Halelujah

I guess I can say "Halelujah!" that it's almost the end of medical school. But this halelujah actually refers to one of my extracurricular activities - the Queensland Choir. We are singing Handel's Messiah this year and this is the final week of rehearsals. Last week, with my unlucky viral infection, my voice dropped an octave and I could only sing about two notes. Singing then would probably get me kicked out of the choir. So, with my voice recovering over the weekend, I feel like I should join the last two rehearsals before our concert at City Hall this coming Saturday.

This will be my final performance with the Queensland Choir. The Messiah is always fun to perform. It was one of the first concerts I had performed in during my undergraduate years with University Singers. In the following ten years or so, I had performed it with other groups a few times. The complexity and intricacy of the masterpiece makes it a challenge but also a joy to perform each time. And each time I gain a new appreciation for Handel's genius.

After this concert, the choir will break for the summer and next year, I will be far away from Brisbane. During the three years that I had been able to sing with the Choir, I had a lot of fun learning new music and making new friends. With no formal music education and not able to play any instrument, I can count on singing as the artistic complement to the scientific side of my life. Being able to sing with a dedicated group of enthusiastic singers and lose myself in the music is incredibly stress-relieving, even during rehearsals when we get yelled at by the conductor.

Halelujah!

Ride Up Mt. Coot-tha

After a few days of doing not much more than turning pages of a book – I am reading Three Worlds Gone Mad by Robert Young Pelton – I am getting really restless. The weather isn’t all that great, but I will have to go outside and do something.

So I hop on my bike and head toward Mt. Coot-tha, a hill just west of the city center. It’s a good climb to the top at about three hundred meters in elevation. I breeze through the familiar bike path along the Brisbane River, go through a couple of suburbs, and start the steady climb at the six-kilometer mark, according to my cycling computer. The climb isn’t that steep, just enough to make you aware that you are doing a good cardio workout. After six kilometers and a three-hundred meter climb, I reach the observation point with a nice view of Brisbane and the surrounding suburbs.

This is what the city of Brisbane looks like today:

This is what it looked like in February, 2003, when I came to Brisbane as a backpacker:

That’s quite a few more tall buildings just in the span of five years.

All that hard work to come up only means an exhilarating coast back down. The road, devoid of any cars, is all mine. I lean forward with hands just touching the brakes, and let gravity pull me along the surface of the road at speeds up to 55 kmph. In just a couple of minutes, I am at the bottom of the hill, back to where I started. And I continue on my leisurely ride home along the river.

What a good work out. Now that I’ve worked up an appetite, I can’t wait for dinner.

Tonight’s dinner: that old standby during my college days - rice, black beans, and salsa. Except this time, the rice is not instant rice, the beans are cooked and not out of a can, and the salsa is not from a jar – I made that yesterday.

Bring Down the House

Te, te Deum laudamus;
Te, te Dominum confitemur:
Te aeternum Patrem
omnis terra vene ratur.

For the last two weeks, I have been humming this opening phrase and other segments of Haydn’s Te Deum. They just form a loop, playing over and over in my head, whether I am reading, commuting, showering, sitting on the toilet, or even watching surgeries. Whenever I am not concentrating one hundred percent on what I am doing, this soundtrack wedges its way through to the front of my brain and starts the automatic loop. I must look like a lunatic on the bus sometimes, staring out the window with my head bobbing and feet tapping, but without the ubiquitous headphones sticking out of my ears.

I sing in the bass section of The Queensland Choir and, like what happens three or four times a year, it’s around concert time again. This time, we are doing Haydn’s Te Deum and Puccini’s Messa di Gloria. With rehearsals twice a week for a month before concerts and increasing familiarity with the music, it is inevitable that the music becomes a temporary fixture in the jumble of information swirling around my head. The music is beautiful and I really enjoy singing it, but having it played in a continuous loop can become a drag. Mercifully, I tend to be able to file it deep into the recesses of my mind after each concert so it does not become a nuisance.

Last Sunday we went down to Bangalow, New South Wales, just inland from Byron Bay, to do the Puccini piece to a full house. It was good to see in the audience a good number of dark spots in the sea of silvery white hair. I know, performances of classical music, with its formal, stiff-upper-lip settings, traditionally high-brow and inaccessible attitude, and strictly no interaction between the audience and performers and no improvisation, can hardly pose any threat to rock concerts. For our concert, we performed at a small Catholic cathedral with the audience filling every pew. With the warm afternoon glow streaming through the windows, we rocked the house. Well, as much as one can rock with classical music.

Our concert tomorrow will be in the Cathedral of St. Stephen in the middle of Brisbane. I am sure we will follow last weekend’s performance and bring down the house once again. What’s the music equivalent of “break a leg”? Strain a vocal cord?

