Ripening

In your grandfather's house in the village, there was this small room near the kitchen where fruits were kept to ripen. Mangoes carefully laid in baskets full of hay. Jackfruits kept standing up in the corners so as not to rot. Banana bunches hung from rafters all over the room so that you had to make your way among them to reach the shelves on the walls. All windows closed, little air coming in through the gaps in the old four-paned wooden windows. The thick smell of ripening that hung so still and full of knowing that you felt guilty for having opened the door and trespassed into a private space.

As a child you would stand there quietly with eyes closed hoping to hear the sleeping fruits breathe. And sometimes a lizard would chirp suddenly from one of the wooden rafters of the ceiling startling you out of your intense listening. A space of quiet waiting, of gradual ripening, a space speaking of maturity and readiness that cannot be forced, of sourness that will change to sweetness, of hardness that will change to softness; but all in its time.

Now when you are surrounded by this haste for experience, this frenzy for acceleration, this dark room sometimes passes in front of your mind's eye, and disappears again, leaving behind the smell of ripe mangoes and changeless truths....

Catcher

"Anyway, I keep picturing these little kids playing some game in this big field or rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean, except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them.

That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy."

'Catcher in the Rye', J.D Salinger

By Piccadilly Station I sat down and wept...

Do you ever wonder where love goes?
Out there in the ether, I suppose
Sometimes it burns enough to leave a trace in the air
A ghost of me and you in a parallel world somewhere

Do you ever think about that walk to the station?
And how it all ended then and there?

As if a door just opened and you vanished in the air
Into a parallel world somewhere

And I know you wonder and I wonder as well
And I'm not a secret that you've kept
My heart broke just that once,
I know the place it fell

By Piccadilly Station I sat down and wept

Does anyone witness such a disappearance?
One minute you're standing in the rain
The air just seems to shiver and you're never seen again

Never seen again.

Tracey Thorn

Is it memory that makes us whole?

Carpe Diem

Is it memory that makes us whole?
The question was posed by the ten o'clock news
investigating Alzheimer's and stroke,
the key network of synaptic fuses
blinking out, the brain's small cities polled,
found empty across the vacant mews.
Where are the poplar trees, where's the bench
you made, the wallpaper irises you glued
in strips? Home vanishes inch by inch.

Is love, too, cobbled out of the past?
What will become of us, landmarks gone?
Dante's worst pang, the knowledge of happiness
lost, would be mine, but wrong
to think you'd feel it less-
you might sense an absence dawning,
it dawns on me, in another's face,
a bewildered sorrow you'd try to calm,
too instinctive in you to be erased.

But I'm willfully naive, I'm told.
Instinct, too, can be extinguished,
the present tense grotesquely folding
in and over on itself, contextless
and dangerous in an endless scroll
of carpe diem. Where's the face I know,
the hands I've memorized and kept?
Is it memory that makes us whole?
Is love over when memory is spent?

Lynne McMahon
The Hudson Review
Summer 2003

Yapa

Amazing French band, at the Alliance Française - Yapa. Three guitars and a drummer. Towards the end the audience was standing up and clapping and dancing through the songs. They performed 2 Encores, because the audience wouldn't let them go :)

From the streets of Burkina Faso to an ancient volcano in Croatia, to a small village in Bourgogne, they spoke of inspiration from many travels, many sources. So much energy, so much skill.

Listen to them here: http://www.myspace.com/yapaguitartrio

Their site: http://www.yapa.fr

On Youtube:

A Mobylette: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfEJ-BL9OV8&feature=related

Project X: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1FpzFJF3P8&feature=related

"Die like a man, like your brother did!"

Malcolm Gladwell, on a possible reason for the high prevalence of violence and crime (related to personal honor) in the Southern (Appalachian) areas of the US:

"The so-called American back country states - from the Pennsylvania border south and west through Virginia and West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee, North Carolina and South Carolina, and the northern end of Alabama and Georgia - were all settled overwhelmingly by immigrants from one of the world's most ferocious cultures of honor. They were "Scotch-Irish" - that is, from the lowlands of Scotland, the northern countries of England, and Ulster in Northern Ireland."

"...Cultures of honor tend to take root in highlands and other marginally fertile areas, such as Sicily or the mountainous Basque regions of Spain. If you live on some rocky mountainside, the explanation goes, you can't farm. You probably raise goats or sheep, and the kind of culture that grows up around being a herdsman is very different from the culture that grows up around growing crops.

The survival of a farmer depends on the cooperation of others in the community. But a herdsman is off by himself. Farmers also don't have to worry that their livelihood will be stolen in the night, because crops can't easily be stolen unless, of course, a thief wants to go to the trouble of harvesting an entire field on his own.

But a herdsman does have to worry. He's under constant threat of ruin through the loss of his animals. So he has to be aggressive: he has to make it clear, through his words and deeds, that he is not weak. He has to be willing to fight in response to even the slightest challenge to his reputation - and that's what a "culture of honor" means. It's a world where a man's reputation is at the center of his livelihood and his self-worth.

"The critical moment in the development of the young shepherd's reputation is his first quarrel," the ethnographer J.K.Campbell writes of one herding culture in Greece. "Quarrels are necessarily public. They may occur in the coffee shop, the village square, or most frequently on a grazing boundary where a curse or a stone aimed at one of his straying sheep by another shepherd is an insult which inevitably requires a violent response."

Page 167, Part Two: Legacy, Chapter 6: Harlan, Kentucky. “Die like a man, like your brother did!”.
From ‘Outliers, The Story of Success’, by Malcolm Gladwell

The Kora

One of the most melodious string instruments I've ever heard - the Kora, a 21-string harp-lute used extensively in West Africa. Kora players have traditionally come from griot families (also from the Mandinka nationalities) who are traditional historians, genealogists and storytellers who pass their skills on to their descendants.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kora_(instrument)

Hear the Kora live at a recent concert of Shoonya, where French-speaking African students in the city performed along with Djembe Ashok's band - fantastic!

