We’re still in October, and the basics seem to be staying pretty constant. The main themes of life this month continue to be art, culture, and friends, all under a chilly rainy sky. We’re not drowning in floodwaters, as the people of central Thailand are, but we too have had enough rain and dampness to last us awhile. I’m ready for some sunshine!
Meantime that warmth and optimism has to come from other sources. Just yesterday I went with a friend to a free concert at the Opera House here in Toronto. There’s a kind of amphitheatre two floors up. That's where the free noontime concerts are held. This one was by the Zodiac trio - have you heard of them? I hadn’t - who are American and French: clarinet, piano, and violin. They were terrific, and so was their program. The concert title was “Music from a Silenced Nation: Soviet Composers.” I knew Shostakovitch and Stravinsky, but the other two were new to me: Edison Denisov (one movement of an amazing sonata for solo clarinet, moody and impressionistic with slides and quarter tones, completely remarkable); and Galina Ustvolskaya, whose Trio, written in 1949, was haunting, each movement tailing off into silence, a questioning suggestive absence.
Then there’s the Chagall, the AGO show on Chagall and other artists who were born in the Russian empire and worked in Russia and then mostly in France, in the first half of the twentieth century. In my ignorance I knew nothing about many of the artists in the show. Apart from Chagall paintings and drawings, there was a wonderful Lipschitz bronze and some lovely Kandinsky’s, but it was the work by the others, called collectively the Russian Avant-Garde in the show’s title, that was new to me and sometimes took my breath away. I didn’t know about Sonia Delaunay or Natalia Gontcharova, nor about Tatin, Malevitch, Rodtchenko... If you have a chance to get to Toronto’s AGO before January 10, do go. And try to make time for two visits, because ther’s a lot to absorb.
There’s often discussion in art and literature crcles, and argument, about whether knowledge of the artist or writer is important or should even be a factor in appreciating the work. At the end of the Chagall is a long (fifteen-minute, maybe twenty-minute) film made in the 1970’s I think, when he was living in the south of France (he died in 1980 at the age of 98, a beautiful looking man). Somehow, watching him talk about his work, watching him work, and hearing about his first stay in Paris (1910-12) when he met Braque and Picasso and the other painters in that then-vibrant art community, helped me get a handle on his achievement. Until then, to me the paintings were whimsical or amusing or sad or sorrowful, sometimes all at once, and their colour and vibrancy and life-force was extraordinary, but I’d never been able to get hold of them for myself. I sat on the surface, you could say, but didn’t “get” them, most of them.
After the film somehow things fell into place: the pictures aren’t disciplined workings out of a theory or a geometry, they’re pure expressions of how he was feeling. In them there are elements of the painterly schools or techniques (the newspaper seller has a cubist feel in parts, in the papers he carries, for example), but he has digested all that others were doing and remained himself. He’s always Chagall, the man from Vitebsk, not contained or constrained by theory or specific techniques.
Now to go back and look at the whole exhibition with fresh eyes. What a treat to have the show waiting for me a few blocks away.
All this Russian art and creativity, from the AGO show to the Zodiac Trio program, is a reminder of how much the world lost in the twentieth century because of anti-Semitism and the totalitarian politices of Stalin et al. Artists were persecuted, some of them managing to flee, others not surviving. (Of the artists in the Chagall show, almost all died in France; one died in 1944 in Auschwitz; I wonder about all that got buried in history, whose work we don’t know about) It’s also a reminder, as the Zodiac clarinetist said in some opening words, that human creativity is remarkably tenacious. Even in difficult circumstances, many artists manage to produce work and to keep their integrity. They’re valuable to us all, a reminder of the larger view, the bigger horizon, the potential in all of us.
That’s the warmth we find in art and music in this chilly damp weather.
Other warmth comes from the glow of the leaves, still clinging, many of them, despite the rain and winds. The huge maple out my back window, a squirrel high-rise, is a blend of red and green against the sky, wind-tattered at the edges of its generous canopy.
