BBC Proms in the Park, Glasgow Green, Saturday

My impression of The BBC Proms, or its gobbledegook formal title The Sir Henry Wood Promenade Concerts presented by the BBC, comes from its Last Night, where some popular classics are performed in the first half and a string of patriotic tunes belted out in the second.

While the first half is regarded 'serious', i.e. decent, the second is meant to be lighthearted, a good occasion for some patriots to flaunt their exuberance, confidence and stylishness of being Britons, where Union Jacks, fancy dress, balloons, party poppers and all sorts of banners are most welcome. Nevertheless, it is not necessary to be a British nationalist to take part in the event. Just have fun and whoop it up, waving whatever you've got!

If my memory serves me, the patriotic songs include:

• Edward Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 (with words Land of Hope and Glory written for the trio theme)
  
• Sir Henry Wood's Fantasia on British Sea Songs
  
• Hubert Parry's Jerusalem (set against William Blake's poem)
  
• Thomas Arne’s Rule Britannia

Interestingly, the first half is usually broadcast on BBC2 and the second half on BBC1, seemingly reflecting the original designated roles of these two channels: BBC1, a venue for news and sport programmes, mainstream drama, film and comedy, and BBC2, a home for less mainstream and more ambitious programming.

Since I came to Britain, watching Last Night of the Proms on TV has become an annual ritual of anointing myself with some British cream as if I was once a member of the British Empire.

Although now I pay much more attention to other prom concerts on Radio 3, Last Night still means a lot to me. This year, thanks to colleagues at the University of Glasgow who forwarded me the ticket information, I was offered a ticket by the organiser to Glasgow Green, one of the venues of BBC Proms in the Park.

The first half in Glasgow Green will see BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Inverclyde Junior Choir and some other artists, and the second half may join the crowd in the Royal Albert Hall in London through live telecasting. I'd better start to remember the lyrics of those British patriotic songs so that I can sing along with those Britons on Saturday.

A concert performance of Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg

Given a ticket by Jenny, a lecturer in our department and my supervisor Simon's wife, I had the pleasure to attend one of Wagner's richest operas, a 5-hour-40-minute long concert performance sung in German, which ended the Edinburgh International Festival last Saturday and marked Sir Brian McMaster's stepping down as Director after 15 years.

Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
Usher Hall, Edinburgh, 2 September 2006

David Robertson conducts the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra with an impressive cast of soloists and the Edinburgh Festival Chorus.

The cast really contained a mixture of up-and-coming young singers and established names:

• Eva: Hillevi Martinpelto, soprano
  
• Magdalene: Wendy Dawn Thompson, soprano
  
• Walther: Jonas Kaufmann, tenor
  
• David: Toby Spence, tenor
  
• Sachs: Robert Holl, bass-baritone
  
• Beckmesser: Neal Davies, bass
  
• Pogner: Matthew Rose, bass
  
• Kothner: James Rutherford, bass
  
• Nightwatchman: Paul Whelan, bass

Besides, the list of other old masters, including John Shirley-Quirk, Jeffrey Lawton, John Mitchinson and Richard van Allan, really reads like a 'Who's Who' of British singers from the past decades, some of whom even have come out of retirement for this special concert. McMaster described this as his near-as-possible dream cast for the opera.

Probably because the musical content of Wagner's opera is usually constructed on symphonic principles which continuously develop many themes, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg was decently appropriate for performance in the concert hall. Though without extravagant sets, props and costumes, the emotional facial expressions, vivid gestures and body language made by the soloists could still be clearly read by the audience. The interactions between leading characters, particularly Sachs, Beckmesser, Walther and David, were no fewer, no less explicit than a real staged opera.

Edinburgh Festival Chorus was also stunning. The choral piece at the beginning accompanied by the organ and the one that concluded Act III, sung together with the whole cast for the outdoor song competition, were particularly impressive.

In addition to the concert itself, another unforgettable experience is joining the audience picnicking on the pavement outside the concert hall. As the performance last nearly six hours beginning at 5.00 pm, most people brought their own meal boxes, bottles or simply grabbed some drinks from the lounge bar in the hall and gave themselves a good feed during the two half-hour intervals between each acts.

Unlike those elderly ladies and gentlemen, who were seated elegantly on the pavement benches and had their home made sandwiches with glasses of wine, I stuffed myself with a huge chocolate bar and dashed into a pub having a quick pint before the bell rang to call us back into the hall.

Thank you Jenny. You would probably never know how much I owe you; it was absolutely a fantastic night.

