S.P. Somtow's Blog

Between Shadow and Flame by C.T. Bryce

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I started this novel thinking, well, it's another retelling of one of the oldest tropes: boy who doesn't know who he really is searches for his real father and finds his true self in a distant fantasy kingdom. And it is, but C.T. Bryce has found new things to say and this book is a brilliantly reimagined take on the theme. In fact, it's astonishing for a debut novel. It's assured, deft, and works on many levels.

The boy in question is named David and he starts off in a stereotypical modern urban world. But soon he's off to a place called Fyrnlendh which feels very much like some forgotten corner of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. (Even its name seems lo take off from German "fern+land" i.e. "a far country.") And while he encounters plenty of darkness and magic and creatures of fantasy, he's very much grounded in the present, and we're as much in the world of dysfunctional families and manipulating relatives familiar in many a literary novel.

I would hate to give away too much of this plot but the author never takes a familiar direction without ringing a change on it. The protagonist is very well drawn — precocious, questioning, conficted, feeling very deeply, with hints of queer identity that may be developed in a later volume of what seems to be a trilogy. Indeed the first book is really just the setup. This is clearly a writer to watch.



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Although Tár doesn't get released in Thailand until February, you can watch it on amazon prime for $25 (for that you can own your own copy and watch it offline.) There is no way for me to review this film objectively - or without spoilers - so I will talk about it here and if you want to wait until you see the film to read these comments, please look away right now.

******* MULTIPLE SPOILER ALERT ********

So, I did not get to see the film until yesterday (thanks to Amazon prime who charged me $25). But, I got an inkling when Paul Spurrier returned from the AFM.

He said to me: "So we have here a mad genius conductor, who is kicked out of a major European orchestra after an act of violence, has rather ambiguous dealings with some young prodigies, ends up in Southeast Asia conducting a youth orchestra in a tawdry venue ..."

"Oh!" I said. "You went to a screening of our film?" Because Paul was telling me the exact plot of our own film. "The Maestro: A Symphony of Terror."

"Actually, no," he said. "I just saw TÁR."

Yesterday, I too, saw TÁR. And actually, Paul was not incorrect. In a sense, it does have the same plot as "The Maestro." But alas, I am a poor substitute for the incomparable Cate Blanchett, and our film is wholly different in substance anyway, being a modest little tribute to the horror films of the 1980s. Plus, the fall of the mighty, from Prometheus to the present, is in its very nature the essence of all that we mean by the word tragedy.

I cannot of course write an unbiased review of TÁR because I'm credited as a consultant up front (though my work, such as it is, only graces a few minutes of this 158 minute film) and also because my orchestra, every single one of them credited by name, appears for a few minutes as well.

However, this is one of the only films ever made that credibly inhabits my world, the real world behind the scenes of classical music, and which references hundreds of little things that only truly make sense to people who live in that world. One of the questions I was always asking myself throughout this film was, "Would anyone get this?" Occasionally it was the opposite: "Why would these characters explain something just to the audience in an expository lump, that everyone in the field would already know?" It's a balancing act which to me, succeeds pretty well, on the whole. I think though that for Blanchett's character to have to be told, for instance, something as well-known to conductors as the story of Furtwängler's denazification struggles (there was even a movie about that!) doesn't ring true. I also don't buy everyone talking of Mahler 5 as Mahler's "big one". I mean, in terms of size, there's 2 and 8, in terms of "what is his greatest symphony" most people I know would probably say 6, or 9, were the "big ones" ... 5 is a "big one" the way Beethoven's 5 is a "big one" ... it is just too "popular" to feel that way to practicing musicians. I'd say that this characterization of No. 5 is at best debatable unless you were first turned on to Mahler by the Visconti movie (which she does make fun of in the course of the movie.)

The film also contains the popular Hollywood myth that composers sit at the piano and try out a few notes and say "ah, that's it" and jot it down. That might be true in the pop world, I don't know. I, and every composer I know, writes music in their head and jots it down (or enters it into their software) ... but alas, that's not very visual.

A very interesting question is — how is Cate Blanchett's conducting? It looks very good. It's flamboyantly cinematic. The kids said that they had a spot of trouble because she seemed to be conducting in 7/4 instead of 6/4, but when I watched the movie she didn't seem to be getting it wrong. However, I do understand why they might have thought so. Blanchett's upbeats are not fully realized, like a golfer who hits the ball perfectly without doing the perfect swing beforehand. But this is also true of many famous conductors. That's because orchestras that are as good as the Berlin Phil don't need that much warning. They can play the piece anyway. All the work is in the rehearsal (as the character herself says.). Those dramatic gestures, in a sense, are for the audience — guiding them through the unfolding adventure. It's actually only a problem with a more inexperienced orchestra. So I'd say top marks on conducting the music, and a bit of nitpicking on how she conducts the silence just before the music sounds.