And then there’s Diwali, the festival of lights, which was last night. We aren’t Hindus, but we did have tiny candles lit and other lights on. It was dark and chilly outside but the house was full of welcome conversation as we talked and ate mostly leftovers with good friends in the warmth of our shared humanity.
AND AS FOR THE DETAILS: We ate well, in many stages, with a backdrop of roasted pumpkin (I was cooking small pumpkin halves to soft, to then puree them for soup), very autumnal altogether. The "menu": dal with cauliflower, reheated with some water and olive oil, and thickened with leftover rice, comfort food at its best; leftover Italian sausage from Sanagan's, sliced fairly thinly, wok-fried to reheat and tossed in the wok with leftover tubetti; multi-colourd fresh carrots cut into sticks, for crunch; and fresh rice to take care of the lovely sauce on some leftover Thai chicken curry, red curry, small pieces of chicken, and delectable. For afters I simmered chopped Grey County apples in brown sugar and a little water, then served them with a dollop of very unsweet stewed damsons and a long lick of maple syrup.
Showing posts with label Indian music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Indian music. Show all posts
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Monday, August 8, 2011
MARKING THIS DATE & TALK OF THRILL-SEEKING, PERFORMANCES, & REFLECTION
Here we are on August 8 - in Chinese it's "ba-ba" the eighth of the eighth, and so it's father's day (a familiar word for father being roughly "baba"). In Burma it's a whole other thing, 8-8, for it's the anniversary of the "four-eights" or 8-8-88, when the democracy uprisings that started with the students in 1988 became full-on in Burma.
Twenty-three years later the rest of the world is watching the struggles of the Syrian people against a harsh and unjust regime, and hoping the outcome is happier and more fruitful than the result of 8-8-88 in Burma. There, the people having lost their fear and demonstrated, the crackdown by the authorities was harsh and bloody. And when elections were held two years later, the opposition, led by Aung San Suu Kyi, stunned the government by winning.
The government's solution? To refuse to hand over power.
And so we celebrate and talk about 8-8-88 outside Burma, while inside the country a date that marks an important anniversary in the history of Burma is buried in government silence and, dare I say it? fear of people-power. Maybe next time there are demonstrations, maybe tomorrow, somehow, by some magic, the government will become more reasonable, and then open discussion and consultation and disagreement will be possible. But for now freedom of speech and dissent and political discussion are luxuries enjoyed by relatively few people in the world, none of them in Burma.
[And a quick update: I'm working on a short history section, to go in the back of RIVERS OF FLAVOR. The photos are now sorted and just needing some captions and a little tidying. I'll send in about 450 I think. All these are late baby-steps in getting the manuscript turned into a book. I am so lucky to be working with Trent Duffy and Ann Bramson at Artisan.]
***
I've been out on my bicycle a couple of evenings recently in the hot humid air, soft with moisture but also laden with every smell. It's so strange, and familiar, the way humidity makes sounds carry, and smells too. I feel I can smell a french fry cooking three blocks away when the air is this heavy. And I kind of like it, as a marker of the season. No, I agree, a lot of the now-intense smells aren't pretty, or even nice as reminders, but they are for sure part of the fabric of summer, especially as we move into August.
Those bike outings are thrilling in many ways: I love the whooshing through the dark, the competitive edge I can get as I race to make a light before it turns, the hyper-alert state that is so intense with adrenalin as I pedal fast along a busy street, ringing my little jangly bell occasionally to warn pedestrians or hopefully prevent a driver from opening a car door in my path. So far so good.
This juice, this thrill-seeking, is pretty juvenile, or un-grown-up, or something, of me. Maybe it's newly possible now that my kids are grown and I don't feel so directly responsible for them? Are there other mothers reading this who have been able to move into a freer more risk-taking frame of mind once the kids are grown?
Talk about life cycles! I never expected to be "back" here in thrill-seeking territory. What a treat.
My recent evening outings have been fun, and unexpected too. I went to a short play on Friday, part of Summerfest. I Tweeted about it later, because it was so fluent and seamless and terrifically written and acted. The play is Hannah's Turn, by Richard Sanger. Do go see it if you have the chance. It demands skilled actors, and we had those too..