Homemade blackberry jam

Blackberrying in the Kings Park yesterday yielded about 3 pounds of blackberries, enough for making a couple jars of blackberry jam.

Consulting my landlady's age-old household cookbook, I worked out the proportional amounts of all ingredients, and then started the first-ever jam making in my life.

• 3 lb. blackberries
• Juice of 1 lemon
• 2 oz. water
• 3 lb. sugar

I was told by some elderly lady in the church that the jam will set only when there is sufficient pectin, acid and sugar present. As blackberries lack acid and pectin, the addition of fruit juice that is rich in these substances is required. In this case, lemon juice is a good idea because it aids the setting and brings out the flavour of blackberries. When everything was ready, I had a deep breath and followed the instruction:

1. Put blackberries with the lemon juice and water into a big pan.
2. Simmer very gently until the berries are cooked and the contents of the pan are reduced.
3. Add the sugar, bring to boil, stirring, and boil rapidly until setting point is reached.
4. Pot the jam.

It actually doesn't look as simple as it looks. I had to make sure the setting point is reach so that enough pectin was release and mixed well with sugar and acid.

Fianally, this first-ever life experience proved to be pleasant and full of fun – jam very successful. I've got four jars and a bowl (as I don't have enough jars).

Howevr, as I don't usually have my bread with jam, I may have to give away two jars or probably, following the Russian way, always have strong tea with jam so that my homemade blackberry jam can be consumed as soon as possible while it's still fresh.

Go blackberrying

Not until recently have I realised that actually the word 'blackberry' refers not only to the edible aggregate fruit of a blackberry shrub, which we also call bramble in Scotland, but also to the activity of gathering blackberries in the wild. Therefore, you can go blackberrying, just as you can go fishing or shopping. However, it does confuse me why British people don't go some other berrying nor do they go lemoning or cherrying.

Anyway, today I went blackberrying in the early evening before the sun sank under the horizon. Walking along the footpath around the Kings Park, I found loads of blackberry shrubs spreading on one side of the path. As these blackberries are wild, unlike those cultivated thornless varieties, their dense arching stems carry countless short curving sharp spines – that's why I've got loads of cuts in my arms, palms and fingers, as well as some spines left in my skins, after today's blackberrying activity. I wonder if there are some techiniques to avoid being cut and punctured by those damned thorns.

What can I do with a pile of blackberries? As not all of these berries are sweet enough to be eaten straight, it may be a good idea to make some blackberry jam. Hope a spread of the sour, sweet jam can pacify a big crying boy, like myself, and bring some light to the last chapter of my thesis. I wish May, Ellen and of course my fiancée were here so that they could have a taste of the first-ever jam I will have made, whether successful or not, in my life.

The setting sun is a mashed persimmon

Metaphor is probably one of the greatest devices ever invented by human beings, which allows freedom of drawing a direct comparison between seemingly unrelated subjects, though it may sometimes occur to us far-fetched, absurd or even non-sensical due to a particular rhetorical and writing style of a user.

Ellen would sometimes chortle at my farcical use of metaphor. Quite unobjectionable as her comments are, it's arguable that it is the tension created by the dissimilarities or implausible associations between the two subjects which are under comparison that generate real pleasures beyond 'words'.

Here is an infamous example of my ludicrous metaphor:

People enjoy sunset at theTamshui River estuary flanked by Kuanyin Mountain in the south. I once agreed with them, but now ridicule them.

What can you do with a mashed persimmon crushed by a naughty boy with his catapult? A persimmon lacks the succulence you can find in a freshly ripened tomato which, after you take a good bite, exudes juices in a perfect mixture of sweetness and sourness. It is also flawed by the absence of the crispy mouthfeel you can expect in an apple.

What could you possibly do with this mashed persimmon in such an estuary where you have to shoulder your way through boisterous crowds and ubiquitous hawkers and stalls, against a deplorable, wet, piscine smell steaming up from the befouled coastal waters?

I would rather devour an intact persimmon in late autumn, when it's acceptably warm but not baking hot in Taipei Basin, with my fiancée fanning beside me.

People always peel off the skins before eating a persimmon; however, I prefer to have them with the pulp, for:

a) I can't be bothered to undergo such a ritual of scalping, as the persimmon is not an enemy.

b) I love such a contrast between the astringent feel in the mouth produced by the skins and the smooth, palate-pleasing firmness of the flesh.

While the former seems to show my natural sloth towards what I deem unnecessary, the latter actually reveals the inveterate pessimism in my personality.

