Music and Me

Was at my former piano teacher's place for a mini-party after last week's concert. Things were rather awkward and quiet until B was asked to make the speech she was supposed to have made on the concert day. B is truly quite admirable. She's a few years older than I am, recently married, works in NAC, and still finds the time to practice and go for lessons every fortnight (a bit like you Bratsche, you are amazing too :)). She talked about what kept her going, how she juggled work and music, why she kept on at it, what music meant to her.

While listening to what B had to say, emotions welled up in me. I knew I had to tell my story too, to the group of music students, most of whom were still relatively young, and more importantly to my piano teacher, who I feel eternally indebted to, and that sometime in the past, I had really let her down by having to stop lessons.

So this is my story, in a more long winded, angsty fashion.

When I was 8, I started lessons with my teacher, after my first piano teacher decided that she didn't want to teach any more. I may have been precocious, but I certainly never thought so back in those days. But I guess I was diligent, practised hard and tried to learn what my teacher had to teach. Those were painful days of re-learning the piano technique, as my first teacher didn't really get the fundamentals right with me. But those were also the days where my teacher really opened my ears to music, we listened to music together, score in hand, ears glued to the music that filled the air. She lent me scores, books, CDs, and even gave me her entire (a few hundred!) cassette collection of recorded music from the library in the Royal College when she was there, because she claimed since she was going into CDs, the she didn't need the cassettes any more. I think it's this gesture of generousity, of how much she really cared for my musical education, of the potential she had seen in me, that made me feel the way I do for music today. And maybe subconsciously it's why I feel ever so strongly to share this passion with everyone I know.

Between the ages of 8 and 14, I had enjoyed remarkable success in exams and the competition circuit. I never thought the success was due to any particular gifts that I had, but rather through sheer grit and hard work. Indeed, I never had much of a mechanical facility. But on hindsight, perhaps I did have something special - a developed sense of musicality that is not that unusual for a person in his mid-twenties, but something quite rare for a child to possess.

When I was 14, I took part in this SMTA competition, where I had won the first prize. A couple of weeks after the competition, I did my Advanced Certificate exam, with basically the same repertoire, and my examiner was one of the judges that had given me the first prize. And so what happened? I flunked the exam. How is it possible? Is music that subjective? Was I really very off-form that day? But what the whole affair made me realize was that competitions and exams are entirely subjective creatures, that they should never ever be the point of music education.

The failure turned out to be a big turning point in my life. My parents, thinking that music was stressing me out, forced me to stop my piano lessons. Stressing me out they say. True, I spent uncountable hours in front of the piano, but I don't think my grades ever suffered because of that. What I believe is the real reason was one of money - how could they spend so much money on my music education but yet I couldn't even pass a simple piano exam? Sometimes I really wonder what was up in their minds - didn't I have all my previous successes to show for? Was I really at the limit of my musical ability? Yes, it was all about the money. I think my parents felt insulted when my teacher sent out a letter once about rescheduling lessons and how people should not be so uptight about ensuring that lessons were always rescheduled in a timely way. After all, no point quibbling right, since she frequently taught me past the hour. But no, my parents were offended. Three hundred bucks a month and they were being treated like that! No, we are the client, we are the boss, we are the ones giving the money here, we call the shots. And no, they refused to talk to her themselves, I always had to be the middle man, the poor hapless early teen negotiating for this and that. Three hundred bucks a month, one failure, let's pull the plug, what's the point of continuing. Which made me really want to cry when I saw of a friend who's family wasn't doing well financially but his parents still eked out the necessary resources for his piano lessons. Why did I repay her generousity with such narrow-minded, such selfishness of spirit?

Naturally these were one of the darkest days of my life. Why? I just kept asking myself why. Why did they have to do this to me? I gave my termination letter to my teacher just as I stepped out of the car after a friend of hers drove me back home after a concert. Oh what a horrible concert that was. I still remember it. The poor guy, obviously distracted or fatigued by jetlag played terribly. Split notes all over the place, memory lapses, repeating a section in the last movement of the Appassionata twice, making it almost 1.5 times as long as the original.... Interminable, painful music. The next day, she called, my parents were at the door, waiting for me to leave the house. Can you imagine the sheer mental torture of having to talk to her while the old folks are outside screaming for you to hurry up and get out of the house? I think I was lucky not to go delirious during those days.