Another outing was to hear music, this evening, a house concert of fiddle music, some Franco-Quebecois and -Ontarian, some from down East and more celtic. The fiddler was Pierre Shryer, a master fiddler; on guitar was Andy Hillhouse; Joe Phillips played a huge resonant double bass.
We were all delighted, not just by the music but by the collegial joy and engagement we shared with the musicians. As one of them said after, it's so different from playing on a main stage at a festival, where it's hard to hear yourself, and there are time pressures and other constraints. Here the musicians could work by feel, and we were all the richer for that (though the money they took home cannot be nearly what they'd get for a big event of course, so perhaps I'm only speaking metaphorically when I speak of being all the richer? It's too easy to take an artist for granted.)
A conversation with a friend at a dancing party she gave this weekend is still resonating with me. She and I talked about reflecting on things, and the fact that as we get older, it becomes more possible, a greater pleasure, and hopefully also more fruitful. She has been writing poetry, that's where her thoughts and reflections have taken her. I end up writing here, in this blog, trying to carve my thoughts out of the strands of musing in my head, and shape them onto this virtual page.
Many thanks for your patience as I bumble along!
And to finish, a suggestion for a summer soup: My CSA delivery last week included a lot of largish patty-pans (those flattish knobby yellow and gold squashes). I chopped them coarsely into a large pot, added one chopped onion and a little water, then boiled them with the lid on until they were softened, about fifteen minutes. I was surprised at how much flavour they had, once they'd been pureed in the processor to a thick smooth potage. All it needed was some mustard seed, nigella, and fennel seed heated in olive oil (with a pinch of turmeric, now my ingrained habit since working with recipes from Burma); as well as some salt, a dash of soy sauce, and a little rice vinegar, just a touch (or you could use some wine).
Torn basil leaves, pungent and intense these days, from the back garden, were a good addition on the soup with a little more olive oil (when are they NOT a good addition). I made rice, so we poured soup over the rice and voila, a taste of summer, with no sweat. Soup is such a good way of dealing with an excess of any summer squash, from patty-pans to zucchini. And then there are the soup possibilities for all those extra leafy greens. That's for another day...
Twenty-three years later the rest of the world is watching the struggles of the Syrian people against a harsh and unjust regime, and hoping the outcome is happier and more fruitful than the result of 8-8-88 in Burma. There, the people having lost their fear and demonstrated, the crackdown by the authorities was harsh and bloody. And when elections were held two years later, the opposition, led by Aung San Suu Kyi, stunned the government by winning.
The government's solution? To refuse to hand over power.
And so we celebrate and talk about 8-8-88 outside Burma, while inside the country a date that marks an important anniversary in the history of Burma is buried in government silence and, dare I say it? fear of people-power. Maybe next time there are demonstrations, maybe tomorrow, somehow, by some magic, the government will become more reasonable, and then open discussion and consultation and disagreement will be possible. But for now freedom of speech and dissent and political discussion are luxuries enjoyed by relatively few people in the world, none of them in Burma.
[And a quick update: I'm working on a short history section, to go in the back of RIVERS OF FLAVOR. The photos are now sorted and just needing some captions and a little tidying. I'll send in about 450 I think. All these are late baby-steps in getting the manuscript turned into a book. I am so lucky to be working with Trent Duffy and Ann Bramson at Artisan.]
***
I've been out on my bicycle a couple of evenings recently in the hot humid air, soft with moisture but also laden with every smell. It's so strange, and familiar, the way humidity makes sounds carry, and smells too. I feel I can smell a french fry cooking three blocks away when the air is this heavy. And I kind of like it, as a marker of the season. No, I agree, a lot of the now-intense smells aren't pretty, or even nice as reminders, but they are for sure part of the fabric of summer, especially as we move into August.
Those bike outings are thrilling in many ways: I love the whooshing through the dark, the competitive edge I can get as I race to make a light before it turns, the hyper-alert state that is so intense with adrenalin as I pedal fast along a busy street, ringing my little jangly bell occasionally to warn pedestrians or hopefully prevent a driver from opening a car door in my path. So far so good.