The critics have picked out the amazing scene where Tár bullies a Julliard student in a conducting workshop, and have read into it inklings of the hubris that leads to her downfall. First, this is a scene of staggering virtuosity ... quarter of an hour or so in one take, the camerawork (steadicam?) as seamless as Blanchett's flawless, nuanced reading of every complex line in the scene. This has got to be one of the most technically astonishing monologues in all of cinema. But most critics have focused on the fact that Tár mercilessly takes apart the poor little conducting student who's only trying to cancel Bach for being a straight white protestant. Because they haven't been through the fiery baptism of what it takes to become a conductor, they often miss that what Tár tells the kid are some of the deepest truths about why we do music. Conductors do it all ... persuading, cajoling, insisting, and in the end bullying ... if that's what it takes ... and if the kid can't take it, he's not cut out for it. It's a cruel profession. That monologue, truthfully, is full of things that I have said to my own students, though I'm usually not quite as mean about it. Sometimes, years later, I realize I should have been more mean. Truth is, I am the most mean to the students I care about the most. I guess you'd call it tough love. Lydia Tár, it seems, is a lot more promiscuous in her meanness than me.

The thing is, the TÁR character did the right thing. She may have belittled little Max, may have condescended in her tone, but the substance of what she said did not talk down to him at all.

Much is also made of the ending of the film — where my orchestra appears, as it happens. Because it is read, by most critics I have seen, as the bathetic nadir of Tár's existence ... of the karma coming to roost.

Yes, I personally believe that Mahler (and Bach, of course) exist on a higher plane than "Monster Hunter." I did not know this music. But let me tell you, the kids in our orchestra were familiar with the score. My resident conductor, Trisdee, who is in his thirties, and who is a world expert in early music performance practice, has played this video game all the way to the end. The hushed, religious intensity of the kids in weird costumes is as real as the fervour of the old folks listening to Brahms. I know for a fact that this gaming world is as rich and as real to those who are in it, as the nuances of romantic "sehnsucht" are to those who love "Tristan".

The reason I don't think Todd Field intends this to be purely a fall from grace is that Tár is never shown denigrating or despising this music at all. She's seen studying it seriously, and when she conducts it, she gives it as much her all as in her illustrious Berlin career. Indeed, she subsumes herself ... exactly as she taught little Max he had to do in the Julliard scene.

And we all know there's more money in video game music than in playing Mahler symphonies ... that's just the real world.

I think that we are expected to see this as the classic tragedy — a great figure whose hubris leads to death (career death at least). But the director has pulled a fast one. It's not a tragedy at all. The tragedy is just the top stratum of this multilayered work.

And the clearest foreshadowing of this is in the "apocalypse now" reference ... the crocodiles in the river who were imported to "be in a Marlon Brando movie" and stayed. As the boy from the orchestra says, "They survive."

Crocodiles are predators. In our story, Lydia Tár comes to be viewed as a predator. She's done a lot bad things, sure. Like the crocodiles, she eats people alive. But like the crocodiles in the river, she's still there at the end. Every indication is that she's going to climb her way all the way back again. Before her departure for the old "unnamed Asian country" we learn that she's already reinvented herself once before, dropping her decidedly "white trash" past for the exotic mystique of the name with the funny accent. I am not at all sure that she won't have the last laugh in this story.

The joke is on me, too, because when Living Films, the Chiengmai-based production company tapped me to consult on getting a youth orchestra in Thailand, they didn't tell me much. The only parts of the script I ever saw were a few sides that some of the young musicians needed for their audition. At first, I thought it was going to be a "white saviour" movie ... about some do-gooder musician who brings us benighted Asians to enlightenment through the power of music, or whatever. It turned out to be a movie that really asks questions about the nature of creativity. And whether geniuses can be "bad people" — and whether this matters in the context of their genius and of history.

In a real sense, this could actually be read as a "brown saviour" movie. Arrogant white genius gets canceled by bad acts ... and finds salvation in Asia, because we don't (yet) HAVE cancel culture here. Yes, you can just as easily read this as being about the first steps toward redemption as a film about an artist self-destructing.