And then they wanted me to do the Advanced Cert again, by myself, the following year. No problem what, just the same old pieces. You've come so far, must as well have something to show for it right? You cannot imagine how enraged I was. Screaming, shouting, going into mild seizure... But in the end I acquiesed. And weirdly, I passed.

What doesn't kill you truly makes you stronger. Music was truly an important part of my life, and I knew had to move on beyond all that anger and angst and all that wallowing in self pity. And so I did. Thankfully RJC had a wonderful music department, very encouraging, lovely teachers who let me play in concerts even when I wasn't even a MEP student. Really enjoyed my time there. Then moving to Cornell, I was lucky again to play actively in the chamber music groups, slowly changing my focus more away from the solo repertoire to become more of a chamber pianist. I'm truly glad to have stuck to my passion and refocused my energies constructively, rather than let my hands waste away. I sometimes surprise myself that I can still play after ten years without formal lessons.

Any problems I've faced? Certainly. Self-doubt used to be a big issue. Am I playing correctly? What if all I'm doing here is rubbish? It still is, but I just pray I'm not doing stupid things and hope for the best. The other is discipline - it is very very difficult to sit down and practice without external motivation. So that's where chamber music comes in - you've got friends who meet with you regularly to ensure that you're up to the mark, and so you practise.

I don't blame my parents for what happened quite as much these days. After all, people have different opinions on things, people make mistakes, and sometimes the mistakes don't turn out to be all that bad. Sometimes I wonder how I'd have turned out if all this didn't happen to me.

I guess in general, things have turned out pretty well for me. I still love music. I love it so I want to create it, to create the sounds that I have in my head. That's why I still play. I love it so I want to share it. That's why I go round like a crazed idiot at times insisting that people listen to this and that. I love it that in spite of all my obvious failings as a musician, of all my self-doubts, I try to ignore them to keep my passions alive. Music is beyond exams, beyond competition, beyond being a profession. Music is an art, and with it comes all the wonderful implications that art brings with it. It's about feeling, about thought, about passion, about reason, about life, about death, about rebirth. It's about being human. And if I had to discover it the painful way, I'm glad that at least I was lucky enough to do so.

And this has become a lot more personal than it should have. Ah well.

Goodbye Geekhood, Hello Policy Wonk

I can't quite believe it, but the panel of grand old men gave me the thumbs up.

So I guess this might be it - the end of geekhood. Feel a sense of loss actually that I probably will never write another program, or come up with another algorithm ever again. Time to become a policy wonk, to start using English, instead of Java, to think of people, instead of mathematical structures.

And then there's the issue of aptitude. Do I really have what it takes to do this kind of work, or am I just a great pretender, schmoozing my way around the old men? What about office politics? How am I going to cope with that? At the end of the day, I think I'm just an average guy who liked what he studied in school, and spent a lot of time at it. No spectacular CV, no outstanding leadership, man, I didn't even make it to OCS. Maybe I'll hate policy work and yearn to go back to some good ol' programming once more.

I guess some how I must ingratiated myself with the old folks. Man those chinese prostitutes could sure learn a thing or two from me about winning old men over.

And maybe I should learn a couple of things about being politically correct while I'm at it.

New Look

Got a new look to my blog. Much more sophisticated looking than my old one no? :)

Well the reason I decided to go for a revamp was that blogger finally has a built-in commenting service, and so I decided to get rid of haloscan. Unfortunately the older comments prior to this revamp will be lost.

But no matter, onwards to progress!

Finally Over!

Yep, my commission interview's finally over.

It didn't start off on a pleasant note though. Rained cats and dogs at about 3pm when I was making my way to PSC, so by the time I was there, I was already semi-drenched, despite using an umbrella. Fortunately I had around an hour to dry off, so managed to go into the interview relatively dry.

After hearing all the horror stories about the dreaded commission interview from friends, I was expecting to be another lamb sent to slaughter. However, it wasn't to be that bad. Either the grand old men were in a jolly good mood, or perhaps because my interview was at 5pm, they were in a rush to go off, or perhaps they had already decided that the quota of MAPs had been filled and they were just humouring me by giving me the interview, but they were rather gentle with me.

So the first question they asked me was: "Do you like national service?"

I was quite taken aback. Did I sound so anti-NS during my psychological interview? So I went about repairing the situation, saying how NS wasn't that bad, just rather inefficient at times.

But they pressed on with, "So would you have preferred to be a combat soldier or clerical one?"

