This morning I get a phone call:
Me: Hello.
Voice at the Other End: Hello.
Me: Who is this?
Voice at the Other End: Me.
That is such a perfectly idiotic answer. And such a perfect joke, provided only that it isn’t happening to me or to you. It should be in an American sitcom, and I am sure it has been.
The subsequent conversation included this:
Me: I am going to blog this.
My thanks to Me.
Just got back from a great talk by Rob Waller at Christian Michel’s, about Artificial Intelligence, dream or nightmare, etc. Rob himself was quite optimistic, but to illustrate the pessimistic side of the debate, he talked about … well, see above: a robot dog apocalypse. He mentioned also its creator, Charlie Brooker, which made googling easy.
We’ve all seen movies and TV shows about killer robots. But until Netflix’s new season of its future-shock anthology drama Black Mirror, never before have we seen a terrifying vision of machines run amuck that so closely resembles the design of actual real-life robots — namely, those Boston Dynamics “dogs” that have impressed the world with their remarkable balance, speed, and dexterity … yet also unavoidably make you wonder: What if one was chasing me?
But then Rob talked about how AI was achieving huge increases in agricultural productivity and miracles of environmental protection, by doing such things as providing water automatically for migrating birds, and also for crops. Like I said, he was optimistic.
So this evening I dined at Chateau Samizdata, where hippos assemble, from all parts of the world. This hippo, with storage space and a lid, is the latest arrival:
I said I thought it looked a bit like a sheep. It’s the legs. I was told, no, it’s a hippo. The food was great and the drink was even greater, and I even got a present of some drinks glasses that were superfluous to Chateau Samizdata’s current requirements. So yes, now that I look at it again, I see that it looks exactly like a hippo. No question about it. Not like a sheep at all.
Incoming email from Tony entitled “Couldn’t resist buying this”:
Here’s hoping he was/will be amused by its cheek.
Apparently the Arse is a river in southern France, beside which grapes are grown.
Up early tomorrow. So now, to bed.
I visit the Royal College of Music quite a lot these days, thanks to GodDaughter2 studying there. There were those Bach Cantatas. Last Thursday there was a recital of songs by Women Composers, in which GD2 performed. And this evening, there was the RCMIOS (RCM International Opera School) production of Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. All excellent.
It doesn’t feel right taking lots of photos while in the place, but here was a snap that I both liked and didn’t feel bad about taking:
They’re hardly going to call that snooping, are they?
The RCM is a truly bizarre agglomeration of buildings. The corridors joining this bit of it to that bit of it are labyrinthine. I never know where I am, if only because I am usually following GD2 around the place, rather than finding my own way around.
Here is another snap I reckoned it okay to take, of some building work in progress:
The fact that both of these snaps feature things which are only temporary is what makes me think them not to be breaches of etiquette. I don’t know if that’s truly right, but it feels right to me.
However, the point of these two photos is, as I later (like: one hour ago) realised, that they are both photos of the same things. The first photo is the corridor from the inside, and the second photo, in addition to all that grubbing about in the earth at the bottom, also features the same corridor from the outside. The outside of a corridor is not normally something you get to see, is it?
The reason I found myself inside that corridor is that it is the temporary way of getting from the main part of the Royal College to the college bar and canteen. I took the above photo on my way from that bar and canteen to the main entrance of the College. I was on my own at the time.
I gave a talk to Libertarian Home early in 2015, entitled What is the Libertarian Movement for?, and it is now up at the Libertarian Home website. A more accurate title for what I ended up saying would be more like: What the libertarian movement is and how to be part of it. It is more about how to do libertarianism than about why to do it, although that is implied.
What I said hasn’t dated in the time since then, and this was one of the better speaking performances I’ve done, I think. Certainly better than the most recent talk I gave, at Christian Michel’s on the subject of causation, about which, it turned out, I had very little more to say than this. Memo to self: now that the cold snap has ended, get a haircut. I have reached the age when I need to keep my hair short, the way it was in this video. The tramp look makes me look too much like a tramp.
My thanks to Jordan Lee for supplying a written summary of what I said.
After a hard afternoon yesterday, exploring Churchill and his wartime government’s subterranean lair, I was, in the evening, in no mood to do much else. But Christian Michel had one of his 6/20 evenings (yes I know, on the 5th (there was a reason but I have forgotten it)), and I forced myself to attend, knowing that I would not regret this. And I didn’t.