This juice, this thrill-seeking, is pretty juvenile, or un-grown-up, or something, of me. Maybe it's newly possible now that my kids are grown and I don't feel so directly responsible for them? Are there other mothers reading this who have been able to move into a freer more risk-taking frame of mind once the kids are grown?
Talk about life cycles! I never expected to be "back" here in thrill-seeking territory. What a treat.
My recent evening outings have been fun, and unexpected too. I went to a short play on Friday, part of Summerfest. I Tweeted about it later, because it was so fluent and seamless and terrifically written and acted. The play is Hannah's Turn, by Richard Sanger. Do go see it if you have the chance. It demands skilled actors, and we had those too..
Another outing was to hear music, this evening, a house concert of fiddle music, some Franco-Quebecois and -Ontarian, some from down East and more celtic. The fiddler was Pierre Shryer, a master fiddler; on guitar was Andy Hillhouse; Joe Phillips played a huge resonant double bass.
We were all delighted, not just by the music but by the collegial joy and engagement we shared with the musicians. As one of them said after, it's so different from playing on a main stage at a festival, where it's hard to hear yourself, and there are time pressures and other constraints. Here the musicians could work by feel, and we were all the richer for that (though the money they took home cannot be nearly what they'd get for a big event of course, so perhaps I'm only speaking metaphorically when I speak of being all the richer? It's too easy to take an artist for granted.)
A conversation with a friend at a dancing party she gave this weekend is still resonating with me. She and I talked about reflecting on things, and the fact that as we get older, it becomes more possible, a greater pleasure, and hopefully also more fruitful. She has been writing poetry, that's where her thoughts and reflections have taken her. I end up writing here, in this blog, trying to carve my thoughts out of the strands of musing in my head, and shape them onto this virtual page.
Many thanks for your patience as I bumble along!
And to finish, a suggestion for a summer soup: My CSA delivery last week included a lot of largish patty-pans (those flattish knobby yellow and gold squashes). I chopped them coarsely into a large pot, added one chopped onion and a little water, then boiled them with the lid on until they were softened, about fifteen minutes. I was surprised at how much flavour they had, once they'd been pureed in the processor to a thick smooth potage. All it needed was some mustard seed, nigella, and fennel seed heated in olive oil (with a pinch of turmeric, now my ingrained habit since working with recipes from Burma); as well as some salt, a dash of soy sauce, and a little rice vinegar, just a touch (or you could use some wine).
Torn basil leaves, pungent and intense these days, from the back garden, were a good addition on the soup with a little more olive oil (when are they NOT a good addition). I made rice, so we poured soup over the rice and voila, a taste of summer, with no sweat. Soup is such a good way of dealing with an excess of any summer squash, from patty-pans to zucchini. And then there are the soup possibilities for all those extra leafy greens. That's for another day...
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
SPRING CLEANING AND OTHER TRANSFORMATIONS
The back doors are open onto the garden, letting in the cool morning air. It's promising to be a scorcher today, a late June kind of day in late May, so I''ll close the windows and curtains later to try to keep the most intense heat out. Just a few weeks ago we were talking about extra-chilly nights and now we've leapt into full-summer mode. Mother Nature keeps us light on our feet and forces us to be adaptable; we complain as we adapt, but are lucky to have the ability to change and to transform ourselves...
Transformation is where I've been this week, engaged in the task of transforming this house from a much lived-in student dwelling to a clean and airy space. The impetus, apart from a growing urge to clean things up and spring-clean clutter out the door, as the spring sunshine highlighted the dirt on the windows and the dustballs under the furniture, was a rather wonderful offer from a faraway friend named David Trasoff, a sarode player who lives in Los Angeles.
We'd met in Kerala, at Kovalam, in 1999, just before the turn of the year and the millenium, and then kept in sporadic touch. He wrote in the winter this year to say that he'd be in Toronto to perform at a Bengali wedding and would I be interested in hosting a house concert? Sure, I wrote back, How do we do this? He designed an invitation and then as the time got closer I wrote to friends and acquaintances, attaching the invite. it fell in the middle of the Canadian 24 May weekend, so I expected many people would be out of town. But with an unknown number of friends and strangers coming, I knew it was time to take on the layers of dirt in the house.
