Wednesday, September 20, 2006
forbidden city is great! i think s'porean musicals are really pretty respectable. the last one i watched was chang and eng, or was it they're playing our song.. well, both were very much up to scratch in their own way-- tho the former much more than the latter. i enjoyed all three thoits a story about a story. how people really rely on the often unreliable fellow human beings and the channels of communication that they operate -- writing, painting, art, speech-- to determine their stories and hence their identities. and conversely, to determine their perception of people and things, and basically to shape their whole worldview. when you think about it, its really scary. you mean, we're content to allow something so personal and so fundamental to the definition of who we are, to rest so completely in the hands of mere humans who are just as fallible, undependable, malicious, selfish and inadequate as we are? how can that be? and yet, it is. the show made me think about this. that even as we were watching what put itself out to be the actual and true version of what happened, (as opposed to the decietfulness and expediency of journalism, or the inadequacy and of painting/visual art in its silence and openness to manipulation) who's to say that the show wasn't itself a distortion of the facts? oh, there'll never be an actual version of a thing once the thing is over, i think. even eyewitnesses can never give an objective record. thats one of the things that occured to me in the show too-- that the record-keepers (hossan leong and some other dude whose face i just couldn't see from my fantastic 32 buck seat), were essentially just clowns.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home