May, 2010

Woof! Ruff! A-Rooo-ooo! In the moody blur-grey of a late autumn afternoon on the forecourt of the Melbourne Museum, a gathering of 47 dachshunds drew hundreds of well-wishers together in hope. They were the quadruped delegates of Dachshund U.N, an “architectural installation and performance work” by Bennett Miller. The project is “a joyful and chaotic [...]

This year in Malaysia, calendars still featured the date May 13, 1969. . The horror KL, May 2010: Concentrated silence – a flurry of motion and the crowd cranes its neck to see an arm rise and then smash down in a killer blow. Shutting its eyes the crowd wails in despair as Malaysia loses [...]

Fact: Highly successful doctors do not read very much because they are incredibly busy people. (Actually, HSDs read quite a lot.) Fact: Highly successful doctors only read for work and do not have time for lighter or frivolous material. (Actually, HSDs often read children’s books.) . . Last night, RN’s Book Show recorded another in [...]

On Cantonese opera One of the reasons I was swanning about Kuala Lumpur last week was to attend a Cantonese opera. (Which is like Beijing style, except in Cantonese.) Unlike the usual show one might catch in KL or Singapore – a brief string of sketches from different shows, usually without benefit of costumes or [...]

Even if you don’t care if dead-tree media companies are going to survive, it’s everyone’s concern that newspapers – not dead-tree, but livewire online whatever format – have a future. Because, you know, we can’t have all these unemployed journos running around desperate and ranting – look what happened when the US forces disbanded the [...]

The recent trip reminds me that shapes and lines, and maps and routes keep transmuting in Kuala Lumpur. It’s looked a bit like this before, but it really looks like this now, if you see what I mean. Ripping along one of the many aerial freeways you can observe that KL is fully skyscraping with [...]

Boarding my return flight from KL a couple of days ago I picked up the courtesy papers. Their front pages carried the kind of story that measures something of the distance between South East Asia and Australia, at least for the meanwhile. The Star‘s* headline assumed everyone was in on it: “Maid deal soon.” The [...]

+++ Away note: The Mulcher is away for a week, unplugged, off grid and off piste, up in the bright tropics, beneath umbrella clouds and the burning sun. Back Friday 21 May. Aloha la vista. +++ The late David Foster Wallace used to scrawl in (annotate) his books. We know because his library and papers [...]

‘The people have spoken but what did they say?” The Sunday Times, 9 May 2010

The song of Seikilos is the oldest complete song – music and lyrics – in the western canon, carved in literal stone. The pillar (in Turkey, dated c.200BC–100AD)  announces itself: I am a tombstone, an icon. Seikilos placed me here as an everlasting sign of deathless remembrance. This is the melody: And the lyrics: Hoson [...]