And He is Right

Rite of Spring produced by Joffrey Ballet

 Leonard Bernstein on Rite of Spring:

Bernstein's ideas about The Rite of Spring may come as a surprise. He didn't think of it as being all that radical.

"It's extremely tonal, despite all the talk about barbaric dissonance," he told Humphrey Burton in an interview included on this . "It is also extremely tuneful and dancy, rhythmically seductive, beguiling."

Seated at the piano for the interview, Bernstein dissects the jabbing chords near the beginning of The Rite, demonstrating how they are perfectly normal, just stacked in such a way that "makes a marvelous kind of savage sound."

"The minute you analyze these sounds," Bernstein says, "you find that they are traceable to the 19th century or even 18th century — the basic classical roots of tonal music."

掀桌，可不就是嘛，怪不得，第一次听春之祭的时候我就在不停地扭啊扭啊扭，即使它的节拍并非固定，但就是忍不住引人扭起来。

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

When I grow up I want to write like Philip K. Dick --- without the real madness in my head of course.

His brand of eeriness is exactly the effect I want to create and can't. If I can do that I'd die a happy woman.

I don't think when he wrote the novel he was thinking about psychopathy, but his portrayal of empathy-less androids is precisely psychopaths.

Empathy, that's what makes one human. According to some researchers' claim, one in four among us is an android ... I mean psychopath.

The movie (Blade Runner) didn't get it.

Sketch: The Coach

"You see how she holds the edge?" She poked at the iPhone screen with a finger to play the video.

"Wow," was all I could say. The girl in the video covered the entire length of the rink in three strokes. It takes me three times as many wobbly steps.

"Bet your knees! Back straight! Tuck in!" She shouts at me as I stumble around on two feet. Good skating requires predominantly one-foot skating, preferably on one edge. (Each skate blade has two edges.)

She's short with chubby cheeks but moves on ice like fish in water. And she seems to have a soft spot for complete newbies like me. Sure, any coach would want to hold the hands of cute little toddlers bundled up like teddy bears and teach them march-march-glide, but clumsy old legs and flabby middle-aged bodies stepping on the ice for the first time in our lives? Her eyes tracked her adult students with utmost seriousness.

"You just need more confidence," she said. "Take a longer stroke. Don't put the free leg down."

"I felt like I was falling over," I whined. Slamming the body onto the cold, hard white surface hurts. Scarier than the pain is the sense of losing control, not knowing one's place in space. 

"What?" She leaned in with a palm over the right ear. She's a bit deaf and wears hearing aids.

"I just need more practice," I raised my voice a little. She nodded and said she'd send me a couple of videos of off-ice exercise to do at home.

In off-ice chatting, she let it slip that she went to law school. I don't think she is practicing law though, knowing that she coaches skaters on weekdays. She also teaches mentally disabled kids speed skating. "My kids threw up on ice at the Special Olympics," she said with a laugh. "I took a shovel and got on the ice. And then we went right on." 

She talked about ice dancing with her father as girl in New York, on the rink by the Rockefeller Center. "It's the best memory of my life," she said dreamily. Her mother still lives in New York and she goes up regularly to visit. Of all the women I've met in figure skating fan circles, a large proportion have never married. I wonder whether it's the case with her as well. She mentioned she has never owned a house.

She may or may not have given up a career in law (a speculation to be confirmed), but her career in coaching is no doubt her ultimate calling. She never gets off the ice immediately after her coaching session is over. As she leaves us students to practice in public sessions, she would linger on ice and give a pointer or two to unsuspecting kids or adults gliding around. If they're interested, she would give them an impromptu --- and free --- mini-private lesson right there.

"My friend Debi Thomas ..." She remembered happily. Along with the off-ice exercise video links, she sent me another link of Debi Thomas doing her popular and hilarious Wanda Beezle character --- a stumbling new learner struggling to do the basic stuff. I bet I look just as bad as Wanda and unable to do most of the skills she does.