rear window

Via the always brilliant Nag on the Lake, we are invited to peek behind the curtains of the privacy-treasuring Norwegians, escorted by the private-eye of photographer Ole Marius Joergensen. Such haunted voyeurism that raises more questions than answers about identity and public-personæ and reminds us that the eerie spectre of being observed (or being the observer) isn’t just about the brute panopticon of total surveillance that spoils the surprise by not leaving much up to the imagination for nosy neighbours for whom the truth is immaterial against the excitement of constructing one’s own narrative. Such curiosity remains harmless, I think, until it becomes the official profile of another—or of the watcher.

hither and yon

Nearly eight years ago (and I must not forget my blogoversary), this little blog was created as a travelogue to document our adventures in Normandy and Brittany, crowned with a visit to otherworldly Mont Saint-Michel, a sight I could not believe actually existed until we spied it on the horizon.
A complementary destination, we discovered with a similar sense of wonder and disbelief, was to be found just across the Channel on our recent trip through England.
Saint Michael’s Mount, just off the coast from the town of Marazion, chartered since the Middle Ages and once wealthy from copper and tin deposits, is a tidal island—accessible by a footpath when the sea ebbs—whose summit has been adorned with various institutions since the eighth century, having hosted a Benedictine abbey, just like Mont Saint-Michel and inspired by the same apparition of the Archangel Michael appearing to local fishermen.

Though battered over the centuries by tsunamis and earthquakes and significantly smaller than its French counterpart, there was no shortage of exploration to do through the tiny village, harbour and the gardens that trellised upward towards the more recent castle and priory, which is still a royal seat and sometimes entertains distinguished guests.

theatre district and whistle all the airs from that infernal nonsense pinafore

Just a few kilometres away from the westernmost reach of England at Land’s End—visited in the grey when a sudden fog came up but we wanted to cross all the way from East to West and weren’t being deterred by the weather—lies the cove of Porthcurno with the open-air amphitheatre hewn into the wave-rocked granite outcroppings.
The skies opened up suddenly and the sun returned to the Penzance peninsula and we stopped to explore the stage and arena seating of the Minack Theatre, the endowment of a local patron of the arts who recognised that the gully looking out to the sea who be a perfect venue for the community players to stage their performance of The Tempest.
From the first show in 1929 whose footlights were car headlights, the theatre has evolved into the beautiful sculpted gardens that attract many matinee-goers just to see the playhouse. I am unsure whether Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance was ever shown there but the location certainly provides the proper backdrop.
The comic-opera’s premiere rather took place on Broadway instead of their native London, interestingly, because America afforded no copyright protection and did not respect the intellectual property rights of foreign authors, and when HMS Pinafore debuted in the West End dozens of unscrupulous US companies “pirated” the performance with unsanctioned productions. Hoping to forestall further copy-catting, the duo figured that a New York inauguration might distinguish the genuine from the plagiaristic.

agrabah

Via Quartz Magazine, we learn about the Chinese government’s ambition to create a Muslim theme park of sorts in order to court wealthy tourists and bridge Sino-Arab relations and highlight (or perhaps dampen or whitewash) Islam’s identity in the broader Chinese cultural heritage, prising out the folklore that Aladdin of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights hailed from eastern China.
The reporting from Quartz—to my mind, selectively draws from the most cynical and suspect elements of World Muslim City, the trappings and the stagecraft meant to mask China’s internal struggle with its Islamic population, the lack of visitors, the rather insensitive way women are invited to wear veils to see how it feels. All these faults and more are in the source article of course, however cushioned, and perhaps this project is like the 1:1 recreation of Hallstatt, or zombie planned-communities that never came to fruition. Those are epic failures a lot of people take with some schaden Freude—like Chinese wine-enthusiasts paying a mint for counterfeit cheap, supermarket red wine. Executed with the same soft diplomacy, I’d venture it’s far more foreboding that China’s public-relations apparatus is hoping to limn a fairy-tale version of Islam that’s palatable to the government’s world-view, removing potentially destabilising characteristics. I’d applaud the effort for simply not propagating the stereotype of the violent terrorist, but it’s not respecting of the interplay between religion and governance determining social norms and is fraught with the same trappings that forms the impasses of the One China Policy and the evisceration of Tibet (the pronouncement that the next incarnation of the Dalai Lama will be ethnic Chinese and the current avatar fearing he might be the last) and other undesirables that don’t tow the party line. What do you think? Would you visit World Muslim City?