I could say a lot more, and will at some stage, because there is a lot of substance to talk about.

Thoughts While Binge-Watching “The Mandalorian”

I was finally able to watch The Mandalorian recently in between moments of incredible personal and professional stress. And one of the best things about it, ironically, is that it doesn’t contain a single original idea. I’m not praising with faint damns here — far from it — I am trying to explain why this series is so appealing, absorbing, and generally bingeworthy.

Alexander Pope said of great poetry that is “what oft was said, yet ne’er so well express’d.” The Mandalorian is great because it uses tropes that we know and love, and serves them up in ways that are fresh and surprising enough to please the palate and push our emotional buttons. Everyone knows apples and walnuts — yet a Waldorf salad is an exquisite masterpiece of recombinant DNA.

And when you start disassembling the tropes, you also see a whole history of science fiction and adventure stories — a long line stretching all the way back to Gilgamesh, but this is just a short review so I’ll mostly stick with the last hundred years.

First, it’s the music the telegraphs the milieu. Gone are the lush late-romantic soundscapes of “big epic”. Odd, ethnic sounding wind instruments, rattling percussion immediately bring a particular shade of Ennio Morricone to mind, so before we even see much, we know we’re in a sort of spaghetti western. The lone hero travelling through a desert with a mute child is also inhabiting the world of Jodorowsky’s El Topo … and then there’s the veneer of orientalism — the ronin-like guild, “the way” (and what is the way but bushido?). We are in a very real sense back in the 1970s, the “birth time” of Star Wars — but we have moved in the direction of David Carradine in Kung Fu — a TV series so influential to the culture and to
what came after that we take all its radical influences for granted and have forgotten the show itself.

All of this puts us in the same universe as Star Wars but in a wholly “new” kind of “old” story — the picaresque tale of a knight errant on a solitary quest accompanied by a mysterious fifty-year-old Child.

Calling the companion simply “The Child” and mentioning its age reminds us also The Child, one of the main Jungian archetypes, isn’t just some undeveloped person but in mythological terms is someone infinitely old and wise who appears as a Child.

So, apart from a few red herrings in the middle, this is a pretty clean clear-cut arc of a story and I am not surprised that it’s getting more positive attention than the more ambiguous and perhaps “kit-bashed” films of the final trilogy. The Mandalorian with his thinly disguised bushido code, the miniature Yoda-like alien, the much subtler fansaabisu which reference more obscure minutiae of the canon (and occasionally even things rejected from canon) … all these things keep hitting the right buttons and it’s particularly delicious that this iteration of the “hero with a thousand faces” has no face.

Indeed, how any acting manages to occur at all is a triumph with all that armor. I am assuming its mostly ADR work, meaning that scenes of interactions with others must be particularly hard on the other actors. And yet it kind of works. Perhaps a “Lone Hero” by nature has to act like a block of wood — pace David Carradine. The inevitable last minute face revelation, mandated by the structure of such shows, was almost unnecessary, though it was useful to see that the hero was not some scarred monster — or some surprise celebrity — as men in iron masks are wont to be.

Although it’s clear that “Baby Yoda” has injected an almost unbearable level of cuteness into the show, this little guy’s no Ewok. The Ewoks were somewhat nauseating in their cuteness whereas B.Y. is genuinely adorable. The Ewoks were very obviously toys, as well, and served no actual plot-based purpose, whereas the existence of the B.Y. opens all sorts of doors and asks interesting questions. And puppetry, or whatever this is, seems to have improved a lot since the Ewoks — whose toy-ness one could never actually forget. B.Y. was pretty convincing — this was no muppet.

The best thing about this new series is the very human scale in which it’s set. There aren’t any space battles with thousands of battleships, and there isn’t a super-weapon that annihilates an entire planet, let alone an entire fleet of such weapons. There’s no one who wants to rule the entire universe — just a planet or two is fine. As befits climbing down from the movie screen to the home screen, the operatic bombast is greatly reduced.

When an actor plays one of those rugged, implacable types, we often say that his face is masklike. In The Mandalorian, the face and the mask are one, so acting ability is basically moot. Sexual charisma is moot. Rippling muscles are moot. Hell, it’s all moot. The ability to play a convincing protagonist while completely encased in Beskar is probably quite rare, though we don’t have many antecedents to compare our favorite bounty hunter with. David Carradine probably worked pretty hard to impersonate a block of wood; portraying a hunk of metal comes easy to Pedro Pascal, thanks to the fact that he is his costume.

