Post-Literate Humor

Parental Discretion

Despite being in the midst of a game of musical 'flu - we all keep giving each other the updated version of our latest midwinter virus - I actually have gotten some useful research work done of late. But that's not very entertaining, so I thought I would post here some play-time pieces I've made while resting between bouts of usefulness. The idea was to bring the communicative power of icons (and other simple signs) to their next logical level. I'm sure this is not a new idea. In any case, here's what I spun out. They're named to provide an extra layer of entertainment but it ought to go without saying they they ought to go without saying. Enjoy!

Escalation



La Différance

You can never go home, again.

(I wasn't sure it was obvious enough, this one.)


Glubat Se.
(Latin: Let him blow himself.)

Some Days Are Low

Howdy friends. Well, I'm on the fourth day of a feverish sick (same one, it would seem, that I had two weeks ago, and thought I'd had done with), and a bit down. Stuck in this apartment staring out at the rain. Today I heard of the death two days back of a good friend, Lou Genise (pictured), age 38, of various cancers, in LA. He brought great riches to all his friends' lives, but I'm feelin' pretty broke, now.

What to say. I'm just going to post here this link to him breathing some fire and a piece of music I wrote and recorded for three friends named Lou, and some explanatory text below it. And then I'm going to drink a little and try to get some sleep.



A Tale of 3 Lous

I’ve had three friends named Lou. One of them, Lou Harrison, a composer, taught me among other things to appreciate long-lined melodies of the sort common in the classical Turkish music I now play and compose, but rarer in Western music, which I was studying at the time I met him. He passed away at a respectable old age, having gotten his nickel’s worth, and then some. They’re making a documentary of his life here.

Another Lou, Lou Genise, was a fire-breathing, triple-X, Godzilla-taming space gaucho of long acquaintance. At only 35 years of age he got liver cancer a couple of years ago. The first doctors to see him gave him six months, but he was having none of it. After about eighteen months of aggressive treatment and his usual kickass drive he was *this close* to being cancer free, but it recently came back with a vengeance that even this buffalo of a man couldn't take down and live to tell the tale, and I am very pissed off at cancer. You can see him at play here.

The third Lou, Lou Savett, at 76 and strong as a bull came down with pancreatic cancer last March that swept him away in a shockingly short six weeks. My girlfriend (his step-daughter) and I got to his house in Santa Monica about forty minutes after he'd gone, but our last times with him had ended with peaceful smiles. He was a mensch of the old school menschen and I don't think they make them like that any more. When we got back home to Santa Barbara, full of the gravity of life and death, I wrote this piece to celebrate my three friends named Lou.

(The piece is also called Hüseyni Peşrevi: Üç Lou Hikâyesi, though here in Turkey it has been criticized as neither a true peşrev nor strictly in makam hüseyni - I am holding it to a different standard of authenticity, and you may call it whatever you will.)

New Year for Trees

Hello all! Not much to report on the research front (I hope that slow and steady will do the job, since that's what I have to work with). I just wanted to thank all of you who have (and who yet will) wished me a happy birthday - all of 43 solar revolutions completed successfully as of today - and remark on the delightfully silly Jewish holiday Tu b'Shevat, the New Year for Trees, which is also today. Didn't think they even wanted one, did you? Well, they're already drunk and half-naked in my neighborhood - I expect some sort of fruity fireworks to break out at any moment, and it's only noon.

Anyway, I'm not planning on doing anything special for the day (though am not working, either), but I did have a good time at my friend Sinan's last night, which will stand for a party. Earlier in the week he'd said some musicians were going to meet at his place (which, as I have mentioned before, is also the tomb of a Sufi saint, Ümmi Sinan) and would I like to come play? Well, it turns out to have been a house concert, and when I got there the musicians said, "OK, now we can start!" and lead me to a room with maybe 30 to 40 people waiting for the performance to begin. Awkward! I'd never heard any of the music before, though there was sheet music, and, a little shocked, I declined to play the first half, which was all religious music - hymns and whatnot - since I didn't want to screw it up for them, especially at a saint's house. But I joined in for the second set, for which there was no written music, but it was all secular tunes - easier to follow, less serious for the audience, and some of them I knew already, so I jumped right in with both paws.

Anyway, it's the first performance I've done on this trip, and it was fun and everyone enjoyed it - I got some good feedback afterward, and my lâvta was a big hit with the musicians. On the whole it seemed to me to be an apt set-piece/metaphor for life - "Surprise... you're on, kid!" - so it was a good birthday present/celebration.

And that's it! I think I'll wander around to see if I can find a decent Chinese restaurant. Thanks again... back soon!

(Photo of almond tree by Nicolás Pérez.)

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."

First Snow

I'm not from one of those cultures that has a hundred words for snow. We're lucky to have just the one, and that mostly employed to describe something distant and abstract, like unicorns or self-replicating machine elves (which might be more common in Southern California, depending on one's chemical disposition at any given moment). This morning's "light flurries" reminded me of nothing so much as the first ash-fall of the fire season - albeit with the temperature all wrong - and I understood thereby the aspect of nostalgia associated with this strange substance.

Native Istanbulites seem, like myself, to be both eager to see some, and unprepared to describe in detail this unusual phenomenon which, just a mile or two in any direction away from the city's ubiquitous water, is socking in friends and family for a long white winter. I am preparing therefore, first in English and later to translate for my fellows, a few terms of description to refine our perception and understanding of this subtlety called "snow."

There is naso, the snow that gets up in one's nose immediately upon opening the front door. Startling, but seems to disappear before any danger of asphyxiation. Its insidious cousin the windy co-worker seems ever to be right in one's face, no matter which direction one turns.

There is jellice, the snow that falls upon the impenetrable layer of jellyfish on the surface of the Bosporus. You'd think it would kill them but they only seem annoyed. It is said that if one attempts to lick fresh jellice one's tongue will stick to it until a warmer season, but this is partly "urban myth"; one would stick anyway (an experiment not worth repeating).

There is rap-snee, which only accumulates in the bad haircuts of the fashionably young; the surgeon general, which makes a cigarette even less pleasant than usual; and the reminder, a slow moving snow that engenders frequent passing thoughts that one should've worn gloves, brought that hat, bought better shoes despite the cost, or - if one has got all those thing with - that one should have peed before bundling up.

There is the morgan-stanley, which dissolves houses in minutes (see photo above). There is the nearly invisible paloma loca that drives mourning doves to shelter among vaguely menacing berries (see photo here).

Yes, it is a bold new adventure, identifying snow, and this is only the first day we've had any! Fortunately the Turks do have a highly detailed vocabulary for describing hot tea - the refuge to which I now abandon thee, gentle reader. Thanks again for visiting... more in a few days, for good or ill. Coming soon: a new apartment!