Author: Terrie Chen

Transition periods are often fraught with the uncertainty of non-belonging. They are not precisely anchored to one end, but neither are they to the other. Human logic tends to separate things into binary oppositions, dividing concepts not only into categories but demanding the certain identity of one or the other. Black and white, up and down, right and wrong. But who is to determine the precise boundaries, the exact points of division, when nearly everything is a gradient? And so these distinctions are rendered almost arbitrary.

And then, there is night and day.

Twilight is itself already a murky time, somewhere between sleep and waking, silence and noise. Then there is what is known as the blue hour, so termed for its literal appearance. These are the hours situated just before sunrise and immediately following sunset, when the sun itself has not yet risen above (or has only just dropped below) the horizon, but there is an diffused, ambient sort of light filtered down from the atmosphere. The first glimmerings of sunlight scattered in the upper atmosphere give the sky a deep, jewel-toned glow, while the land remains unlit by direct light.

What this time of day provides is an ethereal in-between transition period, valuable for its unusual quality of light and, perhaps, because it is so fleeting. Moving inward towards the daylight hours, light progresses into the golden hour, the first and last hours of sunlight. A lower solar angle and more atmospheric interference translate into longer, redder wavelengths, and it is during this time that light takes on a strong, warm glow. Building faces are gilt, landscapes turned to amber.

Dusk and dawn and the times surrounding them are often perceived as boundaries, as lines, as borders between night and day. But in truth they are segments of time, unbounded at either end, melting seamlessly from one to another. They are quiet, brief, and go frequently unnoticed, yet they provide such drastically contrasting types and temperatures and qualities of light that they remain unique, and, as ever, a sight to behold.

Those who are interested in a twilight-hour jaunt (with or without camera) may find this site invaluable. It comes with location/coordinate input, charts and maps with hours and angles and latitudes of everything the sun and moon are doing, and all sorts of helpful things.

There is something about the sound of French composer Yann Tiersen (of Amélie fame)’s music, a strange, poignant quality. The tracks are largely instrumental, but only minimally so; piano and accordion and violin often layer over other unconventional instruments. Sound is sparse but constant, running, circling ever around and around. It is lively, fluid, lilting, this music.

Timeless at its core, the best of Tiersen’s music seems to revel in individual moments rather than transcending time altogether. Freeze frame. Click, whirr. A handful of Polaroids. Sun-faded corners. Worn wooden floorboards, a cobbled street, the café under striped awning. Whirp. A worn leather-bound book, indolent summers on a green riverbank somewhere.

Perhaps it is more accurate, when making such observations, to specify that we in the end really are examining Tiersen’s scoring of Amélie (2001, full title Le Fabuleau Destin D’Amélie). Its sound draws largely upon Eastern European folk and classical roots, but is not defined by its inspiration. Evocative of quiet idyll, of philosophical reflections on life, the music is at once quaint and familiar, old and new.

(Or, “In Which TChen Offers Excerpts/Thoughts From a Previous Paper In Lieu of the Rubbish Spawned by Late-night Attempts to Write.”)

Street photography is, I believe, integral as both a form of art and as a mode of documentary. It is not set up, premeditated, or manipulated in any fashion; what one sees at any particular moment is what is recorded. Simple, yes?

Unlike many types of photography, street photography is surprisingly personal in a way that other styles are not. Street photography is intended to be documentary, and is precisely what its name suggests: The subjects are captured in public, going about their everyday lives or whatever they happened to be doing at the moment someone hit the shutter button. It is candid in a way that makes an increasingly great number of people uncomfortable. When one takes into consideration more of the restraints on photography in public spaces is social rather than legal, it becomes evident that laws protecting security are not the sole or perhaps even greatest threat to street photography.

Unfortunately, it has become increasingly fraught with concerns from the general public, over reasons from personal privacy to matters of security. These are valid concerns, of course, public spaces, it seems, have grown to be less accepting environments for photography.

When everything is factored in, the greatest restrictions on public photography do not come from [laws and national security concerns], but from oppression through public perception. There is no use in an activity being legal, if societal pressures suggest otherwise. Were street photography to be viewed in a favorable light, public misconceptions must go.

It was an opinionated piece. I feel it comes off a tad strong now, as the atmosphere and the context in which I was addressing the issue have quietened down somewhat. But who am I to judge?

Hopefully, I shall have returned to full brain functionality and writing capacity by next week. Until then, this (relevant link) is fantastic.

November.

November is that indeterminate blank of time caught between autumn and winter, reluctant to loosen its grasp on the light and warmth of autumn, but slipping inexorably, a reminder of time’s unyielding progression, towards winter. The scarlets and coppers and saffrons of September and October have long faded into brown, desiccated hulls fluttering and rattling in the wind. There was a period when the foliage, bright and plentiful, came flopping wetly down to plaster the pavement in little leaf-shaped cutouts every time it rained, or drifted, in a whirlwind of colour, to settle upon the lawn while the sun was still high.

But now the palette has changed. Browns and greys and beiges, muted by the haze of November, a name under which these colours fall. The sky, no longer piled with the cottony white cumulus of summer, settles into iron-grey blankets that lie low and flat and heavily across the sky. Trees are stripped to their skeletons, stems and stalks whisper and sigh, and humans begin to don garments in hues with such names as camel or charcoal or sepia or maroon, and they, too, adapt to the November landscape.

Rain, hanging in a cold, drizzly mist (or torrential downpours, as yesterday’s). Wind, stiff and dull, almost biting, but not enough so to be bitter. The sun weakens towards watery, when it shows. Breaths begin to mist first at night, then gradually during the day, some days.

