This week I went to Sydney for business (photos). This largely involved lying in my hotel with food poisoning but that's another story. As I was in town, I had to check out the Sydney Opera House.
On Thursday I went to see Carmen in the Opera Theatre along with a lot of pensioners and a few tourists (the average age of the audience was about 65). The place was packed and with tickets going at $220 a pop, it's safe to say these people do not have financial problems.
The performance was enjoyable although this Carmen was a total bitch and I was rather happy to see her murdered in the end. They portrayed the French equally well... as being the bunch of cigarette smoking bastards that they are. They were even smoking Gauloise so the whole place stunk. No in fairness it was not bad at all. I have, however, resolved never to see Carmen again... It's never advisable to see opera in a language you speak because invariably the cast will butcher it.
The next night I went to see the Sydney Symphony in the concert hall. The hall has a cozy feel and even though there is more seating than the Esplanade, there seems to be a great focus on the stage. I felt closer to the musicians even though I was near the back. The hall has a high sweeping ceiling from which clear plastic donuts 1 metre wide (affectionately referred to as perspex calamari below) are suspended on cables. This is presumably to improve the sound quality - my chief interest for the evening.
I was keen to compare the acoustics of this famous space to my adopted home auditorium: The Esplanade. Major disappointment. The Symphony was doing a jazz thing and were using SPEAKERS to amplify the sound. Huh? Then the guy next to me spills the beans that the SOH concert hall acoustics are notoriously bad. Well I'll never know because I caught the show via the speakers above my seat. Imagine paying $90 for a ticket and then your aural experience comes down to the audio set up. Well the concert was a great performance I only wish I could have heard it live.
On the SOH: A disappointment since it opened its doors 32 years ago and the Australian Opera tried to cram Prokofiev's epic War and Peace into the mean stage and claustrophobic pit of the opera auditorium. Not Joern Utzon's fault. He had planned the big auditorium for opera, and the smaller for orchestral music. But the Sydney Symphony Orchestra wouldn't leave the Sydney Town Hall unless it got the larger space. So the Opera Theatre became the Concert Hall and vice versa. Neither is a success. Even with the perspex calamari floating above the orchestra, the Concert Hall acoustics are certainly no better than the Town Hall's, though the real problem is an opera theatre with too few seats, too small an orchestra pit and too little wing space. The Opera House should have been abandoned after stage two, when the shells were completed, without ever attempting the interiors. It would be a glorious white-tiled folly on Bennelong Point, strikingly beautiful as a soaring sculpture, and no less effective as a symbol for the city. The money spent redesigning then executing the compromised Opera House interiors could instead have financed a couple of plain but functional boxy auditoriums in some then-neglected part of Sydney which could have done justice to both voice and instruments. - source.
Labels: travel
For over a week, the smell of smoke has rolled in after dark. During the day, the skies are clear and the air smells fine. But at night, when the temperature drops, the winds seem to shift and smoke blows in from Sumatera. This has given me and several of my friends sore throats and for the last three days, my lymph nodes have been throbbing. It sucks.
Of course there is NOTHING in the newspaper about the
haze (which many people are talking about). And given that the pollution index (
PSI) is now only provided for the 24 hour average (as opposed to hourly readings) the daily peaks are masked.
Here's the stats since Jan 1 - below 50 is considered good. In the evenings the reading is probably up to around 70 (I became a fairly accurate gauge back when hoursly readings were on offer for comparison).
There's nothing obvious from that data which would suggest what we're experiencing these days. Looks like it was pretty hazy in mid Jan but that's when I was freezing my butt off in New York just before the major snowstorm.
The lack of info is mind boggling. When
dengue stats were soaring here a few months ago, it was the same thing. How is it that not one news reporter figured it would make a story...?
This phenomenon is also untimely. Historically, farmers cleared with fire in September. The fires would then be put out by the monsoon in October. So either the corporations who own large tracks of land don't bother following traditional methods anymore or the messed up environment means that old hot spots never really died and this dry spell has caused them to flare up.
Either way we could use some rain. Singapore now seems to see-saw between wet weather that spawns dengue and dry weather that spawns haze. This is definitely a change... The seasons used to be more predictable.
I heard it even
snowed in Dubai recently... This planet is going to
hell in a handbasket... Which means the
polar icecaps are melting and it's
probably too late to do anything about it.
Singapore is the ideal place for a national recycling program. You would simply mandate that everyone recycles (as in Canada) on pain of egregious fines (fines are big here) and in a short time you'd have over 90% recycling rates. But that doesn't happened now. Is it because Singaporeans are among the
laziest people in the world?
So where does all the waste in this country goes... Into landfills? Shipped to Indonesia? There are
four incinerators in Singapore - at Ulu Pandan, Tuas, Senoko and Tuas South... The government is calling them "
waste to energy" plants. As usual, independent efforts don't go very far so Uncle GOS (Government of Singapore) has to step in. In this case it is in the form of the
Singapore Environment Council which has a good
list of recycling resources. Well the list is up to date but unfortunately everything on there seems to be some kind of thrift shop.
But to be fair, we can't overlook the New Water recycling effort which turns sewage into drinking water. And there are a number of
lights on footpaths that use solar power (that's pretty cool).
Well somebody MUST be recycling in this country because there are recycling bins in my condo but for the life of me I don't know who does the collection. Is it possible this is just the
rag and bone man getting organised? There does seem to be some kind of
National Recycling Programme that's ongoing but is this just an umbrella term for encouraging people to send business to
independent operators in this area? Who gets the booty from the
Recycling Bins scattered around the island? There certainly seem to be some major players in this space - like
ECO and
EcoWise.
But who collects my cans and how can I get them to collect them from the whole condo by making the system easier for my lazier neighbours?
Labels: singapore
Economists have not always found it easy to explain why self-interested people would freely share scarce, privately owned resources.
I find it amazing that this question is being asked. Perhaps it is because the question is posed wrongly. It should be, Why do people freely share their creations? Because people create. We love to create. The desire to create can outweighed any compensation you may get for that creation. You want to give your creation life by sharing it with others. And if they take your creation and build on it, then the birth has been successful and your baby will have a life of its own.
People don't ask why painters paint pictures that will never be sold or write books that will never be published. But cross the line to technology and they fail to see the same creative energy at work. We understand the proliferation of blogs and websites as something arty. Why not the plethora of freeware and open source programs? Why are such creations explained away in terms of personal gain? "... writing open-source software increases the authors' prestige among their peers or gains them experience that might help them in the job market..."
Creating software is a precise form of art that may capture the creator's imagination as much as any poem or drawing. If you are paid to do what you love then that's great. But either way, if you are an artist, whether analog or digital, create you must.
Labels: rants