And yet we’re all in love with him.

It doesn’t hurt that we were in love with Boba Fett when he was no more than an action figure. It doesn’t hurt that Baby Yoda presumably sees his saintly nature beneath his rough-hewn exterior — presumably being a Force user lets you see the man beneath the metal.

So — it’s the adventures of a tin man and a cute puppet, zooming through the galaxy, busting balls. one step ahead of the law, bargaining with jawas, getting chased through sewers, with a healthy dose of scum and villainy — how could one not enjoy it, guilty pleasure though it might be? And when the wicked Moff pulls out a — gasp — darksaber — while our hero finally achieves flight — well, a lot of buttons are being pushed.

It’s not deep, as such, but there’s enough quasi-Eastern philosophy woven into it to create a credible aura of depth. And it asks many questions that Warsies have always wanted answers to. Next season, presumably, there will be answers.

In the rain....

A week has gone by since I was asked to put together one of the biggest “sing-ins” in history — the massed performance of our Royal Anthem in front of the Grand Palace last Saturday. I’ve been asked a lot about what it was like, how it felt, how is it even possible to “conduct” a quarter of a million people. Indeed, when I saw all the cameras and the “cast of thousands,” I immediately christened HSH Prince Chatri Chalerm “Cecil B. De Mui” … and he deserves all our thanks and more, because his vision whipped it all together.

I lived in Hollywood for several decades, and I do understand the ego rush that could come from having a hundred-foot crane on a dolly swooping down from the sky and swivelling to a stop right next to one’s face in the midst of a powerful moment of emoting. And as a conductor, I do understand the power surge of lifting one’s arm and eliciting a thunderous chord from a vast ensemble.

Rehearsing in Korat

And yet, for all its cinematic spectacle, this was not that kind of event, in the end. A film was being made, but we were not there to make a film.

I would like to say something about what I think this moment means to me, to all of us who participated. Because I think this was more than a whole lot of people singing a song, and more than the creation of an epic music video. I think that this may come to be seen as the moment when Thailand began to see herself as one again, when this country began to heal.

Many things have divided us, and the divisions have become bitter. But if there is a single thread that has tied together all our lives in this country, that has connected all the dots of our fractious past, it has always been the special relationship between King Rama IX and the people of Thailand.

There are, in my experience, a minimum of three “Thailands”. One is the Siam of the Hollywood imagination, exemplified in the quaintly racist fantasy of The King and I. Another Thailand is, equally, a fantasy: the Thailand that drives the narrative that many international journalists love — a Thailand fueled exclusively by class struggle or color-coded factions. Then there is the Thailand that we actually live in. It is a country not perfect, but aware of its problems and striving to improve; a country that has come amazingly far in a short time, from an agrarian third world nation to a powerhouse, a journey that has been undertaken not without some terrible deals with the dark side; a country that has yet so much further to go; a country that has chosen to vest its collective sense of identity in the person of a mild-mannered monarch with a massive intellect and a mighty heart. It is a good country, but it is a wounded country.

But when the first note of my arrangement of the Royal Anthem sounded, it was more than just a musical unison, more than just a quarter of a million people all producing the same note. At that moment, many people felt a cold wind arise and blow over their heads. Some stated firmly that it was a supernatural wind, others that it was just the goosebumps, the power of the shared emotion.

But it was also the wind of history, and I and the musicians and the choristers and the crowd and the millions who watched live on television were all motes of dust in that great tempest. In the end it was not how “big” the moment made me feel, but how small.

A few days later we were invited to the town of Korat, and if anything the experience was even more powerful. The rain lashed down as a crowd estimated at 200,000 by the Korat authorities came together. I could barely conduct the music through my tears. In about a week we will repeat the anthem in Yala and to me this is particularly significant because our King is the protector of all religions, Islam as well as Buddhism.

Music can be a powerful metaphor for nationhood. When you perform a piece of music with other people, it is not just about playing well. It is even more important to listen well. A symphony is greater than the sum of what the individuals musicians play. What holds it together is that we listen to one another. And in listening, we become one. What holds true for the symphony also holds true as a life lesson. It is definitely true in the political arena. Too many people have spoken without listening. When we make music, we cannot do this. Our art comes from listening.

A quarter of a million people could not all see the conductor’s beat, no matter how grandiose the gestures. They were forced to listen to one another. And they did. They could feel each other’s heartbeat. They came together and they were one.

