme output from the students can be found here here



London being such a cultural city; I'm happily distracted by all the musical and creative activity going on here. Thanks to G too (whom I work with and who has a blues band of his own), I now own a little keyboard to play on and am slowly picking up the guitar (guitar hero too :P)




So in a way, this post is dedicated to all the musicians in my life, past, present and future - thank you for the music!

If I Ain't Got You - Alicia Keys

More 'English' English

Here's a few more colloquialisms in 'English' English I picked up - there's even some 'kata-kata ganda'

'Hokey-Kokey' = Ok

'Lovely-jobly' = That's good

'Easy-peasy' = That's a piece of cake

'Marks and Sparks' = Marks and Spencer's

'Heigh-ho' = Oh well

'Secret-squirrel' = Top-secret project

London Bridge Fantasia by Peter Marcan

Do not try to understand what this crazy turmoil of a place is all about, as it is quite beyond all understanding. Point of arrival and departure, human society here is so chaotic, so entangled, all on the move that no one can surely make head or tail of it all.

During office hours faces gaze out of a hundred and one office-windows, fists long to smash into smithereens a hundred and one computer screens; caged in during office hours, the home going time stampede of people who have become animals in a zoo let loose. At home going time, it is frightening to behold the savage desperation of so many people on their way out; do not scrutinize these people too closely; the young men may give you a karate chop in the stomach; the young women will cut you down with their withering glances.

You hear the music of Bela Bartok in this place; everything out of synchrony, jangling dissonances and frenzied inner despair; shrieking stumps of humanity, bodies lurching forward, minds crushed into nothingness.

"Promise me you will practice your Bartok," said the artist Mike Challenger when I visited him at his studio home in Park Street; and after our meeting when he played Bach preludes and fugues to me, we went out and heard the squeals of incoming and outgoing trains, felt the abandonment of the market emptied of its traders, yet still full of intangible energy, and saw the desperate gregariousness of people away from their work pouring drink down through their throats in street corner pubs.

In My Ghetto

Six a.m. he ambles down the street
Had too many beers in a row
He's not sure if he's coming or going
Lost his footprints in the snow

Six a.m. she's back from the beat
Some dollars and pennies in her bowl
She's not sure if her child will weep
But it don't matter anymore

Oh it's a cold dark morning
Over in my ghetto
But if I keep on walking
I know I'll come back home

There's a church in the corner of the street
It's lamps are burning low
It's bells are silent, incensed melody
I think there's no one home

Oh it's a cold dark morning
Over in my ghetto
But if I keep on walking
I know I'll come back home