The highlight of my evening was undoubtedly getting to talk with an artist and art teacher by the name of Elina Cerla. We spoke about how we were both fascinated by the difference between how two eyed people see things, and how one eyed cameras, or camera-like gadgets used by artists, see things. Summary: very differently. Also about how she is more concerned to help people solve the artistic problems they consider important, rather than to shape them all into her preferred sort of artist.
She gave me her card before we went our separate ways, so I’m guessing she will have no problem with me linking you to that website.
You could become one of Elina Cerla’s pupils by doing what this says:
Having already wandered about in the website, I was particularly struck by that naked figure when I came across it elsewhere on the website, so I was intrigued later to find that she chose it to illustrate her teaching advert. I think you will agree that this image inspires confidence that the time of pupils will not be wasted. This is someone with definite skills to impart.
I am presently listening to this YouTube interview. Refreshing absence of art-speak bullshit and political infantilism, of the sort commonly emitted by those who practice (or who are attempting) shock-art.
My friends Perry and Adriana now live a short walk away from South Kensington tube. I can now get to them in about half an hour, compared to over an hour when they lived way along and just off Kings Road, and a solid bus ride away from any tube station.
And just as good, every time I now visit them to collect the Amazon purchases that they receive for me, as I did today, I get to see one of my favourite statues in London, the one of Bela Bartok. When I walk past that, I know I’m going the right way.
Trouble is, when I go past Bartok, the sunlight usually arrives on his back, and I get a photo like this:
Nice windows. Shame about the face.
So, inspired by the example of 6k (see below), I cranked up my photoshopclone and redid the photo so that I could see what the face consisted of:
Nice face. Shame about the windows.
You could probably combine the two, and make it: nice face, nice windows. You. Not me. That kind of thing just does not interest me enough to want to know how to do it. I wanted to see the face and I did. Mission accomplished.
Yesterday afternoon GodDaughter2 arranged for me to be in the audience (which was mostly singing students like her) of a master class presided over by American operatic tenor Michael Fabiano, a totally new name to me. He should not have been. My bad, as he would say. Very impressive. Very impressive.
This event was the most recent one of these. But they scrub all mention from there of the past, however immediate, so no mention there of Fabiano, which there had been until yesterday.
Here are a few recollections I banged into my computer last night before going to bed. Not tidied up much. I just didn’t want to forget it.
Sing, every note, all the time – switch off singing and then when you need to switch on again, you won’t be able to do it.
Singing is not just done with two little things in your throat. Sing with your whole body, from head to toe. Including your balls. (The student singers he was teaching were all guys, two baritones, two tenors.) I hope you don’t mind me saying such things. (Nobody did.)
You must sing to the people way up in the roof. They must hear every note you sing. Not just the people in the first five rows.
Don’t be afraid to take a breath – I’m a great fan of breathing when you need to breath – no seriously
First note is critical. Final note is critical. You can screw up in between. But first note bad can mean they’ll hear nothing further. Final note good, and that’s what they’ll remember.
Stay firmly planted on the floor. Stand how you stand in the tube, when you have nothing to hold on to. Don’t rise off the floor on your toes when it gets difficult.
Stay relaxed by going to your “happy place” in your mind.
In auditions, don’t be bound by rules that box you in. Break those rules, do whatever you have to do to do what you do. Applies to all artists.
Piano accompanists: play louder, like an orchestra. Louder. Twice as loud as that. (He spent a lot of time conducting the pianists.)
Go for it. (Said that a lot.) Be free. Fly like a bird. Never relax your wings (keep singing) or you fall to the ground.
In my opinion … this is my opinion …
Make progress as a young singer by finding one or two people whose judgement you trust. Follow their advice and work hour after hour, day after day, with them. A hundred people advising is confusion. One or two is what a young person needs.
How to make the transition from student to real singer? With difficulty. I began by doing 22 auditions all over Europe. First 21, I followed the rules, stood in the spot marked X: nothing, failure. 22nd audition: disaster. Fell over at the start, literally. But laughed at myself. Good middle notes, they knew I had a cold, but also a good personality. Got work. They trusted me to do better.