Eeek. So more repair work, saying combat is this and that, good experiences that clerks will never get, not dissatisfied with combat per se but the inherent long lull periods. But lull also good because can have free time to do my own stuff.

Next up, were some generic questions about my college life, which were easy enough to answer. Then the question about why I didn't want to do engineering, which I was prepared for, so gave a stock answer. Asked me if I read the papers, and I said yes, describing to them the difficulties I had obtaining papers in camp. But was rebuffed by the Chairman, who asked me, "So can you bring these small portable radios into camp?" I naturally agreed, and he went on, "So you can get your news from the radio! BBC! No need for papers!"

Right.

So the only more difficult questions that I was asked was regarding the write-up I had done on how Singapore can learn from the US. I had written on the honour-based system (like leaving cookies and coffee on a table where people who consume them pay for them without anyone monitoring) and the low levels of government intervention in the US. So quite a bit of time was spent on whether such an honour based system would be tenable in Singapore or in a mature society like UK. The Chairman also asked if Singapore suffered from overgovernance.

So not too bad overall, went quite smoothly, managed to amuse them occasionally. I had honestly expected a lot worse, but well that could also mean they found a priori to the interview that I wasn't going to make it, so no point tekaning me. Ah well, things aren't in my hands now. Just wait and see.

Popped over to the Supreme Court after the interview where I met up with S. momentarily, but she was rushing off for a night class of sorts. Visited SL's office too, which was very nicely decorated. So good, these JLCs have their own offices. Saw the horrendous amounts of paper that they had to plough through for just a single case - well I guess she deserves the office :).

Met YJ and S for dinner, where we discussed possible interesting tech projects which we could perhaps work on.
1. Something similar to Craig's List for Singapore
2. Some file sharing software for easy sharing of files between friends without having to configure this and that or fiddle with firewalls.
3. Some location sensitive application, something on the lines of this or this.

And one of my track heros El Guerrouj has finally won the 1500 gold in the Olympics! Hooray!

Viva la Barenboim!

Just spent the last 2+ hours watching my newly bought Barenboim 50th anniversary concert at Teatro Colon DVD (cheapo chinese edition, no less from the same shop in Bras Basah). The fact that I'm writing this at 3+am is testimony to simply how enthralled I was with the performance. Barenboim may not be the pianist he once was, but you know, once a musician, always a musician. From the simple charm of the Mozart K330, to a very heartfelt Appassionata, to an idiomatic Iberia, to the thirteen(!) encores, Barenboim brought me on quite a journey through the full range of human emotion. I thought his last encore, the 2nd movement from Mozart's K545, was absolutely poignant in its simplicity - it really reminded me of the genius of Mozart and how only someone like him could write music which sounded as natural and effortless as that.

Earlier today, I was at a concert by the students of my former piano teacher. Was a happy reunion of sorts, as I met up with a few old friends, some of whom I hadn't met in years. Sadly, the number of us lao jiao students seems to have dwindled, as most of us have gone to college, started working and some have even gotten married. The music was pretty decent, of which the highlights were a piano duet arrangement of Feria, Bernice playing Mendelssohn's Variations Serieuses (oooh I really really love the theme going over that big big A pedal just before the last variation), an amazing pre-teen named Shaun Choo (I don't think he's in his teens yet, incredible talent, but has rather disorienting mannerisms that are way beyond his age) playing (gasp) 4 Chopin etudes from Op 25, and finally good old Michael playing a rather improvisatory (in a good sense!) 3rd Chopin Scherzo. Lovely stuff.

I think tonight was a reminder of how thankful I should be for the gift of music. Even if I may not be able to play like I once could, fortunately music can still stir my emotions and make me do stupid things like stay up till 3am watching some guy depressing some black and white strips of wood with his fingers.

Excuse Me While I Scream

FIVE DAY WEEK!!!!!
LONG WEEKEND EVERY WEEK!!!!
NO MORE SATURDAY LIFE RUNS!!!!!!

Foreign Talent

Watched the nerve-wrecking, nail-biting match between Li Jiawei and Kim Hyang Mi this afternoon. Pity that Jiawei lost after a 3-1 lead. What I found intriguing, but not so surprising on hindsight, was that the (china) chinese supporters in the background, who were there for the previous semi-final match, were cheering for the North Korean girl. So either Communist blood runs deep, or they saw Jiawei as a defector, as someone who betrayed their country by settling in Singapore. It is interesting how a lot of players in the badminton and table tennis circuits originate from China, but left probably because they could not make it to the first team in China, and preferred to take their chances in a foreign land, where they would be the top players and be able to keep their prize money etc. I wonder how players like Jiawei feel when they are playing against players from China. Ashamed? Vengeful? Or simply indifferent?