A good friend did a big chunk of the labour, vacuuming rugs and floors and wiping down surfaces. It's hard work, strenuous exercise that makes my morning jog look very easy. And once you start this kind of process, I find, it extends itself to other areas, of the house and of life. The urge to tidy and sort, to come to grips with long-avoided messes, becomes irresistable, a kind of cathartic purging. Maybe this is what those addicts of colonic irrigation feel about their bodies? I wonder.
As I washed the windows and carried out bags of discarded clothing and other unwanteds, I had time to think about all the effort humans around the world put into keeping chaos at bay and protecting ourselves against encroaching dirt, disease, disorder of all kinds. It's the primary struggle for survival. In tropical villages it's important to sweep up dead leaves and burn them, so that snakes have nowhere to hide themselves; everywhere in the world we clean up our food carefully to keep rats and mice away; and in cities especially we wash our hands when we return home from being out in public places to protect ourselves from disease. (Of course these days many people in North American cities carry hand-cleanser with them wherever they go, which feels like fearful over-reaction somehow; you may disagree!)
There's a mental health aspect to this too. Perhaps it's evolutionary. We know that safety and wellness depend on our taking charge of our environment. Because keeping destructive nature at bay can be a matter of life and death, disorder and dirt make us edgy and unhappy. And the converse is true too: having things clean and in order can make us happy, and can be very relaxing. So my thoughts went on, as sparkle returned to my windows and clarity to my house.
Then it was time to empty the living room completely of chairs and tables etc. And onto the clear open space of the floor we laid overlapping layers of rugs, covering the floor completely. It reminded me of my grandfather's apartment long ago, which, because he loved rugs and buying them and giving them away, was often three layers deep in rugs, a rotating population of richly coloured and patterned Persian and Caucasian rugs. It also looked like a prayer room, a place of airy ease, with cushions by the walls, and rugs nothing but rugs everywhere to sit or lie on: an invitation.
At last came time for the house concert, late on the sunny Sunday holiday weekend afternoon... People found their way in through the garden, took off their shoes, and the house filled with life and talk. Then it was time to start, so they found a place, each of them and made themselves comfortable on the rugs or perched on stools. The music - David, a master of the sarode, whose great long-time teacher Usted Ali Akhbar Khan died just last June, playing sarode, and Ravi Naimpally, arguably the leading tabla player in this part of Canada, on tabla - was astonishing. It was like an intense infinitely unwinding meditation, as they took us into a lovely long afternoon raga...and more ... Afterward, conversation with friends and visitors was easy and happy in the soft warm air of early evening, all of us transported to a new place and space by the music.
And now? Well now I have a house that is not just clean and airy, but also transformed by the music, given fresh life and breath and energy. Thank-you, all who helped and all who came, and especially, thank-you David.
POSTSCRIPTS:
ONE: Here is a link to David Trasoff and to his music.
TWO: Another week of agony and violence has unravelled in Thailand, with anger still at the boil, though the streets of Bangkok are calmer and clean-up has started. It's a huge toll this has taken on everyone, but especially on the poor. There's a comment in the Herald Tribune, republished today in the NYTimes, about it all, the larger picture, that points out that China which benefits from Thailand's loss of stability... (it's here), Thailand that has for a long time been an anchor of non-totalitarian and often democratic government in southeast Asia. Let's hope that the social and political fabric can get knitted together enough that people can move forward with hope and some confidence. It's not hclear ow things will unfold in the next months, but it will be bumpy, for sure. Fingers crossed.
Transformation is where I've been this week, engaged in the task of transforming this house from a much lived-in student dwelling to a clean and airy space. The impetus, apart from a growing urge to clean things up and spring-clean clutter out the door, as the spring sunshine highlighted the dirt on the windows and the dustballs under the furniture, was a rather wonderful offer from a faraway friend named David Trasoff, a sarode player who lives in Los Angeles.
