You May Feel Some Discomfort

75 Redwood Spirit 2, Mark Ryden

Pardon me if my language is a little lumpy; I caught some kind of 'flu bug two days ago and am at the end (I hope) of its feverish phase at the moment. Stuck home with nothing but this beautiful view, my instruments, and high speed Internet to keep me company - not wholly unpleasant, actually, despite being achy and stupefied.

So, it's been a few weeks since my last entry, and research-wise they have been pretty good weeks; I've made another nine recordings - ud, violin, and tanbur - and heard a few concerts, and also got in quite a bit of 'quality time' hanging out with musicians in their offices. Also, I've been invited to play once a week with a group that gets together to play and sing Mevlevi ayin-s here in Üsküdar (this is the music that accompanies the 'whirling dervishes') ... it's a bit rare, and I'm lucky to have found them and to have been invited to join in. It's about one third professional musicians and two thirds amateurs, maybe twenty or so people any given week.

I don't know if I mentioned that I give copies of the little movie clips I make (see "First Recording Project" under December posts) to the artists who want their own, and a couple of these are shooting around the Internet, on Facebook, etc., so now they're asking me to put my name on them (that's very thoughtful - thanks!) and even to translate the analyses into Turkish. Everyone (artists and students, that is) really likes these... it's a more condensed way of explaining/learning what goes on in a taksim (solo improvisation) than they are used to seeing at one go. Good for me, because it gives artists I haven't yet worked with a tangible incentive for working with me. I'd like to figure out a 'creative commons' way of copyrighting the clips, but I have to consider the whole issue in more depth, preferably with a clearer head, so for now I'm just putting the normal © under my name for the clip itself and ℗ (full rights to the music) under the artist's name. (Any opinions or advice on this? Even though we ethnomusicologists talk to each other about 'copyright issues,' I hadn't expected to have to deal with any in quite this way.)

Meanwhile, I am still getting used to the Asian side of Istanbul, and to my neighborhood (Üsküdar) particularly. Previously I had lived only in different European neighborhoods of the city and thought I knew what the place 'was about.' But this Üsküdar is really a different zone. People from both sides, of course, opine that theirs is 'the real Istanbul,' and I can't really disagree with either party, but the feel of a modernist, sophisticated, secular city that pervades most of the European side seems to hold for only a couple of neighborhoods on the Asian side, my own (which hosts the paranoid religious right party) not included. I'll start making a little list of the differences to share with you in a later post.

Partly related... I don't know what the press' or public reactions to the recent situation in Gaza have been where you are, but here they have been universally and fiercely partisan in a way that I had not seen previously in Turkey (formerly considered an 'honest broker' regarding the conflict, having long-standing and largely neutral ties with both the Arab world and with Israel). I think it best to remain publicly discrete regarding any opinions I may have on the subject - one is bound to piss someone off even bringing the subject up - but I will say that it seems to me that if recognizing the suffering of only some of the perpetually traumatized people of the region were an effective way of stopping that suffering, it would have been over a long time ago, and we could all say, 'what a great tactic that was' and move on to more pleasant things. In fact it appears only to maintain the conditions under which all of the people in that area will continue to try to forge their traumas into viable identities, and thereby continue to consider violence a reasonable and primary solution to political problems of the sort that dozens of other peoples have long since worked out much more peacefully in the age of the nation-state (absent, of course, the insistence of much of the rest of the world that the conflict is really all about them, the actual suffering of their brOthers being necessary to validate the symbolic suffering that maintains internal political positions at a safe remove from actual harm).

It's like the aftermath of a car wreck where all the bystanders are fighting over who among the injured has the right to go to the hospital. The injured and their representatives can argue later about who was at fault, who pays what reparations, changes in driving laws, revoking of licenses, whatever, but first get the suffering to stop. Humanity is more than 'my side is right, and theirs is wrong.' If, upon closer inspection, one's sense of humanity seems to be contributing to the perpetuation of human suffering, it might be time to expand one's ideas on the subject. Not to mention that doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results is an index of lunacy. That so many in Turkey - and the official rhetoric especially - have moved from a position favoring an end to all of the suffering in that region to one that condemns only certain kinds of violence (regardless of any position with respect to the current sub-crisis) seems to me to bode ill for all involved, and if history is any guide, probably most of all for those whom the new rhetoric pretends to support.

Anyway, it has lead to a few awkward conversations.

And that's the report from this side... I'd better go track down some soup, now. Thanks again for stopping by!

New Continent, Same City

Howdy folks! It's been a while since I last wrote, mainly due to my having moved to Üsküdar on the Asia side of the city, and only today getting the Internet connection set up. Above, I've posted a little movie showing the view from my balcony (and office, bedroom, and living room)... I invite you to think of it not as a pretty dull movie, but as a rather interesting postcard, like the paintings in Harry Potter films. But keep the sound on if you'd like - finally - to hear that new lâvta of mine; here, after a short taksim, I'm playing Segâh Saz Semaisi by Neyi Osman Dede (1642-1729). One of my favorites. (I've been practicing Mesut Cemil Bey's Nihavend Saz Semaisi to play for you, but it's not ready for prime time, yet.)

I was hoping to catch some of the normal traffic on the Bosporus in this video but I had a run of mediocre luck with it - at the very end there's a short bit with one of the huge cargo ships that, along with oil tankers and other vessels, are constantly taking heavy stuff to and from Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, Romania and Bulgaria (except when you're trying to film them. Leftward is south, by the way). It's still surprising for me to see them casually passing by so close. While I was downloading the raw footage from my camera two days ago, a smallish Turkish Navy submarine passed by going north, and about half an hour ago I saw it heading back south, but I didn't catch it on video... ah, well! Quite the Zen experiment, watching the sea for hours, hoping for six and a half minutes of continuously interesting events. This was the best I could get, but at least the wintry sunrise colors are nice.

Haven't had any more snow here, so my snow-naming project is on stand-by, but the research is coming along bit by bit. Yesterday had a long interview (but no music) with two ney players, then a music recording (but no interview) with an ud-ist whom I'd first met in Santa Barbara last year when he came to UCSB with a group of dervishes ("Didn't you used to have long hair and a Mongolian beard? You play cümbüş right?" Indeed, I confess). And I have appointments to meet with them and other folk tomorrow and next week, so it's all good, as they say, on the research front.

Well, I'll leave you with that, then. Healing wishes go out to Denise's dad, and to friends Lou and Will... "geçmiş olsun."