Or maybe the Chinese crowd rooted for Kim just because Jiawei beat Wang Nan the previous day.

Bekele of Ethopia won the Men's 10000m with an Olympic record of 27:05:10, with a last lap of 53.02. That is simply ridiculous, considering Singapore's 400m record is 47.4 - the crazy guy ran his final lap just 6 secs slower than the Singapore record for 400m, despite having run 9.6km before that. He even managed to lap some competitors - in the Olympics no less! Even more amazing is that Bekele also holds the world record, which is 26:20:31, which is 45 seconds faster than the Olympic record. Madness.

Things to do before the Commission Interview

1) Speak slower, don't stop sentences mid-way and restart.
2) Read pile of material lying on desk
3) Find out how to give convincing answers for:

• The engineering, non-engineering question
• What did you like / dislike about the US
• Describe how you overcame some great difficulty
• Which specific field (of whatever) are you interested in

Just got back from the SID interview, which wasn't tough as they didn't ask very difficult questions. I really have to be more prepared for these things, especially with the biggie coming up next Wednesday.

Found out that it is really difficult to explain technical stuff despite having mentally prepared to talk about my iSecurity paper. Kept stumbling and fumbling about. Makes me bloody worried about talking about current affairs, which I have even less background in.

Am very enthused about Yvonne's music outreach idea, but not being a real music expert, I'm a bit worried about misinforming the public with my biased views (like Beethoven being boring and Bach being a dude) :). I don't think people other than close friends would like to see a music geek rave about how wonderful certain things are. I have mentioned to Ju Dee once that perhaps we should start small within a group of friends first to see how things work out before venturing out. There's nothing worse than raving in front of a group of people who are unmoved by what you're talking about.

拜六礼拜。。。会不会开

Interesting!

Tucque's Notes - For the Brainy Stuff

Was inspired by Yvonne's reading notes blog, and so decided to come up with my own. Hopefully, it'll be interesting.

The Engineer Speaks

Ok, so we were thinking about how to make video clips look like animation. Interesting problem no? After some googling, we found this site, but it wasn't very impressive. More impressive was the movie, Waking Life, which looks like an interesting movie in its own right, which had really interesting video to animation conversions. Even Microsoft's got it's own take on the problem.

So what characterises a animation-like video from a real-life video? We reduced it to two properties - homogeneous colour and distinct outlines. To achieve homogeneous colour, I toyed with the idea of some region growing algorithm, taking a moving average of each growing region and classifying regions as separate when the averages are far apart. But in the end, I hit on k-means clustering, which should work fairly nicely as the colours are quantised to the k colours. And hooray, I have actually implemented k-means clustering as part of a computational biology class (pardon the bad indenting, some how it dies when i cut and paste it in)!

function [clusterVector, clusters] = KMeansCluster(dataset, k, centers)
% KMEANSCLUSTER performs the K-means clustering algorithm
% [CLUSTERVECTOR, CLUSTERS] = KMEANSCLUSTER(DATASET, K, CENTERS) returns the cluster that each protein
% in the DATASET belongs to in CLUSTERVECTOR, as well as the data representing the clusters in CLUSTERS.
% K indicates the number of clusters and CENTERS specifies the initial cluster centers. If CENTERS is
% [], random centers are chosen within the ranges of each dimension of the data vectors.
% Maximum number of iterations
MAX_ITERATION = 50;
[row, col] = size(dataset);
%Generate random centers
if length(centers) == 0
centers = zeros(k, col);
for i = 1:k
for j = 1:col
centers(i,j) = rand*(max(dataset(:,j))-min(dataset(:,j)))+min(dataset(:,j));
end;
end;
end;
clusters = centers;
clusterVector = zeros(row,1);
%Iteration for convergence
for i = 1:MAX_ITERATION
oldClusterVector = clusterVector;
for j = 1:row
distVector = zeros(k,2);
for m = 1:k
distVector(m,1) = norm(dataset(j,:)-clusters(m,:));
distVector(m,2) = m;
end;
%Assign data point to nearest cluster
distVector = sortrows(distVector,[1]);
clusterVector(j) = distVector(1,2);
end;
clusters = zeros(k,col);
clustercount = zeros(k,1);
for j = 1:row
clusters(clusterVector(j),:) = clusters(clusterVector(j),:)+dataset(j,:);
clustercount(clusterVector(j)) = clustercount(clusterVector(j))+1;
end;
for j = 1:k
if clustercount(j) ~= 0
%Find average of clustered vectors to find new center
clusters(j,:) = clusters(j,:)./clustercount(j);
else
%Randomly pick new center if cluster has no members
for m = 1:col
clusters(j,m) = rand*(max(dataset(:,m))-min(dataset(:,m)))+min(dataset(:,m));
end;
end;
end;
%Break if no change
if norm(clusterVector-oldClusterVector) == zeros(row,1)
break;
end;
end;