Qui tollis peccata,
peccata mundi
suscipe deprecationem
deprecationem nostram…

Riverfire

There is some kind of festival going on in South Bank. On schedule tonight is fireworks over the Brisbane River and a fighter jet from the Royal Australian Air Force doing some kind of dump and burn maneuver over the city. It happens every year; but I never bothered to go and watch it before.

But tonight, I strolled down to Kangaroo Point, found a spot with a good vantage point and not completely blocked by ten layers of people, and strapped my camera to the railing to take a few snaps.

Wooh, pretty fireworks. Is it just me or is Brisbane’s skyline really bland?

Warholic Culture

Quick, who do you think of when you see panels of technicolored Marilyn Monroe or Mao? Of course, it’s none other than Andy Warhol, that weird dude who also brought us paintings of giant Campbell soup cans and all things previously thought to be un-art worthy. He is either enthusiastically embraced as the cultural icon who elevated the lowest common denominator and made art accessible to the general public or passionately loathed as a fraud who shamelessly presented advertisement and crass commercialism as art.

I tend to agree with the former. I love Warhol, whose work is on exhibit at Brisbane’s brand new Gallery of Modern Art. This is the last weekend for it, so of course I am making a day of going to see it. Not that I haven’t seen his work before, I had visited the Andy Warhol Museum seven or eight years ago when I went to Pittsburgh, Warhol’s hometown, to see a friend. But it’s good to revisit great art like this.

As I walk through the exhibit, it suddenly strikes me that the material on exhibit is very American. The exhibit shows a snapshot of the American pop and underground cultures of the sixties and seventies. Does the Australian audience get the cultural references and know the subjects of the artwork? I think most of them do – the Coca-Cola bottle is universally understood, international superstars in their days like Liz Taylor and Elvis are instantly recognizable, even the series with Jackie Kennedy wouldn’t be too foreign to Aussies; pieces like the Oxidation Painting where squares of copper-coated canvas were urinated on and then allowed to oxidize to immortalize the patterns of urine splatter are both base and sublime – the main determinant is probably generational rather than national. Of course, this exhibit would probably feel infinitely more foreign in some parts of the US than the cosmopolitan city of Brisbane.

I spend the rest of the afternoon sitting, with coffee in hand, with my friend Pedram at the open-air café overlooking the river.

After a year out in the cultural desert that is Hervey Bay, it is good to be back in Brisbane again.

Earth Hour

Tonight at eight o’clock, Brisbane will join the world to observe Earth Hour by turning off its lights for one hour. And the city has urged everyone to do the same.

Well, I’ve got other plans. I just found a place to live and I am moving today. As my stuff is scattered among a few friends’ places, I need to gather them and move them to my new digs. After moving all my boxes and suitcases with my little car all day, I finish the day by shoving my bed into the Little Car That Could and drive back to my new home. It is already eight o’clock when I leave my friend’s place. As I drive along the freeway past the city center, an eerie scene of darkened skyscrapers, punctuated by an occasional bright window here and there, unfolds before me. This is the only time I have seen Brisbane like this – no neon lights on building tops, no floodlighting on the bridges, not even the reflection of the skyline in the Brisbane River. I can’t help but think of my friends in Lubwe, Zambia, who would no doubt be having their Earth Hour when it’s their turn; and they observe it everyday! Soon, I am home and unpacking – with the lights burning bright in my room.

It’s not that I don’t care about the environment; to the contrary, I care so much, I have earned a reputation among my friends for being a tree-hugging, tofu-eating, and organic-munching hippie. To me, the purpose of Earth Hour is to raise awareness of our collective voracious appetite for energy and how it affects our lives and where we live, both locally and globally speaking. We all know that by turning off our lights for one measly hour will do nothing, in the long run, for the environment. It will be a success only if the event convinces people to start conserving energy. I have already been doing my part for a long time, especially since I moved to Brisbane three years ago. I turn off the lights when I leave the room. I line dry my clothes. I eat as local as possible by getting my fruits and vegetables from a community-supported agriculture club and by shopping at the local farmer’s market. I take my own reusable bags to go grocery shopping. I recycle and reuse jars and containers – oh, I am so famous for this one, my friends make fun of me to no end; apparently I am not wasteful enough to be considered “normal” in a developed country. I get around Brisbane by riding my bike almost all of the time and drive only if it’s not practical to ride or to take public transport – like when I am moving.

That’s why I feel like they are preaching to the choir and, to me, Earth Hour is a non-event.

Homeless, Need Shelter

I’m back in Brisbane, and I am homeless.

After staying in student housing in Hervey Bay last year, I went on various trips for almost four months. My stuff is scattered among a few friends’ places. For now, my friends Richard and Henry are running a shelter out of their living room floor and have taken me in.

So the immediate priority is to find a place to live; my jetlag can wait. As I have been told, housing cost in Brisbane has gone up substantially in the last year. Throw in the freefalling US dollar, I have a feeling I’ll have to bleed to get through this year.