A beautiful 8-minute video where Toumani Diabate presents the kora, demonstrates various styles and how the instrument is made, and plays pieces from his latest album.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrEPm04v9Mk&feature=related

Elyne Road, a favorite piece:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SVAPvnR0og&feature=related

October

Blue skies,
And dragonflies,
October.



* Photo from Google Images

Wake Up!

The nice thing about sharing music is that you sometimes get great music in return - listen to another wake-up song!

The Drums - Let's go Surfing!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dBv4i0dXUc&feature=channel

Installing an Operating System :) :) :) :)

Another Dave Barry classic!

"So there are many different operating systems available, each with different capabilities, advantages, and drawbacks. Which one is right for your specific needs? The answer is: Whichever one is already on your computer. Believe me, you do not want to try to install a better operating system yourself. I have done this several times, and it is terrifying. Your computer is taken over by an Evil Demon Installation Program, very much the way young Linda Blair was taken over in the movie The Exorcist. First your screen goes blank, and then suddenly your computer starts asking you a series of questions that you could never answer in a million years, like:

"The Installation Program has determined that a conflict exists between your IRQ Port Parameter Module and your Cache Initialization Valve. Shall the Installation Program reallocate the Motherboard Transfer Polarity Replication Allotment, or shall it adjust the Disk Controller Impedance Threshold? Bear in mind that if you answer this question incorrectly, all of your data will be lost and innocent people could die."

And:

"Before it will proceed any further with the installation, the Installation Program wishes you to name the capital of Cameroon."

And:

"How many men are in your unit? What is your objective? What is your radio frequency? What is the password? ANSWER! THE INSTALLATION PROGRAM HAS WAYS TO MAKE YOU TALK!"

This can go on for many hours, and at any moment your computer may start laughing in a diabolical manner and spinning its monitor around 360 degrees and projectile-vomiting green stuff."

I remember a couple of years ago when my son, Rob, in an act of great bravery, attempted to install the "OS/2" operating system, which came in the form of about 8000 diskettes accompanied by a manual the size of a Toyota Camry. The computer was working fine when Rob started; after several hours of installation, it was a totally dysfunctional, muttering, potentially violent thing, and we had to take it outside and shoot it."

Page 82-83, 'In Cyberspace' by Dave Barry

Spoken Word Poem: The Information Man

Buddy Wakefield performs a spoken word poem, The Information Man. (Received this from a friend)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qv1VImmcYA

"Spoken word is used as a musical or entertainment term, referring to works or performances that consist solely or mostly of one person speaking as if naturally.

Musically, this is distinct from rapping, as rapping incorporates rhythm and sometimes melody, whereas spoken word is more akin to narration or speaking as the person would in conversation, as shown in the song "Everybody's Free (to Wear Sunscreen)" by Baz Lurhmann.

In entertainment, spoken word performances generally consist of storytelling or sometimes poetry, something exemplified by people like Hedwig Gorski, the originator of performance poetry, Mark "Chopper" Read and Henry Rollins.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoken_word

Start wearing Purple!

I didn't really wake up even after a brisk morning walk, have been very tired - but this woke me up!! If you need some energy, here it is -


Start wearing Purple!
by Gogol Bordello, Eugene Hütz

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_81l4DXlwM


"Eugene Hütz is a Ukrainian-born singer and composer, most notable as the frontman of the critically-acclaimed New York Gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello. Hütz is also a DJ and actor."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_H%C3%BCtz

Perfume

"I stepped into the bookshop and breathed in that perfume of paper and magic that strangely no one had ever thought of bottling."

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Angel's Game)

Four fresh new French books. A gift from afar.

No feeling is final

From a Lonely Planet guide on Laos, left by some other backpacker, one rainy afternoon in Luang Prabang:

"...The Theravada doctrine (of Buddishm) stresses the three principle aspects of existence: dukha (suffering, unsatisfactoriness, disease) anicca (impermanence, transcience of all things) and anatta (non-substantiality or non-essentiality of reality - no permanent 'soul').

Comprehension of anicca reveals that no experience, no state of mind, no physical object lasts. Trying to hold onto experience, states of mind, and objects that are constantly changing, creates dukkha.

Anatta is the understanding that there is no part of the changing world we can point to and say "This is me" or "This is God" or "This is the soul".

(Photo by a friend)

Shankar

Yesterday, 'Shankar', Anant Nag's book on his late younger brother, the very versatile Shankar Nag, was released, in Kannada. This particular extract was translated by Deepa Ganesh and published in The Hindu Friday Review today. What a man, and how tragic, his untimely death. For those who are not familiar with him, he was the director of 'Malgudi Days'. An extract from the article:


"Take it as it comes was Shankar's motto. It always seemed like he was telling life, "Whatever you say...". Shankar's ways were not that of a great disciplinarian. Shankar never rigidly insisted that things had to be done in a particular fashion. Scarcity never disturbed him, neither did he gloat over abundance. Poverty made me feel inferior and diffident, but it was not so with Shankar. When we lived in Mumbai, I would never invite anyone home, but Shankar would bring everyone in and have great fun. As days went by, I felt less embarrassed by our modest circumstances.

During the movement led by Jayaprakash Narayan and also the Emergency days, our little house used to be teeming with people. All that we did in those days was to distribute relief to those who were in jail, or to their families, make pamphlets and secretly reach it to people, collect money and distribute it. "


http://www.shankarnag.in/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shankar_Nag