I always remind myself of bitterness of life, particularly at those happiest moments, so much as the principal of a university talks about the approaching solitude, loneliness, desolation, frustration and suffocation during doctoral study in a welcome wine reception to those students, who are still basking in the great joy of being offered places on postgraduate study.

Helen of Troy is back

Helen of Troy was probably the most beatiful woman that had ever walked on earth, whose abduction by Paris brought about the Trojan War and fall of Troy.

According to Homer's Odyssey, she was exiled after the death of her husband Menelaus by his illegitimate son Megapenthes

In the Greek tragedian Euripides's play Orestes, she had long left the mortal world and been taken up to Olympus even before the war.

It doesn't matter which version is truthful to history, as I believe she is now around me.

(Image ©Howard David Johnson 2005)

Read what I have written for you Helena, mi mariposa en la noche.

Throughout countless sleepless nights flooded with torrential sweats, it is you, my sylph, the everlasting muse condensing into a dew drop before the dawn, the immortal goddess having sublimed into the zenith, who stroke every fissure of my hypothalamus with fingers full of charge and emboss my chest with reveries and incubi.

Lo, what I have to suffer in the days you remain incammunicado via the ethernet: without being nuzzled by your whispers through words blinking on the screen, a day is never complete, let alone the night.

Helena, for you Troy had fallen, but now another citadel is collapsing. Return to me, even though cyberspace is our humble cot, and even though I can barely feel you in real.

A bottle of Scotch from Port Customs Bar

Most of the time, if not always, I'm sort of the old school, conservative, reserved, almost taciturn. I prefer traditional British pubs to refurbished modern pubs or clubs which are always filled up with head-banging music.

In a traditional pub, people are more friendly, approachable and always more than happy to buy you a pint. Besides, barmen or barmaids always remember your name and favourite drink; sometimes before you actually order, a pint is ready for you.

In a traditional pub, you don't have to shout at each other against the ever bombarding loud music to make the conversation audible. Maybe some people just fancy something that would deafen them to visceral fears accumulated during working weekdays, but ear-splitting music is really not my cup of tea – I would rather eavesdrop on whatever chinwags going on at the next table or roars over a losing football match on flat-screen TV.

A traditional pub is also a classless institution, a cross between social club and a citizen's advice bureau, where all sorts of social distinctions or class gap never exist. You don't have to worry about if you attire is up to the dress code, which is nil in this venue, nor do you have to pay any attention to your accent and grammatical errors, as after having umpteen pints, no one would give proper language a damn.

However, the practice of drinking 'rounds' is probably a nightmare – you came in for a pint but end up drinking five, as well as coughing out more than a tenner. It is indeed more convenient to buy a round because only one has to leave the group to get some drinks instead of all queuing up and shoulder-rubbing in front of the bar, but if five chaps buy you drinks, you absolutely have to buy a round for all of them to successfully organise a piss-up.

This afternoon, I completed my weekend routine going to the Port Customs Bar. An old bloke named William promised me last week he could get me a bottle of Scotch for as less as ten quid. I kept my words and visited the bar; however, he said the bottle hasn't been delivered yet. 'Never mind', I replied. 'Until next time whenever you can manage it.'

Much to my amazement, while I was getting myself a pint, William went to Victoria Wine and bought me a bottle of Bell's. 'It's really not necessary', I shouted. 'I don't deserve it.'

His daughter Vicky came to me, coming out with 'Come on, if William fetches you one, then you deserve it.'

Established in 1825 by Arthur Bell. Bells Scotch Whisky is a finely balanced malty, fruity and rich whisky from Blair Atholl, Scotland. Famed for its distinctively mellow character and uniquely complex taste, it's claimed that Bell's Scotch Whisky has earned its reputation as one of lifes truest indulgences.

It's Scottish: do what you promised.

Tonight, while I was having a sip of the eight-year-old blend, I thought of those neighbourly chums, who always greet me with a warm handshake and a pint. They might be simply passersby in my life, but they give me warm hugs without any cunning plans.

Cheers, folks!

How do you find Chinese music?

What are the features of Chinese music? To Westerner ears in the early years, listening to Chinese music was probably one of the least pleasant things in their world. In reading historical literature on Western impression of Chinese music in the nineteenth century, I encountered some interesting comments.

Fred Gaisberg, a business representative of the Gramophone Company, who started his Asian tour in 1902, wrote in a field report that in Shanghai they had to stop the session after making ten records because the din had so paralysed his wits that he could not think.

