…Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality…

…But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better…”

Click here. 

“… What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure…
However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown academically.

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life….”

The image is not appearing properly so click through here if you to see it…

http://image.guim.co.uk/Guardian/culture/gallery/2008/jun/16/1/billnotes-4961.jpg

And his review:

Driving down the M4 on a bank holiday Monday in pelting rain to watch a darts tournament in Cardiff, I wonder if I am being punished in some way, either by God or the Guardian. As a darts virgin, I imagine watching sweating, beer-bellied arrowmen playing to a few hundred spectators. What I discover is that Premier League darts is a mixture of showmanship, skill and big business played to more than 4,000 people, who pack every inch of the Cardiff International Arena. “Darts,” I am told by Sky Sports commentator Sid Waddell, “is working-class theatre.”

I get to talk to Waddell in his presentation box and soon realise why he is as much a legend as the players he describes. In the course of doing his vocal warm-ups, this genial Oxford-educated Geordie talks to me knowledgeably about the original Pitmen Painters (recently dramatised by Lee Hall in his play about the Ashington miners, now at the Cottesloe) and quotes Wittgenstein’s remark that trying to define sport is like trying to define language. But he has none of the pretentiousness of Keith Talent, the anti-hero of Martin Amis’s novel London Fields, which I have been reading by way of preparation. Talent talks of “the address of the board” and “the sincerity of the dart”. Waddell gives me shrewd tips about the players, the punters, the phenomenal popularity of darts and, on air, displays a manic fervour that produces off-the-cuff lines such as “he could play a ukelele and make it sound like a Stradivarius”.

The event itself - consisting of two play-off semis and a final - is a mixture of razzmatazz and expertise. The players, flanked by glamorous female acolytes, enter down a red carpet, like championship boxers. The crowd chant, shout, sing, roar on their favourites, hold up placards (”Kids, has the babysitter turned up yet?” reads one) but fall appreciatively silent for each “leg” of the contest. What soon becomes clear, however, is that we are here to watch the coronation of a darts genius: Phil “The Power” Taylor, who has won the three previous Premier League finals and is about to sweep to a triumphant fourth.

“Taylor is to darts,” I was told by Waddell, “what Bradman is to cricket or Pele to football: he has set a standard which we know will never be matched.” But in sport, as in theatre, there is always a hidden story just beneath the surface. In the second semi the 47-year-old Taylor defeats the 23-year-old Adrian Lewis with contemptuous ease: only later do I learn that both hail from Stoke and that Taylor is a professional mentor to the visibly crestfallen Lewis. And, although in the final Taylor beats the 25-year-old James Wade with a run of remarkable trebles, the steely, bespectacled Wade periodically unsettles the champ. Are we, I wonder, seeing the darts equivalent of drama’s peripateia: a crucial turning-point in which the reigning king has to acknowledge a rival to the throne?

But, for now, the rotund, unflappable Taylor displays the perfect hand-to-eye co-ordination and muscle memory of the great sportsman. His only mistake, in picking up the £100,000 prize, is to say that “it’s been a great year for English sport” momentarily forgetting that he is addressing a crowd of raucous, partisan, tanked-up Welshmen. Darts may be a display of sporting skill. But, as one of Waddell’s Sky colleagues said to me as I was about to quit the noisy arena: “You can take darts out of the pub, but you can never entirely take the pub out of darts.”

2. What are 5 things on my to-do list for today?

- Assess the benefits of GLP-1s in diabetes, make sure I mention the Gila monster.
- Think about writing
- Make sure A. does not stress out too much
- Think and write about planning applications
- Figure out how to keep the cats from pooing in the garden especially on my beans.

3. Snacks I enjoy: Kinder surprise, chocolate buttons, home made crispy pork scratchings, Tortas de Aceite de Ines Rosales. I like all yummy food, snacks included! Can I have Jamon Serrano or culatello as a snack?

4. Things I would do if I were a billionaire: Amongst other things, I’d kick start some creative hub or industry; with theatre but probably other arts as well. Some great arts centre maybe like the ICA but with more resourced sections for various artists.

5. Places I have lived: London, Ham, Cambridge, Cambridge, Mass.

So states the US Declaration of Independence written mainly by Thomas Jefferson, however it is believed that Benjamin Franklin may have wrote the phrase

“Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”

Changing it from

“Life, Liberty and Property”

in Jefferson’s draft. However it was put back to Life, Liberty and Property in the Bill of Rights.

I’m not sure anyone quite knows why the changes occurred. I don’t believe the change was explained during Jefferson’s lifetime. The pursuit of happiness is the better slogan but perhaps legally “Property rights” is a more important (or at least easier to understand legally) concept to legislate for.

It is thought that the phrase is based on the writings of, English philosopher (and other moral thinking of the time), John Locke, who expressed a similar concept of “life, liberty, and estate (or property)“. Locke said that “no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.” Strong legal property rights are now a fundamental for forging a modern healthy economy and society but were only developing under English common law at the time. At the time, it was probably not readily thought of as an essential component of liberty which we take for granted in many societies today.

However, on a moral philosophy level, I would like to speculate that the phrase was influenced by Aristotle and his Nicomachean Ethics.

Aristotle argued that eudaimonia is the goal of life, and that a person’s pursuit of eudaimonia will result in virtuous conduct.

