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Author Archives: A S H Smyth

Don’t evoke me…

Sunday, July 25, 2010

Eshantha Peiris, piano, Lionel Wendt Theatre A piano, a pianist, and a soft white light. Good, I think. Good. Neat. Clean. Then I see the banner projected onto the backcloth. It is 15ft by 6, at least. It says ‘EVOCATIVE’.  The pianist begins to play. The banner remains. Sort of. Now it plays a slide-show […]

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O worship the Lord with the beauty of… oh, Mendelssohn.

Sunday, June 13, 2010

te Deum veneramur – A Celebration of Sacred Music  Last Saturday’s Colombo Philharmonic Choir gig was sold to me almost solely on the strength of the acoustic in Ladies’ College chapel – being as it is not the Ladies’ College auditorium. But I confess I was also in a hurry to hear some good church music […]

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SOSL steppes up

Monday, May 31, 2010

In a programme frankly unimaginable by any orchestra not at the very top of its game, it was depressing to see the Symphony Orchestra of Sri Lanka open last Sunday’s concert with a return to ‘form’, another slack and soupy rendition of their own national anthem. The second national anthem was rather rousing – the […]

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The greatest Googly (n)ever bowled?

Sunday, May 9, 2010

Chinaman: the legend of Pradeep Mathew – Shehan Karunatilaka Chinaman is brilliant. Brilliant, I tell you. If you don’t have a spare Rs. 800 to rush out and buy it right now, then starve yourself/rent a trishaw/sell your grandmother – whatever it takes to raise the cash. Can we leave it there? No, I suppose […]

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Æsop revised

Saturday, May 8, 2010

I I was walking in the desert outside the city when I saw, coming towards me, a woman. She was alone, her face veiled against the whip of the sand. ‘Who are you?’ I asked, ‘and what are you doing out here on your own?’  ‘I am Truth,’ she replied. ‘I came to live in the […]

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Drowning in a tsunami of cliché?

Friday, May 7, 2010

The Gratiaen Prize 2009 The Gratiaen Prize – for those of you not up on your South Asian literary gongs – is an annual award given to Sri Lankan writers for creative writing in English, f(o)unded in 1993 by Michael Ondaatje, with his English Patient Booker winnings. Writing-in-English is a small crowd here – ‘here’ […]

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So far, So-malia*

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Somali Islamists go to war – against each other. For The First Post. — * no, that line didn’t make the edit.

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Incommunicado – a very short story

Sunday, April 25, 2010

My mother writes to say that no-one understands my writing. What can she mean?

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The Devil is in the DJs

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Crazies ban music in Mogadishu (and the Somali ‘government’ attempts to ban the ban). For The First Post.

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“Is Ash [sic.] bereft of normal human feelings?”

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

First Post article on rising racial tensions in South Africa, following the murder of Eugène Terre’Blanche (in which it transpires that the present author is a vile racist for not mourning the death of… a vile racist).

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