On Saturday, children from our music program in the slums of Klong Toey sang side by side with the granddaughter of His Majesty the King. This is a Thailand we may dream of. This is a Thailand that may come to pass, if in our grief we begin to hear the voices of those who share our overwhelming bereavement.

You see, grief counsellors cannot heal us. Psychiatrists cannot heal us. And most certainly, politicians cannot heal us. We must heal ourselves. We must prepare for a long journey. And listening to one another is the first step.

I was saddened to learn earlier today that Thanat Khoman has died. He was 102 years old. Our kids’ quartet had just played a concert in his home to celebrate his birthday and only a week or so I gave Woody, his son, the video so that he would be able to play it for his father...

When I learned of his death, I was sitting with one of students and when I read the message, my student asked me who this man was. It just shows you how little history they teach.

I can’t remember a time when this man was not in our lives and the lives of my family. As a child, I was always frightened of the guard at the gate of his house. He had a sunburned and weatherbeaten face, and I thought that he resembled one of those Indian chiefs in a cowboy movie ... like Chief Dan George. My earliest memory of Khun Thanat’s house was my fear of the man who opened the gate to let in our car.

It is my incredible fortune to have been a fly on the wall at some very major historical events. For instance, there was this meeting of all the Southeast Asian foreign ministers ... they were going to sign the ASEAN treaty. By day these ministers were all banging out the treaty while their wives were being entertained by Khunying Molee and my mother (my Dad was Khun Thanat’s right hand man at the time). I remember being hovered over by these very important ladies and taking barge trips along the canals … and at one particularly important lunch, when they suddenly discovered they were thirteen at table, and they were worried about bad luck, they summoned me from the kitchen to share the lunch. Maybe if I hadn’t sat there to avert the ill omen, the ASEAN treaty would never have gone through! However, of course I was too young to know that the events around me were of such import!

As I grew older Khun Thanat never stopped being like a very beloved uncle to me. Whenever I was home for the school holidays, he would always summon me and ask me to do a fake Indian accent, which he found quite hilarious. The last time I had a coherent conversation with him, I ran into him in the Erawan Hotel where he had gone for a dim sum buffet. He called out to me and said, “Hey ... you’re the kid who can do the funny Indian accent.” He was in his nineties. I couldn’t believe he could still remember that.

This man has had an extraordinary life, the kind of life that is the stuff of huge, picaresque novels. When he was a young teenager, Thailand was still an absolute monarchy. Thanat played a crucial role in dragging Thailand into the modern age. His life spanned both World Wars and the Cold War and he was a key shaper of Thailand’s alignment with the U.S. He was a mastermind behind the creation of ASEAN. He ran the foreign ministry as a meritocracy, promoting highly qualified people like my father and ignoring the complaints of those who felt that their seniority entitled them to better treatment. He once literally saved my father’s life, when certain political enemies wanted a human sacrifice after they ignored my father’s legally accurate but politically unpalatable warnings about international law. Our family therefore owes him far more than we can ever say.

However, I really think of him mostly as a gentle, generous, and profoundly intelligent avuncular figure, and his son is one of the only people from that far back in my school days whom I still talk to on a regular basis. Today I promised Woody I would put on a memorial concert. I hope that our friends will come to it, and we will remember him together.

The photo above was taken 55 years ago and shows him in Bayreuth. Wieland Wagner is standing behind him. This was during the King and Queen’s state visit to Germany....

So, 38 years ago, the same month that my first published science fiction story appeared in the semiprozine Unearth, I watched Star Wars on the opening day with several dozen members of the Washington Science Fiction Association. People cheered and screamed and clapped all through the show. Leaving the theatre, we all knew what had witnessed the birth of a new mythology.

A few years later, I sat at a table at the Hugo Awards ceremony. At the next table sat Gary Kurtz, producer of The Empire Strikes Back. We all applauded loudly at his expected win. I did not expect to win because before the banquet started, Robert L. Forward had already commiserated with me about my losing the Campbell Award to him. I therefore had not even bothered to dress up. Imagine then my amazement when Somtow and the Star Wars franchise were both winners that night.

It can be seen that this series of movies has always put in an appearance at key moments in my career. When I returned to Bangkok in late 1977 to try to realize my youthful ambition of “revolutionizing all art” in Thailand, I came to a Star Wars-free world because the Thai film industry was having a protracted fight with the government, who wanted to encourage the local film biz by charging an outrageous tax on foreign films. In Manila, giving a concert, Bruce Gaston and I snuck away one afternoon to see Star Wars in a dreary suburban theatre, turning down our taxi driver’s offer to provide nubile women for the evening. I surprised Bruce a bit by being able to recite the entire dialogue along with the film.

