On jazz

'Now don't try to kid me man-cub I made a deal with you, what I desire is man's great fire so I can be like you.'

The bear opened its mouth and out from it came the most wonderful music. I was 7 when I fell in love with jazz. Baloo the bear and King Louis the orangutan of the Jungle Book were my jazz heroes. The songs were always the same, but the blare of the trumpets and the thump of the double bass had a terrific effect on a young mind. I grew up on jazz, while others were swooning over boy bands and all things shiny and new, I was interested in the dead people and some who were still alive. Maybe I got old too quickly. Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday spoke to me during times of love and loss while painting a picture of a previous era gone by through the sway and swing of their music. Martin Taylor and Joao Gilberto taught me that the guitar played solo can produce the rhythm of a whole band. From the subtle nuances to the crazy riffs, jazz to me embodies the irregularities, the improvisations and the moods of life – ‘it don’t mean a thing, if it ain’t got that swing’.

Thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory

I recently reread The Power and the Glory and it is truly a fantastic piece of work. Graham Greene writes about out a more ‘realistic’ kind of Christianity, one that isn’t about smiling faces, happy communities and praise and worship songs, but one that it is filled with human anguish, with the heavy burden of sin and with redemption. I recently mentioned to my friend that the Christian community here is too damn happy, maybe I’m just being cynical. That’s how I see Christianity now, not in clear black and white, right and wrong but a Christianity where the boundaries are a little uncertain. I never thought I’d end up thinking this way but I guess I learnt how to sympathize. Maybe it’s just an excuse. I was particularly moved by a passage in the Introduction by John Updike:

“Greene, at a low ebb in his Chiapas travels, took shelter in a roadside hut, ‘a storehouse for corn, but it contained what you seldom find in Mexico, the feel of human goodness.’ The old man living there gave up his bed – ‘a dais of earth covered with a straw mat set against the mound of corn where rats were burrowing’ – to Greene, who wrote of the moment, ‘All that was left was an old man on the verge of starvation living in a hut with rats, welcoming the strangers without a word of payment, gossiping gently in the dark. I felt myself back in the population of heaven.’ Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

I find beauty in imperfection. Perhaps it’s a way to negotiate through my failings and the fact that life more often than not slaps you in the face when you’re not looking. If the world were filled with good Christians, what a bore it would be. I mention Christians here in the conventional interpretation of being a good Christian one that is bounded by a certain set of rules. In the end, I find that it’s something to figure out between you and God and not just fitting into some specific mold society has created. That’s why I’m always suspicious of worship concerts or huge prayer rallies where some famous speaker comes and moves the crowd. These things don’t work for me. The potential for hypocrisy is just too great. You make yourself vulnerable to the effects of the music, lighting, atmosphere and words, mistaking it for a religious experience, saying and feeling things you don’t really mean. That’s why I like the traditional church service where the space is not taken up by a constant drumbeat or a deliberately stirred-up feeling, where there is space to meet God.

And when I meet Him, I ask, ‘help me in my unbelief.’

this is rock and roll

Too much fun

Report from the Asian front

All is quiet on the Asian front. In Spanish class, we sit together in a row facing the rest, a conference table filling the divide. Was it a conscious effort that gave us our place on this side of the table? Or rather, was it a conscious effort on their part to sit on the other side? Who knows? The professor jokes, the rest laugh, we smile, trying desperately to make sense. Questions are asked and answered naturally but we sit there, a wall of silence.

Perhaps we are afraid of being judged, perhaps the words simply escape us, perhaps we unconsciously hold on to the subservient Asian attitude and feel beaten down, perhaps we're just quiet.

"It could be because your command of English isn't that good so you may find it a bit difficult," the professor said.

Yeah right.