Henry Ellis, the third commissioner of the Lord Amherst’s British diplomatic mission to China in 1816 to 1817, described the performance of Canton opera as annoyance of a sing-song and mass of suffering, and said he never wanted to endure the noise of actors and instruments which he would not even call musical.

William Tyrone Power, the commissary general-in-chief of the British army, commented that Chinese singers employed an unnatural falsetto key pitched as high as possible, and the vocal timbre was hideous and ludicrous which could be compared to a tom cat caterwauling on the pantiles.

While these comments draw on the viewpoints of a businessman, a diplomat and a general from the British Empire, what could a real musician say?

Hector Berlioz, a famous French composer of the romantic period, contended that to name what Chinese people produced by their vocal and instrumental noise music was a strange abuse of the term. He also criticised that nothing so strange had ever struck his ear as Chinaman’s voice. From his view, Chinese singing is as a series of nasal, guttural hideous tones, which can equate the sounds a dog makes when after a long sleep it stretches its limbs and yawns, and even less flattering, wildcat howls, death-rattles and turkey cluckings.

Although some earlier Western criticism is apparently culturally egocentic prejudice against the sound out of their classical traditions and practices, the derogatory comments are actually understandable.

First, these Westerners simply applied the musical knowledge they had learnt in their culture to what they heard in China: some of them could only equate Chinese music with noise based on their definition of ‘music’, whereas some, from their technical point of view, deemed Chinese music backward.

Moreover, as there was no need, and perhaps nowhere, to develop a musical capacity to appreciate Chinese singing or the acoustic effect of instrumental performances in their society at that time, a person like Gaisberg would certainly not be ‘musical’ enough to tell the difference between ‘din’ and Chinese music nor the variation among those pieces he recorded.

However, with the development of information technology and commodification of culture products, more and more ethnic or folk music from different corners of the globe are available in the music marketplace. It may help people to understand and appreciate musical sounds of the others.

How do you find Chinese music?

Thinking of Mum

Throughout all this life are two very cries I indulge in:
One at the birth of my life;
The other at the conclusion of your life.

The first, as I could never remember, was heard of from you;
The second, as you would never acknowledge, needn't be mentioned.

Nevertheless, ah, across these two crying sounds
Is boundless and everlasting laughter,
Over and over again
Having reverberated in the whole of thirty years,

You have acknowledged, so much as I remember.

~Yu Guangzhong

This is a peom composed by the famous Taiwanese poet Yu Guangzhong in moemory of his mother.

Encountering this poem on the Internet, I think of my mum, who had a stroke five years ago and then unfortunately was diagnosed as having cancer two years ago.

I always remember the story she would reiterate whenever I phone her. Having been in labour for umpteen hours, she gave birth in a storming morning, and thereafter quit teaching in a kindergarten to take good care of me. Indeed, she dedicated all her life to me and my sister, to this family.

This March, half a year since I saw her in summer 2005, I flew to New York to visit her. Hoary hairs, wrinkles, trembling hands, wobbling legs and, above all, the wishful longing in her face for my returning to her for good are the images etched in every inch of my flesh. She becomes older each time I see her, which I notice with a fear on mind wondering how many years I still have.

'A tree prefers to calm, but the wind does not subside; a son is able to serve, but the parents are no longer living ( Shu yu jing er feng bu zhi, zi yu yang er qin bu dai),' a Chinese saying goes. Filial piety is more than an obligation, but rather, it involves a wholehearted feeling of emotional indebtedness towards the parents.

May Mum live a long and healthy life; may I have enough time to serve her.

Kim Jong Il, the leader of North Korea

This is absolutely a stuning video clip praising Kim Jong Il, the leader (or actually the dictator) of North Korea, to the skies.

In a communist country like North Korea, nothing is impossible, as was in China before the bamboo curtain was raised and Chian opened up to the world. The state can simply launch the propaganda machine and convey whatever messages it desires. Even if the information delivered to the general public is truth, it always contain partisan bias and fail to present a complete and balanced consideration of the issue, let alone those exaggerated idle boasts.

Below are some other North Korean political propaganda video clips. I wonder what were on the minds of the artists who performed at the stage and the producer who edited the video clips when they were carrying out those 'missions' assigned by the state.

• Potato Pride
  
• Miso Soup Song
  
• Army Of Beauties
  
• High School Girls

We may consider the contents of these video clips laughable; however, the images presented here would be the pride and joy of the beguiled North Korean people.