I didn’t care for the third film much; the first of the prequels was okay, exciting sort of, but I didn’t even bother to watch Nos. 2 and 3 in the theatre. When I finally got around to catching them on video, I found them decidedly dull. But today, driven by a trailer that managed to revive all those decades-old emotions, I dropped everything to take my son to a sneak preview of No. 7. Everyone’s already saying it’s the first good one since The Empire Strikes Back, and that’s pretty much true, so I don’t need to review it. Though I will.

The explosion of the Star Wars mythos into our collective consciousness was transformative. There are the things that everyone talks about, such as the way the universe looked used and dirty for the first time, or the Joseph Campbell wholesale plot borrowing, the deadpan wit. And of course how Star Wars dragged the nerdy world of science fiction fandom into the bright (and unforgiving) light of the mainstream. Also seriously discussed in the SF world was how science fiction film had caught up with 1930s space opera (this became even more explicit after Leigh Brackett was brought in as a writer) ... and the hope that perhaps one day science fiction film would manage to reach the 1950s and even 1960s ... which now, with series like The Man in the High Castle, is happening right on that same 50-year-delay schedule.

Less talked about perhaps was the way in which Star Wars heralded a full scale invasion of Asian sensibilities into American culture, for Star Wars was of course almost a scene by scene remake of Kurosawa’s film The Hidden Fortress, and what is “the force” if not some Zenlike thing, and who is Yoda if not some kind of Shaolin master, and so on.

The darkness of Empire deepened the mythos; the silliness of Return broadened it and lowered its denominator. Despite the strident toy-selling of Return and the aw-shucks revelations about Darth Vader’s “heart of gold,” the trilogy as a whole was one of the most important icons of the culture of the second half of the twentieth century.

The same couldn’t really be said of the prequel trilogy. Binge watching it on blu-ray is kind of fun, only because the “real” trilogy leaves one wanting so much more. Indeed we found those films’ “lack of faith disturbing” in their inability to trust the vision, and go instead with size, effects, and spectacle. It took a seventh film, made without the original visionary, to return us to the original vision.

But we who saw that first film 29 or 100 times, who memorized the dialogue, are a lot older now. Those ten year olds have had lives and loves. Some have even read Joseph Campbell and understand the tricks. We are jaded and we are tired, but The Force Awakens does have the ability to function as a sort of emotional Viagra for the child within.

Yet it’s impossible to watch it with quite the sense of wonder that one had then, and J.J. Abrams knows this; what he has directed is as much reboot as it is invention. Every button is pushed — even the controversial Kessel Run one. (We all really know that “the Kessel Run in twelve parsecs” was a huge science gaffe, but later Lucas tried to finesse it by claiming a level of irony that is not at all apparent no matter how many times you view the clip. Actually the savvy science fiction audience in the 1977 opening I went to booed raucously at the parsec boo-boo. ) Abrams not only brings back the infamous line, but riffs off it. There’s other infamous resurrected lines, too, and a few new ones that will become infamous over time.

As for the plot, it’s essentially the same as A New Hope, except with a black dude and a way cute female warrior instead of a bunch of white guys. There’s a sort of Mega-Death Star that uses entire suns as fuel, except we never quite learn why when the sun goes out, the temperature on the planet doesn’t drop to around absolute zero and why everyone’s still breathing. But then no one cared about spaceships thundering through the vacuum of space either, or fighter pilots using atmospheric banking maneuvers when there’s no atmosphere. It’s just part and parsec of the fun.

The mellowing of the audience and the filmmakers showed right in the first few seconds of the film. The familiar fanfare sounds, and just before the big theme starts up, on that final triplet of the fanfare, we get something I don’t remember hearing before ... a rallentando. It’s an almost imperceptible touch of espressivo in the music but to a musician it immediately tells us that this intense cup of java is going to be sipped through the whipped cream of nostalgia.

The cream on top lards every loving reference to the first trilogy. The prequel trilogy is pretty much ignored. Thank God those pesky midichlorians are never mentioned. Once we learn that Luke Skywalker has been missing for decades and that the standard mcguffin stored in a cute bot is a map to his location, we pretty much figure out that this will be a family saga and that there will be descendants. It doesn’t take long to figure out who is descended from who, though one mystery is left hanging — hopefully we will be surprised in the next part, but I doubt it.