We'd met in Kerala, at Kovalam, in 1999, just before the turn of the year and the millenium, and then kept in sporadic touch. He wrote in the winter this year to say that he'd be in Toronto to perform at a Bengali wedding and would I be interested in hosting a house concert? Sure, I wrote back, How do we do this? He designed an invitation and then as the time got closer I wrote to friends and acquaintances, attaching the invite. it fell in the middle of the Canadian 24 May weekend, so I expected many people would be out of town. But with an unknown number of friends and strangers coming, I knew it was time to take on the layers of dirt in the house.
A good friend did a big chunk of the labour, vacuuming rugs and floors and wiping down surfaces. It's hard work, strenuous exercise that makes my morning jog look very easy. And once you start this kind of process, I find, it extends itself to other areas, of the house and of life. The urge to tidy and sort, to come to grips with long-avoided messes, becomes irresistable, a kind of cathartic purging. Maybe this is what those addicts of colonic irrigation feel about their bodies? I wonder.
As I washed the windows and carried out bags of discarded clothing and other unwanteds, I had time to think about all the effort humans around the world put into keeping chaos at bay and protecting ourselves against encroaching dirt, disease, disorder of all kinds. It's the primary struggle for survival. In tropical villages it's important to sweep up dead leaves and burn them, so that snakes have nowhere to hide themselves; everywhere in the world we clean up our food carefully to keep rats and mice away; and in cities especially we wash our hands when we return home from being out in public places to protect ourselves from disease. (Of course these days many people in North American cities carry hand-cleanser with them wherever they go, which feels like fearful over-reaction somehow; you may disagree!)
There's a mental health aspect to this too. Perhaps it's evolutionary. We know that safety and wellness depend on our taking charge of our environment. Because keeping destructive nature at bay can be a matter of life and death, disorder and dirt make us edgy and unhappy. And the converse is true too: having things clean and in order can make us happy, and can be very relaxing. So my thoughts went on, as sparkle returned to my windows and clarity to my house.
Then it was time to empty the living room completely of chairs and tables etc. And onto the clear open space of the floor we laid overlapping layers of rugs, covering the floor completely. It reminded me of my grandfather's apartment long ago, which, because he loved rugs and buying them and giving them away, was often three layers deep in rugs, a rotating population of richly coloured and patterned Persian and Caucasian rugs. It also looked like a prayer room, a place of airy ease, with cushions by the walls, and rugs nothing but rugs everywhere to sit or lie on: an invitation.
At last came time for the house concert, late on the sunny Sunday holiday weekend afternoon... People found their way in through the garden, took off their shoes, and the house filled with life and talk. Then it was time to start, so they found a place, each of them and made themselves comfortable on the rugs or perched on stools. The music - David, a master of the sarode, whose great long-time teacher Usted Ali Akhbar Khan died just last June, playing sarode, and Ravi Naimpally, arguably the leading tabla player in this part of Canada, on tabla - was astonishing. It was like an intense infinitely unwinding meditation, as they took us into a lovely long afternoon raga...and more ... Afterward, conversation with friends and visitors was easy and happy in the soft warm air of early evening, all of us transported to a new place and space by the music.
And now? Well now I have a house that is not just clean and airy, but also transformed by the music, given fresh life and breath and energy. Thank-you, all who helped and all who came, and especially, thank-you David.
POSTSCRIPTS:
ONE: Here is a link to David Trasoff and to his music.
TWO: Another week of agony and violence has unravelled in Thailand, with anger still at the boil, though the streets of Bangkok are calmer and clean-up has started. It's a huge toll this has taken on everyone, but especially on the poor. There's a comment in the Herald Tribune, republished today in the NYTimes, about it all, the larger picture, that points out that China which benefits from Thailand's loss of stability... (it's here), Thailand that has for a long time been an anchor of non-totalitarian and often democratic government in southeast Asia. Let's hope that the social and political fabric can get knitted together enough that people can move forward with hope and some confidence. It's not hclear ow things will unfold in the next months, but it will be bumpy, for sure. Fingers crossed.
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