Eudaimonia has no direct translation in to English but is often thought as best translated as happiness. And so the Declaration also has this ethical dimension.

On this dimension, does the right to pursue happiness also give use the “right” to fall in love and find our life long partner?

I think it does. In this way our pursuit of love and hence happiness is an unalienable right that is self evidently true….

That I made with my own hands from a cedar of Lebanon that lived in the grounds of Salisbury Cathedral

until it was blown down in a storm, and a shell we collected from the beaches of east Sri Lanka.

I received in return

Time for a small spot of this

On a bagel.

Then as part of a secret trip going to

For

And La Fromagerie for

Carrying with us this (inherited from the remnants of my father’s collection)

Of which Robert Parker claims: “thick, supple, velvety-textured, gloriously decadent, and hedonistic…If [you] need just one wine with which to impress someone, close a deal, or just experience the pleasures of wine, make it the Pichon-Lalande 1982…”

Leading to me cooking an unforgettable meal here

For a perfect day to become engaged.

lc, as an actress writes in the comments:

“Definitely! As a performer, so many times I’ve wondered how a friend has got that dream job/audition while I didn’t even get a look in… only to realize later that the company had specifically been looking for a black performer, although the colour of the character was not at all relevant to the piece…

Quite simply, I get the impression that black is cool, brown is quite cool, yellow is not.

But this applies not just to theatre but to a wide range of areas including music, politics, media… East Asian societal figureheads do seem in short supply in comparison with black and other Asian counterparts. I do still think that we are very passive in Britain, despite being (I believe) the third largest ethnic group.

I’m ambivalent about these labels “black/brown/yellow theatre”. I’m all for culturally diverse work, but I do long for the day when I can work with a company composed of individuals from a wide range of racial and cultural backgrounds, when we won’t be known or celebrated because we are all black, yellow, or just “different” but because we are simply producing high quality work that unites people regardless of race, class or nationality.

Idealistic? Of course! And there are flaws in the proposal but I find myself increasingly drawn to notions that unite and not divide us. If theatre is about humanity, then it should be our (shared) humanity that drives it, not our appearance.

And returning to this idea of being “sidelined” - part of me wonders if we are being sidelined, or whether we’re simply not fighting hard enough”

Both feature a strong female character trying to do her best in a world full of characters, which may not always really want the best for her.

In the Good Soul of Szechuan, Brecht is articulating a dilemma of the time. Trying to do good when it will most likely drown you at least economically). I’m not sure “free markets” are quite as bad as that… although they do suffer from the “tragedy of the commons” which essentially Shen Te – quirkily brilliant Jane Horrocks – is to everyone. A free resource will be overused – think over fishing of seas.

The visual and theatrical staging (and design, Miriam Buether) is brilliant and I think the director’s (Richard Jones) work in opera and large scale visions shows through.

Sally Hawkins as Poppy is more beguiling in Mike Leigh’s film. She seems drawn to helping people and like the film title is happy-go-lucky.

Like John Sayle’s Limbo, the films says what it is. Happy-Go-Lucky.

Do we looks for Poppy’s dark secret in the film? I think because of general story narrative, we do. But, we don’t find it. This is film as a character study and the character is optimistic and chirpy, and if she wasn’t so genuine she might even be a little irritating but she’s genuinely compassionate and caring. I believe her.

I believe there are many people who are like her some of the time, and even some who are like her most of the time. I’d even venture to say, there are some who have always decided to look on the bright side of life – perhaps in the belief that if everyone did and if everyone remained optimistic, caring, compassionate then the world would be a happier place.

I’d like to think, I try and do that when I can.

I missed my friend, Penny Skinner’s play, Fucked, at the Old Red Lion although to be fair it was sold out and so I couldn’t get a ticket.

I’ve not seen an awful lot of late for the above reasons. But I have been thinking about some of the similarities between creative processes.

The crafting of a play; its themes, characters, plots, images and the designing of interior architecture.

Trying to create enough ingredients to sustain the interior or the play. Fun, surprise. The constant re-working of ideas. The seeking of inspiration.

I’ve also been asked to write on this posed question: The British East Asian theatre experience; if “brown is the new black”, where does that leave yellow? Are artists/practitioners with East Asian roots sidelined in favour of South Asian and Black British work?

Any thoughts welcome.

I’ll be back when I have something more to say. Lots of good plays around at the moment. Am going to try harder to get out and about. At least the sun is out.

I was struck by a thought experiment Warren Buffet does before he decides how to vote. Buffet is one of the richest men in the world and tends to vote Democrat.
It is 24 hours before you’re to be born as a baby, and a genie appears.

The genie is going to let you set the rules of the world you’ll be born into. You can set the social rules, the political rules, the economic rules-whatever you like. And whatever rules you set will apply for your lifetime and your children’s lifetimes too.

You think: This sounds great! What’s the catch? And the genie then tells you that you don’t know if you’ll be born rich or poor; black or white; male or female; sick or healthy; intelligent or slow. The only thing you know is that there’s a lottery with 6 billion choices…. and how you start life will be represented by one of them.
Buffet called this the “ovarian lottery”.

Some of us are born pretty, some of us are born intelligent, some of us are born to rich parents…

Buffet votes as if he didn’t know which lottery ticket he would have, and which he thinks – not knowing how the lottery will turn out – will best serve.