However, that doesn't solve the problem of 'holes', or small regions of pixels with different k-clustered colours from their surrounding regions. But some dilation erosion should fix that.

Achieving distinct outlines I think will be a lot more tricky, since it involves image segmentation and edge detection. But hopefully with the colours homogenised from the previous step, edge detection should be a lot easier.

But alas, I've lost my copy of Matlab, so no trying this out till tomorrow.

So how am I to be a policy wonk like this?

Improper Channels

So last week, I went with a few colleagues who're working on the NDP '05 Celebrations@Heartlands concept video went to Temasek Polytechnic to request for the use of their facilities for our work. One of my guys asked his former lecturer, who said that we had to send an email to the PCEO and director of design school to ask them for permission. He also adviced us to explicitly indicate what we wanted - like how many computers, for how long etc.

And so, despite feeling a bit uneasy about shooting an email all the way to the top, we followed his advice and sent off the email, as we were quite desperate to get our hands on computers so that we could start work. Little was I to know that this was to have an amazing roll-down effect.

Later in the afternoon, I received a call from my officer that the someone in Temasek Poly had called someone in Division HQ, who had subsequently called my brigade commander, who consequently called my officer, informing him of an apparent breach of protocol due to the email. We were all hauled up for a meeting the next day with brigade commander where he made me read my email to everyone and said that it was inappropriate to contact an external organisation like that. "Made Temasek Poly look like they are uncooperative," he said, "... not happy that they are talking to a Corporal..", ".. make 3rd Division look overly demanding without having built up our mutual relationships". And so, a letter of explanation was demanded from me, my officer and my colleague who knew the lecturer.

Well this is the email I sent:

Dear Sir,While NDP'04 was just over, the planning for NDP '05 has begun. For NDP '05, the committee I represent, the Celebrations@Heartlands Secretariat, has been tasked to bring the celebrations beyond the parade to the masses.

We understand that Temasek Polytechnic is involved in the organisation of NDP '05. My intention of writing to you is to request, in the capacity of the Celebrations@Heartlands Secretariat, for the use of a room with computers with multimedia development software and internet connection from 9am to 5pm daily, till April 2005. The facilities would be used for developing visual presentations and websites for NDP '05. We would greatly appreciate your help in our efforts to make NDP '05 an especially successful and special event.

Regards,
CPL Leong Der Yao
HQ 8 SAB
Celebrations@Heartlands Secretariat
NDP '05 Organising Committee

Well yes, on hindsight it does look a bit demanding and inappropriate, but at that moment, I was drafting the email based on what the lecturer had told me. And maybe I shouldn't have put my rank there, and perhaps I shouldn't have used the committee's name without having consulted with the higher ups. But I think we were genuinely intent on getting the facilities to start work, with the deadline drawing ever closer.

However, we are not all to blame though. Not once was there any mention by my superiors on the procedure for dealing with external agencies. The impression we had was that they wanted this and that, and we had to find our own means of getting things done, hence we took things into our own hands. Well at least after this incident, which really is a trivial issue being blown out of proportion, people with some rank have started using their own influence to get a room with proper computers for us in Jurong camp, for a start, so at least work can finally proceed.

So at the last meeting, I repeatedly requested this Major for him to help us get video footage from various agencies via the "proper channels". But no, he said, "Go find resources yourself first on the internet". Ok, but it's not that easy to find videos of tanks and what not on the web, and on top of that, the videos are all copy righted by the agencies which made them! So is it any more appropriate to rip videos of tanks off MINDEF? So how do we acknowledge them? What is the proper channel? So frustrating to do anything with so many protocol-driven obstacles around.