For the emotional climax of the film, our storytellers choose a variant of the “I am your father” scene from Empire. Joseph Campbell and the blueprints left by the previous stories lead us to expect exactly what does in fact happen, but it’s well done nonetheless, even tear-jerking. Indeed, the new villain, the Darth Vader successor, is nuanced, very much of our time. He’s petulant, cruel, and dashingly handsome — a very effective new mix of elements. Harrison Ford is the only original actor whose return is more than a cameo and his presence lends a kind of authenticity to the entire piece.

In the 70s, diversity in casting meant giving a few lines to aliens, but that’s not enough in 2015. It’s refreshing and satisfying to see the “Luke” position in the plotline taken by a woman (Daisy Ridley) and to have the turncoat stormtrooper seen as black man. One might hope for, say, a gay couple as military leaders in the next installment, but that’s maybe too much to ask for. A bounty hunter with a Scottish accent was pretty amusing, as well. (Was it Scottish? It went by so quickly, and giant octopuses were running around eating people so I soon forgot him.)

Okay, so not a single surprise in the whole movie, really, except the surprise that the team got away with it. It really did feel like Star Wars. I felt like a kid again. Well, a very analytical, over-intellectual kid to be sure, who couldn’t help analyzing each moment for its Jungian overtones, but as much of a kid as one can still feel like at my age.

Let’s hope the “special edition” doesn’t ruin it....

from the opening concert of the 6th Season of Thailand's much-loved youth orchestra the Siam Sinfonietta.

It’s been called the most influential work in the history of music. I would like to give you some of the reasons. The Siam Sinfonietta, our youth orchestra, is opening its Sixth Season with this symphony. I hope everyone who reads this will come. It’s a free concert, so you have nothing to lose.

There are many bigger works than the Eroica. Beethoven himself also wrote the monumental Ninth, and if you’re talking monumental there’s always Mahler 8. In an earlier era, the Bach B minor mass is iconic, too. But the Eroica draws a line in the sand not just for music, but for all western art.

Before the Eroica Symphony, artists were servants whose worked served to glorify a patron. It could be a King, a rich banker like the Medici family, or even God himself, but the point is that what artists did was attached to something, was an adjunct, a decoration. The Eroica Symphony does not revolve around its patron — or even around Napoleon, who originally inspired it. It is the first music to be an end in itself, the first work of art to herald a new kind of hierarchy in which the artist, not the lord of the manor, is at the center of the universe.

The first performance of the Eroica was in a nobleman’s house. Its audience was baffled and bewildered. Some said that a piece this long, this difficult, and this complicated couldn’t possibly really be music. The first movement alone was as long as many symphonies of its time, and it is relentless, battering the senses with wave upon wave of vehement passion. The second movement is a gutwrenching funeral march in which you can hear the germ of every funeral march in every Mahler symphony … and of Siegfried’s funeral march … and of every funeral march that had not yet been composed in 1804. The word scherzo means a joke, but the third movement isn’t that funny — it’s a careening roller coaster ride interrupted by a hunting scene. And the Finale — in those days a Finale was supposed to bring a symphony to a close with something light and frothy, but instead we have a huge set of variations that runs an entire gamut of emotion.

Teaching the Eroica Symphony to a bunch of 12-24 year olds has been a rollercoaster as well, especially here in Thailand where the stylistic techniques of the classical period are not often taught. We are getting there — this is the first concert of the season with many new faces in the orchestra, some of whom probably didn’t quite know what they were getting into when they signed up for this very intense ensemble. I hope you will hear a Beethoven you don’t hear too often in this country. We will see — there is still some rehearsal time left.

I’d like to close by pointing out the special relevance of this work to this exact and place. You see, culturally, we are at a similar point to where Beethoven stood in Europe in 1804. The arts in Thailand are emerging from a perception that they are decorative, that they exist to enhance the barami of a patron, that art is something that flows downward from a court or a cultural ministry — to a whole new way of looking at art — to the idea that art is supposed to say important things, to teach us who we are. In a sense, we are looking for our own Eroica Symphony, for a work that will definitively revolutionize our perception of what art is.

And so we come to the figure of Napoleon, who plays such an important role in this work. It is said that Beethoven was inspired by Napoleon, the heroic liberator, to compose this work, and that when he learned that Napoleon had crowned himself emperor, he tore up the dedication page, shouting “So he too is mortal after all.”