Mentor? Renee Fleming was one. Sang next to her on stage. Her voice ridiculously small, on stage. But, my agent way up at the back heard everything, and wept. I then sat way up there myself and listened to Fleming sing equally quietly, heard everything and was equally moved
Sing oh well and sing ee well, and you’ll sing ah well. (Think that was it.) …
And probably lots more that I missed. But, I now find, you can watch the whole thing on YouTube. However, the length-to-content ratio of watching something like this on YouTube is such that you, if you have got this far in this posting, are much more likely to make do with reading what I just put. So let’s hope I didn’t get anything too wrong. Plus: more mentions of this event, with video bits, at the RCM Twitter feed. Fabiano also tweets, of course. More reaction to yesterday there.
There were four student singers on show, first two being baritones, and in the second half, two tenors. The most extraordinary moments of this event came in the second half, when the two tenors took it in turns to sing things that Fabiano has presumably sung for real, as it were. And occasionally, to illustrate a point he was making, Fabiano would sing a snatch of the thing himself.
At which point, as the young people say these day: OMG. His sound was about four times bigger than what the students were doing. (The first of these moments got Fabiano a loud round of applause.) Fabiano’s talk, about filling the entire 2,500 people place, was a hell of a lot more than talk. He does this, every time he sings in such a place. The message was loud and the message was clear. That’s what you guys must aim for. That’s what it sounds like.
The good news is that the first tenor in particular (Thomas Erlank), was taking audible steps towards being an opera star, after only a few minutes of badgering from Fabiano. I think you’re great, said Fabiano, which is why I’m being so hard on you. Fabiano didn’t say those exact words to any of the others, so that will definitely have counted for something, in Erlank’s mind. You could see him getting bigger, as Fabiano both talked him up and hacked away at his mistakes.
Of the others, the one who particularly impressed me was the second baritone (Kieran Rayner), who looked and behaved like a trainee accountant, but who sang like a trainee god. By the time Fabiano had been at him for a bit, he started to get a bit more like an actual god. The sheer sound of Rayner’s voice was beautiful from the start, I thought. As did Fabiano.
Fabiano made a big deal of vibrato, which he seemed almost to equate with singing. But vibrato is, for me, a huge barrier. Rayner did do enough of it to satisfy Fabiano, but not nearly enough to put me off. I mention this because I believe that I am not the only one who feels this way. Too much wobble, and it just sounds like wobble and nothing else. Singers who overdo the wobble never break past that oh-god-it’s-bloody-opera barrier. But not enough vibrato, and they don’t get to fill those 2,500 seat opera houses. And even if they do, no OMG, Fabiano style.
Final point, by way of summary. When each singer did his performance, Fabiano made a point of going to the back of the hall, to hear how it sounded there. Fabiano made no bones about it that what concerned him was not how you or he felt about it while doing it, or how Renee Fleming sounded to him when he was standing on the stage right next to her. What matters is the effect it has on the audience, all of the audience, including and especially the audience in the cheaper seats. Are they getting what they came for and they paid for?
Deepest thanks to GD2 for enabling me to witness all this.
I’m not saying Happy New Year to you, again, although now that I’ve mentioned it, I actually do, again. No, what I have in mind is that today feels like my New Year has, at last, begun.
I always tell people that I like a quiet Christmas and a quiet New Year, but it seldom turns out that way, and it did not this time around. This was not because I got lots of appalling demands to attend appalling things. If they had been appalling demands and appalling things, then I would have happily played them all off against each other and ignored the whole damn lot of them. No, the problem was: enticing requests to attend enticing things, frequented by enticing people whom I might not soon be meeting again, things that I knew I would enjoy and which I did mostly enjoy, hugely, but which just came one after another. (Plus, I arranged an event myself at my home, on the last Friday of December.)
And then, in the midst of it all there was that dose of Ashes Lag, to play havoc with the already imperfect sleep pattern. The point of such fill-in-the-blank lags is that it only takes one such night of lag to create a ripple lasting about a week. Throw into that mix a few invites to things that happened not in the evening but earlier in the day, and it all became pretty strenuous.
But now, all these events have come and gone. I had a huge sleep last night and way into this morning, and finally feel able to think about the year ahead rather than just the next thing I need to get to.
So like I say: Happy New Year.