Somewhere, a flock of crows has roosted, the black of their plumage invisible against the darkness, but their raucous conversation lasting well into the night. Sunsets slip closer, alighting unexpectedly earlier and earlier. Grey days bleed into one another, and November passes.

Disclaimer: This post was written last week and is not Leah Burgin’s column in today’s Daily, which, incidentally, is about the same exact thing. Sort of.

Once upon a time, I refused to read Harry Potter, and only relented because a friend had lent it to me― or pressed it upon me, rather, with a “this is really good!” of which I was skeptical (either it had not yet reached peak popularity, or I was simply oblivious)― and my mother insisted it’d be rude to not at least attempt to read it. So I read the first book, then the second, and the third, until at some arbitrary point in time, I began eagerly awaiting the publication of the next successive volume with ever-increasing fervor.

The world Rowling crafts is wide and all-encompassing, with rules and laws built into it that are illogical to reality but entirely logical within its own fictional framework, that are structured and regular but leave room for inferences and implications and the imagination to build something for itself. It separates itself from the mundane, but suggests that the magical world exists simultaneously as an ordinary one, and thus can actually exist; this, at least by my reckoning, is one of the things that makes the series so accessible to its audience― to children, to those who had read it as children, to people who just want to enjoy a nice escapist bit of fantasy. It isn’t merely the sum of the hype and the massive franchise built off seven books. It has shaped the youth of a great many people- it has certainly factored into mine. Don’t pretend you were entirely unaffected.

Harry Potter never did make it into my conscious list of favourite books, however. I preferred to state (with dignity), publicly and to myself, that on my list were the likes of Tolkien and oh, C.S. Lewis, maybe, and perhaps a bit of O. Henry tossed in there for good measure (and to balance out the fact that I enjoyed reading fantasy, etc). Which I genuinely did, of course, I did and do like them very much, but the language of Harry Potter is easier to read, its characters more easily relatable, its content more interesting. It is, for the same amount of effort expended, more enjoyable. Harry Potter is not, understandably, generally considered high literature; they are children’s books, written for enjoyment and immersion in said enjoyment, rather than an introspective discourse about the workings of societal values and the nature of intangible ideals. But what begins as a simple narrative about a boy in a tale of good and evil blossoms out into an intricate and multifaceted web of struggles and intrigues.

And this leads us to the present argument: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final installment. We spent all the space before its release rereading the previous books and hypothesizing what would occur in that momentous, precipitous conclusion that would answer all our questions and tie all the loose ends together. What happened was not entirely unexpected, but rather disappointing all the same, to be honest. Realizing that there was only so much time for all the remaining plot points to occur, Rowling must have squeezed everything else into the limited space of 700+ pages in order to bring everything to a logical conclusion. Which… it did, conclude logically, that is, after a fashion, but at least to me, the ending was too contrived, and quite unsatisfactory. The remaining protagonists seem to be all paired off neatly with one another by the end. Then comes the epilogue, in which we see said characters in their now-married couples with their multitudes of children, happy as can be in their domestic bliss. It might just be me, but there could be better and more convincing ways to end such a complex narrative. As a response to the culmination of 10 years’ emotional involvement on part of the readers? Ouch.

Least satisfactory of all is the matter of Severus Snape. The tragic antihero, who plays perhaps the most pivotal role in the entire narrative, whose entire life is one of hardship and of being loathed by everyone around him no matter what he does, does not receive the ending he deserves. He is perhaps one of the most complex characters in the entire series. Snape is caught between moral dilemmas, treads a precarious line, and yet manages to do the right thing (in addition to maintaining a stoic facade, remaining a vaunted intellectual in academia, and being Alan Rickman). And what does he get? He dies, and in a rather undignified way, to boot.

Well.

TChen will be the one sobbing all through the end of the last film.

There was a time when the luminous sound of a choral performance was defined solely by the certain resonance of voices in an acoustically-fitting space– a cathedral, perhaps, a high-ceilinged hall with columns of stone soaring into the air and wrapping the sound within its spacious confines. And this is still important, still a staple image, still an ideal rooted in tradition, but it is not the only definition.

The Virtual Choir may be a relatively well-known phenomenon by now, and has probably already been thoroughly discussed by others. This fact, however, does not diminish its impact. Eric Whitacre, who coordinated (and still coordinates) the project, posts sheet music and an instructional video of his silently conducting it on the internet. And the internet, in response, performs his music, as individuals who upload their respective parts onto Youtube. These are then assembled into a multi-track work, the likes of which have never been seen before.

The goal of the project, says Whitacre, was to “not just sing our parts separately and cut them together; I wanted to see if we could actually make music.” And he did. They did.

Aside from the aesthetic, auditory wonder of the music itself, there is also the fact that the shape and nature of what constitutes a community, what constitutes a shared understanding and a shared experience, has been expanded to accommodate this, the Virtual Choir. No longer are those who wish to create music together restricted by geography or personal circumstances or who one is.

A singular idea, the one piece of music, is merely an amorphous concept until it is realized. Under normal [choral] circumstances, a number of people come together, make their individual sounds fit together, and perform. The Virtual Choir, however, breaks that concept into small pieces and disperses them all around the world. Here and there, individuals pick up the pieces, nourish them, and then they are fed back into the system and reassembled once again into a whole, but an entire, fleshed-out, fully realized whole.

This, good people, could very well be the sound of humanity.