Haven’t many of us in Thailand recently had a similar experience? No, I am not really saying that Thaksin is Napoleon. Just pointing out that we’ve all felt what Beethoven felt, with one idolized person or another — someone we thought might save the universe turning out to be “mortal after all.”

It may just be that the Eroica Symphony is a more accurate mirror of our world here than of twenty-first century Europe.

To find out, here’s a link to get a free ticket: https://goo.gl/XUDgsG

Please tell all your friends as well. And here is the Facebook Event:

https://www.facebook.com/events/863...

Suryadhep Music Sala, Rangsit — Siam Sinfonietta — Copland Fanfare for the Common Man, Prokofiev Love of Three Oranges Suite, and Beethoven Symphony No. 3 in E flat, “Eroica” 7:30 pm. Thursday, October 15, 2015.

I feel impelled to comment on Trisdee na Patalung’s little subtitling fracas. This tempest in a teapot erupted this morning and is causing people all over the spectrum to make comments. I think the controversy itself is a silly one; but it illuminates a much bigger issue which I would like to address and that is the state of English language teaching and proficiency in Thailand.

History: Trisdee and his friend Tom emerged from a showing of The Martian,and were discussing how dreadful the Thai subtitles were. This discussion blew up into an internet flame war, because the translator of these subtitles turns out to have been one of the most highly respected subtitlers in the field, having done this kind of work for years and being responsible for the subtitles of many of the top Hollywood pictures shown in Thailand. Trisdee pointed out one or two egregious errors and this lady responded with an astonishing level of vehemence and self-righteousness, driving nail after nail into her own coffin and revealing over and over again the depth of her ignorance of the subtleties of the English language.

So let’s start with the basic problem: Thai subtitles, generally speaking, are abysmal. One sees elementary errors all the time. They have not improved in the many decades in which I’ve happened to watch movies in this country. The kind of errors Trisdee pointed out are commonplace.

This all goes back to the way that English is taught in Thailand, and the fact that almost all those in teaching positions are not really fluent, but can quickly rise to the level of being perceived as “experts.” Although almost everyone one runs into here has some knowledge of English, one almost never encounters a genuine command of the subtleties of idiom, let alone of nuance, implication, irony, or humor.

One of the few people I know who actually does know English in a truly native way is Trisdee. The reason that he is this way is that he grew up in my home, which is an English-speaking household. He has been exposed to colloquial English in many varieties both British and American, and has always taken the trouble to ask me to explain complexities, weird etymologies, and aspects of language not apparent on the surface.

The examples Trisdee gave in his exegesis were all extremely obvious mistakes that any native speaker would immediately notice, yet this translator flew into an insecure rage at the notion that she might not actually be quite as knowledgable about colloquial contemporary English as she is perceived.

Even if every word in a film script were to be translated literally and correctlyinto Thai, the audience would miss more than half of the content of those words, because language is not a series of equivalences, but a living thing. But correct translation would be a really good start, and it’s not really happening. If, as she herself seems to maintain, this particular translator is one of the most highly-regarded in the field, one hesitates to think about what the worst examples of the genre might be.

This lady may think that because Trisdee doesn’t have a degree in English or whatever, that he is not qualified to critique her translation. But of course, his ability to make these sorts of comments is in itself prima facie evidence of his qualifications.

I, of course, do have a degree in English, and I’ve published almost sixty books in English and have received a great deal of critical praise for my use of English. But more apropos is the fact that two of my novels are cited in theOxford Dictionary of Idiom as source texts for correct idiomatic usage and one of my books has been an A Level text in the past. Therefore, if I tell her that Trisdee’s criticisms of her incorrect translations are spot on, I really don’t think she can dismiss me in the same way.

For example, it was evident from her protestations about the word “booster” (“I’ll spell it any way I like”) that the problem is not how it is spelled in Thai but that she simply didn’t realize that it comes from the word “boost”, not the word “boots”.

In every case, her overblown rantings seemed to be about “How dare you have the chutzpah to attack a great one such as myself” and never about, “That might have been a mistake, I’ll take another look.”

Thailand is entering a period in which the use of English is going to become a major passport to advancement on a social, cultural and business level. Thailand’s decades of insularity are ending very quickly. This means that there are going to be a lot of “Emperor has no clothes”-type revelations, and — given the near godlike status afforded to those believed to be experts — a lot of those “experts” are going to be shaken to the core, especially by young people like Trisdee who actually do know a thing or two.

I think that no matter how old or experienced you think you are, it’s never too late to go back to school. I have learned a lot from all of my students, and others my age should do the same.