But having said everything I guess this is a perennial problem in any bureaucracy. The young energetic, but lowly ranked people are all very motivated and take the initiative to push their work forward, but the higher ups, wanting to keep to protocol and proper channels, play it safe by demanding that their subordinates don't take things into their own hands when dealing with external agencies. But yet, the very people with the power to make the contacts and negotiations that would significantly aid the work at hand are simply too lazy to do so. And so, what we are left with is an ever-approaching deadline and zero progress.

Bah.

Nostalgia

Was randomly surfing around when I revisited a charming site which I've not been to in a while. Brings back memories of the days in Stanford where my housemates and I used to play the bee game. The star game has an achingly beautiful soundtrack to boot.

Decision-making Time

Spent a good part of my weekend agonizing over the job choices which I had to submit to PSC. I've never been good at making decisions. From choosing my JC, to choosing my subject combination, to choosing which college to go to, to deciding on my major, and now, choosing on my first job, I've never been able to come to a decision in a decisive way. It's always so so difficult - I'm always swung from rationalizing the decision, to using gut feeling (but how can I trust my feelings?), to gazing into the crystal ball to see how my life would be like if I chose one path or the other, to appraising my own strengths, weaknesses and goals, to succumbing to societal pressures, to defining my own utility function, to accepting that circumstances dictate my life more than decisions... all leading to my mind blanking out, unable to focus on what precisely I'm trying to think of. Sigh.

Anyway, the fundamental question I had to answer was whether to stay in engineering or to move on to a administrative job in the ministries. So difficult.

1) Engineering is what I'm trained in doing, but I'm not that great at it, after seeing the real deals in Stanford.
2) I think I like computer science ideas, but doing real engineering projects might not be what school was like.
3) From past experience, the kind of work they do in Singapore is rather uninspiring.
4) Engineering is pretty well-paying, and you would still get to retain your specialist skills after you're done with the bond.
5) Going on to do a PhD? Very difficult, may not have the aptitude for it.
6) Work in a ministry is probably more glamorous, but do I have what it takes to work there? I know nothing about writing policy, and I'm not confident about my written or analytical skills.
7) Will the skills I develop working in a ministry be useful after 6 years? Administrators are very replaceable after all. Would I end up as a civil servant all my life?
8) There is a big disparity between what the ministry does and what its employees do to support the cause of the ministry. Will I find paper pushing meaningful? NS is part of national defense, but it's almost impossible to think in terms of that while you're running around the jungles.
9) Engineering appears to be a dead-end, a dumping ground, since being a PSC scholar, you're expected to become an administrator. After all, they are tightening up the scholarship recruitment process, reducing the numbers of scholars accepted, and allowing for automatic entry into the MAP program.

And oh man, ranking the choices is horrendous too, you could take a class on game theory or optimization just trying to find the optimal strategy. Basically we're given 3 choices plus 2 reserve. Akin to the secondary school placement exercise, this requires all kinds of careful strategizing - like no point putting a very popular ministry low down your ranking, considering carefully the number of vacancies offered, planning for some random element, as the human resource needs of the ministries change unpredictably in the coming months. Yet again, reasoning in an uncertain environment - what a classic problem.

Well, no conclusions to the numerous considerations, and with a head swimming with all these thoughts, I put down, MTI, MOF, MITA, DSO and SID. Now to come up with a story to defend my choices, lest I'm questioned on them during the commission interview.

The commission interview is also causing great pain. As much as I've been trying to keep up with the news, I don't get to read the newspapers on a very regular basis, and, having a memory like a sieve now, I can hardly recall what I've read after a while. Really inspiring confidence here.

On a more cheery note, I visited a fellow NDP '05 committee member's home yesterday to pick up some CD-Rs. He has a most fascinating hobby - taxidermy. His entire room was filled with stuffed alligators, heads of various deer, bottles of snakes in alcohol, tiger skulls etc etc etc. Macabre, yet absolutely fascinating. I was amazed at how he managed to build up his collection, given the probably strict laws involving the import of these things. Apparently some less than legal channels do exist. His interest in taxidermy ties in very nicely with his other passion, photography, as he has made it a kind of trademark, at least in my opinion, of taking pictures of these dead animals artistically posed. His photographs fill me with a sense of morbid curiousity, which, together with the interplay of the surrealism of posed animals and the gritty earthliness of the dead, slightly decomposing animals, makes his work quite special, in my opinion.

Just a random geek link, which is a fascinating resource on the structure of information networks, a course taught my one of my heros in college, Jon Kleinberg.